Radiation Nation Read online

  The accident was more than a technological crisis. It signaled the birth of the ecological age—an era in which political questions are refracted through the fear of environmental disasters caused not by nature but rather by human action. There had been earlier intimations of ecological crisis, including Rachel Carson’s warning about DDT and other chemical pesticides in the 1960s, the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, and the Love Canal disaster of the 1970s. But Three Mile Island was different in three respects. First, it was a nuclear event that evoked the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, establishing a historical continuity between an earlier atomic age marked by the fear of nuclear destruction and an emergent ecological age pervaded by the fear of environmental catastrophe. Second, occurring in the late 1970s, when New Deal liberalism had unraveled, the Vietnam War had raised the specter of national decline, and the new right was gaining ground, the accident facilitated the rise of a distinct gender politics that combined women’s heightened agency with ecological anxieties about motherhood, reproduction, and species continuity. Finally, the accident revealed that this gender-inflected ecological consciousness could mediate between left and right and, as we shall see, would ultimately infuse the conservative imagination. More than a crisis juncture in the history of nuclear power, the accident in rural Pennsylvania illuminated profound transformations within late-twentieth-century US political culture.

  FROM THE ATOMIC AGE TO THE ECOLOGICAL AGE

  The ecological age that coalesced in the 1970s had its origins in the nuclear age, which began with the detonation of atomic weapons in 1945. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far more than episodes in World War II’s military and geopolitical history. They were also environmental ruptures that initiated a new chapter in what geoscientists call the Anthropocene, the moment when human activity began to be traceable in the geological record. While geoscientists continue to debate the question of when the Anthropocene began, the end of World War II was the moment when earth scientists and oceanographers, and then the broader public, realized that radioactive fallout from bomb detonations could—quite literally—change the meteorological, biochemical, even intramolecular constitution of the world.3 For the first time, the human species was confronted with the prospect of self-induced extinction: not just megadeath, but also the rendering of the planet uninhabitable through alterations in the composition of the atmosphere, the gene pool, and the quantum field of life. Today, almost hourly, a new scientific report suggests that what we once called “human civilization” turns out to have been an enormous, unregulated, reckless, and potentially catastrophic planetary experiment.4 But a generation before anthropogenic climate change became the subject of public debate, the atomic bomb introduced the threat of species extinction through the slow, accretive contamination of the air, the land, and the oceans, as well as through the chemical and genetic restructuring of life.

  The politics of the atomic age revolved around the revelation that extinction could unfold insidiously. After 1945, the debate about radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing introduced the specter of an invisible, silent toxin seeping into the air and the food chain, harming human and animal health, and tainting the reproductive gene pool.5 The stealthy threat of radiation contamination, which can lie dormant within the body for years and even decades before manifesting itself, proved even more devastating than the detonations themselves. This debate receded into the background in the 1960s, but radiation served as the prototype for subsequent warnings about chemical toxicity. Rachel Carson’s 1962 classic Silent Spring focused on the pesticide DDT, but Carson opened her book with a description of the radioactive isotope Strontium-90’s potentially lethal journey from fallout to soil to grass to bones, observing that “chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world.”6

  By the time of the accident in 1979, radiation still remained shrouded in ambiguity. Utility company employees and government officials at Three Mile Island struggled to both quantify and contain a radiological threat that they could not see, smell, hear, or touch. These challenges were compounded by the fact that no one could see inside the reactor core to assess the damage. Nor could anyone see inside the bodies of residents, who feared that they might be harboring the accident’s damage. The crisis thus propelled residents into a state of uncertainty about how much radiological exposure they had sustained and whether they or their family members might get sick at some indeterminate point in the future. Despite official reassurances that the accident had done no harm, these residents feared that radiation from the plant had left behind a “weirded world.”7 Both its invisibility and dormancy made the radiation threat at Three Mile Island an example of “slow violence”—forms of violence that play out across long time horizons, making them difficult to quantify or represent.8 Such violence leaves behind a sense of strangeness, anticipatory anxiety, and dread about the future that can sometimes shade into paranoia. Seven years after the accident, novelist Don DeLillo immortalized this paranoia in White Noise, his fictionalized account of a community transfixed by what DeLillo called “an airborne toxic event.”9

  The ecological anxiety that emerged at Three Mile Island centered on threats to reproductive futurity and generational continuity, encompassing procreation, birth, maternity, and infancy.10 This preoccupation also went back to 1945. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, biologists, geneticists, and radiologists determined that radiation was especially dangerous to fetuses, babies, and young children. Exposure in utero posed cancer risks, while children’s growing bones, organs, and tissues were more susceptible to the absorption of radioactive isotopes. Radiation exposure could also set in motion cellular mutations associated with birth defects, disease, and premature death. The ecological writings of the 1960s elaborated on the theme of reproduction-under-threat. What rendered the spring silent in Silent Spring was the disappearance of robins, starlings, and cardinals in habitats where DDT had been sprayed; the pesticide left a “shadow of sterility” in its wake. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, evoked an equally alarming dystopia: unimpeded human reproduction as the functional equivalent of a large-scale, slow-moving detonation. Arguably the two most influential books of US environmentalism after 1945 oscillated between visions of reproduction-run-aground and reproduction-run-amuck.11

