Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  Disarmament is an issue that can have appeal beyond right or left wing: it is an issue of human security which cuts across ideologies. In this respect, another area of caution is the Vietnam connection. By assuming that your audience must be convinced that U.S. participation in the Vietnam War was wrong in order for them to now support disarmament, you may be hurting their potential for change in both areas. Even though you may believe, as I do, that it was wrong, there are a lot of people with psychological wounds from the Vietnam War for whom the worst possible thing may be to attack them on that issue to begin with. If you agree, you may even want to avoid using the example of “How the peace movement helped to end the Vietnam War” as an example of effective action. What if your audience does feel open to reducing armaments now, but still is not sure about the Vietnam experience? Just think twice before you bring it up.90

  Organizers felt that this strategy was especially crucial in conservative bastions of the country. In January 1983, a freeze field worker in Kearney, Nebraska, reported to the national office that “Nebraska is conservative and does not like lots of noise, conflict, polarization, and banner-waving.” Instead, campaigners had successfully used local churches and service clubs to quietly educate people about the freeze. Through hard work, they had also won over Kearney’s local media. As one activist reported back to the national office, “We avoided the scruffy, protest image of the 60s.”91 At a moment when the culture wars were creating new fractures and fault lines within the body politic, freeze activists deployed a conscious strategy of depolarization when it came to the question of disarmament. This strategy reflected the very real sense of urgency that animated their work, but it effaced the movement’s own political debts. Meanwhile, a steady but protean preoccupation with reproduction opened the door to the ecological age.

  REPRODUCTION, NUCLEAR WINTER, AND THE EXTINCTION THREAT

  In the early 1980s, the revival of the nuclear war threat generated its own set of questions about the fate of reproduction. Vivid descriptions of the immediate and short-term radiological effects of a nuclear attack often overwhelmed any consideration of its latent, slower-moving effects on the gene pool. Yet thought experiments about nuclear war did speculate about the genetic legacy that such a war might leave behind, thus harkening back to the fears voiced at Three Mile Island. Imagining the decades that would follow even a limited attack, Jonathan Schell predicted that survivors would face not only a contaminated and degraded environment, but contaminated “flesh, bones, and genetic endowment” as well. “The generations that would be trying to rebuild a human life,” he wrote, “would be sick and possibly deformed.”92 In addition to unleashing a fatal cancer epidemic, doctors warned, a nuclear war would leave behind high rates of sterility and genetic damage.93 Unlike a conventional war that has a beginning, middle, and end, a nuclear one would redound indefinitely. In a brochure titled What About the Children?, Parents and Teachers for Social Responsibility declared that “we have set the stage to annihilate the next generation and perhaps all generations thereafter.”94 Drawing again on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, doctors speculated that pregnant women would suffer spontaneous miscarriages and give birth to babies with physical and mental defects during the postattack period. In light of that, they wondered whether abortions should be provided en masse in the wake of a nuclear attack. Members of PSR elaborated on this idea. Since there was an accepted place for therapeutic abortion after rubella exposure in the first trimester, there should also be a place for mass abortion in the postattack period.95

  Much as it had been at Three Mile Island, the unborn was evoked in a dual sense throughout these accounts—as both a living fetus vulnerable to radiological danger and a shadowy, futuristic figure that was doomed before it had even been conceived. In fictional depictions of nuclear war, newborns and infants got sick first. “Doctor, my baby wouldn’t take my milk this morning,” a new mother tells a physician in Testament the day after a nuclear detonation levels nearby San Francisco. “She threw it up, maybe that’s nothing. Maybe she’ll be fine in the morning. How do I know? Is there something I can do?”96 The dialogue was consistent with the warnings of doctors, who predicted that after a nuclear attack, babies and infants would be the first to die.97 Thus even as radiation’s symptomatology underwent revision as weapons supplanted power plants in the nuclear imaginary, the front line of victims remained the fetus, the unborn, the newborn, the infant.

