The MX Moment: Part III
The MX Moment
EXPLORING COLD WAR HISTORY AND DEMOCRATIC FUTURES IN THE NUCLEAR WEST
Part III: Nevada Test Site
Atomic Scars
Of the assorted sites that connect to one another in the scattered web that makes up the Nuclear West there is one location that is crucial to better understanding the pervasive growth of nuclearism and the military-industrial culture during the latter 20th century. The Nevada Test Site (NTS) is a 1351 square mile chunk of desert carved out of the larger Nellis Air Force Base that surrounds and buffers it to the north, east, and west. The NTS is a prism through which much of the crucial history around which many angles and contours of the nuclear world can be viewed.
In tracing the history of U.S. nuclear activity in the immediate post-war period the policies and procedures that would come to mark the oncoming Cold War quickly manifest. Chief among these was the joint decision by the U.S. and Britain not to share the secrets of atomic power with the world, a hope that many of the early nuclear scientists working at Los Alamos had harbored.
A second crucial decision came with the U.S. decision to not only maintain the bureaucracies and military power born of the war, but also in many ways expand on them. In a flurry of legislation and executive action between 1946 and 1947 the National Security Act was passed, which institutionalized much of the military buildup and secrecy born of the war.
In addition two powerful new government agencies were born, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense. Through the channels made available by these agencies and shifts in national priorities the country began to pour resources into developing nuclear technologies, both for military application and domestic nuclear power. But while the work of creating new technologies to promote peace and security through nuclear power had noble ambitions, “from the beginning finding alternate uses of atomic energy has taken a back seat to the development of its military applications.” (Titus 35)
With the U.S. government decision to build on the advances made at Los Alamos, new weapon tests were quickly scheduled and conducted at various island outposts in the Pacific Ocean. Between 1946 and 1962, the U.S. military in the Pacific conducted 105 aboveground atmospheric tests. This included the Ivy Mike test shot in 1952, which ushered in the unimaginable force of thermonuclear weapons. The rapid advances of weapons development and testing had consequences, both on those working on the tests as well as individuals inadvertently exposed to the massive fallout clouds that were swept across the sea. Both soldiers working in the Pacific during the atmospheric testing era as well as downwind islander communities would suffer elevated rates of particular cancers in the years following testing.
Similarly, many of the Pacific island communities were displaced and either prevented from returning to their ancestral homeland, or were returned after testing concluded to places that were fundamentally changed by toxic legacies of fallout and radiation. To the detriment of many, it was during this era of Pacific testing in which many of the safety protocols governing weapons testing were established. In the legacies of abused places and bodies, the Pacific testing era would also foreshadow many of the darker shadows that would soon manifest in the Great Basin.
The emergence of a domestic nuclear test site in North America was incredibly swift. With the Soviet detonation of their first nuclear weapon on August 29, 1949 and the rise of the Korean conflict in 1950 plans were accelerated to identify a domestic atomic test site. With the logistics and costs of testing in the Pacific making accelerated testing in that region unsustainable the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project had initiated Project Nutmeg in 1947 with the direction to study potential spaces in which a domestic test site could be established. With the Joe One shot and escalation of military activity in Korea the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission accelerated work that had been done on Project Nutmeg, and quickly identified three sites in the arid west that had varying degrees of potential. These three sites included the militarily controlled areas of Dugway and Wendover, the Trinity site near Alamogordo, and a windswept desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was this latter location that would ultimately become the Nevada Test Site via an executive order from President Truman on December 18, 1950.
With regard to the criteria established for a domestic site by Project Nutmeg analysts, the geography around the Nevada Tests Site made it a deft choice. Walled in by mountains, that would begin there in early 1951 was fairly well hidden, though the early mushroom clouds that would rise up from the expansive playa on Frenchman’s Flat did become a recognizable site for residents of southern Utah and tourists in Las Vegas. Between 1951 and 1992 the NTS served as the central testing site for numerous weapon designs created in the competing labs at Los Alamos and Livermore. In the course of its history the NTS has born witness to 928 nuclear events. National security imperatives born of the Cold War have transformed formerly recognizable Great Basin valleys into a pockmarked valley full of the littered debris and irradiated wreckage that will serve as a permanent legacy of what took place in the silence and secret spaces provided by the desert.
