Week 6: E-response to Masco and Jain

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11 Atomic Health, or How The Bomb Altered American Notions of Death

J o s e p h M a s c o

What happened to health in the atomic age? If we consider health the absence of illness and thus the opposite of death, the atomic bomb has fundamentally altered, if not totally invalidated, the concept. My dictionary defines health as a “condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit” involv- ing “freedom from physical disease or pain.” I like this idea, even yearn for the simple purity it assumes about bodies and knowledge. But this concept of health is at best nostalgic, representing a dream image from an age long sur- rendered to modern technology and the nation-state. The atomic bomb has not only produced a new social orientation toward death, it has insinuated itself at the cellular level to challenge the very structure of all living organ- isms (plant, animal, human) on planet Earth. In order to assess a transfor- mation of life on this scale, we need to understand how the atomic bomb has inverted definitions of health and security, remaking them from positive values into an incremental calculus of death.

Instant mass death, individualized cellular mutation, and radiation-induced disease have become normalized threats in our world, producing a new con- cept of the healthy life as well as a new relationship between citizens and the state mediated by catastrophic risk. The inability to think beyond these atomic potentialities—let alone to reduce the technological, political, and environmen- tal conditions that continue to support them—renders these nuclear effects invisible, normalized, routine. In the atomic age, incipient death has become a form of health itself, both normalized and rendered invisible as a new form of nature. Health, in my formulation, is thus a social construct that regular- izes certain potentialities for the human body through an increasingly per- verse process of naturalization and amnesia. I propose to track the profound physical and psychological effects of the atomic bomb on American society by exploring how the long-standing state concern with “hygiene” as a joint project of public health and security mutated during the Cold War arms race.

Kirkland, Anna. Against Health : How Health Became the New Morality, edited by Jonathan Metzl, New York University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=865704. Created from washington on 2018-09-20 17:42:24.

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After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the technological potential for nuclear war expanded exponentially in the United States, quickly producing a world in which American life could end at any minute. Always on alert, intercontinental missiles, nuclear submarines, and long-range bombers insure that nuclear war can begin any second of the day and, in the first minute of conflict, exceed the total destructive power unleashed in all of World War II. The Cold War state installed this new form of total destruction within the minute-to-minute reality of everyday life by calling it “national security.” The technological capability for a totalizing mass death has not changed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formal end of the Cold War. It remains a brute fact of the life that we live, and have lived for several generations, that our everyday space is imbued with the potential for an unprecedented form of collective death. It is unhealthy to say the very least.

But a radically foreshortened social future is only one possible effect of the nuclear revolution; the other is individualized, covert, unpredictable, and cellular. The atmospheric effects of nuclear development—there have been thousands of nuclear explosions conducted in test sites around the world— delivered vast amounts of radioactive material into the global biosphere. Taken up by global wind currents as well as plants and animals, these materi- als were delivered into each and every person on the planet and deposited in varying amounts within their genomes. As a result, all of us carry in our bodies traces of Strontium-90 and other human-made radioactive elements from the nuclear test program, making life on planet Earth quite literally a post-nuclear formation.1

We don’t really talk about atomic health anymore. We reject the domes- tic costs of the U.S. nuclear project in favor of the more generic discourse of “terrorism” and “WMDs.” These terms project responsibility for nuclear fear outward onto often nameless and faceless others. They deny that the United States has been the global innovator in nuclear weapons, respon- sible for every significant technological escalation of the form. The United States also remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, and, in terms of its nuclear development program, it remains the most nuclear-bombed country on Earth (with 904 detonations at the Nevada Test Site alone). Indeed, the social process of coming to terms with an imminent fiery death or a slower, cancerous one has now been normalized as a fact of everyday American life. The roots of nuclear anxiety, how- ever, have not dissipated over time but rather have become more deeply woven into American culture and individual psyches.2 Whether we choose

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to recognize it or not, each of us is now a post-nuclear creature, living in a social, biological, and emotional world structured by the cumulative effects of U.S. nuclear weapons science.3

