Atomic Americans: Citizens in a Nuclear State

By Sarah E. Robey

At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans encountered troubling new questions brought about by the nuclear revolution: In a representative democracy, who is responsible for national public safety? How do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What role should scientific experts occupy within a democratic government? Nuclear weapons created a new arena for debating individual and collective rights. In turn, they threatened to destabilize the very basis of American citizenship.

As Sarah E. Robey shows in Atomic Americans, people negotiated the contours of nuclear citizenship through overlapping public discussions about survival. Policymakers and citizens disagreed about the scale of civil defense programs and other public safety measures. As the public learned more about the dangers of nuclear fallout, critics articulated concerns about whether the federal government was operating in its citizens' best interests. By the early 1960s, a significant antinuclear movement had emerged, which ultimately contributed to the 1963 nuclear testing ban. Atomic Americans tells the story of a thoughtful body politic engaged in rewriting the rubric of rights and responsibilities that made up American citizenship in the Atomic Age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501762109

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Cover: Atomic Americans, Citizens in a Nuclear State by Sarah E. Robey

ATOMIC AMERICANS

CITIZENS IN A NUCLEAR STATE

SARAH E. ROBEY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To RJB

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Stop Play[ing] Pattycake with the Whole Issue

2. Between the Devil and the Deep

3. The Man in the White Lab Coat

4. The Fallout from Fallout

5. Atomic America

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing about nuclear history is strange business, populated by esoteric research rabbit holes, unsolvable puzzles, and the occasional vivid nightmare. Actually, the same could be said for most academic pursuits. In reflecting on the work that went into this book, I am most thankful for those who made the process less solitary. Researching and writing this book has brought me into the fold of several communities of thoughtful people who sustained me intellectually, professionally, and emotionally over the last decade. I sincerely thank those who helped me see this work through.

Several institutions were critical to the completion of this project. Idaho State University’s College of Arts and Letters and Department of History sponsored several conference trips that allowed me to test ideas across subfields and historical communities. Temple University’s Department of History, Center for the Humanities, as well as the Center for Force and Diplomacy funded my many early archival trips. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Philadelphia History Museum all provided funding while I completed my PhD. The Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Rockefeller Archive Center supported me for two extended stays at their archives. I am also grateful for the help and unmatched patience of the archivists, reference assistants, and student employees at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Library of Congress, the National Archives at College Park, the National Museum of American History, the New York City Municipal Archives, Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Yale University’s Special Collections. Late in the project, Lily Birkhimer, Ralph Drew, Mary Hansen, Miranda Rectenwald, and Keith Weimar provided essential assistance in securing the art for this volume. I would also be remiss to leave out thanks for the unsung library heroes at Temple and Idaho State; thanks especially to Beth Downing, Barbara Mayfield, and Ellen Ryan.

My many academic homes over the years have supported me in more ways than I can count. I continue to benefit from Beth Bailey’s encouragement and mentoring. This book is a testament to not only her hard questions and firm nudges but also her unwavering commitment to her students. Beth, Brian Balogh, Petra Goedde, and Richard Immerman also provided essential counsel and countless letters of recommendation in the final years of my time at Temple. I carry their wisdom, guidance, and compassion with me as I have formed relationships with my own students. I consider myself lucky to have found an equally supportive community of friends and colleagues at Idaho State.

Two fellowship years gave me the space and time to think about this project in new and creative ways. My year in Washington, DC, split between the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum, taught me the value of cultivating an intellectual community even in a temporary home. As a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, I also had the pleasure of being part of a tight-knit cohort of historians and political scientists. I treasured our time spent in Charlottesville.

I am also grateful for the many individuals who gave formal and informal feedback on various parts of this project as it evolved over the years. My colleagues in the Network for Civil Defense History have been a steadfast source of encouragement, enthusiasm, and camaraderie. The Technology and Physical Sciences working groups at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine not only read several early chapter drafts but also created community in Philadelphia. I thank the Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies for introducing me to two communities of bright, big-hearted scholars. Countless conference copanelists, commenters, and audience members helped me uncover different ways of thinking about nuclear history. Finally, the Fellows Seminar at the Center for the Humanities pushed me to answer difficult interdisciplinary questions, and this book is better for it.

