History 4120    Spring 2004    MacKay

Week 14 The West as Dumping Ground   

reading: read from some of the following sites--

academic journal topic: Consider the implications of the West being distinctive as a region for "dumping."

take a journey through nuclear sites in the West: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/experience/the.bomb/route/

(image is from Bravo20: http://www.breweryarts.org/Bravo20/bravo01.htm

The American West has long been seen, at least by the powers in Washington, as a dusty outback that is just right for testing nuclear weapons and dumping toxic wastes of various kinds. That outback is the domain of Indians, who view it differently, as sacred geography.

From 1951 to 1963, the U.S. government conducted atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada without regard to the effect of radioactive fallout on humans, livestock and the environment. In the late 1950s, birth defects and deaths from cancer began to soar among civilian and military test-site workers and their newborn children, and among "downwinders" living in Nevada, Utah and other western states.

Additional Information

2000 article on the Goshute proposal for nuclear waster dump site, with links: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Goshute-Tribe-Nuc-Waste.htm

Articles about the Nuclear West from High Country News: http://www.hcn.org/archivesbycategory.jsp?category=Nuclear

Links updated from West Web:

• The Los Alamos Historical Museum has both artifacts of Anasazi settlement of the area and of the Atomics industry which Los Alamos Labs spawned.
• The U.S. Department of Energy's Richland Operations Office encompasses the Hanford Site.
  The Los Alamos National Laboratory welcome page, Los Alamos National Laboratory History page,  and the LANL Research Library of Nuclear Information pages are all run by the U.S. government.
• Seattle Times science reporter Bill Dietrich and photographer Alan Berner detail the history, impacts and future of atomic weapons and nuclear power at the Seattle Times Trinity Web.
• An "Unofficial Trinity Site" page deals with the Trinity Site's history.
• A UFO/paranormal site yields a lot of information about the Nevada Test Site; the N.T.S. adjoins the famous "Area 51."

From the American Studies Web: http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/cafe.htm

• 50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons

• U.S. Military Spending: 1946-1996

• U.S. Military Spending: 2002

from Paul Starr's Images of the American West: http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/GeoImages/Starrs/starrsone.html

from  Downwinder's : http://www.downwinders.org/