My mother and father lived the American dream. The Jewish go-getter married the pretty Irish-Catholic showgirl and lived happily ever after—until their marriage ended when I was sixteen. My father’s late nights, talent-scouting trips far from home, and entourage of gorgeous showgirls whose company he seemed to prefer to ours finally drove my mother to drink and despair.
Until then, my younger sister, Susan, my older half brother, Jimmy, and I knew little but privilege. There were large homes with swimming pools and rose gardens, private schools and lessons of all kinds, two ill-tempered but fiercely protective dachshunds, and a nanny also imported from Germany. I could never fathom why my father, who because of the Holocaust hated all things German, wanted German dogs and hired an austere German spinster to help raise his children. He was a complicated man.
An hour away from Las Vegas was something else that shaped my life far more than show business. The site was off-limits to most of us at the time, but living under its shadow marked me in ways I understood only later.
* * *
The dog had melted. The rumor raced through my first-grade class at John S. Park Elementary School in Las Vegas a few days after “Harry” was detonated at dawn at the Nevada Proving Ground, sixty-five miles northwest of my home.
A family in Indian Springs, twenty-five miles from ground zero, had returned home after the test to find their pet a puddle of blood and bones. The government, we were told, had supposedly suppressed news of the incident.
There probably never was a dead dog. But there were dead sheep—over four thousand, by some claims; about a quarter of the southern Utah and Nevada herds—as well as dead pigs, rabbits, cattle, and other livestock for miles southeast of the blast. Then the goats turned blue, literally.
Just before the detonation on May 19, 1953, a strong wind altered the meteorological conditions that the US Atomic Energy Commission had mistakenly anticipated. Radioactive debris of the test spread to St. George, a tiny farming town in neighboring Utah. Rather than evacuation, which might have “alarmed” the local population, according to AEC files declassified nearly three decades later, residents were advised to “shelter in place” with their doors and windows shut until the radioactive danger “passed.” On a major freeway near the site, some forty cars registered low but above-average levels of radioactivity. The AEC instructed car owners to hose down their vehicles and themselves. Neither the unusually rainy weather nor the flu-like symptoms that some residents reported were connected to the blast, the commissioners told us. Even the radioactive “snow” found as far away as Rhode Island did not stir much debate.
I remember Harry—or “Dirty Harry,” as the test was eventually called. Trudy Siebenlist, our nanny, had set my alarm for a quarter to five in the morning to ensure that I wouldn’t miss the historic event. It was pitch-black when I crept out of the bedroom. I slipped out the front door of the ranch house we had recently bought near the Las Vegas Strip.
I sat with our cat on our crabgrass and cactus lawn, waiting. At exactly five o’clock, night became day. Was I dreaming? Did I really see or just imagine the flash that lit up the skies? It wasn’t the familiar yellow, pink, and lavender of a Nevada dawn. In my childhood memory, it was ripe red—beautiful, and irresistibly terrifying. Brighter than a thousand suns, as nuclear historian Robert Jungk wrote later.
The flash was followed by stillness, a slight smell of iron in the air, and a metallic taste on my tongue; the sensation you get from licking a spoon after the ice cream is gone. TV broadcasters said the test was visible as far away as Idaho.
I was only six and in first grade, but I sensed that the bomb was special. I knew that being so close to something so dangerous made us different: I was living next to what American officials told us was a major “battlefield” of the Cold War on the “frontier of freedom.”
