L. Rumiel

One of the things I love about studying history is examining the unintended consequences of people’s actions. As humans, this is something we constantly have to deal with. We make decisions based on factor X, Y, or Z, expecting A, or possibly B or C to occur, but, sometimes, something completely unexpected happens and, on occasion, that something is bad. This past week has been a painful lesson in how my own actions can sometimes result in an unintended and decidedly negative outcome.

The Nuclear History Matters blog has attracted an unprecedented level of attention over the past week from people outside of History 4JJ3 – according to the stats listed on worpdress, there was a 488.4% increase in website traffic for the week of March 27 and a total of 5376 viewers. Accompanying that increase in blog traffic was a focused discussion of a blog post wherein one of my students reflected on a recent tour some of us in the class took of the McMaster University Nuclear Research Reactor. Some of the comments were really great, with two coming directly from a member of the Nuclear Engineering Faculty and another from someone who runs an undergraduate laboratory for students doing research with radioactive materials (I hope I am representing that correctly), but it was not long before the blog began attracting comments from people who were angered by the post and who responded by directly attacking my student. This is why I decided to close comments and, shortly after, take down the post.

Neither of these actions ended the discussion, which, I quickly learned, had been taken elsewhere on the internet, where people could continue reading the deleted post (damn you, Google cache!) and more freely share their critiques of it, in what occasionally read like a witch hunt. This distresses me, in particular, because I created the conditions under which it was possible for this to happen. And, so, I would like to use this space to try to guide the debate away from a focus on my student and back to territory that lays the groundwork for positive future discussion between nuclear engineering and humanities students at McMaster. (I realize this sounds somewhat vague to people who are newly aware of this issue, but I have deliberately chosen to avoid directing people to the post because I would like to avoid causing my student further stress – even if my ability to do so is limited.)

One thing I thought might be helpful for me to do is explain how this course – The Nuclear Age in Global Perspective – came to exist. Something postdoctoral fellows at McMaster (at least in the History Department) are able to do is teach upper level seminars that directly overlap with their areas of research. My doctoral dissertation examined the role played by American physicians and scientists in the anti-nuclear movement during the final two decades of the Cold War. Some of the things the project explores are the role that counter-experts played in disseminating public knowledge on nuclear technology, the way they tried to shape American nuclear policy from within advocacy organizations, the contested nature of knowledge on the health effects of radiation exposure, the secrecy (and lack of transparency) within the American nuclear program, and what, if anything, the groups had to offer the broader anti-nuclear movement that was special. One of the groups I studied was the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group of physicists and engineers who initially formed in 1969 because they were concerned about what looked like a wholesale redirection of American scientific resources towards military research and development. Founded on the MIT campus, the group challenged the appropriateness of the university as a place where anti-ballistic missile technology was being developed. In the 1970s, the group’s concerns shifted towards nuclear power technology, in particular, the Atomic Energy Commission’s plans to adopt an Emergency Core Cooling System design that, according to the group, had significant design flaws and was untested. In the 1980s, the group expanded its focus to include U.S. Energy Policy, broadly, technological critiques of the Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars), and arms control, more generally. People following (or participating in) expert discussions on nuclear technology in the aftermath of Fukushima may be familiar with their continued advocacy work in the area of commercial nuclear power safety. My postdoctoral research focuses on the work of ecologists and biologists from the University of Washington during the American nuclear weapons testing program in the Marshall Islands. This project examines questions like: how was it that a university department developed a laboratory that was expressly used for carrying out military research? What did the scientists working for this laboratory think about their work? How did their research shape public knowledge on the dangers of fallout and radiation exposure? What was it like to be on a research expedition in the Marshall Islands? And…

Are you sleeping yet? My point in outlining my research areas is so that people know more about what kinds of topics informed my approach to creating a course on the Nuclear Age. I never had the opportunity to take an actual course in nuclear history during my many years as a student. Rather, it was through the study of things like American foreign policy, social history, the history of science, medicine, and technology, and my own research that I engaged with nuclear history. Hence, the idea for a course on the Global History of Nukes was born. Some of the topics explored in the course are the Manhattan Project, the role of scientists in the decision to pursue the a-bomb project, the U.S. reasoning for dropping the bomb on Japan, the effects of the bomb on American and Japanese society and culture, the international history of the atoms for peace program, how, if at all, nuclear weapons transformed global diplomatic relations (Can you believe someone actually argues that they didn’t?!?), the anti-nuclear movement, the relationship between nuclear technology and nationalism, the legacy of nuclear contamination and nuclear waste, and reasons for the emergence of new nuclear nations/powers.

