Report from ground zero - Carole Gallagher, author of 'American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War' - Interview

Photographer Carole Gallagher left New York to pursue a story most Americans would like to forget.

When the Atomic Energy Commission began exploding nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert in the early 1950s, it described the area's residents -- the farmers and ranchers, schoolchildren and homemakers, Mormons and American Indians who would live under massive fallout clouds, bury their dead livestock and drink radioactive milk -- as "a low-use segment of the population." Such was the official rationale for detonating 126 atmospheric nuclear bombs, some more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some 800 underground nuclear "tests" over a 40-year period.

So it was not surprising that almost all of the hundreds of "downwinders," testsite workers and veterans of atomic blasts interviewed and photographed by photo-journalist Carole Gallagher (pictured opposite) expressed feelings of betrayal, mistrust and anger about their involuntary role in America's nuclear exercises. They and their families have suffered an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, sterility, immune system diseases and painful, untimely deaths.

Gallagher searched for eight years and was turned down by more than 30 publishers before MIT Press agreed to publish American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. Her work was financed by her personal savings and grants from several foundations, including the Columbia Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The result -- in which these "undecorated casualties" tell their own stories, underscored by dramatic black-and-white photographs of their deformed bodies, scarred tissue and courageous faces -- is a powerful chronicle of suffering, deception and the destruction of lives and lands at the hands of the U.S. government.

"Out of this blind silence, a brief whisper of the voices of the living and the dead can be heard rising from these pages," Gallagher writes in the book's prologue. "The nuclear war that claimed their gentle lives is no longer a secret. They leave their memories to us as a warning."

Gallagher spoke with Common Cause Magazine from her home in New York City.

Common Cause: When did you first become interested in the history and the victims of this country's nuclear testing?

Gallagher: When I was a child. I grew up in New York, and we were the obvious ground zero for a first strike from the Soviet Union. I'm a duck-and-cover baby. I was born in 1950, and by the time I was in school people were hysterical about communism and nuclear war. I was very aware as a child that nuclear testing was going on in the West, because there were newsreels about it. And people in my neighborhood would gather at night and talk over the backyard fence about the fallout. So I was sitting in my little army tent doing my little things after dinner, and I would hear that. And it made a big impression on me. This was preschool; that would have been '54 or '55.

Another thing that really made me sensitive to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was 12, and I was educated at a monastery in Brooklyn, and the nuns were cloistered and we were being prepared for the hereafter in a rather strenuous way, especially on that day. We were all looking at the clock waiting for 11 o'clock to happen, when we were supposed to either be blown up or not.

It all sort of congealed in my mind and then went to the back burner for a number of years -- until Three Mile Island happened. I had my suitcase packed; I was going to get in the car and leave at the first sign that the thing had blown. I felt we were being lied to then.

So I think when you have experiences in childhood where you face annihilation in a very blatant way it works on you for the rest of your life. And eventually one wants to cope with the source of that fear, which I did.

Common Cause: When and why did you decide to do the book?

Gallagher: I decided at the end of '81, beginning of '82. I had been a fine arts photographer and had had some success in the art world. But it wasn't deep enough for me, and it wasn't honest enough.

So it was very cathartic for me to change careers to journalism. And it was coupled with this rather obsessive need to find out what happened out there. I was very curious. I wanted to be sure I had the truth of it, but you couldn't have the truth from just reading books. So I went out there.

Common Cause: A lot of people will acknowledge that the government's nuclear testing program represents a dark chapter in our nation's history, but they say there's no point in continuing to talk about it. You obviously feel differently.

Gallagher: What's hidden festers. Ignoring things does not make them go away. This issue ties into a lot of other human issues through history -- a human genocide syndrome: We're going to do what we want no matter who we kill. It's placing the well-being of an entire nation and perhaps the planet on some shadowy ideals. It's less about ideals, I think now, than about money. We actually have a nuclear industry that has metastasized throughout the military and the commercial world.

I think the issue of the effects of testing had been swept under the rug for a long time. Most people in the East never knew that we were having a secret nuclear war in part of our country. People have to know.

And it's not just the Nevada test site. We have a catastrophic situation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. Then we have the enormous problem of nuclear waste. We have 45,000 radioactive sites in the country that need to be cleaned up, and we have more and more waste being created by nuclear power even as the nuclear weapons program is winding down. So everybody's affected.

Common Cause: What kind of impact do you hope your book will have?

Gallagher: I think it's a statement that just won't go away. Once something is published and goes into the libraries people can read these stories and realize that they have to be more vigilant about the quality of their lives. There are dangers that affect generations of people, that may shorten your life by 20 or 30 years. That's something to be considered.

I really think that vigilance has to start with the nuclear industry, with the clean-up and the problems of weapons installations that are environmentally unsafe and potentially castrophic.

