How the scientific community overlooked, ignored, and denied the
catastrophic fallout of decades of
nuclear testing in the American West
In December of 1950, President Harry Truman gave authorization for the
Atomic Energy Commission to conduct weapons tests and experiments on a
section of a Nevada gunnery range. Over the next eleven years, more than
a hundred detonations were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, and
radioactive debris dispersed across the communities just downwind and
through much of the country. In this important work, James C. Rice tells
the hidden story of nuclear weapons testing and the negligence of the US
government in protecting public health.
Downwind of the Atomic State focuses on the key decisions and events
shaping the Commission's mismanagement of radiological contamination in
the region, specifically on how the risks of fallout were defined and
redefined, or, importantly, not defined at all, owing to organizational
mistakes and the impetus to keep atomic testing going at all costs. Rice
shows that although Atomic Energy Commission officials understood
open-air detonations injected radioactive debris into the atmosphere,
they did not understand, or seem to care, that the radioactivity would
irrevocably contaminate these communities.
The history of the atomic Southwest should be a wake-up call to everyone
living in a world replete with large, complex organizations managing
risky technological systems. The legacy of open-air detonations in
Nevada pushes us to ask about the kinds of risks we are unwittingly
living under today. What risks are we being exposed to by large
organizations under the guise of security and science?
