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to study the physiological effects from the fallout, the endless search for redress by the victims. Some in New Mexico are well aware of the environmental injustice involved in the treatment of Navajo uranium miners during the Cold War “uranium rush,” when the appetite for nuclear materials was insatiable, but few will know about Leetso, the powerful monster that the Navajo people believe lives in the dust of uranium yellowcake; or “dog-hole” mines; or about the Church Rock Flood in 1979, when nearly 100 million gallons of water and 1,100 tons of radioactive waste escaped from a mill-tailings dam and poured out across Navajo grazing lands. Romancing the Atom is not just a book about the shabby secrets of the atomic age, it also proposes a key for springing the lock on what the author sees as the enabling ideology that has made all this possible. He argues that we have been persuaded and controlled by a subtle and pervasive nuclear dogma and that we have been entranced, by hook and crook, into letting it all happen somewhere out there beyond our reach. “Authorities, government, the military and educational establishments, and the media — it’s almost like there is an intention to keep a mindset in place to accomplish a certain agenda,” Johnson said. How else, he wonders, to explain public complacency in the face of the endless repetition of risky behaviors and destructive consequences? Johnson quotes the 1982 book Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Vision and Mindset: “A mindset acts like a filter, sorting information and perceptions, allowing some to be processed and some to be ignored, consciously or unconsciously.” The authors of Nukespeak identified the phenomenon after the Three Mile Island nuclear power accident in the same year as the Church Rock flood. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake spawned a tsunami that struck the northeast coast of Japan, setting off a chain of destruction, reactor meltdowns, and explosions at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station. Aware that the catastrophe was putting a new exclamation point on the nuclear story, Johnson recalled his book from the publisher and added a chapter on Fukushima, emphasizing the tragic irony of Japan as a two-time victim of the nuclear monster and suffering from its own arbitrary handicaps. The rigid assumptions responsible for saddling the world with the man-made aspects of these disasters was born in an environment of great secrecy — the urgency of the world war. But that was only the beginning. “The mindset of secrecy was strongly reinforced through patriotic adrenaline and the guarantee of jobs,” Johnson writes. “Questions were not welcome, nor were they likely to occur.” These are ominously repeated themes in the nuclear age. A solution, Johnson advised, is to replace unreflective thinking with reflective thinking. He said we shouldn’t keep doing the kind of thinking that plunges straight ahead with blinders on, but we should take things much more cautiously, examine new ideas and reexamine old ones, question assumptions and consider alternatives more thoroughly. “Mindsets are also about forgetting,” he writes. Some firmly held notions are best forgotten, he suggests, or at least remembered in new ways. ◀
Robert R. Johnson
“Romancing the Atom: Nuclear Infatuation From the Radium Girls to Fukushima” by Robert R. Johnson was published by Praeger Books in August.
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