Radiation Nation Read online

  By the late 1960s, the debate about low-level radiation—earlier confined to the fallout controversy—was pivoting to civilian nuclear power safety. With the AEC licensing new plants at a steady clip, a handful of scientists and engineers began to warn that the industry’s radiological safety standards were inadequate. Among the most prominent were Arthur Tamplin and John Gofman, two researchers at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratories who had received AEC funding to study the health risks associated with low-level radiation exposure. The commission had enlisted the two men in the hopes that they would dispel allegations about radiological risk that were circulating at the time, in particular those leveled by Ernest Sternglass, a professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh. In specialized journals like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and more popular outlets like Esquire, Sternglass estimated that fallout had caused approximately four hundred thousand infant deaths and an incalculable number of fetal deaths. He maintained that the danger extended to nuclear power plants, claiming that infant mortality rates were statistically higher in communities where reactors were situated.97 While Gofman and Tamplin refuted Sternglass’s direst estimates, their own findings were sobering. In 1969, they warned that the maximum radiation dosages permitted by the Federal Radiation Council were far too high and could lead to over thirty thousand annual cases of fatal cancer. Rejecting the concept of a safe radiation threshold, they insisted that there was a direct proportional relationship between radiation and adverse health effects “right down to the lowest doses.” The dosages permitted by the AEC amounted to, in their words, “trading human lives for some supposed benefits of technology.”98 The AEC froze Gofman and Tamplin’s research funds and terminated their staff.99 The experience of University of Pittsburgh researcher Thomas Mancuso followed the same trajectory. Mancuso had received AEC funding in 1964 to study the health effects of workers’ radiation exposure at Hanford, Washington, the site of the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. In 1977, he concluded that Hanford workers had suffered disproportionately high rates of fatal cancer, even when exposures had not exceeded permissible doses. Like Gofman and Tamplin, Mancuso found his research funds withdrawn.100

  Joining these dissident scientists were three middle-management nuclear engineers who resigned in protest from General Electric’s Nuclear Division in February 1976. The men distributed copies of their resignation letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and were soon campaigning on behalf of a ban on nuclear power plant construction in their home state of California. When they had joined GE’s nuclear division, they recalled, they had been hopeful about the “promise of a virtually limitless source of safe, clean, and economic energy,” but the nuclear industry had become, as they put it, “an industry of narrow specialists, each promoting and refining a fragment of technology, and with little comprehension of the total impact on our world system.” The dangers of compartmentalization compounded the likelihood of error. “It’s human fallibility that’s the chink in the whole nuclear armor,” they later told Congress. “You cannot expect these things to run flawlessly for forty years. With as many people as have to be involved with them—in fuel manufacturing, fuel distribution, reprocessing, transport. There are too many people, too many steps, too many weaknesses in the whole chain.” Gofman and Tamplin had challenged the notion of a safe threshold of radiation, and now the three engineers exposed the presumption of human infallibility on which the industry relied.101

  As the debate about low-level radiation pivoted from the dangers of weapons testing to those of nuclear reactors, an antinuclear movement coalesced that aimed to stop entirely the expansion of nuclear power. This movement had roots in both pacifism and a legal activist public interest tradition, but it also took its cues from the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.102 From the black freedom movement, it borrowed the tactic of nonviolent direct action. From the antiwar movement, it took the directive to question authority. From the cultural feminist wing of the women’s movement, it drew on a celebration of an essential female culture that cast women as natural opponents of both nuclear power and war, while from the liberal and radical feminist wings, it took the insight that women were independent citizens and actors in the public world. And from the New Left as a whole, it appropriated the concept of participatory democracy, which called on citizens to play an active role in democratic decision-making.103

  But even as the movement reflected the endurance of the left, it simultaneously indexed a growing conservative influence in a way that foretold the realignment of the 1970s. This was not a simple movement from left to right, but rather one that melded earlier categories, creating a new politics that would gradually tilt in an antistatist (rather than anticorporate) direction. The attempt to slow down or halt plant construction attracted libertarians who opposed the government’s support of the nuclear industry on the grounds that it violated free market principles. It drew into its orbit national security hawks who feared that more plants would lead to weapons proliferation. And the centralized nature of the industry placed the question of community control at the center of the fight. By accusing federal regulators of placing local communities at risk, the antinuclear movement tapped into long-standing localist and communitarian impulses that, by the late 1970s, were being harnessed by grassroots activists throughout the country in battles over desegregation, schooling, and taxation. The antinuclear movement of the 1970s represented a mash-up that drew together disparate and even contradictory political elements.

