I was barely twelve years old and largely unsupervised in my television viewing, as was the case with youth in those days. I recall this because my parents were divorced, and I was all alone when I watched the NBC Sunday Night Movie one night in March of 1983. I don’t recall if I was merely alone in the room, or alone in the entire house (Mom worked late and sometimes through the nights back in those days, pasting up the big full-page ads for the car dealerships at the local paper).
It was an age when kids got exposed to adult things, often with adults not around. So this night was just another rite of passage, I guess. Parents everywhere seemed to think that the things that did not outright kill us must be mostly okay. So I got of alone time with the television, just like everybody I knew.
So the Movie of the Week was just another way to pass the time. The title didn’t especially catch my attention one way or the other. It was called Special Bulletin, and I didn’t really know the first thing about it. Or I guess I should say, little did I know.
Hard to imagine a more formative moment in my youth, outside those events that actually led to my folks getting divorced. But those are stories for another time.
In case you didn’t happen to catch it like I did, Special Bulletin was written in the style of that old Orson Welles rendition of The War of the Worlds. That is to say, the movie unfolded in somewhat real-time, as if it were a series of news broadcasts.
Within the faux-world of the narrative, the reporting was all about a hostile takeover of a boat in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. As the facts unfold, we come to find out that the group that have taken over the boat are terrorists. In fact, they are anti-nuclear terrorists.
But then, at about the halfway point, we find out they are terrorists who have themselves built a crude nuclear device, and it’s on the boat with them, and they have threatened to detonate it unless their demands are met.
So anyway, let’s just say that this Sunday Night Movie had my attention. I got really wrapped up in the story, and the verite of it. I never mistook what I was watching for actual events, but man, it sure felt real.
And that’s what, at the end of the story, when the bomb actually detonates, I found it terrifying and pretty emotionally overwhelming. I had gotten invested in the story, and in these mock news characters, and then I watched some of them get vaporized, and others have to deal with the aftermath of that.
Let me just say that, in no uncertain terms, everything changed for me that night.
The world was really never the same.
What I have since come to figure out is that, starting that night, I developed a complete and thoroughgoing radiophobia. That’s a real thing—it means a fear of radiation, of nuclear things. It turns out I am not alone. Thomas Edison, according to reports, developed radiophobia after he saw what happened to the early X-Ray technicians who were on his staff. There are also reports that many of the survivors of Chernobyl and Fukushima are radiophobes, as well.
And who can blame them?
For me, Special Bulletin impacted me like a horror movie. Maybe you know what I mean. Like, you watch a film in the evening and then it gets into your psyche and by the time you get around to turning out the lights it’s there, waiting for you, with claws out. That’s how it felt to me.
By the time I got to bed that night, the images of the movie, and the threats and conflicts of the characters, had metastasized in my mind. I could not get to sleep.
In fact, I pretty much stopped sleeping well from that night onward.
Looking back now, what I think was happening was that I was taking all the things that had caused me anxiety in my family—the late-night fights of my parents, the violence, the secrets and eventually the divorce—and I mapped all that anxiety onto radiation and nuclear things.
It makes sense, in a way. Radiation is tasteless, oderless, and has no immediate visible effects, but it can do you irreparable harm. That’s actually not a bad metaphor for the kind of threats that exist for kids who grow up in abusive families. It is very hard to point to and name the things that are threatening you, that might even kill you.
I couldn’t consciously name the anxiety I felt about my broken family, so I think I put it all on the bomb.
The radiophobia became pervasive through the years. When I was younger, it amounted to a complete avoidance of sources of radiation whenever possible. So I asked my dentist to turn off the X-ray machine. If I flew, I got through the security screenings as quickly as possible. To this day, I have never set foot in a full-body scanner. I’m the guy at the airport who always gets to security early and opts for the full-body pat-down instead.
This is to say, I still feel the effects of that embedded fear aroused by Special Bulletin, nearly four decades later. But at the same time, it is not the same fear. It has grown with me, and has changed and lessened in interesting ways.
It turns out fear may have a half-life.
My fear of nuclear weapons led me to begin to read everything I could about them. I have heard this happens sometimes. For example, someone afraid of spiders may also be fascinated by spiders, reading and researching about them. So it was with me and my radiophobia.
I read up on the Manhattan Project, and the odd personalities that were involved. I read about the early nuclear tests. I read about the bomb plants, like Fernald, and Hanford, and Rocky Flats.
The first time I kissed a girl, and she suggested I meet her parents, I joked that that would be fine, as long as her folks didn’t work at a nuclear plant.
It turned out her dad worked at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. That freaked me out a bit.
But the thing that read about the most were the nuclear accidents. Big ones (like Three Mile Island and later, Chernobyl) as well as the small ones you probably haven’t heard about (Idaho Falls, Chalk River, Juarez, Goiania)—I have forty years under my belt of reading and thinking about the depths of the damage that untethered radiation can do.
It sounds strange, but something happened around ten years ago, after a long time having this hobby of research being (forgive me) the background radiation of my consciousess.
I had gotten a hold of a technical document that was compiled by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (one of the earliest nuclear labs, and the one responsible for the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It was a document that gathered together all the information about criticality accidents.
Without getting too technical, these are a very particular form of nuclear accident. Criticality accidents occur when you get too much of a certain type of material into one place in an unshielded manner. Too much plutonium or uranium in one spot under the wrong conditions can create a sudden and terrible release of energy. It’s not a bomb, of course, and it won’t level a city—but it can take people within a thirty-foot radius and pretty much cook them from the inside-out. It is a particularly horrible way to die.
The document I was reading is about a hundred and fifty pages long. There have been about sixty of these accidents through the years since the Manhattan Project. As I was making my way through it, I had a moment of realization.
What I figured out was that, of all the accidents in the history of humankind, it is not an exaggeration to say that nuclear accidents are actually the most documented, the most understood, accidents of all.
In other words—all those nights of laying awake in fear, I was afraid of the unknown. The nuclear threat was an invisible one to me in all senses of the word: invisible rays, but also the personalities, intentions, and mechanisms of the nuclear industry seemed shrouded in secrecy (for good reason, as most of the details are still classified).
But I realized that, after years of reading about this stuff, it was not a mystery to me anymore. These accidents were horrible, and the human cost was incalculable in many cases, but they were no longer black boxes to me. I understood their mechanisms, and the limits of their destructiveness.
These were no longer monsters in the night to me. They became more manageable fears.
At this point, I still read a good deal about the nuclear weapons complex, and I have amassed a good deal of unclassified technical information about the history, development, and political policies around the bomb.
It hasn’t made the bomb less terrible to me, and there are stories from the history of the nuclear weapons complex that will chill your blood (the Karen Silkwood murder is just the tip of that iceberg), but I no longer have the fear that keeps me up at nights.
Circling back to the spider analogy, I have become an amateur arachnologist of sorts. I have studied my fears so long I now think of them as old friends. I have comfort with what once terrified me.
I kind of wish I could go back to that scared kid and let him know that things will get better.
Nuclear weapons design and nonproliferation are some of the hardest sets of problems I can imagine. I find myself pondering them the way some folks ponder the New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s almost relaxing to me.
I’m not sure I have the time to get to know some of my other fears with this level of intimacy, but my experience with this particular set does give me some hope.
I've had some similar success reading about mushrooms—but when learning anything about COVID, only tend to spin into a spiral of doom, agh.