Possible Instructional Themes

Radiation and U.S. History

Radium Girls are young women who worked for the Radium Company. They licked their brushes with radium to paint small numbers on dials. Because of their work, they ingested radium and suffered from various ailments and cancers in the 1920s. The two factories were located in New Jersey and in Ottawa, Illinois. 

Japanese Atrocities and Colonization

Comfort women offer one example of how people were exploited and treated as expandable under the military regime in Japan during the war. In addition, we can discuss Unit 731, the notorious lab that conducted human experiments on Chinese civilians and American POWs, performing vivisections, injecting horse blood, etc. 

Environmental Studies/Justice

We can discuss the sufferings of the Dine people—especially in New Mexico, where people suffer quadruple radiation exposure from abandoned uranium mines, nuclear fallout from Nevada test sites (yet, again, New Mexico’s downwinders were not eligible under RECA, or the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act), nuclear production sites (Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has proposed 30 plutonium pits per year by 2025), and nuclear waste. 

Race and Discrimination

African-American workers were exploited in the construction of the Manhattan Project sites. In addition, they had to compromise their anti-nuclear movement in exchange for civil rights. In Japan, Korean descendants are still discriminated against by Japanese citizens. Again, Project 4.1, regarding the nuclear tests at the Marshall Islands, states, “they (the Marshallese) are more like us than mice.” 

Memorialization

Story of Sadako Sasaki, who witnessed the atomic bombing at the age of two. She was diagnosed with leukemia ten years later. She folded one thousand paper cranes, believing in a Japanese folklore in which one thousand paper cranes will make one’s wishes true.  John Hersey’s Hiroshima 

Gender

The militarization of citizens in the 1950s heavily depended upon women. Women’s housekeeping skills were framed as survival skills for nuclear war. In 1955, 23 women who suffered external injuries from the atomic bombing in Hiroshima landed in the U.S. to receive reconstruction surgery free of charge. Their appearance in media was not to disseminate the aftermath of the nuclear war but rather to reconstruct post-war American ideals, such as the white, middle-class, suburban family based upon a heterosexual couple with “Judeo-Christian” morality. 

Ethics and Science

The first radiation experiment was conducted on an African-American male patient at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1961 and 1962, the University of Chicago conducted experiments in which students and staff were fed radioactive fallout or synthetic fallout. Pregnant women were given radioactive materials as vitamins. 

Chicago Local History and Nuclear Development

University of Chicago and Manhattan Project, Chicago Pile 1, Henry Moore’s “Nuclear Energy”, Michael Reese Hospital site and nuclear waste contamination, Museum of Science and Industry’s nuclear exhibition