Nulear Testing and Ecocide in the West

Question for Discussion: What is the larger
legacy of nuclear production and testing and
U.S. military operations in the American West?

Reading: Davis, "Dead West: Pictures from the
Nuclear West"; Tempest Williams, "The Clan of
the One-Breasted Women"

Video: Atomic Cafe (1983); DVD: Yucca Mountain Project (1998); DVD Current Yucca Mountain (2003)

Nuclear Ecocide in the West

A Nuked Western Landscape (in-class)
Toxic Waste Sites in the West (in-class)
Nuclear Tests in the West (in-class)
Nuclear Test Sites in the West (in-class)
Nuclear Testing History in the West (in-class)
U.S. Fallout Map for Nuclear Testing (in-class)
U.S. Fallout Map showing Nuclear Radiation
(in-class)
The Atomic Bombing in the West
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)
Percentage by State of U.S. Government
Land in the West (in-class)
Nuclear testing zones in Nevada (in-class)
Atomic Veterans and Guinea Pigs (in-class)
Mike Davis, Dead West (in-class)
Williams, Clan of the One-Breasted Women
(in-class)
Toxic Utah: A Land Littered with Poisons
(in-class)
Nuclear Weapons Production Complex (in-class)
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Storage Facility (in-class)

Nuclear Testing History
in the West
U.S. Fallout Map for Nuclear Testing (in-class)
U.S. Fallout Map showing Nuclear Radiation
(in-class)
U.S. Fallout Exposure Map: Nuclear Radiation
Exposure in Rads
Summary of U.S. Nuclear Testing
and number of Atomic Veterans used (in-class)
Nuclear Testing caused 80,000 Cancers
in the U.S. (in-class)
Nuclear Fallout worse than Thought (in-class)
Toxic Utah (in-class)
Utah Downwinders Honored (in-class)

Nuclear Test Sites in the West
Nuclear Testing areas in Nevada
The Nuclear West: A Map
Nevada Nuclear Test site
Gallery of U.S. Nuclear Tests (in-class)
Nuclear Test Image Gallery (in-class)
Nuclear Test Locations in the World (in-class)
History of the Nevada Test Site and
Nuclear Testing Background
Portable Nuclear Fallout Shelter Patent (1986)

Nuclear Weapons Production Complex
Where the Bombs are, 2006 (in-class)
Map Locations of Nuclear Weapons-2006 (in-class)
Google Earth Map of U.S. Nuclear Weapons 2006
(in-class)
New Nuclear Warhead Design in the U.S.
in 2007 (in-class)
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex
Map of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Production
Complex
The Legacy Story: Study of U.S. Nuclear
Weapons Production Facilities

Atomic Veterans and Guinea Pigs
The National Association of Atomic Veterans
(in-class)
U.S. Fallout Map for Nuclear Testing (in-class)
U.S. Fallout Map showing Nuclear Radiation
(in-class)
U.S. Fallout Exposure Map: Nuclear Radiation
Exposure in Rads (in-class)
Atomic Veterans History Project: Film footage
Radiation Injury and the Atomic Veterans (in-class)
The First Atomic Veterans

The Debate over the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Facility
Obama Nixxes Yucca Mountain Project
DOE: The Yucca Mountain Project (in-class)
Map of U.S. Nuclear Power Reactors (in-class)
Location of Spent Nuclear Fuel destined
for Yucca Mountain (in-class)
YuccaMountain.Org
Nuclear Waste Transportation Routes
in the U.S. (in-class)
Potential Transportation Problems
Shipping Nuclear Waste (in-class)
If not Yucca Mountain, then What? (in-class)
Cleaning Up the Cold War Mess
EPA: About Yucca Mountain Standards

The West from Space at Night (in-class)
Population per Square Mile in the West (in-class)
The Atomic Bombing of the West (in-class)
A Nuked Western Landscape (in-class)
Toxic Waste Sites in the West (in-class)
Nuclear Tests in the West (in-class)
Nuclear Test Sites in the West (in-class)
Nuclear Testing History in the West (in-class)
Atomic Veterans and Guinea Pigs (in-class)
Toxic Utah: A Land Littered with Poisons
(in-class)
Downwinders Organization (in-class)
Utah Downwinders Honored (in-class)
Nuclear Weapons Production Complex (in-class)
Mike Davis, Dead West (in-class)
Williams, Clan of the One-Breasted Women
(in-class)
Cancers Caused by Nuclear Testing (in-class)
The Debate over the Yuccal Mountain
Nuclear Waste Facility (in-class)

The Atomic Bombing of the West

Nuclear testing zones in Nevada (in-class)

The atomic age started here in the 1940s and boomed during the Cold War, creating a landscape nuked by the atomic research labs (Alamogordo, Sandia, and Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; and the Idaho National Engineering Lab), bomb factories (Rocky Flats, Colorado), A-bomb detonations (Nevada Test Site and Trinity Site in New Mexico), and "peaceful" underground bomb tests (Piceance and Rulison, Colorado; Fallon, Nevada; and Farmington, New Mexico). Add to this the dozens of mines and mills and busted uranium towns and the nation's nuclear waste dumps at Nevada's Yucca Mountain and New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad Caverns, proposed final resting spots of the country's hottest radioactive dregs. Unless nuclear power gains better public acceptance, the nuclear future of the West looks to be one of clean-up and long-term watchfulness; atomic leftovers remain potent contaminants for thousands of years.

