Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  40. Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Last Epidemic, 1981.

  41. On the inadequacy of shelters, see S. Warren, “You, Your Patients, and Radioactive Fallout,” New England Journal of Medicine 266, no. 31 (May 1962): 1123–1125; V. W. Sidel, H. Jack Geiger, and Bernard Lown, “The Physician’s Role in the Post-Attack Period,” New England Journal of Medicine 266 (May 31, 1962): 1137–1145; Kevin Lewis, “The Prompt and Delayed Effects of Nuclear War,” Scientific American 241, no. 1 (July 1979): 35–47; and Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Last Epidemic, 1981.

  42. Leaning, “Civil Defense in the Nuclear Age.”

  43. Ibid., 35.

  44. See SI 454, Box 5, Folder: PSR, 1982–6, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM; “The Nuclear Threat to San Francisco,” SO 660, Box 6, Folder: Public Health Booklets, Marin Co/Mass Department of Health, PSR Collection, SHSM; and Jeannie Peterson, The Aftermath: The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

  45. 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.

  46. Sidel, Geiger, and Lown, “The Physician’s Role in the Post-Attack Period,” 1137–1145.

  47. Brochure: Civil Defense Planning for Nuclear War: Security or Illusion?, SO 660, Box 1, Folder: Arsenic Pills for Civil Defense, PSR Collection, SHSM; “Physicians Warn of Nuclear Risk,” New York Times, December 10, 1981; and Leaning, “Civil Defense in the Nuclear Age.”

  48. Arnold Relman, “Physicians, Nuclear War, and Politics,” New England Journal of Medicine 308, no. 6 (September 16, 1982): 744–745.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Letter dated September 1, 1981, from Kathryn Bennett, Medical Staff President, Health Services Department, Contra Costa County to John H. Moxley, Department of Defense, SO 660, Box 1, Folder: Civil Defense, PSR Collection, SHSM. See also Herbert Abrams, “Preparing for the Highest Rate of Casualties in History,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 39, no. 6 (June 1983): 11S–16S.

  51. Letter to the Editor in Lancet, April 25, 1981, SO 660, Box 1, Folder: Civil Defense, PSR Collection, SHSM.

  52. “Coast Doctors Rebuff Pentagon on Plan for War,” New York Times, October 27, 1981.

  53. Jay Bisgard, “The Obligation to Care for Casualties,” Hastings Center Report 12 (April 1982): 15–17. For other critiques of PSR’s position, see Howard Maccabee, Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, “A Medical and Ethical Argument,” Emergency Management Review, Winter 1984. See SO 660, Box 2, Folder: Geiger/Maccabee 2/6/84, PSR Collection, SHSM.

  54. Arnold Relman, “Physicians, Nuclear War, and Politics,” New England Journal of Medicine (September 16, 1982): 744–745.

  55. H. Jack Geiger, “Why Survival Plans Are Meaningless,” Hastings Center Report 12 (April 1982): 17–19.

  56. Randall Kehler Congressional testimony, March 22 1982, 1, SO 454, Box 3, Folder: Freeze Forum, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.

  57. Schell, “The Abolition I.”

  58. Patrick Caddell, “The State of American Politics,” October 25, 1983, Draft: confidential, Cambridge Survey Research, SO 454, Box 3, Folder: Freeze Activists for Presidential Campaigns of 1984, October 1983–October 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.

  59. Rejoinders, a Handbook.

  60. See SO 454, Box 7, Folder: Strategy Committee, Jan–March 1981, National Freeze Strategy, 1/3/81, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.

  61. Ibid.

  62. “Professional Approach to Peace,” Nuclear Times, August/September 1983, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Nuclear Times, Jan–Dec 1983, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.

  63. “Anatomy of a Nuclear Protest.”

  64. “A Physician’s View on Nuclear War: An Interview with Helen Caldicott,” SO 660, Box 1, Folder: Helen Caldicott, PSR Collection, SHSM.

  65. “On Women and War: Interview with Joanne Woodward,” Common Cause Magazine, November/December 1983, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: News Clippings, March 1974–December 1983, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Collection, SHSM.

  66. “Will Gender Gap Become a Gulf?,” Nuclear Times, April 1984, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Nuclear Times, Jan-Apr 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  67. See SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Peace/Disarmament, 1984–5, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  68. “Will Gender Gap Become a Gulf?”

  69. Quoted in “A Matter of Life and Death,” Newsweek, April 26, 1982, 20–25.

  70. Quoted in Press Release, Presbyterian Church USA, June 4, 1984, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Peace/Disarmament, 1984–5, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. SHSM.

  71. See Meyers, A Winter of Our Discontent, 104–109.

  72. www.usccb.org/upload/challenge-peace-gods-promise-our-response-1983.pdf.

  73. “Bishops Endorse Stand Opposed to Nuclear War,” New York Times, May 4, 1983.

  74. See “Anti-Bomb Equals Anti-Choice,” Nuclear Times, February 1984, Box 5, Folder: Nuclear Times, Jan-Apr 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. SHSM.