If you don’t believe me, if you resist my definition of nuclear health as incipient death as absurd or extreme or simply too depressing, consider the hyper-rationalist argument about radioactive life presented by Herman Kahn in his 1960 treatise, On Thermonuclear War. Writing as a RAND Corpora- tion strategist, Kahn was influential in conceptualizing U.S. nuclear policy in the early Cold War period. He set out to “think the unthinkable” and work through the details of a nuclear conflict in his book, taking readers from the first salvo of atomic bombs through the collapse of the nation-state and into the possible forms of social recovery.4 Kahn was a central inspiration for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film of the same name, and like the character in the film, he delighted in the shock effects he pro- duced in his audience by exploring the details of nuclear conflict and the conditions of a post-nuclear society.5 On a surface level, On Thermonuclear War is an effort to calculate via cost-benefit analysis the economic, environ- mental, and health effects of different types of nuclear war. The text, however, also reveals the absurd biological and social stakes of Cold War “national security,” calling into question the very “rationality” of the nuclear state. Kahn begins by breaking nuclear war into eight stages. He then assesses the result- ing “tragic but distinguishable postwar states” of nuclear conflict depending on the specific war strategy and scale of the conflict.6 For Kahn, nuclear war is a universe of physical, emotional, and social misery in which decisions still have to be made with stark consequences at each stage of the conflict, from military strategy to medical mobilization and economic recovery. To those who would reject this line of thinking as immoral or perverse, Kahn simply asks: Would you prefer a “post-nuclear America” with 50 million dead or 100 million dead? How about environmental ruin lasting ten years or fifty?7 Nuclear conflict is rationalized here, as are its vast range of effects, in order to open up a new possibility for post-nuclear governance. Kahn ultimately runs the gruesome numbers to assess the degree of suffering Americans should be willing to accept in order to fight the Cold War. He also attempts to calculate the precise point at which the nuclear destruction would be so great that the “the survivors would envy the dead,” thus rendering the Cold War null and void as a collective project (see figure 11.1).8

In making these calculations, Kahn provides a new vocabulary of col- lective risk as well as a variety of new metrics for assessing health in the nuclear age. Consider just the figure titles he uses to illustrate the con-

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sequences of different nuclear scenarios: “Acceptability of Risks,” “Genetic Assumptions,” “The Strontium-90 Problem,” “Radioactive Environment 100 Years Later,” “Morbidity of Acute Total Body Radiation,” “Life Shortening,” and “Seven Optimistic Assumptions.” While these tables detail a scale of suffering that is unprecedented in human experience, Kahn’s ultimate met- ric is not radiation exposure rates or “life shortening” effects or the eco- nomic cost of rebuilding destroyed cities and infrastructure, but a rather new kind of social calculus: the “defective child.” Acknowledging that the nuclear test programs of the United States and Soviet Union had distrib- uted vast amounts of Strontium-90 in the form of fallout into the global biosphere, Kahn assesses the damage to the human genome. Recognizing that the health effects of Strontium-90 contamination can be both immedi- ate (cancer) and multigenerational (genetic damage), Kahn calculates how many American children will be born severely disabled because of U.S. investment in the atomic bomb. This is a remarkable moment in American history as it recognizes that “national security”— traditionally a defense of both citizens and the state from outside dangers—has been fundamentally altered in the nuclear age, requiring new forms of internal sacrifice. Kahn, however, goes much, much further in his assessment of the Strontium-90 problem, revealing the new terms of nuclear health in a security state that will consider paying any cost right up to the edge of total annihilation in order to win the Cold War:

Figure 11.1. Table from Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War.

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I could easily imagine a war in which the average survivor received about 250 roentgens . . . This would mean that about 1 percent of the children who could have been healthy would be defective; in short, the number of children born seriously defective would increase, because of war, to about 25 per cent above the current rate. This would be a large penalty to pay for a war. More horrible still, we might have to continue to pay a similar price for 20 or 30 or 40 generations. But even this is a long way from annihila- tion. It might well turn out, for example, that U.S. decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional 1 per cent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia. Or it might be that under certain circumstances the Russians would be willing to accept even higher risk than this, if by doing so they could eliminate the United States.9

It might well turn out . . . In a world where a security state can imagine as a viable calculus exchanging the health of its children in perpetuity for a politi- cal victory, the terms of both “public health” and “security” have been mightily and permanently altered. We have moved from a notion of health as an absence of disease to a graded spectrum of dangerous effects now embedded in every- day life. Health, as Kahn presents it here, is a statistical calculation rather than a lived experience, and it is precisely by approaching health as a population effect rather than an individual one that he creates the appearance of rationality.

