From 1959 to 1972, U.S. and Japanese authorities sought to facilitate U.S. nuclear-powered warship visits to Japan by downplaying their ''nuclear'' status. This diplomacy of anti-spectacle ultimately backfired, leading to the exclusion of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The paper reveals the contradictory role of nuclear secrecy in U.S. foreign policy.
The history of struggles against war and for peace is typically narrated as a human story. Peacemaking, however, is about more than humans. While the theoretical and empirical relationship between peace and the environment has a long history, it entered a whole new chapter in the modern era. As industrial capitalism drove exponential increases in production and consumption around the world while augmenting the destructiveness of warfare, peace seekers frequently drew their metaphysical ideas, policy issues, and personal inspirations from the natural world. At the same time, those who studied and spoke about nature also actively absorbed the philosophies of peace, protest tactics, and rhetoric of war to address the accelerating human impact on the environment. As we confront a host of human-driven environmental changes with potentially catastrophic effects, historians must work together to uncover and teach a more-than-human perspective on peace and justice.
On August 28, 1974, Japan’s first domestically produced nuclear-powered freighter, the Mutsu, embarked on its inaugural sea trial. However, a minor radiation leak detected on September 1st forced the ship to return to port. This initiated a fierce protest from local scallop growers in Mutsu Bay, who successfully blocked the ship's entry for weeks until the government agreed to relocate its base. This pivotal event, largely overlooked in existing literature on Japanese antinuclear and environmental movements, highlights the critical role of fisherfolk and their unique relationship with their marine livelihood.
The protest, often dismissed as "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" (NIMBY) activism, is re-examined in this article through the lens of oceanic spatiality. Unlike land-based protests, the Mutsu was not in the "backyard" but directly above the scallop farms that formed the economic backbone of the community. This essay argues that the conflict arose from a clash between two concurrent industrializations of the ocean: the superficial view of the ocean for transoceanic mobility, represented by the nuclear ship, and the undersea industrialization of aquaculture. The "inescapable ecologies" of Mutsu Bay ultimately brought these two "blue industries" into direct conflict over the risks of nuclear contamination, demonstrating how the integrity of the marine environment was paramount for the scallop farmers' very survival.
原水爆の時代は、人類の文明が始まって以来続く紛争や対立の危険を単に高めただけではない。それは、地球にとっても新しい時代の幕開けを告げるものでもあった。本稿では、原水爆の脅威を地球史という長いスケールで考えてみたい。
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are typically remembered as a human tragedy. The first and only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, however, were also an environmental disaster. The attacks on the two Japanese cities not only killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of people but also destroyed and scarred countless numbers of plants and animals, with some notable genetic mutations found in their posterity. The nuclear explosions and induced mass fires generated thunderstorms, with “black rain” washing out radioactive ash and dust over large areas outside the bombed area. The firestorms observed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki also provided one of the rare pieces of empirical evidence to the nuclear winter theory, which predicted that the smoke and gases arising from mass fires would block out sunlight and cool Earth’s surface, resulting in crop failure and mass starvation around the world. Yet, the existing literature has overlooked the environmental impact of the atomic bombings and its historical significance as one of the earliest interfaces between the nuclear age and the environmental age. This essay explains how the scientific knowledge and lived experience of the human-made environmental catastrophe in Hiroshima and Nagasaki dramatically changed the ways we think about nuclear warfare, nature, and its relationship to humans when human impact on Earth has become unmistakable.
After a deadly 1958 nuclear reactor accident in Vinča, Yugoslavia, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) engaged in intensive nuclear diplomacy to assemble a major international scientific experiment on radiation dosimetry at the accident site. The 1960 Vinča Dosimetry Experiment made history as the first multinational “big science” project in this field. It was also a significant political victory for the young IAEA, which had been struggling to prove its value in the international community. The story of the successful mounting of the Vinča Dosimetry Experiment highlights the complex interplay between the material culture of science and diplomacy and internationalist ideas. The experiment can therefore be described as a case of "materialized internationalism," whose material and political dimensions were mutually constitutive.
