ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

The team that started up the first nuclear chain reaction, 50 years
ago, was as nervous as if it was supervising the birth of Frankenstein’s
monster. If something went wrong in the primitive reactor pile as the control
rod was gradually removed, simply replacing it would have reversed the process.
As scientists they knew this – they had done the calculations to prove it.
Yet one of them rigged up an additional neutron-absorbent rod to go in at
the touch of a button. A second scientist added another rod, which would
drop in automatically in case of trouble. A third hung a rod overhead by
a rope, and stationed a reliable colleague alongside with an axe. Not satisfied,
still another scientist organised a ‘suicide squad’, with buckets of neutron-absorbent
solution, ready to soak the pile and ruin it at the first sign of danger.

Was such caution beyond reason? In 1942 it was already clear that a
nuclear reaction could ‘run away’, overheating catastrophically and throwing
out radioactive gas and dust that would endanger health for centuries. So
there were sound reasons to fear nuclear energy. Yet there must be some
point at which caution becomes excessive; people always mix irrational
fears with their rational ones. Controlling the first chain reaction actually
turned out, as everyone had calculated, to be as straightforward as tuning
a radio.

Ever since nuclear energy was discovered at the turn of the century,
it has touched a uniquely sensitive nerve. It has somehow become a source
of more dread, and of more vehement and effective opposition, than any other
technology. The scientists in 1942 already knew quite a lot about nuclear
hazards. Besides their theoretical calculations, they had a generation
of direct experience with the medical effects of radioactivity. These suggested
nothing exceptionally frightening. What spurred the deepest anxieties was
another heritage, far more ancient and laden with emotion.

Within a year of the discovery of nuclear energy, one of the pioneers,
Frederick Soddy, the British chemist, had announced that the energy locked
within atoms was so great that the Earth must be seen as a storehouse full
of explosives. A man who could unleash this energy, he said, ‘could destroy
the Earth if he chose’. There was nothing new about the idea of an end to
the world – Armageddon is a primal human concept. What was relatively new
at the turn of the century was the idea that it could be brought on not
by some act of God, nor by some cosmic catastrophe beyond human control,
but by a group of people – even a single person. Journalists and science
fiction authors fuelled the fear, warning that a careless nuclear experimenter
could destroy the planet. In 1929, a writer for The New York Times suggested
that not just the Earth but the entire Universe could be accidentally fired
‘like a train of gunpowder’.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s such as Ernest Rutherford, the British physicist, annoyed
by the sensationalism suggesting that (as he put it) ‘some fool in a laboratory
might blow up the universe unawares’, tried to explain that the idea was
scientific nonsense: if the world were so unstable, it would have disintegrated
long since. But Rutherford was not successful: the notion of nuclear catastrophe
had a fascination all its own.

Nor was it new to hear people exclaim that science was going too far.
Almost all cultures have worried about men and women who poke unwisely into
the great secrets of nature: first witches, sorcerers and alchemists, then
such fictional figures as Faust and later Frankenstein. Now it was the turn
of the mad scientist.

A typical example of this new stereotype appeared in The Invisible Ray,
a 1936 film starring Boris Karloff. He played a scientist who tampered (as
his mother warned him) ‘with secrets we are not meant to probe’. The scientist
devised a ‘radium ray projector’, capable of blasting cities or curing people’s
illnesses, a sort of magic wand. He meant to use it only for good, but got
a dose of his own weird radiation and began to glow in the dark. Having
gone murderously insane, he crept about killing people with a touch of
his hand.

The association of a new force with weapons was inevitable. Even before
the First World War, physicists were speculating about nuclear arms. The
phrase ‘atomic bomb’ was first used by HG Wells, in a 1913 novel about a
cataclysmic world war, The World Set Free. However, he also predicted a
golden age that would come afterwards, the result of atomic bombs so terrible
that they would mandate universal peace, while atomic energy would create
a new Utopian society. This was in close accord with a very old structure
of myth: in the tales of many cultures, Armageddon in turn leads to the
Millennium, a time of peace and happiness.

The hopes for nuclear energy were just as grandiose as the fears. After
the First World War, newspapers saw nuclear science as a wonderful enterprise,
leading toward an earthly paradise. By 1930, there were about 100 patent
medicines on the market whose active ingredient was radium. Pastes, tonics,
pills and suppositories promised to cure everything from warts to baldness.
Mineral springs were proud of the radioactive content of their waters –
something most of them do not advertise now.

The public was aware that nuclear radiation had a harmful side. Newspapers
reported all the main problems: sterility, genetic mutations and cancer.
Yet the news was also full of similar risks from other things, such as household
chemicals. In the hands of competent doctors, people said, radiation would
save far more lives than it would ever take.

DIVINE MADNESS

But away from this optimism, there was still an undercurrent of fear
about radioactivity, fuelled by science fiction stories and horror movies.
This undercurrent was tapped in 1945 when the US dropped the first nuclear
bombs. People’s responses were guided by the images already in their heads.
As soon as President Truman revealed that an ‘atomic bomb’ had been used,
journalists began to talk of doomsday, hellfire and cosmic secrets. ‘For
all we know,’ intoned an NBC radio commentator, ‘we have created a Frankenstein.’
By this time physicists were beginning to understand that nuclear forces
are neither more nor less cosmic than more familiar electrical forces. Yet
most people believed that there was something supremely mysterious, almost
divine, in any manifestation of nuclear energy.

