Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia

Actors, Arenas, and Aspirations

Johan Östling, Niklas Olsen, David Larsson Heidenblad, Johan Östling, Niklas Olsen, David Larsson Heidenblad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367503604
• eBook ISBN: 9781000075298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia uses case studies to explore how knowledge circulated in the different public arenas that shaped politics, economics and cultural life in and across postwar Scandinavia, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

This book focuses on a period when the term "knowledge society" was coined and rapidly found traction. In Scandinavia, society's relationship to rational forms of knowledge became vital to the self-understanding and political ambitions of the era. Taking advantage of contemporary discussions about the circulation, arenas, forms, applications and actors of knowledge, contributors examine various forms of knowledge – economic, environmental, humanistic, religious, political, and sexual – that provide insight into the making and functioning of postwar Scandinavian societies and offer innovative studies that contribute to the development of the history of knowledge at large. The concentration on knowledge rather than the welfare state, the Cold War or the new social and political movements, which to date have attracted the lion's share of scholarly attention, ensures the book makes a historiographical intervention in postwar Scandinavian historiography.

Offering a stimulating point of departure for those interested in the history of knowledge and the circulation of knowledge, this is a vital resource for students and scholars of postwar Scandinavia that provides fresh perspectives and new methodologies for exploration.

Part I

The environment and global crises

1 Nuclear fallout as risk

Denmark and the thermonuclear revolution

Casper Sylvest

Among the consequences of nuclear fallout in the Cold War West was a new wave of fear concerning everyday existence and the future of human civilisation. This phenomenon attracted attention when large parts of the West also invested hope in a future driven by peaceful atoms. Meanwhile, the superpower politics of the Cold War was precariously poised. In Denmark and elsewhere, the debate on fallout raised questions about political and epistemological authority, which in turn shaped Western societies in the ensuing decades. While these controversies initially concerned the efficacy of civil defence, health effects, and the rationale and risks of nuclear testing, their wider reach gradually became evident. The debate was emblematic of a contentious, complicated struggle over knowledge that reconfigured scientific authority. It involved uncertainty, a dynamic agenda, political interests, and information campaigns. Over time, it shaped popular politics, giving rise to new forms of activism and social movements insistent on transparency and intergenerational justice within an increasingly global vision. In short, fallout constitutes a peculiarly radioactive sort of those “seeds of the sixties” that were dispersed in the 1950s.¹ The debate gave rise to a notion of stewardship that was proto-environmentalist in orientation.² Indeed, the recurrent contemplation of death, destruction, and global risk in the thermonuclear age produced a gaze towards the future that paved the way for many of the questions about modernity addressed in this book, whether they concern limits to growth, new forms of environmental thinking, or new forms of regulation.

Fallout refers to the distribution of radioactive material resulting from a nuclear detonation. Depending on the size of the detonation and its proximity to the earth’s surface, this material may reach the atmosphere or stratosphere, where it will sail in the wind before, eventually, dropping to the ground. While this phenomenon had figured sporadically in popular science before the mid-1950s, it had mainly been the province of scientific and specialised interest. Above all, it was events during the spring of 1954 that ignited the fallout debate. On 15 March, two weeks after the American Castle Bravo test of a thermonuclear device on the Bikini atoll, the Danish newspaper Politiken carried a news story on its front page: “Pacific atoll obliterated in new test of a hydrogen weapon”. The story pointed out that 236 local residents and 28 US military personnel were being examined for radioactive poisoning and referred to an official admitting that the size of the test surprised US authorities. The article went on to speculate about a further “gigantic” test planned for 1 April 1954 and illustrated the unfathomable power of H-bombs by referring to their explosive power as the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.³ By late March 1954, Bravo’s contamination of the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel caused a media frenzy and directed attention to fallout. The US government was forced to respond, and the debate had begun.⁴

