Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  FIGURE 4.2.  Physicians Marching for Disarmament, New York City, June 1992. Copyright held by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

  This proto-ecological vision, based on a circulation between somatic and planetary injury, was widely shared among physicians. Throughout the early 1980s, the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Medical Association all passed resolutions urging physicians to become involved in the campaign to prevent nuclear war. Articles on the health consequences of such a war appeared regularly in medical and scientific journals, and the nation’s leading medical schools offered courses on the topic. Meanwhile, PSR chapters spread quickly throughout the country. As Harvard cardiologist James Muller observed, “This is not just some fringe group, it’s now the mainstream.”37 Glen Geelhoed, a physician who worked with the American Red Cross, explained that he would not have joined PSR “if it were a ‘kook’ movement for fear of injury to my career.” In his words, he had “no truck with idealism.”38

  Where PSR broke with traditional organizations, however, was on the crucial question of politics. PSR leaders like H. Jack Geiger and Bernard Lown believed that physicians were obligated to do more than detail the medical effects of a nuclear attack. They were also obligated to speak out against federal civil defense planning for nuclear war, which the organization condemned on psychological grounds as delusional, on strategic grounds as provocative, and on ethical grounds as a “travesty of morality.”39 In the closing minutes of The Last Epidemic, Geiger, who at the time was a professor of community medicine at the City University of New York, receives loud applause when he tells his audience, “any physician who even takes part in so called emergency medical disaster planning specifically to meet the problem of nuclear attack … is committing a profoundly unethical act.”40

  PSR’s opposition to civil defense reflected a new ecological awareness of the planet’s fragility and inescapability. The organization rejected the efficacy of both shelters and relocation, the two prongs of Reagan’s civil defense plan. During the World War II–era bombings of Hamburg and Leipzig, they recalled, those who had remained in shelters had died from intense heat and carbon monoxide poisoning. Something similar would happen in the event of a nuclear attack, PSR predicted: the firestorms would turn shelters into crematoria.41 The organization also took aim at crisis relocation plans. In a booklet published in 1982, PSR asked what relocation would mean from an epidemiological perspective: “Crisis relocation,” it wrote, “serves merely … to substitute immediate death in the cities for a more protracted but nonetheless certain death in relocated areas.”42 Like the radiation threat at Three Mile Island, nuclear war had the capacity to render meaningless the boundaries between soldiers and civilians, between illness and health, between danger and safety, between war and peace.

  But for PSR activists, the problem was not limited to any one particular civil defense plan or another. They found delusional the very concept of survivability embedded in all civil defense planning for nuclear war. Like those who lived at Three Mile Island, PSR members were concerned about the future of reproduction, but now it came down to the question of survival itself. “To evaluate that concept,” explained the booklet, “we must stretch our understanding of what existence may or may not mean … our cities in rubble, our land burned and contaminated, our friends and relatives gone, our future grimly foreshortened by prospects of famine and disease. Civil defense cannot change what the weapons can do.”43 What made the concept of survivability so perverse, in their view, were not only the massive biological traumas, but also the near-total collapse of medical services, since most hospitals and treatment centers were located in cities.44 In the New England Journal of Medicine, Bernard Lown imagined how such a scenario might play out in Boston. Out of approximately sixty-five hundred physicians who worked in the city, nearly 74 percent of them would immediately be killed in an attack, and another 16 percent would be injured.45 The wounded would receive no morphine for pain relief, no intravenous medicine or fluids, no emergency surgery, no antibiotics, no dressings, no nursing, and little food and water.46 It was not that a nuclear war would place an excessive burden on doctors. Rather, it was that such a war would eviscerate medical services altogether. The point was vividly made in The Day After, when after the attack, the campus hospital is transformed into a morgue.

