Connecting to the Living History of Radiation Exposure

Jacob Darwin Hamblin writes about the history and politics of science, technology, and environmental issues. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Science, Salon, and The American Scientist, and his peer-reviewed essays have appeared in Isis, Diplomatic History, Environmental History, Technology and Culture, and many other academic journals. He has published dozens of book reviews.

Hamblin's most recent book is The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology. It focuses on the promotion of nuclear “solutions,” especially in the developing world, from 1945 to the present. This history is drawn from archival work at the International Atomic Energy Agency and many other sources. It draws attention to unfamiliar connections among environmental rhetoric, nuclear technology, petroleum interests, and arms deals.

Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism, the winner of two major book prizes, challenges us to consider how much our views of global environmental change come from collaboration between scientists and the military as they planned to fight, and to survive, a third world war. His previous book, Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, was the first international history of one of the least-understood environmental controversies of the twentieth century. An earlier book, Oceanographers and the Cold War, explores the reasons for the explosive growth of the marine sciences after World War II.

Hamblin created H-Environment Roundtable Reviews and edited more than thirty of them from 2010-2015. He commissioned and edited essay reviews for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences from 2011-2015, and has served as advisory editor for that journal continuously since 2011. He was advisory editor of Isis from 2009-2011, and was on the advisory board of Environmental Historyfrom 2013-2018. He has chaired the selection committees for the George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history, Phil Pauly Prize for best first book in the history of science in North America, and the Usher Prize for best essay in Technology in Culture. He has directed three different graduate programs at Oregon State University, and currently he directs the university’s Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Linda M. Richards