Book to Note

Jacob Darwin Hamblin. Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. x + 311 pp. $49.95.

Reviewed by Nicole Rietmann

Jacob Darwin Hamblin follows up his 2005 offering, Oceanographers and the Cold War, with another look at the state of the world’s oceans during the mid-20th century. Despite the growing concern about radioactive waste disposal, the real history of the problem has been relatively unknown to the general public. In Poison in the Well, Hamblin explains how the ocean became the dumping ground for the world’s radioactive waste. He focuses on the years between the end of World War II and the 1970s, when dumping was at its height and nations were ignoring the warnings of scientists and oceanographers. Nuclear power was the wave of the future, and international tensions dominated over scientific protest when it came to the lackadaisical applications and unsafe disposal methods of radioactive substances. Hamblin addresses the issue from many sides, citing political motives and international diplomacy as the cause of such irresponsibility.