Success and Excess in the Nuclear WestA Burning WindYou can stare at a thing and know that you personally
have no place in its heart whatsoever, but keeping it
out of yours is another matter. – Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer…the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return. – Homer, The OdysseyThe nations of the earth have collectively detonated over 2,400 nuclear explosions, almost all off them in the process of developing weapons. Close to exactly half of the total has been exploded by the United States. The first was named Trinity and was exploded in summer, 1945. Since then we have set off 1126 more. Among our other attributes as a nation, we are expert makers of explosive nuclear devices.
Disasters do not happen for no reason, nor do they happen solely because of the instigating act (the throw of a switch, a turn of fate, a kiss of lips). They happen because of a great weight building, like stones added to a hanging basket. The final act is only the merest breath on the overburdened fibers. Usually the construction of a disaster is a collection of many bad decisions: a lack of forethought, a neglect of stockpiling in a time of abundance, fear, haste, arrogance, obsession, hubris, and most of all: greed.
In the American West, wind and fire are frequently intertwined. In dry weather, one is rarely found without the other. When they run in tandem, disaster is not far behind. This is the story of two fires and two winds. Both fires were set by humans, and the winds blew the flames into the lives of many Americans. One blaze was nulcear, and the other a wildfire, but both were born high on a mesa in New Mexico.
A flame was struck on the flanks of Cerro Grande, in the Jemez mountains of New Mexico in early May, 2000 by agents of the US Government. Weather and vegetation conditions were consulted but ignored in a process that seemed to have a life of its own. A fire was set that day for forest management purposes. The idea was to prevent future wildfire disasters. The first touching of flame to tinder-dry vegetation was the final act that started a conflagration, but it was only a minor part of a chain of decisions that led to a disaster. Downwind was the town of Los Alamos, and the laboratory where many of the nuclear bombs exploded by the US were designed.
Los Alamos was a city which popped into being from a few summer-camp cabins and the surrounding sagebrush, juniper and pine forest with the purpose of developing the first nuclear weapon. Near the end of World War II, it was deemed a safe place far from prying enemy eyes. That first effort produced three bombs: Trinity, and the two that were used to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
After the war, Los Alamos become a center for nuclear weapons research and development. The most experienced scientists were already assembled there, and the scenic and remote location was beneficial to both attracting more and to minimizing spying. The post-war bombs they designed needed testing. The scientists knew well the dangers of the products of nuclear explosions. A whole host of intermediate radionucleotides is produced in a nuclear detonation, with a variety of half lives and a multitude of effects on living things. The specific connections between the radioactive products and their effects on humans was then not known, but certainly they knew the radioactivity was not safe. The US closely cataloged the deaths and the diminished lives of the survivors of the nuclear blasts in Japan. That is why, for the tests that were conducted in the late Forties, the scientists chose remote islands in the South Pacific.
A handful of tests were conducted in the South Pacific. By the early Fifties, with the perceived Soviet threat becoming ever more menacing, the nuclear establishment needed a place to test that was not so remote. A place more convenient and expedient, preferably within the borders of the continental US. A place not too close to cities, and not upwind of anyplace important. The desert north of Las Vegas, Nevada was chosen. And the managers and scientists, high in the foothills of the Jemez mountains, thought they were out of range. But nowhere was out of range.
We were making good bombs, better bombs, the best bombs yet, and we needed to demonstrate how great they were. We were a strong nation, a proud nation, and we felt threatened. Sacrifices must be made to protect our way of life, our freedom. Disasters are made of such justifications, piled one on another. But the sacrifices were mostly made unwittingly by the rural residents of Nevada, northern Arizona, and especially Southern Utah. They were also made by the servicemen and workers at the Nevada Test .
After World War II, we didn’t use any nuclear devices in combat with other nations, we bombed our own people instead.
In 1951, atmospheric detonations of nuclear devices commenced at the Nevada Test Site. Weather conditions were monitored before each bomb was exploded to assure that the fallout went in the preferred direction. That is, easterly, in a direction to avoid sending radioactive clouds toward the then small city of Las Vegas or the more populated California cities. The people living in rural areas downwind of the test site were considered expendable. They came to be known as “downwinders”. They did not earn this title, they endured it. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) agents were posted to several small towns in Southern Utah during the fifties. They were sent to assure the population that nuclear testing was safe and to monitor levels of fallout.