At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy saw the potential in this project early on. His advice, encouragement, and patience are reflected in these pages, and I am thankful for his support over the years. I am grateful too for Sarah Grossman’s stewardship of this project in its final stages, and the editing, production, and marketing teams for making the process of publishing a first book less daunting. Finally, I thank the two anonymous readers whose comments on the manuscript did much to help me position and clarify my arguments.

This book was researched and written as I was employed by four different universities while living in five cities on two continents. My homes away from home were many and my friends, loved ones, and colleagues far-flung. Countless people have nurtured me with their generosity, food, and good company over the years. Their love made this project possible. For solidarity, friendship, and levity, I thank Arunima Datta, Melanie Newport, Marie Stango, Matthew Unangst, and John Worsencroft. For the joy of chosen families, I thank Nate Hopkins, Brenden Nosratbakhsh, Julia Fiorello, Zaire Durant-Young, Adam Tecza, and Adam Erickson. For friends far and wide, I am grateful for Jess Bryson, Bettie Graham, Christian Gunkel, Svenja Hohenstein, Celeste Sharpe, Jill Sullivan, Katharina Thalmann, and Arwen Wyatt-Mair. For their friendship and collaboration, I thank Peter Bennesved, Anthony Eames, and Silvia Berger Ziauddin.

I would not be where I am today without my family. They unquestioningly supported my choice of career path even when it took me far away from home. My parents, Gerry and Cynthia Robey, were my first teachers and remain my biggest cheerleaders. They taught me empathy and independence and to embrace creative thinking. My brother, Tom Robey, has inspired me more than he probably realizes. I learned from his tenacity, thoughtfulness, and curiosity, and I am a better human for it. Parts of this manuscript took shape during getaways to New Haven and Seattle; visits to see Tom, Suzy, Michael, and Fritz gave me much-needed clarity of mind and spirit. Along the way, I was fortunate to become part of a second family. The Bloks’ loyalty and laughter has sustained me since the moment we met. And to all of the above, I thank you for only asking occasionally when my book will be finished. I’m proud to deliver it to you at long last.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my partner in mind and heart, Richard Blok. Being an academically adjacent spouse takes a special degree of patience and calm. Yet through several moves, professional challenges, and life’s various and sundry curveballs, I am grateful for the life we have built together.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

The Wars to Come

Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war)

—Adaptation of quotation from Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari

In October 1958, the United Press International news service ran a story about nuclear fallout shelters. Just the sound of a musket shot from the camp site where Washington’s patriots withstood the frigid winter of 1776, it read, Paul Pazery stands ready for whatever the Atomic Age has to offer. Pazery, whom the article refers to as a Nuclear Age Noah, had recently completed a four-year project to build two nuclear fallout shelters for his family of six in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The article ran in newspapers nationwide, closing with Pazery’s words: At first people thought I was a crackpot, spending all this time and money [nearly $4,000] … but they don’t think so anymore, with all the saber rattling in the news.¹

Pazery’s story is typical of any number of newspaper articles that ran across the country in the 1950s featuring local optimists preparing for the worst version of the future but hoping for the best for themselves, their families, and their nation. Less often, however, did a news outlet so explicitly connect the nation’s history to the modern conditions of the Atomic Age. Yet Valley Forge evoked the patriotic ideal of 1776 so completely that the editors at United Press did not notice that the article’s author had misdated the episode: the Continental Army spent the deadly winter of 1777–1778 at the site.

The invocation of national origin stories was a familiar trope in US Cold War political and cultural rhetoric, but Pazery’s story is more than a metaphor for the nation’s founding. For the Continental Army, the period spent at Valley Forge was the lowest point of the war. Undersupplied and cut off from aid, thousands of troops died of exposure, malnutrition, and illness. Thus, Valley Forge also represented historical survival and perseverance in the hardest of times. Like Washington’s unforgiving winter, the forthcoming nuclear war that Pazery and others imagined would be long, isolating, and cold.² But as in the American Revolutionary War, the reward for survival would be nothing less than the triumph of American democracy. The jumbled symbols of American exceptionalism present in Pazery’s story—patriotism, militias, Christianity, and millennialism—fit naturally into the contours of Cold War culture (figure 1).

