On a Farther Shore (45 page)

In the space of just ten paragraphs—the
New Yorker
combined them into three—Carson had written the story of the end of the world. What reader in 1962 could fail to see in this description all the bleak possibilities of the modern age? Carson’s subject was pesticides, but she began in a way that just as surely evoked the images of nuclear devastation and all its ensuing sickness and pallor, right down to the residue of poison from the sky.

This was a familiar tableau, as the Cold War had offered a running preview of such scenes of annihilation in the picture many Americans already had of the colorless, lifeless void that resided behind the “iron curtain,” where an oppressive society was understood to be functionally dead but at the same time a deadly threat. In September 1961, the Soviet Union had resumed atmospheric testing and by early December had detonated
thirty-one
nuclear devices, including one more than 3,300 times the size of “Little Boy,” the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Though not a practical bomb, this gargantuan device produced the largest nuclear explosion in history. The United States immediately embarked on a crash program to restart its own testing in the South Pacific—and did so in April 1962, just as Carson was finishing
Silent Spring
. The testing continued at a furious pace through the spring and into the summer and then fall. In the month of June alone, as readers were learning of the dark promise of pesticides from Rachel Carson in the
New Yorker
, the United States exploded ten nuclear devices in the atmosphere. That year a nuclear device exploded somewhere in the world every few days.

President Kennedy had been reluctant to start testing again but felt the Soviet resumption left him no option. Such was the morbid dance of mutually assured destruction. Humanity’s only hope was thought to be in the maintenance of equivalent nuclear arsenals by the Soviets and the Americans.
When Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote to the president imploring him to stop the tests, an obviously conflicted Kennedy wrote back that he, too, hated the testing—which he called a “tragic choice,” but one that had to be made, as the only thing worse would have been the alternative: allowing the Soviet Union to
gain a nuclear advantage that would destabilize the balance of power in the world. This, Kennedy insisted, might result in “fateful consequences for all our hopes for peace and freedom.”

The resumption of atmospheric testing—even though the American tests were on the far side of the world—brought on a renewed anxiety about exposure to radioactive fallout. People had reason to be concerned:
The latest round of tests had, in the space of only months, doubled the amount of fallout dispersed around the planet. The U.S. tests in the South Pacific contributed only slightly to this new rain of radioactivity in the densely populated Northern Hemisphere.
But fallout from Soviet testing drifted eastward over North America, where three cities—Minneapolis, Des Moines, and Kansas City—were rapidly approaching the federally established “safe” limits for radiation, as established by the government’s Radiation Protection Guides. Of special concern was the radionuclide iodine 131. Despite its short half-life of just eight days, iodine 131 was being detected in milk supplies at levels that might soon require restrictions on dairy operations in the affected areas. Government officials felt trapped by their own prior conservatism, as the radiation guides outlining safe levels had been set low based on what was expected from routine industrial operations during peacetime. The authorities felt sure that the guidelines were therefore well below what would constitute a risk of health effects—though in truth, nobody knew that to be the case.

The Federal Radiation Council, overlooking concerns such as those raised by Linus Pauling about the cumulative damage from even small health effects when they occur in large populations over long periods of time, tried to put a calming spin on the government’s lack of certainty over its own policies: “
We cannot say with certainty what health hazards are caused by fallout from nuclear testing. We expect there will be some genetic effects; other effects such as leukemia and cancer are more speculative and may not occur at all.”

Although thyroid cancer had been induced in laboratory animals with radioactive iodine, no case of human thyroid cancer had ever been traced to such exposure. Officials in the U.S. Public Health
Service agreed with everyone else in the government that the health risk from iodine 131 in fallout was probably nil—but they insisted that steps be taken to shut down dairy suppliers whose milk contamination exceeded the guidelines.
President Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, told the president that was only one option. Another would be to raise the threshold level of concern for iodine 131—that is, to simply rewrite the guidelines.

Meanwhile, the administration requested a nearly $2 million supplemental budget for fallout monitoring by the Public Health Service, which also planned to investigate better “countermeasures” to use in areas of excessive contamination. Wiesner recommended that the USDA be given a seat on the Federal Radiation Council, a move that was likely to restrain the council in its tendency to set fallout safety guidelines so low as to threaten farm interests—as they already did.
In mid-July 1962, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman—who was from Minnesota, one of the places most contaminated with fallout—ordered his staff to make plans in the event milk production had to be halted anywhere.

A month later, having been appointed to the Federal Radiation Council, Freeman warned the president that if contamination levels rose above the federal safety guides things could get politically messy. In Minnesota, milk prices had already been raised, and cows were being “dry fed” off-pasture to reduce iodine 131 contamination in milk. Freeman wasn’t happy about this, and he told Kennedy that nobody on the Federal Radiation Council thought the Minnesota initiative necessary or prudent—that it was likely to make things worse while putting federal officials in a difficult position. Freeman said one possible federal response would be to announce that the Minnesota program was a strictly local, “experimental” effort while at the same time supplying Minnesota dairy operators with dry feed at reduced cost under federal disaster assistance authority. But Freeman equivocated, as launching such a program risked setting a precedent that might spin out of control. If fallout radiation levels went up in other regions, Freeman said, the federal government could find itself
with a “vast and expensive” new program on its hands—words that might just as well have described the nuclear testing that caused all the trouble in the first place.

