Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  28. John Cockcroft, “Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy: The Second International Conference,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 15, no. 1 (January 1, 1959): 18.

  29. On the “domestication” of the atom and attempts to explain the atom to popular audiences, see Carroll Pursell, Technology in Postwar America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 59–77; Joshua Silverman, “Nuclear Technology,” in A Companion to American Technology, ed. Carroll Pursell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 305; and Michael L. Smith, “Advertising the Atom,” in Government and Environmental Politics: Essays on Historical Development Since World War Two, ed. Michael J. Lacey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

  30. Reddy Kilowatt Coloring Book, Record Group 220 (hereafter referred to as RG 220), Central Files, Box 79, File 61900641B, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, National Archives II, University of Maryland, College Park (hereafter referred to as NA II).

  31. For examples, see You Can Understand the Atom (Washington, DC: Atomic Energy Commission, 1951); and Selig Hecht, Explaining the Atom (New York: Viking, 1947). The AEC relied on a range of mediums for popularizing the atom: Atomic Energy Clubs, comic books, animated color film series, and newsreels. See Weart, Nuclear Fears, 170.

  32. On the historic role of cheap energy in successive waves of capital accumulation, see Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).

  33. Outline of Master Plan for Public Education and Public Relations, 1975, Metropolitan Edison, RG 220, Central Files, Box 80, Folder: Speech Copy Outlines, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  34. Weart, Nuclear Fears, 177.

  35. One-Minute Radio Script, Metropolitan Edison, RG 220, Central Files, Box 80, Folder: Radio Commercials, 1966–3/27/79, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  36. Quotation comes from a spokesperson for New England Power Company (NEPCO) and was reprinted in Jerry Elmer, “Power Plants and Weapons: The Nuclear Connection,” SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, Folder 1, Swarthmore College Peace Collection (hereafter referred to as SCPC).

  37. Ibid.

  38. See, for example, Brochure on Observation Center, RG 220, Central Files, Box 79, Folder 61900641B, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  39. Glenn Seaborg, “Our Nuclear Future,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 26, no. 6 (June 1, 1970): 7–14.

  40. Met-Ed Brochure, RG 220, Central Files, Box 80, Folder: Nuclear Brochures, Information produced by Met-Ed, 6191068, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  41. Nuclear Power Brochure, RG 220, Central Files, Box 79, Folder 61900641B, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  42. One Minute Radio Script for Metropolitan Edison, RG 220, Central Files, Box 80, Folder: Radio Commercials, 1966–3/27/79, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  43. On the history of atomic weapons testing, see Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Masco, Nuclear Borderlands, 43–98.

  44. Masco, Nuclear Borderlands, 60.

  45. Although the earliest postwar tests were conducted in the Pacific, President Truman approved the Nevada site in December 1950 ostensibly in response to China’s invasion of Korea two months earlier. That invasion supposedly convinced him of the need for a secure test site within the territorial boundaries of the United States.

  46. Weart, Nuclear Fears, 187.

  47. On this dilemma, see Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85–107.

  48. United States Congress, Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint House and Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, “Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests,” 86th Cong., 1st sess., June 1959.

  49. See, for other examples, “Atomic Fallout—How Bad? The Facts and the Intrigue,” Newsweek, April 6, 1959, 36–38; “These Precious Days,” New Yorker, May 16, 1959, 180; and “The Silent Killer,” Saturday Evening Post, August 29, 1959, 25. The edition of Scientific American from September 1959 was devoted to the theme of ionizing radiation.

  50. Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (New York: Norton, 1995), 144. On the significance of radiation’s invisibility, see Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (London: Routledge, 1998), 193–211. For a classic anthropological study on the broader theme of contamination, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Taylor, 2002).

  51. On the question of whether there is such a thing as a safe threshold of radiation, see Walker, Permissible Dose. See also Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 134, 225.

  52. “Radiation Report,” New York Times, May 9, 1960.

  53. Jacob Hamblin, “A Dispassionate and Objective Effort: Negotiating the First Study on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation,” Journal of the History of Biology 40, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 147–177.

  54. Weart, Nuclear Fears, 185; “Increased Radiation Found in East; Laid to Atom Tests, Held Harmless,” New York Times, February 3, 1951; “AEC Calls Rate of Fall-Out Safe,” New York Times, April 5, 1958; “AEC Denies Peril: Radiation Level in US Held High,” New York Times, April 7, 1958; “Radiation Report: Expert Panels See No Major Rise in Perils of Radioactivity,” New York Times, May 8, 1960.

  55. “Science in Review: UN Report on Fall-Out Reveals Agreement on Radiation’s Deleterious Effects,” New York Times, August 17, 1958; Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 32; Ralph Lapp, “Civil Defense Faces New Peril,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 10, no. 9 (November 1954): 349–351.