Environmental radioactive contamination caused by the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident has aroused great concern regarding a possible increase in the incidence of childhood thyroid cancer. The ultrasound examinations were conducted immediately after the accident as part of the Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS), which is divided into the preliminary baseline survey (PBLS) and the full-scale survey (FSS). Some of their outcomes are reported regularly and made available to the public. We have detailed measurements of the air-dose rates and radioactive elements in soil in many places all over the Fukushima prefecture. To study the dose-response relationship, we begin with the assumption that the external and internal doses are correlated with the air-dose rate and the amount of 131I in soil, respectively. We then investigate the relationship between these estimated doses and the PBLS and FSS thyroid cancer cases. Our analysis shows that the dose-response curve with the FSS data clearly differs from that with the PBLS data. Finally, we consider the potential mitigating effects of evacuation from highly contaminated areas in both external and internal exposure scenarios.
The successful test of a US thermonuclear weapon in 1954 raised a compelling question as to the worldwide dispersion of radioactive fallout. This article reexamines the Eisenhower administration's test-ban policy in the context of global radioactive contamination. To explain the shifting public discourse of the global fallout hazards and its impact on the test-ban debate, the article focuses on epistemic frictions, seeking to demonstrate how a variety of expert bodies evaluated scientific uncertainty and moral ambiguity concerning the biological effects of fallout from different sets of concerns, and how the resulting incongruence both within and between the scientific advisory committees fueled the fallout controversy and affected the Eisenhower administration’s test-ban policy leading toward the test moratorium in 1958.
This chapter discusses radiation protection in Japan regarding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, with a focus on the use and abuse of numerical guidelines called reference levels. Informed by historical and sociological studies of administrative standards, the chapter traces the process in which the Japanese government consistently used the reference levels in such a way as to exclude backup plans and informed choices on the part of citizens in a wide range of practices from evacuation to decontamination. It also shows that the Japanese government became a victim of its own policy, lowering the reference levels to restore public trust and belatedly realizing that it could not deliver the promised results. It concludes that the fundamental cause of radiological mismanagement lay in the excessively top-down structure of administration in Japan, and argues for de-centralization and accountability to correct overreliance on numbers.
A brief excerpt in lieu of an abstract
To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, this special issue seeks to situate the growing awareness of nuclear peril in the mid-1950s in a comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary context. Central to this new development was, as the case of the Bikini ashes has shown, the radiological dimensions of the nuclear arms race. ... Although the border-crossing nature of radioactive materials was clear to many scientists from the beginning of the nuclear age, the Bikini incident and its aftermath demonstrated it in the most dramatic manner, prompting scientists from various fields and countries to investigate radioactive fallout, share their findings, and re-conceive nuclear peril on whole new levels.
This paper takes Yoshio Hiyama as an example to explain how Japanese biologists confronted radioactive contamination revealed during the Fukuryu Maru incident in 1954. It argues that Hiyama sought to reconcile a twofold dualism through research and advice. The first part of dualism was scientific, as radioactive fallout had a potential not only as a harmful pollutant but also as a useful tracer. The other part was political due to Japan's conflicting status as a partner of the United States while being a victim of its nuclear weapons. Hiyama sought to manage this matrix of science and politics, defusing the tuna scare that rocked U.S.-Japan relations while making the case for a nuclear test ban which the Japanese government embraced as a politically less destabilizing goal. By bringing antinuclear sentiments to a soft landing, Hiyama midwifed the birth of Japan as an anti-nuclear weapons nation with all its contradictions.
Radiation protection standards for the general population have constituted one of the most controversial subjects in the history of atomic energy uses. This paper reexamines the process in which the first such standards evolved in the early postwar period. While the existing literature has emphasized a "collusion" between the standard-setters and users, the paper seeks to examine the horizontal relationship among the standard-setters. It first examines a series of expert consultations between the United States and the United Kingdom. Representing a different configuration of power and interest, the two failed to agree on the assessment of genetic damage and cancer induction whose occurrence might have no threshold and therefore be dependent on the population size. This stalemate prevented the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), established in 1950, from formulating separate guidelines for the general public. Situations radically changed when the Bikini incident in 1954 led to the creation of more scientific panels. On e such panel under the U.S. Academy of Sciences enabled the geneticists to bridge their internal divide, unanimously naming 100 mSv [in total for the 30-year reproductive period] as the genetically permissible dose for the general population. Not to be outdone, ICRP publicized its own guidelines for the same purpose. The case examined in this paper shows that the standard-setting process is best understood as a series of "epistemic negotiations" among and within the standard-setters, whose agendas were determined from the outset but whose outcomes were not.