  By challenging the concept of survivability central to civil defense planning, PSR anticipated the ecological insight that there were some disasters that could not be outrun. This reality prompted some city councils to push back against federal disaster planning. After PSR hearings, city councils in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder, and Boston came out against crisis relocation. In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors rejected any federal nuclear attack contingency plans involving relocation on the grounds that such planning heightened the likelihood of war by deceiving citizens into thinking that evacuation would save them. In Greensboro, North Carolina, the director of the region’s Emergency Management Assistant Agency not only refused to sign on to relocation planning, but removed the city’s fallout shelter signs to protest what she saw as their misleading claim of protection. In March 1981, the city council in Cambridge directed its civil defense director to cease distribution of evacuation plans and instead circulate a publication that would inform citizens that the one thing that could truly protect them from nuclear war was worldwide disarmament.47

  Not all physicians agreed that civil defense fell within their purview. Some felt that civil defense was a political issue that dovetailed with strategic nuclear policies, an arena where physicians had, in the words of NEJM editor Arnold Relman, “no special competence or authority.”48 This divide within the medical community came to a head in 1981 in a debate over a Department of Defense proposal that called on civilian healthcare providers to supplement military ones in the event of an overseas war. The goal of the plan, called the Civilian-Military Contingency Hospital System, or CMCHS, was to secure approximately fifty thousand civilian hospital beds that could be used by the military “for the treatment of casualties from a future large-scale overseas war that might begin and end very rapidly and might produce a great many casualties.”49 The AMA, along with the American Hospital Association, supported the plan, signaling the organization’s reluctance to take a critical position vis-à-vis federal civil defense planning. But others were alarmed by the proposal, which they interpreted as a de facto endorsement of the concept of a limited nuclear war. As Kathryn Bennett, a medical administrator in California, explained in a letter to the assistant secretary of defense, John H. Moxley, her hospital staff was “particularly disturbed by the kind of war anticipated by this plan. The proposals’ language, emphasizing the expectation of an unprecedented number of casualties in a short period of time, indicates the likelihood and acceptance of ‘limited’ nuclear war.”50 A month later, Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco called on all Catholic hospitals to oppose it, contending that the plan fueled the delusion that there could be an effective medical response to nuclear war. In a letter to the British medical journal Lancet, fifty physicians from Oakland, California, condemned CMCHS, noting its perverse prioritization of hypothetical future need over so much actual need in the present. “Public hospitals,” they wrote, “are being asked to expend manpower and resources in preparation for human slaughter, while patients are denied basic medical needs because of lack of funds.”51 The deans of seven medical schools in New York City called on the city’s hospitals to reject the plan, and PSR urged hospitals throughout the country to do the same.52 The controversy captured how effective PSR had been at reframing civil defense as an issue that fell within the medical establishment’s purview.

  Again, some doctors felt that PSR and its allies had gone too far. Jay C. Bisgard, a physician within the Defense Department, contended that a doctor’s highest obligation
was to care for casualties, regardless of whether they were military or civilian. In his view, those who rejected the CMSHS proposal were reneging on that obligation. “My sacred vow as a physician was to use my skill to save life and alleviate suffering,” he wrote in April 1982, “It would be a moral outrage for a physician to withhold care from any human being in need.”53 Writing more broadly about the proper role of the physician within antinuclear activism, NEJM editor and doctor Arnold Relman drew a sharp distinction between the medical and the political-strategic dimensions of the nuclear issue. Physicians possessed special insights when it came to the medical consequences of nuclear war, Relman observed, and they had a responsibility to share those insights with the public. But they possessed neither special knowledge nor a single, unified position when it came to nuclear strategic policies. If physicians spoke out publicly on those policies, he warned, they ran the risk of undermining solidarity within the profession, eroding public confidence in their authority, and confusing personal conviction with professional expertise.54

  In contrast, PSR leaders contended that the nuclear threat had blurred the line between the medical and the political-strategic. This was because nuclear war planning was qualitatively different from other kinds of disaster planning. In contrast to a flood, a fire, or an earthquake, preparing for nuclear war could actually make such a war more likely to occur. The planning itself, in other words, produced outcomes and shaped futures. “We are far likelier to approach [nuclear war] step by step … in a process that escalates risk to the breaking point,” Geiger wrote in 1982.55 In his view, plans like CMCHS, which treated limited nuclear war as a viable possibility, were one step along the path of escalation. Consequently, they confronted the physician with an ethical dilemma. If the physician gave her assent to such a plan, she would be providing the public with false assurance while promoting the dangerous myth that there was no real distinction between conventional war (in which medicine can relieve suffering) and nuclear war (in which it could not).