Perhaps hundreds of toxic spots exist for every "superfund" site mapped here, which concentrate near the West's larger cities. The leftovers of chemical and biological weapons are more contained, in just three Western depots: Hermiston, Oregon; Tooele, Utah; and Pueblo, Colorado where the military faces a choice between letting the weapons slowly deteriorate and leak, or burning them on site -neither of which appeals to local citizens. Unexploded conventional ordinance litter the weapons test ranges. The American Rivers Council includes 15 Western rivers on its most endangered roster, including Montana's Blackfoot, setting for the movie A River Runs Through It, and Colorado's Animas, threatened by what might be the last big Western water project.

Some 30,000 tons of chemical weapons fester in U.S. military stockpiles. Under international treaty all the weapons are slated for destruction, but the process is years behind schedule. Incineration began in 1996 only at the Tooele, Utah, depot and could be shut down anytime by citizen activists or the governor. Thousands of decaying weapons await incineration at eight national stockpiles, three in the West:

Umatilla Chemical Depot, Hermiston, Oregon:

91,400 M-55 rockets filled with Sarin gas

14,500 M-55 rockets filled with VX gas

32,300 artillery shells filled with VX gas

Deseret Chemical Depot, Tooele, Utah:

768,400 artillery shells filled with Sarin gas

29,600 artillery shells of mustard gas

22,700 land mines filled with VX gas

Pueblo Chemical Depot, Pueblo, Colorado:

480,500 cartridges of mustard gas

299,600 artillery shells of mustard gas
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Mustard gas blisters the skin and inflames lungs, throat, and eyes.

VX gas in minute amounts on the skin kills within hours.

Sarin gas in minute amounts kills within 15 minutes.

Nuke Tests in the West

But these tests were merely the most recent in a long line of nuclear explosions beginning with the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Over 2000 nuclear weapons have been detonated for testing purposes, over 500 in the atmosphere, under water or in space, and the rest underground. Of these about 1000 were conducted by the United States, 700 by the Soviet Union, 30 by the UK, 180 by France, 35 by China, 5 by India and 5 by Pakistan.

Initial tests by countries were done to determine whether basic nuclear weapons designs would work. Subsequent testing was done to improve existing designs and to develop new types of nuclear weapons. Some testing was also done with military personnel in the vicinity to determine military survivability and fighting capacity in a nuclear war. Research was also done on civilians exposed to radiation from nuclear testing to determine the effects of such exposure. Nuclear testing was also done in some cases for political purposes. India and Pakistan, for example, testing in 1998 in order to assert their status as nuclear weapon states.

In the 1950's, atomic tests were conducted
above ground and resulted in devastating
health effects to the "Downwinders"
northeast of the site in Nevada and Utah. Since
then, tests were conducted only underground,resulting in a pockmarked "lunar"
landscape. From its founding in 1951 until the final Divider test on September 23,1992, 99 above ground tests and over 800 below ground nuclear tests were detonated in this desert. There have been over 1000 nuclear tests conducted by the United States. Of these, 24 tests were done jointly with the United Kingdom, and over 900 tests were conducted at the NTS.

Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women

"I belong to a Clan of One-breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.

I've had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small tumor between my ribs diagnosed as "a borderline malignancy."

This is my family history." (183)

"Over dessert, I shared a recurring dream of mine. I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert. That this image had so permeated my being, I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas." (184)

"It is a well-known story in the Desert West, "The Day We Bombed Utah."' Or perhaps, "The Years We Bombed Utah." Above-ground atomic testing in Nevada took place from January 27, 1951, through July 11, 1962. Not only were the winds blowing north covering "low use segments of the population" with fallout and leaving sheep dead in their tracks, but the climate was right. The United States in the 19505 was red, white, and blue. The Korean War was raging, McCarthyism was rampant, Ike was it, and the Cold War was hot. If you were against nuclear testing, you were for a Communist regime." (185)

"The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons was the same fear I saw being held in my mother's body. Sheep. Dead sheep. The evidence is buried.

