At the end of a long hot day underground, the uranium miners would walk along the ore car tracks and emerge from their dank tunnels into the open light. At the mine opening there was a Geiger counter that was swung over the surfacing ore cars to get a reading of how powerful their radioactive loads were. I once listened to a former miner tell how he and his friends would turn the Geiger counter on at the end of a work day and blow on it to see who could get the highest reading from his lungs. The instrument would crackle with static as each worker exhaled hard his radioactive breath. This was done for amusement. As the only survivor of the group, he shook his head in amazement and got that thousand-yard stare as he struggled to understand his own ignorance, the sad fate of his coworkers who died young of lung cancer, and his government's complicity in hiding the danger it surely knew was there. In the 1950s and '60s, he and thousands of other uranium miners, many of them poor Navajos, were expendable. The Cold War was on and we were in an arms race that required uranium quickly, too quickly for safeguards or caution. Today, among the forty-five thousand radioactive sites in the U.S. that must be cleaned up, there are over 1,140 uranium mining sites in Utah. There is no count for dead miners.

Nuclear

The uranium ended up in bombs like those tested over the Nevada desert. Those that ran the tests waited until the wind blew towards Utah. Utah was sparsely populated with Mormons who, in the 1950s, were still a small and unpopular minority; official documents from that time describe them as a "low use segment of the population."

Mormons, in turn, were well aware of their status and the problems of their polygamist past. With their backs against the desert wall, they had built a proud society and culture that could endure hardship; they were now eager for acceptance and willing to sacrifice for inclusion. Those bafþed by the passivity of Utahns and their political leaders to the onslaught of military experimentation and abuse in years to come, must start with the formula that the military learned to use over and over to their advantage: poor plus obedient plus numb plus eager to belong. And across the globe, you find communities plagued by the contamination from military and industrial activities, and in each case you also find that powerlessness is a key to the equation of contamination.

My friend Abel was a small boy then on his grandfather's sheep ranch. He remembers sitting on the roof of his family's house with his brothers and sisters, waiting with the kind of anticipation children feel when sitting on a curb and waiting for a Fourth of July parade. Only they were not waiting for a marching band, fire trucks, or sequined girls with batons -- they were waiting for the blinding þash of a distant atomic detonation, followed minutes later by a wall of hot air. It would þatten their shirts against their chests, sweep their hair back, bend the trees in the back yard, and send clouds of dust swirling. Sometimes a blizzard of hot ashes would fall later and the children would run, shout, and twirl in the summer storm of atomic debris.

As my friend and his siblings yelled and leaped through the radioactive dust and ashes, soldiers who had crouched in trenches near the blast climbed from their hiding places and marched slowly towards the bruise-colored mushroom cloud in front of them. With their naked eyes, they had just studied the x-rayed bones in their hands at the moment of destruction. It was the whitest light they had ever seen. Soon, the soles of their boots would melt under the crunching surface of hot sand that was melted into globs of glass by the inferno. They marched right into "ground zero." They were young, most of them, and their lives would be short.

Abel also remembers when the family car was stopped on the way into town by government scientists, covered from head to toe in protective suits, like spacemen. They waved their instruments over the car tires and took notes. His father leaned out his car window and asked if all was well. No problem, the scientists told him while keeping their gas masks tight, drive on.

That spring most of the sheep that were gathered into the shed had raw patches between their wool or odd-looking bleached spots. Some had blisters around their mouths. Many aborted their fetuses and the fetuses looked like exhibits in a carnival freak show -- two heads, no heads, two tails, extra legs, misshapen and hideous forms that resembled no earthly creature. Lambs that were almost as freakish followed. Some had hearts that beat outside of their chests.

This same story, with different circumstances but the same elements of fear, arrogance, trust, ignorance, and betrayal, can be told in Hanford, Rocky Flats, Kazakhstan, or at the Nevada Test Site where more than two hundred even bigger underground nuclear blasts were conducted in the years after above-ground testing was banned. And lately the circle of exposure has been broadened as the secret documents continue to be discovered, released, or leaked. It wasn't just in southern Utah that unsuspecting innocents were dosed. Clouds of radiation drifted in the wind and fell hundreds of miles away. Every community east of the prevailing winds was a player in an atmospheric game of radioactive roulette.

Chemical

Farther north in Utah, at the Dugway Proving Grounds, the sons of poor farmers ran to their places on a grid laid out along the sagebrush by military scientists. Shirtless under the hot desert sun, the men were told to stand still and wait to be bitten by mosquitoes released by the scientists. The bites would be recorded and then injections given.

The mosquitoes were carrying encephalitis. Memories of the Great Depression were powerful and the men were thankful they had secure employment with the government. Hazard work such as this paid an extra six cents an hour. They were sure the shots the docs gave them would work and they were proud to be part of something so much bigger than they were. It appealed to their homegrown patriotism.

Others workers were setting out cages of rabbits in the salt þats. When the animals were set, shells containing nerve agent were fired into the grid where they burst. Cameras whirred as the rabbits' eyes watered. Seconds later they would twitch violently and then go rigid as the nerve agent paralyzed their muscles so they could not take a breath.

