Invisible Threats and the Politics of Disaster: Three Mile Island and Covid-19

An invisible, potentially deadly threat. Elected officials saying one thing, and public health experts saying another. A citizenry hungry for information and guidance. A cultural divide between those who are afraid of the threat and those who claim to have no fear. This is the world we have inhabited since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic last March. But it is also reminiscent of a technological disaster that occurred forty years ago at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the early morning hours of March 28, 1979, a valve was mistakenly left open, permitting large amounts of water—normally used to cool the plant’s core—to escape. Temperature and radiation levels in Three Mile Island Unit Two rose, causing a partial meltdown that disabled the unit, exposing unresolved safety questions about reactor safety and galvanizing the transnational anti-nuclear movement.

While Americans watched the crisis unfold on the evening news, the men, women, and children who lived in the shadow of the reactor saw their region transformed into a scene out of a science fiction film. Civil defense coordinators handed out Geiger counters, hundreds of thermal luminescent thermometers were placed within a twenty-mile radius of the plant, and helicopters took aerial measurements of radiation. Everyone coming and going from the island wore respirators, and residents received full-body scans to track radiological exposure. On the third day of the accident, Pennsylvania governor Richard Thornburgh advised all pregnant women and children under the age of five living within a five-mile radius of the plant to leave the area. Faced with confusing and contradictory reports about the accident’s severity, residents called local radio stations, doctors’ offices, and the governor’s office in search of reliable information. For the first time in their lives, they confronted something that the nuclear industry had assured them would never happen: their bodies and those of their loved ones had become possible repositories of radioactive contamination.

In the months that followed, state and federal officials sought to reassure residents that the accident had not, in the end, posed a danger to public health. The amount of radiation released from the plant, they maintained, had never been large enough to cause biological injury in the region’s plant, animal, and human life. It is possible that in an earlier era, these reassurances might have worked, especially in a place like the Susquehanna River Valley, which was well known for its political and cultural conservatism. Most residents there were descendants of German and Scots-Irish immigrants, and the majority were Christians. The Valley was a Republican Party stronghold in the state where respect for God, family, and country was well established. If any community appeared poised to accept the official story about the accident, it was this one.

But this was not the case. The accident came at the end of a decade when public confidence in government had sharply declined. The US military disaster in Southeast Asia shattered the Cold War consensus and cast doubt on whether elected officials and experts could be trusted. The disjuncture between official reports about US military progress in Vietnam and the reality on the ground created a “credibility gap” that extended to the decade’s other upheavals. Nine months after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords that brought a formal end to the conflict in Vietnam, OPEC declared an oil embargo against the United States in retaliation for its support of Israel in the October War. Polls showed that many Americans believed that the crisis had been contrived or, alternatively, that its severity was being exaggerated by oil corporations who stood to profit from higher prices. Then, only five months after the embargo had been lifted, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency amid mounting revelations of his direct involvement in the Watergate break-in. These cascading crises deepened a collective sense that those in positions of authority could not be trusted to tell the truth.

In this climate of distrust, many local residents at Three Mile Island rejected the official story about the accident. They were convinced not only that the state had underestimated radiation releases during the crisis, but also that the plant posed an ongoing public health threat during ostensibly normal operations and needed to be shut down. They feared that the radiation exposure from the plant had led to higher rates of cancer, blood disorders, infant deaths, and fertility problems in the region. The people of Three Mile Island wrote letters to elected officials, provided testimony at public hearings, formed protest groups, filed class action lawsuits against the utility that owned the plant, and traveled to the nation’s capital to participate in antinuclear protests. Throughout these actions, they portrayed themselves as radiation victims who had been betrayed by the state.

The accident thus sheds new light on the political culture of the 1970s. That decade witnessed a standoff between those who endorsed and those who opposed the cultural revolutions embodied by movements like feminism and gay liberation. For this reason, historians often use martial language—terms like divisions, battlegrounds, and wars—to portray the contentious politics of the time. But this language obscures what the political left and right shared during these years: a growing suspicion of governmental authority. In the late 1960s, it had been activists in the antiwar, student, and Black power movements who questioned the legitimacy of the power structure. By the end of the 1970s, however, this questioning of authority had migrated into patriotic, White communities like the one at Three Mile Island. The men and women who lived near the reactor rejected labels like “radical” or “protester,” and they often took great pains to differentiate themselves from the era’s protest cultures. But after the accident, they drew on those very cultures for their inspiration. From the antiwar movement, they absorbed a picture of the government’s secrecy. From ecology, they borrowed insights about the contamination of air and water. And from the women’s and Black health movements, they drew on the idea that bodily health and illness were innately political issues. The US political terrain of the 1970s might have resembled a warzone, but it was one in which concepts and insights moved more freely across the battlefield than has often been appreciated.

Scholars have long recognized that disasters can work like x-rays, allowing us to see historical moments with greater clarity and precision. Disasters—whether natural, technological, or epidemiological—can illuminate subterranean structures, fissures, and currents that are present within a society before the disaster arrives but that remain hidden from view under ostensibly normal conditions. The current pandemic has worked this way, bringing into sharp relief the social, racial, and economic inequalities that were here long before the country’s first Covid case was diagnosed. These inequalities render some populations uniquely vulnerable to sickness, pain, and premature death. But not unlike the Three Mile Island accident four decades ago, the pandemic is also illuminating the ambiguities embedded within contemporary US politics. Those ambiguities can be hard to see when we are bombarded with social media images of healthcare workers squaring off against anti-mask protesters in the streets or groups storming statehouses to decry stay-at-home orders. But polling suggests that the reality on the ground is considerably more complicated, with a majority of Americans supporting social distancing, mask-wearing, and staying home; they believe that such measures will protect themselves and their loved ones from the virus. Indeed, given the country’s longstanding individualist ethos, it has been striking to see how quickly so many have adjusted to a new social reality in which we must act on behalf of a collective whole. Both Three Mile Island and the current pandemic remind us that in the face of an invisible threat to public health, communities respond in ways that can defy our expectations of red and blue and left and right. Disasters thus have much to offer historians who seek to uncover the contradictions that animate US political culture.

Natasha Zaretsky is a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968−1980 (2007) and Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (2018), which was named by Choice as an outstanding academic title for 2018. She is also the co-editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.