Apocalypse, for example, actually means to uncover or reveal…. Reaching a conclusion carries the illusion of death.
—Dr. Louise Reiss
One
THE CHAIN OF EVIL
FALLOUT describes a physical process that begins in violence and often ends in death. It is also a rhetorical orientation: to think in terms of fallout is to think in terms of chains of events, glowing with connections both seen and unseen.
In the beginning of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson describes a “chain of evil” unleashed on the environment. But this chain of contamination is largely invisible to us. It is felt, rather than seen, and takes place on a timescale measured not in hours but lifetimes. The problem is essentially imaginative: to envision how this chain of evil spreads, the public first had to be convinced, in a secular context, that malevolent invisible forces were working both without and within us.
To solve this problem, Carson evokes the imagery of radioactive fallout, making an explicit connection between a known danger and a less known or foreseen one. Radiation, she writes, in the form of “strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death.” And so too do herbicides (or what she refers to as “biocides”) create a “chain of poisoning and death.”
Around this time, the journal Science published the results of a study sponsored by the Committee for Nuclear Information, of which Carson was a member and fan, describing it as “a model for all environmental organizations.” The paper that appeared on November 24, 1961, was written by Dr. Louise Reiss, a mother and scientist. In it, she describes the results of a decades-long study that proved that radioactive fallout in the form of strontium-90 was indeed lodging itself in the bodies of children. Earlier studies had already confirmed the link between strontium-90 and cancer. This study showed “a substantial increase in environmental strontium-90” in children growing up in St. Louis after the initiation of aboveground nuclear testing in Nevada and elsewhere. Strontium-90 is a radioactive isotope created in the immense furnace of nuclear fission. God’s leftovers. Developing bodies—children and the fetuses of pregnant women—absorb strontium-90 and mistake it for calcium, storing it in bones and teeth.
The word is associated with dust, with death, with cancer, and nuclear radiation. Since it first came into common usage in 1946, it has come to mean nearly any kind of disaster (from political gaffes to environmental destruction) whose immediate impact is seen, in retrospect, to be nowhere near as bad as its aftermath. Our hair falls out. Our teeth fall out. We fall out with friends. By definition, the fallout is always