In this chapter, I examine the Danish debate over fallout by asking how knowledge about the effects of nuclear weapons was created, circulated, and contested. When the question became salient in Denmark, with some delay, a sustained process of information gathering, analysis, and debate was initiated. In the years following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Danish citizens had access to general knowledge and news reporting about the development of nuclear weapons technology, and in that context, it was mainly the sheer force of the bomb and the dangers associated with radiation (through direct exposure) that were highlighted. Fallout, however, was uncharted territory. The phenomenon raised vexed questions for a small state. A history of knowledge perspective represents a particularly productive approach in relation to this topic, as the debate constitutes a quintessentially modern case of assessing scientific knowledge and evaluating risk in a highly politicised context, where secrecy and limited access to information constituted recurrent challenges.⁵ It soon became clear that fallout could be understood through various formal, scientific methods as well as through less formal, more intuitive approaches focused on precaution. Unfolding at a time when the thermonuclear revolution and the prospect of a new, menacing form of warfare dominated by megaton bombs and long-range missiles appeared inevitable and increasingly real, this debate had a series of direct and indirect effects on life and politics in Denmark: from questions of national security, civil defence, and public health to the more elusive existential and emotional challenges associated with life in the nuclear age. Studying the Danish case in a transnational context not only provides insight into a debate straddling elite and popular politics and spanning questions of science, health, and politics. It also demonstrates how a small state dependent on its superpower ally for security and, to a large extent, information about the effects of nuclear weapons received, circulated, and created knowledge at the height of the Cold War.

Against this background, I ask two questions: first, how the debate over fallout was reflected, received, and possibly transformed in Denmark, and what political stakes were involved in this production of knowledge? Second, what kinds of arguments came to prevail, and how were they promoted? I begin by outlining the contours of American (and British) debates on radioactive fallout during a period of nuclear testing and increasing public scepticism towards the arms race and its consequences. I then turn to the Danish debate by examining the circulation and production of knowledge among and by authorities, scientists, and peace activists.

Knowing fallout

Since the late nineteenth century, radiation protection had focused on scientists and professionals working with x-rays and radium. With the invention of the atomic bomb, the question expanded massively. The number of radioactive substances increased, and radiation exposure gradually became a wider concern. The scientific community reacted by becoming more sceptical of the biological consequences of radiation exposure. Terminologically, this shift was symbolised by a shift from “tolerance dose” to “maximum permissible dose”, which “conveyed the idea that no quantity of radiation was certainly safe”.⁶ In a period when fear of atomic weapons was accompanied by atomic utopianism in areas of health, energy provision, and transportation – a vision that was promoted in President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program – the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was tasked with monitoring and protecting the American population from any dangers of radioactivity resulting from nuclear technology. Radiation effects had been a contentious and closely guarded question when the atomic bomb was invented and used in 1945.⁷ The arrival of the H-bomb produced a host of new issues, and the AEC found itself at the centre of the ensuing controversy.

From 1954, the key scientific issues of the fallout debate concerned protection and the consequences for humans of exposure to (low-level) radiation over time. While distinct, these issues were not easy to separate. The main focus was originally on civil defence and human health effects, though prominent voices in the debate also drew attention to the consequences for animals, plant life, and nature more broadly. Initially, local (or regional) fallout took prominence, but in time, global fallout and its consequences for humanity and nature also attracted attention. Three questions were central: first, how could civil defence deal with radioactive fallout; second, did fallout produce somatic injuries (predominantly cancer), or was there a threshold below which fallout did not have harmful effects; third, what if any genetic consequences would follow from an increase in (the global distribution of ) fallout? Much of the debate was characterised by conjecture based on incomplete data, and security concerns loomed large. Received wisdom – that radioactivity produced harmful effects – was often repeated, but voices of authority, primarily the AEC and affiliated scientists, preferr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: histories of knowledge in postwar Scandinavia
• Part I The environment and global crises
• Part II Economy, politics, and the welfare state
• Part III Education, culture, and the humanities
• Epilogue
• Index