Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s by Natasha Zaretsky (review)

Natasha Zaretsky’s approach to the 1979 nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, is deeply rooted in cultural history, yet also draws on political economy. The big question looming over Radiation Nation, as well as her earlier work, No Direction Home, is “how the New Left revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s transformed American culture and society but failed to halt the nation’s rightward political march” (p. xix). She makes an original contribution to the literature, centered on gender and family. She contends that the upsurge of local protest over this disaster led to a profound realignment of American conservative politics, drawing on various strands of leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s such as environmentalism and feminism, while also tapping into religious beliefs and the anti-abortion movement.

Zaretsky’s central thesis is that this catastrophic failure of technology brought about what she calls “biotic nationalism,” rooted in the body, specifically an “aggrieved nationalism” based on the idea that “the nation has callously turned its back on the bodies of its own citizens” (p. xvii). White, working-class Americans saw themselves as the nation’s most loyal citizens, she argues, and felt that their government had treated them as disposable in the Vietnam War. According to the author, in 1979, this sense of betrayal initially centered on the callous disregard of how men’s bodies were treated in that conflict. In the wake of Three Mile Island, the female body and its reproductive capacity took center stage. Orders to evacuate pregnant women and preschoolers living within a 5-mile range of the nuclear power plant only added to residents’ anxiety and distrust in the government. Women argued that the release of radioactively contaminated water and gases from the nuclear power plant turned them, the unborn children in their wombs, their children, and their descendants into “guinea pigs” (p. 100). The scientific background was an ongoing debate about the somatic effects of low-level radiation exposure (notably cancer), as well as older concerns about radioactivity’s genetic impact (associated with eugenics). According to the author, it was the associated image of the wounded nation and the wounded fetus that created such a powerful narrative, making abortion a central issue for the burgeoning conservative movement. However, this preoccupation with the body did not carry over into concerns over gun ownership, healthcare, or food insecurity among American conservatives. The Three Mile Island crisis strengthened anti-statist conservatism in the United States, unlike in West Germany, where anti-nuclear power activism ushered in the rise of the leftist Green Party. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission came to be considered a “hostile, distant authority, callous toward residents’ physical suffering and psychological distress” (p. 142).

In the final chapter the author moves on to the Second Cold War and the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. She points to parallels with the Three Mile Island protests: the importance of the “imperiled body” as a theme in the movement, concern about genetic damage, the significance of women and maternalist arguments, and appeals to Middle America. The concept of “Nuclear Winter”—a devastation of the planet caused by nuclear war and leading to mass extinction, also of the human race—placed reproduction and the “unborn” at the heart of the anti-nuclear narrative. She is critical of what she sees as the nuclear freeze movement’s failure to embrace the ideals of the New Left, asserting that freeze activists “unwittingly aligned themselves with the new nationalism of the 1980s” (p. 171). Thus, in her reading, the nuclear freeze movement failed to block the rightward turn in American politics due to the lack of political commitment and apolitical anti-nuke stance. It is worth remembering, however, that some scholars believe that overcoming political divides was key to ending the Cold War.

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