Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War

ANTHROPOLOGY COLLOQUIUM SERIES, SPRING 2008 Half-Lives and Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War

Barbara Johnston, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Political Ecology

3:00 pm • 10 April 2008 • Saunders 345

In this talk, Barbara Rose Johnston presents a compelling analysis of years of official secrecy in both the United States and Russia.

For most people, the specter of nuclear war evokes nightmares of giant mushroom clouds, blistering waves of heat, and massive casualties-followed by a sigh of relief that to date the world of nations has avoided such "mutually assured destruction." Johnston disagrees, suggesting that over the past 60 years, nuclear weapons production itself has waged a different kind of war on the communities around the world that have hosted the nuclear war machine. The Cold War was, in fact, intensely hot, generating acute and lasting radiogenic assaults on the environment and human health. During what many call the first nuclear age, when uranium was exploited, refined, enriched, and used to end a world war and fight a cold war, a growing security state compounded environmental and health damages.

For decades, this culture of secrecy distorted and withheld information about the dangers of radioactivity from the communities that hosted various elements of the government's nuclear activities-uranium mines, mills, and enrichment plants; weapons production facilities; military proving grounds; battlefields; and nuclear waste dumps.

Controlling information meant the government was able to convince the public of the relatively minimal threat posed by atmospheric tests. This concerted public relations campaign also generated biases that skewed generations of scientific research.

At the most fundamental of levels, the struggle to address the radioactive legacy of the Cold War has been a struggle over who has the right and power to shape, access, and use information.

Barbara Rose Johnston is an ecological and medical anthropologist, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University, and the Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, California. Her professional work has helped shape the fields of political ecology and human rights and the environment, and has included a focus on the impact of economic development and national security in the Marshall Islands, American southwest, the Caribbean and Mesoamerica.

In 2007, her research and expert witness testimony was cited in a precedent-setting judgment by Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal—awarding damages for involuntary resettlement, loss of a way of life, loss of a healthy way of life, and human subject experimentation to the Marshallese community of Rongelap.

Her talk today is based on her book Half-lives & Half-truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War (SAR Press 2007).

Other notable publications include Disappearing Peoples? Indigenous Groups and Ethnic Minorities in South and Central Asia (with Barbara Brower, Left Coast Press 2007); Water, Culture & Power: Local Struggles in a Global Context (with John Donahue, Island Press 1998); Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the Millennium (AltaMira 1997); and Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis (Island Press 1994)

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Co-Sponsored by the Center for Pacific Island Studies

For further information, please contact anthropology at anthprog@hawaii.edu

Event Sponsor
Center for Pacific Island Studies and Anthroplogy Dept., Manoa

More Information
Marti Kerton, 956-7153, anthprog@hawaii.edu

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