Projects

This project addresses one of the most consequential yet overlooked uses of atomic energy: as a source of power for ships and submarines. Until now, the history of nuclear-powered vessels has been the domain of military and technology historians. My book charts a new path by examining nuclear marine propulsion from the perspectives of diplomatic, cultural, and environmental history. The evolution of fossil fuel engines in the modern era both motivated and enabled the United States to exercise influence beyond the water’s edge in pursuit of national security and economic opportunities. Emerging from WWII as a global hegemon, the United States eagerly embraced the promise of nuclear propulsion, which in theory could operate for a virtually unlimited duration, as a technical solution to power its navy, revitalize its merchant marine, and assist its NATO allies in defense buildups. Nuclear-powered ships and submarines also captured the global imagination. The mass media was obsessed with the USS Nautilus’ Arctic expedition and other record-breaking voyages, and the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship, toured many foreign countries on a goodwill mission.

By the 1960s, however, nuclear marine propulsion increasingly became a source of friction between the United States and its allies, especially Japan and New Zealand. Part of the problem came from the knotty issue of liability in case of a reactor accident on the high seas or in territorial waters. Radioactive wastewater discharged from nuclear vessels also made environmental radiation monitoring at foreign ports a politically delicate exercise. Most importantly, the nuclear fleet became a highly visible target for antinuclear protests abroad because the United States, for both strategic and public relations reasons, adopted a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons on warships and aircraft in transit. Following the arc of the nuclear marine propulsion story from a strategic asset to a diplomatic liability and eventually to an invisible infrastructure for power projection, Engines of Friction brings the allure of unrestricted mobility across oceans and its messy reality to the center in the analysis of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War.

Select Works and Presentations

“Mutsu Adrift: The Nuclear Ship in Search for a Port.” Oceanic Japan: Environmental Histories of the Archipelago and the Sea (Organizers: David Howell and Ian Miller). The Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University. January 25, 2020, Boston.

“Another Black Ship: Nuclear Vessels and America’s Civilizing Mission in Japan, 1959-1968.” Panel: Pedagogy of Nuclear Technology: Cold War Civilizing Missions and Their Consequences in Asia (Chair: Yuka Tsuchiya). 15^th International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia. August 22, 2019, Jeonju, South Korea.

“Just Another Ship? The Contested Nuclearity of U.S. Nuclear Warships in Japan, 1959-1968.” The 2019 SOKENDAI-UST STS Joint Workshop. August 21, 2019, Daejeon, South Korea.

Work in Progress

Mutsu Adrift: The Nuclear Ship in Search for a Port

On September 1, 1974, during its first sea trial in the Pacific Ocean off the northeastern coast of Honshu, Japan’s first nuclear-powered cargo ship Mutsu reported a minor radiation leak from its reactor and decided to go back to the home port of Ominato, Aomori Prefecture. The fishermen around Mutsu Bay, however, refused the ship’s reentry into the port for weeks, until the Japanese government formally agreed to relocate the ship’s base to be outside of the basin in due course. Tracing this forgotten episode of the Japanese nuclear program, the essay explores a key role that a seaport and its surrounding bay played in driving the safety controversy over nuclear marine propulsion in Japan.

As the bearers of the nation’s enduring ambitions as a pelagic empire after World War II, the leaders of the nuclear ship project viewed the port as part of the industrial infrastructure for oceanic transportation. This emphasis on functionality guided the extensive search for a port to host the vessel, which eventually settled on Ominato in 1967 after a failed bid for Yokohama. Confidence in engineering also guided the project leadership’s approach to safety, asserting that the ship was built to contain the damage caused by a major accident at or near the port without any unduly adverse effects on its surroundings.

The people living along the coast, however, viewed the port differently. For them, it was part of a complex and dynamic marine environment. Yokohama officials and the Mutsu fishermen alike worried about the potentially serious effects of lingering radioactivity inside the basin on humans and sea life. The success of sea scallop farming in Mutsu Bay, which became evident shortly after Ominato’s selection as a base for the nuclear ship, also directly connected the economy of the gulf to urban consumers, multiplying the reputational risk of a nuclear accident in the eyes of scallop farmers.

In short, the aimless drifting of the Mutsu in the open ocean following the radiation leak was the inevitable outcome of the clash between these two different views of the seaport and its environment. In this way, the seaport proved to be an Achilles’ heel for Japan’s postwar vision to become a nuclear-powered pelagic empire.

Just Another Ship? The Contested Nuclearity of U.S. Nuclear Warships in Japan, 1959-1968

On January 19, 1968, U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise and its escort ships entered the port of Sasebo in southwest Japan. Noting the special sensitivity of Japanese people to anything nuclear, many likened this first port call by a nuclear-powered surface vessel to the arrival of the steam-powered Black Ships that had broken Japan’s slumbers in self-imposed seclusion from the “civilized” world a century earlier. Unlike the Perry expedition that sought to leverage the shock value of modern technology in diplomacy, however, the Enterprise visit marked the culmination of a decade-long effort by the United States to make the entry of its nuclear-powered warships into U.S. bases in Japan normal, routine, and unexceptionable.

