As children growing up in the ‘50s, we were told not to eat the snow. That was the extent of my awareness of the clouds of toxic radiation circling the globe from atomic bomb atmospheric testing happening at that time. Only later would I learn about the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as a grad student in political science study the pros and cons of the international defense strategy of “mutually assured destruction” – or MAD -- the “mad” attempt at insuring peace through the ever-increasing stockpiling of nuclear weaponry. But it wasn’t until reading Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones that I would learn of the secrecy and deceit at the heart of the entire project of the creation, testing, and effects of nuclear weapons. A few years later, I had the privilege of having among my students a young man from Nagasaki. He was concerned that, unlike Nagasaki, where a ceremony is held annually to commemorate the victims of the bombing and to remind the world of the horrors of nuclear war, here in the US, the only country actually to have used the atom bomb, there is little memory or awareness. So he brought with him a book and a film documenting the reality of the horrific effects of the atomic bomb, asking me to place them in the library so people here would know the truth of what happened there.[i]
John Hersey, the first reporter whose reports that shed light on the realities of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki managed to evade the US censors, said in a 1986 interview, “’I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory.’”[ii] He feared the fading of that memory of the horrific destruction wreaked upon the world by the bomb. Indeed, my experience with students over many years is that they have had little or no awareness of the ways in which nuclear bombs differ from other weaponry, or of the effects of radiation on every living thing in their immediate path and beyond.
The film Oppenheimer has recently brought visibility to Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” himself and the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the first atomic bomb, but like radiation, the story of the many who were involved, been deeply impacted, or suffered the effects of the atomic bomb remain invisible. It’s my intention here to shed a bit of light on these.
The film accurately portrays the way those choosing the site of the Manhattan Project regarded it as being “mostly empty – just a few Indians,” as if the indigenous people of this land don’t count, as surely they haven’t for the long history of the United States. In reality, in addition to the plants and animals in the region, several thousands of primarily Native and Hispanic people lived in the area. 32 Hispano families in Los Alamos were forced to leave their homes with only 48 hours’ notice, and with little or no compensation. Their homes were bulldozed and cattle shot. 19,000 people, including many pueblo-dwelling Native Americans, lived near the Trinity atomic bomb test site, located 200 miles from the lab in Los Alamos. including many pueblo-dwelling Native Americans. In addition, nearly half a million people, most of them Hispanic and Native American, lived in the Tularosa Basin, the 150-mile radius from the site of the explosion. Those directly impacted remember the bright light of the explosion in the middle of the night, and ash falling all the next day. They were never warned about the test before or after, and were later falsely led to believe that they’d witnessed an explosion of ammunitions at the nearby Almogordo Air Base. “They refused to see us,” said Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who believes the ethnic makeup of Los Alamos and the White Sands testing site is central to why these sites were chosen. “We were the first people ever exposed to radiation as the result of an atomic bomb, and most of us were Hispanos and Native Americans.”[iii] As is true throughout, the story of the atomic bomb is also the tale of whose lives were considered expendable, and whose not. It was later discovered that radiation levels in the blast radius were nearly 10,000 times what were deemed acceptable levels at that time. The nuclear radiation infiltrated the air, soil, and water and continues to cause cancers in inordinate numbers in people five generations following the original explosion.
A similar story of displacement and environmental degradation occurred at the several different communities unknowingly involved in the creation of the first atomic bomb. Unknowingly because, as was stressed in the film, secrecy and compartmentalization required that workers at the several different facilities involved knew nothing about any of the others, or what they themselves were participating in. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where enriched uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was manufactured, around 3000 poor farm people were displaced, with little notice or compensation, in order to build the 60,000 acre facility so secret that it had no name on a map for the initial years during the development of the bomb. The amount of radioactive and other toxic contamination there was revealed only decades later when toxic and radioactive wastes were found in the groundwater, as well as forty miles downstream in White Oak Creek.
In Hanford, Washington, plutonium for the Trinity test and the bomb detonated over Nagasaki was produced at a facility built close to the Columbia River, whose waters were used to cool the nuclear reactors at the site, and in which nuclear and other heavy metal and toxic waste was dumped. Here again, the army displaced and relocated inhabitants of Hanford and White Bluffs, Washington, as well as the Wanapum Nation. Radioactive waste from the plant quickly spread via the Columbia and prevailing winds. Clouds of radioactive iodine were released, covering pasturelands, croplands, and forests hundreds of miles away, exposing at least 13,000 people. Members of the Yakima and Nez Perce tribes, who depended on the Columbia River and its fish, began to report that the fish in the Columbia could be seen “glowing” at night. Solid nuclear waste had been buried in pits and corrosion-prone canisters near the Columbia, and liquid nuclear waste stored on site in underground tanks that began developing leaks. Clean-up efforts began in 1989 and are expected to continue at least into the 2040s.[iv]
Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, located near St. Louis, Missouri, refined uranium for the Manhattan Project. Leftover radioactive waste continues to impact residents of the city of St. Louis, and especially Coldwater Creek, into which deteriorating drums of radioactive waste leaked for decades. Yet it was not until 2011, when several high school friends reconnected and discovered that many of them were sick with rare cancers, that they launched an investigation that revealed that 120,000 tons of nuclear waste material had been dumped into a creek where they had played for years as children.
