Radiation Nation Read online

  While the internal structure of the AEC reflected the inseparability of the military and nonmilitary applications of atomic power, the agency worked tirelessly to make the case that civilian atomic energy had nothing to do with war. As President Eisenhower explained in 1953, atomic power needed to be “put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”6 Doing so required that a hypermilitarized, on-edge society behaved as if it were at peace. In modern psychology, the term dissociation is used to describe the ways victims of trauma protect themselves from pain by splitting off the trauma from their other experiences. The trauma becomes something abstracted: it exists “out there” and cannot be coherently integrated into the victim’s own life story. A similar process attended the promotion of the “peaceful atom” throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. The trauma in question was the dropping of the atomic bomb. But here, it was the perpetrators rather than the victims who sought refuge in dissociation. The peaceful atom had to be shorn of its painful associations with wartime violence, and the atom’s civilian applications had to be split off from the extraordinary destruction wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many years later, nuclear power critics like Helen Caldicott would accuse industry promoters of self-servingly celebrating the promises of the peaceful atom in order to assuage their own sense of guilt over the bombings.7 But AEC members were in fact candid about the reparative function of civilian atomic power. As the first AEC chairman David Lilienthal explained, commission members wanted to “prove that the atom has a peaceful nonmilitary promise of high importance, that somehow a weapon so destructive [had] humane applications.”8 In the simplest terms, something bad had to be remade into something good. This required both a celebration of the atom’s generative potential and an amnesic suppression of its dangers, which periodically threatened to resurface throughout the Cold War, as the US military considered the deployment of nuclear weapons in the Korean War (1952), the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954), the Berlin Blockade (1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and Vietnam (1969).9

  This dissociation did not begin with the dropping of the atomic bomb. During the Spanish-American War in the Philippines, William James insisted that the scale and anonymity of the modern corporate-state made it difficult to penetrate what he called the “invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual.”10 This difficulty deepened during World War II, which was a “highly rationalized, bureaucratized, compartmentalized undertaking” that relied on high levels of abstraction.11 This abstraction was necessary because most military men never met their enemies face to face, and carpet and saturation bombing meant that pilots dropped incendiaries on civilians from high above ground.12 The construction of the atomic bomb also relied on mechanisms of denial, abstraction, and distancing. Those who worked on the bomb did so “thousands of miles” away from the deaths that they eventually enabled, and with the exception of atomic scientists, few of the tens of thousands of employees who worked on the bomb even grasped that they were building a nuclear weapon.13 The dropping of the bomb was the culmination of a process that had brought civilians into the orbit of military risk on a wholly unprecedented scale.

  The culture of dissociation also shaped the Atoms for Peace program. Initially, the program advanced a technological utopianism that encompassed visions of planetary engineering (the use of atomic technology to alter the global terrain) and predictions of the peaceful atom’s miraculous, soon-to-be-tapped potential. Industry promoters predicted that civilian atomic energy would one day ameliorate a range of social and economic ills, from bodily sickness to world hunger to natural disaster. General Leslie Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project, imagined that atomic energy would eventually raise “the curtain on vistas of a new world.”14 If the wartime atom constituted an unprecedented threat to humanity, the peaceful atom was the opposite: a magical, almost talismanic gift. Promoters speculated that barren deserts could be transformed into nuclear-powered food factories, that radiation could breed new crop strains, that nuclear power could be harnessed for the propulsion of ships, barges, and submarines, that radioactive isotopes could cure cancer, that nuclear explosions could alter the course of ocean currents and dissipate the destructive effects of hurricanes and tornadoes, and, finally, that nuclear energy could provide clean, cheap electricity to people from the Arctic to the Sahara.15 An article in the Saturday Evening Post described the heady range of possibilities: “In spite of its lethal potentialities, atomic energy has become for small nations and large, the new symbol of the more abundant life, the radioactive key to industrial independence. It has been seized upon as the all-purpose tool, suited to any task—from moving mountains to curing cancer. It can power factories, light homes, drive ships, find leaks in pipelines and trace underground water sources.”16

