Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment

SIX: Science, Ethics, and Dissent

89 CHAPTER SIX ScIence, eThIcS, And dISSenT the scientific controversy over Operation Ranch Hand picked up where the controversy over atomic radiation had left off. A 1964 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists launched the decade-long scientific movement to terminate herbicidal warfare.1 That same year, Lyndon B. Johnson declared ecological victory ten years in the making. In a nationally televised broadcast, the president celebrated the end of atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, declaring: “The deadly products of atomic explosions were poisoning our soil and our food and the milk our children drank and the air we all breathe . . . Radioactive poisons were beginning to threaten the safety of people throughout the world. They were a growing menace to the health of every unborn child.”2 As a political statement, Johnson’s was hardly risky. By overwhelming margins, the public supported the ban, and the real work to end atmospheric testing had been completed by John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, culminating in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.3 The origins of this agreement, widely hailed as Kennedy’s greatest achievement in the area of cold war détente and nuclear disarmament, began not in the halls of America’s elite foreign-policy establishments but in the laboratory of Barry Commoner, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Commoner, regarded by many admirers as the “father” of modern environmentalism , became a key player in the scientific protest against defoliation in Vietnam following his work on atmospheric testing.4 The scientists who protested Operation Ranch Hand worked to replicate Commoner’s success in the political arena. 90 CHAPTER SIX In 1953 Commoner became one of the first American scientists to view nuclear weaponry as having a more pernicious role than guarantor of postwar American security. In April of that year, the Atomic Energy Commission exploded a nuclear bomb at the Nevada test site. The following day, a huge thunderstorm across the country rained radioactive debris on Troy, New York.5 To Commoner, who had spent his early career studying the effects of cancer and free radicals in human tissue, this was alarming news; over the next five years he attempted in vain to extract information from federal authorities on all aspects of the nuclear testing program. Commoner encountered a wall of silence, buttressed by a steady rejoinder from federal officials, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that radioactive fallout posed no health danger to humans.6 Fears of atomic espionage and the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957 further undermined Commoner’s efforts. In a sweeping editorial in Foreign Affairs, Edward Teller, the “father” of the hydrogen bomb, suggested that Sputnik was only the beginning of an ominous trend toward Soviet scientific superiority, and any attempt to ban nuclear testing would further the trend.7 In response Commoner exhorted his colleagues to keep in mind that scientific certainty is “a direct outcome of the degree of communication which normally exists in science . . . What we call a scientific truth emerges from investigators’ insistence on free publication of their own observations. This permits the rest of the scientific community to check the data and evaluate the interpretations, so that eventually a commonly held body of facts and ideas comes into being. Any failure to communicate information to the entire scientific community hampers the attainment of a common understanding.”8 The “problem,” as the title of Commoner’s piece, “The Fallout Problem,” suggested, was double-edged: the elevation of secrecy above ecological health for the sake of national security remained a political and a scientific problem; in his analysis the two were inseparable because the political repression of scientific collaboration rendered deductive discovery impossible . To circumvent this dilemma, Commoner created the Committee for Nuclear Information (cni) and initiated a baby-tooth survey that subsequently became famous. Commoner was convinced that radioactive fallout, particularly the radioactive isotope strontium 90, which had been deposited over fields on which cows grazed, had worked its way into the human food supply. He was right: after an enthusiastic response from the greater St. Louis community, netting cni some seventeen thousand teeth in two years, Commoner and his colleagues demonstrated that even the remotest areas SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND DISSENT 91 “sacrificed” for nuclear testing could not adequately shield American citizens from radioactive contamination. This was precisely the position that President Johnson staked in 1964 with the support of anxious parents all over...