For 2021, the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History is awarded to Toshihiro Higuchi. The committee—Jessica Gienow-Hecht (chair), Nathan Citino, and Max Paul Friedman—found his work best reflects the methodological approach of the historian whose name marks the prize: multi-archival and multi-lingual resources as well as an astute interpretation of both sources and context that significantly expand our knowledge of international history.

Higuchi’s Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of A Global Environmental Crisis retraces the domestic and international politics around the control of radioactive fallout in a variety of countries including Japan, Great Britain, and the United States. Introducing the concept of the "Nuclear Anthropocene," Higuchi shows how nuclear powers (Great Britain, United States, and Soviet Union) consistently downplayed fallout risk and deceived their populations in order to continue and expand nuclear testing for military purposes.  As scientists and private citizens grew alarmed (and in Japan even organized to retrace and then protest the consequences of testing), the test ban and its attendant treaties can be understood not only as a consequence of disarmament and arms control but also as a result of early anti-nuclear testing movements.  Political Fallout’s principal strengths consist, first, in its in-depth research citing Russian, Japanese, and English primary sources. Second, Higuchi’s take and presentation on a complex issue – notably the science around nuclear fallout – strikes the committee as both comprehensible and fascinating. Third and most importantly, Political Fallout constitutes a timely, bold, and innovative reinterpretation of a seemingly familiar phenomenon at a moment in time when western societies once again engage in debates over the fallout of nuclear power.

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I chose the topic on my own. I first stumbled upon the issue of nuclear weapons testing when I was still a graduate student in Japan. Like many, I initially examined it as a case study in arms control. I wrote two Master’s theses on the test-ban debate, first at the University of Tsukuba and then at SUNY Albany. So, I was ready to move on to a different topic when I came to Georgetown for my PhD, thinking that there was nothing more to be said about the test ban. By a twist of fate, however, I soon discovered environmental history through John McNeill. I never formally took any of John’s seminars, but my fortuitous encounter with environmental history inspired me to reexamine the test-ban issue from a whole new perspective. But it took many more years and Kathy Olesko’s patient guidance to develop the overall analytical framework grounded in the history of science. Of course, none of these exciting adventures outside my field would have been possible without the generous support and encouragement of my main adviser David Painter. So, my topic is in many ways a product of our department’s diverse and collaborative intellectual environment.  

I originally proposed a fairly descriptive title similar to my dissertation’s, that is, “Atmospheric Nuclear Testing, the Politics of Risk, and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis, 1945-1963.” But when I signed an advanced contract, Norris Pope, my publisher’s then editor-in-chief who launched the famed Stanford Nuclear Age Series, said that it sounded too “dissertation-ish” and suggested “Political Fallout.” I initially worried that it might give my readers a wrong impression that the whole issue of radioactive fallout was merely a political football. But I was instantly reassured when my colleague Adam Rothman, a master of catchy and creative book titles, liked it!

The biggest challenge for me was a thick shroud of secrecy surrounding nuclear affairs. Even today, thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the information directly relating to nuclear weapons is nearly inaccessible in all three nuclear-armed countries studied in my book. Luckily, my topic happened to be the least secretive part of all atomic secrets thanks to the public controversy over fallout hazards, which led to the systematic declassification of government records since the 1990s. Many of these and other kinds of sources used for the book are technical in nature. I am not a scientist, but most of the key theories and data in the fallout controversy are fairly basic so that I could understand them based on some good textbooks. More importantly, the literature in the history and sociology of science helped me discern the context of scientific knowledge and its connections with a broader, non-scientific world.

My favorite source is the 1958 report of the Japanese delegation to the United Nations Scientific Committee that I found at the Diplomatic Archives in Tokyo. The committee had earlier adopted a proposal made by its Western members that fallout surveys focus on milk and dairy products as a principal pathway of radiostrontium (a highly carcinogenic element which mimicked calcium in metabolism). Upset by this culturally biased guideline, a group of Japanese scientists checked the local diet and discovered that brown rice, a staple in monsoon Asia, was much more contaminated than milk. In a comical way, the Japanese delegation reported on its effort to promote this startling revelation within the committee, saying that it worked closely with the Indians “as the same rice eaters” to confront the “milk-drinking” Western members! 

Instead of dividing the narrative along national lines, my book offers an integrative analysis of transnational interactions among the key actors in the shared context of the Cold War and the Anthropocene. This allows me to piece together materials from different countries in a seamless and productive way. These sources also provide some missing pieces of the puzzle. For example, the reports of the Japanese delegation to the United Nations Scientific Committee made it possible to recover some of the key internal deliberations that neither the official United Nations records nor U.S. and British diplomatic cables mentioned.

My book was long in the making. Completing the dissertation was just the beginning of this slow, challenging, but ultimately rewarding process. I had all the sources necessary to tell my story, but I was dissatisfied with the way that I pieced them together for the dissertation. Like many dissertators, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees; I buried myself too deeply in the materials to look at the situation as a whole. Therefore, as soon as I was done with the dissertation, I set out to revise the manuscript to be more focused, concise, and argument-driven. The time I spent as postdoc at Stanford, Madison, and Kyoto was a tremendous help, giving me exposure to many innovative and useful concepts which eventually shaped much of the book’s analytical backbone. But what was most helpful in the process of revising the manuscript was undergraduate teaching. The survey courses that I taught at various institutions in the last several years compelled me to see the bigger picture and articulate key takeaways. I feel that I emerged from writing the book as a better scholar and teacher.