  With the reescalation of the Cold War in the 1980s, the fear of nuclear power that had dominated the political landscape over the previous decade was eclipsed by the fear of nuclear war. As the threat of an attack displaced the threat of an accident, radiation was transformed from something stealth and slow-acting into something that could inflict visible and immediate injury. By calling attention to an attack’s medical and biological consequences, doctors placed the imperiled human body at the center of disarmament politics, elaborated a portrait of a vulnerable planet, and conjured images of a disaster that could not be escaped. In the process, they helped to translate the atomic age into the ecological one. But what was the freeze movement’s relationship to the political realignment of the 1970s? The answer resides in the contradictions and tensions contained within disarmament activism.

  THE FREEZE MOVEMENT AND POLITICAL REALIGNMENT

  Three Mile Island captured how the protest culture of the 1960s had migrated into regions of the country removed from the epicenters of social upheaval. Freeze mobilization offers an inverted version of the same story; it demonstrates how local varieties of conservatism were transforming national politics. Playing out at the same moment, the fight over the restart and the fight over the freeze were very different. One centered on a localized threat, the other on a planetary emergency. But despite the differences, there were revealing resonances. Both embraced a centrist politics of respectability, both appealed to traditional gender and family roles, religion, and patriotism, and both aimed to distance themselves from the earlier antiwar movement. Thus like the local fight at Three Mile Island, the freeze movement registered not only how key elements of left and right were combining and reconstituting themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, but also how a biotic nationalism, centered on the vulnerable human body, helped to tip the balance of national politics rightward.

  The defining accent of freeze activism was its appeal to the supposedly bipartisan center of American politics. Indeed, the very concept of a bilateral freeze—in its specificity, its simplicity, its accessibility, and its plea to both superpowers—was meant to transcend partisanship. As National Freeze Campaign director Randy Kehler told Congress in March 1982, the campaign “is broad-based and non-partisan. It includes both conservatives and liberals, young and old, whites and non-whites. While it has recently found an enthusiastic response in the halls of Congress, the campaign is rooted in town halls, union halls, and parish halls in hundreds of communities all across America.”56 Polling conducted at the time indicated that this strategy was very effective. One poll conducted in 1983 found that 70 percent of the public favored a freeze.57 In a report on American politics for Cambridge Survey Research, pollster Patrick Caddell observed that the freeze represented “the first potential centrist mass movement in our lifetime.” He described it as “a self-generated middle class movement, consisting of yeomen, burghers, and housewives, who, normally politically passive, [have] reacted spontaneously to the rhetoric and actions of the Reagan Administration.”

  Much like the restart fight, freeze activism defined itself against the earlier antiwar movement. In contrast to the movement against the Vietnam War, Caddell explained, the freeze was not “a student/activist effort at the fringe of the body politic.” In fact, it almost transcended conventional politics. Rather than an attempt to achieve a specific or concrete goal, it should be interpreted as “an expression of concern” that had activated what he called “the normally dormant center.” Caddell praised the sheer numbers that the movement had mobilized, but he was even more impressed with the way the movement rose above the familiar, stale political divisions. No comparable national cause, he wrote, can match “the centrist middle-class nature of those activated.”58

  Caddell was right about the movement’s breadth, but by associating it with moderation and centrism, he missed what was driving freeze activists in their efforts to win the center: a deep sense of planetary urgency. Simply put, many were convinced that they were running out of time. Two California-based freeze activists insisted that this was why the movement needed to eschew any wider political debate about US Cold War militarism and instead focus on one clear message. “The differences are too deep,” they wrote, “the time too short. We need consensus in three to five years, not three to five decades. We have to focus on this single narrow option, the Freeze. And we have to promote it, however urgently, in such a non-offensive, non-partisan way that any faction—for any ideological or political reason whatsoever—can not fail to see that it is this or doomsday.”59

