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American Ground Zero: by Carole Gallagher, MIT press, pp 424, 129 duotones,
£24.95

When the US Atomic Energy Commission placed its nuclear weapons test
site at Mercury, Nevada in 1950, it described the area to the north-east
as ‘relatively uninhabited’. When the people who live there, in Utah and
parts of Arizona, began to compare notes about the rates of cancers and
birth defects in their largely nonsmoking, teetotal isolation, some took
to referring to themselves as ‘the relative uninhabitants’.

To a visitor from England, Central Nevada with its old, red, round mountains
and salt-flats tens of miles wide gives a very strong sense of being a place
where people are not meant to be. To the Shoshone and Paiute peoples, though,
and to the farmers and miners whose hamlets huddle wherever there is water,
it is home.

Every few weeks since 27 January, 1951, a nuclear explosion has shattered
the silence of the desert dawn. The Department of Energy, successor to
the AEC, lists 100 above-ground tests in Nevada before the Partial Test-Ban
Treaty of 1963. Among these were nuclear battlefield exercises, in which
between 250 000 and 500 000 troops some British witnessed atomic explosions
from slit-trenches three miles, or less, from the blast. Since the treaty,
tests have continued in tunnels and shafts beneath the mountains; there
were at least four in 1992.

Al Maxwell was a prisoner of war in a camp near Hiroshima in August
1945. He was sent to clean up the remains of the city; and then passed through
Nagasaki on his way back to the US, days after it had been levelled on August
9. (The Veterans’ Administration denies he was there.) He moved to Ogden
and then to Logan in southern Utah. Six times his wife Jackie conceived:
‘The fetus I lost, it was so abnormal they couldn’t even tell what it was.
It took me three days to miscarry, parts of it coming out a piece at a
time.’ Four babies died from multiple malformations.

As Maxwell was dying in 1987 of multiple myeloma a cancer of the marrow
associated with radiation exposure he told his daughter: ‘Believe me, this
country is worth dying for. You may not agree with what’s going on, but
the Constitution is divinely inspired.’ The last phrase is the doctrine
of the Mormon Church, the power in the land of Utah. Photographer Carole
Gallagher heard it many times as she interviewed dozens of ‘downwinders’
in Utah, from widows of test site workers and veterans of the nuclear exercises.

What caused the Maxwell’s problems? Science can give no answer that
would stand up in a court of law. What has caused the Mormon church to be
so acquiescent? Rather than a detailed technical and political investigation,
Gallagher chose to adopt ‘the method of the anthropologist, to examine the
culture itself in as detached a manner as possible . . . thereby discovering
the roots of how and why this tragedy could happen here.’

Hap Lease, nicknamed Happy, worked at the Test Site for 14 years from
1962. His widow Marjorie explained: ‘He was a monitor so he was one of the
first guys (into the test tunnels to recover equipment and check radiation
levels) after these shots.’ His daughter Bonnie also worked at the site,
driving pay checks to workers scattered over hundreds of square miles: ‘They
didn’t know where I was If they had a shot, they had a shot. I didn’t know
radiation from anything else. They said it didn’t hurt you so you went along
and did your thing.’ Bonnie’s second son, now 19 and conceived while she
worked at the site, was born with a cleft lip, no stomach muscles and bladder
troubles. ‘Right across the hall’ from Bonnie’s office, she says, is where
they did all the (radiation monitoring) badges I’d hear the guys say, This
one’s too hot’ and Let’s ditch this one; get a new one and give it the same
²Ô³Ü³¾²ú±ð°ù’.’

Marjorie Lease and Bonnie McDaniels posed in front of a grim photo of
Hap Lease, taken as he was dying from throat cancer in 1987. ‘It don’t bother
me none to talk about it,’ Marjorie Lease told Gallagher, who describes
her ‘lips pursed in a thin, hard line’.

What other response can there be to this catalogue of destroyed lives?
Only the US Congress can provide much more than sympathy. Law-suits for
compensation have dragged on. As someone who took part in the nuclear exercises
says, ‘Atomic veterans are an endangered species’. The future of futures
past and present

Mike Holderness is a science writer.