With a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing went in effect since 1992 the operations that have defined NTS are held in flux. The towers of two planned underground tests have been left standing as an increasingly historic reminder of the work done here which had more transformative power over place than perhaps any other site in the world.
With its raison de’tre in limbo the Nevada Test Site has reoriented itself in unsettling ways. The history of what has taken place here insures that it will always remain under military control, and today it serves as a multi-use site for a variety of military and industrial purposes. Interestingly the site is also finding unexpected new life as a tourist destination, via the monthly tours that are offered through the Department of Energy. The process of obtaining a tour at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) involves submitting an application to the Department of Energy.
After submitting my own application for a tour in early 2012, I was contacted by an NDSS official who told me that the earliest tour date I could get in on would be in August. Being familiar with travel through Nevada in August, I booked the date, and weeks before the official date I received a packet in the mail that included an itinerary as well as expected rules of conduct for the tour. While the list of prohibited activities isn’t as explicit in terms of behavior expectations as that of Trinity, it is obvious that a high premium is placed on physical control and interpretation of the place. In addition to adhering rigidly to the daylong itinerary multiple rules speak to a sweeping prohibition that is in effect on any type of recording devices at the site.
Arriving at the Atomic Testing Museum at 7:30 AM I was quickly directed to the museum lobby to obtain my security badge. Outside the doors of the museum, representatives from the Nevada Desert Experience hand out literature that is highly critical of government activity at the Nevada Test Site. It is a perspective that I will learn is at direct odds with the NDSS mission, as well as that being promoted by the Nevada Atomic Testing Museum. After obtaining my security badge and signing my name, an elderly tour guide instructs our group to take a seat on the bus. At 8:00 we disembark and I am struck that in spite of the restrictions on available tour dates prior to August, the bus we are on is only half full.
Before leaving Las Vegas a brief stop is made in an industrial area north of the city so that our guide can get a microphone to adequately address the entire bus. Back on the road he shares some of his history. After serving in the army during Korea he returned to the United States and learned how to assemble and disassemble atomic weapons, which led to an assignment at the Nevada Test Site. He tells us that he participated in tests conducted at both NTS as well as in the Pacific. Eventually his service led him into budget and accounting for the military, before he retired and sought out his present position as a public relations liaison for the NNDS.
It is in the midst of telling us personal anecdotes that our guide informs us of a group of Japanese tourists he once led, which included a survivor of both the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to his memory when he had a quiet moment he asked members of the group their thoughts on the U.S. decision to drop the bomb on civilian targets. He was stunned when this question was met with thanks, an appeal to the rhetoric of less prolonged destruction of U.S. and Japanese lives through the more immediate destruction born of the bomb. This has has been a common justification for its use since atomic fire lit up the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The drive from Las Vegas to Mercury takes approximately 90 minutes. On the way we pass the High Desert State Prison, as well as the Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. The Creech Air Force Base has gained new life as the research, development, and proving grounds for the unmanned military drone predator aircraft that has become an increasingly large component of the Obama administrations military strategy. Passing the base we see a drone fighter slowly hovering over the base, and our guide expresses adulation for the technology. He praises the fact that former videogame prodigies can now fly and kill remote targets from halfway across the globe.
As we pass the base the vast open desert and nearby mountain ranges begin to dominate the scenery. A tourist on the bus requests the name of the mountain ranges that border the highway. Our guide admits that he doesn’t really know much about the mountains that have been a daily site for the majority of his professional career.
Arriving at the turnoff for the Mercury base that sits like a sentinel at the entrance of the Nevada Test Site the bus passes two holding pens constructed out of chain-link fence. We are told that these are holding areas for protestors who periodically gather at the Mercury turnoff and trespass onto the base. The enclosures are segregated by sex and each contains a pit toilet and five gallons drum of water. Standard procedure is to keep protestors in these pens until units from either the Clark County or Nye County Sheriffs Office can arrive and transport them to either Beatty or Tonopah. Our guide seems to take great joy in the fact that protestors are both treated roughly and separated from the camping gear they are forced to leave behind when law enforcement officials remand them to the faraway towns.