Of course, those most directly impacted by the atomic bomb were the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on whom the atomic bombs were dropped, obliterating every man-made structure, irradiating the soil and water, and destroying every living thing -- killing an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. The effects of the bomb continued far beyond that initial blast. Radiation from the bombings would go on to claim hundreds of thousands of lives. The survivors, known as hibakusha (“atomic bomb-affected people) suffered from radiation poisoning -- including hair loss, bleeding gums, fatigue, purple spots, fever, and death, and faced ostracism and discrimination as radiation sickness was considered to carry evil spirits or be contagious.
The lies and cover-up continued after the bombs had been dropped and the war was over. Even though Japanese doctors began to suspect their patients suffered from radiation sickness, Major General Leslie Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project, dismissed these suspicions, stating in a New York Times article that if there was any truth to the Japanese claim that people died from radiation poisoning “the number was very small.” He would later state before a Senate hearing that radiation poisoning was “without undue suffering” and a “very pleasant way to die.”[v]
The US government continued its efforts to deny and cover up the true effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by not allowing reporters into the area, and when they were, their reports were censored. John Hersey, whose reporting first disclosed the devastation of the atomic bomb in a piece published in the New Yorker Magazine in August of 1946, had to go to great lengths to get his story past the censors.[vi] As recently related by Lesley Blume, what was most unsettling to Hersey was not only “that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history” but also that it then “tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”[vii]
Perhaps the US government wanted to keep the true effects of the bomb from the public so as not to sully its new reputation as the liberator of Europe and the leader of the Free World. Or perhaps it did not want to make the horrors known so that it could, over Oppenheimer’s objections, continue to build bigger and more destructive nuclear weapons, which they have continued to do at Los Alamos to this day. As part of this process, in 1946, the United States began twelve years of nuclear bomb tests, some a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, in the Marshall Islands, population 52,000, primarily on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, remote enough and on a people considered disposable enough to once again render them invisible to most of the world.
Telling them they were a chosen people and the use of the atoll was for the good of humanity in order to prevent future wars, the Navy relocated the people living on the Bikini Atoll to another uninhabited atoll 125 miles away. As a result of the testing, some of the islands vaporized; others became uninhabitable. In a futile attempt to make the Enewetak Atoll habitable again, the US army scraped off the topsoil of the southern islands, burying it in a bomb crater on another island.[viii] Generations later, sea turtles of Enewetak still carry radiation.
On the Rongelap atoll, 100 miles away from Bikini, inhabitants suffered direct fallout from the 1954 tests. Immediately after, a third of all the pregnant women suffered fetal death. Fetal death rates remain high to this day. By 1966, 52% of the people on Rongelap who were under ten at the time of test developed thyroid cancer; by 1989, the rate was 69%. Others suffered respiratory diseases, miscarriages, stillbirths. Perhaps the worst was the grossly deformed fetuses known as “jellyfish babies” who had no eyes, heads, arms, or legs. While able at first to breathe, they were only able to live a few hours. It is still not possible safely to eat food grown on the island. The combined effects of the reproductive deaths and high rates of cancers have resulted in the deaths of more than 15,000 people. But it was not until traces of radioactive material were found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe, and the United States that the US shut down its testing in the Pacific and instead began testing on mainland US.
While the Army conducted some testing in Alaska, Colorado, and Mississippi, most of the testing in the continental US occurred at the main test site in Nevada, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, a site chosen once again for its “remoteness,” as though no one lived there and as if the radiation could be contained. Yet, in the nearly 1000 tests, 400,000 American soldiers, now known as “atomic soldiers,” were deliberately exposed to radiation from nuclear tests, both for training purposes and for the army to obtain information on the effects of exposure. They were ordered into trenches near the blast site. In contrast to the protective gear worn by technicians in the labs, the soldiers wore only helmets and gas masks for protection, and were told to cover their faces with their arms. The blast knocked them to the ground, and they later reported being able to see the bones and blood vessels in their hands. Many were haunted by nightmares and PTSD, and suffered radiation-related diseases. They developed high rates of cancer, particularly nasal and prostate cancer, as well as leukemia, with a death rate from leukemia that was 50% higher than that of military personnel who had not been exposed. They also suffered from gaslighting, as the military consistently denied the facts of the amount of radiation to which they’d been exposed, as well as the causal relation between their illnesses and exposure to radiation. In some cases, entire medical records disappeared. The entire operation was clandestine. Soldiers were sworn to secrecy. To tell anyone and even talk among themselves was considered treason, punishable by a $10,000 fine or 10 years in prison.[ix]
Until 1963 when the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, these were all above-ground tests, generating a considerable amount of radioactive fallout. Unaware of the dangers, some civilians became exposed by having “watch parties” in designated areas where they could witness the blasts. But most were exposed unknowingly. Those most immediately affected by fallout carried by the wind were individuals living in parts of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, now known as Downwinders. As Rebecca Solnit so poignantly describes this, “The nuclear bombs being exploded there regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small-town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsals for the end-of-the-world war..” [x] Downwinders have suffered high rates of cancer and birth defects.[xi] Studies now show that the fallout reached 46 of the 48 continental United States, and undoubtedly other countries as well, as nuclear radiation was carried by high-level winds and deposited as rain and snow, landing on trees,[xii] crops, and grasses eaten by cows, where it became concentrated in cows’ milk, consumed disproportionately by children. It’s estimated that the death toll from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s has been responsible for about 400,000 deaths in the United States alone. [xiii]
……..
