Review: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Soraya Boudia and Kyoko Sato (eds.), ‘Living in a Nuclear World. From Fukushima to Hiroshima’
Review of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Soraya Boudia and Kyoko Sato’s (eds.) Living in a Nuclear World. From Fukushima to Hiroshima (Routledge, 2022), 342 pages
Abstract
Living in a Nuclear World. From Fukushima to Hiroshima proposes to ‘use Fukushima as a prism to explore the different ways in which nuclear technology produced our world’. This volume, the outcome of a series of conferences held in Stanford, Paris, Fukushima and Tokyo between 2017 and 2020, offers a series of case studies based on new sources, newly declassified documents and field research at the intersection of STS, history, disaster and Anthropocene studies. Adopting a multi-scale approach, it takes into account a diversity of geographical areas, though it predominantly focuses on the United States, France and Japan.
Reviewed by Charlotte Bigg
When I started teaching in the mid-2000s, I was struck by the indifferent, at the very least distant, attitude of students towards the Chernobyl disaster. It was and remains a vivid childhood memory for me, even though I grew up a long way from the contaminated zone, whereas in 1986 my students were not yet born or were too young to remember it. The photographs were in colour, but they seemed to them as remote as Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to me, something that belonged in history books.
In 2011, with the Fukushima disaster the world was once again confronted with the dangers of civil nuclear power. Today, for populations in neighbouring countries it is impossible to ignore the fact that Europe's most powerful nuclear power station, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, is located in an area of intense fighting. Across the world, civil nuclear programmes are being relaunched, intensified by the energy crisis, while the nuclear arms race continues unabated.
While at times and in some places, we may have thought that nuclear danger was a thing of the past, such events (and many more 'incidents' we know or do not know of), and especially their rapid succession, remind us that humanity is still, and will probably never cease, living in the nuclear age. The risks and dangers of nuclear technology may presently seem overshadowed by the climate and environmental crises, among the slow disasters competing for our attention, but they are in fact interlinked. As the editors point out:
“After much debate, a working group of geologists in charge of classifying geological periods settled on nuclear technology as the best marker for the beginning of the Anthropocene; the plutonium released by nuclear tests in the mid-twentieth century fulfils the three criteria for marking a new period: it is man-made, operates on a planetary scale, and lasts long enough to be relevant on the geological timescale'‘ (16).
Living in a Nuclear World. From Fukushima to Hiroshima proposes to "use Fukushima as a prism to explore the different ways in which nuclear technology produced our world" (3). This volume, the outcome of a series of conferences held in Stanford, Paris, Fukushima and Tokyo between 2017 and 2020, offers a series of case studies based on new sources, newly declassified documents and field research at the intersection of STS, history, disaster and Anthropocene studies. Adopting a multi-scale approach, it takes into account a diversity of geographical areas, though it predominantly focuses on the United States, France and Japan.
The fifteen contributions brought together here, proposed by many of the best experts in nuclear studies today as well as promising young scholars, give a good overview of the current state of this field of study and open up promising avenues for further research.
Reading this collection, one is struck at how far perceptions of nuclear history have changed. For a long time, historians focused on nuclear physics, the Manhattan project, the exile of physicists, and the Pugwash conferences. The history of secrecy, patents and the post-war geopolitical reconfigurations is equally well charted. This work predominantly centred on the United States and on the scientific, technological and political production of nuclear science and technology and the global techno-political order which they contributed to create.
Recent years have seen a marked shift in perspective which Living in a Nuclear World reflects and furthers. The volume firstly offers an often-salutary revisit of well-known events and actors in the history of nuclear power since the 1940s. The IAEA is thus re-examined by Angela Creager and Maria Rentetzi from the perspective of the standardisation of radioactive materials and their eminently political distribution. Similarly, John Krige, Hiroko Takahasi and several authors recast the historical milestones of the Atoms for Peace campaign, the 'Lucky Dragon No. 5' and Three Mile Island incidents.
The book also offers new perspectives, investigating for instance environmental and health issues, e.g., through the history of radioactivity monitoring charted by Nestor Herran, but also the question of ruins and waste, new forms of globalisation (even if of course nuclear matters were global from the outset) including postcolonialism and internationalism. Often the narratives decentre the point of view to take into account and study the nuclearity, to borrow the term from Gabrielle Hecht, of spaces and social groups that have hitherto been neglected. It reflects a search for an historical narrative for a post-Cold War, or even, as its title suggests, our post-Fukushima times.
