Fear of Radiation

Plenty of the people who went on to show extreme anxiety about low doses had received doses too small to matter, and what followed in them was psychosomatic illness. Drinking rose alongside it, of the fatalistic kind. Yamashita's conclusion is practical: relocation is not easy and the stress is very large, and those problems have to be treated rather than merely tracked, or people will feel they are only research subjects.

L. A. Ilyin and O. A. Pavlovsky introduced the term radiation phobia syndrome in 1987, reporting on the radiological consequences.

The word is older than the radiation

Radiophobia has meant several things and only the most recent one involves ionising radiation. The non-ionising kind, the fields coming off a phone mast or a router, carries its own separate name in electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and the distinction is the whole of the physics.

The earlier senses run in order:

1. Dr Albert Soiland of Los Angeles presented a paper titled Radio-phobia and radio-mania in 1903
2. in the 1920s the word described people afraid of radio broadcasting and receiving technology
3. in 1931 The Salt Lake Tribune used it for a fear of loudspeakers, an affliction it reported Joan Crawford as having
4. Australian newspapers used it the same way through the 1930s and 1940s
5. a 1949 poem by Margaret Mercia Baker titled Radiophobia complains about advertising interrupting radio broadcasts

The current meaning arrives in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Science Service attached the word to fear of gamma radiation and medical x-rays, proposing that it followed the National Academy of Sciences publishing on the genetic hazards of ionising radiation in 1956.

Writing in 1970, Dr Harold Pettit set out the position most of the later literature holds: a healthy respect for the hazards of radiation is desirable, and when atomic testing began in the early 1950s those hazards were grossly exaggerated, producing what was called radiophobia or nuclear neurosis.

Why Castle Bravo produced radiation fear in Japan

Castle Bravo was detonated on 1 March 1954 and overshot badly. The predicted yield was four to six megatons and the device produced fifteen.

The consequence was an unanticipated quantity of fallout, the visible particles known as Bikini snow, which caught the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru outside the fallout area that had been cordoned off on the basis of the lower prediction. About two weeks later the twenty-three crew began to fall ill with acute radiation sickness, largely from beta burns caused by scooping the fallout into bags with bare hands. Kuboyama Aikichi, the chief radioman, died on 23 September 1954. Roughly a hundred fishing boats were contaminated to some degree, and Marshall Islanders were exposed, with several islands evacuated.

Joseph Rotblat published findings that the contamination was nearly a thousand times greater than the official statement. In the secrecy of the period, the incident produced widespread fear of weapons that were uncontrolled and unpredictable, and fear of contaminated fish in the Japanese food supply, and it was called by some a second Hiroshima.

To keep the anti-nuclear movement from becoming an anti-American one, the two governments agreed compensation of two million dollars for the fishery, with the twenty-two surviving crewmen receiving about two million yen each.

Why radiation fear attaches to people rather than places

The surviving crew and their families later experienced prejudice and discrimination, because local people thought radiation was contagious.

That sentence contains the whole problem. The fear behaves like a fear of infection, attaches to people rather than to places, and the harm it does falls on those already harmed.

How radiophobia reached the cinema after Castle Bravo

Castle Bravo redirected a good deal of cinema. The Godzilla films, beginning with Ishiro Honda's Gojira in 1954, are read as metaphors for post-war radiophobia, and the opening scene of Gojira reproduces the Daigo Fukuryu Maru story from the distant flash of light to survivors found with radiation burns. Roger Ebert, unconvinced by the effects, called the film an important one and said that properly decoded it was the Fahrenheit 9/11 of its time.

Akira Kurosawa took the interior view a year later. I Live in Fear, from 1955, follows one man's unreasoning terror of radiation and nuclear war, and ends with the foundry worker declared incompetent by his family while the possible partial validity of his fears transfers to his doctor.

Nevil Shute's On the Beach, published in 1957, sets a nuclear war six years ahead, with fallout having killed everything in the Northern Hemisphere and Australia waiting for the same. Helen Caldicott read it as an adolescent and puts that reading among the things that made her an anti-nuclear campaigner.

Why radiophobia is a misnomer

Compare the fear of radiation commonly encountered with the clinical criteria in DSM-5 and radiophobia is fundamentally a misnomer. It is not a phobia.

Lindberg and Archer offered a workable replacement in 2022. What the word names, on their account, is how people stand culturally and socially toward ionising radiation, and the defining feature of that relationship is a plain mismatch between what exposure does and what people take it to do.

A disparity between actual and perceived risk is not a diagnosis. It is a measurable gap, and the Chernobyl figure is what happens when public health responds to the perceived side of it. The same gap is what puts radiophobia beside chemophobia: another invisible contaminant whose real risk is a matter of dose, and another avoidance calibrated to the perception rather than to the measurement.