  75. See “A Matter of Life and Death,” Newsweek, April 26, 1982, 20–25; see also “Four Proposals Concerning Political Aspects of the Freeze,” SO 454, Box 7, Folder: Strategy Committee, Jan-March 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. SHSM.

  76. Four Proposals Concerning Political Aspects of the Freeze, SO 454, Box 7, Folder: Strategy Committee, Jan-March 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  77. “Anatomy of a Nuclear Protest.”

  78. “What About the Children?,” publication of Parents and Teachers for Social Responsibility, SO 660, Box 3, Folder: Kids and Nuclear War, PSR Collection, SHSM.

  79. Warning, Peace Marchers Flyer, paid for by the Alliance to Halt the Advance of Marxism in the Americas, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Opposition/Criticism, Apr-Aug 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  80. Letter from Jerry Falwell to members of the Moral Majority, June 17, 1982, 1, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Opposition/Criticism, Apr-Aug 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  81. See Interchange Memorandum Re: Anti-Freeze Initiatives/Report #2, January 20, 1983, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Opposition/Criticism November 1982-Feb 1983, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM. See also Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, remarks to the Massachusetts Medical Society, May 19, 1982, Shattuck Lectures, New England Journal of Medicine, September 16, 1982, 765–768; and “Nuclear Freeze Crusade: Gaining or Waning,” US News and World Report, April 25, 1983.

  82. Letter from Vinton Heuck to David Riley, Co-Chair, Freeze Campaign, April 12, 1984, SO 454, Box 2, Folder: The Day After Organizer’s Kit, November 1983, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  83. Memo from Mark Niedergang, November 1982, SO 454, Box 7, Folder: Strategy Committee, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  84. Letter from Beverly Woodward, Coordinator of International Seminars on Training for Nonviolent Action, December 5, 1981, SO 454, Box 1, Folder: Correspondence, Jan 1981-Mar 1982, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006).

  87. Quoted in “The Movement in Black and White,” Nuclear Times, August/September 1983, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Nuclear Times, Jan-Dec 1983, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  88. Letter from Patricia Williams to Randy Kehler, May 3, 1984, SO 454, Box 4, Folder: Minorities Outreach Program, 1984, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  89. H. Jack Geiger had been a civil rights activist before helping to found PSR. He was a member of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), an interracial group of physicians and other healthcare providers who sent volunteers to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Geiger remained there after the voting drive was over in order to address the medical n
eeds of the African American community. See Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 1–6.

  90. “Depolarizing Disarmament Work: Twelve Guidelines to Help Us Reach New People,” by Wendy Mogey, The New Manhattan Project, SO 660, Box 2, Folder: “How to Do Its,” PSR Collection, SHSM.

  91. Assessment, Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, Kearney, Nebraska, SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Political Consultant Meeting, January 20, 1983, National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM.

  92. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 70.

  93. See, for example, 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): 59.

  94. “What About the Children?”

  95. Sidel, Geiger, and Lown, “The Physician’s Role in the Post-Attack Period,” 1144.

  96. Carol Amen, dir., Testament (PBS, 1983).

  97. Adams and Cullen, The Final Epidemic, 130.

  98. On social reproduction, see Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett, “Gender, Social Reproduction, and Women’s Self-Organization: Considering the US Welfare State,” Gender and Society 5, no. 3 (September 1991): 311–333; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs (Autumn 1992): 1–43.

  99. 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): 960.

  100. “The Nightmare Comes Home,” Time, October 24, 1983.

  101. The Day After is discussed at length in SO 454, Box 5, Folder: Nuclear Times, Jan-Dec 1983; Box 5, Folder, Nuclear Times, Jan-Apr 1984; Box 2, Folder: The Day After, Aug-Oct 1983; and Box 2, Folder: The Day After, November 1983-February 1984, all in the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, SHSM. Markey is quoted in “ABC Film Depicting Consequences of Nuclear War,” New York Times, October 6, 1983.

  102. See, for example, R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 222, no. 4630 (December 23, 1983): 1283–1292 (this became known as the TTAPS study); Paul Ehrlich et al., “Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War,” Science 222, no. 4630 (December 23, 1983): 1293–1298; Carl Sagan, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Information,” Foreign Affairs (Winter 1983/1984): 257–292; Curt Covey, Stephen Schneider, and Starley Thompson, “Global Atmospheric Effects of Massive Smoke Injections from a Nuclear War: Results from General Circulation Model Simulations,” Nature (March 1984): 21–25; Barry Pittock, “The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange,” Environment 27, no. 3 (April 1985): 25; Peterson, The Aftermath; Anne Ehrlich, “Nuclear Winter,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40, no. 4 (April 1984): 1S-14S; National Research Council, Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear War Detonations (Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1975); and Paul Crutzen and John Birks, “The Atmosphere After a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” Ambio 11, no. 2/3 (January 1, 1982): 114–125. For an illuminating overview of the nuclear winter debate, see Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter’s Tale: Science and Politics in the 1980s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

  103. Interestingly, NW theory simultaneously anticipated current geoengineering schemes that have been proposed as potential remedies for rising global temperatures, including releasing stratospheric sulfates in order to cool things down. For a discussion of this, see Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (New York: Penguin, 2010).

