Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960 by Neil S. Oatsvall (review)

Reviewed by:

• Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960 by Neil S. Oatsvall
• E. Jerry Jessee (bio)

Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945–1960
By Neil S. Oatsvall. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. 264.

The world was irrevocably changed on July 16, 1945, when the Manhattan Project detonated the world’s first atomic bomb (Trinity) in the desert of central New Mexico. Three weeks later Hiroshima lay in ruins, strikingly demonstrating the devastating power that scientists had managed to wrest from the atom.

In the eighty years since Trinity, historians have produced a vast literature documenting how efforts to confront a future of apocalyptic nuclear weaponry utterly transformed society and politics. One major consequence of the nuclear apocalyptic imaginary, as Donald Worster noted, was the rise of environmental consciousness: “The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945,” he memorably declared in Nature’s Economy (1977). Since then, scholars have deepened Worster’s formulation of the connections between the atomic age and the age of ecology by showing how scientists’ eagerness to work with nuclear technologies shaped the growth and influence of the “environmental sciences” (Hagen, An Entangled Bank, 1992; Rainger, “‘A Wonderful Oceanographic Tool,’” 2004). More recently, driven perhaps by our contemporary confrontation with the climate apocalypse, Jacob Darwin Hamblin (Arming Mother Nature, 2013), Joseph Masco (“Bad Weather,” 2010), and Matthias Dörries (“The Politics of Atmospheric Sciences,” 2011) have suggested compellingly that the perceived world-altering power of nuclear weaponry provided a critical context through which visions of global environmental vulnerability, planetary threat, and perhaps the very idea of the “global environment” came to be. [End Page 1059]

It is within this heady research that Atomic Environments offers an examination of the interplay between nuclear technologies and the environment from the origins of the bomb to 1960. The book opens in the Nevada desert with the 1953 Encore test to illustrate “how environmental considerations impacted the development of the US nuclear program” (p. 3). For this test, officials uprooted 145 ponderosa trees and placed them in concrete footings to simulate a forest, which was leveled when Encore detonated a mile away. Destroying the constructed forest informed weapons testers’ understanding of the bomb. “Ecological knowledge,” Oatsvall claims, “. . . buttressed nuclear science” (p. 2). The main thrust of the book, however, centers much less on the scientists who utilized nuclear technologies to construct knowledge of the environment. The book does not make much of the constructedness of the forest to ask questions about how “nature” was deployed as a technology in atomic development either. Atomic Environments is instead interested in how “environmental ideas became essential to the institutions of nuclear policymaking at the highest levels” and how “politicians, bureaucrats, and their institutions mediated those understandings” (p. 6).

One strength of Atomic Environments lies in its breadth. In two parts, the book brings together relatively well-covered topics that are usually treated separately to draw generalizations about the critical links between the environment and nuclear science. Part 1 is focused largely on how Truman- and Eisenhower-era policymakers within the US Atomic Energy Commission drew from environmental knowledge to test nuclear bombs, evaluate fallout effects, and detect Soviet nuclear developments in the run up to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (surprisingly, not examined here). “Executive policymakers,” Oatsvall argues in the first chapter, drew on environmental science to “locate and craft functionally ‘natural’ habitats for the testing of atomic bombs” (p. 16). At the same time, Atomic Environments also aims to show that environmental science offered something of a check on weapons development: “Increasing sophistication of environmental science caused the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and executive branch to take fallout more seriously” (p. 46), even as policymakers prioritized national security over human and ecological health concerns. The two final chapters comprising the second part of the book expand the analysis beyond fallout by detailing how nuclear research aimed at improving agriculture was deployed to promote the “peaceful atom,” while the atomic establishment also mobilized oceanographers to deal with the intractable problem of radioactive waste disposal in the oceans.

Despite the book’s admirable effort...