  Fears, rumors, and speculations of imperiled reproduction were also widespread at Three Mile Island. On the third day of the accident, Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh urged all pregnant women and preschool-aged children living within five miles of the plant to evacuate the area. Expectant mothers called local radio stations, state agencies, and hospitals to find out if their fetuses were in danger. In the months that followed, anecdotal stories of plant and animal mutations and reports of stillbirths, miscarriages, and birth defects circulated through the community. Over and over again, residents expressed the fear that the accident had wrought havoc on the region’s reproductive future. As they did so, they brought to the fore a figure that had remained shadowy in 1945 but had become considerably more legible by the late 1970s: the fetus uniquely vulnerable to environmental injury.12 The unborn could not speak, but it was the figure that transmuted the atomic age into the ecological age, and Three Mile Island was where it happened.

  The fear of contamination that erupted at Three Mile Island also reflected a wider crisis in political authority, one linked to the place of science and technology in society. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, would-be nuclear experts had insisted that dangerous levels of radiation could emanate from weapons, but not from power plants. This insistence was part of a postwar culture of dissociation, which sharply demarcated bombs from power plants, splitting off the destructive elements of atomic weaponry from its civilian uses. Central to this culture was the claim that radiation was a part of—rather than a threat to—the natural world. Revising a turn-of-the-century fascination with radium as an elixir, promoters of nuclear power port
rayed radiation as ordinary and benign. In their attempts to separate nuclear energy from its destructive wartime purpose, promoters also placed great faith in plant design. Redundant safety systems, they had maintained, made a serious accident impossible. The Three Mile Island crisis undermined these arguments and shattered the culture of dissociation, which had always been part of a larger dissociative logic that sought to suppress Cold War military violence and deny its inextricable relation to the domestic, civilian realm. This logic unraveled during the Vietnam War. That war not only exposed the considerable costs and failures of policies of containment and rollback; it also raised dire questions about the technocratic experts responsible for the disaster. At first, the near-meltdown redirected these questions toward the utility company that operated the plant. Part of what made the accident so shocking was that residents who lived near the reactor had been assured that it would never happen. Soon, however, for reasons we will explore, the initial mistrust of the utility would be transformed into mistrust of the state.

  The dual threat of a meltdown and an explosion at TMI unleashed the fears that the industry and the government had tried to allay: power plants could behave like bombs. They could explode, they could poison people and animals, and they could contaminate the land. State and federal officials rushed into the Susquehanna River Valley, handed out Geiger counters and gas masks, conducted full-body scans of local residents, and stockpiled potassium iodide, which can block the thyroid’s absorption of Iodine 131, a radioactive isotope. Americans watched the crisis on the evening news, and polling conducted at the time revealed that the public believed a plant explosion would replicate a bomb attack. The dissonance between earlier assurances about nuclear safety and the escalating crisis at the plant created a credibility gap that resonated with the Vietnam War and Watergate. But unlike these emergencies, the accident at Three Mile Island centered on a potential assault on the civilian population’s biological health and unfolded within a new reproduction-centered ecological imaginary.13

  POLITICAL REALIGNMENT AND THE SUFFERING BODY

  This new ecological imaginary took shape against the backdrop of the dramatic political transformations that were underway in the United States by the late 1970s, often described reductively in terms of “the rise of the right.” The problem with this description is not that it is untrue, but that it is incomplete. It neglects the considerable cross-pollination between left and right that took place during the 1970s and overlooks what both sides shared: waning public confidence in governmental institutions and rising skepticism vis-à-vis official truth-claims. The accident simultaneously deepened this loss of confidence and brought into relief its atomic age origins. The culture of dissociation, always precarious, supplied the field within which realignment germinated. At Three Mile Island, local citizens and outside observers accused Metropolitan Edison (Met-Ed), the utility company that owned the plant, of lying to the public about the accident’s severity. Could they trust official reassurances that radiation releases posed no threat to public health? If plant conditions had deteriorated, were state and local officials prepared to evacuate the surrounding population? Could they trust the government at all?

  Throughout the 1960s, the antiwar movement had charged the US government with obfuscation and deception. Now, however, the accident occurred in a region of Pennsylvania well known for its political and cultural conservatism: the predominantly rural Susquehanna River Valley, an area of pastoral landscapes and small towns dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, and government. Most residents were descendants of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants, and the majority were Christians. The Valley was a Republican Party stronghold where respect for God and country was well established. This is not to suggest that there was no dissent. There had been some opposition to the Vietnam War, especially among the region’s college students, and by the early 1970s, the antinuclear movement had established a modest presence in the area. But prior to the accident, most men and women who lived near the plant considered themselves conservative patriots. They supported nuclear power, were grateful for the employment opportunities that the state and private industry provided, and—above all—had supported the war in Southeast Asia.

