138. “Neighbors Find TMI a Strain.”
139. Quoted in Walsh, Democracy in the Shadows, 109.
140. On the Agent Orange comparison, see S. V. Kasl, R. F. Chisholm, and B. Eskenazi, “The Impact of the Accident at the Three Mile Island on the Behavior and Well Being of Nuclear Workers, Part I and Part III,” American Journal of Public Health 71 (1981): 472–495.
141. “Neighbors Find TMI a Strain.”
142. On the hostage crisis, see David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran (New York: Penguin, 1986).
143. “Candle Vigil Flares to Verbal Clenched Fists,” Evening News, March 28, 1980, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 201, Folder 13, DT Papers, UPSC.
144. Del Tredici, The People of Three Mile Island, 54.
145. “Crisis: Three Mile Island,” Washington Post Special Report, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 7: Three Mile Island, Box 200, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.
146. “TMI Area Mother Tells of Her Life of Fear,” Harrisburg Patriot, March 25, 1982, Subseries: News Articles Collection, DT Papers, UPSC.
147. “TMI Has Made Stress a Fact of Life,” Letter to the Editor from Mel Clouser, Middletown Resident, Harrisburg Patriot, March 15, 1982, Subseries: News Articles Collection, DT Papers, UPSC.
148. “Fear Itself.”
149. “TMI and the Politics of Public Health,” Lecture Prepared for Physicians for Social Responsibility, Gordon MacLeod, November 22, 1980, Beverly Hess Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, TMIC, DCASC.
150. “Three Years Later, Middletown Remembers,” undated, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 223, Folder: Untitled Event, DT Papers, UPSC.
151. “Lancastrian Urges Shutdown of TMI,” Harrisburg Patriot, March 31, 1980, Box 201, Folder 13, DT Papers, UPSC.
152. “Middletown Remains Concerned by TMI.”
153. Interview with Guidance Counselor, May 25, 1979, LMOHI, TMIC, DCASC. Resource Center of threemileisland.org, www.threemileisland.org/resource/item_detail.php?item_id=00000193.
154. Associated Press Article, TMI Plus Four, March 27, 1983, Box 197, Folder 6, DT Papers, UPSC.
155. Letter from Barbara Kunder to Richard Thornburgh, February 5, 1982, member of Friends and Family of TMI, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 207, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.
156. “A Middletowner’s Comments,” John Chubb, Insights, April 1979, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 207, Folder 1, DT Papers, UPSC.
157. US Congress, Joint Hearings of Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Supplemental View by Anne D. Trunk, Report of the Presidential Commission on the Three Mile Island Accident, 96th Congress, 1st sess., October 31, 1979, 77.
158. Mary Bradley, Harrisburg Evening News, RG 220, Central Series, Box 472, no folders named, Public Information Task Force, Interviews of Reporters, NA II. On Germany, see Interview with Engineer and Wife, August 28, 1979, LMOHI, Three Mile Island Collection, DCASC. Resource Center of threemileisland.org, www.threemileisland.org/resource/item_detail.php?item_id=00000222. On comparisons between local and national news reporting, see Interview with Attorney, July 7, 1979; Interview with College Administrator #9, August 29, 1979; Interview with College Professor #1, July 8, 1979; Interview with College Professor #2, June 6, 1979; Interview with Cumberland County Coordinator, August 8, 1979; and Interview with Homemaker #2, August 9, 1979, LMOHI, TMIC, DCASC. Resource Center of threemileisland.org, www.threemileisland.org/resource/index.php?aid=00024.
159. Interview with Jeff Blitzer, WHP-TV, Harrisburg local television/CBS affiliate, RG 220, Central Series, Box 472, no folders named; Public Information Task Force Interviews of Reporters, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II. On the crucial role of local media in the context of disasters, see Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).
160. David Salisbury, Christian Science Monitor, RG 220, Central Series, Box 472, no folders named; Public Information Task Force Interviews of Reporters, Papers of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, NA II.
161. “Innocence Lost.”
162. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009), 118.
163. Synopsis of US Court of Appeals Decision, Opinions Filed, May 14, 1982; US Court of Appeals, September 1981, PANE Versus the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 218, Folder 12, DT Papers, UPSC.
164. Ibid.
165. Ibid.
166. Quoted in “Justices to Rule on TMI,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2, 1982.
167. Synopsis of US Court of Appeals Decision.
168. Ibid.
169. Ibid.
170. “High Court Rejects TMI Stress Issue,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 20, 1983, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 223, Folder: Untitled Event, DT Papers, UPSC.
171. Ibid.
172. Michael Kinsley, “Mental Cases,” Harper’s, July 1982, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 218, Folder 13, DT Papers, UPSC.
173. Quoted in Walker, Three Mile Island, 169.
174. Ibid., 195.
175. On the centralization of the nuclear industry, see Christian Joppke, Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of the United States and Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 23–36.
176. On these abuses, see Kay Pickering and R. R. Smedley, TMIA Letter, February 1984, Beverly Hess Papers, Box 4, Folder 4; and Box 5, Folder 7, TMIC, DCASC; and PIRC Collection, Box 1, Folder 19; Box 2, Folder 8; Box 3, Folders 8 and 19, TMIC, DCASC.
