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Signs of Risk: Materiality, History, and Meaning in Cold War Controversies over Nuclear Contamination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2020

Davide Orsini
Davide Orsini*
Affiliation:
History, Mississippi State University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This study draws on ethnographic and archival evidence from the Italian Archipelago of La Maddalena, offshore from the northeastern corner of Sardinia, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. It addresses two questions: (1) How do non-experts make sense of radiological risk absent knowledge and classified information about its instantiations and consequences? (2) How do objectifications of risk change and stabilize within the same community over time? STS scholarship has emphasized the epistemic and relational dimensions of lay/expert controversies over risk assessment. Many case studies, mostly focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, have assumed lay and expert ways of knowing are incompatible due to clashing cultural identities. I use Keane's concept of “semiotic ideologies” and Peircean semiotic theory to critically reassess the validity of that assumption and examine the role of material evidence in processes of signification to explain how experts and non-experts fix, challenge, and negotiate the meanings of radiological risk in sociotechnical controversies. I critically review empirical studies and analyze ethnographic and archival data to advance a set of methodological and substantive arguments: meanings of risk change as new signs become available for interpretation; and meanings of risk are semiotically regimented: their emergence or silencing depend upon the power relations in place in a given community and organizational efforts to assemble coherent technopolitical arguments. I call this set of organizational practices “politics of coherence.”

Keywords

risklay/expert controversiesSTSsemiotic ideologyItalynuclear submarinesnuclear contaminationenvironment
Type
Contamination and the Half-Life of History
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 520 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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References

1 “Soviet Thrust in the Mediterranean,” Time Magazine 97, 26 (28 June 1971): 27–28.

2 “Choke points” are bottlenecks, points of access into a naval area for both surface and underwater navigation.

3 Located amidst the Tyrrenian Sea, the archipelago had been a strategic maritime fortress of the Italian Navy since the nineteenth century. Because of its geographic position and the local community's long experience living in the vicinity of military personnel, U.S. and Italian defense strategists decided that La Maddalena was the perfect location for the base. They did not expect local opposition.

4 Two months after the base was installed, at the request of the Italian Ministry of Defense, the Center for the Military Applications of Nuclear Energy (CAMEN) and the president of CNEN issued two reports reassuring people that radiological risks in the archipelago were slight. No special safety protocols were necessary, they said, given the reliability of the U.S. reactor technology. The personnel of CNEN's radioprotection division protested that the report was written at the personal initiative of CNEN's president, Ezio Clementel, and was not based on scientific evidence.

5 Webb Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language and Communication 23, 2–3 (2003): 409–25.

6 By “material signs” I indicate that signs have material embodiments and characteristics that allow their perceivers to interpret them in various ways.

7 For a discussion of the methodological approaches to analyzing semiotic regimentation, see Parmentier, Richard, “The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life,” Semiotica 95, 3–4 (1993): 357–95Google Scholar.

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10 Brian Wynne's alerts about the perils of overstretching his original argument are illuminating. See, for example, “May the Sheep Safely Graze”; and his reply to Darrin Durant: “Elephants in the Rooms where Publics Encounter ‘Science’: A Response to Durant, Darrin, ‘Accounting for Expertise: Wynne and the Autonomy of the Lay Public,’ Public Understanding of Science 17 (2008): 21–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (SAGE, 1992). One of the most important theses in Beck's work is that modern society is characterized by a new fundamental cleavage, which he evocatively conceptualizes as “relations of definition”: the uneven distribution of expertise (normatively defined) that creates a status of subalternity of laypeople vis-à-vis technoscientific knowledge production. I cannot here illustrate all the critiques that STS scholars have addressed to Beck's argument, But for an overview of the most controversial points, see Boudia, Soraja and Jas, Nathalie, “Risk and ‘Risk Society’ in Historical Perspective,” History and Technology 23, 4 (2007): 317–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wynne, “May the Sheep Safely Graze?”