North of the holding pens are two distant structures on the horizon that serve the last remnant reminders of the former military camp that once existed here. Named Camp Desert Rock, this now non-existent former base once housed over 10,000 soldiers and military personnel who were directly involved in a variety of activities and tests meant to gain a better idea of what the realities of potential nuclear combat might look like. Much like the tests in the Pacific, those who were exposed to potentially harmful fallout while in the midst of active service for their country have had an even harder struggle seeking justice than the civilian populations who lived downwind from testing areas.
The security gates of Mercury are reminiscent of the concrete slabs of dark glass and concrete found at border check stations. A barrel-chested soldier sporting a Desert Eagle sidearm and utility knife climbs aboard our bus and checks every individual security badge. Entering Mercury I am struck by the fact that this isn’t so much a ghost town as it is a town on life support. The existing structures look dated and worn. Some go all the way back to initial construction in 1951. There is a research building that belongs to Los Alamos Labs, as well as a fire station. Clearly, however, this is purely a place for work, as those who are now contracted by NDSS are bussed in everyday from nearby communities. Full time residence is no longer permitted at the base, and the buildings that once supported permanent dwelling, such as the Mercury movie theater or neighboring bowling alley, are now closed.
We set out on the Mercury highway we begin an ascent up the mountain pass that will carry us into the nearby valley of Frenchman’s Flat. Our first view of the valley reveals the type broad flat expanse, with low vegetation that is quintessential in the Great Basin. To the east I can see the large playa of Frenchman’s Lake, which served as the Ground Zero site for the majority of the fourteen atmospheric tests that took place here between 1951 and 1962. Our bus passes the decrepit remains of wooden bleachers that were used to watch these first atmospheric tests conducted at NTS, a reminder of the sublime sense of wonder that has accompanied nuclear testing since the first blast lit up the dark skies over Trinity. The road heads north on until we reach a turn off that skirts the southern edge of Frenchman’s Lake and brings us closer to Ground Zero.
Soon the landscape is littered with the ruins of broken concrete structures and various pieces of abandoned debris. The bus pulls off the road and we exit at a site containing four massive concrete pillars, upon which giant steel beams have been left twisted and rusting under the Great Basin sun. This wreckage was originally built to model the type of elevated rail lines that are found in Chicago. The test was meant to see what a nuclear blast would do and how to plan infrastructure accordingly. Today nothing but bent metal and rust remain. Evidence of rain from a storm that passed over the valley the day before is evident, as the playa has filled with massive puddles of water that will remain here until evaporation reclaims them. Dylan observes numerous tadpoles swimming in a puddle next to our parked bus, and we speculate on how they made it to the impermanent water source in the desert lowland.
The tadpoles are a reminder that human beings are just one of the many life forms that have been impacted by the events that have shaped the Nevada Test Site. Between 1964 and 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency managed a farm in neighboring Yucca Flat that monitored the effects of fallout and radiation on both livestock and crops grown at the site.
Perhaps the most haunting legacy of how this place has impacted the non-human world can be seen in the moments of scientific testing, where the depths of inhumanity have been most nakedly revealed. Over the course of time a variety of animals, from dogs to chimps, have been placed in cages at varying distances from Ground Zero sites in order to study the effects of both nuclear blasts and radiation on bodies. Among these experiments, one that is often cited came with the Priscilla Test held in 1957 on the Frenchman Lake playa. For the Priscilla shot, 719 pigs were used as test subjects in a variety of ways, including several who were dressed in military uniforms and other clothing.
Among the debris that now litters the Frenchman Lake playa are large bolts of steel to which a number of the animals involved in these experiments were once chained. It is a chilling reminder of the far-flung costs in life and environment born here, as well as the loss of a shared link with the species with which we share this planet and a reminder of our periodic savagery.
On the opposite side of the road from the animal holding cell rods we are shown the HAZMAT spill facility that has been constructed at the site. This HAZMAT site is used by emergency first-responders and various government agencies to test future emergency scenarios. Work like this has given the NDSS something of a new lease on life. We are informed that the wide-open and secret space of the NDSS has become a crucial component of current U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The implication is that the versatility of this multiuse space can be easily reoriented to fit any variety of military needs, not just those driven by a Cold War prerogative.