Testing was so frequent that the bomb detonations became commonplace. At first, people rose early in the morning to watch the flash and the fireball climb to the heavens, but later went on with their lives with the confidence that the testing was keeping the Reds at bay. Just as frequently, in towns like St. George, a pinkish-tan cloud would grow in the west and descend onto farm and sidewalk.
The AEC agents were in the towns with Geiger counters, going nuts. Both the agents and the radiation detectors, that is. They rushed to get out of their clothes and shower the fallout from their hair. They phoned their superiors to get permission to raise the alarm. Their superiors told them to stay silent. Getting the folks alarmed about fallout would only incite anger, suspicion and worry. Besides, there was nothing to worry about, there was no proven connection between radiation and heath problems. In fact, the pamphlets that were distributed in the towns assured the folks that fallout was perfectly safe. Heck, it was no worse than the radiation you got from just breathing the air and working in the sun. The AEC agents jumped into their fallout-dusted cars and got the hell out of town, Geiger counters crackling away on the front seat beside them. They knew. The scientists at Los Alamos knew. The generals knew. The managers of the tests at the AEC knew. In the name of national defense, they ignored what they knew. They did worse, they deceived.
But most of all they tested. We tested. We set off nuclear bombs with wild and frequent abandon. Like a young couple in love we did it wherever and whenever we thought we could get away with it. Not just at the Nevada test site. We set off bombs in western Colorado, in New Mexico, in Alaska, off the coast of San Diego, and even in Mississippi for Pete’s sake. We made up reasons, we constructed justifications. Deterrence, research, civil engineering, Progress. We wanted to blow harbors clean out of coastline, build canals, scare the Reds, advance the science, see what we could do. We were heady and intoxicated. In the South Pacific we evicted native islanders so we could set the big boys off, the thermonuclear devices, the H-bombs. And then with small mispredictions in the wind, we rained fallout upon them too, on the islands we moved them to, taking not only their homes from them, but their health as well. We were lazy.
When the South Pacific got too inconvenient again, we tried an H-bomb in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site despite an understanding among the scientists that thermonuclear weapons would never be tested on the mainland. Windows broke in Las Vegas. Oops, back to the islands, boys.
To stimulate natural gas production, we bombed well fields in Colorado and New Mexico. The underground blasts tripped up cows and generated the expected excess of gas. Trouble was, it was too radioactive to use. Duh! We set three of them off in such a manner before we figured out that all we were going to get was contaminated gas. We set another H-bomb off in northern Nevada and this time the underground detonation rattled windows in Salt Lake City (Bob Ellis wrote a Survivor article about this test a few years ago). The lower 48 was just a little too small for the hydrogen bombs. So we moved to a wildlife refuge on the Aleutian chain of islands in Alaska. This test was performed in the name of peace. We had developed techniques to detect nuclear explosions in other countries, and we needed an expected blast in order to test the technique. But as long as we are setting off a bomb, we might as well make it the biggest H-bomb ever detonated underground and a warhead for a submarine missile to boot. The land on the island sunk 25 feet, cliffs all around the shore collapsed into the ocean and thousands of sea otters had their eardrums burst. This kept them from diving for food and they soon died of starvation. Their carcasses washed up on the beach for weeks. We set three bombs off on this island and another two in salt domes in Mississippi to test our ability to detect nuclear explosions, all the while detonating a continuous series of bombs at the Nevada Test Site.
Downwind, the rural people lived under a cloud. Constant government reassurance allowed children to stay outside and play in the fallout dust. Their fingers tingled with radioactive exposure. Livestock ate dusted grass and burnt their mouths from the beta radiation. Milk taken from cows which fed on radioactive grass contained high levels of strontium isotopes. When consumed, the strontium replaced calcium in bones and lodged there, singing a deadly radioactive song. The independent people of Southern Utah ate fresh local milk and produce and thus doomed many of their number. Childhood leukemia, an unknown malady, became an epidemic. Sterility and miscarriage soared. Glandular cancer, stomach cancer, bone cancer and breast cancer all shot up in a Mormon population that through rural labor and denial of vices such as smoking and drinking had previously enjoyed a scarcity of such cancers. Children were born with enough chromosomal damage that it was recommended that they remain childless themselves. The duck-and-cover drills the Utah children practiced to keep them safe from World War Three only brought them closer to the dust on the schoolroom floor. They didn’t know that they should have been hiding from their supposed protectors instead.
