I would like to begin by telling you all what an honor it is to be your commencement speaker this year. I came to Berkeley Geography as an undergraduate over ten years ago, and now they can finally get rid of me! Thank you to our fine faculty who smarten us up, coax us along and generally put up with us. Special thanks go to my fabulous committee members, Ruthie Gilmore, Allan Pred and Dick Walker, for their love of the intellect, devotion to their students, and commitment to connecting the realm of ideas with the realm of practice. I am also indebted to a wonderful community of graduate students – who put me up to this speech. The department’s staff makes the world go ‘round, which I can now say with some authority. And finally, and I think I speak for all of us, to our understanding family members, neglected friends, and long-suffering partners, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. You survived our schooling with good grace, and that has made the whole thing possible.
So, one of the things a number of us in the department have been talking about is hope, and what hope has to do with how people dream about changing the world while in the midst of war. In an effort to thank my classmates for their inspirational work and words, some of which are included in this address, I would like to talk about the creation of hope in the midst of war – through innovative experiments that doubled as forms of popular education, and which outlined alternative geographies connecting the world’s children across political divides.
How do you trace the geography of something that is tasteless, colorless, odorless, and invisible? This is an intellectually provocative question, a staple of geographic theorizing – and another way to stump family and friends when they ask you what geographers do – but it was also what scores of mothers and scientists worked to trace when they set out to understand radiation and its material effects. In the mid-1950s, just ten years after the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and scores of nuclear bombs had been detonated in the atmosphere, only 17% of Americans knew what fallout was. But soon after a large fusion bomb was tested over the Pacific, spreading radioactive ash over a 7,000 square mile area, including upon the Marshall Islanders and crew of the Lucky Dragon fishing boat, nuclear weapons had again become an issue of concern for the American public.
In 1956, a group of scientists and doctors at Washington University joined with the Greater St. Louis Women for Ending H-Bomb Tests to form the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information. At a time when the effects of radiation were as contested as the effects of depleted uranium are now, strontium-90 was one of the radio-isotopes in fallout that caused the greatest consternation. It has a relatively long half-life of 29 years and is known as a ‘bone seeker’ because it replaces itself for calcium in teeth and bones. It is a particularly dangerous material for growing children because as part of the body’s architecture, it can remain embedded for a lifetime causing leukemia and bone cancer. By 1956, strontium-90 had been detected in wheat, cow’s milk, rainwater in Chicago, and in caribou at rates 20 to 30 times greater than in cattle, posing additional risks to peoples of the Arctic. The St. Louis Committee began a unique experiment to trace the embodied geography of strontium-90: the Baby Tooth Survey. Through the P.T.A. and other women’s networks, women of the Committee began to collect the baby teeth of children living in the area. Between 1958 and 1970, they collected and tested over 300,000 teeth. Their results, published in Nature, showed a 55-fold increase in the average amount of strontium-90 to calcium in the teeth of babies born after the large-scale nuclear testing compared to those who were born in 1949-1950. This experiment “brought the nuclear issue into people’s homes in an individual and deeply engaging way, particularly for mothers.”
Other medical doctors were also working to trace this embodied geography of radiation. In 1962, the newly formed group Physicians for Social Responsibility published a series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, which showed that civil defense efforts were terribly misleading and that it was impossible to prepare for surviving a nuclear war. Doctors would be utterly unable to offer medical treatment because their facilities would be destroyed and many of them would be dead or gravely injured. They concluded that the only medical solution was to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. By documenting their effects, doctors and scientists transformed nuclear weapons from an item of Cold War foreign policy into issues of human health and the environment that reached directly into the home.
Women, as we have seen, also played a prominent role. On November 1st 1961, 50,000 middle class American housewives surprised the nation by going out on strike. Under the banners “End the Arms Race – Not the Human Race,” “Let’s Live in Peace Not Pieces,” and “Save the Children,” they connected their children’s well-being to seemingly far-away geopolitical strategies. While the US, UK and Soviet Union had agreed to a temporary halt in atmospheric testing in 1958, France had just conducted a test. With Cold War tensions mushrooming, Khrushchev, and then Kennedy announced they would resume nuclear tests. In response, large peace protests were held in the U.K., but the quietude of U.S. peace groups and quickened pace of the arms race led a small group of women in Washington, D.C. to respond. They had put out the strike call just six weeks before November 1st and spread the word through phone calls to friends, church and temple groups, and P.T.A. networks. In Los Angeles, some 4,000 women took to the streets and when asked how they had organized such a turnout, one woman explained to the L.A. Times, “You know the saying – ‘telephone, television, tella-woman.” The image of smartly dressed housewives acting as political amateurs was played up by the media, but their voices could not be downplayed and the strike received extensive front page coverage.
