Glowing Gently in the Dark

I was once invited to participate in a project consisting of interviews with people who had grown up literally in the shadow of the atomic bomb: in or near Las Vegas, Nevada. Atomic Kids is what we were, in some cases more literally than in my own. Back in the good old 20th century the Nevada Proving Ground (later to be renamed the Nevada Test Site) was located a mere 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and that's where - in January of 1951 - the first atmospheric test of the atomic bomb took place, if you don't count dropping a couple on civilian targets in Japan a few years previous, and apparently the U.S. government doesn't count those.

So it was that that morning my family got up really early and trooped outside onto the shared lawn of our fourplex in Kelso-Turner and watched a mushroom cloud rise from Frenchman Flat. A few minutes later the shockwave hit, rattling windows for miles around. This is the story I told the scholar who was compiling these accounts into a thesis a few years back. From this distance I think I can be forgiven for thinking of it as sort of hazily romantic (see the film Desert Rose, from the Larry McMurtry novel, for a portrayal of that time that looks exactly like the childhood I remember), and it was a tiny thing of a bomb, really: just one kiloton.

Of course that was only the first of many. Officially there were 99 more above-ground nuclear explosions between that memorable morning and 11 1/2 years later when above-ground tests were abandoned in favor of bombs detonated in deep shafts in the earth. Explosive testing was suspended altogether in 1992, and meanwhile somewhere between 10,000 and 75,000 people in several contiguous states may have contracted Hashimoto's Thyroiditis from exposure to Iodine-131, and some communities in Utah suffered leukemia rates of several hundred times over the national average, and their livestock fared even worse than their children. Turns out you can't explode an atomic bomb when the wind is blowing toward either Las Vegas to the south-east, or Los Angeles to the west, and that pretty much leaves Utah.

I offer this abridged tale of my early childhood merely to explain the title I've chosen for this blog, which will be general rather than nuclear in nature, past, present, and future in its orientation, wide-ranging in its subject-matter, and occasional rather than several times daily in frequency. Welcome any and all.