Kahn’s interest in thinking through nuclear warfare, however, does force him, in a few rare but telling moments, to confront the raw physical reality of the human body. Food, for example, would be a major concern in a post- nuclear world, and Kahn imagines nuclear war scenarios in which U.S. agri- culture could be “suspended” for fifty to a hundred years.10 Since nuclear war in the era of thermonuclear weapons would spread its effects over the entire continental United States, Kahn focuses on how to manage food produced in a largely contaminated environment. His answer once again points to a new concept of health as incipient death. He proposes to classify food based on the amount of Strontium-90 contamination it contains in groups labeled “A” (little contamination) to “E” (heavily contaminated), and then to distribute the food based on the following criteria:

The A food would be restricted to children and to pregnant women. The B food would be a high-priced food available to everybody. The C food would be a low-priced food also available to everybody. Finally, the D food would be restricted to people over age forty or fifty. Even though this food

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138 | Joseph Masco

would be unacceptable for children, it probably would be acceptable for those past middle age, partly because their bones are already formed so that they do not pick up anywhere near as much strontium as the young, and partly because at these low levels of contamination it generally takes some decades for cancer to develop. Most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer. Finally there would be an E food restricted to the feeding of animals whose resulting use (meat, draft ani- mals, leather, wool, and so on) would not cause an increase in the human burden of Sr-90.11

These people would die before they got cancer. Thus, while contamination is total, linking all Americans in a post-nuclear reality, the role of governance is not to prevent disaster but to minimize its effects through the rational cal- culation of individual age versus the longevity of radioactive materials in the distribution of food. Again, there is no concept of health here if by health we mean an absence of disease or risk. There is rather the naturalization of a new baseline reality (in this case a very contaminated North America and a dam- aged human genome) within which to begin anew the calculations of effec- tive medical governance. Specifically, the length of time it takes for cancer to appear is calculated against the expected longevity of middle-aged Ameri- cans in a post-nuclear world and thereby eliminated as a concern. Under this line of thinking, it is not a sacrifice if you die before the health effects of eat- ing radioactive food give you a fatal cancer.

Kahn recognizes that the psychology of a post-nuclear world would also be a major source of conflict. His analysis participates in a long-running state concern about how emotions—fear, panic, and terror—influence mass popu- lations at a time of constant crisis. He asks his readers to consider this:

Now just imagine yourself in the postwar situation. Everybody will have been subjected to extremes of anxiety, unfamiliar environment, strange foods, minimum toilet facilities, inadequate shelters and the like. Under these conditions some high percentage of the population is going to become nauseated, and nausea is very catching. If one man vom- its, everybody vomits. It would not be surprising if almost everybody vomits. Almost everyone is likely to think he has received too much radiation. Morale may be so affected that many survivors may refuse to participate in constructive activities, but would content themselves with sitting down and waiting to die—some may even become violent and destructive.12

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If one man vomits, everybody vomits. For Kahn, the question is not how to avoid a world where nuclear war is possible but rather how to help indi- viduals understand the meaning of their own gag reflexes. Thus, he proposes a national program to distribute radiation meters throughout all towns and cities as a means to help survivors determine if their physical responses are acute radiation poisoning, the flu, or merely the correct reaction to a world destroyed. Kahn here moves from nausea to panic as an immediate problem of a post-nuclear world. In doing so, he participates in the chief project of civil defense in the early Cold War period—an emotional adjustment of the American public to the reality of nuclear warfare. Having provided radia- tion meters, the state can now say that citizens possess the means of self- regulating their emotions in a post-nuclear crisis, thus refocusing the crisis from one of mass casualties and destruction to the issue of how individuals control themselves.

The crucial point here is that Herman Kahn’s examination of the effects of nuclear war, though widely read in government circles, did not produce a retreat from the escalating arms race but rather an ongoing project to nor- malize nuclear war as simply another element of risk in everyday life. The Geiger counter becomes the perfect emblem of this logic as it cannot prevent radiation exposure, only document its occurrence. Put differently, nuclear terror—with all its stomach-turning, mind-wrenching, multitudinous forms of anxiety—was never the enemy during the Cold War; this terror was a core tool of the U.S. security state. U.S. officials did not define mental and physical health during the height of the Cold War as an absence of anxiety or injury but rather as the correct response to it, an emotional self-discipline grounded in normalization rather than abjection or terror.

