Radiation Nation

On March 28, 1979, the worst nuclear reactor accident in U.S. history occurred at the Three Mile Island power plant. Radiation Nation uses the accident to explore the late 1970s as a turning point, focusing on how women crafted a homegrown ecological politics and a new body-centered nationalism. The first cultural history of the accident, Radiation Nation reveals the surprising ecological dimensions of post-Vietnam conservatism while showing how growing anxieties surrounding bodily illness infused the political realignment of the 1970s in ways that blurred any easy distinction between left and right.

On March 28, 1979, the worst nuclear reactor accident in U.S. history occurred at the Three Mile Island power plant. In this innovative study, Natasha Zaretsky uses the near-meltdown to shed new light on the era’s political realignments. Radiation Nation uncovers the surprising bodily and ecological dimensions of post-Vietnam conservatism.

Natasha Zaretsky is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 (2007).

Finis Dunaway, author of Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images:
Radiation Nation is much more than a brilliant cultural analysis of Three Mile Island. Zaretsky offers stunningly original insights into the full scope of modern America, stitching together the history of the arms race with the history of nuclear power to reveal the contested meanings of gender, family, and the fetus. This urgent, important book challenges left-right polarities to uncover surprising connections across diverse social movements.

Roy Scranton, University of Notre Dame:
Zaretsky's astute and lucid work breaks new ground illuminating the cultural history of the Anthropocene, revealing how reproductive rights, antigovernment paranoia, and ecological activism emerged fatefully conjoined in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. In the late 1970s, as Radiation Nation brilliantly shows, ethnonationalism and ecological thinking united over the threatened body of the unborn. Necessary reading.

Jeremy Varon, the New School:
This is an epic book, speaking to grand stakes. Centered on Three Mile Island, it is actually a chronicle of postwar America, touching on everything from atomic-age anxieties, to declining faith in expertise, to the long-grinding pessimism of the 'anthropocene.' It is, in short, brilliant, among the best works of history I have read in years.