Historical Background: Environmental issues related to nuclear development (both for weapons and for energy) were part of the larger environmental movement that swept through the US during the second half of the 20th century. Often, early environmentalists protested nuclear development of any kind. They opposed nuclear weapon production because they wanted an end to the arms race that was characteristic of the Cold War. They opposed nuclear energy because of its ties to weapons and some of the pollution issues associated with it. As we trace the history of the relationship between environmentalism and nuclear development, think about the intersection between the Cold War, nuclear pollution, and activism. Here is a quick timeline:
Communication Strategies: This section includes a variety of document formats aimed at different audiences, including private government reports, short public pamphlets, and unpublished scrapbooks made to keep a record of activist events. Think carefully about the ways that such items are communicating science to their intended audiences. For example, communicating the realities of the early Cold War to US citizens was clearly a delicate balancing act. The government needed to inform people about real issues (such as what to do in the event of nuclear war) without leading to doom and despair. Do you feel like they accomplished this?
The document below is the US government's official report of the atomic bombings in Japan. It is split into two parts here: the text first and the images second. The book was given to those whose work related in some way to the Manhattan Project. This copy was owned by Al Bartlett, a physics professor at CU, who clearly read the piece extensively and underlined many passages he found important. The second half of the book includes over one hundred images of the destruction.
Civil Defense (defending civilians against war and nuclear attack) became a major issue in the US in the 1950s and 1960s. Pamphlets like the three below were sent to public entities (like libraries) and private citizens in order to inform them of steps they could take to be prepared or to help out. The first piece here (Just in Case Atom Bombs Fall) is particularly interesting because it is aimed at residents of Denver and even discusses a scenario where a nuclear bomb falls on Denver's Union Station.
The growing environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s was often also anti-war (and by extension, anti-nuclear). One particular point of contention was at the Rocky Flats Plant, just 10 miles south of Boulder. Here, the US government created plutonium "triggers" for nuclear weapons. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, a growing grassroots movement attempted to get the plant shut down, both because of environmental pollution issues and general anti-Cold War sentiment. The following scrapbooks, created by the CU student group CU World Citizens, document many of the anti-Rocky Flats protests and include many clippings and flyers about ongoing issues surrounding nuclear weapons (and nuclear power). These documents were never published, but were compiled to purposefully record historical events.