This edited volume grew out of the National Science Foundation-supported Downwinders Project at Oregon State University (2017–2021), which created an oral history archive, encouraged the collection of other historical materials, and facilitated scholarship and reflection on the legacies of radiation exposures. The project brought together people with different standpoints and the papers collected here reflect that approach. Thematic sections focus on community and trust, international discourses of harm, and remembering and forgetting. The volume situates historical scholarship in conversation with autobiographical recollection, artistic reflection, health epidemiology, and activism.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 106
Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Linda Marie Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure. Oregon State University Press, 2023.
Review by Susan Lindee, University of Pennsylvania
4 September 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE106 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: John Krige | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
This edited volume grew out of the National Science Foundation-supported Downwinders Project at Oregon State University (2017–2021), which created an oral history archive, encouraged the collection of other historical materials, and facilitated scholarship and reflection on the legacies of radiation exposures. The project brought together people with different standpoints and the papers collected here reflect that approach. Thematic sections focus on community and trust, international discourses of harm, and remembering and forgetting. The volume situates historical scholarship in conversation with autobiographical recollection, artistic reflection, health epidemiology, and activism.
Contributions explore nuclear incidents and exposures in India,[1] North Africa,[2] Kazakhstan,[3] at Chernobyl,[4] in North Wales,[5] in the Marshall Islands,[6] and at Rocky Flats, Nevada,[7] as well as at Hanford Nuclear Facility[8] and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[9] Leading scholars in the history of science join activists, documentary filmmakers, downwinders exposed to fallout, artists, poets, and other advocates for exposed populations. They focus on those whom Robert Jacobs has characterized as “global hibakusha,”[10] using the Japanese term for those exposed to radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and extending it to include uranium miners, accident victims, radiation cleanup workers, military personnel, and others defined not by labor but by having lived in close proximity to dangerous radioactive sites.
The editors comment on the zone of invisibility created by radiation. Radiation exposure generates no unique health consequences (with the exception of radiation cataracts), causing cancers and other conditions that can also be caused in other ways. Individual or even community cases of disease can be dismissed as not radiation related, and therefore do not qualify for compensation and are not deemed to require remediation. Two contributions capture this dynamic with particular urgency. Magdalena Stawkowski provides a disturbing portrait of health in Kazakhstan’s former mining communities of Krasnogorsky and Kalachi, where “malignant infrastructures” (in this case, the residues of uranium mines) led the international press to dub Kalachi “the village of the damned” (100). The two industrialized towns, which are now no longer occupied after a series of eerie health crises, are places “marked by the abandonment from state oversight, their redundancy within new political and economic systems, as well as their ongoing habitation” after the uranium mines were closed (103).
Similarly, Sasha Stiles and Edward Granados track the struggle to understand the health experiences of those living around the decommissioned ruins of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, which produced thousands of fissile plutonium cores for nuclear warheads from 1952 until a crisis in 1989.[11] Explosive plant fires first became visible to the public in 1957, when one fire burned non-stop for 13 hours and sent an estimated 500 pounds of plutonium into the atmosphere. Other large fires followed, as did night burning of contaminated debris, which caused significant exposure of workers to toxic and radioactive substances. In its daily operations, Rocky Flats exemplified careless Cold War nuclear practice. Now it exemplifies the general tendency to turn contaminated spaces in the United States into wildlife refuges: the 6,000 acre Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge exists because cleanup and remediation regulations are less stringent for parks than for spaces intended for residential use.[12] People living around Rocky Flats experienced all the predictable effects of radiation exposure, yet their health problems were dismissed by Department of Energy authorities. Stiles and Granados outline the sampling and analysis practices that made Rocky Flats exposures institutionally invisible. Both papers call attention to the long-term consequences of nuclear contamination, playing out today in places all over the world.
The volume also includes attention to the diplomatic and political consequences of French nuclear testing in the Sahara, a subject that has attracted relatively little historical attention, even though the tests were central to North African alliances and were a source of tensions (between France and its allies, including the United States and Great Britain, and among African member states in the French Community including Mali, Chad, Niger, Congo-Brazzaville, Haute Volta, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Mauritania) in the wake of rapidly changing colonial systems. Historians Austin Cooper and Matthew Adamson each contribute welcome analysis of Saharan testing and its scientific and diplomatic meanings. For Cooper, the processes of secrecy and evasion—even within French administrative networks—capture complex diplomatic calculations relating to the health effects of radiation. Adamson considers a different level of ambiguity concerning the geographical space where the tests occurred, which was either French (or so the French colonial administration said), or Algerian, or Moroccan or something else. French officials claimed that the testing area was terra nullius, a common tactic of nuclear states when they were choosing testing grounds or nuclear facilities,[13] The Saharan site had been claimed historically by both Algeria and Morocco, however, and the issues were by no means resolved. At the end of the 1950s many borders were still disputed, and Moroccan leaders interpreted the French tests as both geopolitical and biomedical threats. These geographical dimensions illuminate a critical aspect of how the tests “affected the politics of newly independent postcolonial states” (149). Both papers suggest the importance of this case for an understanding of global nuclear diplomacy.[14]
I was struck by the confluence of this edited volume with other recent work that analyzes Cold War nuclear cultures in terms of the human experience of an irradiated world. Robert Jacobs’s Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (2022), Livia Monnet’s edited volume Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (2022) and Danielle Endres’s From Nuclear Colonization to Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting (2023) all emphasize the experiences and struggles of those who have been exposed to radiation, and who have often been among the least powerful people in these systems.[15] Monnet, like Hamblin and Richards, integrates artistic and literary interpretations of nuclear damage (in a style some have called “nuclear humanities”), though her volume is more explicitly activist and oriented around “decolonizing pedagogy of the nuclear.”[16] Endres, a literary scholar, similarly focuses on different kinds of historical actors, in her case indigenous groups in the western United States who fought to keep out nuclear waste. Also relevant is my own co-edited volume now under review, with Angela Creager and Maria Rentetzi, Negotiating Radiation Protection in the Global Cold War, in which our contributors reflect on how and why particular aspects of natural knowledge become selectively institutionalized, legalized, and subject to international control and consensus.[17]
This work collectively is a call to pedagogic action. What do we tell the next generation about the rise of nuclear technologies? What is it important for them to see and to understand? Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s brilliant 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the film Oppenheimer (2023), are absorbing and gut wrenching.[18] But scholarly and especially popular tendencies to focus on powerful and privileged men have often constricted our understandings of how nuclear culture has shaped the human experience, and how nuclear contamination and debris continues to act in the world through long-term bodily risk.
