Radiation Nation

In Radiation Nation Natasha Zaretsky deftly uses the March 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island (Tmi) nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a window onto the development of conservative politics. Zaretsky convincingly asserts that “the culture of disassociation” crafted by the nuclear industry to separate the destructive power of nuclear weapons from the domesticated power of nuclear energy shattered after the Tmi accident. Pennsylvania residents expressed concern with radiation exposure, especially to women, children, and the unborn, and developed an abiding distrust of the government that they felt had betrayed loyal citizens. After tracing the decline of Tmi activism, Zaretsky turns her attention to its continuities with the widespread nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s. The Reagan administration's apparent acceptance of the possibility of nuclear war horrified many and invigorated fears of radiation poisoning and nuclear winter. The book reveals fascinating connections in the development of conservative ideology. Although the prolife movement was well underway in the late 1970s, both the Tmi accident and the nuclear freeze movement solidified deep-seated interest in protecting the health and safety of the unborn. Zaretsky also traces the conflicting influence of 1960s activism. Conservatives drew on the era's protest concerns about the environment and health, but distanced themselves by defining their activism as “forced upon them” and motivated by a deep patriotism (p. 109). They accepted feminism's goal of granting women a political voice, yet focused on women as vessels for children. Zaretsky argues that these features should not be seen as “messy, inchoate moments of exception,” but indicates that similarities in concerns about “species reproduction and bodily contamination” create “bedfellows that only appear strange” (p. 196). These issues, she suggests, may give Americans more cause for unification than can be seen on the surface

Distrust · Geography · Government (linguistics · Ideology · Mile · Nuclear power · Nuclear weapon · Patriotism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law

• Nationalism, Self-Determination, and Empire

  Open Access•Brian S Mueller•Left History An Interdisciplinary…•2019

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