Abstract
On December 3, 1956, the General Assembly of the United Nations established the Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) to collect and evaluate information on the worldwide levels and the effects of ionizing radiations. The committee, which was compelled to present a complete report to the UN General Assembly by late 1958, became a key space for international scientific exchange, setting of standards in radiological protection, and establishment of transnational networks of radiological monitoring. Nonetheless, its very creation, design, and operation were surrounded by controversy. Diplomatic tensions regarding nuclear disarmament, surveillance ambitions, and the interest in playing down a transnational collaborative project seeking to find out more about radioactive fallout shaped the structure and inner dealings of the committee.
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Notes
On the use of international institutions as spaces susceptible of transnational historiographical approaches, see the special issue on transnational history of science of the British Journal for the History of Science (45:3, 2012), and specially the introduction: Simone Turchetti, Néstor Herran, and Soraya Boudia, “Have We Ever Been Transnational? Towards a History of Science across and Beyond Borders,” British Journal for the History of Science 45:3 (2012): 319–336.
On the UNESCO and radiological monitoring, see Jacob D. Hamblin, “Exorcising Ghosts in the Age of Automation: United Nations Experts and Atoms for Peace,” Technology and Culture 47:4 (2006): 734–756.
On the establishment of an international regulatory system, see Soraya Boudia, “Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks,” History and Technology 23:4 (2007): 389–406, in which she suggests that the scientific expertise embodied in the committee and other international organizations for the global regulation of radioactivity were essentially instruments used by political leaders “for restoring and strengthening public trust.”
For a comprehensive study of early US nuclear monitoring activities, see Charles A. Ziegler and David Jacobson, Spying without Spies. Origin of America’s Secret Nuclear Intelligence Surveillance System (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).
On the German nuclear bomb project, see Mark Walker, Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1995).
This collaboration had been forged despite the limitations imposed by the 1946 McMahon Bill, which prevented the exchange of American nuclear information with foreign countries. The need of gathering intelligence about Soviet nuclear activities implied, however that as early as 1948 the AEC allowed collaboration with Canada and the United Kingdom in the fields of geophysics and meteorology. On the US–UK collaboration in surveillance of the Soviet Program, see Michael S. Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 43–46.
Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: Norton, 2006), 113.
The participation of British spy Harold “Kim” Philby seems to have been essential in providing the Soviet Union information about American monitoring programs. See Verne W. Newton, The Cambridge Spies: The Untold Story of Maclean, Philby, and Burgess in America (Lanham: Madison Books, 1999), on 336–341.
G. A. Goncharov, “Thermonuclear Milestones,” Physics Today 49:11 (1996): 44–61.
In 1958, this network allowed them to detect and determine the causes of Sellafield accident, and to survey Bristish nuclear tests in the Pacific. Division of International Affairs, Memorandum of Conversation. Discussion with Dr. Yves Rocard, French Physicist, February 26, 1958. NARA archives, box 490, folder 21.33.
The origin and consequences of the fallout controversy in Japan has been studied by Toshihiro Higuchi in a series of paper: Toshihiro Higuchi, “An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954–1963: The Politics of Risk, the Government, and the Grassroots Movement,” Peace & Change 33:3 (2008): 333–366; “Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Debate on Risk Knowledge in Cold War America, 1945–1963,” in
J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 301–322; “Tipping the Scale of Justice: the Fallout Suit of 1958 and the Environmental Legal Dimension of Nuclear Pacifism,” Peace & Change, 38:1 (2013): 33–55.
US AEC, Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons. Project Sunshine, August 6, 1953 (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1956).
Ralph H. Lutts, “Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout, and the Environmental Movement,” Environmental Review 9:3 (1985): 210–225.
“Nehru Proposes Atom ‘Standstill’ Pending UN Curb,” New York Times, April 3, 1954. Quoted in Matthew Jones, After Hiroshima: The United States, Race and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), on 202.
Jacob D. Hamblin, “‘A Dispassionate and Objective Effort: Negotiating the First Study on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation,” Journal of the History of Biology 40:1 (2007): 147–177.
The argument that UNSCEAR was to delay the implementation of more radical solutions endorsed by activists (in this case, the test ban) has been raised in Boudia, “Global Regulation: Controlling and Accepting Radioactivity Risks,” 389–406. A similar example of this dynamics can be found in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change in the 1980s, as discussed by Shardul Agrawala, “Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Climatic Change 39:4 (1998): 605–620.
Minutes of the Seventh Meeting of the UNSCEAR, March 23, 1956. See also David Sowby, “ICRP and UNSCEAR: Some Distant Memories,” Journal of Radiological Protection 21 (2001): 57–62;
and David Sowby, “Some Recollections of UNSCEAR,” Journal of Radiological Protection 28 (2008): 271–276.
James V. Neel and William J. Schull, The Effect of Exposure to the Atomic Bomb on Pregnancy Termination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, 1956 [Publ. No. 461]). According to Susan Lindee, this report was a result of much compromise regarding “information inclusion and emphasis … [reflecting] the authors’ sensitivity to the public impact and institutional meaning of their work.”
Susan Lindee, Suffering Made Real, American Science and the Sur vivors of Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), on 219. In particular, this could have meant incertitude the about the continuation of the program, which was on the verge of being cancelled because of its cost and uncertain scientific results.
Ray K. Appleyard, “The Birth of UNSCEAR—the Midwife’s Tale,” Journal of Radiological Protection 30 (2010): 621–626.
Andrei D. Sakharov, “Radioactive Carbon from Nuclear Explosions and Non-threshold Biological Effects,” Soviet Journal of Atomic Energy 4:6 (1958): 159–169.
Linus Pauling, “Genetic and Somatic Effects of Carbon-14,” Science 3333 (1958): 1183–1186.
UNSCEAR, Report to the General Assembly of the United Nations (New York: UN, 1958), on 112.
John Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” Osiris 21 (2006): 161–181.
John H. Harley, Naomi A. Hallden, and Long D. Y. Ong, Summary of Gummed Film Results through December 1959 (New York: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Health and Safety Laboratory, 1960), 14–15.
On “infrastructural globalism,” see Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010),
and Paul N. Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” Osiris 21 (2006): 229–250.
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© 2014 Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts
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Herran, N. (2014). “Unscare” and Conceal: The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the Origin of International Radiation Monitoring. In: Turchetti, S., Roberts, P. (eds) The Surveillance Imperative. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438744_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438744_4
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