On Nature Writing in the Nuclear Age

John Hersey,. Hiroshima.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.

Kristen Iversen,. Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
New York: Crown, 2012

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
New York: Pantheon, 1992.

When Oppenheimer and company developed nuclear weapons in the 1940s, they not only created new methods of destruction and explosive ethical questions, but they also birthed—quite unknowingly—a new literary subgenre written in response to the Atomic Age. Beginning with John Hersey’s 1946 Hiroshima, published a year after the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb, this subgenre has focused on the price we pay for nuclear development. Oftentimes categorized as literary journalism, Hiroshima profiles six survivors dealing with the aftermath of nuclear destruction and puts a human face on the 140,000 Hiroshima victims. When it came out in its entirety in the August 31^st issue of The New Yorker, the 31,000-word article jolted readers to attention in a way that more statistical and less personalized accounts of the bombing had not.

Although the ripple effects of Hiroshima were strong and far-reaching, few literary accounts of the anti-nuclear weapons movement followed. What did follow instead were primarily factual and objective reports explaining and describing the explosive power that arrived in our lives at the end of World War II. It wasn’t until 1991, after the long-term effects of atomic weapons had begun to surface, that Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place presented readers with a version of the post-Hiroshima subgenre that moved away from Hersey’s journalistic style and towards what may be described as the nuclear memoir.

Beginning with Williams’s childhood bird-watching excursions, Refuge concerns itself less with telling other people’s stories and more with conveying the author’s own experiences watching the flooding of Utah’s Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as well as the devastating cancer experienced by her mother. If Hiroshima is about the fast and harsh short-term impact of atomic bombs, Refuge is about their slow and brutal long-term effects. This growing discovery of the accumulating and delayed repercussions of low-level radioactive exposure more than anything, perhaps, explains the lapse between Hersey and the literary nuclear works that came later. The structure of Refuge reflects this delay: it isn’t until the book’s last chapter that readers learn about the fallout Williams’s mother was exposed to from aboveground atomic testing in the 1950s. In the passage below, Williams grapples with a smoking gun, the connection between cancer and exposure to nuclear contamination:

It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking contaminated milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother—members, years later, of the Clan of the One-Breasted Women.

Williams’s deliberate delay of the cause-and-effect relationship between nuclear contamination and cancer mirrors the naïveté of a society that understood the immediate horror of atomic bombs, but had yet to learn about their long-term effects and, even more so, the costs of producing any kind of nuclear power.

Beautiful in its subtlety and lyricism, Refuge is considered a classic nature-writing text often taught in environmental literature courses alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. Yet as a personal memoir chronicling the link between cancer and the Atomic Age, it has had little company in the world of creative nonfiction. Until last June, that is, with the publication of Kristen Iversen’s Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Shadow of Rocky Flats. A hybrid that is both nuclear memoir (à la Williams) and literary journalism (à la Hersey), Full Body Burden depicts Iversen’s childhood living adjacent to Rocky Flats, a factory 15 miles northwest of Denver that manufactured plutonium triggers used to detonate nuclear bombs.

In a recent interview Iversen articulates her debt to Williams. “Terry Tempest Williams gave...