Toshihiro Higuchi is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University.
Since the mid-20th century, we have entered the era of the Great Acceleration, a period of unprecedented human impact on Earth Systems. While Anthropocene scholars often focus on nuclear power generation as either a missed low-carbon opportunity or a major environmental hazard, this talk delves into another facet of atomic energy use: nuclear weapons. The exponential growth of nuclear arsenals and their destructive power ushered in what I term the Great Apocalypse. The Great Apocalypse was not merely an alternative reality to the Great Acceleration; it fundamentally shaped its trajectory. The specter of nuclear war as a planetary catastrophe fueled the development and testing of nuclear weapons, accelerating the magnitude of radioactive contamination worldwide with far-reaching and long-lasting health consequences. By examining the Asia-Pacific region’s experience with radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1950s, this talk will discuss how the changing notion of victimhood in the Anthropocene – shifting from a faceless, statistically constructed global average to class-based, racialized, and gendered "innocent bystanders” facing disproportionate health risks – played a crucial role in disentangling the intertwined production of the spectacular violence of nuclear war and the slow violence of radioactive fallout, ultimately leading to the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
Higuchi is the author of Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020). The book won the 2021 Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His academic works have appeared in The American Historical Review, Peace & Change, Journal of Strategic Studies, Historia Scientiarum, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific. He is a contributor to many joint research projects and edited volumes. His opinion pieces have also appeared in a number of news outlets, including the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Asahi Shimbun.
