On November 9, 1979, computer monitors at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado, the National Command Center at the Pentagon, and the Pacific Headquarters in Hawaii all detected missiles launched from submarines off the West Coast of the United States. Then they depicted intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched from sites throughout the […]

In September of 1945, Manhattan Project scientists and U.S. Army officials returned to the Trinity site in south-central New Mexico, where just seven weeks earlier the atomic military age abruptly began. This time they invited the press. Walking about in protective booties, they kicked at the twisted steel remnants of what had been a 100-foot

In the fall of 1945 Eastman Kodak began receiving complaints of damaged industrial X-ray film. It appeared speckled, as if it had measles. A little detective work suggested radioactive debris from the Trinity detonation in south-central New Mexico in July had traveled far from its point of origin. An Indiana papermill manufacturing strawboard, used in

Few Cold War research projects so vividly highlight the permeability of the body as Project Sunshine–a clandestine effort to procure bodies and body parts for analysis amid open-air atomic testing in Nevada and the South Pacific. It began at a meeting of Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) officials and affiliated scientists at the RAND Corporation in

In September of 1962, Silent Spring arrived on bookshelves. It was an instant hit. Rachel Carson (1907-1964) did not simply describe the unintended consequences of the widespread use of pesticides, and DDT in particular, but linked to public concern over open-air atomic testing. Throughout the 1950s the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) detonated dozens of

In October 1956, a boy from the Warm Springs area, just north of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), died in a hospital far from home in Reno. Martin Bordoli came home from school feeling tired, running a fever and died less than a year from the initial diagnosis: stem cell leukemia. His nickname was “Butch,”

Just as a magician diverts attention from one hand onto another, dominant organizations in society engage in rhetorical strategies highlighting some things while obscuring others. As the Upshot-Knothole series began in March of 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) distributed a pamphlet in the communities downwind of the Nevada Test Site (NTS). “Continental Weapons Tests…Public

In March of 1953 a 24-kiloton tower detonation codenamed Nancy dropped radioactive fallout over thousands of sheep grazing on the winter range just northeast of the Nevada Test Site (NTS). By the time the herds returned home to Cedar City, Utah, several weeks later, there were problems afoot. Many had blisters and scabbing around the

“What would happen if radioactivity itched?” Ulrich Beck ponders. If it did, the public would not be dependent upon organizational actors, both corporate and governmental, to intercede on their behalf. In turn, socio-technical prowess introduces hazards the individual, family, or community cannot easily negotiate. As Beck notes, the pubic are left in a state of