The message of Women Strike for Peace struck a chord and the ‘non-organization’ grew rapidly in numbers. These women worked from a specifically maternalist position that recognized the grave effects of the arms race for all the children of the world. As housewives, they explained, they had to leave the home in order to save it. Using their strength as consumers, one campaign urged women to place notes in their empty milk bottles that threatened to cancel their delivery service if the milk was not decontaminated. They tied their responsibilities as mothers to their position as citizens in another campaign that asked women to send their children’s baby teeth with results from tests for strontium-90 to their senators. The presence of strontium-90 in the bodies of their children was evidence that the Cold War generated lasting biological changes that the geopolitical divide could not contain.
Their work was so effective in driving home the dangers of the arms race that they caught the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which aimed to show these well-meaning housewives had been made Soviet dupes. Women Strike for Peace saw the Committee as an example of us-versus-them thinking that had left the world on the nuclear brink and threatened their peace efforts. Rather than blanch, they organized a campaign calling for public support and cancellation of the hearing. The public statement they drafted began, “With the fate of humanity resting on a push button … the quest for peace has become the highest form of patriotism.” They continued, “Differences of politics, economic or social belief disappear when we recognize man’s common peril … we do not ask an oath of loyalty to any set of beliefs. Instead we ask loyalty to the race of man. The time is long past when a small group of censors can silence the voice of peace.” The judiciousness and sincerity of their testimony disarmed the Committee, and served to discredit its legitimacy. One Washington Post political cartoon showed one HUAC member asking another, “I came in late, which was it that was un-American – women or peace?”
WSP both brought the effects of nuclear weapons home – “‘Pure Milk Not Poison’ was their most effective peace slogan” – and then took the issue full circle by calling for governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain to stop testing and stockpiling nuclear weapons. Their geographical imaginary was one in which ideological iron curtains could not stop the ill effects of radiation. WSP refused a divide that was supposed to pit them against us, and instead connected, connected across geopolitical divides by revealing the madness of a national security strategy that simultaneously undermined children’s bones from within. WSP both exposed the contradiction between “mothers’ responsibility for preserving life and the state’s nuclear recklessness” and sought to undo it through their peace work. In 1963, the U.S., France, U.K., and Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and President Kennedy acknowledged the voices of mothers for influencing his decision.
One of the doctors who started the St. Louis Committee wrote in 1960, “Radiological weapons can now make entire countries the targets and continents the battlegrounds. But with this change in the size of wars has come no parallel growth in the statesmanship of nations.” The scalar increase of the military ‘footprint’ on the globe since WWII is simply impossible to overlook – human time-space has been stretched to a force of geological magnitude, with the half life of depleted uranium 4.5 billion years, mushroom clouds that reach 25 miles into the stratosphere, and expanses of land devoted to military uses stretched by millions of acres. We also cannot but see the stark geography of war that has emerged since WWII in which the vast majority of people killed as a result of so-called conventional wars have been civilians living in the Global South. The U.S. would have a central place on this map as the world’s largest supplier of arms.
Geographers from every part of the discipline – studying economies or ecologies, politics or plants – can trace the outline of this military footprint from indistinct battlefields through international commodity chains of resource extraction, facility construction, weapons and matériel manufacture, marketing, storage, and use – a veritable picture of globalization. At every step along this chain we find waste materials that have made entire ecosystems waste-lands and communities living there, or downstream, or downwind into “human sacrifice zones.”
Each one of the hibakusha, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, remind us that the stories I’ve told here are not history, but remain present – at this month’s negotiations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for instance, or with the U.S.’s and the University of California’s development of so-called mini-nukes and bunker busters. Hibakusha remain part of a visible geography of the otherwise invisible because they have told their stories and people have heard them. Likewise, the innovative experiments citizen-scientists and mothers conducted enabled them to trace the invisible geography of war by showing the invisible in tooth-after-tooth, child-after-child. The visibility and materiality of this geography of war opened the possibility of a different geography that connected the world’s children in common; they are our commons. That, to me, is the hope that supercedes doomed military prerogatives.
A doctor long active with PSR once said, “Only those who see the invisible, can do the impossible.” Geographers can trace and make visible those political relations that make wastelands and (zones of) human sacrifice both possible and seemingly normal through their unhuman invisibility. One of the women who struck for peace expressed the same thing when she wrote, “Let’s tell them we don’t mean that they should kill other women’s children to protect our security; that essentially other women’s children are like our own. And whatever the color of their eyes, we want them all to live and laugh, to fulfill their dreams.”
Thank you.