  104. Sagan, The Nuclear Winter.

  105. See Sagan, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe,” 273; John Harte is quoted in Anne Ehrlich, “Nuclear Winter,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 40, no. 4 (April 1984): 1S–14S.

  106. Ehrlich, “Nuclear Winter.”

  107. H. Jack Geiger, “The Meaning of Nuclear Winter: Scientific Evidence and the Human Spirit,” speech delivered at fourth congress of IPPNW, Helsinki, Finland, June 5, 1984, SO 660, Box 4, Folder: Nuclear Winter, PSR Collection, SHSM.

  108. Sagan, “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe,” 264.

  109. Ehrlich, “Nuclear Winter,” 1S–14S.

  110. On this intuitive model of disaster, see H. Jack Geiger, “The Illusion of Survival,” in Adams and Cullen, The Final Epidemic, 174.

  111. Geiger, “The Meaning of Nuclear Winter.”

  112. On the history of the concept of extinction, see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Holt, 2014), 23–69. My discussion here is wholly indebted to her history of extinction.

  113. Luis W. Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel, “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” Science 208, no. 4448 (June 6, 1980): 1095–1108.

  114. Ehrlich, “Nuclear Winter,” 1S–14S.

  115. Herbert Abrams, “Infection and Communicable Diseases,” in Adams and Cullen, The Final Epidemic, 201.

  116. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 150th anniversary ed. (New York: Signet, 2003), 150. See also Rebekah Sheldon, The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

  117. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 166.

  118. Robert Jay Lifton, “Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatrics 52, no. 4 (October 1982): 626.

  119. Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 115.

  120. Ibid., 115.

  121. Ibid., 118.

  122. Ibid., 116.

  123. Ibid., 144.

  124. Ibid., 140.

  125. Ibid., 146, 162.

  126. Ibid., 160.

  127. Jerome Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), 185.

  128. Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Power in an Age of Uncertainty (Washington, DC: US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-E-216, February 1984).

  129. “Nuclear Follies,” Forbes Magazine, February 11, 1985.

  130. See Nuclear Public Relations Campaign in US Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 98th Cong., 1st sess., June 30, 1983.

  131.US Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 98th Cong., 1st sess., May 23, 1983, 156. See also US Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy Research and Production of the House Committee on Science and Technology, 97th Congress, 1st sess., December 15, 1981, 5.

  132. Nuclear Public Relations Campaign in US Congress, House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 98th Cong., 1st sess., May 23, 1983, 191–197.

  133. Ibid.

  134. Quoted in The Legacy of Chernobyl: Health and Safety Twenty Years Later, in US Congress, Hearing Before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 109th Cong., 2nd sess., April 25, 2006, 25. On Chernobyl, see Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  135. Cassandra Koerner, “Media, Fear, and Nuclear Energy: A Case Study,” Social Science Journal 51 (2014): 240–249.

  136. Quoted in “Chernobyl Causes Big Revisions in Global Nuclear Power Policies,” New York Times, October 27, 1986.

  137. Hans A. Bethe, “Chernobyl: It Can’t Happen Here,” New York Times, May 2, 1991.

  138. Quoted in “Chernobyl Causes Big Revisions in Global Nuclear Power Policies,” New York Times, October 27, 1986.

  139. “Chernobyl Reconsidered: The Disaster Reflected a Society in Decline,” New York Times, April 26, 1996.

&nbs
p; 140. Letter from Edwin Markey to Anatoly Mayorets, Minister of Power and Electrification, and Genadi Veretenikov, April 29, 1986, in Soviet Nuclear Accident at Chernobyl, reprinted in US Congress, House of Representatives, Briefing and Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 99th Cong., 2nd sess., May 1 and 7, 1986, 52.

  141. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 73; Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Norwell, MA: Anchor, 1989); “Endangered Earth,” Time, January 2, 1989.

  142. Rep. George Miller, American Energy Council Congressional Information, February 1989, Future of Nuclear Power, in US Congress, House of Representatives, Oversight Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, 101 Cong., 2nd sess., May 10, 1990, 21.

  143. The U.S. Nuclear Energy Industry’s Strategic Plan for Building New Nuclear Power Plants, Executive Summary, May 1998, http://lobby.la.psu.edu/051_Nuclear_Waste/Organizational_Statements/NEI/NEI_Strategic_Plan.pdf.

  144. See “Greenwash!,” Mother Jones (March/April 1991), 38–41, 88; Future of Nuclear Power, 80; and Diane Farsetta, “The Campaign to Sell Nuclear Energy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64, no. 4 (September/October 2008): 38–41.

  145. US Congress, Senate, Hearing on Radiological Contamination in the United States Before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, 102 Cong., 2nd sess., April 9, 1992, 2.

  146. Statement of Michael Mariotte, Executive Director, Nuclear Information and Resource Center, Future of Nuclear Power, 96.

  CONCLUSION

  1. The quotation comes from Charles Maier. See Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 44.

  2. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).

  3. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview, 2000); Melissa Checker, Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Jennifer Clapp, Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Waste from Rich to Poor Countries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); David Naguib Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Dorceta Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Carl Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2016).