The government’s relationship with its citizens who have born the most lasting impacts from nuclear weapons testing has always been muddled. The legacy of toxic places and ruined bodies that has underwritten the atomic experiments in Nevada provides a crucial means for revisiting MX. In the myriad voices that rose up in opposition to the MX weapon system, echoes of the hurt and abuses on the Great Basin landscape and its people can be heard.
The MX Opposition
The social context surrounding MX is vital to understanding the high burden of proof Great Basin residents placed on federal officials to show its need and efficacy. A legacy born of the winds and dust from the Nevada Test Site also reveals the fuel that helped stoke the fire of MX opposition forces from the beginning. Born into the context of a post-Vietnam and post-Watergate America, a place where military buildup and ongoing Cold War anxiety were on the rise, public trust in government was low. President Jimmy Carter faced a very different task in explaining why Great Basin residents needed to sacrifice for the missile system than previous presidents.
In Utah and Nevada feelings for the world’s largest atomic weapons system also stirred the ashes of a deep betrayal that would soon take on a distinct form in federal court. During the atmospheric testing period at the Nevada test Site the security precautions put into effect for the Utah, Nevada, and Arizona communities living downwind proved to be too inept far too often. Among the dirtiest test shots fired at NTW were those of the 1953 Upshot-Knothole test series. Nuclear explosions with names like Harry, Nancy, and Simon not only produced more fallout than scientists expected, but also spread fallout through wind and rain much faster than NTS officials anticipated.
The first indication that something had gone wrong came with the blanket of fallout dust that began raining on local communities like St. George, Utah and Mesquite, Nevada. These were small, relatively isolated communities with strong Mormon roots, places with citizens who looked on their proximity to NTS as an opportunity to prove their Cold War patriotism, something that had troubled many Mormons who often felt like outsiders within the national context.
The following spring of 1954 brought the next sign of trouble born at NTS when local sheep ranchers in Cedar City began noticing problems with the herds being brought in off the ranges of southern Nevada. Many of the sheep were sick and emaciated, and those that were pregnant and giving birth were often producing animals that were either stillborn or suffering from abnormal birth defects. Local health officials in Salt Lake City were joined by federal AEC scientists to investigate, and by late early 1955 the AEC published findings that claimed that the animals were suffering not from exposure to radioactive fallout, but rather malnutrition and dietary problems born of a particularly hard winter on the range. Nearly thirty years later this ruling would be called into question when the declassification of formerly top-secret records produced as part of the investigation revealed that many of the sheep in question showed evidence of enlarged thyroid glands, a common side effect caused by an excessive exposure to radioactive iodine.
The effects of fallout from NTS on downwind human populations didn’t take much longer to appear, as soon the small communities living in the shadow of the Nevada Test Site began to exhibit epidemiological trends for certain forms of cancers (as well as higher rates in birth defects) that were far outside the margins of similarly-sized communities elsewhere in the country. These trends stand out in even sharper relief because of the high Mormon demographic in the region, as Mormon beliefs and customs prohibit the types of risk factors, such as smoking and alcohol, that can have a measurable impact on cancer rates.
By the time President Carter announced the MX scheme in the fall of 1979 the legal wheels were in motion for the federal court cases that would eventually pit downwinder citizens against their negligent government. Many of the anti-MX correspondence to Governor Matheson, himself a downwinder who would die from multiple myeloma in 1990, reflect the general anxiety of exposing future generations to the same risks those living downwind had viewed as a patriotic duty in the 1950’s.
Another pivotal consideration in assessing the context into which the MX proposal emerged has to do with the still ongoing tensions that exist in western states like Utah and Nevada which are largely federally controlled and administered by a plethora of federal agencies, including the National Parks Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. The federal presence in the west has had transformative effects on both the landscape and its people, most observably in the forms of western reclamation and a robust military presence. In this regard the Great Basin made sense as the home for MX, as the federal land available was much larger (and limited by fewer impediments) than other sites that were considered.
