2011 Volume 2011 Issue 163 Pages 163_28-40
In the 1950s, as the Cold War set in and nuclear arms race accelerated apace, the worldwide contamination by radioactive fallout from nuclear tests triggered a fierce controversy. The Eisenhower administration, whose pursuit of national security through nuclear superiority led to the production of environmental insecurity, sought to contain the latter through environmental monitoring and risk evaluation. Informed by the sociological theory of risk, this article interrogates Cold War America's nexus of scientific knowledge and political power that underpinned this first global environmental crisis of the Cold War.
At the heart of the controversy was a much contested “proper perspective” of risk. Critics noted an absolute increase of harm by fallout and warned about the unknowns in its nature and scale. Washington, in contrast, emphasized the knowns, backed them up with its monopoly of monitoring data, and pushed the burden of proof upon the critics. It also adopted a comparative framework that mirrored the double-binding consensus of national security and high modernity, in which the risk from fallout appeared “negligible” compared to natural and artificial radiations, socially accepted risks, and benefits of atomic energy. The Eisenhower administration even pursued a technological solution of “cleaning up” nuclear bombs to justify the continuation of nuclear tests as well as to break an emerging taboo surrounding the use of nuclear explosives for war and peace.
Cold War America's leadership in the risk evaluation in and out of the United States, however, proved to be far from absolute or static. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, an all-powerful national security state institution which underwrote the government's safety assurances, suffered much from the growing public mistrust due to the embedded conflict of interests between promotion and regulation. The commission of a risk review to the National Academy of Sciences hardly helped the government when the British counterpart issued a more conservative report. At the United Nations, the Soviet Union became assertive in challenging the logic of America's risk judgment as its scientists were rebuilding the knowledge basis of radiation biology and genetics and absorbing an alternative risk perspective through their transnational communication with Western experts. The resultant shift of consensus toward a more conservative risk assessment, in turn, increasingly narrowed the latitude of test ban policy for the Eisenhower administration, which eventually decided to abandon an option of atmospheric tests in 1959. Beyond the test ban, the transformed consensus also led Washington to reconsider the fundamental promise of “peace through nuclear superiority”, ironically, in a way to reinforce it. In short, the fallout controversy revealed the dynamic co-evolution of risk knowledge and nuclear policy for Cold War America.