  Winning the center entailed a bid for respectability and an accompanying attempt to attract professionals. The freeze signaled a new politics within late US capitalism as deindustrialization, globalization, and the rise of an information- and service-based society devastated the industrial working classes, creating a larger, more ostensibly meritocratic professional-managerial class that would displace them within the political arena. The freeze sought to woo this new class. In addition to physicians, other constituencies were well represented throughout the movement, including educators, lawyers, social workers, nurses, psychologists, and musicians. Such professionals either formed groups to support the freeze or endorsed the freeze resolution at their annual meetings.60 Freeze organizers believed that the visibility of these professionals would not only reinforce the campaign’s nonpartisan character, but also endow it with legitimacy. Steve Ladd, a field director for the Northern California Freeze Initiative and a cochair on the national campaign, urged his fellow organizers to line up “credible and respected people” who could “speak to the moral, scientific, medical, or economic aspects of the issues.”61 Part of what made these professionals so highly valued was that they defied popular expectations of what an activist was supposed to be. “Chances are the words ‘anti-nuclear activist’ do not bring to mind your high school physics teacher, family doctor, or local attorney,” commented the Nuclear Times in 1983, “But over the last two years, dozens of professional groups,
combining expertise with enthusiasm, have brought sizable constituencies to the movement.”62 The New York Times argued that the participation of these groups distinguished freeze activism from the antiwar demonstrations of the late 1960s: “The leaders are not bearded radicals but middle aged and middle class men and women, many accustomed to positions of responsibility and prestige.”63

  Like the coverage of the local fight over the restart at Three Mile Island, such commentaries were as much about the legacy of the 1960s as about their ostensible subject. In this case, the New York Times not only derided “bearded radicals,” but also neglected the considerable scope of antiwar activism at high tide. After all, by the late 1960s, there were many middle-class men and women (as well as doctors, nurses, scientists, and priests) who had come out against the war. The careful demarcation of freeze activism from antiwar activism, in other words, relied on two related moves: denial of the freeze movement’s roots in earlier forms of social protest and a degradation of an unapologetic leftist politics. And while it is tempting to pin these gestures on the media alone, it was freeze leaders themselves who sought to ward off the stigma of radicalism. Antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott told audiences that there was “nothing left wing or radical” about opposition to nuclear war. Quite the opposite; in her words, it was “the ultimate in conservatism.”64

  The appeal to a bipartisan center, the prominent role assigned to professionals, and the attempt to distance itself from the antiwar movement all combined with a distinct gender politics. Women, specifically in their capacities as mothers, were central to freeze activism, just as they had been at Three Mile Island. The terrifying scenarios of nuclear attack all came down to the fact that most mothers would never see their children again, and those who did would watch them die excruciating deaths. This prediction placed mothers at the heart of the freeze, not simply as advocates of disarmament but as guardians of children, reproduction, and the planet as a whole. In an interview in 1983, actress and freeze supporter Joanne Woodward echoed the widely held view that motherhood endowed women with innate sensitivity to the nuclear threat. Women, she declared, “are the ones who raise children, who give birth to the children. It’s our children who will be destroyed along with us.”65 In 1982, Helen Caldicott helped to launch Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) after observing that it was women in her audiences who responded to her message with the greatest sense of urgency.66 Above all, it was pregnant women who embodied the escalating danger. In preparation for a rally to be held in May 1984, WAND wrote a letter to supporters urging anyone who was visibly pregnant to make the trip to Washington, DC: “If you are expecting a baby between early June and mid-September, or can recruit someone who is, please send your name and address and expected date of birth to WAND.” The letter explained the underlying rationale: “It is difficult to imagine ignoring the moral authority of a contingent of visibly pregnant women.”67