nuclear-news

Add this little public service booklet, illustrated with the drawing at left and written by the Atomic Energy Commission to the people of Nevada:

“You are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation’s atomic test program. … Some of you have been inconvenienced by our test operations. At times some of you have been exposed to potential risk from flash, blast, or fall-out. You have accepted the inconvenience or the risk without fuss, without alarm, and without panic. Your cooperation has helped achieve an unusual record of safety.”

As though they were asked.

I’m not sure what I make of this. Certainly in the 1950s nobody was controlling nuclear weapons; they were alive, reproducing, and roaming the world. So knowing precisely what damage they cause might help mitigate that damage. And certainly I’m not going to think about the more distant and longer-term effects of those shots, more than 200 of them above ground, except to say that as a 10-year old girl in Illinois, even I wasn’t safe.

I do know I’m impressed by the amount of directed effort, the thoroughness of thought that went into cutting down 145 ponderosa pines, trucking them out of the canyon, digging holes, filling them with concrete, sticking the trees into them, dropping the bomb, and beginning the measurements. And though the United Nations belatedly began negotiating a ban on above-ground tests in 1955, the Limited Test Ban Treaty didn’t get signed until 1963. That was the limited treaty; the comprehensive one banning all tests everywhere took another 40-plus years, and even now the United States hasn’t ratified it.* I’m most impressed by the contrast between the pointed determination of the test shots and the infinite dithering about the (yes, infinitely more complicated) test bans. I might suspect that human nature and its governments have a dark side.