177. “Nuclear Fallout: High Technology Age Causes New Problems in Coverage by Media,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1983, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 223, Folder: Untitled Event, DT Papers, UPSC.
178. SVA Newsletter, February 1985, Beverly Hess Papers, Box 1, Folder 13, TMIC, DCASC.
179. “Fears Caused by Three Mile Island Endure,” New York Times, November 11, 1982, Section XI: Governor of Pennsylvania, 1979–1987, Subseries 8: Office of Policy Development, Three Mile Island, Box 223, Folder: Untitled Event, DT Papers, UPSC.
180. Letter from Joan Olsavsky to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, August 22, 1981, Edwin Charles Collection, Box 1, Folder 12, TMIC, DCASC.
181. Walsh, Democracy in the Shadows.
4. THE SECOND COLD WAR AND THE EXTINCTION THREAT
1. Nicholas Meyer, dir., The Day After, 1983, ABC Television.
2. Jonathan Schell, “The Abolition I: Defining the Great Predicament,” New Yorker, January 2, 1984, 2.
3. “Hollywood Is Hoping Nuclear Drama Isn’t a Box-Office Bomb,” Wall Street Journal, July 19, 1983.
4. See, for example, Congress of the United States, the Office of Technology Assessment, The Effects of Nuclear War, May 1979; Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do (New York: Bantam, 1978); Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982). Other texts they used included Nigal Calder
, Nuclear Nightmares: An Investigation Into Possible Wars (New York: Penguin, 1981); Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (New York: Basic, 1981); and Arthur Katz, Life After Nuclear War (New York: Ballinger, 1982).
5. Richard Barnet, “Fantasy, Reality, and the Arms Race: Dilemmas of National Security and Human Survival,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 52, no. 4 (October 1982): 582–589.
6. “Fallout Over ‘The Day After,’ ” Newsweek, October 24, 1983.
7. Ibid.
8. “Fallout from a TV Attack,” Time, December 5, 1983, 40.
9. The “coitus interruptus” phrase comes from Kim Newman, Apocalypse Movies: End of the World Cinema (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 231. On the made-for-TV movie as a genre and its relation to melodrama more generally, see Laurie Schulze, “The Made-for-TV Movie: Industrial Practice, Cultural Form, Popular Reception,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (New York: Routledge, 2013), 351–376; Lynne Joyrich, “All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture,” Camera Obscura 6, no. 1 (January 1988): 128–153; and Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On The Day After specifically, see Gregory Waller, “Re-Placing the Day After,” Cinema Journal 26, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 3–20; and Deron Overpeck, “Remember! It’s Only a Movie: Expectations and Receptions of The Day After,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 32, no. 2 (June 2012): 267–292. On the film’s reception at the time, see “TV’s Nuclear Nightmare,” Newsweek, November 21, 1983, 70.
10. On the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the place of the Cold War revival within it, see Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Robert Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture in the Reagan Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper, 2008); James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Doug Rossinow, The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
11. The directive itself can be accessed at www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb390/. On the directive, see William Burr, “How to Fight a Nuclear War,” Foreign Policy (September 14, 2012), www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/14/how_to_fight_a_nuclear_war.
12. Interview with George Bush by Robert Sheer in Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1980, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: National Committee, March-June 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, the State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri at St. Louis (hereafter referred to as SHSM).
13. Quoted in Lawrence Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Disarmament Movement, 1971–Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 119. See also David S. Meyer, A Winter of Our Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics (New York: Praeger, 1990).
14. William Chipman, Director of Civil Defense Division, FEMA, quoted in Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1982. SO 454, Box 5, Folder: National Committee, March-June 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.
15. Ibid.
16. Rejoinders, a Handbook: Facts and Authorities for Doubters about the Bilateral Nuclear Arms Freeze, by Harold and Edith Waterhouse, plus excerpts from questions and answers on the Soviet threat and national security, all indexed together for use by Californians for a Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Opposition/Criticism, May 1981–March 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.
17. Quoted in “Does Reagan Expect a Nuclear Armageddon?,” Washington Post, April 8, 1984.
18. Ibid. Quotation originally appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 29, 1983.
19. Quoted in Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War (New York: Random House, 1982), 3.
20. T. K. Jones, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Strategic and Nuclear Forces, Interview with Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1982, SI 454, Box 5, Folder: National Committee, March–June 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM. Quotation also appears in Edward M. Kennedy and Mark O. Hatfield, Freeze! How You Can Prevent Nuclear War (New York: Bantam, 1982), 94; and Schell, “The Abolition I.”
21. “The Dirt on TK Jones,” New York Times, March 19, 1982. On Reagan’s civil defense, see Kennedy and Hatfield, Freeze!; and Scheer, With Enough Shovels. See also SO 660, Box 1, Folder: Civil Defense, Physicians for Social Responsibility Collection (hereafter referred to as PSR Collection), SHSM.
22. Randall Forsberg, “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race: Proposal for a Mutual US-Soviet Nuclear-Weapon Freeze.” https://livingwiththebomb.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/call-to-halt-arms-race.pdf.
