Radiation Nation
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An extinction-level event would revise the prior rules of the evolutionary game by upending the species hierarchies that had been in place before the catastrophe. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, mammals—including humans—would be the most vulnerable to death from radiation exposure, while insects would be the most likely to endure. Biologists pointed out that those species with short life cycles and high reproductive potential would be quicker to recover from radiation’s damaging effects.114 These species included pests, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Jonathan Schell famously labeled a postnuclear landscape a “republic of insects and grass,” and PSR imagined a world overrun with pests: “mosquitos would multiply rapidly after an attack … the fly population would explode. Most domestic animals and wild creatures would be killed. Trillions of flies would breed in dead bodies.”115 In The Day After, Russ Oakes spies a cockroach scurrying across the hospital floor, which he regards with envy rather than repulsion. “Impervious to radiation. You are looking at man’s legacy. The only guaranteed survivor of a nuclear war.” This insight was at the heart of the concept of extinction. If the ecological context changed, species hierarchies of strength and dominance could be rearranged. Charles Darwin grasped as much in The Origins of the Species, recognizing that humans, like all other species, were not immune to environmental contingency. “Looking to the future,” he wrote, “we can predict that the groups of organic beings which are now large and triumphant, and which are least broken up, that is, which as yet have suffered least extinction, will for a long period continue to increase. But which groups will ultimately prevail, no man can predict; for we well know that many groups, formerly most extensively developed, have now become extinct.”116 At Three Mile Island, animals functioned primarily as augurs for humans. Throughout forecasts of a nuclear attack, however, they were both fellow victims (in the case of mammals) and victors (in the case of insects) in the postwar evolutionary contest for species survival.
The fear of extinction built upon but also transcended the fear of death. Death always occurred in “a biological and social world that survives,” explained Jonathan Schell.117 Robert Jay Lifton described an “endless biological chain of being” that linked individuals to those who had come before and those who would come after, making a single life a link in a larger chain.118 The horror of nuclear war was that it threatened to break the chain, not only by killing everyone on earth, but also by voiding all future generations.119 To make the point, Schell posed two different global catastrophic scenarios. In the first, most people were killed in a nuclear confrontation, but there were enough survivors to repopulate the earth. In the second, a substance was released into the environment that sterilized all human beings, gradually emptying the world of all people. A full-scale nuclear war would do both things at once. “In extinction by nuclear arms,” Schell wrote, “the death of the species and the death of all people in the world would happen together.”120 An individual death extinguished life, but extinction “cut off birth.” “We have always been able to send people to their death,” Schell wrote, “but only now it has become possible to prevent all birth and so doom all future human beings to uncreation.”121
Predictions of species extinction again placed the unborn at the center of the nuclear threat, and nowhere more so than in Schell’s award-winning The Fate of the Earth. Nuclear war, in Schell’s words, would stop “future generations from entering into life” by canceling out “the numberless multitude of unconceived people.”122 For Schell, this made the term disaster a misnomer. “In extinction,” he explained, “there is no disaster, no falling buildings, no killed or injured people, no shattered lives, no mourning survivors. All of that is dissolved in extinction, along with everything else that goes on in life.” Extinction left only “the ghostlike cancelled future generations, who, metaphorically speaking, have been waiting through all past time to enter into life but have now been turned back by us.”123 Imagining extinction required conjuring something that existed outside linear time: one had to “gaze past everything human to a dead time that falls outside the human tenses of past, present, and future.”124 For Schell, extinction was the biosocial analog to totalitarianism, but while totalitarianism sought to destroy memory, extinction voided the future.125 This placed a terrible burden on the living: they had to remember something that had not yet happened on behalf of those who might never be born. Extinction was the collective murder of unborn victims, obliging the living not only to never forget, but to never allow.
Here the rituals of marriage and mating enter the picture. When films like The Day After paid so much attention to heterosexual love, marriage, romance, and courtship, critics found these plot elements cloying and sentimental—distractions from the “real story” of nuclear war. But the extinction threat made clear that because they were so tightly bound up with reproduction, these elements were the real story. Thus Jonathan Schell only ostensibly veers off course in The Fate of the Earth when he champions the institution of marriage in profoundly traditional terms. As the conduit for bringing children into the world, Schell contended, it was this institution above all others that enshrined the “biological continuity of the species.” When a man and a woman made their marital vows, they showed the world that they were “fit for receiving what the Bible calls ‘the grace of life.’ ” Those who bore witness to the exchange were announcing their own stake in life’s continuity. Thus for Schell, marriage was not only a personal act but a collective one as well. “In a world that is perpetually being overturned and plowed under by birth and death,” Schell wrote, “marriage—which for this reason is rightly called an ‘institution’—lays the foundation for the stability of the human world that is built to house all the generations.” Marriage established “a map of hereditary lines across the unmarked territory of generational succession, shaping the rudiments of a common world out of biological reproduction.”126 The peril of extinction threatened to undo this. At the end of The Day After, Russ Oakes tells a traumatized overdue pregnant woman that by refusing to go into labor, she is “holding back hope.” “Hope for what?” she asks him angrily. “What do you think is going to happen out there?” In Testament, the pubescent daughter asks her mother what it is like to make love. The mother speaks to her of feelings of closeness, longing, desire, and intimacy, to which the daughter—who is already exhibiting symptoms of radiation poisoning—whispers, “not for me.” One critic dismissed Testament as a “post-nuclear feminist weepie.”127 But he mistakes as subterfuge what is the heart of the nuclear threat: the end of reproduction.