The rural doctors in the small towns had never seen such diseases and sent patients home with diagnoses of neuroses and indigestion to grow the tumors big enough to eliminate all doubt. The patients asked their doctors if their problems might be caused by the upwind testing. The doctors replied “the government wouldn’t do that to us”. They did. When the cancers were finally recognized, the only treatment available was more massive doses of radiation. Families had to drive to Salt Lake City for treatment, hundreds of miles away. The nausea on the trips back must have made for a horrific drive home.
The Mormon church, usually known for its protection and nurturing of members, was in this case silent and inert. They knew the cancer rates were soaring in their southern colonies, but they were so locked into the power structure of the US Government that they were effectively handcuffed. A small cancer clinic or even a training program for the rural doctors would be an admission of danger, an admission of deception, an admission of guilt. The communist threat to our way of life meant the sacrifice of our own. It meant the slow gnawing death from inside that is cancer. These were not the acts of a god. They were not the acts of nature. We clapped our hands in the Nevada desert to scare the Reds and instead planted seeds of death in our own people.
While most concentrated in Southern Utah, the radioactive clouds passed over the entire US. At Eastman Kodak in upstate New York there are sensitive radiation detectors used to monitor photographic film manufacturing. One cloud became ensnared in a storm system and dumped 6 inches of radioactive snow on Rochester. Radiation levels were high enough that Kodak shut down film manufacturing until the snow melted. We slept, safe from the Soviets, but outside the fallout rained down upon us. Mispredictions or defiance of the weather at the Test Site sent hot clouds looping back into Oregon and California. How many cancers across the nation were a result of the testing? We will never know.
Between ourselves and the other nuclear nations, we have released several tons of plutonium into the atmosphere. One tiny particle of plutonium inhaled and lodged in a lung will guarantee death by cancer. Nuclear bombs are a very efficient means of pulverizing plutonium and sending it high into the sky.
When the risks of atmospheric testing were starting to be recognized by the world at large, a treaty moved testing underground. Moving the tests underground didn’t stop the exposure, and the recognition of the dangers by politicians didn’t stop us from killing our own citizens. Cracks broke open from the underground shocks, venting radionucleatides. We sent workmen to muck out the still-hot tunnels with no protections beyond a shower afterwards and then sent them home with dusty clothes to irradiate their wives and children as well The explosions finally stopped in a tentative way after a last underground test in September, 1992. There is no treaty to back up the termination of testing. President Clinton considered pushing an underground test ban treaty through the Senate before leaving office, but did not. The crater-riddled test site is officially in mothballs, ready to be reopened at any time.
The fire set upwind of Los Alamos in 2000, driven by high winds and hot weather, quickly grew out of control. A map of the fire’s progress resembles a map of the fan of fallout from the Nevada Test Site. Except this time Los Alamos was downwind. Except this time the city and the Los Alamos National Laboratory were evacuated. Except this time no human lives were lost. Hundreds of homes burned, and portions of Lab property burned as well. The fire, finally extinguished in July, left blackened hillsides and cement slabs where the homes of affluent Lab employees once were. The town was angry and indignant. A search for the guilty ensued. The supervisor of Bandolier National Monument, where the fire was set, was removed from his job. Lawsuits were filed. The citizens of Los Alamos lost photographs and furniture, pets and heirlooms. The stories in the paper claimed that the city was still reeling from the disaster six months later. Still healing.
In a series of nuclear tests in the 50’s, U.S. military soldiers were brought in to determine how to fight a nuclear war. Some 250,000 soldiers were involved over the years both in the Pacific and in Nevada. Out on the flats at the Test Site, some in trenches and some on open ground, the soldiers turned away and pressed their hands to their eyes as the countdowns neared zero. In the flash from the detonations they could see the bones of their hand clearly through closed eyelids. The ones in the trenches frequently become half buried and had to be pulled from the collapsed dirt. The ones on open ground were scattered like bowling pins in the shock wave. Thus initiated, they were ordered to charge toward ground zero with nothing but the cotton of their fatigues between them and the radiation. They passed cages with cows, pigs, sheep and other animals still smoking from the blast, and felt like guinea pigs themselves. After one apocalyptic detonation and rush to ground zero, soldiers boarded a bus to return to barracks and passed what several claim were humans handcuffed to fences near the blast center. The ones who saw the humans and raised questions about them were later tracked down by government agents and subjected to isolation, sleep deprivation, and brainwashing techniques in an effort to blur the reality of the experience. The loss of photographs and knick-knacks at Los Alamos seems mild indeed when compared to the loss of dignity, health, sanity, and life suffered by these veterans of another fire born in Los Alamos.
