The Politics of Radiation Illness and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge after Hiroshima/Nagasaki

The 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have resulted in conflicting understandings of radiation illness. On the one hand, the longitudinal studies conducted by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission have indicated that radiation effects on humans are limited. On the other, nation states’ definitions of illness have varied considerably depending on nationality, race, and ethnicity of those affected. The Japanese government, the first to recognize the illness in the 1950s and 1960s, has gradually expanded the definition of it, including not only physical disorders but also psychosocial disabilities. In response to Korean survivors’ outcry, the Japanese government also began to issue compensation in the late 1970s for non-Japanese survivors, although amounts fell short of those offered to Japanese survivors. By the early 2000s, these “second-class” survivors included South Korean, US, Brazilian, Peruvian, and Bolivian nationals. The US government, by contrast, did not begin to recognize radiation illness until the 1980s, providing limited compensation for US veterans irradiated during the US occupation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and 1946. In the 1990s, the benefits were extended to Native Americans irradiated in uranium mines during the Cold War. And yet, the US definition of radiation illness remained much narrower than its Japanese counterpart, allowing only a handful of cancers to count; the burden of proof was placed almost exclusively on radiation survivors, severely curtailing the benefits’ accessibility. Moreover, Asian American survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of them US citizens by birth, were completely left out of the compensation. By showing these inconsistencies, my paper argues that medico-scientific definitions have played strikingly limited roles in defining both radiation illness and radiation survivors. Given the considerable outlay of funds, medico-scientific research might be seen as one of the most wasted resources of the nuclear age.