The Price of Progress WIP
How Radiation Fear Drove Stagnation and Made the Modern World
“Our days as a race on this planet are, at this moment, numbered,” Stephanie Mills warned in her 1969 commencement address to her graduating class.1 “And the reason for our finite, unrosy future is that we are breeding ourselves out of existence.”2
The Cold War American mind had been primed to accept prophecies of apocalypse long before Ms. Mills took the stage. The more dire the prediction of Earth’s desolation, the more it held true to the internal logic of a country whose imagination had been seared with towering fireballs just five years prior.3
The 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test had marked the dawn of unnatural extinction-- born not by nature’s caprice but by willful devastation.4 With nuclear weapons now wielded by both world powers, man’s fate hinged on his ability to contain his own dark impulses.
A cohort of scientists, skeptical of man’s capacity for self-restraint, embarked on a crusade against nuclear weapons testing. Well aware that the abstract and complex realities of nuclear physics and geopolitics would fail to sway the hearts and minds of the masses, they made a deliberate choice to abandon scientific objectivity. In its place, they crafted outrageous hypothetical scenarios, designed to evoke visceral terror and rally support for their noble cause.
Linus Pauling, one of the most outspoken among them, struck a chord when he went on live television to warn that the radiation from each atomic bomb test “sacrificed” 15,000 children worldwide to genetic damage.5 In private he confessed that scant data backed his audacious warnings, but such scientific trifles could be ignored if they stood in the way of a good scare story - such is the flexible morality of world-saving activism.6
Public anxiety stoked by scientific agitators like Pauling quickly galvanized political action. In 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed, ending the atomic trials. However, the fear of a world ravaged by man’s creations, far from fading in the wake of the treaty, gained newfound strength in the ascendancy of the catastrophizing environmentalists.
Their rise marked an unsettling transition. What had begun as skepticism of mankind’s ability to serve as the responsible steward of the planet had now devolved into outright misanthropy. The early environmentalists sought to castrate man-- both metaphorically, through stringent regulations on human activity, and literally, through the imposition of restrictions on procreation. Their efforts yielded horrific success - the measures they championed were little short of genocidal in their implications.
The movement quickly gained traction nationally and a wave of new laws aimed at slowing down growth were enacted in the early 1970s. At the heart of this bold vision lay a ruthless premise: to stop man’s ability to destroy, one must take away his ability to create.
It was in this context that 21-year-old Stephanie Mills did the unthinkable for her time in publicly renouncing motherhood.7
While she credits Paul Ehrlich's work, The Population Bomb, for inspiring her speech, her convictions drew on a deeper well of existential dread that had haunted her since childhood. "Living with the possibility of the bomb," she later reflected, "is foundational to this idea that human extinction has been put within human grasp.”8
When Ms. Mills ominously proclaimed that population growth would spell mankind's ruin - that progress would be our downfall - her words of revelation merely articulated fears that had already taken root. Her proclamation confirmed the deepest anxiety of the era: that technology was an uncontrollable force destined to be civilization’s undoing.
This fear, awakened in the atomic age with the emergence of radiation and exemplified by the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism, has fundamentally reshaped humanity’s understanding of both nature and our place within it. The myth of progress, once a powerful schema propelling our collective aspirations toward an ever-brighter future, underwent a radical transformation
The atomic bomb revealed nature not as a force to be conquered, but as something that could be utterly destroyed by human innovation. Through this victimhood, nature acquired a kind of sacred status, leading to movements like environmentalism that took on quasi-religious qualities in their mission to protect it from human technological power.
This fundamental shift has ultimately undermined the spirit of invention and discovery that has defined the past two centuries of Western history. The transformation of the myth of progress has ushered in an era of scientific and technological stagnation, as the fear of humanity's own destructive capabilities now dominates our time.
Science and Mythology
From the Enlightenment through the modernist era, humanity imagined its relationship with nature through a mythology clothed in the language of reason rather than religion. Science and technology became more than mere tools; they were transformed into sacred instruments of transcendence, promising to elevate humanity above the constraints of the natural world.
This elevation of scientific pursuit to religious significance is vividly captured in Francis Bacon's declaration that we must "put nature on a rack and torture from her her secrets” captures the Enlightenment view of nature as an oppressor that must be overcome. Science became the means by which nature's mysteries would be forcibly extracted, her laws laid bare for the betterment of mankind. The scientist replaced the priest as the mediator between humanity and the fundamental truths of existence.
I call this framework "the myth of progress," though we must understand that "myth" here doesn't mean "fiction." Myths are, in a profound sense, more true than truth itself - they are the foundations upon which we build our understanding of truth. These psychosocial schemas shape how we interpret facts, define our collective identity, and establish our mission as a society. They are the stories through which we make meaning of our existence.
The mythological nature of science becomes clear when we examine watershed moments like Darwin's theory of evolution. While we consider Darwin's findings purely scientific, they served a dual function: both as empirical discovery and as a new origin story that fundamentally reshaped humanity's self-conception. By situating humans among the animals and replacing God with natural selection as our creator, Darwin's theory eliminated Christian deification as the legitimate path to transcendence. Instead, transcendence became redefined as mastery over the natural world - achievement within the material realm rather than escape from it.
Darwin's impact extended beyond our understanding of human origins to reshape our very conception of how the world changes. Particularly in the pre-war period, progress itself came to be seen as a form of evolution - natural, inevitable, and ever-ascending. We believed we were destined for constant improvement: bigger cities, better machines, more of everything. Technology would advance like an organism adapting to its environment, each innovation building upon the last in an unstoppable march toward perfection.
Radiation and Disorder: The First Manmade Diease
The myth of progress9, born from the Enlightenment's embrace of pagan scientism, maintains that through the force of human rationality and the power of his creativity, man can liberate himself from the limitations posed by nature and religion alike.1011
During the Enlightenment, nothing was considered greater than man and his deeds. The pursuit of scientific and technological advancement became a sacred endeavor, with technology seen as a manifestation of man's godlike potential to shape reality according to his will. Each new scientific discovery and technological invention was celebrated as a triumphant step toward a glorious future in which the secrets of nature would be forcibly extracted, her mysteries laid bare and harnessed for the betterment of all.12
Technology’s promise of utopia began undergoing decay when innovation proved just as capable of industrializing death as revolutionizing life.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, warfare took increasingly more devastating potentials. At the peak of this unsettling progression stood a weapon that held a potency matched by no other: the atom bomb, the pinnacle of human ingenuity and technological progress… yet also the carrier of radiation, that insidious force within the perfection of fission's symmetry.
Nature is the ultimate force of entropy, the great leveler that breaks down form. In the face of disaster, our cities crumble to dust; when disease strikes, our bodies deteriorate and decay; and in death we are reduced to dust. Nature dissolves the boundaries between order and chaos.
Subconsciously, we know that chaos is an irrepressible element of nature no matter how hard we strive to restrain her. But with the splitting of the atom emerged a force that demonstrated the harsh truth of nature’s superiority vividly: radiation.
Radiation is the perfected symbol of disorder. Invisible, inaudible, intangible-- radiation still pulls living cells apart one by one.
The emergence of this destructive force through the very tool we had used to subdue nature - scientific technology - is a twist of demonic irony.
Hundreds of 1950s science fiction films were born by the unholy matrimony between technology and disorder. Once the ominous click of the geiger counter was heard, any transformation was permissible. Click. Click. Click. Everything from giant bugs13 to prehistoric beasts reawakened from oceanic depths14 were transmuted by radiation. Nature perverted into a monstrous entity, colossal and catastrophic, while humanity stood diminished—minuscule, powerless, and infantilized.15
Our ultimate progressive breakthrough had bred the ultimate regression: radiation fear evokes archaic anxiety of primordial nature, where her naturalistic forces elude our comprehension, let alone control.
Radioactive Fallout and the Making of a Global Crisis
On the fateful morning of March 1st, 1954, atomic power once again proved its propensity for escaping our grasp. That morning, a routine thermonuclear bomb test was scheduled to take place on Bikini Atoll, a tiny speck of land off the coast of Japan.
For weeks, the Atomic Energy Commissions scientists had deliberated, carefully calculating the bomb’s release of force to be 5 megatons upon detonation, but a previously unknown “tritium bonus” effect threw off their estimates, triggering a chain reaction that would amplify the bomb’s power far beyond their expectations.
The Castle Bravo detonation ultimately unleashed 15 megatons of force-- about 1000 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The massive, runaway blast unfurled a mushroom cloud over 6 miles high and left a crater over a mile wide carved into the reef. Vast amounts of radioactive fallout were unintentionally spewed into the sky and rained down over 7,000 square miles of the surrounding Pacific as the horrified scientists helplessly watched their calculations go terribly wrong.
That same morning, a Japanese fishing vessel named the Lucky Dragon had drifted perilously close to the exclusion zone of the Castle Bravo test site. As the first black clouds of fallout swept eastward, the small wooden boat’s twenty-one man crew became unwitting witnesses to the unfolding disaster. Though all would become violently ill with radiation sickness - one perished weeks later- it was not primarily their misfortune that galvanized American attention.16 Rather, it was tuna they had hauled aboard painted ghastly gray with radioactive ash.
The Lucky Dragon’s spectral catch headlined across American news media for weeks that spring - no family could look at a tuna the same way again. Plates of tuna salad sandwiches provoked visions of radioactive corpses caught in the dying Pacific, sprinkling tables with strontium-90 and cesium-137. Panicked consumers recoiled en masse, provoking tuna market prices to plunge by nearly 60% by the end of March.
In the midst of this turmoil, it would be the field of classic genetics that transformed the fallout contamination at Castle Bravo into a global hazard.
The geneticists theorized that radiation inflicted gradual genetic damage, which, though imperceptible to any individual or their immediate descendants, accumulated within an entire global population. Faults invisible today could propagate silently down a lineage, blooming as abnormalities generations hence. There existed no harmless radiation exposure according to this framework; even minuscule exposure stacked inexplicably. With no apparent refuge, the only calculus was a morbid ledger tallying these molecular debts incurred by each nuclear test.
Or so the theory went; there was no data to support their theory of a global radiation hazard-- nevermind that the amount of radiation emitted by nuclear bombs during the peak testing year of 1963 matched that of the normal fluctuations of background radiation.
Alfred Sturtevant, a prodigious geneticist, balked at the Atomic Energy Commission’s placating announcement that “no harm” would befall the public following the Castle Bravo debacle. In his speech for the American Advancement of Sciences, he declared that “there is no possible escape from the conclusion” that the bombs already detonated would result in “the production of numerous defective individuals” in the unborn future.
That fall of 1954, the Alsop Brother’s media group took Sturtevant’s sober warnings of “numerous defects” and recklessly extrapolated predictions of literal “monsters” emerging from human populations around the globe.
While the complexities of statistical mutations accumulating over generations left lay audiences perplexed, the comparison to colossal rampaging beasts from B-movies instinctively struck a chord. With one inflammatory act of misinterpretation, speculative science fiction appeared perched on the verge of collapsing into reality - waiting only for the next atomic catalyst.
Where the Alsop Brothers left off in spinning science fiction into sensational headlines, Linus Pauling eagerly grabbed the baton. Chemist by trade and incendiary by noble calling, he marched into the public forum armed with shock-value statistics.
In the Spring of 1957, Pauling released disturbing casualty projections in the wake of the first British H-Bomb test. His estimations reached as high as 100,000 hypothetical deaths globally, plus 20,000 children born with defects in the next generation worldwide.
When pressed about his audacious figures, Pauling conceded that there was “considerable uncertainty” around such speculative quantification17 Forget the uncertainty and forge ahead, virtuous crusader! As his wife Ava Helen later underscored, the entire body of scientific contributions that had landed Pauling a Nobel laureate would amount to nothing if the world was destroyed by nuclear annihilation.18
Pauling’s hypothetical body count aimed not at advancing science but at mobilizing sentiment. What use was sticking to scientific objectivity if it failed to arrest catastrophe? No, the dull blade of scientific precision would not do now, only pseudo-scientific moral pleadings stood a chance at Saving the World.
1963 and the Turn Away From Progress; Technology as the Forbidden Act
In a 1958 debate aired on television with Los Alamos scientist Edward Teller, Linus Pauling once more railed against nuclear testing, decrying the loss of 15,000 children with each new detonation. But when Teller demurred in the name of progress, he scarcely realized the monumental implications couched within his rebuttal.