For postwar Americans, the goal of surviving the Atomic Age became inextricably tied to matters of civic pride and American identity. If the ideological conflict that undergirded the Cold War ever boiled into a hot war, fought with nuclear weapons, a nation’s capacity to survive would dictate the outcome.³ Nuclear survival was thus never entirely absent from Cold War nationalism. In a practical sense, Americans realized that nuclear war carried the potential to disrupt the American way of life. But as time went on, they began to understand that the threat of nuclear weapons was not limited to how they imagined the catastrophic aftermath of an attack on American soil. Concerned Americans also looked inward and worried about what the peacetime growth of the American nuclear arsenal meant for American democracy. As it would turn out, the work that went into reconciling nuclear weapons with American democratic ideals was much more complicated than a simplistic comparison of the Cold War to the American Revolution. In the postwar world, where the staunch defense of American society against enemy threats became urgent and instrumental in waging the Cold War, nuclear weapons became a powerful domestic political force with which to reckon.⁴

Atomic Americans uncovers how nuclear weapons—whether used in war or maintained in peace—threatened to upset long-standing assumptions about the strength of American cultural and political institutions between 1945 and 1963. At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans repeatedly encountered troubling new questions wrought by the nuclear revolution: Who, in a representative democracy, is responsible for public safety on a national scale? How do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What should be the role of scientific experts within structures of democratic government? The prevalence of these questions, among others, reveals that nuclear weapons created a new and unprecedented arena for debating individual and collective rights in the United States and threatened to destabilize the very basis of US citizenship.

No alt text needed because caption fully describes the entire content and meaning of the figure.

FIGURE 1. Cover of Civil Defense … An American Tradition. Tropes of the nation’s founding melded easily with early Cold War civil defense ideas. In addition to the American Revolution–era musket, powder horn, and tricorne hat featured on the cover, every essay consciously invokes the grit and self-reliance of American revolutionaries and pioneers of an earlier era. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Civil Defense … An American Tradition: Four National Award Winning Essays (US Government Printing Office, 1960). Scan courtesy of the University of Virginia Library.

If citizenship can be understood as a set of rights and obligations that define the relationship between citizens and a nation-state, US conceptions of citizenship came under extreme new pressures in the Atomic Age. The resulting contentious debates surrounding survival, responsibility, and national community revolved around what I call nuclear citizenship. Nuclear citizenship is the way Americans came to define their relationship to the federal state as something fundamentally tied to nuclear survival. This framing provides a way to understand how nuclear weapons came to be a conduit for discussing rights and responsibilities, one that reached Americans at a deeply personal level. For individual citizens, many of whom felt that their lives were jeopardized by the Cold War contest, the political became a matter of life and death. Never before had basic survival taken on such overtly political tones. Put another way, the body politic became intimately tied to the bodily survival of citizens. But logics of national survival and individual survival reflected back on one another again and again through a lens clouded by practical impediments to protecting the public’s safety.⁵

Conceptions of nuclear citizenship emerged alongside the broader reorientation of American political culture in the early Cold War. Domestic anticommunism and increasing international hostilities significantly narrowed the landscape of acceptable politics and forms of expression. Historians have examined this era in great detail, highlighting the myriad contradictions between Cold War political ideology, policies that often worked against those ideals, and the complex lived experiences of being a citizen in this era. Cold War exigencies—real and imagined—created rigid structures of inclusion and exclusion that recast what it meant to be a good American. Cold War citizenship demanded the performance of loyalty, anticommunism, morality, and normative individual behavior, especially in public. Those who embodied racial, gender, or sexual difference or political ideologies outside the mainstream were particularly vulnerable to the abuses of Cold War cultural exclusion. Reinforced by policies that could penalize outsider status by jeopardizing one’s livelihood, social standing, privacy, rights, or freedom, Cold War citizenship expectations worked to perpetuate a narrow normative culture while silencing dissent.⁶

