Downwind of the Atomic State: Atmospheric Testing and the Rise of the Risk Society

2024 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Reviews How the scientific community overlooked, ignored, and denied the catastrophic fallout of decades of nuclear testing in the American West In December of 1950, President Harry Truman gave authorization for the Atomic Energy Commission to conduct weapons tests and experiments on a section of a Nevada gunnery range. Over the next eleven years, more than a hundred detonations were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, and radioactive debris dispersed across the communities just downwind and through much of the country. In this important work, James C. Rice tells the hidden story of nuclear weapons testing and the negligence of the US government in protecting public health. Downwind of the Atomic State focuses on the key decisions and events shaping the Commission's mismanagement of radiological contamination in the region, specifically on how the risks of fallout were defined and redefined, or, importantly, not defined at all, owing to organizational mistakes and the impetus to keep atomic testing going at all costs. Rice shows that although Atomic Energy Commission officials understood open-air detonations injected radioactive debris into the atmosphere, they did not understand, or seem to care, that the radioactivity would irrevocably contaminate these communities. The history of the atomic Southwest should be a wake-up call to everyone living in a world replete with large, complex organizations managing risky technological systems. The legacy of open-air detonations in Nevada pushes us to ask about the kinds of risks we are unwittingly living under today. What risks are we being exposed to by large organizations under the guise of security and science?

About the Author :
James C. Rice is Professor of Sociology at New Mexico State University.

Review :
"Mastery of nature has a dark side—spiraling unintended and unwanted consequences. James C. Rice's history of radioactive fallout from atom bomb testing is a striking demonstration that it is almost easier to build weapons of mass destruction than to contain—or even recognize and admit—their grim penumbra. An object lesson for the Anthropocene." (Andrew Pickering, author of The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future) "With this gripping account of poisoned sheep, radioactive milk, and desert towns blanketed in nuclear fallout, Rice brilliantly reveals the technological hubris and governmental arrogance behind the post-war era of open-air atomic bomb testing. Based on new research and cutting-edge theory, Downwind of the Atomic State highlights the perils of underestimating a vibrant material world that can often be more complex and treacherous than we imagine. A powerful cautionary tale for our own day." (Timothy James LeCain, author of The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past) "Downwind of the Atomic State charts the relationship between human and non-human participants in the ongoing burdening of the Great Basin ecosystem with fallout radionuclides throughout the 'open-air' testing era. Rice tracks the tensions between the fallout models of the test site managers and the reality of the intractable uptake of fallout by the ecosystem, weaving a powerful narrative from test series to test series, and ultimately to the court cases that followed." (Robert A. Jacobs, author of Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha)