The Slow Violence of the Nuclear Age

“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 anthropological shock as our “personal access to reality” is undermined. Despite brilliant advances in science and technology–in some ways we are more vulnerable as modernity progresses rather than increasingly liberated and free.

Commenting on the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, Beck argues:

“In the face of this danger, our senses fail us. All of us-an entire culture-were blinded even as we saw. We experienced a world, unchanged for our senses, behind which a hidden contamination and danger occurred that was closed to our view-indeed, to our entire awareness.”

More than this, however, modernity is beset by slow environmental violence. Except at high levels of exposure, the injurious health effects of ionizing radiation may take years if not decades to find expression. Rob Nixon explains:

“By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”

Slow violence is characterized by ambiguous but not absent outcomes, a lack of spectacular visual images necessary to grab media attention, and uncertainty in regard to the geographical and biophysical boundaries of impact. These dimensions are outlined in the following:

Temporal Distance–the gap in time between exposure and the expression of adverse consequence; distance exacerbates the attribution of cause and effect.

Incremental Onset-injury is not acute but attritional and long-standing or is predicated upon repeated exposure; often leads to the “normalization of contamination” or the tacit acceptance of attritional change.

Ambiguous Boundaries-the geographic contours of damage are uncertain, difficult to demarcate; the line between those exposed and those not exposed is uncertain or impossible to distinguish.

Lack of Salience-a scarcity of dramatic empirical cues sufficient to garner and/or sustain media attention; few definitive prompts to spur a change of interpretive framing.

Time obscures recognition of cause and effect and hinders social accountability. The greater the temporal distance between cause and effect the greater the indemnity. Powerful actors have few incentives to consider the interests of marginalized segments of the population when the passage of time insulates them from decisions made or those abandoned.

There are many issues that encompass slow environmental violence: Agent Orange persisting for decades in rural areas in Vietnam and the bodies of American soldiers, Gulf War Syndrome today, pesticides banned in the industrialized countries but exported elsewhere, toxic chemicals at Love Canal, radionuclides engulfing Europe in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle, “Cancer Alley” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a rising time encroaching upon the Maldives Islands, illicit shipments of electronic waste (e-waste), from the industrialized countries to middle and low income countries, Union Carbide and Bhopal, India, an exclusion zone around the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Slow environmental violence is dependent upon organizational decision-making or failure to make key decisions. It does not necessarily presuppose malicious intent but is more often perpetuated through heedless disregard for others. Slow violence, then, is a situation that could have been otherwise but for the decisions and/or non-decisions of organizational actors.

How do we address the sense imperceptibility of radioactivity and, in tandem, the slow environmental violence of nuclear technology?

The experiences of those afflicted is a start. Personal testimonies of living amid contamination give form and character to slow environmental violence. Rather than letting time indemnify past and present activities of powerful actors in society, those burdened by environmental inequality can illustrate for a broader audience slow environmental violence. Nixon argues:

“Writing can challenge perceptual habits that downplay the damage slow violence inflicts and bring into imaginative focus apprehensions that elude sensory corroboration. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen.”

In Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Shadow of Rocky Flats, Kristen Iversen recalls living near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant near Arvada, Colorado. At times sudden and dramatic, as with a fire in 1969, more often contamination was slow and incremental. She notes:

“The problem with Rocky Flats is not just a smoking chimney or a hole in the dike. The weapons plant is like a bag filled with ultrafine sand-a bag filled with millions of glittering, radioactive specks too tiny to see-and the bag has been pricked with pins.”

In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry Tempest Williams contemplates faith, land, and loss. Growing up in Utah during the years of open-air testing upwind in Nevada, she asks questions many Utahans ponder and looks to her genealogy for answers:

“I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation…This is my family history.”

The articulation of personal and family experiences can make visible that which might otherwise remain obscure. Testimony can articulate lessons powerful actors in society typically prefer to ignore. And democracy. More democracy. Beck argues:

“We are living in an age of technological fatalism, an “industrial middle ages,” that must be overcome by more democracy-the production of accountability, redistribution of the burdens of proof, division of powers between the producers and the evaluators of hazards, public disputes on technological alternatives. This in turn requires different organizational forms for science and business, science and the public sphere, science and politics, technology and law, and so forth.”

The decimation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945, remain pivotal images of the nuclear age. Sudden, jarring destruction on an unfathomable scale introduced the public to the perils of splitting the atom. This is but one side of the nuclear coin. The other is the crescive effects that take years, if not decades, to find expression in disease and disability. Nuclear technology has introduced anthropogenic sources of ionizing radiation into the world, and some of the most perplexing conundrums of modernity involve a hazard that is imperceptible to human sense perception while evoking effects characterized by a temporal distance undercutting institutional accountability let alone prudence. As evocative, and instructive, as images of annihilation may be, a central tension in society remains coming to terms with the slow consequences of nuclear technology.

For more information:

Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009).

Ulrich Beck, “The Anthropological Shock: Chernobyl and the Contours of the Risk Society,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987): 153-165.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (NY: Crown Publishing, 2013).

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (NY: Vintage Books, 1991).

James Rice, “Slow Violence and the Challenges of Environmental Inequality,” Environmental Justice, 9(6) (2016): 176-180.