Considering nuclear weapons as a site of public debate provides a different window for understanding citizenship in the decades after World War II, however. From the mid-1940s forward, Americans voiced concerns about a variety of nuclear matters, including civil defense and public safety, the role of nuclear science in government, the wisdom of nuclear testing, and the imperative to make peace with the Soviet Union. By the late 1950s, such civic debate had solidified into an antinuclear movement that brought together long-established activist organizations with concerned scientists as well as unaffiliated citizens. In part, this trajectory coincides with the declining viciousness of anticommunist fervor that accompanied the second half of the 1950s. However, the earnest public debate that existed even at the height of McCarthyism suggests that nuclear citizenship is not altogether coterminous with what we have come to understand as restrictive Cold War citizenship. This is not to say that anticommunism and related forms of repression were absent from nuclear debates. Accusations of communist leanings dogged vocal antinuclear scientists and protest organizations throughout the period in question, and activists of all stripes were careful to frame their dissent as a matter of protecting mainstream American values. With a few notable exceptions, however, prominent antinuclear critics maintained reputable standing and found significant support among the public. Nuclear threats thus created spaces for civic engagement that circumvented the political restrictiveness accompanying other aspects of Cold War national security culture.⁷

This book examines nuclear citizenship through three intersecting and overlapping threads. First, because citizenship in the early Cold War became inextricably tied to ideas about individual and collective survival, the history of nuclear civil defense takes a central role. Civil defense here does not serve as a foil: I do not see civil defense as a failed federal program, a bad-faith distraction, or, as one historian called it, a tragicomedy.⁸ As policy, civil defense was a product of its time, hemmed in by national security requirements, Cold War ideological imperatives, partisan arguments over postwar liberalism, and budgetary constraints. We know that very few Americans volunteered for official civil defense corps, retrofitted their cellars, or excavated their backyards, yet Americans discussed nuclear public safety at length.⁹ The idea of civil defense was highly visible in American life during the early Cold War and has remained remarkably so in public memory ever since. The compelling question in the history of civil defense is not why it never would have worked or why it failed. Thankfully, we have managed to avoid the kind of armed conflict that would test the utility of nuclear civil defense. Instead, this book joins a body of nuanced recent scholarship that interrogates the cultural and political consequences of programs designed to transform civilians into nuclear cold warriors.¹⁰

The nuclear threat was a constant reminder that although nuclear war had the capacity to devastate entire cities or the country writ large, it was a dire threat to individual Americans as well. The question of individual survival relative to the survival of the collective emerged at the crux of discussions about the logic of civil defense in the Atomic Age. Therefore, civil defense—in both its practical and hypothetical forms—serves as a primary vehicle for understanding how American citizens positioned themselves in relation to their state. Historian Laura McEnaney in her thoughtful work on the history of civil defense in the 1950s argues that civil defense paved the way for the intrusion of military ideas and structures into civilian life.¹¹ McEnaney’s focus on militarization reveals how civil defense policies worked to domesticate the national security state and mobilize its citizens. Still other studies have used civil defense to examine the intersection of culture, politics, and personal life in the Cold War. Through explicit and implicit means, civil defense recommendations reified a white, middle-class, heteronormative, family-centered ideal, echoing other structures of postwar inclusion and exclusion. In particular, historians Kenneth Rose and Thomas Bishop use the family fallout shelter as a point of connection between postwar social and cultural anxieties and the survivalist demands of the Atomic Age.¹² As a body of scholarship, these cultural histories of civil defense show that individual national security–mindedness was something promulgated by the state, then sometimes reproduced and reinforced by citizens themselves.¹³