What to do? Freeman said he was working closely with Jerome Wiesner to find a balanced approach that took into account the “political, emotional, and other factors” that made the whole subject of radioactive fallout so “touchy.” Freeman thought the administration’s options were narrow. Downplay the potential health consequences of fallout and they risked “a lot of demagoguery” from political opponents. But too aggressive a response could also undermine public confidence in the administration by “contributing needlessly to widespread concern and alarm” that would end up producing “all kinds of bad results.”

While the president mulled over the secretary’s ambiguous advice, Freeman explored the possibility that the milk-price increases in Minnesota—which had been undertaken simultaneously by several dairy cooperatives—might amount to price fixing and therefore be a violation of federal antitrust statutes.
Freeman was briefed on this angle by Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale—who had been appointed to the job by Freeman himself when he was governor of the state. Mondale reported that public worries over fallout-contaminated milk in Minnesota were being used as a “cover” for the price increase by milk suppliers.

By November 1962, the government had decided to retroactively redefine its own radiation guidelines so as to remove the idea that they had anything to do with public safety. The Federal Radiation Council now torturously maintained that there was no conceivable health risk to people from fallout even at radiation levels many times greater than the guides’ recommendations. In fact, people were advised to henceforth consider the guides not as “a dividing line between safety and danger in actual radiation situations.” Nor did exceeding the guides necessarily mean that protective action was required. Instead, the guides were to be used only as indicators for when “detailed evaluation” of radiation exposure was warranted. The Federal Radiation
Council declared itself ready and willing
when requested
to provide “consultation and technical assistance” in the apparently unlikely event that there was concern about radioactive fallout “in any part of the country”—an astonishing claim given that there was concern about radioactive fallout everywhere in the country.

The growing and pervasive threat from radioactive fallout—and the government’s dodgy response to it—so closely mirrored what was happening with pesticides that Carson decided to make the connection explicit early in
Silent Spring
. People couldn’t see radiation. Sometimes they couldn’t even see the fallout that carried it across the sky and eventually back to earth. But they could understand the dangers of an invisible poison that was everywhere, and whose effects could last for years or even generations. If one considered the whole long history of life on earth, Carson wrote, it was a story in which all living things responded to and were a product of their environment. Evolution was the steady maintenance of a biosphere in harmony with prevailing conditions. Only recently—within the “moment of time represented by the present century”—had one species managed to turn this agreeable relationship around and begun to effect change in the other direction. Carson thought it a bitter irony that the evolution of life on earth, which had unfolded over eons, could be so shattered as to make its continuation uncertain:

Just as it had done with
The Sea Around Us
and
The Edge of the Sea
, the
New Yorker
’s serialization of
Silent Spring
generated a tremendous response, and anticipation of the book’s publication in September soared. This time, however, a noticeable portion of the reaction was negative.
The Michigan Department of Agriculture took strong exception to Carson’s characterization of its spraying efforts against the Japanese beetle with the insecticide aldrin. The campaign had been carried out over some twenty-seven thousand acres, including the suburbs of Detroit, in 1959. Aldrin was dropped from low-flying airplanes, and within days citizens reported finding alarming numbers of dead and dying birds.

Carson had written that the beetle wasn’t a problem in need of such a heavy-handed response and that aldrin, among the most toxic of insecticides, had been chosen mainly because it was cheap. She relied on official information the U.S. Department of Agriculture had put out on the spraying program, and on the firsthand account of a prominent Michigan naturalist named Walter Nickell.
In a sarcastic letter to the
New Yorker
, an official with the Michigan Department of Agriculture said that neither Carson nor Nickell knew what they were talking about—though that was to be expected, as most articles taking a stand against pesticides were crammed with “scientific errors, half truths, oblique and irrelevant references, and in some cases outright falsehoods.” The writer did not offer any proof that Carson was guilty on any of those counts.

The
New Yorker
got an earful from executives at a number of chemical companies—all complaining of one-sidedness and Carson’s
failure to consider the economic benefits of pesticide use, especially in food production.
One salty citizen in San Francisco thought
Silent Spring
reflected Carson’s obvious “Communist sympathies,” which were shared by so many writers “these days.” He said anyone could live “without birds and animals,” but not without business. The whole thing, he thought, must be some kind of sick attempt at humor. Inexplicably, he thought Carson was interested in destroying insects:

Another angry letter writer wondered when the
New Yorker
was going to run a comparable three-part series by someone competent to “refute the farrage [
sic
] of half-truths, mis-emphases and out and out misstatements” found in the
Silent Spring
articles—though he had no illusion that such a follow-up would set the record straight, as “corrections never catch up with the original untruth.” The writer’s specific objection was that Carson had treated pesticide users as soulless technicians with no regard for the preservation of wildlife or the protection of human health.