Drawing on historian Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of nuclearity as a dynamic construct, this paper examines a variety of ways in which the supporters and opponents of the visits of U.S. nuclear-powered warships tried to exceptionalize or de-exceptionalize nuclear propulsion as part of a broader struggle over Japan’s security and democracy in the Cold War world.

The paper argues that the regime of secrecy played a key role in the technopolitics of nuclear exceptionalism. The U.S. government initially made headway toward the normalization of nuclear ship visits by carefully controlling information about their engines, armaments, and operations to be disclosed to the public. This policy, however, suffered a major setback in 1968 when controversy broke out over the suspected presence of nuclear weapons on the Enterprise and also over the report of abnormal radioactivity detected in Sasebo harbor during the visit of nuclear-powered attack submarine Swordfish. Ultimately, the entry of nuclear-powered warships into Japanese ports became routine as Washington had hoped. This outcome, however, came with a steep political cost, as the public uproar and the flurry of Diet debate over the Enterprise visit forced the Japanese government to go on record as denying the presence of nuclear weapons aboard the ship, a statement which directly contradicted the secret understandings between the two countries that exempted the transit of nuclear-armed aircrafts and vessels from the consultation requirement of the Security Treaty.

Principal Investigators: Toshihiro Higuchi, Evagelia C. Laiakis, and Tomoko Y. Steen

Sponsor: Georgetown Environmental Initiative (AY2019-21)

This pilot project seeks to reexamine the linear non-threshold (LNT) model for ionizing radiation. Widely referenced with regard to heritable and cancer effects, the LNT model posits that effect is directly proportional to the amount of the exposure, with no minimum dose required. Recently, however, advances in scientific knowledge, changes in the regulatory environment, and major events such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor accident have led many to challenge the LNT model. While a variety of standards organizations and government agencies are currently reviewing the validity of the model, we need a truly multidisciplinary inquiry because scientific fields for radiation protection are not one but many, with each discipline and methodology having its own set of rules and practices regarding evidence, uncertainty, and proof. Radiation protection also involves value judgments regarding legal, ethical, and policy issues. Above all, any change in radiation protection is bound to affect a wide range of policies and practices beyond science, including administrative guidelines, legal proceedings, safety practices, and the cleanups of contaminated sites.

Our purpose is to bring together many and diverse insights from humanities, science, and practices relating to radiation protection and identify new ways to connect academic knowledge to practices. Another purpose is to create an enduring scholarly network around our shared interest in and concern for the issues relating to radiation protection.

Select Works and Presentations

The Multidisciplinary Workshop on Ionizing Radiation and Protection, March 25, 2020 (online)

This project is concerned with the history of conservation as a key element in the making of the modern Pacific world. This reflects my scholarly interest in the entangled histories of the United States and Japan, two countries which encountered one another across the North Pacific Ocean in the late nineteenth century and which have had to learn how to share the vast ocean and its rich resources over time. Taking this maritime setting seriously, I have published a number of book chapters that bring the natural environment into the historical analysis of modern Japan and its relations with the United States and other Pacific countries. My Japanese-language publication, “The Natural Resources Section of the GHQ-SCAP and Japan-Korean Relations in the Reconstructing of the Marine Resource Order” (2011), explains how U.S. experts in the occupation authority in Japan after World War II tried to promote reconciliation between Japan and South Korea through fisheries cooperation in East China Sea. A more recent work, “Japan as an ‘Organic Empire’” (2015), identifies the soil fertility crisis in Japan’s core region since the eighteenth century as a major driver of colonial expansion into Hokkaido and Manchuria in search for the supply of organic fertilizers. Currently, I am preparing a paper on the significant impact of the “opening of Japan” on marine fur-bearing animals in the North Pacific.

Select Works and Presentations

“The Nature of Unequal Treaties: Illegal Sealing in Meiji Japan and an Environmental Consequence of Extraterritoriality.” Panel: Territory in East Asia: Islands and Seas (Chair: Sakura Christmas). The Association for Asian Studies 2018 Annual Conference, March 24, 2018, Washington, D.C.

"The Strange Career of Dr. Fish: Yoshio Hiyama, Radioactive Fallout, and Nuclear Fear Management in Japan, 1954-1958." Historia Scientiarum, 25, 1 (2015): 57-77.

"Japan as an 'Organic Empire': Commercial Fertilizers, Nitrogen Supply, and Japan’s Core-Peripheral Relationship." Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands: From Prehistory to the Present, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015.

"Natural Enemies, Colonial Friends: Biological Control and the Limits of Colonial Governance in Taiwan, 1902-1910." Panel: What Is Colonial Technology? (Chair: Philip Brown). Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, October 10, 2015, Albuquerque, NM.

“Before Whale Wars: Modern Japan and the Conservation of North Pacific Fur Seals.” Panel: Building Borders, Crossing Borders: Animals in the Making of Modern Political Order in East Asia. American Society for Environmental History Annual Conference, March 2012, Madison, WI.