Common Cause: As you learned about the government's nuclear testing program and how it was conducted, what struck you the most?

Gallagher: I was amazed at the callousness. There was no hiding behind what they were doing to the atomic veterans, putting them 2,500 yards from ground zero. And when they came away from the shot they would be walking over ground zero, where the sand had melted into glass. How can you watch your men ... walking away bleeding from every orifice in their bodies and say that this is in the best interests of the country?

The nuclear industry's credibility has been shattered. They've had such an effective system of covering up and shredding documents and outright lying -- you don't know when they're lying to you.

Common Cause: Do you believe the government realized the danger of what it was doing?

Gallagher: Oh, absolutely. A couple of weeks ago at the National Security Archieve in Washington, I came across a letter from [J. Robert] Oppenheimer [the developer of the atomic bomb who was later ostracized for his opposition to post-war development of the hydrogen bomb] dated 1946, to [President] Truman, which gave many reasons why they shouldn't do [nuclear] tests and how things should be safer. And then I found a letter from the acting chairman of the [Atomic Energy Commission] saying that it would be safe to explode 50,000 hydrogen bombs, no problem. And then I saw a memo from Truman to Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, attacking this letter from Oppenheimer and calling him a crybaby scientist.

They always knew that radiation could hurt you. They just didn't know how much could kill you, and when. They still deny that low doses of radiation can hurt you.

It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that in 1946 and even before, that even the first nuclear test, Trinity, at Alamogordo [N.M.], they thought the entire atmosphere of the planet might blow up and they did it anyway. These were people who wanted to have their big science at any cost.

Common Cause: As you met, interviewed and photographed the downwinders, test-site workers and atomic veterans, what were the common themes of their stories and experiences?

Gallagher: They were all angry. They were enraged. But different groups had different ways of coping. With the downwinders, I found that the further away they were from Utah and the Mormon Church, the more active they were in coping with this and doing things about. Mormons were told by the church that they shouldn't be afraid, that they shouldn't complain, and that they were doing something for their country. So they were almost embarrassed to be angry. But once that rage broke through, some were very active. And they paid a huge price for being active because they were thought to be disloyal to the government and unpatriotic for even speaking up about it.

Common Cause: Which stories and people struck you the most?

Gallagher: Joanne Workman had polio in the '50s. She lived in St. George, Utah. She had been out of school for a while but she went back, and she was not able to walk very well but she went to her geology class and they were encouraged to watch these bomb blasts as part of their science program. So she went out with the class -- close enough to see the bomb go off -- and then they were told to do identifications of the different geological areas of the place where they were.

And she sat out for five hours, because she couldn't walk, doing identifications. And the wind came over very hot. It was a fallout cloud; she was right in the middle of it, and little specks of the cloud would land on her and she'd brush them off. And by the time she got home she was so burned that she tried to put her brush through her hair to get the flakes out of her hair and her scalp was so badly burned it lifted right up off her skull. She eventually got five different kinds of cancer, including a brain tumor. [She died in 1987.]

But she had the guts to go testify at congressional hearings in the late 1970s. And she was ridiculed by the government lawyers. They asked her to prove that she had been bald since that time. And she removed her wig and one of the government lawyers said, "Well, I guess when I get 50 and start losing my hair I'll ask the government to give me a loan." For a toupee, he meant.

Here was a person who was bald, toothless,... and she was going through enormous experimental procedures at Stanford to try to cure the cancer. She was a guinea pig. She signed away her rights to sue the government or to even get information about the treatment just so she could stay alive a little longer. Her husband stood by her. She would say, "I'm bald and toothless, but I'm happier than a barrel of monkeys because I'm alive."

And that's the type of survivor mentality that really touched me.

Common Cause: So many people you talked with said they had lost all faith and trust in their government. Is there hope for regaining that trust? What do you say to those people?

Gallagher: Trust yourself. Get honest. Take a good look at things. Develop a community of other people around you that you trust and get active.

Common Cause: Do you believe we can learn from our mistakes?

Gallagher: Oh, yes. Otherwise I would not have done this book. I try to be hopeful. I think the only way you feel hope is if you're active. Don't give in to the depression and to being a fatalist entirely.

As really catastrophic as these stories are, there are pockets of similar catastrophe all over the country that are not known. Fallout was all over the country; it's all over the world. There is lots of plutonium in the atmosphere. There's endless environmental destruction from that, and contamination.

People need to be vigilant. People need to attend to their own health and the general needs in health care for the country and the world.

The biggest thing, I think, is not to give in to the paralysis, the feeling that you can't make a difference. So if people read this book and they get depressed, what I hope they know by the end is that there is some hope if you're active, but there's no hope if you're passive. It's the passivity that is killing the ideals of this country.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Common Cause Magazine
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