Feldman - Nuclear Reactions

WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL CLASSICS

Paul S. Sutter, Editor

WEYERHAEUSER ENVIRONMENTAL CLASSICS

Paul S. Sutter, Editor

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics are reprinted editions of key works that explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. Drawn from many disciplines, they examine how natural systems affect human communities, how people affect the environments of which they are a part, and how different cultural conceptions of nature powerfully shape our sense of the world around us. These are books about the environment that continue to offer profound insights about the human place in nature.

Making Climate Change History: Primary Sources from Global Warmings Past, edited by Joshua P. Howe

Nuclear Reactions: Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy, edited by James W. Feldman

The Wilderness Writings of Howard Zahniser, edited by Mark Harvey

The Environmental Moment: 19681972, edited by David Stradling

Reel Nature: Americas Romance with Wildlife on Film, by Gregg Mitman

DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism, edited by Thomas R. Dunlap

Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts, edited by David Stradling

Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, by George Perkins Marsh

A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement, by Mark W. T. Harvey

Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, by Herbert Guthrie-Smith

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, by Marjorie Hope Nicolson

The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 18051910, by Donald W. Meinig

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics is a subseries within Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, under the general editorship of Paul S. Sutter. A complete listing of the series appears at the end of this book.

NUCLEAR REACTIONS

Documenting American Encounters with Nuclear Energy

EDITED BY
JAMES W. FELDMAN

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle and London

Nuclear Reactions is published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.

Copyright 2017 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Design by Thomas Eykemans

Composed in OFL Sorts Mill Goudy, typeface designed by Barry Schwartz

21 20 19 18 175 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Cataloging information is on file with the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-295-99962-3

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

For
Chris, Sam, and Ben

CONTENTS

, by Paul S. Sutter

FOREWORD

Postwar Americas Nuclear Paradox

PAUL S. SUTTER

Some time in the near future, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) will make a momentous decision: whether or not to designate a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This decision, though a complex and technical one, hinges on whether humans have become such a dominant force on this planet that they will leave an unambiguous signature in the earths strata, one that would constitute a clear dividing line in the planets geological history. A collection of scholars known as the Anthropocene Working Group has been tasked with making an initial recommendation to the ICS and with deciding when to date the beginning of the Anthropocene. Although there are several viable contenders, including the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the widespread combustion of fossil fuels that came with it, these scholars are increasingly focused on a more recent beginning point: July 16, 1945, the day that Americans exploded the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. As a result of that detonation, known as the Trinity Test, as well as the two bombs that the Americans subsequently dropped on Japan and the hundreds of aboveground tests that followed over the next two decades, radioactive debris has settled in sediments all across the planet in ways that will be stratigraphically recognizable for a long time. With nuclear radiation, humankind has etched its signature across the earths surface.

Whether or not the ICS recognizes the Anthropocene as a new epoch with a punctuated beginning in July 1945, it is clear that the dawn of the Atomic Age ushered in a new day in humankinds collective environmental history. The achievement of controlled nuclear reactions capable of generating unfathomable power was a crowning success of modern American science and technology, one that J. Robert Oppenheimer (lead scientist on the Manhattan Project) famously characterized as technically sweet. American and international scientists and engineers had unlocked an elemental source of unbounded energy that promised to change human life on earth. To use an apt metaphor, humankind had harnessed the atom. At the same time, however, many people came to rue the realization of nuclear power as a feat that threatened to destroy the fabric of life on earth. The Promethean act of unleashing the energy of the atom symbolized both unprecedented human mastery of nature and the considerable dangers that came with such comprehensive environmental power and control. Oppenheimer apparently later recognized this too, in an ominous invocation of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. The very notion of human progress pivoted as a result of this earth-shattering achievement.

In Nuclear Reactions, an essential and timely collection of primary source documents on the history of Americans reactions to nuclear energy, volume editor James W. Feldman helps us to see that the Atomic Age was indeed a profound environmental watershed. This is why this book finds such a comfortable home in the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics series. But Feldman also wants us to consider the myriad other ways in which the arrival of nuclear energy shaped postwar American history. If the harnessing of the atom represented a new chapter in the history of human-environmental relationships, it also ushered in a novel moment in the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the United States. Although the environmental frame is thus a necessary and overarching one for understanding American reactions to nuclear energy after World War II, it is not a sufficient one. Indeed, the documents that Feldman has skillfully assembled in Nuclear Reactions show us that nuclear energy not only occupied a central place in postwar American history, but that in the Atomic Age mainstream U.S. history was necessarily environmental history. This collection of classic documents will be as useful to modern U.S. history courses as it will be to environmental history and environmental studies courses.

Feldman has adeptly organized these documents around what scholars have called the nuclear paradox: that nuclear energy, in its various forms, has been the subject of both technological optimism and apocalyptic pessimism. Americans have seen nuclear energy as both the greatest hope for humankind and our gravest threat. Few scientific and technological achievements, Feldman suggests, have raised so many profound questions about Americans relations with the natural world, the shape of civil society, and the very meanings of progress. Where some see commercial nuclear power as a vital source of clean energy, others insist that the potential for nuclear accidents and the unresolved problem of radioactive waste make nuclear power anything but clean. Where some see a nuclear-powered future as essential for democratic affluence and the continued flourishing of our consumer economy, others fear that the nature of nuclear power generation, which requires centralized control and tight security, will embolden technocratic elites to remove energy decisions from democratic control. Where many have seen a strong nuclear arsenal as essential to American strength in the world and the protection of the American way of life, others (particularly in the postCold War world) have become deeply anxious about how rogue nations or nonstate actors might use nuclear attacks to destabilize the world order and undermine U.S. power. Where some have celebrated nuclear energy as a culminating scientific and engineering triumph, others have used the myriad threats posed by it to fundamentally question whether continuing advances in science and technology constitute progress at all. And although Americans have debated nuclear energy, as they have many other important issues that have become the topics of readers like this one, they have also been deeply confused and conflicted about its promise and perils. Even Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, could not quite plumb what he had done by unleashing the power of the atom. Most Americans have, in their reactions to nuclear power, experienced this same kind of deep ambivalence.