What kind of governance is this? And what has happened to the idea of public health as a state project devoted to improving the lives of citizens? While nuclear war has not yet occurred on the scale Kahn imagined, the effects of the nuclear test project distributed fallout and other environmen- tal contamination on a massive scale to U.S. citizens. The combined effects of environmental damage and social anxiety created by the nuclear arms race fundamentally altered—indeed, placed in opposition—the concepts of “national security” and “public health.” In other words, the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb did not just create a new kind of weapon; it revolution- ized American society. The achievement of the bomb in 1945 certainly trans- formed the nature of military affairs, but it also fundamentally altered the cit- izen-state relationship and created a new concept of state power, the nuclear superpower. How does nuclear superpower status change concepts of health

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in the United States as well as alter the state’s commitment to improving the lives of its citizens? It is important to remember that the roughly ten thou- sand nuclear weapons that the United States maintains in its current arsenal (and the vast means of delivering them via aircraft, submarines, cruise mis- siles, and intercontinental missiles) are capable of holding the entire planet hostage. The first technological achievement of the Cold War state was the production of a 24/7 system of global surveillance and nuclear war fighting capability. This “closed world” system, as Paul Edwards has described it, has kept the world on the edge of a nuclear conflict that could happen with less than ten minutes of warning.13 Since there is no interior or exterior to this global logic which makes a claim on every living being on the planet, the bomb does not produce “bare life” (a reduction to a purely biological con- dition) or a “state of exception” in Giorgio Agamben’s formulation;14 in its totalizing scope and effects, it is something rather new in human history.

The modern state form is grounded, as Michel Foucault has argued, in the management of internal populations and the constant improvement of the means of securing that population from a variety of threats. The state’s effort to improve and regulate the lives of citizens in terms of hygiene, dis- ease, mental health, and education not only produced the social sciences but also mobilized state power in ways that touched every citizen—from taxes, to inoculations against disease, to the structure of the school system, to the safety of roads, and to the logics of imprisonment (for crime, insanity, and infectious disease). Modern technology as well as modern social science pro- vided the means for constant social improvement as the nation-state form developed, constructing for citizens an imagined future in which health was to be an endless horizon of better living and part of an increasingly secure world. More state security was thus coterminous with the promise of more security for the individual, in other words, a happier, healthier life. This nar- rative of idealized “progress” was possible until the atomic revolution, which both underscored the reality of radical technological change and invalidated the state’s ability to regulate society at the level of health and happiness. Secu- rity and health, which were linked for several hundred years in the develop- ment of the modern state concept, became contradictory ideas after 1945, all but invalidated as intellectual concepts when challenged by the nuclear real- ity of the Cold War.

Foucault seems to acknowledge this in his lectures on security. He notes that something fundamental about the state changes after 1945, disrupting his theory about the evolution of state power from monarchal authority through the modern nation-state form, which relies on a variety of means of

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influencing individuals (discipline) and populations (biopower) in constitut- ing its power.15 In Society Must Be Defended, he argues:

The workings of contemporary political power are such that atomic power represents a paradox that is difficult, if not impossible, to get around. The power to manufacture and use the atom bomb represents the deployment of a sovereign power that kills, but it is also the power to kill life itself. So the power that is being exercised in this atomic power is exercised in such a way that it is capable of suppressing life itself. And, therefore, to suppress itself insofar as it is the power that guarantees life. Either it is sovereign and uses the atom bomb, and therefore cannot be power, biopower, or the power to guarantee life, as it has been ever since the nineteenth century. Or, at the opposite extreme you no longer have a sovereign right that is in excess of biopower, but a biopower that is in excess of sovereign right.16

The “excess” biopower produced by the bomb is a topic that bears much scrutiny, for the United States has literally built itself through nuclear weap- onry. In his Atomic Audit, Stephen Schwartz has documented the fact that between 1940 and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons.17 This makes the bomb the third-largest federal expendi- ture since 1940, just after non-nuclear military spending and Social Security and accounting for roughly eleven cents out of every federal dollar spent. After the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the relationship among military, governmental, industrial, and academic institutions grew as these institutions supported a U.S. security state that was founded on nuclear weaponry and anti-communism. The Cold War nuclear standoff conse- quently became the ground for a new articulation of state power as well as a new social contract in the United States, transforming the terms of everyday life as well as the very definition of public health.

