The MX Moment: Part V
The MX Moment
EXPLORING COLD WAR HISTORY AND DEMOCRATIC FUTURES IN THE NUCLEAR WEST
Part V: A Lonely Grave
Democratic Futures
In light of the events that would follow President Reagan’s October 1981 announcement, it appears that both the Great Basin and its inhabitants were spared a monumentally expensive mistake. That the missile systems targeted finishing date coincided so closely with the fall of the Soviet Union speaks to a lack of clear military intelligence on the matter, a failing that sheds suspicion on other claims that have been used over time to build and support the massive military-industrial apparatus upon which so much of the U.S. economy is now codependent.
And yet, the story of MX has parallels that gesture directly to problems in the modern day. Chief among these are the striking resemblance between the doomed MX MPS basing scheme, and the Yucca Mountain Waste Repository in Nevada. Returning to the windswept basin and range of the Nevada Test Site, Yucca Mountain sits on the southeastern edge of Jackass Flats, home of the MX missile silos that now serve as military storage units. The shadow of the nuclear west first fell on Yucca Mountain in 1987 when the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act was amended to make Yucca Mountain the primary research site for any future high-level nuclear waste storage on the continent.
Years of research on the Yucca Mountain Project were pushed from theory to the brink of reality on July 23, 2002, when President George W. Bush signed legislation authorizing the Department of Energy to begin the planning process that would build the nations first centralized location for high-level waste storage.
Like MX, the project was born into controversy, with government officials justifying their actions on a national security imperative. And in the chorus of voices that emerged to rally against the Yucca Mountain, familiar refrains and oppositional strategies from the MX drama can be heard. Among the most potent is the challenge being presented by the Western Shoshone, who has long challenged the U.S. occupation and use of land at the Nevada Test Site. For the Western Shoshone, Yucca Mountain is a holy site that is vital to the continuation of their culture. The case presented by the Western Shoshone (among others) sounds like MX, and offers evidence of the types of opinion that trouble the assumptions of nationalism and nuclearism upon which the Nuclear West has been founded.
The historic echoes that link Yucca Mountain and MX grow even louder when considering the political processes that played a role in bringing each to a quick end. Consider that both projects were opposed by powerful Nevada Congressmen who drew on political alliances to halt each project, Paul Laxalt for MX and Senator Harry Reid for Yucca. Furthermore, the end of both projects coincided with the transition of power to a new presidential administration, as funding for development of the Yucca Mountain waste site was effectively terminated through an amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed by Congress on April 14, 2011. The actions and statements that issued by the Obama Administration concerning Yucca Mountain indicate that the prospect of storing nuclear waste at that particular Great Basin site are as dead as the MX missile racetrack was with Reagan’s statement against MPS basing in 1981. At present the Yucca Mountain Site proposal, and the future of high-level nuclear waste storage remains at a critical crossroads.
This comparison between the failed MX system and seemingly doomed Yucca Mountain proposal helps raise important questions about the U.S. and its nuclear future. With the end of the Cold War and termination of underground nuclear testing in 1992, the currents that once informed an entire Cold War generation now run cool. And yet, the legacy of the Cold War and Nuclear West has the strange effect of simultaneously persisting all around us, both in the ruins of formerly secret spaces that are now tourist destinations, as well as the clandestine sites that continue to trouble the landscape. The post-Cold War generations of today are much more likely to associate the rhetoric and terms that were once foundational to an anxiety-ridden America, with more contemporary events like 9/11. This persistence of language to fully divest from society seemingly validates the claim offered by Joseph Masco, namely that the Cold War military/security state hasn’t passed away, but rather transmuted itself to fit new realities:
The fears supporting the Cold War ‘balance of terror’ can morph into the “war on terror” today not because it makes any real sense but because the images of threat can be presented to American citizens as both coherent and eternal. Efforts to unpack the detailed history of the Cold War, or to address the specific claims of current counter-terrorism, inevitably challenge the rationale of the national security state. For this very reason the public history museums and archives that address aspects of American security are both essential and highly politicized. (39)
And yet, in spite of this reorientation, it isn’t difficult to envision scenarios that might reignite the fires that burned bright during the heights of America’s atomic age. True, with the rise of globalization and the economic dependencies that have come to form the connections between nations it is difficult to imagine future scenarios in which an entrenched Cold War founded on the same principles that governed U.S. and Soviet relations for decades emerging. But this isn’t to say that the military applications and attendant anxieties over nuclear weapons are completely a thing of the past. One only needs to see the anxiety over the potential of a nuclear Iran, a partisan talking point that found its way into the 2012 presidential debates, to see that the threat of a military nuclear world is still very much around us.