Federal control over lands in the west has led to conflict over time between the periodically competing interests of the federal government and individual states. When these flare-ups occur they are often rooted in states-rights arguments that claim federal overreach in placing regulations that prevent the (often extractive industry-based) development of natural resources, as well as the inevitable conflicts that arise with the varied multi-use doctrines that are often imposed on federal lands.
Interestingly, the MX proposal was born into an even more dramatic articulation of this ongoing drama, the Sagebrush Rebellion. Born over anger of the increase in restrictions on federal land use that came with the slate of environmental legislation in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, including the National Environmental Protection Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Endangered Species Act, participants in the Sagebrush Rebellion participated in a variety of public demonstrations with the hope of drawing attention and gaining more state control over federal spaces. But in spite of the generally hawkish pro-military position of many in the Sagebrush Rebellion, the MX prospect led them to the unexpected position of standing against the weapon system, knowing that it had the potential to close off and lockup federal lands in the Great Basin even more dramatically than any regulation imposed by environmental legislation.
Clearly, the lessons from the NTS and the future prospects of MX in the Great Basin helped many disparate groups find unexpected common ground, and in doing so facilitate the creation of a broader and more nuanced dialogue. This dialogue in turn facilitated a greater expression of disparate opinions, which are mandatory within an effective democracy. And yet, for one group participating in the MX opposition, the promise of an improved future through the exercise of democratic expression remained frustratingly oblique.
For the Indian tribes of the Great Basin the prospect of MX proved to be another troubled moment in advancing their sovereign rights and claims within a larger national dialogue. The story of challenges faced by the Indian groups in their struggle with MX reflects a tendency of government to either flatly ignore native rights and claims, or co-opt native groups into a larger framework that undermines their sovereignty by lumping them into a larger dialogue into which their interests may not be represented. The story of Indians attempting to exercise their voice in the context of the MX proposal is one of ongoing environmental injustice that is seen across many landscapes, namely the inability of those with little political power to prevent the destruction of landscapes and ecosystems on which they depend.
Numerous records in the MX holdings reveal a pattern practiced by U.S. Air Force officials in relation to the Paiute Indian Nation in which tribal officials were routinely ignored and excluded from MX planning discussions. On December 5, 1980 Tribal Coordinator Richard Jameson stated as much to Ralph Starr of the MX Policy Board when he wrote, “The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah has the feeling that they are being excluded from mitigation planning activities regarding Native American people in the state’s MX policy.”
Another strategy employed by the U.S. Air Force appears to be one in which tribal consent is stated in materials to outside parties, only to be refuted by official correspondence from the tribe. In laying out a list of tribal concerns over the MX to U.S. Air Force officials on February 12, 1981, tribal chairperson Marguerite Lane confronts this tactic head-on when she says, “It is my understanding that the United States Air Force feels that there are no problems with the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah over deployment of the MX missile in Southern Utah. I think it would be a great mistake to go on as if not problems exist with the tribe.”
This position taken by the U.S. Air Force to not actively engage the tribes as sovereign nations manifests yet again in the DEIS, which routinely places MX shelter bases on tribal lands. The DEIS process demanded that mitigation alternatives be provided for any action undertaken that will demonstrably alter environment, but in the case of Indian groups any plausible mitigation was ignored, often relying on blanked statements stating that Indian lands and culture would be irrevocably changed with MX.
The Indian story in relation to MX is one that echoes in the ongoing dispute between members of the Western Shoshone nation who have asserted their land rights to the area, which includes the Nevada Test Site. Basing their claim on the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, the Western Shoshone has been roundly rejected by the U.S. government, who refuses to entreat the issue as one between sovereign nations. This federal refusal to accept the Western Shoshone claim has led them to self-ascribing their tribe, and the homeland upon which their culture and religion are forged, as the most bombed nation on Earth.
The act of appealing to the spiritual costs of nuclear weapons and giving the MX debate a rhetorical religious edge was one often successfully made by Indian groups (for whom culture, spiritualism, and place are all intimately bound). However, the Indian tribes of the Great Basin were not the only ones to pursue this line of reasoning.