With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons came to
symbolise all the horrors of modern technological warfare. For the first
time, the idea of destroying civilisation and the world became a technical
reality, which people found hard to consider objectively. There is evidence
that most people preferred to ignore the awful thoughts. At first they were
glad to leave decisions to the experts. But in the late 1950s the undercurrent
of fear began to emerge as a spur to public action.

Fallout from bomb tests became a major issue after gray radioactive
ash from a hydrogen bomb test in 1954 covered and killed a Japanese fisherman,
leading to vehement protests worldwide. Mothers began to worry about giving
their children fresh milk, because it could be contaminated by strontium-90
from bomb tests. Something new was happening. Radioactivity was no longer
seen as a mixture of white and black magic. It seemed only harmful, an
ultimate pollutant.

People’s anxiety took visible form in many popular films, such as Them!
and Godzilla, about monsters created or released by radioactivity – giant
ants, crabs, spiders, squids, even grasshoppers. These creatures were updated
versions of the magician’s demon and the mad scientist’s creation, the monsters
that always served as warnings (as the movies said explicitly) against those
who ‘Went Too Far’, who tried to grasp more than is proper. The implicit
risk was authority, with its craving for power. The leaders of the protests
against nuclear fallout understood this, and stated plainly that their main
fight was against overweening military and political authority.

It made sense to protest against the spread of radioactive dust, but
the protest leaders admitted that fallout was chiefly a stalking-horse for
the greater problem of nuclear war itself. So long as nuclear weapons might
destroy civilisation, the word ‘nuclear’ would carry a burden of fear, anger
and distrust.

There was another aspect of nuclear energy that could not be shoved
under the rug: civilian nuclear reactors were going into operation at many
sites, with the first entirely commercial reactor starting up at Shippingport,
Pennsylvania in 1957. Ever since 1942, scientists had demanded elaborate
precautions against reactor explosions; two decades later, the imagery and
language of monstrous and polluting damage, first inspired by nuclear weapons,
transferred to the civilian nuclear industry. For example, radioactive wastes
stir greater anxieties, and have provoked more devoted opposition, than
any other industrial hazard. Polls show that the public sees nuclear waste
as a far more difficult problem than most technical experts do, with a wider
divergence than on any other issue. Yet the image of radiation as the most
apocalyptic pollution was only part of a still larger picture. Now that
thousands of nuclear weapons were hanging over everyone’s head, modern technology
no longer sounded entirely wonderful. What was most dreaded was the unknown,
and nuclear technology seemed supremely mysterious.

IMAGE PROBLEM

Nuclear experts, constrained by government rules of secrecy, could not
shake off the aura of sorcerous powers – and perhaps did not quite want
to. Industrial and governmental officials got a reputation for haughtily
brushing aside public concerns as ill-informed nonsense. The critics began
to call the nuclear industry arrogant, secretive, heartless and dangerous.
Nuclear energy began to stand for all the problems of modern bureaucracy
and industrial power. People opposed nuclear reactors as a way of opposing
all complex centralised power, including military, industrial and bureaucratic
authority in general.

By now nuclear energy carries quite a burden. It is associated with
images of weird polluting rays and mad scientists, the destruction inherent
in modern war, with everything people dislike about technology, with impersonal
and manipulative authorities, and behind that, always, with an ancient tradition
of cosmic and secret forces of life and death. Such negative associations
have become inseparable from the most seemingly rational discussion. For
example, in 1989, three years after the Chernobyl accident, the government
of Taiwan launched an elaborate and expensive ‘risk communication’ programme
to promote public support for building a new reactor. Surveys showed that
if the programme made any difference, it was to increase public worries
about reactors rather than alleviate them. Simply to be reminded of nuclear
energy’s power, even in the most reassuring context, was to become more
anxious.

These strong, negative associations conceal an opportunity: if they
can be dealt with, everyone will make progress toward handling feelings
about science, technology and modern social authority in general. Hopes
and fears must be respected and problems of reactors and weapons tackled.
There must be a step-by-step improvement in the systems for power production
and military security, nuclear and non-nuclear, in all their complex effects.
It will take a long time to win confidence through truly safe practices,
but it can be done.

It will be fruitless to work through some authority claiming to be rational
and infallible – a set of scientists and bureaucrats who decide what is
best for everyone. The only solution will come when the people who expect
to benefit from a technology routinely respect the rights of the people
who might be hurt by it. A familiar example is levying a fee on people who
use mildly radioactive materials and must dispose of the waste, then giving
the money to people who live near the proposed waste repository – money
they can use, if they like, to hire their own experts and radiation monitors.
In the long run, the way to a solution is to give everyone a share of power
and a stake in the outcome. Dread of our future can only be removed when
every-one has a part in helping to determine how we will share the benefits,
and the risks, of whatever technology we must use.

Spencer R. Weart is director of the Center for History of Physics of
the American Institute of Physics in New York. He is the author of Nuclear
Fear: A History of Images, published by Harvard University Press, 1988,
price $14.95/ £11.95 (paperback).