Let's re-read, an old article by Vittorio Zucconi, published in "La Repubblica" in 1993. A dramatic portrait of the tide of victims of atomic tests, carried out in the US during the period of tension with the Korean peninsula.
Las Vegas: It was 1951 and everyone in the world slept the sleep of reason, tucked under the Cold War nuclear blanket. Martha Laird was also asleep, one night of that 1951. A young 26-year-old mother asleep next to her husband, her two small children, her sheep and her horses in the Nevada hills west of Las Vegas, in a tiny village called "Twin Springs", twin springs.
"We were awakened by a flash of light that warmed our faces as if the sun had exploded in front of the window," he says now. "After a few seconds we heard the roar coming from afar, like an earthquake. The house began to shake, the windows crumbled, the door flew away like an old newspaper. The children were crying. My husband and I huddled together, until the rumble subsided and the sun went out at night. We didn't understand anything. "
They will begin to understand later, when the older child became ill with leukemia, the smallest of bone cancer, the husband in the pancreas and the newborn that Martha carried in himself was born premature, of six months, "with two strange black appendages and twisted that dangled under his belly, instead of legs ". He also lived five hours before he died, like his brothers, like his father, like the deformed foals that emerged from the wombs of mares that were galloping away with their matte eyes, as if they were afraid of what they had given birth to. "We didn't know then that we were the 'downwinders', the guinea-pig people who lived 'leeward' compared to the nuclear tests in the Nevada atomic range," says Martha.
Now, 40 years later, they know it. The US government also knows that it paid a few days ago to this woman, and to thousands of 'leeward' like her, $ 50,000 each, for "compensation for radiation damage", according to a law financed by a special fund wanted by Clinton, of over 200 billion lire a year.
Only today, after years of complaints, lawsuits, trials, investigations and above all horrible deaths on horrific deaths, the truth about the secret war waged against the people of the "Sottovento" begins to come to the surface, dissolved by the silence of the Cold War. The 104 hydrogen bombs detonated in the open air in the Nevada desert, between 1951 and 1963, when Kennedy signed the banning of atmospheric experiments, and then the over 800 detonated in underground caverns, until yesterday they did more victims than Chernobyl, here in the huge region between Arizona, Utah and Nevada covered by the cloud of nuclear 'fallout'.
Their exact number is still a state secret. Maybe 50 thousand, like in Vietnam. Yet Clinton is planning to authorize four more nuclear tests by 1996. As all that concerns the atom, even this horror has no visible sign other than in the consequences. Look for the effects in the Laird family, destroyed by the fallout of the 'Harry' bomb (every experiment had its name, Harry, Bob, Frank, John, to humanize it. Even the one that destroyed Hiroshima was nicely called 'Fat Boy', fat) .
The imprint of that internal war lies in the 100,000 Indians of the Navajo nation, employed as uranium miners to dig the ore needed for bombs, exterminated by lung tumors and dead without even being able to name what killed them: in Navajo language there is not a word that expresses the concept of 'radioactivity'. They called it the "death that consumes".
For years, official silence was absolute, fierce. In the village of St. George, a village among the Mormons of Utah, a local doctor discovered monstrous, inexplicable amounts of tumors in the mid-1960s, 25 times more than the national average ... why? He asked the authorities, why so much mortality among these healthy people, in one of the most beautiful and virgin corners of America? In response, an FBI agent arrived at home: "Are you not a communist? A Russian spy? ”The doctor gave up.
There are no monuments, medals, heroes of that secret war of Americans against other Americans. Only cemeteries. Only the sinister and gigantic nothingness of rock and desert that was the 'Nevada Test Site', the atomic polygon. Today only a sign of that hell remains - "Warning! Warning! You are entering the Nevada nuclear range! ”, Just over an hour's drive from Las Vegas. It is not forbidden to enter it, but many say it is stupid. The dust that covers the road is perhaps still 'hot', radioactive and will be for 400 years.
In a low voice, in order not to disturb the tourists, the local old people suggest you to travel with the car windows tightly closed, the ventilation blocked and the paper masks on the mouth to avoid breathing the 'death that consumes'. That same death that also killed John Wayne and all the people who worked with him on the set of a western made in these parts. No one from the crew of that film shot next to the nuclear range has escaped. Everyone died some time after working here for 4 weeks, all of lung cancer. They said they were cigarettes.