One of the criticisms I have seen circulating about this course is that I am somehow biased or selective in what I have been teaching my students. To this, I answer, absolutely! I have included in the course a list of topics that I think are necessary (i.e. you can’t have a course on the nuclear age without discussing the Manhattan Project or the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan), others that are interesting to me and that I wanted to know more about, and still others that are near and dear to my heart. This is the beauty of universities, where scholars are given the freedom to define the contents of their curriculum and where students have an opportunity to learn from many different teachers.

My decision to create a public blog and make student blogging a requirement for the course was related to my interest in using social media as a tool to share with and engage the public in historical research. I also saw in the blog an opportunity for students to have fun, to experiment with less formal (more creative) ways of writing about history, and continue talking to one another outside of the classroom. (The name Nuclear History Matters was adapted from a blog run by a number of my colleagues who are also interested in public engagement – their tagline is History Matters.) Blogging about nuclear history is something that I myself have played around (very minimally) with since the Fukushima nuclear reactor accident started unfolding in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan one year ago. I did this because the accident was upsetting, because I was frustrated with how nuclear experts talked about the accident, and because I felt like public discussions of nuclear technology (of which there were so many all of the sudden) might be enriched by some examination of nuclear history. And it was for this final reason that I decided to extend the exercise of blogging to this course. I must admit, though, that I didn’t really think many people (beyond my circle of colleagues and friends and my students’ circle of colleagues and friends) would read it. I was wrong.

The point that I think has been largely lost in the discussion of the Nuclear Reactor blog post is that this is a student blog. These are undergraduate students who are grappling with issues that are complex and for most of them these topics are new. One commenter on the post noted their irritation that a humanities student was allowed to say something that was false (concrete is porous) by drawing a parallel: “You wouldn’t let an engineer get away with saying “While I have no knowledge of 20th century history whatsoever, it seems like Joe McCarthy may have been on to something!” My response was this: “The exercise that students are asked to participate in is sharing their reactions to the readings (or, in this case, to the nuclear reactor tour that some of them attended). They are undergraduate students, *reacting* to things that they have encountered in their education. They are given leeway in how they react and they are being evaluated on their ability to write interesting, thought provoking, coherent, and well-written blog posts. One of the central goals of a humanities education is to develop the ability to think and write about complex ideas, events, what have you.” People who read the comments saw that I did evaluate portions of the blog post, correcting mistakes and misinterpretations in the comments section, although not the sentence about concrete: 1) because I’m not an expert in materials science and 2) because I understood the *intent* of the sentence differently than many others – as a question, i.e. what the hell happens to concrete when a nuclear reactor melts down? I work very hard to teach my students that what they say and write (and how they say it and write it) matters, so they need to think carefully about how they piece words, thoughts, and ideas together. But sometimes the things students do along the way to developing those skills are clumsy and awkward. It is part of learning and they do not deserve to be scorned if they make mistakes. The person who has had to endure this attack is a very thoughtful, bright, intellectually curious, and private person.

This is what I regret: creating a situation where one of my students was victimized for something that they wrote, for fulfilling the requirements of this course. It is not what I intended, but it is what has happened. Although I did note with some relief that the discussion evolved a bit over the weekend to focus on the issues raised in the post. Some even admonished their peers for so vociferously targeting this student. And, I hope that after reading this post more people will rethink their approach to the discussion thus far.

So, where do we go from here? It’s really up to you. As I mentioned in the comments to the Nuclear Reactor blog post, I do have one student who is very interested in opening the lines of communication between the Engineering Physics Department and humanities students, but I will leave it to him to make his intentions publicly known. I also received a private email from a McMaster engineering student who is interested in opening the lines of communication, so perhaps there is interest. But what do students want to talk about? One of the questions that arose after our class tour of the McMaster nuclear reactor related to the reactor’s future. When will it have to be decommissioned? On a related note: How old is too old? Will there ever be funds to build a new reactor? If there aren’t plans to build a new reactor, how will that affect engineering physics at McMaster? Other questions that have arisen in this course, which are related: What makes someone believe in the safety of nuclear technology and others to fear it? Most of the questions I have seen posed by engineering and science folks relate to whether or not someone who doesn’t have a background in science has the right to offer opinions on nuclear technology. Another person wondered whether or not there was value in discussing the relative harm caused by nuclear reactor accidents like the one in Fukushima and the effects of an accident like the BP oil spill. Still another wondered whether or not there was such a thing as too much doubt among non-scientists when it came to accepting the assessments of experts.

If people want to continue this conversation in the comments section, they are free to do so – although I must admit that I am a bit daunted by it. But please keep in mind that this blog is an extension of my classroom and I will not allow comments that are hateful or which seek to derail the discussion past moderation. I think a good guide would be for people to consider whether or not they would say what they are saying in a classroom discussion among their peers. If the answer is no, you should probably avoid saying it. I realize that people will disagree with how I evaluate various comments and that’s fine. I am human and I will be using my discretion.