  These utopian ambitions for atomic energy evoked an earlier fascination with radium’s magical and vitalizing properties. While many elements are relatively inert, radium displayed a special capacity for transmutation. After its initial discovery in 1898, physicists, biologists, and botanists saw radium as an elixir that held the “secret of life.” “Atomic literally meant that which could not be subdivided,” writes historian of science Luis Campos. But radium was different. It was “a substance that had all the hallmarks of an element, that fit an empty spot on the periodic table, and yet came apart, spontaneously.”17 Radium’s unique capacities to ferment, spark, glow, and generate heat established a powerful metaphorical and experimental link between the living and the inert, the animate and the inanimate, and the biological and the physical. Indeed, radium was the “rock star” of the periodic table. In 1903, crowds flocked to New York City’s Museum of Natural History to see 125 milligrams of radium on display behind a protective glass casing, part of the turn-of-the-century radium craze. Yet scientists soon discovered the dangers of both radiation exposure and radium ingestion. Physicians observed that extended X-ray exposure could burn their patients, and in the 1920s, young women factory workers who painted radium dials on watches and clocks fell fatally ill. The 1930s witnessed two high-profile deaths from radium poisoning. In 1932, a wealthy socialite died after ingesting large quantities of a popular radium tonic called Radithor. And in July 1934, radium discoverer Marie Curie succumbed to aplastic anemia, caused by years of working with radioactive material without adequate safety precautions.18 Even before World War II, radium’s earliest association with vitality and life was corroded by its association with danger and death. But the bombings in 1945, followed by the acceleration of weapons testing in the late 1940s, facilitated the transformation of both radium and radiation into objects of fear.

  And yet radiation’s association with magic never completely disappeared. It was instead granted an afterlife within postwar predictions of civilian atomic energy’s potential, one that could be realized only through American stewardship. The capacity of the United States to bequeath the gift of atomic power to other states enhanced the nation’s unprecedented military, economic, and political hegemony after World War II, while appearing to affirm that the United States alone possessed the maturity—a trait that likened the nation to a living being—required to oversee such a powerful technology. The AEC included a foreign aid program, the commission showcased atomic energy at international trade fairs and exhibits, and, by the end of 1957, US firms had sold twenty-three small research reactors abroad.19 In contrast to atomic weapons, atomic research was promoted as something that could rise above the Iron Curtain and rally international cooperation. When Eisenhower gave his speech in 1954, he called on the world’s nations to share atomic information (the International Atomic Energy Agency was created three years later), implying that the peaceful atom might somehow transcend US-Soviet hostilities. In reality, of course, civilian atomic energy was closely bound up with Cold War competition. Turning their gaze to the global South, science writers predicted that atomic energy would turn deserts and jungles into “new lands flowing with
milk and honey,” and that Africa would be transformed “into another Europe.”20 William Knox, the president of Westinghouse Electric (the company that opened the first nuclear power plant in the United States), believed that atomic energy was destined to become the safest and cheapest source of power in the developing world: “it is in these vast expanses of desert and jungle where atomic energy will … play its most important economic and social role. In these areas of our shrinking world, demands will not wait for gradual evolutionary developments. We must help them leapfrog many stages of progress and endeavor to telescope into the next twenty to thirty years much of what it has taken a century or more to realize in the United States or Europe.”21 These narratives about the gift implied that the magical capacities of atomic power, when paired with American stewardship, could enable developing nations to defy sluggish, evolutionary time by leapfrogging into late modernity. Simultaneously, such accounts elided the labor-intensive role played by the global South (and Africa in particular) in the making of the atomic age as a crucial extractive source of uranium, the heavy metal that enabled the industry to flourish. Throughout the Cold War, between one-fifth and one-half of the Western world’s uranium came from Congo, Niger, South Africa, Gabon, Madagascar, and Namibia, making it (along with oil) what historian Penny von Eschen has dubbed a “quintessential cold war commodity.”22

