Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  105. Kristin Iverson, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Shadow of Rocky Flats (New York: Crown, 2012).

  106. Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrial Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

  107. Pamphlet: Radiation: The Human Cost, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 139, Folder: Low Level Radiation Pamphlet, 1979, SCPC.

  108. See, for example, Richard Curtis and Elizabeth Hogan, Perils of the Peaceful Atom: The Myth of Safe Nuclear Plants (New York: Doubleday, 1969); “Did You Give Permission for Nuclear Power Plants? 14 Reasons for Paying Attention,” Limerick Ecology Action, RG 220, Central Files, RG 220, Central Files, Box 79, File 61900641B, Box 81, Folder: Anti-Nuke Info, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II; “The Nuclear Menace,” Shad and Clamshell Alliance Papers, unprocessed, SCPC; Leaflet for August 5–9 Days of Action, Shad and Clamshell Alliance Papers, unprocessed, SCPC; and Fundraising Letter from SANE, April 25, 1979, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series G, Box 96, Folder: Fundraising, Direct mail, Third Renewal, Three Mile Island, SCPC.

  109. Examples of this line of argument can be seen in “Did You Give Permission for Nuclear Power Plants? 14 Reasons for Paying Attention,” RG 220, Central Files, Box 81, Folder: Limerick Ecology Action, Anti-Nuke Info, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II; “What Are the Dangers of Nuclear Power?,” Shad and Clamshell Alliance Papers, unprocessed, SCPC; Resolution Proposed by the 1979 National NOW Conference by NOW-New Jersey, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 139, Folder: Low Level Radiation Pamphlet, 1979, SCPC; Statement adopted by the National Board of SANE at its meeting on June 2, 1979, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 139, Folder: Low Level Radiation Pamphlet, 1979, SCPC; Clamshell Alliance Declaration of Nuclear Resistance, Clamshell Alliance and Shad Alliance Documents, unprocessed, SCPC.

  110. Illustration of Ionizing Radiation in the Female Body, Clamshell Alliance and Shad Alliance Documents, unprocessed, SCPC. Also located at SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series G, Box 140, Folder: Low Level Radiation Materials, 1978–1980, SCPC.

  111. Kristin Iverson writes, “In the geography of the land and the geography of the body, some things are seen and some are unseen.” Iverson, Full Body Burden, 338.

  112. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  113. On the NTS in particular and the American West as a site of nuclear toxicity more broadly, see Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Kuletz, “Invisible Spaces, Violent Places: Cold War Nuclear and Militarized Landscapes,” in Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 237–260. See also John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Kevin Ferlund, ed., The Cold War American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); and Peter C. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). On the history of the plutonium industry in Hanford, see Hill Williams, Made in Hanford: The Bomb That Changed the World (Pullman: Washington State University, 2011); Brown, Plutopia; and William J. Kinsella and Jay Mullen, “Becoming Hanford Downwinders: Producing Community and Challenging Discursive Containment,” in Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the US Nuclear Weapons Complex, ed. Bryan C. Taylor et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007). On Rocky Flats, see Len Ackland, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Iverson, Full Body Burden; and Krupar, Hot Spotter’s Report. On atomic veterans, see Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1999). The NTS, Rocky Flats, and Hanford are all analyzed as sites of Cold War commemoration in Jon Weiner, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America (Berkeley: University of California, 2012).

  114. For a more extensive discussion of this politics and its relation to radiation activism, see Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Suffering and Patriotic Body Politics,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 487–510.

  115. US Congress, Joint Hearings, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and Health and Scientific Research Subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee and Committee on the Judiciary, Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation, Volume 1, 96th Cong., 1st sess., April 19, 1979, 8.

  116. These studies are discussed at length in the SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series G, Box 140, Files of SANE Publications Directors, 1978–1985, Folder: Low Level Radiation: Reference Material, 1978–1980, SCPC. On children’s particular vulnerability to radiation exposure, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 274.

  117. See Ball, Justice Downwind; “Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims,” 1980, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, Folder 5, SCPC; Folder: Radiation Victims, 1980–3, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, SCPC; US Congress, House of Representatives, Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Natural Resources and Environment of the Committee on Science and Technology, Research on Health Effects of Nonionizing Radiation, 96th Congress, 1st sess., July 12, 1979; and US Congress, Joint Hearing, Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation: Volume 1.