  Reproduction loomed large over the nuclear war threat in another way. This was because the debate about civil defense was implicitly about social reproduction. With roots in both Marxist and feminist theory, the term social reproduction refers to all of the activities and relationships that are required for people’s survival, both from one day to the next and across successive generations. If biological reproduction encompasses conception, gestation, pregnancy, and birth, social reproduction encompasses all of the daily practices that Marx saw as vital to the maintenance of any system of economic production. These included the purchasing of household goods, food preparation and service, the laundering and mending of clothes, the maintenance of the home, the socialization of children, and the provision of emotional and physical care to the young, the sick, and the elderly.98 Of course, when policymakers within the Reagan Administration spoke of survival and recovery from a limited nuclear war, they did not use the language of social reproduction. Yet this was precisely what they were talking about. Their championing of civil defense hinged on the premise that a postattack social world could be made to resemble what had come before. If a strong civil defense program were in place at the time of an attack, they predicted, people could subsequently secure food, water, shelter, and medical care, electricity could be restored quickly, and infrastructure could be rebuilt. Disarmament activists, in contrast, predicted that even a limited nuclear war would make it impossible to reproduce the social conditions that were a prerequisite for life to go on. The true meaning of survival, they contended, was social, not biological. For PSR’s Jack Geiger, the issue was not “the biological possibility of the survival of the last humans,” but “the possibility of the survival of organized human social existence.”99 Jonathan Schell cautioned against imagining that the postattack period would in any way mimic the aftermath of a natural disaster in which rescuers and unaffected survivors would provide food, clothes, and medical care to the injured, who would then be able to make their way to safe communities. Instead, the detonation of a nuclear weapon would “attack the support system of life at every level”; there would be no untouched place. It would kill both directly and indirectly—“by breaking down the man-made and the natural systems on which individual lives collectively depend.” “Human beings,” Schell observed, “require constant provision and care, supplied by both their societies and by the natural environment, and if these are suddenly removed people will die just as surely as if they had been struck by a bullet.” It was no coincidence that the plotlines of The Day After and Testament chart the gradual realization on the part of a doctor and a mother—two pillars of social reproduction—that, in the aftermath of an attack, there is nothing they can do to care for their patients and children.

  The ultimate message of The Day After was that in the event of a nuclear war, there would be no postattack recovery as FEMA conceived of it. When critics on the right complained that the film implicitly undermined the strategy of deterrence, Brendon Stoddard of ABC Motion Pictures countered that The Day After contained no political content at all: “The movie simply says that nuclear war is horrible. That is all it says. That is a very safe statement.”100 But both the accusation and Stoddard’s defense missed the point. The political message of The Day After was not that deterrence would necessarily fail, but that should a nuclear war come to pass, civil defense would definitely fail. The film paints an unreservedly grim picture of physical and social disintegration after the attack. There is no electricity or telephone service, roads and buildings have been destroyed, food and water have been contaminated
, the soil in the ground has been poisoned, and livestock lie dead in the fields. Survivors on the outskirts of Kansas City wander in a daze in search of food, shelter, and medical help. As it becomes clear that no such help is coming, violence breaks out. There are food riots, looting, and firing squads. The lone allusion to civil defense planning is in a scene in which representatives from the National Emergency Reconstruction Administration (modeled on the Office of Defense Resources, which would supplant FEMA after a nuclear war) advise a group of farmers on how to decontaminate their fields by removing several inches of top soil and only planting UV-resistant crops. One of the farmers questions the directive. “How do you know what safe is?” he asks. “Where did you get all of this information? This good advice? Out of some government pamphlet?” One of the final scenes of the film shows survivors in Lawrence huddling around a single salvaged short-wave radio, listening to the president as he assures them that the government is prepared to “make every effort to coordinate relief and recovery programs at the state and local levels.” But the president’s message is steadily belied by a montage of bleak images: fields full of rotting corpses, the faces of stunned survivors, and a hospital hall packed with dying burn victims. While the creators of The Day After deliberately shrouded the war’s causes in ambiguity, they were considerably more forthcoming about its aftermath. Civil defense would be a complete failure, and any official claims to the contrary could not be trusted. “Anyone who advocates limited survivable nuclear war is not going to be happy with this movie,” Democratic representative Edwin Markey surmised.101