There was a debate in Las Vegas about whether it was wise to test nuclear bombs in the atmosphere so close to a major population center. But skeptics were drowned out by the media and our town fathers, my own among them. Nuclear testing was our patriotic duty, insisted Hank Greenspun, the influential publisher of the Las Vegas Morning Sun. His closeness to the AEC and Pentagon officials and access to “inside” information had influenced my father and other Vegas entrepreneurs about the need to continue testing on American soil to “maintain our lead” over the “Reds.” Atoms, Greenspun said, were as “American as apple pie.”2
People concerned about the safety of testing were unpatriotic and undermining the city’s economy, Greenspun argued in his influential column, Where I Stand, which was required reading in our household. Las Vegas depended on tourists. The testing was one of the city’s “natural” attractions. President Truman’s designation of Las Vegas as an area “critical to national defense” made it eligible for federal funds for housing and infrastructure that were paying for its phenomenal growth. Frivolous accounts and rumors spread by a few “sensation-seeking reporters” threatened not only America’s national security but also the city’s welfare. When the AEC issued a press release attributing the death of sheep in Utah to “unprecedented cold weather,” Greenspun warned that “panic can spread where no danger exists.”
My mother said nothing, but was not persuaded. Occasionally she would confront my father about her fears. I listened to what became a familiar refrain behind their bedroom door: Vegas was no place to be raising children. The Mob, drinking and gambling, drugs and whores were bad enough, but now her children were exposed to radiation. She missed New York. She hated the sun and the sandstorms, the dry air, the cactus. She had found a dead rattlesnake in the garage. Could radiation have killed it? Had my father heard about the blue goats? Or the dog that had melted? Couldn’t we move, as we did eventually, to Los Angeles?
The AEC’s public relations campaign aimed at making Nevadans “feel at home with neutrons trotting around” and to encourage “local pride in being in the limelight,” according to now declassified government memos written shortly before the tests began, was effective. The commission’s two-pronged strategy sought to convince those near the site that the tests were safe and vital to national security. If the United States was to win the arms race against the Reds, we had to test. A March 1953 editorial in the Deseret News, the daily published by the anticommunist, progovernment Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, called the nuclear trials “tragic and insane.” However, it concluded, “so long as we live in an atomic world, we must and will continue to learn more about this power and how to survive it.” After the first test at the site two years earlier, the paper’s lead editorial, mirroring those of papers throughout America, had celebrated the dawn of the testing age: “Spectacular Atomic Explosions Mean Progress in Defense,” the editorial’s headline proclaimed. “No Cause for Panic.”3
Every detonation in Nevada, the AEC assured us, was being “carefully evaluated” to protect our safety. After six full years of open-air nuclear tests, the government claimed to have confirmed that fallout from the tests had “not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site.”
America’s arsenal of thirteen weapons in 1947 had increased to fifty by the time I was born a year later. I memorized the names of the tests the way other kids learned the names of presidents. “Able,” in 1951, the first test at the Proving Ground, as the Nevada Test Site was then known, was followed twenty-four hours later by “Baker,” a more powerful, eight-kiloton device that awakened much of the city. Then came “Easy” and “Fox,” almost three times as powerful as “Baker,” the blast wave of which had shattered show windows in two Las Vegas car dealerships minutes after detonation.
The bomb, like the radiation, was all around us—as much a part of my childhood as jacks, roller-skating, skipping rope, and, this being Vegas, strippers. A warning poster from the Clark County Civil Defense Agency was attached by magnets to our fridge door reminding us to keep a “well-balanced” supply of food on hand and a list of telephone numbers to call in an emergency. Since mo
st Vegas homes had no basements, my parents argued for months about whether to build a bomb shelter in the backyard. My mother won. The underground, blast-proof shelter that my father purchased from a friend—“wholesale,” not “retail,” as he had boasted to my unimpressed mother—was not installed and was given to a friend.
She did yield to my appeals to take us to J.C. Penney to see the display of some fifty mannequins two weeks before they were blown out of bed in a colonial two-story home, complete with aluminum venetian blinds, that had been built for a sixteen-kiloton test at the site. The plastic people were used to assess the impact of the blasts by the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which was subjecting US soldiers, animals, and plants to ever more powerful bombs to determine blast and radiation effects. The mannequins were a major attraction for the department store chain, which proudly announced that it had donated their clothing for the test. Equally popular were the “before” and “after” photographs of the “Annie” house tests published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, accompanied by a warning: “These mannequins could have been real people; in fact, they could have been you. Volunteer now for Civil Defense.”4
In 1956, ranchers who had lost sheep and other livestock sued the AEC in federal district court. The judge accepted the government’s argument that the animals’ deaths had been caused by “inadequate feeding, unfavorable winter range conditions, and infectious diseases.” The lawsuit received little publicity.