On January 23, 1980 the Shared Ministry of Utah drafted a letter to Governor Scott Matheson stating:
We, the member representatives to the Shared Ministry in Utah, at our meeting on January 19, 1980, representing the United Presbyterian Church the United Methodist Church and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the state of Utah, do hereby register our serious concern vis a vis the proposed MX Missile System. The member representatives to the Shared Ministry in Utah specifically urge you to carefully reflect on the moral, social environmental issues that the proposed MX Missile System raises. Our hope is that all three of these issues are before you as the debate continues.
Over the course of 1980 and early 1981 other groups would similarly take a stand against the project. On April 02, 1981: 26 of 37 priests in southern Nevada issued a statement protesting MX and a week later bishop William K. Weigand of SLC came out against proposal.
However, in a region in which sizable portions of the citizenry were active members of the LDS Church, a statement from Temple Square (pro or con) was destined to hold tremendous weight. In December of 1980 the First Presidency of the LDS Church issued a Christmas statement of hope for peace on Earth and an effort on the part of humanity to begin ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
In the early months of 1981, SLC attorney Ed Firmage and future LDS Church President, Gordon B. Hinckley began working together to present the MX issue to various church leaders. On May 5, 1981 that work helped deliver an official statement from the First Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball, N. Eldon Tanner, and Marion G. Romney, outlining a clear stance against the MX missile system within the confines of the Great Basin. Stating that, "our fathers came to this Western area to establish a base from which to carry the gospel of peace to the peoples of the Earth," the church's governing First Presidency concluded that "It is ironic, and a denial of the very essence of that gospel, that in this same general area there should be constructed a mammoth weapons system potentially capable of destroying much of civilization." The LDS statement was unique as church policy since Utah statehood had been one of every increasing support for federal defense while simultaneously remaining silent on controversial political issues.
The reaction outside of the Great Basin to the LDS statement was largely one of derision. Arguments against the LDS position was that the statement revealed an unpatriotic, “not in my backyard” attitude on the part of the church, as well as being hypocritical in light of the fact that the majority of Utah’s Mormon government representatives were wildly hawkish in matters of national defense.
Yet, in spite of criticisms against the LDS statement on MX, the message gave opposition members a potentially powerful tool to utilize in their efforts to derail the project. The church statement meant that U.S. Air Force efforts to base MX in Nevada and Utah would be met with a deeper degree of skepticism and disapproval in the small, largely LDS communities for whom the words of the prophet were seen as literal transcriptions from God.
Drawing on power of religious rhetoric to undermine military claims for the MX proved to be an important and effective strategy for MX opponents, but it is one that hasn’t had the same traction at the Nevada Test Site. Born into a very different era and context, perhaps it is through the lens of another idea with religious undertones, the Kantian sublime, that the slippery realities of the Nevada Test Site can be better understood.
Tracing the Nuclear Sublime
Perhaps there is no place better to assess the changes that have governed the relationship between human beings and nuclear weapons than on the mountain pass that takes our tour bus from Frenchman’s Flat to its northern neighbor, Yucca Flat. The area of Frenchman’s Flat was home to the earliest aboveground atmospheric tests at the NTS, while the pockmarked landscape of the Yucca Valley displays the permanent scars left when operations were taken underground in 1962.
In his work on uncovering the evolving techno-aesthetics of the nuclear bomb and the resulting implications it has had on the politics that govern it, anthropologist Joseph Masco comments on the transition between the atmospheric testing that was a hallmark of Frenchman’s Flat and the underground testing in Yucca Valley. The former he identifies as a vivid example of the Kantian dynamic sublime, an event that is so overwhelming and beyond the scope of human words to understand that true meaning isn’t derived, but rather intellectual compensation. The era of atmospheric testing placed the full force and potentially devastating impacts of the bomb in a relationship with the corporeal body. Echoes of it exist today in the various historic photographs and videos capturing the swirling, violent mushroom cloud as well as the radiation burned bodies of Hiroshima or the cancer-stricken portraits of former nuclear workers and downwinders. The nuclear monster that manifested with every atmospheric test served as a grim reminder of the costs of nuclear technology, even if perhaps it couldn’t be fully articulated by any words or rhetoric.
