The Cold War context of "risk"
The Journal of Policy History recently published Linda Nash's "From Safety to Risk: The Cold War Contexts of American Environmental Policy" . From the introduction (notes omitted): The late twentieth century marked the rise of “risk society,” to use Ulrich Beck’s well-known term . In Beck’s account, the seemingly endless proliferation of material risks to health and environmental integrity is the outcome of late capitalist modernization, a proliferation that society’s institutions are completely unable to control or address. But without disputing the fact that industrialization has introduced a multitude of new threats to both bodies and environments, their conceptualization as “risks”—rather than merely as “dangers”—was more than a choice of words; it marked both an important policy change and a crucial cultural and political shift. The dominance of risk discourse in environmental and health policy has not gone unchallenged. Since its inception in the 1970s, the assumpt...