I’ll leave you with a comment (originally posted on the now deleted blog post) made by my student, which I think is a great beginning for promoting understanding (and tolerance) across the disciplinary divide between engineers and historians studying nuclear technology.

“Hi All,

As a student of Dr. Rumiel’s class I would like to state our “indoctrination” as I see it, for I certainly consider it to be such (to anyone on the science end of the spectrum, feel free to correct me if you feel I am misconstruing your fields). But that is not an indictment of Dr. Rumiel or anyone else, teacher or pupil. Indoctrination to me is essentially a synonym for bias. These words have slightly different connotations yes, and indeed the connotations are different from person to person, meaning that using the word is almost equal to using a meaningless symbol since there is no agreement (and language is fundamentally a social convention).

We are history students, reading articles concerning events, practices, and procedures from decades past. An intuitive aspect of history is that it occurs through time, and as such we have a tendency to learn it thus, beginning at the beginning as it were. We narrow it down by choosing a subject around which to investigate, but we still have an overwhelming tendency to follow the temporal progression.

As such, the difference between how nuclear engineers and how history students go through the learning process as that they begin at opposite ends of the temporal spectrum (generally speaking). The engineer is first introduced by learning the most up-to-date scientific fundamentals about the atom and subatomic particles. Building up an exceptional base of

working knowledge with notions of statistical and probabilistic truth gives them a certain amount of skill in “reading” the numbers. The numbers, probabilities and statistics mean much more to them than they do to other members of the populous. Combine this with up-to-date learning, and the engineer (which it should be noted is being used as a general example of a “scientist/mathematician”) is able to rationalize the state of the discipline because they trust. They trust the numbers, and they trust the people who taught them the numbers (as we’ve all been brought up in education systems where we are rewarded by following authority’s line, historians, engineers, scientists and everyone else). They’ve seen that it can be safe, it’s been safe for them up until this point, and they have many reasons to believe that it will continue to be so (reasons that we don’t understand because we can’t read the numbers).

Historians, on the other hand, begin looking at the beginning, when the collective knowledge about radiation and its effects on the physical and biological environment was comparatively abysmal, and when communication was more limited, meaning that less oversight was possible because fewer people could even see what was happening (literally, in many ways in the case of nuclear technology). Historians must constantly be careful not to project our current knowledge onto people in the past and not to project the speed of our current communicative abilities on that time period either. This becomes more difficult when the subject is something like science which becomes inherently complex, and where it therefore takes much time for information to disseminate. Thus the historian reads of studies done in the 1950s that show exceptionally dangerous properties of radiation (one example of which was done by a scientist who then turned around and told the public the exact opposite, then complained of a lack of honesty in reporting), and then reads of how this knowledge was “ignored,” (whether or not we can call it ignorance depends on how stupid each individual in the past was, something that is generally difficult to ascertain and not frequently practiced). This does the exact opposite of the engineer’s curriculum, it cultivates distrust. Distrust in the numbers that rationalized the discourses of the past, distrust of the people who doled out those numbers and told us what they were supposed to mean. Historians, not understanding numbers, see no meaning in them and are wary of being told what they mean by those in “the know.” (I feel I must make a sidenote here in defence on the humanities and a humanistic education, simply by cautioning the scientists that to us, science does not appear so objective or hallowed because it must interact with other institutions which I think we would all agree are not objective, like politics and universities. Learning something from the basis of math, physics, and engineering guarantees us nothing when we are given no guarantees that these forms of knowledge will be used wisely).

But both communities are in the know. Both historians and engineers, social and hard scientists have valid knowledge which can contribute to the discussion. Under the banner of democracy each person has something to say, and because of the nature of the subject matter (radiation, which penetrates invisibly and invasively, and as Barry Diacon points out [with a nice example that is easy to understand, though still potentially tricky to interpret], we are all exposed to every single second of our lives) everyone is an interested party. We are interested because we are affected, even if negligibly for now. With this in mind, we must work for mutual education. Scientists, when you use your numbers, please try and remember what it was like to not know what they meant (for some it may be exceptionally hard because they’ve always understood numbers in a more fundamental way than others, but these people should recognize that not everyone sees the meaning behind those symbols). The numbers need to be explained to us, in as many ways as possible because we are unfamiliar with them, and the more explanations, the more connections we may draw. Historians, when you talk about anything in the past (the farther back the more you ought to remember this point) try to remember that the scientists have not read the obscure articles that we have (for they are extremely obscure, even for someone working within the industries that they are about, simply because of the insane amount of information that exists) and have spent their time learning about how to make science go right, not about how it goes wrong.

Let’s take our time. Let’s discuss calmly, rather than assuming that we understand the words coming out of each others’ mouths.”