23. Quoted in Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition, 194, 225; On the freeze movement, see also David Meyer, A Winter of Our Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics (New York: Praeger, 1990); Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 3–24; and Michael Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).
24. On the place of futurology in the Cold War national security state, see Matthew Connelly, Matt Fay, Giulia Ferrini, Micki Kaufman, Will Leonard, Harrison Monsky, Ryan Musto, Tauton Paine, Nicholas Standish, and Lydia Walker, “General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1431–1460.
25. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 21.
26. Ibid., 227.
27. Quoted in Carl Sagan, “The Nuclear Winter,” brochure published by Council for a Livable World Education Fund, SO 660, Box 4, Folder: Nuclear Winter, PSR Collection, SHSM.
28. Jennifer Leaning, MD, “Civil Defense in the Nuclear Age: What Purpose Does It Serve and What Survival Does It Promise?,” National Executive Committee and Board, Physicians for Social Responsibility, SO 660, Box 1, Folder: Civil Defense, “Civil Defense in the Nuclear Age: What Purpose Does It Serve and What Survival Does It Promise?,” PSR 1982, PSR Collection, SHSM.
29. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 85.
30. “The Nuclear Threat to San Francisco,” SO 660, Box 6, Folder: Public Health Booklets, Marin Co/Mass Department of Health, PSR Collection, SHSM.
31. “How Doctors Hope to Stop Nuclear War,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 1980.
32. Herbert Leiderman and Jack Mendelsohn, “Some Psychiatric and Social Aspects of the Defense Shelter Program,” New England Journal of Medicine (May 31, 1962): 18. On the medical effects of a nuclear war, see Schell, The Fate of the Earth; Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Madness; and Ruth Adams and Susan Cullen, eds., The Final Epidemic: Physicians and Scientists on Nuclear War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); H. Jack Geiger, “Addressing Apocalypse Now: The Effects of Nuclear Warfare as a Public Health Concern,” American Journal of Public Health 70, no. 9 (September 1980): 958–961; Kevin Lewis, “The Prompt and Delayed Effects of Nuclear War,” Scientific American 241, no. 1 (July 1979): 35–47; PSR pamphlet, Medical Aspects of Nuclear War, SO 454, Box 2, Folder: The Day After, November 1983–February 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM; Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Last Epidemic: The Medical Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War (Santa Cruz: Resource Center for Non-Violence, 1980); Special Report: Medical Problems of Survivors of Nuclear War, New England Journal of Medicine 305, no. 20 (November 12, 1981): 1226–1232.
33. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 46.
34. Schell, “The Abolition I.”
35. Robert Jay Lifton, “In a Dark Time,” in Adams and Cullen, The Final Epidemic, 7.
36. Quoted in “Anatomy of a Nuclear Protest,” New Yor
k Times, July 11, 1982. Large numbers of physicians throughout the country were compelled by the argument, and PSR grew rapidly between 1979 and 1984, from a few hundred to over thirty thousand members. By December 1982, there were 125 PSR chapters in forty-seven states. The following year, the PSR House of Delegates endorsed four planks: support for a bilateral freeze, support for a comprehensive test ban; opposition to destabilizing first strike weapons; and opposition to civil defense planning for a nuclear attack. On PSR, see Adams and Cullen, The Final Epidemic; Bernard Lown, “Nuclear War and the Public Health,” Journal of Public Health Policy 3, no. 1 (March 1, 1982): 12–21; Bernard Lown, Eric Chivian, James Muller, and Herbert Abrams, “Nuclear Arms Race and the Physician,” New England Journal of Medicine 304, no. 12 (March 19, 1981): 726–729; See also Christine Cassel and Andrew Jameton, “Medical Responsibility and Thermonuclear War,” Annals of Internal Medicine 97, no. 3 (September 1982): 426–432; Herbert Abrams and William E. Von Kaenel, “Special Report: Medical Problems That Would Confront Survivors,” New England Journal of Medicine (November 12, 1981); Bernard Lown, “Physicians and Nuclear War,” Journal of the American Medical Association 246, no. 20 (November 20, 1981): 2331–2333; “Physicians Warn of Nuclear Risks,” New York Times, December 10, 1981; J. E. Coggle and Patricia Lindop, “Medical Consequences of Radiation Following a Global Nuclear War,” Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 11, no. 2/3 (1982): 106; “How Doctors Hope to Stop Nuclear War,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 1980; and Howard Hiatt, “Preventing the Last Epidemic,” Journal of the American Medical Association 244, no. 20 (November 21, 1980): 314–315.
37. Quoted in “Physicians Warn of Nuclear Risks,” New York Times, December 10, 1981.
38. “Physicians for Social Responsibility Gain Respectability,” New Physician 31, no. 5 (1982), SO 660, Box 4, Folder: New Physician, PSR Collection, SHSM.
39. See, for example, Leaning, “Civil Defense in the Nuclear Age.” Adams and Cullens, The Final Epidemic, 150; and PSR Statement on Civil Defense, 1983, SI 454, Box 5, Folder: PSR, 1982–1986, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.
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