The atomic revolution, however, presented an immediate contradiction to U.S. policymakers about how to define security and health. By the early 1950s, it was clear that the atomic test program in the Pacific was distributing fallout globally even as the expanding arms race with the Soviet Union made possible the extinction of both nation-states and whole ecosystems. Simi- larly, the decision to open a continental test site in Nevada in 1951 (to lower the costs of nuclear weapons research) insured the direct exposure of Ameri- cans with each and every above-ground detonation. Figure 11.2 is a National Cancer Institute county-by-county map of Iodine-131 contamination from above-ground nuclear testing in the United States. Similar contamination

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maps could be drawn for Strontium-90, Cesium-137, Plutonium-237, and other radionuclides.

The construction of a new national security apparatus, which attacked public health with each detonation, thus required a new kind of collective sacrifice. Not able to pursue both the atomic bomb and the protection of citi- zens (in the classic sense of not exposing them to damaging health effects), the United States chose instead to normalize the nuclear crisis as a new form of nature. In effect, the Cold War state minimized the health effects of the atomic test program while constantly inflating fears of a Soviet attack in order to create a perception-based form of risk management. It then told citizens that the central problem of the nuclear age was just in their heads. Nuclear war was officially converted into a question of emotional self-control.

In other words, mental health was increasingly fused with national secu- rity after 1945 as the United States mobilized nuclear logics to remake its social institutions and its approach to global affairs. Nuclear fear, a unique physiological and mental state first achieved via the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quickly became the basis for a permanent war- time economy in the United States and the total mobilization of American political, scientific, academic, and military institutions. With the first Soviet nuclear detonation in 1949, the United States became a paranoid state, seeing communists and nuclear threats everywhere at home and around the world. The nuclear project not only coordinated American institutions in support of a military agenda, it enabled a vision of the entire world as defensible, vulnerable space. “Containing communism” around the world placed U.S. citizens in a new relationship to the security state, which required not only unprecedented financial commitments during “peacetime” but also a parallel project to transform Americans into Cold Warriors. For U.S. policy makers, an immediate question was how to avoid creating an apathetic public on the one hand or a terrorized one on the other—how to create public support for an unprecedented, and potentially unending, militarism.18

At the height of the Cold War emotional management project, a new form of mental health practice materialized. As Jonathan Metzl has documented, the nuclear crisis of the mid-1950s was coterminous with the discovery and first mass-marketing of antidepressants in the United States.19 Psychophar- macology produced a revolution in the very idea of mental health as individ- uals could now regulate their brain chemistry in an effort to achieve a state of internal calm. Metzl shows how the arrival of psychopharmaceuticals imme- diately began to replace psychotherapy as the dominant paradigm in treating mental illness. Thus, psychotherapy moved away from personal history and

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trauma as an explanatory mode for mental illness at precisely the moment in which trauma was both nationalized and codified within the Cold War system. By eliminating history and experience as an explanatory mechanism, mental treatment could be re-imagined as solely a chemical negotiation, not one involving the social contradictions produced by a nuclear arms race. And by calibrating their emotions to the expectations of Cold War society through drugs, many Americans moved closer to normalizing a state of emergency in everyday life. Anxiety, however, was both a resource and a problem for the early Cold War state.

For the architects of the Cold War system within the Truman and Eisen- hower administrations, the solution to public mobilization was a new kind of project, one pursued with help from social scientists and the advertis- ing industry, to teach citizens a specific kind of cognitive and emotional attitude toward the bomb. Drawing on the historic concept of defense as a protection of citizens, the federal program for “civil defense” was actually a quite radical effort to psychologically and emotionally remake Americans

Figure 11.2. National Cancer Institute Map of Iodine-131 Contamination from Nuclear Tests in Nevada (Courtesy National Cancer Institute).