  Running alongside these predictions about the collapse of social reproduction was an even more totalizing scenario about species reproduction: a nuclear war could constitute an extinction-level event. This view found expression in the theory of a nuclear winter (NW), which postulated that in a nuclear war, multiple detonations and fires would release large amounts of dust, soot, and particulate matter into the stratosphere and smoke into the troposphere, blocking sunlight from reaching the earth. Under these conditions, a deep freeze would settle over the northern hemisphere, soot would block out the sun, noon would look like midnight, average temperatures would drop precipitously, water supplies would freeze, and the subfreezing weather—which could last for months—would lead to catastrophic crop failure. NW research brought together scientists from several disciplines, but the theory’s origins resided in the field of areology, the study of Mars. In 1971, Mariner 9 orbited Mars and recorded images of a global dust storm that was absorbing sunlight and preventing it from reaching the planet’s surface. The discovery prompted scientists to ask if a nuclear war could produce a similar effect on earth. Since they could not test the hypothesis through real-world experimentation, scientists relied on computer simulations in order to play out various scenarios. While they debated certain elements of NW theory, there was an emerging consensus that, in addition to producing immediate megadeath, a nuclear war would have long-term planetary environmental consequences. By 1983, the theory of nuclear winter was circulating within both scientific circles and the broader culture. A conference on the topic was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April of that year, articles on it appeared in journals like Science, Nature, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and in October 1983 astrophysicist Carl Sagan published an article in Parade magazine that explained the theory to a lay audience.102 Along with the discovery in the late 1970s that chlorofluorocarbons were eroding the ozone layer, the theory of nuclear winter anticipated subsequent discussions of anthropogenic climate change in its claim that human activity (in this case, nuclear detonations rather than carbon emissions) could radically alter the earth’s climate, with devastating consequences.103

  At the heart of NW theory was a core insight of modern ecology. As Barry Commoner famously put it, everything was connected to everything else. If the northern hemisphere were suddenly shrouded in darkness and cold, its biological support system would collapse. Without light, the process of photosynthesis would fail, killing off green plants. All crops would be destroyed, herbivores would starve (thus depriving carnivores of food), and plankton would disappear, fatally derailing the entire marine food chain. In other words, the entire biological foundation on which human beings relied for their survival would be shattered, leading to mass starvation. “The delicate ecological relations that bind together organisms on Earth in a fabric of mutual dependency would be torn, perhaps irreparably,” predicted Carl Sagan. “There is little question that our global civilization would be destroyed,” he continued. “The human population would be reduced to prehistoric levels, or less. Life for any survivors would be extremely hard. And there seems to be a real possibility of the extinction of the human species.”104 Among the most frightening dimensions of the NW scenario was that scientists could not predict how the multiple assaults of a nuclear winter—darkness, freezing temperatures, ionizing radiation, toxic air pollution—would synergistically amplify one another. University of California physicist John Harte explained that synergies worked either for or against human survival and could shift gears.105 Analogizing the human relationship to the ecosystem to an intensive care patient’s dependency on IV-bottles and life-supporting medical equipment, Harte likened the waging of nuclear war to “throwing a stick of dynamite into an intensive care ward, rupturing the vital links that ensure survival.”106 Anyone who spoke of winning or even surviving a nuclear war was “gambling, ignorantly and arrogantly, with the chain of life itself, with the whole intricate web from phytoplankton to man,” H. Jack Geiger told the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1984 in a speech on nuclear winter.107 While critics of civil defense predicted that a nuclear war would fatally derail social reproduction, nuclear winter theorists contended that species reproduction itself hung in the balance.