Kathleen Flenniken’s “Whole Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary,” the poem that opens the volume, reflects on the poet’s experiences growing up near the Hanford Nuclear Facility, and being assessed in kindergarten for the possible presence of radionuclides:
Just once I peeked
and the machine had taken me in
like a spaceship and I moved
slow as the sun through the chamber’s
smooth steel sky.
I shut my eyes again and pledged
to be still; so proud to be
a girl America could count on.
New scholarly approaches that bring poetry into our understandings of the diplomatic meanings of science open up questions about historical standpoints and uncertain risks. Can the experiences of a small child in a Whole Body Counter join the story of Los Alamos to illuminate the historical workings of systems of power? Hamblin and Richards suggest that they can.
Susan Lindee is the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book is Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Harvard University Press, 2020); Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (University of Chicago Press, 1994), The DNA Mystique with Dorothy Nelkin (W. H. Freeman, 1995) and Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Johns Hopkins University press, 2005). She is now working on a study with a working title of “Science in the Cypress Swamp,” an environmental and scientific history of the Atchafalaya Basin, where her family originates.
[1] Prerna Gupta, “Challenging the Expert and Public Divide in the Risk Debates on Uranium Mining In India,” in Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Linda Marie Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2023): 47-69, Hereafter Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible.
[2] Austin R. Cooper, “How to Hide A Nuclear Explosion: French Secrets About Saharan Fallout Across Decolonizing Africa,” 109-130; and Matthew Adamson, “Exposing Contested Sovereignties: Morocco and French Atomic Testing in the Sahara,” 131-155, both in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible.
[3] Magdalena Edyta Stawkowski, “The Town That Fell Asleep: Malignant Infrastructures of Soviet-Era Nuclear Ruins in Kazakhstan,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 92-106.
[4] William M. Knoblauch, “Diplomatic Fallout: Nuclear Power and Cold War Diplomacy from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 173-190.
[5] Joshua McMullan “Carrying the Can for Chernobyl: Visualizing Radiation Contamination in North Wales,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 156-172.
[6] Desmond Narain Doulatram, “Marshallese Downwinders and a Shared Nuclear Legacy of Global Proportions,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 227-242.
[7]Sasha Stiles and Edward Granados, “Rocky Flats Health History: Making Risk Visible,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 70-73.
[8] Jeffrey C. Sanders, “History Uncontaminated at the B-Reactor,” 245-267, and Sarah Fox, “Playing Games on the Graves of the Dead: Commemoration, Forgetting, and Ways of Knowing in Richland, Washington,” 268-189, both in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible
[9] Yukiyo Kawano, “Public Address on August 6, 2020, for the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility Event Commemorating 75 Years after the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 290-292.
[10] Robert A. Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2022).
[11] Sasha Stiles and Edward Granados, “Rocky Flats Health History: Making Risk Visible,” in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: 70-73.
[12] John Wills, “‘Welcome to the Atomic Park’: American Nuclear Landscapes and the ‘Unnaturally Natural’,” Environment and History 7:4 (November 2001): 440-472. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i20723194.
[13] My 2020 work explores the “emptiness” of Hanford, Washington, of the Nevada testing grounds, and of the Marshall Islands, none of which were at all empty. See M. Susan Lindee, Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).
[14] Austin R. Cooper, “How to Hide A Nuclear Explosion: French Secrets About Saharan Fallout Across Decolonizing Africa,” 109-130; and Matthew Adamson, “Exposing Contested Sovereignties: Morocco and French Atomic Testing in the Sahara, 131-155, both in Darwin Hamblin and Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible.
[15] Jacobs, Nuclear Bodies; Livia Monnet, ed., Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022); Danielle Endres, 2023 Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2023).
[16] Monnet, ed., Toxic Immanence, xv.
[17] Our volume is currently under review at the University of Pittsburgh Press, with publication tentatively in 2025.
[18] Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus. The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006); Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, Universal Films, 2023.