By the late 1950s, as the novelty of atomic testing waned and alarm about safety and radiation was growing, Greenspun and other city elders tried to allay fear and generate buzz to keep visitors coming to Vegas and parking along Highway 95 to watch the tests. One of their solutions was “Miss Atomic Bomb of 1957,” aka Lee Merlin, a beaming bathing beauty whose outstretched arms welcomed fellow Americans to Vegas, her swimsuit covered demurely by a mushroom cloud.
Even after our family left Vegas for Miami Beach and then Los Angeles, my fascination with all things nuclear continued. I tore labels off Kix cereal boxes to send away for atomic bomb rings and other nuclear paraphernalia. Mom drew the line on Christmas tree ornaments, refusing to let me order the silver bulbs decorated with symbols of the atom. Christmas was about peace, not death. She also nixed the salt and pepper shakers that topped the Formica breakfast tables of many Vegas families: Fat Man and Little Boy, America’s bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There was little debate about President Truman’s decision to drop “the Bomb,” never mind two. Analysts declared that the use of nuclear weapons had forced Japan to surrender and saved a million American soldiers. Many Americans like me grew up believing that stockpiles of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were unsettling, but essential. Only decades later did I begin to doubt their utility, and the secrecy surrounding them.
In 2005, when I went to Las Vegas to write an article for the Times about the new Atomic Testing Museum, I was flooded with memories. The museum featured a collection of the iconic postcards that had drawn a record number of tourists to Las Vegas. My favorite was a black-and-white photo of the mushroom cloud rising behind Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn—the D.I., as everyone called it. I tasted my first cocktail there: a Shirley Temple with two cherries. At bars at the Sahara, the Flamingo, the Dunes, and the Sands, tourists and residents had sampled other “Atomic Cocktails” from the recipe book my mother favored, Mixed Drinks for Modern Times.
I was fascinated by a blowup from the June 21, 1952, edition of Collier’s magazine. A dozen children were lying facedown in a schoolyard, hands cupped over their heads, abandoned bikes nearby. “A is for Atom,” the cover declared. I instantly recalled the drills at John S. Park Elementary. We “atomic kids” sure knew how to protect ourselves against “the big one.”
In the 1950s, most Americans trusted the government. Las Vegas was proud of its status as the capital of skin and sin. Vegas glorified the testing program and the scientists and technicians who worked at the Nevada Test Site, barely noticing that they had less and less interaction with the city’s residents. Many of them would relocate for months on end to a top-secret test site town, appropriately named Mercury.
I spent the night in Mercury when I visited NTS as a Times reporter after 9/11 to report on the nation’s biodefense and nuclear weapons complex. It was almost as empty as the growing list of Nevada ghost towns. Its pool hall, bowling alley, and movie theater, where scientists and other weaponeers once relaxed, were closed.