Still, as is the case with all histories of civil defense, it is easy to overstate the power of the federal government in conditioning how Americans thought about nuclear threats and survival. This work positions civil defense as a conceptual battleground that emerged from a set of historical actors much wider than government experts and policymakers. From the earliest moments of the Atomic Age, citizens articulated and endorsed a wide range of nuclear public safety concepts. Once the newly formed Federal Civil Defense Administration codified a system of self-help civil defense in 1951, however, the philosophical onus was placed on individuals to facilitate their own survival, just as Pazery had understood in 1958. Whatever practical measures were necessary for civil defense—training, funding, stockpiling—were left to the discretion of local and state governments. This federalist complement to self-help created a wildly inconsistent implementation of federal recommendations. For reasons that will be discussed in the chapters that follow, self-help civil defense logic marginalized and excluded millions of Americans.¹⁴ Against this backdrop, many concerned Americans sought alternatives to self-help, insisting on a system that offered universal protections against the horrors of nuclear war. Others repudiated the premise of civil defense entirely. At various moments in the early Cold War, then, civil defense became the subject of intense public demands and controversy. While such dialogues did not always affect policy changes at the national level, civil defense became a means for everyday Americans to see life and death in federal policies. These complex exchanges surrounding civil defense reveal a history that deserves to be understood as both a top-down policy process and a site of important grassroots agency.

Civil defense created space for citizens and the state alike to consider what they owe each other under the novel pressures of the nuclear threat. Americans understood nuclear survival to be a matter that needed to be mediated by governing structures. Yet more often than not, public expectations for centralized and robust civil defense measures did not align with federal, state, or local policy. The task of ensuring universal survival in the event of nuclear war was impossible. Some policymakers were acutely aware of this friction. During congressional deliberations about a national civil defense program in 1950, Senator Brien McMahon wondered how a self-help mandate could work if the first duty of a sovereignty is to protect its people.¹⁵ McMahon struck at the heart of the theoretical debate over civil defense: How could the state convince its citizens to assume the role of protecting the collective body politic? What obligation did citizens have to the state if the state was no longer willing or able to carry out its obligation to keep its citizens safe? Over the following decades, civilians and officials continued to puzzle over this dilemma, using the explicit language of rights and responsibilities. The Atomic Age thus placed survival within the context of broader disputes over rights-based liberalism and the scale and scope of federal power.¹⁶

The evolution of nuclear science and technology provides the second thread constituting nuclear citizenship. Thanks to an extraordinarily well-funded postwar defense apparatus, nuclear weapons and their delivery systems advanced with breakneck speed in the decades after World War II. With each weapons milestone, the reach of nuclear war’s destruction grew wider. The sheer scale of individual nuclear explosions meant that the bombing of any target—whether military, industrial, or political—would kill civilians. But the magnitude and character of this civilian threat changed over time. For several years following the end of World War II, the popular (and strategic) image of nuclear war involved a few atomic bombs used on urban coastal targets: the key industry, transportation, and governing centers. But by the late 1950s such imaginings had given way to an attack with hundreds of atomic and thermonuclear warheads, reaching much farther into the North American continent and blanketing large swaths of the heartland with radioactive fallout. By 1961, some strategic analysts placed the possible national casualty rate of nuclear war as high as 160 million.¹⁷

The public economy of nuclear information shifted in important ways in the context of this rapidly changing landscape of nuclear peril. Before 1945, few Americans had cause to learn about particle physics. The dramatic atomic conclusion of World War II and the technological advancements that followed, however, forced Americans to think of such science as part of their everyday lives. Coincidentally, it was civil defense media, produced in great volume during the 1950s, that was the primary vehicle for public education about the workings of nuclear weapons. But behind the presentation of nuclear public education, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) tightly regulated public access to nuclear information, citing Cold War secrecy imperatives. As such, the nuclear arms race created an elite class of scientists, advisers, and policymakers who operated within the protected space of Cold War competition. Such individuals seemed to wield great power over the safety and security of American civilians. As the 1950s wore on, this lack of governing transparency would come under the scrutiny of several formal and informal protest organizations as well as concerned scientists themselves.¹⁸

