2 - “From Bomb to Bone”

Summary

This chapter explores how the dawn of the nuclear age introduced new ways of thinking about environmental risks and children. Fears of radiation pollution set new terms and new meanings that precarious youth helped to make more concrete. The chapter emphasizes how concerns for youth and ecology moved together, driving the work of federal and citizen scientists who traced the paths of radioactive isotopes at different scales. Through the bodies of children at ever-increasing distances, Americans came to understand a new set of shared environmental risks. By concentrating the local and global releases of radioisotopes in their thyroid glands, blood, and bones, children drew together pollution and fears that could no longer be kept secret or separate from the relative safety of white middle-class domestic life. To postwar Americans, radiation was vague, invisible, and hopefully distant. How it insinuated itself – as metaphor and material experience – at the youthful heart of the postwar domestic dream helps to explain the power of the postwar popular ecology movement.