In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Cold War convention of containment, which undergirded American involvement in Vietnam, was broadly shared, internalized, at times even fostered, by the United States European allies. This consensus broke down by the 1960s, as successive US administrations saw themselves locked ever more rigidly into Cold War logic which seemed to require going to war to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam. By contrast, the United States transatlantic allies and partners increasingly came to question the very rationale of US intervention. By the mid-1960s there was a remarkable consensus among government officials across Western Europe on the futility of the central objective of the American intervention in Vietnam of defending and stabilizing a noncommunist (South) Vietnam. European governments refused to send troops to Vietnam. However, West European governments differed considerably in the public attitude they displayed toward US involvement in Vietnam, ranging from France’s vocal opposition to strong if not limitless public support by the British and West German governments. Across Western Europe, the Vietnam War cut deeply into West European domestic politics, aggravated political and societal tensions and diminished the righteousness of the American cause.

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.