  56. “Radiation Limit for Public Reached in 15-Nation Agreement,” New York Times, November 2, 1959.

  57. Walter Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Norton, 1932).

  58. Linda Nash, “Purity and Danger: Historical Reflections on Environmental Regulations,” Environmental History 13, no. 4 (October 2008): 651–658.

  59. Sarah Vogel, “From ‘The Dose Makes the Poison’ to ‘The Timing Makes the Dose’: Conceptualizing Risk in the Synthetic Age,” Environmental History 13, no. 4 (October 2008): 667–673; and Vogel, “The Politics of Plastics: The Making and Unmaking of Bisphenol A ‘Safety,’ ” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. S3 (September 3, 2009): 559–566.

  60. Finis Dunaway discusses the “ecological body,” and in particular its deployment in visual representations of environmental risk in Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). See also Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

  61. On this association, again see Houser, Ecosickness.

  62. On milk, see Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Greta Gaard, “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” American Quarterly 65, no. 3 (September 2013): 595–619.

  63. “SR 90 in Milk: St. Louis Concerned Over a High Radioactivity Count,” New York Times, July 31, 1960; and “A Radiation Rise in Milk Detected,” New York Times, October 13, 1961. The concern surrounding Strontium-90 is discussed at length in Divine, Blowing on the Wind.

  64. The scene is described in Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax, Radiation: What It Is, and What You Need to Know (New York: Vintage, 2013), 113.

  65. On the symbolic significance of the child in the fallout debate, see Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green; and Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Ch
ildhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

  66. “A-Bomb Tests: Cold War Fears Stifled Doubts,” New York Times, May 13, 1979.

  67. On children’s vulnerability to radiation exposure, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 274. In 1962, the AEC Fallout Studies Branch released the Knapp report, which showed that children in communities downwind from testing sites had received hundreds of roentgens of Iodine-131. At the time, the Federal Radiation Council recommended that infants be limited to doses of half a roentgen a year in peacetime. In August 1963, Dr. Eric Reiss, an associate professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, told a congressional panel that several thousand children in Nevada and Utah had probably received hazardous doses of fallout and predicted ten to twelve cases of thyroid cancer as a result. The following October, the AEC acknowledged that a few children in Utah might have received radiation doses exceeding permissible peacetime levels. Also worrying government officials was an inquiry into leukemia deaths that expanded in 1963 into a study of thyroid nodules in children. In an internal memorandum written in 1962, government experts had termed the discovery “genuinely disturbing.” In 1969, a separate study of thyroid surgery in Utah revealed a fourfold increase in thyroid cancer in the state, primarily among people between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. These studies are discussed at length in SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series G, Box 140, Folder: Low Level Radiation Materials, 1978–1980, SCPC.

  68. On the Edward Murrow episode, see Weart, Nuclear Fears, 206; “Our Irradiated Children,” New Republic 136, no. 24 (June 17, 1957): 9–12; and “Radioactivity Is Poisoning Your Children,” McCall’s, January 1957, cover.

  69. “Nuclear Fallout Danger Stirs Widespread Fears,” New York Times, October 15, 1961.

  70. Dower, Cultures of War, 282. Postbomb images of mothers and children also figure prominently in John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 1946); and Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See also Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  71. See Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2011). Other books that look at the cultural significance of cancer include James Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977); and Robert Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer (New York: Basic, 1995).

  72. Quoted in “Science Notes,” New York Times, September 11, 1960. A UN report from 1962 confirmed that the developing embryo was more susceptible to radiological injury than children and adults, even at low doses.

  73. See Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 33.

  74. Quoted in “Scientists Term Radiation a Peril to Future of Man,” New York Times, June 13, 1956.

  75. Quoted in “Science in Review: UN Report on Fall-Out Reveals Agreement on Radiation’s Deleterious Effects,” New York Times, August 17, 1958.

  76. Linus Pauling, “Genetic and Scientific Effects of Carbon-14,” Science 128 (November 14, 1958). Pauling is discussed at length in Divine, Blowing on the Wind. See also Barbara Marinacci and Ramesh Krishnamurthy, eds., Linus Pauling on Peace: A Scientist Speaks Out on Humanism and World Survival (Los Altos: Rising Star, 1998).

  77. “Text of Genetics Committee Report Concerning Effects of Radioactivity on Heredity,” New York Times, June 13, 1956.

