The cold war over the worker’s body: Cross-national clashes over maximum allowable concentrations in the post-world war ii era

The Cold War was at its height: ten years before, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been born, and in response, just four years prior, the Warsaw Pact. In broad outline, the contrasts were vintage Cold War: those from the United State and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) sharply disagreed, and the Europeans were caught in-between. Russian, American, and Western European these were three contrasting ways of speaking for worker's bodies that would clash around the table at Prague in 1959. We understand this neglect of the Soviet experience as partly due to the relatively publicized and transparent American scientific justifications of their values, but it can also be attributed to Cold War biases. By 1972, Theodore Hatch, the American hygienist and engineer, summarizes this Cold War over the worker's body that cast the Soviet case in a sympathetic light.