Atomic Agriculture: Policymaking, Food Production, and Nuclear Technologies in the United States, 1945-1960

Abstract

While most stories o f splitting the atom-from Chernobyl to Fukushima and Hiroshima to the Marshall Islands-revolve around images o f pure destruc tion and human misery, the truth is that a much more complicated relationship has existed between nuclear technologies and human existence. This article focuses on agriculture to explore how executive branch policymakers in the United States implemented nuclear technologies in the budding nuclear age. Part o f that tale involves how nuclear technologies, especially radioactive isotope tracers, helped improve agricultural science and knowledge. The other side o f the story is that agriculture also proved important to the devel opment o f nuclear technologies because it provided a clearly peaceful output fo r atomic research. Atomic agriculture thus frequently assumed a place o f prominence fo r explaining how splitting the atom was a gift to the world and not the red horse rider o f the apocalypse. A growing plant is a chemical factory, o f course. Scientists have known this fo r years-but haven't known exactly what went on in that factory. They didn't know and couldn't find out how chemicals entered the plant, what the chemicals did, how they accomplished their work. So, agriculture has had to depend on trial-and-error inNEIL OATSVALL received his PhD in history from the University of Kansas in 2013. His current research project, from which this article has been revised, is a book manu script titled "The Nuclear Complex: Environment and Policymaking, 1945-1960." The work examines the confluence of nuclear technologies, the natural world, and executive branch policymaking in the early Cold War United States.