Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Debate on Risk Knowledge in Cold War America, 1945–1963

Abstract

Modern environmentalism in the United States has frequently been described as a product of the peace and prosperity Americans enjoyed at home in the decades following World War II. The Cold War, so the argument goes, was a long peace for the United States that saw an acceleration of industrialization, suburbanization, and consumption; the resulting reshaping of the relationship between humanity and nature spurred environmentalist awareness. It is easy, however, to forget that the Cold War was not simply a metaphoric war and that military activity played a large part in the environmental history of the Cold War era. Warfare has been central to human interactions with nature, as Richard Tucker, Edmund Russell, and Arthur Westing have demonstrated. This insight holds true for the Cold War, and perhaps no facet of that conflict better illustrates the environmental consequences of military activity than atmospheric nuclear testing. Between 1945 and 1963, when the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed to ban atmospheric and underwater nuclear weapons tests, a total of 459 nuclear bombs were detonated in the atmosphere. Scholars have usually treated atmospheric nuclear testing as an arms control question, as a cultural symbol of fear, or as the focal point of a biomedical controversy, but not as an environmental problem in which the risk analysis became complicated by the very nature of the pollution itself.