17 Anthropologist Joshua Reno contends that by focusing on risk as the central analytical category, STS scholars tend to represent and conceptually reproduce the same lay-expert divides that they want to deconstruct: “Beyond Risk: Emplacement and the Production of Environmental Evidence,” American Ethnologist 38, 3 (2011): 516–30. I am not convinced, though, that there is any inherent problem making risk a focus of analysis. Several works in STS have focused on how collaborations between expert-activists and local communities shape hybrid forms of knowledge to leverage citizens’ resources for environmental justice. See, for example, Allen, Barbara, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor Disputes (MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Ottinger, Gwen, Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges (NYU Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22 This point has been largely debated and problematized within the field of political ecology. For a review, see Horowitz, Leah, “Local Environmental Knowledge,” in Perreault, Tom, Bridge, Gavin, and McCarthy, James, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Routledge, 2015), 235–48Google Scholar. For a discussion of the misuses and misappropriations of the concept of “indigenous knowledge” in the context of developmental politics, see Agrawal, Arun, “Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge,” Development and Change 26 (1995): 413–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In STS, this problem is clearly laid out by Ottinger, Gwen, in “Changing Knowledge, Local Knowledge, and Knowledge Gaps: STS Insights into Procedural Justice,” Science Technology & Human Values 38, 2 (2013): 250–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Here I cannot do justice of the complexity of “semiotic relationality” as conceptualized by ANT, so I invite the readers to look at Law, John, “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in Turner, Bryan S., ed., The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Blackwell, 2008): 141–58Google Scholar; Callon, Michel, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” Sociological Review 32, 1 (1984): 196–233CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Akrich, Madeleine, “The Description of Technical Objects,” in Bijker, Wiebe E. and Law, John, eds., Shaping Technology/Shaping Society (MIT Press, 1992): 205–24Google Scholar. Bruno Latour has illustrated this point in many writings, but I think his clearest explanation can be found in “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Shaping Society (MIT Press, 1992), 151–80.

24 Marres, Nortje, Material Participation: Technology, the Environment, and Everyday Publics (Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ibid., 65; Newell, Sasha, “The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn,” Current Anthropology 59, 1 (2018): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I thank two anonymous CSSH reviewers who pointed Newell's insightful work out to me.

26 Marres, Nortje, “Issues Spark a Public into Being: A Key but Often Forgotten Point of the Lippmann-Dewey Debate,” in Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT Press, 2005): 208–17Google Scholar.

27 This point is clearly discussed in Sasha Newell's “The Affectiveness of Symbols,” and especially in Paul Manning's comments (pp. 14–16) about affect as a dyadic relation between two entities, which is not yet articulated and non-representational. As such it is not mediated by reflexive thought (thirdness).

28 Shapiro, Nicholas, “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime,” Cultural Anthropology 30, 3 (2015): 368–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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32 Parr, “A Working Knowledge of the Insensible?”

33 Joy Parr borrowed the concept of “somatic mode of attention” from anthropologist Csordas, Thomas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8, 2 (1993): 135–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Kuchinskaya, Olga, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (MIT Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Wirtz, Kristina, “Spiritual Agency, Materiality, and Knowledge in Cuba,” in Johnson, Paul C., ed., Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 99–129Google Scholar.

36 Keane, “Semiotics and Social Analysis.”

37 Ibid., 418.

38 Keane, Webb, “On Semiotic Ideology,” Signs and Society 6, 1 (2018): 64–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Ibid., 66–67.

40 On the importance of metasemiotic reflexivity in social life, see ibid., especially pages 74–80.

41 Peirce, Charles Sanders, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Buchler, Justus, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover Publications, 1955), 99–119Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., 100.

43 Cited in Fann, K. T., Peirce's Theory of Abduction (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45 Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 104.

46 Keane, “Semiotics and Social Analysis,” 414.

47 Keane, Webb, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things,” in Miller, Daniel, ed., Materiality (Duke University Press, 2005), 182–205Google Scholar, 190.

48 Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 109.

49 Ibid., 108.

50 Ibid., 104.

51 Ibid., 112.

52 Ibid., 114.

53 Eco, “Peirce's Analysis,” 188–89.

54 On the problem of potentially infinite semiotic regressions and the possibility of knowing the world, Parmentier offers an interpretation of Peirce's position based on passages where the philosopher asserts that knowledge and truth are not individual achievements but collective endeavors, based on the evidence that scientifically logical minds will eventually provide to arrive at settled beliefs. See Parmentier, Richard J., “Peirce Divested for Non-Intimates,” RSSI: Recherches semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 7, 1 (1987): 19–39Google Scholar, esp. 33–35.

55 Buchler, Justus, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Dover Publications, 1955), 91Google Scholar.

56 Giulio and Roberta are pseudonyms. From author's interview with them, La Maddalena, Sept. 2012.

57 Here, Giulio refers to the area known as Sasso Rosso, which the local administration used until the early 1990s as a landfill for the entire archipelago.

58 In Italy orata (pl. orate) is the common name for Sparus aurata (Gilt-head Bream).

59 Interviewed by the author, La Maddalena, Oct. 2012.

60 Reno uses Harri Englund's concept of emplacement: “a phenomenological fact [that] is molded by histories of boundary making and constraint” (in “Beyond Risk.”)

