The Fallout of our Nuclear Age

As I finished Kristen Iversen's Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, I was reminded of a number of things that I've read over the past couple of years, including Steven Church's The Day After the Day After and Elizabeth Stuckey-French's novel The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady. I'm fascinated by the shadow that the Cold War continues to cast over a number of writers -- and it's something, of course, that we still see in our politics.  When I saw it in politics during the election, I was most struck by certain supporters of Mitt Romney who kept calling it the Soviet Union and who seemed to want to continue the national security policies that we had under the Cold War.  Of course in that situation, we find it silly: we no longer live in a world dominated by two super-powers, as we did in my own childhood.

I'm about the last of the generations who really grew up during the Cold War -- and I say that as someone who remembers the end of it. I remember glasnost (we even stood out in the cold to see Gorbachev in the Twin Cities).  I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember the coup of 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet state.

And I know that our world is different -- and that our politics need to be different as a result.

But I see something different in the literature that's emerging of late.  It's not about strategy.  It's not about the policies put in place over those years we were in a nuclear standoff with the other most powerful nation on earth.

These are stories -- whether stories of people's actual lived lives or fictionalized versions of the world -- that attend to the psychological scars rendered upon all of us as a result of years of nuclear development.  And Iversen and Stuckey-French's books are about the physical fallout of our country's obsession with all things nuclear.

Stuckey-French's novel follows a woman who, decades after being given a radioactive cocktail without knowledge or consent, has decided to exact her revenge on the doctor who experimented upon her.  The radioactivity poisoned her body -- and it carried into the next generation, resulting in her daughter's death at a young age.*  Iversen speaks similarly of the problems of radiation inhabiting the body: Rocky Flats, a notoriously contaminated nuclear production site, is linked to an incredible increase in cancers throughout the area Iversen lived in as a child.

Stuckey-French's book allows for the redemption of the old woman and the doctor -- and is sometimes humorous, often heart-wrenching -- by bringing together this odd collection of a family struggling to remain in tact (the novel describes the situation as a "nest of yellow jackets").  But the damage of the past is always present for the radioactive lady herself: she cannot undo the death of her daughter, nor can the doctor -- now senile -- remember, or even know, the long-lasting effects of the radiation on his unsuspecting patients.

Iversen's exploration of the physical and psychological fallout is much more closely tied to the nuclear power and the nuclear weapons that we obsessed over in the twentieth century. Her story does not find the relatively neat resolution of Revenge -- but it shouldn't since Revenge is a novel and Iversen's is a work of nonfiction. In Iversen's book, we find the long-term damage, both to Iversen's family, their health, and to the community that she grew up in.  Some are in denial about the dangers posed by the plant (and from my understanding of this, the government has continued to officially underestimate the levels of contamination, and more particularly the dangers of the contamination).  Some clearly know the dangers of working on the site -- and working on the clean-up of the site -- but cannot turn away, because the money's simply too good.  And some try to escape, but of course you cannot escape the radiation levels once you've been exposed.

And that's exactly why the concerns about our nuclear age are so complex -- and still resonate so strongly.  Though we are no longer in a Cold War, and we are no longer building up our arsenal of nuclear weapons, we have to live with these things powered by toxic substances with half lives so long that their potency will outlive generations.  It's something that we clung to throughout the twentieth century, and only now are we dealing with the fact that it still clings to us.


*Incidentally, it would be interesting to think about Stuckey-French's book alongside Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, since that discusses the life and afterlife of a woman whose relationship with the medical research community was also entirely involuntary. But those are thoughts for another day or another blogger.