Nuclear Meltdown and the Culture of Risk

During the last twenty-five years the hydra-headed idea of risk—nuclear, industrial, health-, allergy-, and terrorist-related—has exerted a profound influence over the shape and direction of social scientific research. Informing academic debate and policy formation, it has modified collective perceptions of everyday life. Construction workers no longer expect to be allowed on site without protective clothing. Pedestrians no longer intuitively calculate that, whatever the law might suggest, reckless drivers hold the whip hand in ill-lit downtown streets. While highway accidents continue to kill and injure large numbers, those transgressing the traffic regulations now expect to receive punishments that more accurately reflect the full social meaning of dangerously irresponsible behavior. Progress remains painfully slow, particularly among the less-well-off members of the community, but public health educators now report marginally less depressing results in relation to campaigns targeting the obesity pandemic. Desperate to reduce the risk of premature death, an increasing proportion of Europeans and Americans now behave in ways that acknowledge some elementary connections between nutrition, exercise, and health, thereby pressuring corporations like McDonalds to modify their advertising and their menus; supersize meals have recently been declared a thing of the past.

However, as the somewhat forced media rediscovery of Bhopal indicates, economically advanced nations continue to display minimal concern with the multiple risks that threaten, distort, and devastate life in the developing world. Failing to introduce Western-style health and safety regulations, corporations connive with lax factory inspectorates in nations dependent on massive inflows of foreign capital. In states like Namibia or Sudan, American and European obsession with risk can only seem a weird and expensive luxury. In AIDS-decimated sub-Saharan Africa, which—according to a recent UNICEF report—is now afflicted by the most devastating health crisis that the world has ever known, alcoholism, hard-drug and nicotine dependence, and fatal urban automobile accidents spiral uncontrollably upward. The deadly combination of Western corporate refusal to reduce the price of retroviral drugs and underfunded and misguidedly puritanical indigenous policies toward health care render the classic "risk" pandemic resistant to attempts at coordinated international control. In terms of diet, those fortunate enough to have enough to eat live a more healthy life than American and European populations addicted to the deadly pleasures of saturated animal fats. But this has more to do with climate, local agricultural regimes, and dietary and religious tradition than conscious avoidance of premature death.

Preoccupation with risk has encouraged sociologists, environmental specialists, and historians to catalog, categorize, and differentiate between low-level dangers and sudden and uncontrollable mass technological disasters.¹ Without minimizing the astonishingly high historic death rates attributable to railroad and automobile accidents, this rough-and-ready distinction highlights the potentially catastrophic implications of collapse or meltdown in large-scale, and particularly nuclear, installations. Following the pioneering work of Thomas Hughes, contemporary historians are now beginning to interrogate relationships between the social construction of large-scale technologies, cultural contexts, and systems failure.² Specifying key components of postindustrialism and opening up the mid- and late twentieth century to controlled investigation, researchers are also creatively blurring the divide that has traditionally and unnecessarily separated the near-present from the past. Nevertheless, little attention has yet been given to specific examples of twentieth-century systems failure.

Scholars concerned with the near-contemporary histories of technology, large-scale systems, and potential catastrophe will therefore wish to give the closest possible attention to J. Samuel Walker's Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective, a meticulous, day-by-day reconstruction of that watershed event.³ Combining analysis of federal and corporate policymaking, oppositional politics, and cultural change, Walker interrogates the roles played by local politicians and troubleshooters, newspapers, television, radio, and think tanks. A measure of the book's effectiveness is that it renders Harrisburg of the early 1970s as eerily alien and dated as medieval York.

Nevertheless, the conventional narrative, still present in shadowy form in Walker's thought-provoking study, tends to feature a semipanicked corporation watching, aghast, as dysfunction merges into impasse, and impasse into potential regional, national, and international...