「水産資源秩序再編におけるGHQ-SCAP天然資源局と日韓関係」[The Natural Resources Section of the GHQ-SCAP and Japan-Korean Relations in the Restructuring of the Marine Resource Order]. 李鐘元、木宮正史、浅野豊美編『歴史としての日韓国交正常化・第二巻ー脱植民地編』[Normalization of Japan-South Korean Relations As History, volume 2: Decolonization, edited by Jong Won Lee, Tadashi Kimiya, and Toyomi Asano], 327-349. 東京：法政大学出版会, 2011 (Also translated and published in South Korea).

“The Biological Blowback of Empire? The Collapse of the Japanese Empire and the Influx of the ‘Deadly Environment,’ 1945-1952.” In Comparative Imperiology, edited by Kimitaka Matsuzato, 37-60. Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 2010.

“Birds for New Japan: Bird Conservation and Reforms in Japan, 1934-1952.” The Association for Asian Studies. Philadelphia, 2010.

“‘Learn to Live at Home’: Natural Resource Management and the American Occupation of Japan.” The American Society for Environmental History. Portland, 2010.

Work in Progress

Nature of Unequal Treaties: The Treaty-Port System and the Transnational Enterprise of Sea-Otter and Fur-Seal Hunting in Meiji Japan

The commercial treaties that Japan concluded with Western countries at the end of the Tokugawa era incorporated the country into a new international legal order. With foreign nationals largely exempted from local laws and jurisdiction, the Japanese government faced numerous challenges to its modern project of territorialization. One of them was the conservation of sea otters and fur seals inhabiting the Kuril islands. While whales played a major role in the “opening” of Japan, fur-bearing marine mammals were essential to the border-making process in the North Pacific because their littoral habitats constituted legal borderlands between land and territorial waters on the one hand and the high seas on the other. Unlike the Western countries, however, Japan was also barred from exercising its judicial power over foreign citizens present in its own land and territorial waters. This additional layer of legal complication turned Japan into an ideal base for Western sealers, facing fewer animals and more regulations elsewhere, to exploit the relatively untouched and unguarded stocks along the Japanese coast.

Building upon the scholarship on the role of marine life in the making of the Pacific world, this essay examines the rise of a trans-Pacific stateless enterprise of sealing based in Japan, explaining how extraterritoriality created a space where the seamen of mixed nationalities, both Western and Japanese, defied and ultimately thwarted the Meiji state’s monopolistic claim to sealing. By exploring an environmental consequence of the unequal treaties, the paper seeks to situate Meiji Japan in the maritime Pacific world.

The frightening vision of a Third World War has gripped the United States since even before the Second World War formally ended. When might the next global conflict start? How might it be fought? And what might a post-WWIII world look like? Throughout the Cold War and even today, politicians, diplomats, military officials, scientists, religious ministers, fiction writers, peace activists, and ordinary citizens alike have been struggling to anticipate, plan, survive, or prevent the world war that is yet to come.

One might dismiss the widespread and persistent fear of WWIII as mere fantasy. However, the shadow of yet another global conflict has served as a potent mirror and crucible for U.S. society since 1945. Future war scenarios, both in military plans and science fiction, have closely reflected deep-seated fears – and even hopes – about seismic changes in the United States and the world following WWII. The perceived risk of a global conflagration has also driven concerned U.S. officials, scientists, and citizens alike to act in the real world, whether it is to strengthen the military, seek a negotiated settlement, develop or ban deadly technologies, or stage mass protests for peace and disarmament. And the dominant narratives of a hypothetical worldwide conflict have gradually shifted over time as the United States and the world have undergone political, economic, social, cultural, and technological changes in the last seven decades. In other words, WWIII as a fictional war has a history that is just as rich, complex, and consequential as that of the two world wars.

Using a wide range of scholarly publications and primary sources, ranging from secret war plans to civil defense manuals, from Sci Fi literature to video games, this research/teaching project explores the emergence, popularization, and transformation of discourses in the United States about WWIII from the middle of WWII to the present. I consider a wide variety of popular speculations about a possible cause, development, and consequence of the global conflict. Those include, for example, communists, terrorists, mad scientists, extraterrestrial aliens, killer robots, computer errors, and human mistakes. By discussing each of these scenarios along with its historical context,I ask what it tells us about the following key domestic and international issues for the United States since 1945: political ideology, class, race, gender, empire, science and technology, health and safety, and the natural environment. The ultimate goal of this historical inquiry is to contextualize and historicize our own ideas about WWIII today – and to imagine a more peaceful alternative of the future.

Topics

• Fighting the Last War: World War III as World War II 2.0

• Totalitarianism

• Nuclear Overkill

• Biological Warfare

• War Games

• Accidents, Errors, and Madman

• Survivalism

• 1960s: Crisis of Imagination

• 1970s: Population Bomb, Peak Oil, and Catastrophic Environmentalism

• 1980s: Evil Empire, Star Wars, and Perpetual World War III

• 1990s: Rise of the Rest, Clash of Civilizations, and Narratives of Decline

• 2000s: Threats Everywhere