“If we were to proceed in everything with as great a caution as we are proceeding in the case of nuclear testing, there would be very little progress in the world,” Teller argued, his voice cutting through the hysteria enveloping the debate. His stance was unambiguous: the future could not wait for hand-wringing.
In the end, the moralistic panic sparked by scientific crusaders like Pauling overwhelmed all pragmatic voices of reason. By 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed - and with it faded hopes of scientific technology as society’s savior.
Where once human progress was bounded only by scientific vision, now science itself faced binding regulation. In the span of a few short years, scientists and inventors went from being hailed as enlightened pioneers to being seen as problematic Faustian bargainers requiring moral governors.
1963 marked a turning point in the American cultural zeitgeist, setting the stage for the onset of technological and scientific stagnation.
The atomic age had unleashed a primal dread, awakening an ancient terror that had long lain dormant. This fear, far more profound than the mere destructive potential of the atomic bomb, sprang from the most deeply rooted of human anxieties - the eternal motif of divine retribution for transgressions against the natural order.
The 20th century bore witness to the most haunting manifestation of the ancient Greek pattern of free will to hubris to tragedy. The splitting of the atom unleashed radiation - a force that came to embody the very essence of nature’s untamable power. Born from the apex of our scientific and technological triumphs, this invisible, yet all pervasive power, became a terrifying emblem of the consequences that befall those who dare to overstep the boundaries set by the natural world.
Radiation profoundly reshaped our understanding of the human creative impulse, the catalyst that had given rise to the marvels of technology. This core aspect of human nature, once revered, now found itself shrouded in apprehension. The act of creation itself now seemed to constitute an affront to the immutable laws of natural order, an open invitation for nature’s wrath.
Overpopulation Hysteria: Creation as Destruction
It was this primal terror of divine retribution that ecologist Paul Elrich tapped into with his regrettably influential 1968 work, The Population Bomb.19
In striking parallel to the anti-nuclear crusader of the previous decade, Ehrlich deployed hyperbolic projections of mass starvation and societal collapse to shock readers into action. And what constituted the overreach against nature that had brought humanity to this critical juncture? Breeding. Elrich radically recast the most fundamental aspect of the human creative instinct - procreation - as an act of destruction.
The venerable ecologist had gazed just 15 years ahead into destiny’s jaws and beheld the horrific climax of humanity’s growth. The 1960s were the fateful tipping point whence the teeming human swarm would finally breed past the carrying capacity of Mother Earth.
And what a cataclysmic price humanity would pay for its reckless defiance of nature’s boundaries!
Elrich foresaw a world plunged into a catastrophic nightmare: a planet convulsed by food riots as crops withered before the ravenous hordes, cities imploding like dying stars under the crushing weight of the human throng, governments evaporating into the void of anarchy, financial markets plummeting into oblivion, and pollution engulfing the earth in a final, suffocating embrace.
The apocalypse, Elrich assured us, was imminent, and humanity's fate was sealed.20
What, precisely, set this prophet of apart from the countless other raving zealots who had peddled their doomsday predictions throughout history? The answer, it seemed, lay in the hallowed halls of academia, where Ehrlich's dire predictions were cloaked in the respectable garb of scientific expertise, lending them an aura of unassailable legitimacy.
Evidence, once again, found itself relegated to the backseat as scientific scare stories took the wheel in the race to mobilize public sentiment. The tide of overpopulation hysteria, now an unstoppable force, surged across the globe in the late 1960s, leaving reason and restraint in its wake.
The imperative to save the planet eclipsed all else - including man himself.
With Paul Elrich as their High Priest, his fervent disciples set in motion a sweeping population control holocaust: a systematic campaign of forced sterilization, mass abortion, and infanticide that processed human lives like raw materials on a conveyor belt.
Stephanie Mills became famous overnight, and delivered 80 speeches within a single dizzying year. source: Earth Days, a PBS documentary
Beginning in 1952, Americans were able to watch broadcasted tests from their televisions in their own homes, and many did.
Source: The Dragon’s Tail, Robert A. Jacobs, pg 14
in Linus Pauling’s 1958 debate with Edward Teller, he claimed: "Russia and america have enough bombs to end the world.”