  Yet even as promoters aligned atomic power with magic, they fretted over whether this association might inhibit public acceptance of the new technology. A report commissioned by the World Health Organization in 1958 (in which the AEC participated) made clear that the atomic age posed new kinds of threats to both biological and psychological health. The “shattering possibilities” contained within atomic power, the report warned, could trigger “strong psychological reactions” and provoke “irrational phantasies.” Such fantasies, the report continued, “may well be related to those of early childhood—of magical power, the casting of spells, the working of miracles, and so on—dreams by which children compensate for their felt smallness and weakness. Being of very early origin in the emotional life, these childhood phantasies are normally hidden in the unconscious mind, but are likely to arouse strong emotional reactions, the origin of which remains largely unknown to the conscious mind, whenever they are triggered off by actual experiences of a psychologically similar nature.”23 Indexing the considerable cultural and political authority of psychiatry at mid-century, the report mobilized the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious in the service of crafting what would turn out to be an enduring claim about atomic age citizenship: the extraordinary capacities of nuclear power could trigger regressions and pathologies that threatened to infantilize all citizens. This perceived threat would place the psychological management of the citizenry at the center of Cold War–era governance, a mode of management that would reappear at Three Mile Island.

  By 1960, the most utopian ambitions for atomic energy had receded and engineers were turning their attention to the construction of civilian nuclear reactors.24 Two pieces of congressional legislation in the mid-1950s facilitated this change. In 1954, Congress passed the Energy Act, which granted private utility companies greater access to atomic energy research. Three years later, in 1957, it passed the Price-Anderson Act, which both limited industry liability to $560 million in the event of a single nuclear accident and committed the federal government to footing almost 90 percent of the bill. That act emerged out of growing concern within the nascent nuclear industry about legal liability in the event of a worst-case accident. The first AEC-sponsored risk assessment revealed that such an accident could kill three thousand people and injure forty thousand more, while also inflicting seven billion dollars in property damage.25 Recognizing that private utility companies would never assume such a high liability, the federal government pushed for legislation that would effectively shield the nuclear industry from the fluctuations of the insurance market. Breaking with free market principles, the Price Anderson Act represented, in sociologist Christian Joppke’s words, the “partial abolition of market controls” and a “pampering of risk taking”26—moves that would set the nuclear industry on an anomalous path. The first American nuclear power plant went online at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957, and soon there were plants in the Midwest (Illinois, Michigan, and Nebraska) and along the eastern seaboard (New York and Massachusetts). The 1960s witnessed a boom in plant construction, with companies like General Electric expanding their nuclear divisions and new plant orders peaking in 1967.27

  As the licensing of new plants took off in the 1960s, the earlier logic of dissociation crystallized around one claim: that nuclear power plants could not behave like bombs. In 1959, one atomic scientist likened nuclear power stations to obedient children, observing favorably that, at least so far, they had been “docile and well-behaved.”28 The descriptors docile and well-behaved implied that power plants were not simply unlike bombs, but were the opposite of bombs—predictable rather than volatile, stable rather than erratic. The emphasis on atomic docility was not new. From its beginning the AEC had aimed to domesticate the atom, that is, to convince the public that atomic energy, while endowed with near-preternatural capacities, was nonthreatening and even familiar, something whose powers could be harnessed and controlled.29 An AEC coloring book marketed to young children provided a paradigmatic example. It featured an animated character named Reddy Kilowatt who was portrayed as at once magical and chummy: “I’m a Busy Little Atom / I Split Myself in Two / I Multiply As Many Times / As I Have Jobs to Do / In Summer, Winter, Spring or Fall /I’m Ready Every Hour / Just Flip a Switch and Watch Me Zip /With Heat or Light or Power!”30 A personified figure like Reddy Kilowatt was meant to fill the void left by the atom’s invisibility, a characteristic that the AEC was convinced compounded public fears of atomic technology. The cartoon also represented an attempt to demystify atomic science, which the AEC believed was necessary in order to build public trust. A commission-sponsored newspaper series in the early 1950s noted: “We must get over the dangerous delusion that laymen cannot understand atomic energy as well as they understand automobiles and radios … one does not need to be a scientist to grasp the fundamentals of atomic energy.”31