  These disparate elements created a movement that aimed not only to halt the spread of nuclear power plants, but also—borrowing a metaphor from the era’s gay liberation movement—to out them.104 By physically occupying a nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon or a nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats, activists brought the atomic age out of the shadows and exposed the scope of a vast nuclear complex that had been hiding in plain sight. Consider Kristin Iverson’s memory of growing up near a plutonium weapons factory at Rocky Flats, Colorado, in the 1960s. When, as a young girl, she wondered aloud what went on at the plant, her mother told her that it manufactured cleaning supplies, while her father stated that it represented “the defense of our country.”105 One answer was a lie and the other a euphemism. When activists protested at places like Rocky Flats in the late 1960s, they were, through the physical act of occupation, challenging the mechanisms of concealment and distortion on which the Cold War relied and that a young child unknowingly confronted when she posed the seemingly innocuous question: What happens there?

  By engaging in what political theorist Timothy Pachirat has called a “politics of sight,” which pulls back the curtain on those places that society hides from view in the service of domination,106 activists constructed an alternative geography of North America. This was a nuclear geography that mapped out uranium mining, weapons manufacturing, power plants, atomic testing, and nuclear waste and showed how they were part of a single interconnected system. Movement pamphlets, leaflets, and newsletters included maps of the nation that outlined the multiple stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, from the mining of uranium to the detonation of bombs to the disposal of nuclear waste. A SANE pamphlet featured one such map depicting a vast network of facilities that by the late 1970s had reached into “nearly every state of the union”: 130 uranium mill sites, three enrichment facilities, three reprocessing centers, twenty waste disposal sites, thirty reactors operated by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, 148 naval reactors, and fifty-one weapons storage and deployment sites.107

  This new geography demanded a revised atomic history. Attempting to expose what the Clamshell Alliance described as the “malignant connection” between plants and bombs, activists revisited the bombing of Hiroshima. A nuclear power plant, they argued, was a “silent bomb” that housed enough nuclear material “to flatten dozens of Hiroshimas.” A nuclear reactor could produce as much high-level waste as two thou
sand Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Within each nuclear reactor was a “potential Hiroshima.” The same force that had claimed thousands of lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “stirring in your backyard.”108 Industry promoters had gone to considerable lengths to portray the power plant as the antithesis of the bomb; it was placid where bombs were explosive, predictable where bombs were dangerous. Activists countered by warning that destruction lay dormant beneath the plant’s calm veneer and that every community where a plant was located could find itself transformed into the very place that the AEC had tried to make the public forget: Hiroshima.

  In addition to arguing that power plants were like bombs, activists pointed out that plants, full as they were with nuclear materials, could be converted into bombs. One nuclear reactor produced enough plutonium each year for the construction of ninety nuclear warheads. By placing tons of plutonium into commercial circulation, activists warned, nuclear power plants could lead to the creation of a black market in the metal that could end up in the hands of “terrorists, gangsters, and maniacs.” India, Israel, and South Africa had become part of a nuclear monopoly by diverting plutonium from their own civilian nuclear power programs. Activists contended that the industry was thus trapped in a vicious circle: “The arms industry has used the power plants as a shield to legitimize their technology,” proclaimed the Clamshell Alliance in its Declaration of Nuclear Resistance, “and the reactor industry has spawned nuclear bombs to nations all over the world.”109 The nuclear cartography aimed to expose this symbiotic relationship.

  FIGURE 1.5.  “The Peaceful Atom Is a Bomb.” Copyright Held by SHAD Alliance. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

  FIGURE 1.6.  Map of Manmade Radiation Hazards, SANE WORLD, May 1979. Copyright Held by Women Strike for Peace. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

  What made this cartography innovative was that it combined land and soma. As they mapped the nuclear fuel cycle, activists simultaneously traced radiation’s somatic journey through the human body. A widely distributed movement flyer titled “Ionizing Radiation” showed a drawing of a woman’s naked body that tracked how radioactive isotopes of Iodine, Cesium, and Strontium became lodged in specific organs (the liver, the thyroid, the ovaries).110 This mapping was meant to concretize the bodily violence that accompanied abstract talk of radiation thresholds and permissible doses, but it also established an affinity between bodily vulnerability and a contaminated national landscape.111 As the atomic age gave way to the ecological age in the late 1970s, the geographies of land and body became enmeshed. Radiation—because it was so insidious, because it could travel so easily from one site to the next, because it could mutate and jump between generations, because it could create monstrous new species along the way—had sutured together a new world, establishing a relay between somatic and planetary injury, between the individual (often woman’s) body and the land.

