When We Began to "Think Globally": Radioactive Fallout, the Cold War, and the Making of a Global Environmental Problem, 1945-1963

ABOUT THE TOPIC: The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is known as the first nuclear arms control agreement. One of its declared aims, however, is environmental, namely "to put an end to the contamination of man's environment by radioactive substances." At the beginning of the atomic age, however, few voiced concerns about the worldwide dispersion of radioactive fallout. How did we come to reappraise that contamination as a global problem requiring a global solution? I will argue that the problem of fallout was not only born global as a material fact, but also globalized as a social-epistemic process thanks to the Cold War, which transformed scientific knowledge, ethical outlooks, technological conditions, and political incentives by the time when the PTBT was concluded.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Toshihiro Higuchi (Ph.D. in History, Georgetown) is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the History of Science Department, University of Wisconsin—Madison. Higuchi held a postdoctoral fellowship at CISAC in 2011-12. He will move to the University of Kyoto in June 2014 as a research assistant professor. His current book project traces the science and politics of worldwide contamination by radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear-weapons testing as one of the first truly global environmental problems.