We have undoubtedly entered an era and a historiography of fallout in the sense that the world we live in continues to be affected by all past nuclear detonations and incidents (radiation, disease, waste, wastelands), but also in the wider sense that the nuclear order ushered in at the end of the Second World War is still in place or has continued effects on the way societies are organised today. And thus, the book asks the poignant question: how to live in a nuclear world?
The book proposes four approaches for exploring this question, reflected in four sections that lay bare the immense technical, political, and cultural work required to manage nuclear risk and make nuclear technology acceptable, indeed, to adapt societies to both:
Violence and order
Pacifying through control and containment
Normalising through denial and trivialisation
Timescaping through memory and future visions
Particularly noteworthy is Soraya Boudia's analysis highlighting governments' extraordinarily interventionist policies to promote nuclear power and manage its associated risks. She proposes that a technocratic, centralised state, an almost authoritarian model of governance is a necessary condition for a nuclear industry. Maël Gomri illustrates this thesis via a perceptive analysis of the technical and social work involved in rendering future accidents 'hypothetical', while Tania Navarro Rodríguez looks at governments' evolving strategies to deal with nuclear waste. The chapters by Kyoko Sato, Ran Zwigenberg and Kate Brown focus on authorities' administration of nuclear disaster survivors' claims and policies aimed at minimising, trivialising, and compartmentalising risk. Disasters, they argue, are often presented as the result of local causes rather than as a systemic risk, part and parcel of a recurrent propaganda deliberately aimed at protecting the nuclear civilian industry and the status quo.
In contrast, several contributions focus on and rehabilitate lived experience, particularly that of victims, as a means of protest. Joseph Masco for instance proposes an expanded understanding of the notion of "exposure" linking subjective bodily experience with global environmental phenomena: "The military nuclear age has proliferated forms and intensities of exposure since 1945, linking how we see to what is in our bodies to planetary-scale transformations in the environment" (45). Operation Crossroads, the atomic tests on the Pacific Marshall Islands, are investigated by M. X. Mitchell from the point of view of its inhabitants and the colonial context.
In the realm of the imagination, nuclear power has played a major role in Western visions of the future, as Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent underscores. But these visions have evolved, she argues: "The modern vision of a future as an object of human will and creativity gradually gave way to concern for the future as legacy and heritage" (270). She echoes Spencer Weart's view that nuclear technology "changed ideas about humanity' s role as an agent of catastrophic change" (271). She urges us to abandon the binary progressive/apocalyptic visions of the future and opt for a radical revision of our conception of time made necessary by life in a nuclear world. Inspired by disaster studies, Scott Gabriel Knowles closes the volume with an examination of the slow, parallel and related nuclear and climatic catastrophes. A re-conceptualisation of temporality is another response to the question that opens the volume: how did nuclear power become commonplace, how to manage it now and in the foreseeable future?
As in any collection of essays, this volume offers less a synthetic overview than a series of case studies and one is tempted, even if it slightly unfair, to ask whether the picture would have changed if the geographical scope had expanded even more, including for instance Pakistan and Algeria, that historians such as Bill Leslie and Roxanne Panchasi have begun to investigate.
One interesting question the volume, and our current predicament, raises is that of nuclear power's exceptionalism. Exceptionalism appears in different guises in nuclear history and in the book. Exceptionalism is meant here not in the sense of Hecht's description of the mechanism that tends to attribute an exceptional character to every accident, or Krige's analysis of the United States' perceived own exceptionalism among the nations, but in in the sense discussed by Günther Anders and the philosophers of the immediate post-war. They argued that the first nuclear explosions marked an exceptional moment in the history of humanity, since it opened the possibility of annihilating itself and life on the planet. But what remains of the exceptionalism of the nuclear threat when, less than a century later, it has become commonplace, normalised and banalised? And how can the predicament of the atomic condition be conceptualised in a context of multiplying existential threats to humanity and the planet? Noting the pervasive pollution brought about by the widespread use of oil and plastics and other environmental crises, Bensaude-Vincent writes, "Nuclear technology is no longer uniquely associated with the end of time, although atoms retain a specificity that should not go unnoticed." (274). A more sustained philosophical and conceptual engagement with these issues, taking stock of the development of this thinking since 1945, would be worthwhile pursuing to better understand our current predicament.
A take-away lesson of the volume is in any case that looking at nuclear power from the perspective of fallout requires us to study not only the absolute entanglement of scientific, technical and political matters, but also the experiential, cultural, environmental and even existential dimensions of the issue.
Charlotte Bigg researches the history of material and visual cultures of science and technology. She works at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre Alexandre Koyré in France.
Email: charlotte.bigg@cnrs.fr