The Castle Bravo thermonuclear test in 1954, however, best underscored the power of the public’s understanding of nuclear science. Bravo, conducted at the AEC’s testing site in the Marshall Islands, had an explosive force two and a half times its predicted yield and spread radioactive fallout over thousands of square miles of ocean, populated islands, and the unsuspecting crew of a Japanese tuna trawler. The scale of the accident was too large to go unnoticed by the press. In the weeks that followed, American newspapers reported that the fishing crew had fallen ill and their tuna cargo had to be destroyed. By September, one of the crew members had died of radiation poisoning. The AEC worked to manage the news reporting, but the test and its aftermath unleashed a widespread public discussion about the dangers of nuclear testing and a new awareness of a potentially deadly threat: nuclear fallout. Concerned observers drew immediate parallels between testing in the distant imperial outpost and the AEC’s ongoing test series in Nevada. Throughout the late 1950s, activist scientists, consumer watchdogs, AEC officials, and a host of other commentators fiercely debated the extent to which fallout endangered human health. Because subsequent scientific research often raised more questions than it answered, popular awareness about the dangers of fallout from nuclear weapons testing galvanized a new wave of antinuclear activism by the end of the decade.¹⁹

Importantly, public debates about fallout raised a critical question about whether or not the federal government was operating in a way that served the public good and protected its people. Historians and sociologists have explored at length the relationship between nuclear physicists, science activism, and nuclear dissent movements in the early Cold War.²⁰ Kelly Moore and Paul Rubinson in particular have illustrated the power of scientific expertise to persuade and inform the antinuclear movements and national security policies alike. Science knowledge production, scientists as information disseminators, and scientific authority are all part of the story that follows. However, what the general public did with nuclear knowledge is essential in explaining how concerned Americans struggled to reconcile nuclear policies with their expectations of the state. Knowledge of nuclear science gave civilians a means to understand how nuclear weapons affected their daily lives, even in peacetime. Indeed, the message of antinuclear campaigns was rooted in a populist appeal: the existence of nuclear weapons, whether in peace or war, constituted a danger to every man, woman, and child on the planet. Nuclear survival was no longer dependent on one’s ability to survive an attack. Instead, concerned Americans came to understand that fallout was a constant peacetime threat to survival as well. In raising critical questions about governing transparency, responsibility, and safety, fallout fractured the relationship between citizens and the Cold War state. Nuclear weapons testing, like civil defense, became wrapped up in the contested terrain of nuclear citizenship rights.

The final thread of nuclear citizenship examines expressions of democratic participation in the context of the Atomic Age. Citizens wrestled with the manifold changes that nuclear weapons brought to American life and did so in the context of civic engagement. From the end of World War II until the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Americans wrote to elected officials and administrators with their concerns. As one might expect, their messages were diverse, reflecting public support for and opposition to existing policies, outlandish and practical suggestions, and informed and uninformed positions. By the end of the 1950s, however, the nuclear Cold War had opened significant avenues for public engagement in nuclear issues, including testing, civil defense, disarmament, and proliferation. Several essential histories have chronicled the landscape of formal antinuclear activism during this decade, which included long-standing pacifist organizations and the emergence of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.²¹ This work likewise highlights the evolution of nuclear dissent from written demonstration to organized direct action, public protest, and educational campaigns, or what one historian calls nuclear democracy.²² Yet letter writing, editorials, consumer protest, grassroots petitions, and spontaneous expressions of dissent characterize the entire period as well. By using a framework for understanding public engagement in nuclear issues that extends beyond formal protest movements, I show that nuclear weapons created a principal site of Cold War civic participation even for Americans who never became block wardens but also never took to the streets.

Why were so many citizens compelled to assert their opinions about nuclear policies, matters over which they undoubtedly felt they had little control? After all, it is clear that Cold War Americans understood that the federal government held ultimate authority over nuclear weapons. The arsenal constituted the substance of the American state’s power in the global Cold War conflict, and for much of the postwar era the powerful AEC held near-monopolistic control over nuclear policies. Nevertheless, Americans understood that nuclear weapons—and all their attendant policies—affected their lives on a personal level. I contend that it is this connection between federal policies and individual well-being that drove so many Americans to stake