Sedan Test - NTSREMEMBERING HISTORY:
"WE MUST FIND A WAY TO CLOSE THEM DOWN!"By J Truman, Downwinders, July 2, 2000
This article from yesterday's 50th birthday of the Las Vegas Sun is a part of the history of the struggle for justice for those exposed to Cold War nuclear development and to end nuclear testing, that few people have any awareness of.
Beginning at almost the same time as the first stirrings of grass roots organizing among downwind residents, the 4 year battle between Howard R. Hughes and the Atomic Energy Commission to stop the bombing at the Nevada Test Site, became the driving force that created the sentiments that still fuel nuclear related battles in the west. The widespread media attention given Hughes, which would have been denied we downwinders, not only made it possible for us to get attention to our health effects, but confirmed the concerns, worries, and fears we had and were beginning to see in downwind communities in Utah and Nevada.
Few realize that now approaching 40 years ago this battle raged, and that fallout from it was a big part of the whole Watergate affair. Nor that there were two components to this fight -- Hughes and the first downwinders. When Hughes left Las Vegas in 1970 and that part of the fight ended, the other didn't, and before the decade ended the downwinders had forced international attention to test fallout and to the cancers and other illnesses they were suffering.
These sentiments helped to spawn the Great Basin wide opposition that killed the plans for the MX, and are still seen today with the battle being waged against Yucca Mountain.
It has been the continuing coverage and investigation into these issues first by the Las Vegas Sun and later joined by the Utah based Deseret News that has made the fallout victims issue, and countless others possible, simply because they had learned an important lesson from the dirty secrets unearthed during this original fight against ongoing testing. Nor is it surprising that the key figures who have fought these battles over the years had their first experiences in activism and organizing during this forgotten fight, such as the late Irma Thomas, Dr. Robert Pendelton, three Governors, myself, and the key reporters who are still dogging this story.
And even today the charges and the fears raised by Hughes and the teams of scientists he hired nearly 40 years ago are now still being vindicated and proven to be correct. Such as the findings that plutonium was capable of spreading through the groundwater much faster than ever predicted -- a charge and warning first issued by Hughes in 1968 and laughed at and called crazy until findings at Hanford and NTS the last two years proved Hughes correct. That most all the underground tests leaked radiation into the atmosphere and still do. Or the most recent discovery that radioactive materials from NTS underground bomb tests may be moving off the NTS, which the AEC/DOE maintained could never happen, but which was a key part of the Hughes battle to close the Test Site.
The Sun's article causes me to pause and to remember our history of the fight against the bombing, and calls to mind my favorite Hughes memo on the subject of nuclear testing in Nevada that I have in my collection. It is a good time to quote from it; (all spelling and grammar from the original):
"If the gigantic nuclear explosion is detonated (an upcoming huge underground test he was opposing) then in the fraction of a second following the pressing of that fateful button, thousands and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of good potentially fertile Nevada soil and underlying water and minerals and other substances are forever poisoned beyond the most gastly nightmare. A gigantic abyss too horrible to imagine filled with poisonous gases and debris will have been created just beneath the surface in terrain that may one day be the site of a city like Las Vegas."
"I say Nevada is no longer so desperate for mere existence that it has to accept and swallow with a smile poisonous, contaminated radio-active waste material more horrible than human excrement"
"I am sure that some expert somewhere must have pronounced as safe the bomb tests in Utah, but that doesn't help the sheep lying there on the prairie."
"Some day guides will take tourists from here to Reno, and when they pass (the test site), the guide will say: 'And on your right is the ghastly grave-yard of atomic poison and polution, that is so dreadful no tourists are allowed to go near it for fear some child may wander away from its parents and step within the contaminationed area.'
"Rome proudly displays its battlefields of historic fame, but this miserable blemish on God's creation, the earth, is such a tragedy nobody points to it or boasts about it, it means only one thing: 'Shame!'"
"Well, none of this is getting us any closer to stopping this shameful program. Now how do we go about it?
"We must find a way to close them down."
That is the history of our struggle, all of our struggles, and here as we enter a new century, we are still left with the first goal being the same as then, "WE MUST FIND A WAY TO CLOSE THEM DOWN!"
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