Whether or not we literally could end the world with atomic weapons is irrelevant, as the threat seemed tangibly real to Americans during the atomic age.
“To carry on the tests means that as I have said according to the best estimates of geneticists, all of who agree, 15000 children are sacrificed for every large bomb tested that produces stratospheric radioactivity.” - Linus Pauling, televised debate with Edward Teller, 1958.
link to source: https://youtube.com / watch?v=txky1yMFzcU&t=5s
Linus Pauling was marginalized within the U.S. scientific community. His fellow scientists though he was tainting science with sensationalism, and also criticized him for being personally arrogant and politically naive. Even the atomic scientists in the anti-testing movement frowned upon Pauling.
Source: RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT, THE POLITICS OF RISK, AND THE MAKING OF A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS, 1954-1963, Toshihiro Higuchi, pg 205
1969 was the tail end of the Baby Boom, after all!
Earth Days, a PBS documentary
The modern era's assertion that myths and religion have no influence on human culture is a fallacy. Myths are psychological schemas, whose symbols organize conscious and unconscious activity within both culture and individuals. They continue to be the primary force that guides human behavior and are present in all political, intellectual, and cultural movements.
The modern social sciences are biased toward rationality and essentially anti-religious. Academe - and indeed modern culture, as the academic establishment serves as the high priests of the day - is largely blind to any process that emerges from unconscious processes within cultures or within individuals.
The Enlightenment's greatest irony lies in its assertion that rationality reigns supreme, a notion swiftly undermined by the atrocities of the 20th century.
The modern era grapples with a dilemma: we are beholden to myths that elude our awareness. Despite Sigmund Freud's early recognition of human complexity in the 1920s, contemporary society struggles to come to terms with the uncomfortable truth of the unconscious mind's influence.
The fallacy that humanity can transcend its relationship with nature and religion persists, exerting significant influence over academia and modern culture.
From René Descartes to contemporary thinkers like Judith Butler, the quest for liberation from nature has remained a central philosophical concern. Descartes' portrayal of the body as a mechanistic extension and Butler's concept of gender as performative illustrate this ongoing struggle. Similarly, the insistence on freedom from religion has lead to nothing more than the emergence of debilitated forms of worship and idolatry that lead us nowhere closer to divine understanding.
Man will never be free from religion, nor will he ever be free from nature, as both serve as the primary and foundational to human culture and human biology.
During the enlightenment, domination of nature and scientific experimentation are never distinct, as illustrated by Francis Bacon’s works and language.
See the 1954 movie, Them!
See the 1954 movie, Godzilla: the King of Monsters
In these movies, all of the beasts emerge from the enclosed, the primordial womb of nature: oceanic depths, caverns, tunnels alike. Spencer Weart, author of Nuclear Fear, correctly identifies this and theorizes that the meaning the symbols of the monsters hold is of man's failed attempt at rebirth through the atom bomb, and that in all cases the natural is a displacement for the awakening of the primitive and bestial in man. I disagree- Wehart overlooks the eternal dynamic of man’s flight from and capture by nature.
What is most convincing is that in The Incredible Shrinking Man, one of the only movies that does not introduce beasts of nature transformed into gigantic shape, the plot revolves around a man who comes into contact with radiation. He shrinks and is made impotent by his transformation— his life quickly falls apart. Here we see nothing bestial in man, only infantilization.
The natural beasts of the 1950s B movies symbolize nature’s power itself.
It was the Bravo test that put the word fallout into the public vocabulary.
Source: The Dragon’s Tail, Robert A. Jacobs, pg 10
RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT, THE POLITICS OF RISK, AND THE MAKING OF A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS, 1954-1963, Toshihiro Higuchi, pg 206
“in talking with him thought that of course it was important that he do his work, but if the world were destroyed, then the work would not be of any value, so he should take part of his time and devote it to peace work, as we called it.” Ava Helen, wife of Linus Pauling
Source: Linus Pauling Crusading Scientist, a PBS Nova Documentary
The very title of his book, with its evocative use of the word “bomb,” underscores the connection between the existential fears of the atomic age and fears of overpopulation.
According to the first edition of The Population Bomb, “In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
source: https://www.mdpolicy.org/research/detail/a-doomsday-prophesy-50-years-later