But even more troubling is the unresolved issue of storing the nuclear waste born as a byproduct of the Cold War and military-industrial excess. Currently the United States is in the unenviable position of sitting on massive amounts of high-level nuclear waste, born of the weapon programs and nuclear power plants that grew up in the fertile soil offered by Cold War paranoia and liberal government spending. A July 2002 feature in the National Geographic puts the problem into some perspective by quoting the following figures:
A long deferred cleanup is now under way at 114 of the nation's nuclear facilities, which encompass an acreage equivalent to Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Many smaller sites, the easy ones, have been cleansed, but the big challenges remain. What's to be done with 52,000 tons (47,000 metric tons) of dangerously radioactive spent fuel from commercial and defense nuclear reactors? With 91 million gallons (345 million liters) of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing, scores of tons of plutonium, more than half a million tons of depleted uranium, millions of cubic feet of contaminated tools, metal scraps, clothing, oils, solvents, and other waste? And with some 265 million tons (240 million metric tons) of tailings from milling uranium ore—less than half stabilized—littering landscapes?
This problem is exacerbated further by the global role the U.S. has taken in securing enriched uranium resources from foreign countries, an action based on the premise that it is better to deal with the storage threat of foreign energy waste than have it potentially weaponized and turned against the nation in a military action.
The hope of a long term storage solution increasingly appears to be a pipedream, as the massive lengths of time needed for the safe half-life decay of these materials is not commiserate with the active geology of our planet. In other words, as the active geology of Yucca Mountain has shown, no environment on Earth offers a perfect scenario into which this toxic legacy can be safely contained. So, this material remains on-site at the storage facilities where it was birthed, a dark situation with frightening implications for the future, particularly as the effects from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011 begin to increasingly manifest in the environment and food chain.
All of this is to say that the nuclear future remains as cloudy now as it ever has, and that future policy decisions will not be the black and white scenarios that too often drove Cold War logic. The future will be filled with hard choices, with less-than-ideal solutions. The MX missile is one chapter in a larger story out of which hope for future possibilities must be mined and explored. In this way, the MX missile offers some hope as a moment where multiple voices working within the available democratic channels open to them engaged in impacting a scenario that was not clear cut or well defined.
Historic sites can serve a crucial role in informing, but as the lessons offered here have shown, a strict reliance on the narratives offered by such places will only provide one (often biased) perspective. The real work entails an open mind and a willingness to probe and explore all available sides of an issue. This is where archives and primary source documentation prove themselves as crucial to future democratic efforts. Not only do such places serve as a vital check on the memory of society, they also give for to voices and. insights that act as a guard on the most valuable commodity every person on this planet carries: time.
But just as the sites in the Nuclear West can be co-opted, so can these sites repositories of institutional memory. The threat of this risk demands both vigilance, and an informed public that demands complete transparency in all of its dealings. Trevor Paglan has argued that while transparency is an ideal that is easily espoused, the hard reality is that when it brings unsavory dealings to light, the typical response is not to carve out the problem and safeguard against its return, but rather to bend the paradigms of reality to fit this new unveiling. The Manhattan Project appears to provide solid evidence for his argument, as the eventual response when it came to light wasn’t a rupture that fundamentally reoriented government, but rather a reengagement that allowed for the underlying assumptions and principles that built it to flourish. Echoes of this position can also be seen in the MX, as many who stood up in opposition against it were later struck with a sense of fatalism that the only deep lessons absorbed were by military planners, who simply devised more sophisticated ways to keep their actions out of light of public scrutiny.
