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• W4385741985 abstract "Reviewed by: Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis by Toshihiro Higuchi Néstor Herran (bio) Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis By Toshihiro Higuchi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 301. Toshihiro Higuchi's Political Fallout is an innovative and comprehensive historical study of the nuclear test fallout controversy. Crisply written and attentive to technical detail, the book traces fallout debates since the ill-fated Castle Bravo nuclear test in 1954 to the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963, an agreement that, according to the author, did not end the nuclear arms race, but managed to make [it] environmentally sustainable (p. 189). There is abundant scholarship on the PTBT by Cold War historians (Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 1978; Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 2006; Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, 1999; and Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb, 1993), or more recently by historians of science such as Jacob Hamblin, Soraya Boudia, and the author of this review. In Political Fallout, Higuchi masterfully combines the treaty's political and scientific aspects from an impressive array of sources, e.g., secret reports, UN committee proceedings, Japanese newspapers, and antinuclear activist archives, to convincingly underline the transnational nature of the controversy. The book starts with the first nuclear tests by nuclear powers (the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The radioactive fallout from these tests was not a matter of much concern. Monitoring systems were implemented, but the main driver was not health and safety but spying on foreign nations' nuclear activities. Hydrogen bombs, with yields three orders of magnitude larger than fission bombs and the source of global radioactive fallout, completely changed the situation. In 1954, the U.S. Castle Bravo nuclear test on the Marshall Islands went awry, irradiating not only the island's residents but also the crew and cargo of Japanese fishing boats in the Pacific. Tuna catches sold in Tokyo proved radioactive and provoked a food scare. Using Japanese sources, Higuchi adeptly reconstructs the initial controversy, which reached local and temporary closure after America pressured the Japanese to stop publicizing radiation measurements of specimens caught in the Pacific. [End Page 985] Once the controversy spread abroad, it soon gained momentum. Taken up by the Ban the Bomb and nonaligned countries' movements, the issue turned global. America then established the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) to appease anxieties, and Higuchi provides a brilliant analysis of the committee's scientific discussions and political maneuvers. He shows that UNSCEAR was plagued by asymmetries of expertise and was ultimately unable to solve the controversy, but it emerged as a key platform for data gathering, scientific research, and consolidation of expertise on the effects of radiation in the human body. Pursuing the story after UNSCEAR's first report in 1958, Higuchi argues that the PTBT was the unexpected and contingent result of a changing politics of risk that transformed the meaning of radioactive fallout from a harmless side effect, to an unacceptable hazard that demanded international regulation (p. 190). Before national and international scientific committees construed fallout as a health hazard and technological fixes such as underground testing made atmospheric testing irrelevant for national security, Higuchi stresses the strong advocacy of scientists such as Barry Commoner, Linus Pauling, or Andrei Sakharov and antinuclear citizen movements as necessary factors for the treaty's adoption. The argument is solid, but it only partially opens the big black box of antinuclear activism: the narrative portrays almost exclusively scientists and politicians reacting to the invisible force shaking the public sphere; despite women constituting the most active collective opposing nuclear tests, the book does not identify any individual woman (apart from Ava Helen Pauling, briefly described as a pacifist influence on her husband). Indeed, the book does not follow the controversy into the 1960s and 1970s, when French and Chinese atmospheric nuclear tests challenged the PTBT. It would be interesting to see if the same tensions were at play when new nuclear nations agreed to definitely end atmospheric nuclear tests in 1980. Apart from..." @default.
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• W4385741985 date "2023-07-01" @default.
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• W4385741985 title "Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis by Toshihiro Higuchi (review)" @default.
• W4385741985 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.a904009" @default.
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