  78. Quoted in Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 54.

  79. On the postwar history of genetics research, see Soraya de Chadarevian, “Mice and the Reactor: The Genetics Experiment in 1950s Britain,” Journal of the History of Biology 39 (2006): 707–735; and Peter Harper, A Short History of Medical Genetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  80. My discussion in this paragraph is indebted to Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  81. The radiation scare anticipated subsequent revelations about the impact of rubella, DES, and thalidomide on fetal development. On rubella, see Leslie Reagan, Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). On DES, see Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disrupters and the Legacy of DES (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). On the history of thalidomide, see Andrea Tone, The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers (New York: Basic, 2011), 147–151.

  82. On the Hibakusha, see Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  83. Dubow writes that “atomic sciences and the science of embryology became at least loosely linked in the public imagination.” Dubow, Ourselves Unborn, 52.

  84. On Women’s Strike for Peace and the larger theme of maternalism in women’s pacifist organizing in the 1950s and 1960s, see Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993); and Harriet Hyman Alonso, “Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists During the McCarthy Era,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed. Josanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 128–150. The definitive history of SANE is Milton Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, 1957–1985 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986).

  85. Quoted in Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 59.

  86. Albert Schweitzer, The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today: Statement with Reference to the Present Nuclear Crisis in the World (Chicago: Albert Schweitzer Education Foundation, 1958).

  87. “Facts of Life in the Age of the Hydrogen Bomb: Q and A for Americans,” 10, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 058, Series A, Box 15, Folder 1: Advertisement, March 24, 1958, “No Contamination Without …,” SCPC.

  88. “The World’s Peoples Have a Right to Demand No Contamination Without Representation: Questions and Answers for Americans About Hydrogen Bombs,” February 27, 1968, 58, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 058, Series A, Box 15, Folder 1: Advertisement, March 24, 1958, SCPC.

  89. Quoted in Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 139.

  90. Schweitzer, The Perils of the Unborn.

  91. Ibid.

  92. Excerpt from a Speech Given by Krishna Menon to the UN General Assembly, October 16, 1957, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series A, Box 14, Folder 8: Advertisement, November 15, 1957, “We are facing a danger …,” SCPC.

  93. Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 204.

  94. Letter from Lewis Mumford to Clarence Pickett and Norman Cousins, July 15, 1959, SANE Inc., Records, DG 58, Series A, Box 16, Folder 1: Advertisement, August 13, 1959, “Humanity Has a Common Will …,” SCPC.

  95. Ibid.

  96. SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series A, Box 14, Folder 7: “Scientists for SANE,” SCPC.

  97. Ernest Sternglass, “Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 25, no. 4 (April 1969): 18–20; Sternglass, “Can Infants Survive?,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 25, no. 6 (June 1969): 26–27; Sternglass, “The Death of All Children: A Footnote in the ABM Controversy,” Esquire 72 (September 1969): 1a–1d. For secondary discussions, see Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 265–285, Philip Boffey, “Ernest Sternglass: Controversial Prophet of Doom,” Science 166 (October 10, 1969): 195–200; Joppke, Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy, 27–28; and Walker, Permissible Dose, 36–44.

  98. Quoted in Joppke, Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy, 28.

  99. The
decision no doubt contributed to the two scientists’ eventual alliance with the antinuclear movement. Tamplin would join the Natural Resources Defense Council, and John Gofman later founded the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility.

  100. Mancuso charged the Energy Research and Development Administration (which had assumed the AEC’s nonregulatory duties in 1974) with retaliation and with muzzling him because it did not like his conclusions. Thomas Mancuso, Alice Stewart, and George Kneale, “Radiation Exposures of Hanford Workers Dying from Cancer and Other Causes,” Health Physics 33 (November 1977): 369–385. For a discussion of the controversy, see Walker, Permissible Dose, 94–95; “The Government’s Quiet War on Scientists Who Know Too Much,” Rolling Stone, March 23, 1978, 42–44.

  101. On the resignations, see Thomas Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 147–148; and “News from Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power,” February 1976, RG 220, Central Files, Box 81, Folder: Anti-Nuclear Information, NA II.

  102. On the public advocacy and direct action wings of the antinuclear movement in the United States, see Joppke, Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy, 51–90.

  103. On the ways in which these traditions of political radicalism endured into the 1970s and 1980s, see Dan Berger, The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); and Michael Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).

  104. Historical work on the antinuclear movement has focused largely on local battles over plant-sitings, and with good reason. The stories of grassroots fights against nuclear power at places like Seabrook Station, New Hampshire, and Diablo Canyon, California, provide deeply moving accounts of nonviolent direct action in the 1970s and the 1980s. Case studies of local battles over plant sitings include Henry Bedford, Seabrook Station: Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990); Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Non-Violent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Wellock, Critical Masses. Christian Joppke’s Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy offers an illuminating comparative analysis of the antinuclear movement in the United States and West Germany. In this vein, also see Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Pollak, The Atom Besieged: Anti-Nuclear Movements in France and Germany (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). For a more critical reading of the movement’s localism, see Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).