Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  Masco writes this about the 1955 Apple-2 atomic bomb test in Nevada, when the military conducted “a civil defense exercise designed to measure how a ‘typical’ American community would look after a nuclear attack …

  An elaborately rendered town was built on the test site, consisting of a fire station, a school, a radio station, a library, and a dozen homes in the current building styles. These buildings were carefully constructed, furnished with the latest consumer items (appliances, furniture, televisions, carpets, and linens), and stocked with food that had been specially flown in from Chicago and San Francisco. Residences were populated with mannequins dressed in brand-new clothing and posed with domestic theatricality—at the dinner table, cowering in the basement, or watching television.

  You’ve no doubt seen video of this. The footage of Apple-2 exploding life-size dollhouses known as Survival Town was widely circulated in civilian preparedness videos throughout the Cold War but has, these days, become a kind of cliché, a joke. The archival footage of JCPenney’s mannequins exploded by an atomic blast has been used so often, as B-roll in so many shows and films, that we laugh when we see it. What were we thinking?! Ha-ha. So naïve we were! But even as we recognize our past ignorance, we internalize the image of those smithereened mannequins as the worst thing the Bomb ever did to America. The Campbell’s soups lined up perfectly in the pantry. The midcentury furnishings. The pencil skirts and the Studebakers. A whole lot of staging of now-vintage décor. The ideal of a contemporary American neighborhood that was nuked back in 1955 looks a lot like the inside of a nostalgia-obsessed Applebee’s in 2015. I concoct a plan to replace the Applebee’s mural of the lava obelisk at Trinity with a looping projection of Apple-2’s destruction of the ideal American community to see how that affects people’s appetites. Then Barb and I head out for a smoke.

  Another thing that happened during Apple-2: weapons scientists employed a system of parabolic mirrors to channel the flash (and heat) of the twenty-nine-kiloton blast into a thin beam they then used to light their cigarettes. “The massive destructive power of the atomic age,” writes Masco, “is marshaled to accomplish that most mundane—and purely sensual act—of smoking.”

  I use only a Bic. Barb persists in not talking to me though, so we just stand there, gandering at our smoke in the wind.

  0545 Hours—July 16, 1945

  (Fifteen Minutes After the Blast)

  The energy developed by the test is several times greater than expected. The cloud column mass now reaches a phenomenal height: fifty thousand to seventy thousand feet. The mass will hover over the northeast corner of the Trinity Site for several hours. This will be sufficient time for the majority of the largest particles to fall out. But now various levels move in different directions. In general, the lower one-third drifts eastward, the middle portion to the west and northwest, while the upper third moves northeast. Many small sheets of dust move independently at all levels, and large sheets remained practically in situ … The distribution over the countryside is spotty and subject to local winds and contours. Basically the fallout is going everywhere and could go anywhere and, they say officially, it’s hard to say.

  July 1, 2015—Breakfast

  Tina says many times, We’re the ultimate patriots, a line that has become the rallying cry for Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. She’s battled thyroid cancer just like half the people she knows. Her father died from jaw cancer. Both of her grandfathers died of stomach cancer within a decade of the Gadget’s blast.

  Tina Cordova is a cofounder of the consortium, the person responsible for the meetings and the protests and the luminaria vigil that will happen later this month. She is tireless in her organization of people and politicians in an effort to get the children of the Gadget recognized and compensated as the world’s first downwinders. We’re at IHOP debriefing because she’s recently hosted U.S. senator Tom Udall in Tularosa, had him sit through a few hours of stories of sickness and death from Henry Herrera and Margie Trujillo and Edna Hinkle and Louisa Lopez and dozens of other downwinders. They preached at him and sobbed at him and begged for him to take their sorrow back to Washington and lay it at the feet of lawmakers with power to amend the RECA legislation. Udall will go back to Washington and say, These downwinders are the ultimate patriots.

  Ultimate patriots—that means we’ve died for our country, Tina says when I keep asking about that phrase, which sounds mismatched to the subject, like a group of comic-book superheroes rather than cancer-stricken villagers. Many downwinders have endured lifetimes of discrimination because of their Mexican heritage. All are at an economic disadvantage in this poor state. Some, such as Edna Hinkle, have had their ranchland taken by the government for use in the missile range. The abuses compound and still they love their country. I get the sense there is no other choice. A patriot makes a conscious sacrifice. A victim, on the other hand, is powerless. It is a remarkable contortion to call your involuntary exposure to an atomic blast a sacrifice, but when your whole life has been a struggle against powerlessness, you bend to keep from breaking.

  Tina wears a black bandanna in her hair and a small crucifix around her neck. The area beneath her eyes is always damp from heat, from the sweat of running around. She touches her forehead with her fingertips as she talks, both hands and the fingers just sort of lightly on her temples, as if she’s got a lifelong headache she still believes can be willed away. She presses harder when she talks about her father, who was just three years old at the time of the blast. Milk was his beverage of choice, and before all this mess, everyone used to marvel and tease about how much milk that kid drank. But now they realize the error of their joking—those irradiated cows.