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as Cold Warriors. It turned the idea of public protection—a classic defini- tion of security—into a mental operation, concerned almost exclusively with perceptions, emotions, and self-discipline. This project took the form of an elaborate propaganda campaign involving films, literature, town meetings, and educational programs designed to teach Americans to fear the bomb; to define and limit that nuclear fear in ways useful to the Cold War project; and to move responsibility for domestic nuclear crisis from the state to citi- zens, enabling all citizens to have a role in a new collective form of Ameri- can militarism. Through the 1950s, Civil Defense involved yearly simulations of nuclear attacks on the United States, in which designated American cit- ies would act out nuclear catastrophe. Local newspapers would run banner headlines—“Washington DC, Detroit Destroyed by Hydrogen Bombs”— allowing civic leaders and politicians to lead theatrical evacuations of the city that were filmed by television cameras.20 The formal goal of this state pro- gram was to transform “nuclear terror,” which was interpreted by officials as a paralyzing emotion, into “nuclear fear,” an affective state that would allow citizens to function in a time of crisis. As Guy Oaks has documented in The Imaginary War, civil defense programs of the 1950s and ’60s sought to do nothing less than “emotionally manage” U.S. citizens through nuclear fear.21

Moreover, since the Cold War was recognized as a state of long-term cri- sis, civil defense was designed to create a new kind of citizen equipped with a psychological and emotional constitution capable of negotiating the day-to- day, minute-to-minute nuclear threat for the long haul. In addition to turn- ing the domestic space of the home into the front line of the Cold War, civil defense argued that citizens should be psychologically prepared every second of the day to deal with a potential nuclear attack. Thus, the Cold War state gave up on the idea of merely preventing attack (part of the traditional logic of security), and via the discourse of civil defense, demanded that citizens accept personal responsibility for surviving nuclear conflict. The key move in this shift from emphasizing protection to vulnerability in public safety was a campaign to make panic—not nuclear war—the official enemy. As Val Peterson, the first head of the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), wrote in 1953:

Ninety per cent of all emergency measures after an atomic blast will depend on the prevention of panic among the survivors in the first 90 sec- onds. Like the A-bomb, panic is fissionable. It can produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive known. If there is an ultimate weapon, it may well be mass panic—not the A-bomb.22

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Panic is fissionable. Indeed, Peterson not only argued that Americans were particularly “susceptible to panic” but offered a checklist on how citizens could become “panic stoppers” by training themselves for nuclear attack and becoming like “soldiers” at home (see figure 11.3).

Thus, the official message from the early Cold War state was that self- control was the best way for citizens to fight a nuclear war, revealing a national project to both colonize and normalize everyday life with nuclear fear. Panic, as Jackie Orr has so powerfully shown, became more than a means of managing populations in the nuclear age. It remade the individ- ual as a permanently insecure node in the larger Cold War system.23 Regu- lating the psychology of a nation-state at this level, however, demanded that Cold War policymakers understand how to produce panic as well as calm it. As Orr has argued, this effort produced a collapsing field of men- tal health, national security, and individualized identity formation across the frontiers of gender, family, expertise, and self-knowledge.24 The U.S.

Figure 11.3. Chart from Val Peterson’s “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” (Federal Civil Defense Administration).

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nuclear project writ large required citizens to accept as normal social con- ditions that were both pathologically insecure and intellectually irreconcil- able with health.

The FCDA effort to regulate the national public via images of nuclear con- flict took on extraordinary proportions, involving massive, public exercises in which citizens acted out their own destruction and where the state set out to show citizens what a post-nuclear world might look like.25 The Cold War security state ultimately sought to use nuclear fear to promote a new kind of social and psychological hygiene, one uniquely suited for a nuclear age. In the 1954 FCDA film, The House in the Middle, for example, we see that nuclear fear could be harnessed to any kind of domestic project, including household cleanliness (see figure 11.4).

Presented as an atomic experiment, the film documents how nuclear flash, heat, and blast effects engage model houses built at the Nevada Test Site. The three houses presented in the film are in different stages of cleanliness and repair and filmed against the stark desert landscape. The narrator offers this description of the project:

Three identical miniature frame houses, with varying exterior condi- tions, all the same distance from the point of the explosion. The house on the right, an eyesore. But you’ve seen these same conditions in your own hometown: old unpainted wood, and look at the paper, leaves and trash in the yard. In a moment, you’ll see the results of atomic heat flash on this house: the house on the left. Typical of many homes across the nation: heavily weathered, dry wood, in run-down condition. This house is the product of years of neglect. It has not been painted regularly. It is dry and rotten—a tinderbox ready to turn into a blazing torch. The house in the middle: in good condition, with a clean, unlittered yard. The exterior has been painted with ordinary, good quality house paint. Light painted surfaces reflect heat and the paint also protects the wood from weathering and water damage. Let’s see what happens under atomic heat.26

The moralizing tone of the narration underscores that this film is ulti- mately an effort to recuperate the classic definition of hygiene as a social responsibility, and in so doing to create an image of a state that treats nuclear crisis as it would an infectious disease or a natural disaster. The centerpiece of the film is the slow-motion footage of the atomic blast wave hitting the model houses. The houses on the right and left ignite and burn to the ground, leav-

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Figure 11.4. Stills from The House in the Middle (Federal Civil Defense Administration).

