Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha

Robert A. Jacobs is a historian of science and technology and professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan. His latest offering, Nuclear Bodies, in many ways is a coming together of the impressive body of work he has produced on nuclear technologies, radiation technopolitics, and polysemic histories of nuclear weapons, testing, production, and accidents (Jacobs 2013, 2022, 2010). In particular, the book is based on research undertaken for/during the nearly decade-long oral history project, the Global Hibakusha,¹ as part of which Jacobs and his colleague, Mick Broderick conducted field research across continents irradiated by nuclear weapons tests during the Cold War (DiaNuke.org 2022). These histories, uncovered through oral interviews with radiation-affected communities in over 20 countries, form the backdrop against which Jacobs weaves a larger story, a (re)narrativization of the Cold War, innocuously constructed in the “Western mind” as imaginary (p.180). Rupturing this popular misconception, Jacobs demonstrates that a pervasive feature of the Cold War was, in fact, a limited nuclear war with nuclear weapons exploding on “every continent except South America and Antarctica” (p.5).

Over two thousand underground and atmospheric weapons tests conducted during the Cold War created in their wake radioactive bodies, communities, and landscapes that continue to experience debilitating effects of these nuclear detonations and whose lives, lands, food, water, and successive generations remain forever enveloped in radioactive particles embedded in our ecosystem. Jacobs refers to these individuals as the Global Hibakusha (from the Japanese term Hibakusha, denoting survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Jacobs uses this all-encompassing term to refer to those who have encountered, suffered, and lived in the presence of radioactivity primarily in “colonial, postcolonial, or remote parts of our world” (p.ix) and whose invisibility has been “manufactured in both science and politics” (p.x). These include communities living in the vicinity of uranium mining, weapons testing, nuclear waste, and nuclear power plant sites. Military troops who were both, participants in and observers of the weapons tests, also find elaborate mention in the book – a hitherto neglected but statistically significant population impacted by residual radiation.

Contrary to scholarly investigations that have typically examined test site communities for the medical impacts of radioactive fallout, Jacobs offers a far more complex understanding of how radiation alters families, communities, their structures, internal dynamics, and psychology and emotions, particularly in the face of the ceaseless fear and anxiety of living in irradiated ecosystems. The book, in fact, is the most captivating when narrating experiences and anecdotes of how fallout has forced a decoupling of communities from their foods, traditions, vocations, geographies, and practices of caregiving, among others, thus, leading to incalculable trauma and disruptions that epidemiological studies seldom account for.

While never undermining the centrality of the health impacts of external and internal exposures to radionuclides, Jacobs adds layers of awareness of the ruptures engendered by radioactive fallout. Take for instance the indigenous Sami and Inuit (Eskimo) populations in Scandinavian countries (p.71) who have been forced to forego reindeer and caribou meat, traditionally consumed by them. The reindeer’s irradiation, however, Jacobs reminds us, “penetrates deeper than simple changes to diet” (p.80); the Sámi cultural identity, inextricably embedded in the centuries-old relationship between the community and the reindeer, has been decimated by the fallout from Chernobyl. Similarly, communities living in irradiated geographies that have practiced traditional healing and medicine for generations, now find their community healers unable to cure the cancers and other diseases engendered by radioactivity. Jacobs also captures in vivid detail the sense of loss and grief experienced when contemplating or being forced to abandon their homes due to radiological contamination. From indigenous tribes in Arizona, to communities in the Bikini Atoll to families forced to evacuate towns in and around Fukushima, the sense of loss stems not only from the severing of ties with place, community, and culture but also with their ancestors and spiritual roots; no longer being able to care for ancestral graves, has rendered the experience of displacement profoundly traumatic for many (p.92).

Among the several strengths of the book is its ability to demonstrate that nuclear events, whether the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons tests in “unpeopled” sacrifice zones or nuclear power plant accidents are not inconsonant happenings. They are strung together in a continuum, entangled in a larger web of humans, nonhumans, and pasts, presents, and already implicated futures. The strength of the book is its craft of story-telling, the narration of long-winded and complex histories of nuclear technologies in simple yet profound ways. The demystification of the “science” surrounding radiological harm is another critical contribution of the book. Jacobs demonstrates, for instance, that the denial of health concerns of communities living in contaminated areas and pathologizing them as “irrational” and “radiophobic” has roots in the Life Span Study researching radiation impacts on World War II Hibakusha. Even though the “gold standard” for studying risks from exposures to external radiation, the study does not account for the risks from internalizing radionuclides from fallout, the effects of which are “stochastic” (p.41), and hence easier to deride and dismiss. The book uncloaks many other such abstruse scientific discussions surrounding nuclear technologies.

The book has been effectively structured into four sections focusing on (i) “technicalities” of radiation exposure, (ii) the web of “people” and communities entangled with nuclear risk and harm, (iii) “warlords” who have overseen the selection of “remote” sites where bombs could be exploded and (iv) “heirs”, the inheritors of loss and of a staggering scale of nuclear technologies, infrastructures, materials, institutions, weapons, temporalities, toxic leakages and legacies, and the slow violence that is now inscribed into their (our) collective futures. In effortlessly traversing continents, geographies, institutions, humans, nonhumans, and time frames, Jacobs effectively demonstrates that the history of the nuclear age is in fact a global history of inextricable entanglements that extend far beyond national boundaries.

The book, as stated above, is pivoted in large part on oral history research conducted as part of the Global Hibakusha project. Yet discussions on the oral interviews remain pithy. In the Dianuke book discussion (DiaNuke.org 2022), Jacobs spoke at length of the grief that these conversations had evoked for both, the participants and researchers. Such and other insights into these oral interviews would have provided a greater sense of situatedness and being with for the reader. In addition, Jacobs offers a brief yet compelling“afterword”, seemingly in lieu of a conclusion. While one cannot fault the author for their choice of the book’s structure, it would have been immensely useful had Jacobs offered a concluding chapter, bringing together and tying up the staggering range of subjects that the book explores in the preceding pages.

While Nuclear Bodies is an evidently valuable addition to scholarship in the nuclear humanities, it also offers compelling insights into the history of nuclear technologies, materials, weapons tests, scientific research, and governance regimes. In offering an alternative reading of the Cold War, it also serves as a useful resource in the broader spectrum of posthuman International Relations literature. Beyond the academic resonances, however, the book is a deeply empathetic endeavor to think of ethics and multispecies justice as we stand “on the precipice of the Anthropocene” (p.246) accompanied by long-lived toxic radioactive legacies.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Sonali Huria

Sonali Huria is Co-editor, DiaNuke.org. She recently completed a postdoc at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany and will be moving to Sweden in early 2024 as a postdoctoral researcher.

Notes

¹ See “Global Hibakusha”. https://globalhibakusha.com/.