  It was probably also a mistake to do so much picnicking out at the Trinity Site, Tina says. For up to five years after the blast, locals would drive out to the site for lunch, spend the afternoon eating from baskets and filling those baskets with souvenirs of trinitite.

  We eat as she relates how first they removed the right side of her father’s tongue and jaw on account of the cancer. A few years later when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was no big deal after all the jaw surgeries. Then they found cancer in the left side of his face, a totally separate cancer from that first one on the right side. The doctors kept telling him how incredibly rare this was, to have two different cancers on one face. She mentions again how much milk he drank as a young boy. All around IHOP are glasses of milk and little pots of milk to pour into coffee, skillets of ground beef and burritos of ground beef and big slabs of breakfast steak.

  The first of the creatures mutated by the Bomb were promptly eaten. These were the cows. Other animals died, of course. The government records only the eviscerated jackrabbits, but on September 12, 1945, the AP reports, “Snakes were killed. Ground squirrels and other small animals died. A bat was found miles away, hanging apparently unharmed, but so shocked that it did not attempt to get away from men.* There was the stench of death for about three weeks, all from small animals.” This report doesn’t mention the cows, but by September, ranchers all around Trinity noticed their livestock had changed, were a different color on the sides that had faced the blast. By October the first of these irradiated cows were sold to slaughter. The November 1945 issue of New Mexico Stockman magazine ran the headline “Red Hair of Hereford Cattle in Region Surrounding Site of Atomic Bomb Test in New Mexico Turns White.” But this link to the Bomb didn’t matter much when it came time to sell to slaughter. Or, it only affected the price. “The cattle all appeared healthy, but because of the strange color markings, the purity of the pedigree was questioned, and the ranchers had to take a cut in their price.” Bad pedigree was an explanation that all could wrap their brains around, especially when the country was in the midst of that strange dance with the Bomb, in awe of its power, in a daze from the end of our Second World War, but also with our government swearing up and down that the Bomb was nothing too crazy.

  The first public tour of the Trinity Site was organize
d in September of 1945 “to show first hand,” the AP reported, “that the facts do not bear out Japanese propaganda that apparently tried to lay the foundation for claims that Americans won the war by unfair means.” This was an Army-led media tour with writers and photographers donning “white canvas foot-bags” to protect against radioactive sand and with warnings that “spending a day and night right in the crater [was] a possibly risky business,” but with assertions that “no horrors other than the familiar ones” were inflicted on the enemy. Even as the writers and the scientists tiptoed around “the great jade saucer” and left the “complete annihilation center” after just an hour when their Geiger counters got to jumping too high, the Army maintained that, for the enemy, in the destroyed cities, just eleven days after the Bomb, “it was safe to move permanently into the center of the blast area and live there all his life.”

  “No horrors other than the familiar ones,” they said.

  The mutated cows that weren’t quickly sold to slaughter to keep from incurring too much of a price cut ended up as celebrities. By November of 1945 many more cattle with “discoloration” or “burns” were rounded up and displayed at the Alamogordo zoo. Kids came on field trips and sewing circles spent their afternoons in the zoo park gazing over their needlework and drunks stumbled over from the Plaza Pub across the street to do their cross-eyed gawking. The newspaper called them “Atomic Cows” and they traveled like a sideshow from Alamogordo to El Paso and back again. In December, Paramount Pictures came to town and “secured some good pictures of the cattle and also of two cats which have changed coloring.” This stretch of fame did not last long. The military took note and started rounding up the mutated cattle that hadn’t already been slaughtered, about three hundred head, and sent some as far away as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were poked and prodded and bred until they were raw. Only twice in the 1950s would the atomic cows at Oak Ridge hit the headlines, both times to say they were fine or dying of natural causes or didn’t seem to be passing on any mutations to their offspring.

  The effects of internal radiation from inhalation and the consumption of contaminated food are hotly debated, even in the wake of more recent nuclear fallout situations such as the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986, where estimates of sickness from this kind of exposure range from a few hundred people to millions. More studies are needed is the refrain Tina Cordova keeps hearing. But she has little hope for the ongoing cancer studies in Tularosa. Like Henry Herrera, she thinks the people conducting the studies have so little understanding of the villagers’ way of life that they will never reach the appropriate conclusions. She can’t, for instance, ever remember them asking about the cows. Tina shifts gears, talks about her fifteen-year-old niece, who has expressed concern about whether she should have children because they might be born deformed. Tina talks about her own anxiety, worry over when her cancer will come back or when the next member of her family will be diagnosed. She knows of two young men from the community who committed suicide after they were diagnosed. Having seen their neighbors’ faces and breasts and guts removed, she says, they just didn’t want anything to do with it.

  This kind of fear is a big part of the nuclear uncanny, and some studies suggest the emotional toll is ultimately costlier than the measurable physical effects of fallout. A 2011 study of the aftermath in Chernobyl:

  The information policy of the Soviet government which deliberately concealed the scale and the danger of the accident in 1986 and thereby gave room to rumours about disastrous health consequences, the unresolved scientific debate on expected long-term health consequences as well as the inability to assess one’s own type of affectedness have provoked deep rooted fears and uncertainty in the population. As a consequence, even physically healthy individuals might be afraid of falling ill. This worry and anxiety might manifest itself in lower subjective well-being, psychological distress or mental disease … Significantly higher suicide rates among the Chernobyl affected population indicate the high mental toll associated to the catastrophe.

