While idly searching high-desert real real estate and simultaneously studying the geology of Nevada by flying around in Google Earth, i accidentally found it, because it stands out, a huge malignant zit. Surrounded by a hundreds of other sick pockmarks in the earth is the Sedan Crater, the biggest human-made crater on Earth. Yes, the government used to set off these REALLY big fireworks in the backyard when i was a kid in LA. Sonic booms, mushroom clouds. Sound of freedom, kid.
Somehow i wound up watching this splendid documentary Downwinders and the Radioactive West. One of the most brutal truths spoken by a survivor in the film, is that the Cold War was an actual atomic war. Both the USA and the USSR nuked their own citizens in the name of national defense testing.
Read that last sentence again.
There were atomic casualties of the Cold War on both sides. They nuked themselves as proxy for nuking the enemy. Nuking the enemy would start a real war that no one would win. We will detonate the bombs on our OWN land to show them how powerful we are!
I had to shut off the video and grok that.
It's true, i knew about the Downwinders and the Test Site and even the bad John Wayne movie where many people involved later died of cancer. But hadn't heard it put that way before. We fought the Cold War against our own citizens. Hundreds of nuclear bombs exploded over the years. People and livestock became sick and died in icky ways. And the government lied, told them they were full of shit, poor excuses for ranchers; just covered up the obvious and kept testing anyway. Got to show the Russians our mighty, mighty shit. And the Soviets did the same favor to their citizens. Show the evil capitalist Yanks our power!
And lots of men got rich. That is the purpose of modern warfare.
Will there ever be a monument to the unwary citizen soldiers who lost their lives to the effects of nuclear warfare in the American Southwest? Doubtful. Sedan Crater is on the National Register of Historic Places; maybe that counts.
As a child of the Cold War era, nukes were always on my mind, just like there's probably radioactive bits on my mid-century bones. I have a strange and terrible fascination with nukes to this day. (get past the boring first mathy parts, then the video gets weird) The eerie sound of air-raid sirens still makes me freeze in a fear that goes back to elementary school. Duck and cover and magically you won't vaporize like a mosquito in a blowtorch. I call bullshit, even as a kid. The grownups said shush. Plejaleejunce tathaflag.
They're out there in the desert. Glowing ghosts of good patriotic citizens bamboozled by their own government and scientists. No wonder the West is full of people who hate the government, not just Navajo Nation and the other First People whose land was taken, stripped, exploded, poisoned. Like the Marshallese people of the Pacific atolls destroyed with nuclear testing; casualties of American greed for power and control.
We all are in some way, casualties of the Cold War.