As our tour bus enters Yucca Valley we pass another set of wooden bleachers (nicknamed News Nob) that once allowed spectators to take in the sublime of NTS. Our bus rumbles off of the Mercury highway and onto a dirt road that begins winding in-between subsistence craters of varying size and depth. We are told that these depressions were formed on the landscape when the force of an underground test pushed up Earth, but failed to break through the surface. Not long after any given blast the ground around the test area would begin to sink, as the material that had formerly held it had been vaporize.
It is this area that is home to the next evolution in the atomic sublime argued by Masco. After a moratorium on weapons testing between 1958 and 1962, the Soviet Union and U.S. resumed their efforts with an agreement that all future testing would take place underground. There is some question as to how much of this was motivated by the public health concerns sparked by the examples offered by downwinder populations and how much the policy was driven by an attempt to maintain higher degrees of secrecy over testing, particularly with ongoing advances in satellite technology, but whatever the reasoning the era of atomic testing that would live underground for thirty years had its own impacts on society and governance that must be assessed.
Just as the years of atmospheric testing produced one variety of Kantian sublime, Joseph Masco argues that this second phase of underground testing is responsible for producing a mathematical sublime. And while “both forms of the sublime are deeply disturbing, in demonstrating the limits of human cognition” this mathematical sublime varies from the dynamic sublime through a “flooding of the senses with overwhelming scale and complexity, rather than physical fear.” (Masco 355). Masco offers one proof that captures something of the mathematical sublime in assessing the microcosm of time in which the nuclear chain reaction occurs and is over. He writes: “If one were to add up the 2,053 nuclear detonations conducted in human history – a force of thousands of times the total destructive power unleashed during World War II – collectively, these explosions would still not constitute a single second of time.” (Masco 356).
The implications of moving the bomb underground are vast, beginning with a reorientation away from the spectacle of the bomb and towards a more institutionalized and scientific understanding of nuclear weapons and their effects. This is to say that it probably isn’t a coincidence that the years of atmospheric testing happened to coincide with the national cultures greatest interest in nuclear technology and nuclear culture. It was also an era during which some of the most vitriolic and divisive national language describing the parameters of nationalism and patriotism manifest. With the move to underground testing the almost daily visual reminders of the bomb passed into memory. This isn’t to say that nuclear anxiety was lessened with the move underground, but that perhaps it took on different tones (and found different outlets in society and culture).
The permanently marked landscape of Yucca Flat provides striking evidence of both the move underground and the accelerated pace of weapons testing in the thirty year window in which they took place. Passing along the rims of various subsidence craters, our driver makes a sudden sharp turn and we soon find ourselves descending down into the gaping mouth of the Bilby Crater. Created by a 249 KT blast it measures approximately 1884’ across and 2000’ deep, the bottom of the Bilby Crater resembles the blast zones of Frenchman Flat. It is a place littered with abandoned debris and the twisted metal and blasted concrete chunks left once the test was completed. Wires and cables snake out of ground at various locations along the crater floor, vestiges of the umbilical connection to surface monitoring stations that allowed scientists to measure and study each test (an artificial prosthetic to compensate for the loss of visual assessments that disappeared with the move underground).
Not far from the Bilby Crater is the massive hole created in 1962, when a 104-kiloton device was detonated as part of the Ploughshares Program. The Sedan test shot was meant to test the potentially peaceful applications of nuclear technology, in this case the possibility of excavating massive amounts of Earth for future large-scale construction projects. In displacing 12 million tons of Earth in less than one second the test worked, but it became quickly apparent that there was no practical way to capture and contain the radioactive fallout blown thousands of feet into the sky.
The first site I see when we arrive at the Sedan Crater is a rickety wooden platform that looks down on both the crater pit and the modern day observation deck. Though closed today, this platform once allowed photographers to capture both the crater and the human body in a single composition. It helps provide some sense of scale to a truly surreal scene. Standing at the observation deck and looking at the immediate skyline the rim of the crater carves an irregular jagged gash, attempting to crack the sky at various angles. The sides of the crater descend uniformly, as if a giant upside down pyramid was extracted from the Earth.