61 Irwin, Simmons, and Walker, “Faulty Environments,” 1319.

62 In their work, Kate Brown, Joseph Masco, and Olga Kuchinskaya observe that around Chernobyl, Los Alamos, and in radiocontaminated areas of Belarus, fauna and flora are thriving. They use these examples to underscore the perceptive distortions that radiation introduces into the world and the sensorial and cognitive disorientation it provokes in communities living in contaminated areas where the healthy appearance of natural life masks the invisible hazards of radiocontamination. Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Masco, Nuclear Borderlands; Kuchinskaya, Politics of Invisibility.

63 Eco, Umberto, “Guessing: from Aristotle to Sherlock Holmes,” VERSUS Quaderni di Studi Semiotici Milano 30 (1981): 3–19Google Scholar, 18.

64 Funtowicz, Silvio O. and Ravetz, Jerome R., “Science for the Post-Normal Age,” Futures 25, 7 (1993): 739–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 According to CNEN and ISS experts interviewed by national and local newspapers, four years were not enough for subjects exposed to low-level radiation to experience genetic effects. See notes 72–75.

66 Parmentier, “Semiotic Regimentation,” 360.

67 “Nascite anormali a La Maddalena,” L'Unione Sarda, 28 May 1976: 3.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 “Occorre un'indagine seria sulle nascite alla Maddalena,” L'Unione Sarda, 30 May 1976: 3.

72 “Una smentita che non smentisce,” L'Avanti, 2 June 1976; “La Maddalena: smentite le morti da radioattività,” Corriere della Sera, 2 June 1976; “Si studierà la radio-attività a La Maddalena,” Il Giorno, 4 June 1976.

73 “I tre bimbi anormali: analizzate alghe, mitili della base Maddalena,” La Stampa, 3 June 1976.

74 Il Messaggero, 31 May 1976.

75 Ibid.

76 “Il ministro della Sanità rischia l'incriminazione,” L'Avanti, 10 June 1976. Tamponi's arguments echoed and sometimes explicitly referred to statements about the status of the radiosurveillance system in La Maddalena that ISS and CNEN experts made in public debates and scientific conferences. Moreover he used legal arguments offered by environmental activist judge Gianfranco Amendola, leader of the environmental organization “Gruppo Ambiente.” He intervened frequently in the public debates concerning the lack of radioprotection protocols in La Maddalena through op-eds in national newspapers: Gianfranco Amendola, “Basi infette,” Il Messaggero, 22 Mar. 1974.

77 I say especially leftist political leaders because they were a minority in La Maddalena and were generally denied the resources that the dominant elites monopolized through their affiliation with the central government, the local church, and the Italian Navy. The anti-base front had to elaborate a strategy to break through widespread reticence and undermine official narratives about the economic benefits of the U.S. Navy's “innocuous” presence.

78 For the period 1972–1976, I relied on newspaper articles from La Nuova Sardegna and L'Unione Sarda available at the archive of the municipal library of Sassari, Sardinia. For 1976–2008, I drew from a rich collection of articles about the base assembled daily by the Information Office of the Italian Navy command of La Maddalena. I had access to the collection thanks to the precious collaboration of Mr. Francesco Nardini, director of the library at the Navy Officer Club of La Maddalena, where it was deposited after the base closed.

79 The base in La Maddalena was the station of the squadron.

80 During informal conversations, former U.S. Navy servicemen mentioned the name of Gian Carlo Tusceri as the clearest example of anti-base attitudes in La Maddalena. A retired U.S. Navy officer, who requested anonymity, told me: “That shit that G.C.T. [how Tusceri signed his articles] wrote on La Nuova was just political propaganda.”

81 During our conversation, Tusceri mentioned several times that he had been intimidated and threatened, but he would provide no specifics.

82 Author's interview, La Maddalena, Apr. 2012.

83 Author's interview, La Maddalena, Oct. 2012.

84 The Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) remains the largest leftist union of the country. CGIL was considered the closest union to the Italian Communist Party and other parties of the socialist constellation. The CGIL-Ricerca was the union branch that represented the sector of public employees inside national research institutions like CNEN and ISS.

85 I thank Carlo Papucci for granting me access to his private archive.

86 Salvatore Sanna to Carlo Papucci, private correspondence, 11 Mar. 1977, Carlo Papucci private archive (my italics).

87 In 1972 the Italian government admitted that the news of the imminent arrival of the U.S. Navy in La Maddalena reported by some newspapers was true. This led several scientific organizations, including the Italian Physics Society, to express concerns about the risks involved in installing a nuclear submarine base at the hearth of the Mediterranean Sea. During the plenary assembly of the Society in Cagliari, on 2 November 1972, some members emphasized the importance of maintaining a “technical profile” in order to gain credibility in the eyes of political authorities and the members of the public who were ready to dismiss their advice as the “opinion of a bunch of communists.”