  The study also suggests children exposed to fallout have lower educational outcomes, which in turn makes it more likely their children will have lower educational outcomes, which has a ripple effect throughout the generations. But the same can happen to people who believe they’ve been exposed to fallout even if no objective evidence supports that belief. Compensating for this anxiety, depression, fatalism, and all of the educational and economic implications, the study concludes, would require 7 percent of the Ukrainian GDP in addition to the 5 to 7 percent already being spent on Chernobyl-related social programs. “The long-lasting toll of the Chernobyl catastrophe for the Ukrainian population,” the report says, “works mainly through mental distress and subjective perceptions of poor health rather than through measurable somatic health effects.” Another doctor investigating the Chernobyl disaster put it this way: “These people are sick. It’s just not the type of illness they think. We have to realize that the psychological damage here runs very deep. And we need to treat that every bit as vigorously as we need to treat cancer.”

  Tina holds her forehead, rubs her temples.

  There are no horrors other than the familiar ones.

  0530 Hours—July 16, 1945

  (Fourteen Seconds After the Gadget’s Detonation)

  It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye.

  It just kept echoing back and forth in that Jornada del Muerto.

  While this tremendous ball of flame was there before us, and we watched it, and it rolled along, it became in time diffused with the clouds … Then it was washed out with the wind.

  Words haven’t been invented to describe it.

  Now we are all sons of bitches.

  April 4, 2015

  Today is Holy Saturday. Tomorrow is Easter and I’ll be down in the Valley of Juárez, where the drug cartels have shifted their war away from the city in search of other Mexicans to terrorize. But today I’m up early with Pops and we’re headed to the northernmost part of Southern New Mexico, headed to the Trinity Site as part of the seventieth anniversary caravan of pilgrims. Hundreds of vehicles and a few chartered buses meet up at 7:00 a.m. in the parking lot of Tularosa High School. The caravan coalesces one thousand feet west of a baseball field that will be covered in luminarias in three months, coalesces directly across the road from the lot where Bud E. Anderson’s circus raised its tents in August of 1945. As we snake out of the parking lot sometime after 8:00 a.m., we pass a group of people in folding chairs on the side of the road and people standing alongside the chairs, jumping and pumping signs and shouting. Some of their faces are painted like skulls in the manner common here around Día de los Muertos, but today is not Día de los Muertos. Estos son los días de los muertos, they say. Some of them have skull cutouts pasted to a stick. Many of them have signs that read TRINITY TEST FAILED US or YOUR RADIATION MADE US PATIENTS or SPEAKING UP FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN SILENCED BY THE BOMB. Some signs are just a picture of the international symbol for radiation, the trefoil, with a skull at its center. It is not immediately clear what these people are protesting, and many of the people in cars bearing license plates from out of state roll past them with scowls, upset anyone would try to sour their family vacation to such a historic landmark. The tourists must think these protesters are burnt-out hippies and their progeny, still tripping on ripples of the psychedelic era, still believing a world without nukes is possible or even desirable. But all these folks with signs and skulls are self-described ultimate patriots. They seem a sideshow until you spend hours listening to them read the names of their dead. They do not hate the Bomb or their country that made it. They just want their dues for being in the wake of the first breath. The caravan moves so slowly out of the parking lot that the protesters get a chance to make everyone feel uncomfortable, even if few understand why.

  As we crawl along, it becomes evident that caravans packed this tight with minivans and SUVs are an extraordinarily inefficient way to travel. The kids of the fam
ilies inside the minivans and SUVs keep having to stop along the side of the road to pee. On days when the Trinity Site is open, a solid stream of piss flows down the middle of White Sands Missile Range, down along the road to Tularosa. When we arrive, many hundreds of cars are already there, visitors having streamed in from the north gate, where participation in a caravan is not required for entrance. All those cars and trucks and RVs and buses in the middle of the open range certainly gives the sense something important is going on. And the media add to the frenzy, are already running around with cameras, working up their hot takes about the legacy of the first atomic bomb test in an “uninhabited region of the New Mexico desert.”

  Today thousands of us are milling around, pretty literally milling around because there is little to see or do. You can take a ten-minute bus ride to the McDonald Ranch House, where the Gadget was assembled. You can stand inside Jumbo, the steel blast barrier for the Gadget, which was never used. You can touch the black obelisk marking the exact site of detonation, maybe kick at the ground hoping to uncover a bit of trinitite. Everybody mills. Many chat. Some of it will end up in The New York Times:

  “This is kind of the mecca,” said Cammy Montoya, a spokeswoman for the White Sands Missile Range. “This is the first. This is the marking point.”

  “It’s nice to sit back and let it sink in, and really get a sense of where you’re at—you get to feel the wind, feel the sun and see the mountains,” [a visitor] said. “It’s so important for people to get here and touch and feel a place like this.”