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Introduction
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction When russian president Boris Yeltsin decided in the early 1990s to reveal some of the old Soviet regime’s dark secrets, he dropped an environmental bombshell. A major report from his special advisor on the environment, Alexei Yablokov, unveiled the long history of dissimulations and lies by the Soviet government about dumping radioactive waste at sea. Despite decades of denials under communism, Yablokov now revealed that the Soviet Union had dumped large amounts of dangerous radioactive waste into rivers and seas, notably into the Arctic Ocean. Between 1959 and 1992, the Soviet Union routinely violated international norms and agreements, including the London Convention, which restricted marine pollution. In addition to effluent and packaged waste, it dumped sixteen nuclear reactors from submarines and icebreakers, some still with nuclear fuel, most of them in water less than one hundred meters deep.1 The international outrage that followed these disclosures seemed to suggest not merely corruption or incompetence, but also a problem of pathological proportions within the former Soviet Union that linked its decaying institutions with its blighted environment, already known to be marred by the poisons in Lake Baikal and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. An appalled United States Congress put its Office of Technology Assessment to work gauging the consequences of the Soviets’ Arctic pollution. Some scholars charged that Soviet political culture, lacking democratic openness and political accountability , invited such excesses. Others concluded that the Soviet regime concentrated on production at any cost and ignored its problems, assuming that scientists and engineers eventually would solve them. Exploring the links between communism and environmental degradation became a veritable cottage industry among academic writers.2 2 poison in the well The irony was that the Soviet Union had used the issue of radioactive waste disposal at sea as a vehicle for waging a propaganda war against the West, thus putting the environment into its diplomatic arsenal during the 1950s and 1960s. During those years, most of the criticism for dumping radioactive waste at sea was directed at Western countries, especially the United States and Britain . When international debates raged over the issue in the 1960s, the Soviet Union raised the loudest voice of disapproval, calling Western countries “poisoners of wells” who dumped radioactive waste into the shared resource of the sea. Dumping radioactive waste at sea is banned by international treaty today, but the United States, Britain, and other countries practiced it for decades.3 Although it may be instructive to link environmental pollution from radioactivity to the corrupt institutions of a failed political ideology, as in the case of the Soviet Union, there is much to learn from the processes that shaped those same issues in the West, particularly the United States and Britain —the two countries that first did it and set standards that others followed. Their policy decisions, scientific conflicts, public relations strategies, not to mention mishaps and subsequent cover-ups, defy convenient generalizations about secrecy and openness in the East and West during the cold war era. Why did scientists and politicians choose the sea? What about it proved so attractive, and how did the negotiations about the uses of the sea change the way scientists, government officials, and ultimately the lay public envisioned the oceans? In the 1950s, leading oceanographers viewed the ocean as a sewer, using language that might have led to the professional ostracism of an aspiring marine scientist just a couple of decades later. Poison in the Well is a history of the scientific, political, and diplomatic controversies connected to disposing radioactive waste at sea, told in the context of the democratic nuclear powers. It traces the development of the issue from the end of World War II to the blossoming of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, when old ideas about the oceans confronted new attitudes about protecting the seas, leading in 1972 to the first global treaty, known as the London Convention, limiting radioactive waste disposal and other forms of marine pollution. The United States and Britain, like the Soviet Union, promoted nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear power on a large scale during the 1950s. They rushed into atomic energy for a host of reasons—diplomatic, military, cultural, and economic. And simultaneously they faced an array of challenges to public health, including the fallout from nuclear tests, occupational safety, and radioactive waste.4 By the 1960s, they were joined by France and other nations whose reasons for wanting nuclear reactors varied, but whose...