The news of the first bomb being dropped on Hiroshima was met with celebration and applause around the Allied world. Albert Camus, then editor-in-chief of the French Resistance newspaper, Combat, was one of only a few who denounced the atomic bomb. In his editorial of August 8, 1945, Camus wrote: “We can sum it up in one sentence: our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests. Meanwhile we think there is something indecent in celebrating a discovery whose use has caused the most formidable rage of destruction ever known to man.”[xiv]
At a time when the world teeters yet again on the brink of nuclear war, we live in peril of the denial of the realities of the devastation these weapons cause, as if in scraping off the top layer and burying it somewhere unseen we might be immune from its effects. We may fancy ourselves a powerful nation with our possession of over 5000 nuclear warheads,[xv] but as Adrienne Rich wrote of Marie Curie, who died of the radiation she discovered: “She died a famous woman denying/her wounds/denying/her wounds came from the same source as her power.” [xv] May we reveal rather than deny our wounds, for it is only in exposing the wounds we have inflicted on others and ourselves that we can learn from our mistakes, so as not to repeat them, and begin the process of healing.
Sources
Blume, Lesley M.M. 2020. Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Camus, Albert. 1991. Albert Camus: Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper “Combat,” 1944-1947. Selected and Translated by Alexandre de Gramont. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Atomic Tests During the 1950s Probably Killed Nearly Half a Million Americans – Mother Jones
Coldwater Creek radioactive waste cleanup tops $400M | STLPR
Environmental Consequences - Nuclear Museum
Griffin, Susan. 1993. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Anchor Books.
Hanford Site | History, Cleanup, & Facts | Britannica
How A-Bomb Testing Changed Our Trees : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR
How growing up near Coldwater Creek wrought years of pain | STLPR
Inhabited Desert: The Untold Story Of The Trinity Test (kunm.org)
Marshall Islands – Nuclear Museum
‘Nature does not forget’: These 4 animals are radioactive (nationalgeographic.com)
Nevada Test Site – Nuclear Museum
Nevada Test Site Downwinders - Nuclear Museum
Nuclear Weapons by Country 2024 (worldpopulationreview.com)
People exposed to fallout from 1st atomic bomb test still fighting for compensation : NPR
Rich, Adrienne. 1978. “Power” in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Seager, Joni. 1993. Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge.
Southard, Susan. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2015, quoted in Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Nuclear Museum)
Solnit, Rebecca. 2020. Recollections of My Nonexistence. New York: Viking.
Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Nuclear Museum
Testing in Nevada Desert Is Tied to Cancers - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The Atomic Bomb’s First Victims Were in New Mexico | HISTORY
The Atomic Soldiers: U.S. Veterans, Used as Guinea Pigs, Break the Silence - The Atlantic
The lasting legacy of the first atomic bomb | 1A (the1a.org)
The Truth About What Happened Here: New Mexico and the Manhattan Project — The Latinx Project at NYU
Was the Oppenheimer test site unpopulated? - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
[i] The book is available in the University of Minnesota Duluth library. [Photo collection of atomic bomb destruction: Nagasaki] - University of Minnesota (umn.edu). I do not know what became of the film.
[ii] Quoted in Blume, 172.
[iii] The lasting legacy of the first atomic bomb | 1A (the1a.org)
[iv] The half-life of plutonium-239 is about 24,000 years. To regard the area as “cleaned up” by 2040 is yet another exercise in denial.
[v] Quoted in Southard.
[vi] That article was subsequently republished as a book, Hiroshima.
[vii] Blume, 121.
[viii] They dumped it into a bomb crater on Runit Island, covering it with concrete that has a life expectancy of 300-1000 years. The half-life of some nuclear waste is 24,000 years.
[ix] Pres. Bill Clinton lifted the imposed secrecy requirement in 1994.
[x] Solnit, 195.
[xi] In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to make payments to some of the people who claimed to have been affected by the fallout from the nuclear tests, but these payments are only available under a limited set of conditions. Those affected by fallout from the first test of the bomb made at Los Alamos were not included in this and have yet to be compensated.
[xi]i Studies have shown that trees around the world that were alive during the era of nuclear testing carry a carbon-14 atom. The same is true of persons conceived during that time.
[xii] For one investigation into the health effects of the 1950’s nuclear testing, see Federal Guidance Report No. 3: Health Implications of Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Testing through 1961 (epa.gov)
[xiv] Camus, 110.
[xv] This number is actually a substantial reduction – a testimony to a bit of sanity in global efforts to reduce the number of nuclear warheads from a peak of 70, 300 in 1986 to approximately 13,800 today.
[xv] Rich, 3.