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148 | Joseph Masco

ing the house in the middle standing. After contemplating this slow-motion destruction in detail, the narrator reexamines the ashes of the houses on the right and left and asks against somber background music, “Which of these is your house? This one? The house on the right? Dilapidated with paper, dead grass, litter everywhere? The house on the left—unpainted, run-down, neglected? Is this your house?” Then on an upbeat music cue, the narrator concludes:

The house in the middle—cleaned up, painted up, and fixed up, exposed to the same searing atomic heat wave—did not catch fire. Close inspection reveals only a slight charring of the painted outer surface. Yes, the white house in the middle survived an atomic heat flash. These civil defense tests prove how important upkeep is to our houses and town.27

Only a slight charring. Household cleanliness is directly linked here to the likelihood of winning or losing a nuclear war. Hygiene, as a classic domain of state intervention into public health, is remade as a means of surviving not illness but nuclear attack. Indeed, the film does not mention fallout or radiation effects at all. The implicit message of the film is that each citizen should patrol his or her neighborhood for trash and feel free to discipline neighbors into perfect home performances. The House in the Middle argues ultimately that appearances are more important than real- ity, that a fresh coat of paint is more important than recognizing the city- killing power of nuclear weapons. Indeed, it offers citizens the opportunity to manically tend to their homes in every detail, from paint and yard work to furnishings and foodstuffs, as a means of achieving public health and national security, even as the reality of thermonuclear warfare promises little to no hope of survival.

The House in the Middle demonstrates how the terms of everyday life in the first decades of the Cold War were saturated with a new kind of state discourse, one that used nuclear fear to promote its policies. The challenge in such a psychological strategy, of course, is one of modulation—enough fear to produce support for U.S. Cold War policies, but not too much to generate a counter-movement. Indeed, the debates about nuclear fallout and the ineffectual nature of the Civil Defense program eventually forced the nuclear program into a major reorganization in the early 1960s. Civil defense, at this time, was factually wrong in many of its claims about the ability to survive a nuclear war. Moreover, the effort by Herman Kahn and

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Atomic Health | 149

others to “think the unthinkable” revealed to many the impossibility of civil defense in the thermonuclear age. U.S. scientists also produced a powerful anti-nuclear counter-discourse that emphasized the health effects of nuclear testing as well as the false claims of civil defense, challenging the state to return to concepts of security and health committed to improving living conditions rather than normalizing nuclear crisis. But the first decade of the Cold War witnessed the development of an entirely new form of gov- ernance, one in which a very public “national security” discourse was used strategically by the state to both mask and enable a global vision grounded in the sacrifice of citizens born and unborn. Public health, in this context, became secondary to a vision of national security that installed new forms of individual death within a larger structure of mass death. The social consequences of the nuclear arms race ultimately inverted the concept of health as absence of disease, replacing it with an increasingly naturalized vision of health as incipient death.

The effects of this joint transformation in the logics of health and national security are still with us today. The reactions to the suicide attacks on Wash- ington, DC and New York in 2001 reinvigorated the emotional management strategy and returned Americans to the logics of survival and sacrifice that structured the Cold War period. The threat of terrorism was, in fact, magni- fied by the George W. Bush administration into grounds for a fundamental rethinking of U.S. global ambitions as well as U.S. domestic policy, just as the first Soviet nuclear test in 1949 was mobilized by the Truman and Eisen- hower administrations to construct the Cold War state. The state’s appeal to citizens after 2001 was also modeled on the early civil defense campaigns as it argued for a normalization rather than an elimination of a totalized threat. Consider, for a moment, the first round of civil defense advertise- ments by the newly formed Department of Homeland Security in 2003 (see figure 11.5).

