No.85 Seminar ： Birth of a Global Environmental Problem: Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing and Science and Politics on Global Fallout
- Toshihiro Higuchi (The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research)
- 2014/10/21 4:00pm
- The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research (iCeMS West Wing 2F, Seminar Room)
- Japanese
Summary
Planet Earth has been covered, slightly but still to a detectable extent, by radioactive fallout from the past nuclear weapons tests conducted in the atmosphere. This globally-scattered radioactive fallout (global fallout) is a heritage of the Cold War when nuclear weapons states and their allies pursued “peace through nuclear superiority.” The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, agreed on by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union as part of arms control, is the first international agreement that has successfully regulated pollutants worldwide. When radioactive fallout began to envelop the world, however, scientific knowledge about its environmental distribution and biological effects was uncertain, with a nuclear test ban politically controversial. Why did this uncertain and controversial global fallout came to be recognized as a “problem” and ultimately solved? In this talk, I will focus on interactions between science and politics and explain, based on U.S., ! British, and Soviet documents, how the interpretation of scientific uncertainty and political stakes transformed simultaneously in the course of the Cold War. I will conclude by exploring what the historical experience of global fallout can tell us about global environmental problems of our time.