Then we didn't know what we know now, the authorities defend themselves, we were naive, naive. But it's not true. They knew very well. Experiments were postponed when the wind blew from the shooting range towards Las Vegas and Los Angeles. They waited for the wind to turn and bring the dust to the Rocky Mountains, to the east, in the sparsely populated areas, to the unfortunates who lived scattered in the lee villages, like Martha and her sons.
The Pentagon called them "marginal populations". We also say the word: guinea pigs. They knew, and how they knew. From Las Vegas you could see the 'mushrooms' standing out against the horizon just 100 kilometers away. The players got up from the 'Blackjack' tables, broke away from the slot machines to run over the rooftops to see 'the mushroom'. Schools distributed iodine tablets to children to combat the effects of radiation. They told their parents that they were "vitamins". Soldiers who were placed at 250,000 a few kilometers from 'ground zero', the point of detonation, were given double pay, as were the scientists working on the experiments. So the risk was well known.
"They paid them handsomely and told him it was patriotic work, indispensable for defending America from Communist bombs," says the widow of a Nevada cowboy. Her husband had the task of bringing cows near the bomb to study the effects. A purplish foam came out of the nostrils to the beasts, the eyes swelled up to fall from their sockets. Sometimes even to cowherds. And the silent widows. "Not a word with anyone, my husband told me puking after embracing the toilet bowl after an experiment." He died six months later.
There is nothing alive today along the 'Frontier of the Bomb'. Double desert. I see, from the tightly closed window of my car, the carcass of an old white tank, calcined from the explosion. Scraps of buses, cars, crumbled sections of reinforced concrete bridges, pieces of torn rail, used to measure the bomb-effect, all covered by the fine white powder that traveled hundreds, thousands of kilometers. Sometimes it fell thick as snow on the villages and the children ran out to dive in, laughing and breathing. At night they vomited, in the morning the first sores appeared and the hair began to fall 48 hours later. Mothers prayed for them. First because they recovered. Then why they died quickly.
People trusted. Propaganda worked and the 'Bomba' didn't mind at all. That huge mushroom against the clear west sky was a flag, a sign of triumph. It was America. "Miss Nevada 1953", won the title wearing a bathing suit made of cotton wool in the shape of an atomic mushroom. It seemed like a big find. Wasn't the two revealing pieces called 'Bikini', the atoll of the first Bomb H?
In the Nevada desert, the 'Atomic Bar', 'Atomic Restaurant', 'Atomic Casino' were sprouting. Prostitutes in Reno offered customers 'The Atomic Fuck', the atomic fuck. Families went for picnics in the hills to watch the 'midnight sun' through the smoked glasses. The army distributed and projected a reassuring film entitled "The Chaplain and the Bomb" in the leeward countries of Nevada, Arizona and Utah. Year: 1956.
The chaplain said: "Tomorrow you will see a nuclear experiment on the front line, are you afraid?" The soldier: "A little yes, Father". "Don't have any, son. There is no danger. You will see a great flash, you will feel the heat on your face like when you take the sun at the sea, you will feel the earth shake, the wind will rise. And then you will see a mushroom of wonderful colors flying towards the heavens, towards the Lord. It will be awesome". "Yes, father, I am calm now."
In the desert I see the remains of enormous cages, like large aviaries scattered here and there. They were the cages for animals placed at various distances from "ground zero". The closest ones were pulverized. The most unfortunate, the most distant, lived a day or two. Reason Wareheim, a former Marine serving in the polygon that is 67 years old today and survived lung cancer, still remembers the heart-rending cries and howls of those beasts left to die under the desert sky. Only scorpions and cockroaches survived.
It had to be done. There was the Cold War. Stalin and Khrushchev. Budapest and Cuba. The atomic Holocaust day seemed inevitable, imminent. Experts spoke of nuclear "deterrence" between the US and the USSR to ensure peace. Perhaps millions of lives were spared. Certainly thousands of lives were consumed in silence, here in the Wild West of the Bomb covered by the dust carried by the Nevada wind that left in the mouth "a metallic taste, like licking the blade of a knife". And the radioactive fallout went all the way to New York, the secret papers say.
Martha Laird recounts: "Just before he died, my son lifted his head from the bed where everything was wrapped in a foam rubber shell, because his bones had become so fragile for the tumor that they only broke when they moved. He mumbled like a dog ... Mom I hear the wind coming ... Mom stops the wind ... I thought he was delirious. " Martha has framed the government check. He swears that he will never cash in that money brought by the Nevada wind, like the nameless death that all his children consumed.
Article by Giuliano Corà
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