The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 is typically viewed as marking a first step toward nuclear arms control. But Toshihiro Higuchi argues that it was also one of the first international agreements that addressed a truly global, human-induced environmental problem. By tracing a worldwide struggle to determine the biological effects, social acceptability, and policy implications of radioactive fallout, Higuchi reexamines the Cold War in the context of the Anthropocene - an era in which humans are confronting environmental changes of their own making.

Toshihiro Higuchi is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. He studies the international history of the nuclear age with a focus on its scientific, technological, and environmental aspects. He received a PhD at Georgetown in 2011. His publications include “Radiation Protection by Numbers: Another ‘Man-Made Disaster’,” in Learning from Fukushima, ed. Edward Blandford and Scott Sagan (2016) and a prize-winning article, “An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954-1963,” Peace & Change (2008).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.