Embracing Mystery: Radiation Risks and Popular Science Writing in the Early Cold War

• Published in: Journal of the history of biology Vol. 54; no. 1; pp. 127 - 141
• Main Author: Hecht, David K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-04-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Cold War; History; History of medicine and histology; History of Science; Original Research; Philosophy of Biology; War; Risk; Popular culture; Nuclear; Narrative; Radiation
• ISSN: 0022-5010; 1573-0387
• DOI: 10.1007/s10739-021-09629-6

Narrative form is crucial to the understanding of science in popular culture. This is particularly true with subjects such as radiation, in which the technical details at hand are often remote from everyday experience—as well as contested or uncertain among experts. This article examines the narrative choices made by three popular texts that publicized radiation risks to the public during the Cold War: John Hersey's
Hiroshima
, David Bradley's
No Place to Hide
, and Ralph Lapp's
The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon
. It contends that each author borrowed from well-established literary genres and that this borrowing was crucial to coherence and effective messaging of the argument. At the same time, placing the arguments in such a familiar form served to blunt some of the radical potential in those same messages.