Lawsuits were eventually brought against the U.S. Government on behalf of the Downwinders and the atomic veterans. The government lawyers used the same arguments as the tobacco companies: there is no way to prove that the fallout and exposure caused the specific cancers in the affected people. Statistics are games that mathematicians play. The government claimed that men who had worked 20 years at the Test Site had never set foot within its borders. Military records were lost. Medical records disappeared from hospitals. The government delayed cases until the victims were dead and could therefore not testify. In one set of cases, a lower court judge found that fallout did in fact cause the cancers of some of the plaintiffs and money was awarded to the victims or the survivors of the victims. The ruling was soon overturned by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case. The appeals court ruled that testing was necessary for the security of the nation and the government was therefore not liable. The court was worried about precedent: should they throw open the door for every soldier who dies while on duty to sue the government? If civilians are killed in the defense of the nation, can they bring suit as well? The court effectively legally labeled the testing of nuclear weapons as War. For the first time in the history of war, there were no combatants, only victims.
We have not known horror of this magnitude on our own soil since the Civil War. Darkness and complicity in lock step with fear and denial. How many lives lost? Thousands certainly. Tens of thousands, probably. Made worse by the creeping nature of the death, the uncertainty of origin, the lack of valor. Death by cancer from living your life or doing your duty frequently results in shame, not heroism. 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam and we label it a tragedy of the highest magnitude, a scar on our history. An equal number most likely died from nuclear testing, died by our own hands, and few Americans know of, much less acknowledge, their deaths.
The West is a nuclear landscape. You cannot travel here without tripping in the web of nuclear testing. On the south rim of Grand Canyon, within spitting distance of the lodges and overlooks, is “the most productive uranium mine” in the west. It was worked through the great bomb building era of the 50’s and 60’s. This is at the center of one of our most famous National Parks. Roads to other uranium mines or prospects cut through many mesas and canyons. Nuclear weapons were manufactured in Washington, Colorado and New Mexico and developed in California as well as New Mexico. There is nowhere to drive for more than a few hours in most of the western states without coming to a ground zero for nuclear blasts, a major uranium mine, a weapons development center, or a landscape washed with fallout.
A few hours’ drive from Los Alamos will bring you to Chaco Canyon, a lonely arroyo in northwestern New Mexico. Here was the religious center for a culture we call the Anasazi, which dissolved about 850 years ago. The Great Houses in Chaco canyon contain dormitories of rooms around great clusters of kivas. Kivas are round underground structures that served as places for the religious activities of the Anasazi. Indians today use them for similar purposes. Roads radiate from Chaco to all points in the Anasazi Southwest like spokes of a wheel. The resources available in Chaco canyon, such as water and arable land, could never support a population that lived full time in the thousands of rooms in the Chaco houses. Most Anasazi must have come here for short visits to be involved in religious ceremonies. The full time residents of Chaco must have depended upon the contributions of those who came to worship. Only a successful culture could have afforded the luxury of such an extravagant center for worship.
Chaco Canyon is a cautionary tale for us in the Nuclear West. The greed of success breeds excess. Excess requires denial and rationalization of the costs required, the sacrifices made. Disasters press from both sides when one treads these paths. Lessons given by the past are forgotten. The spoked roads and round excavations at Chaco Canyon are eerily similar to the bomb craters and roads that can be found at Yucca Flat and Frenchman Flat on the Nevada Test Site. Out in the Joshua Trees of the Nevada desert, we came to worship the apogee of technology in the name of security. We yanked the tail of the nuclear coyote and our science became Our Religion and Our Protector. Such concepts of salvation and protection, probably held by the Anasazi, did not save them from the dual shifting axes of climatic change and human folly, and however we hold true to the faith that the wizards will save us from ourselves, the sandy stonework of Chaco lies deserted in testament to our arrogance.
Much of the information for this article was referenced from American Ground Zero by Carole Gallagher, ISBN 0-262-07146-0 and Catalog of Worldwide Nuclear Testing by V.N. Mikhailov, editor, ISBN 1-56700-131-9