This paper explains both opportunities and challenges that court disputes over the alleged danger of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests brought to nuclear pacifism. After reviewing the background in which the danger of radioactive fallout came into focus among peace activists, the paper discusses how the litigation in the United States unfolded. It also explores the judicial structures and legal cultures of the Soviet Union and Great Britain to explain why the planned lawsuits in these countries, unlike that in the United States, failed to even take off. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the implications of the first environmental legal challenges to nuclear weapons during and beyond the Cold War.
Japan entered the post-World War II era of development as one of the aid recipients. During the period of occupation from 1945 to 1952, Japan received both technical and financial assistance from the United States. The US army-administered Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) program, later reconstituted as the Economic Rehabilitation in Occupied Areas (EROA), provided a total amount of approximately $1.8 billion, helping Japan import foods, medicine, fertilizers, machinery, and other necessities for its postwar survival. The end of occupation terminated the GARIOA/EROA aid, but the United States continued to provide non-military financial aid albeit on a smaller scale. Following the end of occupation, US aid officials took over the task and ran various US-sponsored technical training programs in Japan, such as the productivity enhancement campaign and the Third-Country Training (3CT) program. In this chapter I will argue that Japan’s experience as a US aid recipient was essential to the nation’s future role as an aid provider to Asia. The analysis of three major US foreign aid programs that involved Japan during the early postwar period-the GARIOA/EROA funds, the productivity improvement campaign, and the 3CT program-will demonstrate a considerable extent of linkage between Japan’s overlapping roles as an aid recipient and donor. US-Japan talks to settle the GARIOA debts, as this chapter will show, discussed various schemes to use part of, or the whole repayment to increase economic aid to Southeast Asia (the term then including South Asia). Although this pursuit of “recycling” aid ultimately failed, it underlined Japan’s eagerness to turn its debt obligation into an asset for its major aid initiative in Southeast Asia. The US-run training programs in Japan also prepared the host nation as a future provider of technical assistance. The 3CT program became one of the launching pads for Japan’s technical cooperation to the rest of Asia, and America’s strong support for the productivity movement in Japan inspired the Japanese business circles to establish the Asian Productivity Organization as an institutional vehicle to spread the techniques and ideology of productivity across the region. In short, US aid to Japan provided its beneficiary with incentives, means, and rhetoric to take initiative for extending financial and technical assistance to Asian countries.
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.
This paper challenges the centrality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our understanding of Japan's antinuclear activism. Focusing on the social distribution and perception of the fallout d*anger, I reexamine the symbiotic dynamics of governmental diplomacy and the grassroots movement against nuclear tests from 1954 to 1963. I argue that radioactive pollution during the Bikini incident triggered a consumerist and materialist turn in the peace movement with housewives at the center. Initially resisting the citizens’ perception of risk, the conservative administration by 1957 came to embrace it and launched diplomacy against nuclear tests to steal people's support away from the grassroots movement. At this crucial moment, the grassroots movement's leadership switched its focus from fallout to the “war policy” in the West, which brought about a paradigm shift from the consumerist and materialist platform toward militant workerism for socialist peace. Now disparaging fallout as merely a “physical phenomenon,” the campaign leaders left the environmental angle exposed in 1961 when the Soviet Union unilaterally broke a test moratorium in effect since 1958. While the government's diplomacy, shrewdly stressing the fallout danger, applied a blow to the campaign, the group was split and paralyzed over a protest of Soviet fallout until it dissolved in 1963. The Japanese experience ultimately proved to be an abortive attempt to grasp the environmental legacy of the Bikini incident.
The idea of ‘clean’ bombs, nuclear weapons with a reduced amount of radioactive fallout resulting from their fission part, has met much ridicule since its public inauguration in 1956. Many scholars have regarded the bombs as a propaganda tool, stopping short of analyzing their role in the transformative phase of US nuclear strategy in the 1950s. This paper reexamines the clean bomb episode through 1958, shedding light upon the dynamic relationship between the development of nuclear weapons technology and the evolution of nuclear strategy from massive retaliation to flexible response. It also discusses the mechanism and momentum of nuclear weapons technology innovation until the US suspended nuclear testing in late 1958.