  The accident shattered the community’s confidence in Met-Ed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the public officials who had been blindsided by the partial meltdown, and ultimately the federal government itself. Skeptical of the official story, many residents became convinced that the plant posed an ongoing public health threat and should be shut down. After the accident, they wrote letters to officials, provided testimony at public hearings, formed protest groups, filed class-action lawsuits against the utility, passed referendums calling for the decommissioning of the plant, and traveled to the nation’s capital to participate in antinuclear protests. Far from being untouched by the upheavals of the 1960s, then, the region had been transformed by them. The movement against the Vietnam War had instilled an appreciation of the power of protest. Men and women who had never participated in antiwar activism nonetheless grasped the opening it had breached. Thus at a hearing in Harrisburg in 1982, conservative businessmen and housewives stood and cheered when an activist warned that if the reactor was restarted, residents would occupy company headquarters and block access to the plant. In a demonstration at the plant gates in 1983, the first lines of protestors were Republican Party Committee women. These actions drew on indigenous features of the region’s conservatism, such as antagonism toward big government, populist skepticism vis-à-vis experts, and communitarian appeals to local control, but wove them into a new post-Vietnam interrogation of authority. Local residents extended this interrogation to the nuclear industry, which they now saw as representing an unholy alliance between the utility company, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and public officials who, in their view, had failed to protect citizens from harm.

  The fear of derailed reproduction structured the community’s response. Coursing through letters, testimonies, speeches, and lawsuits was the claim that the accident had cast doubt over the viability of the region’s biological future. Residents contended that radiation from the plant had imperiled their reproductive health by leading to infertility, miscarriage, or stillbirth; by risking disability and sickness among their children; or by unleashing runaway mutations that would later appear in their offspring. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the ecological imaginary had remained within the provenance of the political left.14 But after the accident, TMI residents drew on its visions of imperiled fetuses, degraded environments, and debased, contaminated bodies to construct themselves as a “community of fate,” or a community under threat. In the process, they created a new hybrid politics, a conservative ecological politics, which established an affinity between somatic and environmental injury, fortified the image of the fetus as uniquely vulnerable, cast the struggle at TMI as one between local and federal authority, and tethered a biotic conception of a community-under-threat to the specter of sickened, irradiated bodies. As a result, a growing mistrust of authority combined with a new ecological awareness to produce a body politics on the right that provides a missing piece of the puzzle of how and why conservatives gained ground after 1980.

  This politics indexed the heightened visibility of the suffering body over the twentieth century. The advent of ever-more-lethal forms of weaponry, fire bombings, and atomic weapons had generated photographic and other visual images of irradiated, contaminated, mutilated, and broken bodies. But within the United States, the Vietnam War marked a turning point in which the body became charged with meaning. In the 1960s, Americans watched as college students were shot down by the National Guard, soldiers came home in body bags, Buddhist monks immolated themselves, and the bodies of Vietnamese men, women, and children were seared with napalm. By the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War wound down, other social movements turned their attention to bodily pleasure, health, and injury. Feminists insisted that control over their own reproductive and sexual lives was essential to wo
men’s pursuit of freedom. Our Bodies, Ourselves, a primer published in 1971 that stressed women’s control over their own bodies, became a best-selling classic. After 1969, gay men celebrated their bodies as sites of pride, sexual pleasure, and excitation. These transformations spilled well beyond the boundaries of the New Left. Throughout society, there was a heightened awareness of the body’s capacities, pleasures, and vulnerabilities, as well as of the social agents that monitor, survey, and police bodies, including doctors and scientists.15

  At Three Mile Island, this heightened awareness of bodily vulnerability took the form of what I call a post-Vietnam patriotic body politics.16 This was a politics that linked physical illness (both actual and potential) to a collapse of trust in authority; it combined a fear of bodily injury with wounded patriotism and deepening suspicions of government duplicity. Like women’s and black healthcare activism (and later AIDS activism), the body politics that emerged at Three Mile Island focused on a potential assault on health. But in contrast to feminist, black, and gay activism, which viewed medical discrimination as part of a wider capitalist, racist, patriarchal, and heterosexist power structure, TMI residents were self-described patriots whose encounters with illness created in them something new: a profound breach of trust in their relationship with the state. Rather than being fueled by party loyalty or partisanship, this politics was fueled by what historian Michael J. Allen has described as a “politics of loss” rooted in the conviction that the state had abandoned its most patriotic citizens.17 Patriotic body politics located physical illness and the suffering body at the center of a politics that hinged on the belief that the government had turned against those who had been most loyal to it.