Since the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, the ecological imaginary had swung back and forth between images of reproduction-gone-awry and reproduction-run-amuck. While Rachel Carson focused on toxic threats to reproduction, later works like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Soylent Green (1973) focused on the threat posed by reproduction in an overpopulated world of rapidly depleting resources. With the accident at Three Mile Island, the pendulum swung back again to the specter of imperiled reproduction. The culture of dissociation shattered, and as it did, the community’s fears came to center on the fate of the unborn. The Second Cold War of the 1980s routed those fears back to weaponry and located extinction—overpopulation’s inverted twin—at the center of a vision of planetary catastrophe. Disarmament activists raised the alarm over the extinction threat posed by the revival of the nuclear arms race. As we have seen, along the way, they helped to consolidate an ecologically inflected, reproduction-centered nationalism that consigned left universalism to the margins of US political culture. Meanwhile, the nuclear power issue did not go away.
NUCLEAR POWER IN THE SHADOWS
As images of nuclear annihilation circulated throughout the public sphere in the 1980s, the US nuclear power industry lay dormant and quiet. After the Three Mile Island accident, the NRC stopped licensing new plants. Meanwhile, fossil fuel costs—the object of so much consternation during the long energy crisis of the 1970s—declined. In an era of newl
y cheap oil and natural gas, nuclear power no longer appeared worth the investment. Its high capital costs, its poor operating performance, its regulatory requirements, and its unresolved safety questions led the Office of Technology Assessment to forecast a bleak outlook for the technology and to predict that, beyond the reactors already under construction, there would be no future nuclear expansion in the United States.128 Investors viewed nuclear power as a brittle industry in which enormous capital investments could be voided literally overnight by one bad accident. In 1985, Forbes ranked the failure of the US nuclear power program as “the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.”129 To be sure, nuclear power did not disappear. By the mid-1980s, there remained 102 operating nuclear power plants in the United States, providing approximately 20 percent of the country’s electricity. But within the ecological imaginary, the icon of the reactor cooling towers that had dominated antinuclear activism in the 1970s was displaced by the mushroom cloud, now multiplied a thousandfold. The heightened attention to nuclear war in the 1980s upended one presumption of the early years of the Cold War: that the domestic space of the nation could somehow remain insulated from radiological violence. But it also hardened the distinction between weaponry and reactors on which the culture of dissociation had long relied.
Despite the challenges besetting the nuclear industry, its public relations plowed ahead. In 1983, the US Committee for Energy Awareness (which would later be folded into the Nuclear Energy Institute [NEI], the industry’s main lobbying group) launched a thirty-million-dollar campaign funded by utility companies and nuclear power plant vendors called “Nuclear Power: Time for a Comeback.”130 The campaign strategy relied on the same logic that had structured nuclear PR during the industry’s high tide of the late 1950s and 1960s. The industry would need to rely on experts and specialists to foster what it called a rational dialogue with a public that it saw as misinformed.131 It would also need to highlight the naturalness of radiation. At the same moment that popular culture was graphically depicting acute radiation poisoning, Illinois’s Argonne National Laboratory proposed a nuclear power exhibit that included a montage showing how radiation coursed through both the “natural world” and the world of “manmade objects.” Images of the sun, X-ray machines, a granite wall, the ground, food, water, a television set, a gas pilot light, and a smoke detector would convey radiation’s ubiquity and harmlessness.132 The proposal returned to and updated the message that the industry had honed decades earlier: only nuclear power could guarantee the reproduction of middle-class domestic consumption. Now the message acknowledged new social realities, like the fact that more women were working for wages outside the home. The exhibit proposal imagined a “cutaway of a modern home.” Each room would contain “a family vignette—father and son, mother and daughter—but a modern one, in terms of clothes, hairdos, and expressions; it should not look like Norman Rockwell, but a 1980s two career family.” This was the home “made possible by electric power—controlling the extremes of climate and bringing the world into the living room through communications.”133 The affinity between nuclear power and the middle-class home had emerged out of the industry’s earlier public relations efforts, which implied that nuclear power could provide an endless supply of electricity that was cheap, safe, reliable, efficient, and clean. The accident at Three Mile Island had momentarily ruptured that fantasy. But by the mid-1980s, PR experts were reviving and refurbishing it in order to rehabilitate an industry that had lost public and investor confidence.