It is hard to say where in an age of widespread information and increased global connection, what the effects will be in terms of the demands and checks future practitioners of democracy place on their government. Scenarios, such as the future threats promised by a growing nuclear-waste storage problem, do ensure that there will remain some level of immediacy between government and the public, though ultimately the onus for demanding action and restraint from government must derive from an active, and well informed, citizenry.
This requires citizens who are capable of engaging in the hard tasks of listening, learning, and having the capacity to compromise. These virtues lie at the heart of effective democracy. Creating place and ascribing it value is a deeply human act that has deeply political ramifications. In the end it is our words that serve as the building blocks for place, and our narratives that help flesh it out and give it shape. It is with this pervasive power of narrative in mind that I turn to a final story provided by the MX missile record. It is a story of one unlikely Great Basin inhabitant whose actions suggest the potential of place, as well as the challenges and opportunities available to effect change through the necessary work of informed and participatory democracy.
The MX Ballad of Evan Hansen
When I first began processing the dusty MX records that had lived unattended in the permanent collection of the Utah State Archives for decades, I again found myself gravitating to the same passionate expressions from Great Basin citizens that had first stirred my interest over a decade before.
It was in the midst of reading through various letters that had been written to representatives on the MX Missile Policy Board in Cedar City that I found a correspondence that seemed to speak with a fair degree of immediacy to many of the thoughts and issues that were weighing on my own mind. The letter in question was written on November 9, 1979 and addressed to Governor Scott Matheson, and its sender, Evan Hansen, passionately articulated a position of concern not only for the impacts of MX, but also what the MX proposal said about those inhabiting the Great Basin. “Washington says this area is virtually uninhabited.” Hansen wrote to the Governor. “This makes those of us who live here virtual uninhabitants…being a ‘virtual uninhabitant’ destroys identity as a human being. We are non non-persons, with no rights whatsoever.”
Struck by his words I decided to try and track down more information on Evan Hansen. The letter had a postmark from the tiny southern Utah farming community of Beryl, and a quick Google search with the terms “Evan Hansen” and “Beryl” quickly provided me with a mailing address.
Without any clear idea of what to say or ask Mr. Hansen, I decided to write a letter anyway explaining my project and expressing my admiration for the position he had articulated so beautifully to Governor Matheson over thirty years before.
Days after dropping my letter in the mail I received a phone call from a gentleman in Salt Lake City named Bruce Kaliser who wanted to know if I was the person who had mailed the MX letter to Evan Hansen of Beryl. Acknowledging that I was, Bruce and I began a conversation that began to fill in a history that had lay dormant in the MX records for decades.
Bruce told me that Evan Hansen had passed away in 2001, but that a niece with whom he was particularly close still lives in Beryl. It was this niece who had received my letter. “You see, I knew Evan Hansen back when the whole MX project was taking place,” Bruce told me. “I was working for the Utah Geological Survey at the time, and I went to Beryl to conduct field work, when I first met Evan.”
Over the course of a three-hour conversation Bruce told me that while working in north of Beryl, deep in the heart of the Escalante Desert of western Utah, he came across the small home where Evan Hansen lived. They hit it off, and Evan invited Bruce inside to show him the trilobite collection he had gathered from various spots in the west desert.
After the MX proposal was made by President Carter, Bruce was contracted by the geological survey company, FUGRO, to perform some basic fieldwork, again in the Escalante Desert region that Evan Hansen called home. “If I had to describe Evan, the one word that would come to mind is ‘hermit,’” Bruce told me. “I didn’t even know he had any family until after he died, and his niece contacted me.” Bruce went on to explain how, though they have never met in person, he has managed to develop a friendship with Evan’s niece.
“I wouldn’t say that Evan was a trained geologist, but his observations of the place he lived were fairly sophisticated,” Bruce would go on to tell me. “I had no idea he wrote any letters to the government about MX, but then again I’m not surprised. He was a character.”
Months after speaking to Bruce, I again found myself wading through the correspondence from citizens voicing their opinions on MX, and again I found another correspondence voicing the now-somewhat familiar opinions (and hand writing) of Evan Hansen. Addressed to Utah state senator, Frances Farley, Evan’s words again captured my imagination.