  This homology between body and nation was not new, of course. The metaphor of the “body politic” envisions a political community as an entity whose members are united in a corporate whole. The origin of the term is medieval: the king’s body signified the realm. After the Enlightenment, the metaphor incorporated elements borrowed from modern medicine, giving rise to the use of anatomical concepts to describe politics, such as circulation and political anatomy. Throughout modern history, the metaphor appeared across diverse landscapes, from seventeenth-century England and prerevolutionary France to Nazi Germany.112 Its rhetorical power lay in its endowing the nation with an organic lifecycle; the nation is born, has a youth, a stage of maturity, and a decline. In the US political culture of the late 1970s, this link between body and nation became newly fortified by ecological insights about somatic vulnerability and land contamination. These insights had first originated on the political left. But at a post–Vietnam War moment when many conservative policymakers perceived national decline, they jumped the political track.

  FIGURE 1.7.  Flyer of Ionizing Radiation in the Female Body. Copyright Held by SANE, Inc. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

  Nowhere was this track-jumping (and the body’s decisive role within it) more evident than in the radiation activism of the 1970s. This movement was made up of radiation sufferers and their relatives who created a community of illness by bringing together those who worked, lived, and died along the nuclear fuel cycle. These were the people who populated the nuclear geography—Native American uranium miners in the US Southwest, workers in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and Hanford, Washington, who toiled in nuclear enrichment, fuel, and weapons facilities, civilians who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site, and Marshall Islanders who had been exposed to fallout from testing at the Pacific Proving Grounds. The community also encompassed military veterans who had participated in nuclear weapon detonations and the Japanese victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.113 While all of these groups were united by anger and a sense of betrayal, two constituencies came to dominate radiation activism: downwinders and military veterans. Over and over again, downwinders (people who lived downwind from testing sites), veterans, and their relatives recounted how officials from the AEC had assured them that radiation exposure posed no danger to health, assurances belied by the appearance of cancer years or decades later. As a consequence, a once-steadfast faith in government had been shattered. Radiation victims thus elaborated a patriotic body politics that linked physical illness to a growing conviction that the state had abandoned its most loyal citizens. This belief would prove critical to the rise of biotic nationalism in the 1970s.114

  Several factors fueled the politicization of this community. First, by the late 1960s, the Cold War’s toxic toll was coming into fuller view. As early as the mid-1950s, residents of southern Nevada and southwestern Utah had begun hearing rumors about friends and neighbors stricken with cancer. But between 1960 and 1970 several medical studies confirmed what residents had intuited: in their communities, as Republican senator Orrin Hatch later put it, “cancer borders on being the rule rather than the exception.”115 A study conducted in 1963 concluded that infants and children living downwind from the NTS had received hundreds of roentgens of Iodine-131, which can accumulate in the thyroid and cause cancer. Two years later, a study found higher-than-expected rates of cancer in two Utah counties downwind from the site. Another study conducted in 1969 revealed a fourfold increase in thyroid cancer in Utah, primarily among people between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine.116 By the late 1960s, then, scientific findings confirmed that certain populations exposed to radiation had suffered disproportionate rates of leukemia, thyroid cancer, bone cancer, multiple myeloma, lymphoma, and aplastic anemia.117 Over the next decade, still more information came to light. Although some of the most damning studies on the dangers of low-level radiation had been completed in the 1960s, they were not released by the AEC until 1978 and 1979 after investigative journalists filed FOIA requests with the Department of Energy.118 What this meant was that by the late 1970s, downwinders were armed with mounting evidence of radiological injury.

  This evidence was crucial to the formation of a community of radiation sufferers. But the politicization of this community can only be understood in light of the Vietnam War. The credibility gap created by that war—the revelation that the government could deceive its own people—had shifted the terrain of the political culture, not simply among activists who had fought to end the war, but also among patriots who had at first defended it. As Hannah Arendt observed in 1971, “the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy … but was destined chiefly, if not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home.”119 The gradual realization over the course of the 1970s that the United States had blundered and lied itself into a war, which it then lost, generated a symbol that resonated powerfully with downwinders and other radiation victims: that of the young patriot whose body the government viewed as disposable and whose death was meaningless. As a result, the figure of the radiation sufferer could shade into that of t
he veteran. As one downwind activist put it, “We were used as fodder, the same as our young men were used in Vietnam.”120

  In the shadow of Vietnam, these men and women entered into political struggle not out of partisan loyalties, but rather because of a perceived threat to their own families and communities. These “accidental activists” crafted a politics that revolved around the sickened body.121 They provided healthcare services within their communities through locating sufferers, conducting mobile health screenings, ensuring adequate care, disseminating medical information, and providing referrals and assistance. They worked to keep the radiation issue alive through newsletters and letter-writing campaigns, responding to newspapers whenever an article or editorial on the topic appeared. They also held conferences and hearings and provided congressional testimony. Finally, they fought to incorporate radiation suffering into the fabric of Cold War commemoration by holding candlelight vigils at the Nevada Test Site and calling for a National Radiation Victims Day.