These publicity efforts were again derailed in April 1986, when an accident occurred at Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine. This crisis was far more deadly than the one at Three Mile Island, ranking a seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the TMI accident had ranked a level five). Two explosions and a fire at the unit produced a radioactive cloud that ascended and traveled across Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and Western Europe, exposing tens of thousands of people to radioactive iodine that would soon lead to an outbreak of thyroid cancer among both children and adults in the region surrounding the plant. Soviet medical officials diagnosed 134 people with acute radiation sickness and set the official death toll at thirty-one workers. Both the accident itself and the subsequent cleanup exposed over six hundred thousand workers, soldiers, firemen, men, women, and children to radiation. The explosions alone had released one hundred times the radioactivity unleashed at Hiroshima, contaminating large areas of northern Ukraine, southern Belarus, and western Russia. As word of the release spread, public officials recommended restrictions and bans on fruit, vegetables, fresh meat, fish, and milk from Eastern Europe in Italy, West Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Britain, often singling out pregnant women and children for special warning. The specter of a large cloud of plutonium, iodine-131, strontium-90, and cesium-137 traversing the northern hemisphere evoked images of nuclear winter, and pointed to the impossibility of containing radiological danger within national borders.
Much as they had at Three Mile Island, parents expressed concern that their children had been exposed to low-dose radiation in the immediate days after the accident (Mikhail Gorbachev had waited over two weeks before publicly acknowledging the radiation releases). Anecdotal reports of postaccident declines in fertility and elevated rates of abortion circulated widely in the years that followed, and medical workers reported a degradation of health, especially among the Byelorussian population, including epidemics of thyroid cancer, birth defects, immune disorders, anemia, and chronic respiratory and digestive illnesses. As one health worker put it two decades later, “In hospitals and villages throughout Belarus, I’ve met women who are afraid to bear children or to breastfeed and countless families who struggle not only with poverty but with alcohol addiction, chronic health problems, confusion about how to protect their health and despair for their children’s future.”134 Like the Three Mile Island accident, the Chernobyl disaster propelled the surrounding population into a state of uncertainty vis-à-vis its reproductive fate.
For the US nuclear industry, the Chernobyl accident appeared to be another public relations disaster. Polling indicated that public support for nuclear power plummeted immediately after Chernobyl, capturing how an accident anywhere could derail national planning for nuclear power.135 As NRC member James K. Asseltine observed at the time, Chernobyl demonstrated that nuclear safety “is a truly global issue.” “In a very real sense,” he concluded, “we are all hostage to each other’s performance.”136 But within the context of the Second Cold War, the US nuclear industry was able to go on the offensive, attributing the disaster to the obsolete design of the Chernobyl reactor, which had not been used in the United States for over three decades. As physicist Hans Bethe wrote in an editorial in the New York Times, “A Chernobyl accident cannot happen here. The design of a Chernobyl-type reactor is completely different from any reactor in the West; it would never have been licensed in any Western country.”137 The Union of Concerned Scientist’s Robert Pollard rejected the logic, countering that “differences in design between US and Soviet plans mean that the accident could not happen in precisely the same way here. What they do not tell the public is that an accident with as large a release as Chernobyl or worse, could happen.”138 But during an era when Reagan had denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the reactor’s failed design emerged as a symbol not simply of a retrograde Soviet technology, but of the moral bankruptcy, arrogance, and dissemblance that purportedly corrupted the entire Soviet political and cultural system. A decade later, a New York Times editorial would describe the disaster as “a manifestation of the political, moral, and technological rot that was metastasizing in the Soviet system and would soon kill it.”139
Thus rather than raising broader questions about nuclear power safety, the accident fostered a tendency within US policy circles to contrast the opacity of the Soviet political system to the transparency of the American one. In a letter to Soviet officials written in 1986, Repre
sentative Edwin Markey recalled that at the time of the Three Mile Island accident, the world’s citizens knew what was happening “through the open release of information as the accident developed.”140 Markey’s recollection was faulty, disregarding the considerable difficulties that had attended the acquisition of basic information at Three Mile Island and overlooking what the two accidents had in common. Both had placed an unknowing population in the path of radiological threat. Yet the US nuclear industry reworked the Chernobyl accident into a Cold War parable that indicted the Soviet system and endorsed its own safety standards.