In his letter to Senator Farley, Evan describes how a deep love and concern for his home had led him to dedicate his spare time to observing and studying the geology of the Escalante Valley region. The dynamic geological forces he witnessed and describes to Senator Farley speak to a major flaw of the MX project as a whole, namely the fact that the worlds most dangerous weapons systems was being proposed for the continents most dynamically shifting and evolving region. Evan writes:
In 1974, I became interested in studying geothermal activity in this valley…the thing that makes geothermal activity possible is that enough earth movement exists to keep fault lines broken open enough to allow groundwater to reach hot rock. Naturally, any such movement will have effects on surface conditions. So when it was first announced that Beryl had been selected for a base site, I immediately knew this valley was far too unstable to support MX structures. Even the strongest MX advocates must admit the need to build it on stable ground, and this is s some of the most actively moving ground in North America.
After voicing his concerns Evan ends his letter to the Senator by saying, “Something subversive is going on here, and I think it's about time we found out what it is.”
In these two letters, Evan Hansen reveals not only a passionate love and understanding of place, but also demonstrates the willingness to do everything in his power to inform himself and work to protect it. He writes about how when the scientists sent to conduct fieldwork by FUGRO arrived in the Escalante Desert he volunteered to help them, with the hope that both parties might be able to teach one another. Evan also describes his active participation in the environmental impact planning meetings held in nearby Cedar City. This activity coupled with his correspondence with elected representatives reveals something of the type of effort that is demanded of citizens in matters of such pressing public policy.
Today Evan Hansen is buried in a small cemetery south of Beryl. In early October, 2012 I make the journey west of Cedar City, Utah and into the Escalante Desert region that I only know through the descriptions in his letter. The landscape is the quintessential basin and range country that he knew so passionately, and loved enough to learn and give voice to. Irrigated land provides both ranchers and farmers a living in this landscape, testaments to a particular component part of the lifestyle that so many MX activists rooted their actions in. The John McGarry Memorial Park Cemetery, where Evan is buried, is located three miles down a desolate farm road. Upon arriving at the cemetery I began looking for his grave. A quick count reveals 28 people buried here, but wandering amongst the mounds I can’t find Evan. Turning to leave, I notice one grave that is off on its own, about 25 yards from any other grave in the cemetery. Walking to it, I find a weather-beaten board that identifies this spot as the final resting place for Evan Hansen, seemingly a hermit in death as well as life. Roughly carved on his marker read the words:
Evan Leone Hansen
Dec 9, 1932-Aug 4, 2001
Brother, Uncle, Friend, Love
A man of freedom, loyalty, earth, many interests, deep thought, common sense, integrity, intellectual eclectic mind
kind, gentle, wise
I am struck that even though he and I are disconnected through time and space, something of him lives on in the records preserved at the Utah State Archives. The words on his grave seem like a fitting tribute, but on a deeper level they can be read as a hopeful incantation of values for those of us left among the living. These words can be read as an aspiration and ambition for those who seek to define and articulate their sense of place, and then work to protect it.
A slight breeze picks up, and in spite of the gulf of time and space between us I feel a connection to Evan Hansen, a common ground between us that is founded on a shared love for the literal ground upon which I now stand. The low, long Escalante Valley spreads out all around me, eventually broken on the horizon by distant mountains. In spite of the fact that I have never been to this particular spot in the Great Basin before, I feel at peace. I feel like I am home.
Sources
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.
Glass, Matthew. Citizens Against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Kuletz, Valerie L. The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Masco, Joseph. “Nuclear Technoaethetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos.” American Ethnologist 31.3 (2004).
National Geographic. 2002. Half Life. Available at: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0207/feature1/fulltext.html . Website Accessed 20 Nov, 2012.
Paglan, Trevor. Blank Spots on the Map. New York: New American Library, 2010
Utah State Archives and Records Service, Governor (1977-1985: Matheson), MX missile records, series 1646.
Utah State Archives and Records Service, MX Missile Policy Board, Administrative records, series 5643.