Gazing down on the crater floor I am struck by the presence of multiple tires that litter the bottom, a testament to the type of activities that invariably follow bored young men in lonely wide-open spaces. There is a sign hanging from the observation deck at the Sedan Crater, one of the only places I have seen on the site that offers an interpretation. The history provided here explains how the Crater was formed and also informs the reader that testing reveals slightly elevated levels of Cesium in this area. I stare into the abyss and head back to the bus, pondering how the residual sublime of the underground testing era is at exact inverse with the atmospheric era. That is to say, the monumental reshaping of the earth that has taken place at Yucca Flat leave me feeling much more troubled and haunted than the random assortment of debris leftover at Frenchman.
As underground testing evolved numerous precautions were taken to keep the gasses and fallout created during underground testing events from reaching the surface, but in at least one case an unexpected fissure in the earth’s surface led to the unplanned venting of gas. Seen from satellite, Russian intelligence assumed that the U.S. had broken the Limited Test Ban treaty prohibiting atmospheric tests, and were once again detonating bombs on the NTS surface.
Yet, in spite of the massive damages beneath the surface that no one can see, our guide assures us that the Earth can take the punishment and that the poisons created here will not leave the arbitrary confines of the test site boundaries. He doesn’t acknowledge the shifting water table but does tell us that groundwater is routinely pulled from wells at various locations on the test site and that these “always” come back uncontaminated.
As our day winds down and we begin driving south towards Mercury, the bus stops on the mountain pass that transitions between the separate valleys of Frenchman Flat and Yucca Flat. Pointing to a low building on the horizon our guide states, “that building right there is why you aren’t allowed to bring camera’s into this place.” He is describing the Device Assembly Facility (DAF) that was in the midst of construction when the moratorium on testing came down in 1992. The activities that take place in the building today are classified, though with the U.S. shift in nuclear weapons policy it is likely that at least some component of the stockpile stewardship program takes place here. Based on a new effort to cease the construction of new nuclear weapons, and instead maintain the viability of existing forces for as long as possible, stockpile stewardship has effectively repositioned the rhetoric of nuclear weapons from language that once coded it as masculine and necessary for national defense, to the nuclear weapon as an aging body that requires the highly technical care of numerous specialists to remain viable.
The final stop on our tour of the Nevada Test Site is at the Apple II doom town. One of several pre-fabricated doom towns, this remnant speaks to the role that civil defense testing played at the test site. Once filled with furniture, food, and mannequins dressed in the high fashion o f the era, the wooden and brick structure now in front of us were exposed to the intensity of an atomic blast and heat from 5000’ away. Today all that is left standing is a door less, windowless structure, striped to bare wood, incrementally being reclaimed by desert and sun. The atomic blast knocked the house off of its foundation, a story told by the brick chimney that now stands at an oblique angle to the rest of the house. Structures such as this serve as a reminder that while the work done at the NTS was often justified as a crucial component of national defense, many of the projects enacted blurred the line between military activity and surviving nuclear attack. The dual missions have created various schizoid spaces on the NTS landscape that are not easy to unpack and decipher.
The road back to Las Vegas is quiet, as the place has history and contours that demand deep introspection. It is a place that asks troubling questions about the myriad costs that has come with a world living in perpetual fear and anxiety. The unseen threads that unite the Nuclear West run all over the NTS. In spite of the public relation tours it is a place seized by secrets, whether it is the Groom Lake region that has shaped the idea of Area 51 in the cultural imagination, or the other secret spaces we aren’t shown. The narrative being offered is highly controlled and exceptionally laudatory to the work that was done here.
As if to underscore just how interconnected the map of the Nuclear West is consider another site on the Nevada Test Site that the public isn’t allowed to visit, Jackass Flats. Not unlike the White Sands Missile Range, this is a converted space, one in which large areas of unoccupied space are routinely rented out to private interests who are allowed to conduct an assortment of tests outside the boundary lines of public scrutiny. Today massive storage locker sheds sit on Jackass Flats. These are among the only vestiges of MX that still exist, the converted silos in which the missiles would have been stored. It is to the debris of the Cold War and Nuclear West, which have been left scattered on the landscape that I now turn, structures (like the converted MX silo’s) that serve as a haunting reminder that when one starts pulling on the web of the Nuclear West, all of its strings begin to vibrate.
Sources
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Coolidge, Matthew. The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America's Nuclear Proving Ground.. Culver City: Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1996.
Endres, Danielle. “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 39-60.
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