  118. See Ball, Justice Downwind, 45. After 1970, the public sphere became filled with still more information. Some radiation-induced leukemias appeared soon after exposure, while other cancers could lie dormant for decades. Starkly put, by the mid-1970s more downwinders had fallen ill and died, and as a result, their survivors had accrued a larger and more damning body of evidence against the AEC. In addition, the Utah Cancer Registry only started compiling cancer mortality information in the late 1960s. Its official findings, first published in 1972 and 1975, confirmed what downwinders already suspected: acute leukemia and cancer rates had increased significantly in those counties closest to the NTS. An article published in 1979 in the New England Journal of Medicine buttressed the registry data. It found that rates of pediatric leukemia had risen sharply in southern Utah between 1951 and 1958.

  119. Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

  120. “A Flinty Grandmother Battles for the Victims of Utah’s Nuclear Tragedy,” People 12, no. 14 (October 1, 1979): 26–28.

  121. On accidental activists, see Foley, Front Porch Politics. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, radiation activists founded several organizations based in the US Southwest, including Citizens Call, started in 1978 by a Utah woman whose brother had died at the age of twenty-seven from pancreatic cancer; Downwinders, a Salt Lake City group formed in 1980 by a southern Utah native and cancer survivor; and the NTS Radiation Victims Association, which was launched on behalf of military personnel who had worked at the site and subsequently fallen ill. Activists founded organizations for members of the US military and their families, such as the Committee for US Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the National Association of Atomic Veterans, and Atomic Widows, an organization that assisted the wives of deceased veterans who were convinced that their husbands’ deaths had been caused by radiation exposure sustained during their service. There were also organizations like the National Committee for Radiation Victims and the National Association of Radiation Survivors that created a national network by bringing hundreds of radiation victims together under a shared umbrella. These groups engaged in work along s
everal different axes.

  122. Transcript of testimony of O. T. Weeks presented before the Citizens’ Commission Panel, National Citizens’ Hearings for Radiation Victims, Washington, DC, April 11–14, 1980, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, Files of E. Glennon, Folder: Radiation Victims, 1980–3, SCPC. Howard Ball discusses several of these organizations in Justice Downwind.

  123. On the concept of the nuclear sublime, see Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 4–10; Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 349–373; Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 55–68; Hugh Gusterson, “(Anti)nuclear Pilgrims,” Anthropologiska Studier 62–63:61–66; and Gusterson, “Nuclear Tourism,” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 23–31. For a critique of the concept, see David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

  124. “The Atomic Age: A Trail of Victims,” 3, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 139, Folder: Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims, 1980, SCPC.

  125. “The Forgotten Nevada Test Site Workers,” Las Vegas Sun, August 22, 1980. Found in SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, Folder 5: Citizens’ Hearings for Radiation Victims, 1980, SCPC.

  126. Testimony of Robert Jay Lifton, Transcript of Testimony Presented Before the Citizens’ Commission Panel, April 12, 1980, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, Folder: Radiation Victims, 1980–3, SCPC.

  127. On this dual conception of witnessing, see Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

  128. On the women’s health movement of the 1970s, see Wendy Kline, Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); and Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2015). For an incisive look at the centrality of the politics of health to the Black Panther Party, see Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). On race and medical discrimination, see also Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Broadway, 2011).

  129. Report on National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims, April 11–14, 1980, SANE World, Periodicals Collection, SANE World (September 1979), January 1965–October 1986, SCPC.

  130. National Association of Radiation Survivors Newsletter, Winter 1985, SANE, Inc. Records, DG 58, Series G, Box 96, Folder: Fundraising, Direct Mail, Third Renewal, Three Mile Island, SCPC.

  131. Transcript of testimony of Dr. Henry Vyner, psychiatrist and member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Citizens’ Commission Panel, National Citizens’ Hearings for Radiation Victims, Washington, DC, April 11–14, 1980, SANE, Inc. Records, Series G, Box 137, Files of E. Glennon, Folder: Radiation Victims, 1980–3, SCPC.