  These predictions suggested that nuclear war would shatter national boundaries. Even with its transnational dimensions, the freeze movement in the United States relied on a nation-statist framework when it forecasted the effects of a nuclear war on American towns and cities. But NW theory cast nuclear war as a planetary emergency. While NW scenarios were often based in the northern hemisphere, scientists pointed out that the global south would experience effects that, while less severe, would be devastating. Sagan predicted that a cloud of fine particles would travel across the equator, bringing the cold and dark with it.108 Anne Ehrlich painted a grotesque picture of postwar survival in the southern hemisphere, where small bands of people “might persist for several generations in a strange, inhospitable environment … their adaptive capacities sapped by inbreeding and a burden of genetic defects from the postwar exposure to ionizing radiation and increased ultraviolet B—a classic recipe for extinction.”109 Three Mile Island residents had challenged the notion that evacuation could protect residents from the radiation threat in the event of an accident, and now NW theory shattered any remaining illusion that one could outrun a nuclear war by fleeing south. “Where does one go from Kansas City?” a fellow doctor asks Russ Oakes in The Day After as the geopolitical situation deteriorates, “The Yukon? Tahiti? We are not talking about Hiroshima anymore.” The vision of a nuclear winter, in other words, was a distinctly global vision that punctured an intuitive model of disaster that assumed that there was always an outside that could be relied upon for aid.110 NW theory made clear that in the event of a nuclear war there would be no such outside. It thus constituted the ominous underbelly of Buckminster Fuller’s “spaceship earth” and the Apollo’s famous “blue marble” satellite photograph of the earth from space. And it contained within it the same environmentalist caveat. “The message of nuclear winter … is that we are one human family, living in one indivisible home, our planet earth.”111 These words, delivered by H. Jack Geiger in Helsinki in 1984, signaled the emergence of a planetary consciousness as the atomic age gave way to the ecological one.

  FIGURE 4.4.  “The Earth Is Enveloped.” Copyright held by Council for a Livable World Educati
on Fund. Courtesy of State Historical Society of Missouri.

  Much as it had at Three Mile Island and throughout freeze activism, reproduction loomed over NW theory. That theory speculated about a scenario in which the ecosystems required for species reproduction could suddenly collapse. This vision of collapse signaled a paradigm shift in the history of the concept of extinction. That concept first emerged in revolutionary France, when naturalist Georges Cuvier studied mastodon bones and other large mammalian fossils and concluded that they came from what he called “espèces perdues,” or “lost species.” Thomas Jefferson famously rejected the idea, stating that “such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work as to be broken.” Over the nineteenth century, the concept of extinction took hold, but questions remained about its causes and its character. Could extinctions happen quickly enough to be observed by humans? Or did they occur very slowly over long expanses of time? Was extinction a result of Darwinian evolution—that is, had Cuvier’s “lost species” been transformed through a gradual process of natural selection? Or were extinctions the result of a singular catastrophic event? Based on his review of the fossil record, Cuvier went with the latter theory. “Life on earth,” he wrote, “has often been disturbed by terrible events. Living organisms without number have been the victims of these catastrophes.”112 In 1980, as Cold War relations approached a new nadir, the extinction debate among scientists was thrust into the public when Luis and Walter Alvarez, a father-son physicist-geologist team, published an article in Science titled “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.”113 The piece postulated a new and dramatic theory to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years earlier: a large asteroid had collided with the earth, sending massive quantities of particulates into the air, blocking sunlight, suppressing photosynthesis, and fatally breaking the food chain. This hypothesis, along with advances in areology, provided the inspiration for NW theory. Carl Sagan and other astrophysicists began to ask if nuclear detonations could cause similar effects, and in the spring of 1982, after learning of the Alvarez theory, the National Academy of Sciences decided to study the long-term consequences of nuclear war, and specifically the effects of dust. The asteroid theory vindicated Cuvier’s original hunch that species extinctions could occur with remarkable rapidity. The fate of the dinosaurs had irrevocably changed course on what science writer Elizabeth Kolbert—riffing on the title of a famous children’s book—has called one “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” NW theory grafted the Alvarez hypothesis onto a nuclear future, but with one crucial difference. The extinction-level event would not emanate from some extraterrestrial force, but would come from right here on earth. In the event of a nuclear winter, humans would simultaneously be the asteroid and the dinosaur.