Thesis ID: CBB898540521

Irradiating Eden: The El Verde Experiment and the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear prospecting in Latin America, 1954-1970 (2016)

unapi

With this thesis, I connect the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s large-scale ecological research in the El Verde rainforest in Puerto Rico during the 1960s to an experimental nuclear weapons program known as Project Plowshare. I show how the AEC masked a bureaucratic investigation at El Verde as a strictly academic pursuit. I argue that the AEC and its contracted scientists at the Puerto Rico Nuclear Center, led by the pioneering systems ecologist, Howard T. Odum, conducted perverse experiments using highly radioactive sources and isotopes to damage and monitor tropical biota, and predict how radioactive elements would percolate through waterways and into food webs in rainforests following nuclear detonations. I contend that El Verde was a continuation of research linked to the Plowshare program—a program contested in the United States—which American nuclear prospectors expanded into Puerto Rico and Latin America as they planned a nuclear-blasted transoceanic canal in Panama.

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Citation URI
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Authors & Contributors
Higuchi, Toshihiro
Rand, Lisa Ruth
Hideyuki Hirakawa
Candela, Andrea
MacDowell, Laurel Sefton
Verhoff, Gwendolyn
Concepts
Nuclear and radioactive waste
Pollution, radioactive
Nuclear testing
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Science and politics
Radioactivity
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
20th century
Places
United States
Japan
Soviet Union
Nevada (U.S.)
Germany
France
Institutions
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; Partial Test Ban Treaty; Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963)
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
United States. Atomic Energy Commission
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
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