  132. Downwinders often quoted AEC Chairman Thomas Murray, who in 1955 declared, “we must not let anything interfere with this series of tests, nothing.” For example, see Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Vintage, 1991), 284.

  2. THE ACCIDENT AND THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE 1970s

  1. For studies that show how disasters expose social fraying, see Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (New York: Norton, 1994); and Eric Klinenberg, Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For a study that foregrounds disaster’s communitarian dimensions, see Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009).

  2. Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang 2016); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Robert Self, All in the Family: the Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

  3. On the significance of the pregnant woman as a symbol of environmental risk, see Finis Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism,” American Quarterly 60, no. 1 (March 2008): 67–99; and Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  4. For examples, see letters to the Kemeny Commission from Nikki Naumann and Mary M. Wertman, RG 220, Central Files, Box 307, unnamed folder, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.

  5. J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and John Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island: The Need for Change, the Legacy of TMI (Oxford: Pergamon, 1979).

  6. Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1989; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 299.

  7. “What Is Radiation?,” RG 220, Central Files, Box 80, Folder 6190068: Nuclear Brochures, Information Produced by Met-Ed, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II; “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI,” Study Prepared for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Mountain West and Social Impact Research, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 197, Folder 1, Dick Thornburgh Papers (hereafter referred to as DT Papers), University of Pittsburgh Special Collections (hereafter referred to as UPSC).

  8. On the Rasmussen Report, see Weart, Nuclear Fear, 335.

  9. Quoted in Lee Clarke, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 43.

  10. Select Committee’s Report of the Hearings Concerning TMI, Statement by Mayor Robert Reid, Goldsboro Fire Hall, Public Meeting, June 6, 1979, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 199, Folder 13, DT Papers, UPSC.

  11. On the survey data and the two groups, see “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI,” Study Prepared for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Mountain West and Social Impact Research, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 197, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  12. On TMIA, see Susan Stranahan, Susquehanna, River of Dreams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 207–208.

  13. “Three Years Later, Middletown Remembers,” Harrisburg Evening News, April 2, 1982.

  14. On the decline of steel and the transformation of the industrial rustbelt, see Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Decline, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

  15. Dauphin County, where TMI was located, was almost 85 percent white; the African Americans who lived in Dauphin County were centered in Harrisburg. The other counties surrounding the plant had larger white majorities. See US Census of Population and Housing: 1980 Census Tracts, Harrisburg-Hickory. For an excellent compilation of census demographic data on Pennsylvania’s counties, see Renee Lamis, The Realignment of Pennsylvania Politics Since 1960: Two Party Competition in a Battleground State (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), appendix D, 354–360. Of the approximately 35,500 people who lived within five miles of the plant, 97 percent were white and 83 percent were native Pennsylvanians. See TMI Population Registry, Jane Lee Papers, Box 1, Folder 23, Three Mile Island Collection (hereafter referred to TMIC), Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections (hereafter referred to as DCASC).


  16. Paul Beers, City Contented, City Discontented: A History of Modern Harrisburg (Harrisburg, PA: Midtown Scholar, 2011), 259.

  17. Robert Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1980), 64.

  18. Association of Religious Data Archives, www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/counties/42043_1980.asp.

  19. On both the political economy and the political culture of the Susquehanna Valley, see Walker, Three Mile Island; Susan Stranahan, Susquehanna, River of Dreams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); “The Social and Economic Effects of the Accident at TMI,” Study Prepared for the NRC by Mountain West and Social Impact Research, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 197, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC. The quotation comes from “Innocence Lost,” Pennsylvania Illustrated, August 1979, 30, Series XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 200, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.

  20. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic, 1984).

  21. On the experience of the control room operators, see Kemeny, Accident at Three Mile Island, 11, 92–93. Scholars of technological disasters have argued that redundant systems—designed to eliminate risk—often generate new and unanticipated risks of their own. Sociologist Lee Clarke writes that “safety devices can bring systems down, adding more guards can increase opportunities for failure, having extra people can diffuse responsibility, heaping on redundant devices can increase production pressure.” Clarke, Worst Cases, 181.