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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.
Unforgettable congressional hearings in 1978 revealed that fallout from American nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s had overexposed hundreds of soldiers and other citizens to radiation. Faith in governmental integrity was shaken, and many people have assumed that such overexposure caused great damage. Yet important questions remain--the most controversial being: did the radiation overexposure in fact cause the cancers and birth defects for which it has been blamed? Elements of Controversy is the result of a decade of exhaustive research in AEC documentary records and the full clinical and epidemiological literature on radiation effects. More concerned with uncovering the historical story than with assigning blame, Barton Hacker concludes that every precaution was taken by the AEC to avoid harming test participants or bystanders. And, he points out, the biomedical literature suggests that these precautions worked. Yet top officials in Washington--for whom the success of nuclear weapons was of overriding importance--had asserted that testing involved no risks at all. Discrepancies between unverifiable government claims and the revelations that some actual risk was present explain the origins and angry persistence of the controversies, Hacker argues. The Department of Energy delayed publication of Hacker's study for five years, and while his controversial book is sure to draw objections from both sides of the radiation-hazard debates, it will provide a much-needed guide to understanding their polemics. Unforgettable congressional hearings in 1978 revealed that fallout from American nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s had overexposed hundreds of soldiers and other citizens to radiation. Faith in governmental integrity was shaken, and many people have assumed that such overexposure caused great damage. Yet important questions remain--the most controversial being: did the radiation overexposure in fact cause the cancers and birth defects for which it has been blamed? Elements of Controversy is the result of a decade of exhaustive research in AEC documentary records and the full clinical and epidemiological literature on radiation effects. More concerned with uncovering the historical story than with assigning blame, Barton Hacker concludes that every precaution was taken by the AEC to avoid harming test participants or bystanders. And, he points out, the biomedical literature suggests that these precautions worked. Yet top officials in Washington--for whom the success of nuclear weapons was of overriding importance--had asserted that testing involved no risks at all. Discrepancies between unverifiable government claims and the revelations that some actual risk was present explain the origins and angry persistence of the controversies, Hacker argues. The Department of Energy delayed publication of Hacker's study for five years, and while his controversial book is sure to draw objections from both sides of the radiation-hazard debates, it will provide a much-needed guide to understanding their polemics.
"Based on unique access to the IAEA Archives in Vienna and numerous interviews with leading diplomats and scientists, this book provides the first comprehensive, empirically grounded, and independent study on the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency"--
A history of the origins and development of the American atomic bomb program during WWII. Begins with the scientific developments of the pre-war years. Details the role of the U.S. government in conducting a secret, nationwide enterprise that took science from the laboratory and into combat with an entirely new type of weapon. Concludes with a discussion of the immediate postwar period, the debate over the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, and the founding of the Atomic Energy Commission. Chapters: the Einstein letter; physics background, 1919-1939; early government support; the atomic bomb and American strategy; and the Manhattan district in peacetime. Illustrated.
The Manhattan Project—the World War II race to produce an atomic bomb—transformed the entire country in myriad ways, but it did not affect each region equally. Acting on an enduring perception of the American West as an “empty” place, the U.S. government located a disproportionate number of nuclear facilities—particularly the ones most likely to spread pollution—in western states. The Manhattan Project manufactured plutonium at Hanford, Washington; designed and assembled bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and detonated the world’s first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16, 1945. In the years that followed the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected additional western sites for its work. Many westerners initially welcomed the atom. Like federal officials, they, too, regarded their region as “empty,” or underdeveloped. Facilities to make, test, and base atomic weapons, sites to store nuclear waste, and even nuclear power plants were regarded as assets. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, regional attitudes began to change. At a variety of locales, ranging from Eskimo Alaska to Mormon Utah, westerners devoted themselves to resisting the atom and its effects on their environments and communities. Just as the atomic age had dawned in the American West, so its artificial sun began to set there. The Atomic West brings together contributions from several disciplines to explore the impact on the West of the development of atomic power from wartime secrecy and initial postwar enthusiasm to public doubts and protest in the 1970s and 1980s. An impressive example of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies on complex topics, The Atomic West advances our understanding of both regional history and the history of science, and does so with human communities as a significant focal point. The book will be of special interest to students and experts on the American West, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.