I cannot prove that my mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, or my grandmothers, Lettie Romney Dixon and Kathryn Blackett Tempest, along with my aunts, contracted cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I can't prove they didn't." (187)

"What I do know, however, is that as a Mormon woman of the fifth generation of "Latter-day Saints," I must question everything, even if it means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a member of a border tribe among my own people. Tolerating blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the Nevada Test Site as "virtually uninhabited desert terrain," my family were some of the "virtual uninhabitants." (187)

"On March 18, 1988, I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahans for trespassing on military lands. They are still conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of One-breasted Women." (190)

Mike Davis, Dead West

(See nuclear testing zones in Nevada)

"Was the Cold War the Earth's worst eco-disaster in the last ten thousand years? The time has come to weigh the environmental costs of the great "twilight struggle" and its attendant nuclear arms race. Until recently, most ecologists have underestimated the impact of warfare and arms production on natural history. Yet there is implacable evidence that huge areas of Eurasia and North America, particularly the militarized deserts of Central Asia and the Great Basin, have become unfit for human habitation, perhaps for thousands of years, as a direct result of weapons testing (conventional, nuclear, and biological) by the Soviet Union, China, and the United States." (339)

"Millions of others -- soldiers, armament workers, and "downwind" civilians -- have become the silent casualties of atomic plagues. If, at the end of the old superpower era, a global nuclear apocalypse was finally averted, it was only at the cost of these secret holocausts." (339)

"Peterson's Troubled Lands and especially Feshbach and Friendly's Ecocide in the USSR have been received spectacular publicity in the American media. Exploiting the new, uncensored wealth of Russian-language sources, they describe an environmental crisis of biblical proportions. The former Land of the Soviets is portrayed as a dystopia of polluted lakes, poisoned crops, toxic cities, and sick children. What Stalinist heavy industry and mindless cotton monoculture have not ruined, the Soviet military has managed to bomb or irradiate. For Peterson, this "ecological terrorism" is conclusive proof of the irrationality of a society lacking a market mechanism to properly "value" nature." (340)

"The regions that today constitute the Pentagon's "national sacrifice zone" (the Great Basin of eastern California, Nevada, and western Utah) and its "plutonium periphery" (the Columbia-Snake Plateau, the Wyoming Basin and the Colorado Plateau) have few landscape analogues anywhere else on earth."

"In the early 1980s, Gallagher moved from New York City to St. George to work full-time on her oral history of the casualties of the American nuclear test program. Beginning with its first nuclear detonation in 1951, this small Mormon city, due east of the Nevada Test Site, has been shrouded in radiation debris from scores of atmospheric and accidentally `ventilated" underground blasts. Each lethal cloud was the equivalent of billions of x-rays and contained more radiation than was released at Chernobyl in 1988. Moreover, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s had deliberately planned for fallout to blow over the St. George region in order to avoid Las Vegas and Los Angeles. In the icy, Himmlerian jargon of a secret AEC memo unearthed by Gallagher, the targeted communities were "a low use segment of the population."

"[H]er quiet dread of going into the local K-Mart and "seeing four- and five-year-old children wearing wigs, deathly pale and obviously in chemotherapy." But such horror has become routinized in a region where cancer is so densely clustered that virtually any resident can matter-of-factly rattle off long lists of tumorous or deceased friends and family. The eighty-some voices--former Nevada Test Site workers and "atomic GIs" as well as Downwinders--that comprise American Ground Zero are weary with the minutiae of pain and death."

"The ordinary Americans who lived, and still live, these nightmares are rendered in great dignity in Gallagher's photographs. But she cannot suppress her frustration with the passivity of so many of the Mormon Downwinders. Their unquestioning submission to a Cold War government in Washington and an authoritarian church hierarchy in Salt Lake City disabled effective protest through the long decades of contamination. To the cynical atomocrats in the AEC, they were just gullible hicks in the sticks, suckers for soapy reassurances and idiot "the atom is your friend" propaganda films. As one subject recalled his Utah childhood: "I remember in school they showed a film once called A is for Atom, B is for the Bomb. I think most of us
who grew up in that period ... [have now] added C is for Cancer. D is for Death. "43

Indeed, most of the people interviewed by Gallagher seem to have had a harder time coming to grips with government deception than with cancer. Ironically, Washington waged its secret nuclear war against the most patriotic cross-section of the population imaginable, a virtual Norman Rockwell tapestry of Americana: gung-ho Marines, ultra-loyal Test Site workers, Nevada cowboys and tungsten miners, Mormon fanners, and freckle-faced Utah schoolchildren. For forty years the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Department of Energy, have lied about exposure levels, covered up Chernobyl-sized accidents, suppressed research on the contamination of the milk supply, ruined the reputation of dissident scientists, abducted hundreds of body parts from victims, and conducted a ruthless legal war to deny compensation to the Downwinders ." 44

"Most of the urban Midwest and Northeast, moreover, was downwind of the 1950s atmospheric tests, and storm fronts frequently dumped carcinogenic, radioisotope "hot spots" as far east as New York City. As the commander of the elite Air Force squadron responsible for monitoring the nuclear test clouds during the 1950s told Gallagher (he was suffering from cancer): "There isn't anybody in the United States who isn't a downwinder.... When we followed the clouds, we went all over the United States from east to west.... Where are you going to draw the Iine?"

"Yet, over the last decade, Native Americans, ranchers, peace activists, Downwinders, and even members of the normally conservative Mormon establishment have attempted to draw a firm line against further weapons' testing, radiation poisoning, and ecocide in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. The three short field reports that follow (written in 1992, 1993, and 1996- 97) are snapshots of the most extraordinary social movement to emerge in the postwar West."