Chapter 6 explores US survivors’ activism in the last three decades of the twentieth century through the lens of health, illness, and medicine. Radiation illness – physical and psychosocial – continued to concern US survivors. Women were frequently primary caretakers in Asia and Asian America, spurring female survivors to consider radiation illness from both patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives. This dual challenge became a driving force for US survivors to form trans-Pacific coalitions with Japanese and Korean survivors. US survivors’ understanding of illness that placed psychosocial factors at its center drew attention from the broader Asian American community, also plagued by the lack of resources for culturally aware medical and social services. Unlike the earlier medical exams conducted on US survivors by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, US survivors’ grassroots activism proved capable of producing a solution fitting their needs. One distinct accomplishment of their activism was the creation of biannual health checkups conducted in America by Japanese physicians familiar with radiation illness, funded by the Japanese government and supported by the Asian American community.

This chapter explores how the dawn of the nuclear age introduced new ways of thinking about environmental risks and children. Fears of radiation pollution set new terms and new meanings that precarious youth helped to make more concrete. The chapter emphasizes how concerns for youth and ecology moved together, driving the work of federal and citizen scientists who traced the paths of radioactive isotopes at different scales. Through the bodies of children at ever-increasing distances, Americans came to understand a new set of shared environmental risks. By concentrating the local and global releases of radioisotopes in their thyroid glands, blood, and bones, children drew together pollution and fears that could no longer be kept secret or separate from the relative safety of white middle-class domestic life. To postwar Americans, radiation was vague, invisible, and hopefully distant. How it insinuated itself – as metaphor and material experience – at the youthful heart of the postwar domestic dream helps to explain the power of the postwar popular ecology movement.