One commercial begins as a young girl starts working her way across the monkey bars at a playground. Halfway through she stops; while hanging on the bars, she looks directly at the camera and recites the following list: “Batteries, a first-aid kit, enough water for three days, a flashlight, transistor radio, a whistle, a dust mask, a plan.” As she exits the apparatus, text flows on to the screen, stating:

BE PREPARED READY.GOV

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150 | Joseph Masco

Figure 11.5. Stills from 2003 “America Prepared” Commercial (Department of Homeland Security).

In a second DHS civil defense commercial, a little league baseball game is under way, and mid-pitch the pitcher and batter stop to trade preparedness info (see figure 11.6):

P I T C H E R : My dad’s work number: 212-327-1845. H I T T E R : My aunt Judy: 281-837-4066.

P I T C H E R : A meeting place. H I T T E R : A plan.

BE PREPARED READY.GOV

Fifty years after Val Peterson’s national campaign to teach citizens to fear panic more than the bomb, the official position is still that every second of

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Atomic Health | 151

your life should be spent rehearsing the possibility of disaster, training your- self as a citizen to take responsibility for events that are by definition out of your control. Repeating the civil defense logics from the first decades of the Cold War, the state is absent here except in its desire to install a specific kind of fear within everyday life through advertising. The first ninety seconds of a crisis are still the most important, requiring that children be prepared to recite emergency information between swings of a little league bat or rungs on the jungle gym. These commercials reiterate the lessons of nuclear civil defense, that everyday life is structured around the possibility of mass injury from one moment to the next and that citizens must take responsibility for their own survival.

One of the most difficult cultural logics to assess is the arrival of a new social relationship to death. The vulnerability of children is one immediate register of American ideas of death, whether revealed in Herman Kahn’s

Figure 11.6. Stills from 2003 “America Prepared” Commercial (Department of Homeland Security).

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152 | Joseph Masco

meditations on the number of “defective children” it will take to win the Cold War or in these DHS commercials that portray children as robots, prepro- grammed to respond to crisis, rehearsing their life-line phone numbers even in the midst of play. Since 1945, the United States has built its national com- munity via contemplation of specific images of mass death while building a defense complex that demands ever more personal sacrifice in the name of security. Health as an absence of disease or anxiety is long gone. What we have instead is a negotiation of degrees of contamination, of degrees of anxious association, of degrees of escalating risk. The initial concept of pub- lic health as a key coordinate of the modern state system has been replaced by a governmental calculus based on individual sacrifice. A “war on terror” requires that Americans once again naturalize a notion of health as incipient death, inviting each and every citizen to dust off the familiar logics of Cold War sacrifice and embrace the further collapse of mental health into national security. Demilitarizing the mind by rejecting the “war on terror” project thus contains revolutionary potential; it might finally overthrow a national security project that both relies on and installs ever more deeply the possibil- ity of violence and death into everyday life. In the twenty-first century, the last thing we need is more “health.” Demilitarizing the mind, body, and spirit of American citizens by getting rid of the bomb, however, might just open up an entirely new kind of nature—post-national security, post-terror. Panic should be the least of our concerns.

N o t e s

1. See Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Arjun Makhijani and Stephen I. Schwartz, “Victims of the Bomb,” in Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, ed. Stephen I. Schwartz (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998).

2. See Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 82–93.

3. See Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4 (November 2004): 517–50.

4. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

5. See Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

6. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 34. 7. Ibid., 19. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Ibid., 46.

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10. Ibid., 66. 11. Ibid., 66–7. 12. Ibid., 86. 13. See Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in

Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 14. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1998). 15. See Michel Foucault, “The Risks of Security,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault,

1954–1984, volume III, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 365. 16. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76,

ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 253. 17. Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 1. 18. See Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Cul-

ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34. 19. Jonathan Metzl, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder

Drugs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 20. See Stacy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Dur-

ham: Duke University Press, 2007), and Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

21. Oaks, Imaginary War, 47. 22. Val Peterson, “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” Collier’s: The National Weekly,

August 21, 1953, 99. 23. Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2006), 14. 24. Ibid. 25. See Masco, “Survival Is Your Business: Engineering Ruins and Affect in

Nuclear America,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 361–98. 26. Federal Civil Defense Administration, The House in the Middle, 1954, 12 min.,

film. 27. Ibid.

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