The Testing Museum displayed photographs of life at the site. By 2005, we had learned disturbing information about the tests. “Harry” was part of an eleven-shot testing series called Operation Upshot-Knothole. Beginning on March 17, 1953, and ending June 4, the climax was a sixty-one-kiloton test aptly called “Climax.” The eleven blasts unleashed a total force of over 250 kilotons in less than three months—about twenty times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Several of its “dirty” blasts had rained radioactive debris on the sparsely populated downwind towns of southern Utah and Nevada, according to an early, comprehensive account of the testing, killing about 25 percent of the sheep.5
In 1982, in a wrongful death suit filed decades earlier by twenty-four cancer victims and their relatives from St. George (population, 4,500), Frank Butrico, a US Public Health Service radiation safety monitor, testified bravely that the town had been doused repeatedly with “Dirty Harry” fallout, which sent his instruments “off the scales.” The Nevada Test Site’s staff had ordered him to report that the radiation levels were just “a little bit above normal” and “not in the range of being harmful.”6
As more information was declassified in the late 1970s and early 1980s through congressional hearings and lawsuits, we learned that the AEC’s primary concern had not been our health and safety but securing information for the weapons program that only nuclear testing could produce. The AEC had been a shameless cheerleader for a health and safety monitoring program that the Pentagon had co-opted by 1953. At a commission meeting after yet another test had rained fallout on St. George, Gordon Dean, then head of the AEC, noted that at least one commissioner had been unhappy enough with what he called the “public relations” aspects of the test to argue for a testing delay. But the tests were “so important” to national security, Dean noted for posterity in his personal diary, that “we will have to go ahead. We just have to take a chance.”7
By 1955, Lewis Strauss, Dean’s successor, was battling a Nevada legislator who had introduced legislation demanding that the program be moved out of state. Other AEC commissioners joined Strauss in protesting such outrageous interference. “We must not let anything interfere with this series of tests—nothing!” Commissioner Thomas Murray declared.8
As declassified documents would show, the AEC had consistently lied about the health and safety risks of radiation to between 250,000 and 500,000 American soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and civilians whom the Pentagon estimated were exposed to radioactive debris from the tests.9 Published in 1980, Atomic Soldiers, a slender volume by Howard Rosenberg, a friend and investigative journalist for ABC, described how soldiers were ordered to conduct maneuvers right under the cloud, sometimes without protective clothing or glasses, to see how well they would perform their missions. Describing the soldiers’ subsequent battles with cancer and in court for compensation, Howard’s book deplored the national security elitism that “allowed a few men to make decisions that affect us all.”
By the end of the 1970s, nearly a thousand people had sued the government for radiation-related damages in federal court. But records show that the Justice Department had yet to pay a penny in court-ordered nuclear-related compensation. Not until 1979 did the government concede in a federal lawsuit that there was “some risk associated with exposure to radioactive fallout.”10
Some twenty-five years after the ranchers filed their suit seeking compensation for their irradiated livestock, the judge who had initially ruled against them ordered a new trial held when information secured unde
r the Freedom of Information Act suggested that the commission had known almost from the start of the program that detonation yields were unreliable and that the testing was potentially unsafe.
Due partly to growing public alarm, atmospheric testing was outlawed in 1963 by the Limited Test Ban Treaty. But the detonation of more powerful weapons continued, underground, for almost thirty more years. By 1992, when a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing took effect, some 1,053 tests had been conducted, 90 percent of them at the Nevada Test Site. Given the paucity of epidemiological studies, we will probably never know precisely how much extra radiation the “downwinders” living so close to the site absorbed, or the nature or full extent of the damage done to us Las Vegas residents by repeated exposures.
In 1997 and 1999, reports by the National Cancer Institute determined that atmospheric tests at NTS had spread radioactive iodine 131 across much of the United States, particularly in 1952, 1953, 1955 (the years my family lived in Vegas), and 1957. The 1999 report concluded that although scientists thought the exposure levels had still been very low, the increased I-131 from the Nevada atmospheric tests would probably wind up producing “between 11,300 and 212,000” additional cases of thyroid cancer in the United States. The downwinders, vindicated by the panel’s belated link between cancer and the testing, noted that I-131 was only one of scores of isotopes produced by nuclear fissioning. The studies had not examined isotopes such as strontium 90, cesium 137, zirconium, and other atomic debris, most of which had even longer half-lives than I-131. We would probably never know, wrote Preston J. Truman, who created Downwinders, an early antinuclear group, “how many innocent, unwitting, and unsuspecting Americans had died” because of the tests.
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