  The cartoon—which featured Reddy Kilowatt entering and exiting a house through an electrical outlet-turned-portal, zipping excitedly from room to room, and cheerfully powering everyday household appliances—also brought into relief atomic power’s close alignment with the domestic sphere. The domestication of the atom thus referred not just to taming the atom but also to a historically specific model of white, middle-class domesticity. Unlike oil, which was associated with the automobile and spatial mobility, nuclear power—with its promise of cheap and limitless electricity—was associated with the middle-class home in ways that exceeded its comparatively modest share of household electricity generation. Foundational to the faith in nuclear power was the myth that a ramped-up energy regime could supply something for nothing—electricity that, in one famous prediction, would be “too cheap to meter.” Reddy Kilowatt, then, was the conduit through which atomic power’s mythical qualities entered the middle-class home, where electricity would effortlessly circulate in and out of wall outlets, vitalizing and charging commodities, dissolving the boundary between the living and the inert. At once magical and mundane, Reddy Kilowatt advanced a fantasy that underwrote the tremendous capitalist expansion of the postwar period: energy could be forever secured on the cheap, ensuring the endless replication of a high-consumption way of life.32

  Despite such PR efforts, the AEC’s task of domesticating the atom remained daunting. By the mid-1960s, when Metropolitan Edison (the utility that operated Three Mile Island) decided to construct a nuclear power plant, the company predicted that it would face a mammoth task of educating the local community about its turn to nuclear technology. In 1965, Met-Ed drafted a public relations plan that identified several goals: to change public perceptions of the atom “from that of ‘The Bomb’ to that of peacef
ul uses,” to convince the public that nuclear power was safe and economical, to highlight “the scientific, cultural, and prestige” advantages of having a plant in the region, and to show the public how the plant operated. In a move that revealed the company’s simultaneous awareness of and contempt for the still-inchoate environmental movement, the plan predicted that opposition would come from three constituencies: citizens groups, comprising residents in downstream communities and dominated by “uninformed mothers” and members of “garden clubs”; “ban everything groups,” spearheaded by frustrated scientists and “do-gooders”; and finally, “beauty and blight groups”—conservation activists—who would “protest almost any sight for almost any reason” because “everything is hallowed these days.” Conceding that there were a few radicals within each constituency who would remain intransigent, Met-Ed predicted that it could win over most current skeptics through a well-conceived PR strategy.33

  FIGURE 1.1.  Reddy Kilowatt Coloring Book. Courtesy of National Archives II, University of Maryland, College Park.

  At the heart of Met-Ed’s plan was the goal that had structured the AEC’s publicity from the beginning: to dissociate nuclear power plants from atomic bombs (indeed, the word nuclear was chosen over the word atomic with this aim in mind).34 The most-pressing publicity challenge, as the plan presented it, was that “The Atomic Age was born with the atom bomb. The public has a vivid vision of destruction when they think of atomic energy.” The company would have to counter this vision by convincing the public through advertising that a plant could not explode. One proposed radio spot featured a dialogue between two men: “Couldn’t your nuclear reactor blow up like an atomic bomb if something went wrong?” one man asks. The other replies: “It is physically impossible for a reactor to behave like a bomb.”35 As one utility company spokesman asserted, “We feel there is no more connection between nuclear power and the bombing of Hiroshima than there is between electricity and the electric chair.”36 Met-Ed would also need to address the fear of a serious accident, as well as the concern that the plant, even during normal operations, would emit radiation via the electrical grid. On this latter point, the plan stressed that the public would need special reassurance that “electricity generated at the nuclear plant will not transmit radiation into the homes via the electric wire.” The company appeared unaware of how the industry itself had contributed to this worry through its own widely disseminated images of “busy little atoms” zooming in and out of electrical outlets. The way to ameliorate such fears was to liken atomic energy to other natural forces that were Janus-faced in their effects, such as fire (conflagration vs. fireplace), wind (tornado vs. windmill), water (flood vs. hydroelectric generation), and electricity (lightning vs. electric power). Met-Ed believed that “the forces of nature can be destructive, but man has learned to control them.”37 Thus humans could harness atomic power, just as they had harnessed fire, wind, and water. For Met-Ed, this power source was a part of—rather than a threat to—the natural world.