Rabbits died weekly at Dugway from 1959 to 1969. Eventually the tests became more varied as guinea pigs, dogs, horses, cows, monkeys, and even antelope were added to the mix of demonstration targets. After each show civilian employees walked into the target areas, still contaminated with gas, and collected the bodies and transported them to the base lab. They wore no protective clothing. A few had gas masks because they broke into a locked supply room and stole them. Those who were too afraid to steal went into the site with bare lungs.

Although the brains of our chemical warfare program remained for the most part in Fort Detrick, Maryland, Dugway was where the action was. An expanse of Great Basin high desert the size of Rhode Island, Dugway's sage þats, salt þats, and stony rolling hills were ideal for experimenting with munitions filled with nerve agent. In the wake of the big war, a staff was recruited and planted in the isolated dry zone that had been designated for sacrifice.

The biggest challenge in using chemical weapons is controlling the kill zone. Chemical munitions were originally designed as strategic weapons. Say your enemy is racing your troops towards an important junction or strategic position and they get ahead of you. You fire your chemical munitions into the junction to make your enemy wait for the gas to disperse so you can catch up. Of course, that's not the way it worked in World War I. Fired at close range to kill troops, mustard gas sometimes blew back on the army using it or drifted out of the target area, killing adjacent allied soldiers. Nerve agent, the army realized, would be even harder to control and every kind of ammunition they had packed with it would disperse it differently. Between 1951 and 1969 there were 1,635 field trials.

More than fifty-five thousand chemical rockets, artillery shells, bombs, and land mines were blown up to understand how they could be used. Airplanes þew over test grids and sprayed nerve agent to see how it was dispersed in various weather conditions and at various heights. All totaled, a half million pounds of nerve agent was released into the open wind. That's the equivalent of 3.5 trillion lethal doses.

Of course, targets were often missed. On September 13, 1962, for example, the army test-dropped 2,800 pounds of VX agent, but only four percent reached the target grid. And sometimes the ammunition didn't explode. When it could be found, Dugway workers dug it up. Imagine, one of them told me, digging in the mud for an unexploded rocket filled with nerve gas. It's very quiet, he said, because everyone is listening for the sound of that first shovel hitting metal. They couldn't find it all, and today a Department of the Interior study shows about 1,400 square miles of public land in Utah is covered with unexploded ordinance, some of it containing nerve agent and germs.

The weather on March 13, 1968 was not optimal for testing -- there were ominous thunderheads building and shifting winds. But VIPs were visiting and the Dugway crew was eager to show off. A Phantom fighter jet loaded with more than a ton of nerve agent in a spray tank closed in on its target and expelled its load. About twenty pounds of the VX agent the plane was carrying was inadvertently sprayed well beyond the target zone. It ended up in Skull Valley, almost thirty miles away. At first, birds and rabbits died. Sheep followed. Over the next two days, sixty-four hundred would perish. One by one, they sickened, dropped, shuddered, and expired. Soldiers collected the carcasses and buried them.

The sheep kill got national attention, and soon after, Preisdent Nixon banned open-air testing of nerve gas. But the army never took responsibility for the sheep, and they certainly never took responsibility for Ray Peck. Peck and his family were living and working on a rented ranch in Skull Valley then. Ray was clearing a ditch with a tractor between two sheep herds that died. He remembers the following morning as being crisp and clear. There was nothing atypical about it except for some dead birds on the ground and a rabbit dying in the distance he noticed on his way to do his chores. The helicopter that later landed in his backyard, however, was unusual. It carried army officials who wanted to collect the dead wildlife and conduct blood tests on him and his frightened family. The other Skull Valley ranch families, sheepherders, and Goshute Indians who could be located were also rounded up and tested.

The tests measured levels of cholenesterase, an enzyme needed for nerves to send messages. The army scientists assured the Peck family and the others that they showed normal results, though the results were inconclusive. They had no cholenesterase baseline for the family or its community and no follow up was done. In fact, the army did less testing on the human beings in that valley than on the sheep. The local people, the military had learned, were reluctant to bite the hand that fed them. Everyone in the valley had a neighbor or relative employed at Dugway. Even independent ranchers might work part-time there. It could be safely assumed the locals would give up and fade away. And they did.

Twenty-five years later, however, Deseret News reporter Lee Davidson located Ray Peck. Peck told Davidson that in the days after the sheep kill his entire family came down with diarrhea and had earaches and trouble breathing. Army doctors told them they had the þu. From 1968 on, the Peck family suffered violent and debilitating headaches. Ray had strange numbness and burning sensations in his leg. Worse, he had bouts of paranoia and became so terrified of making a mistake at work that he would become immobilized. He lost two jobs that way. Although there was no family history of reproductive problems before that spring day, afterwards Peck's wife had two stillbirths and their daughters had several miscarriages.

The story of the Peck family suggests that even minuscule exposure to nerve agent can be damaging, but it is what army lawyers, their contractors, and state regulators call "anecdotal" evidence. It doesn't count. Because the authorities did not follow up, there is no data. No data, no deal. Ray Peck and company are on their own. As Ray discovered, if you are going to be a victim of military testing, your chances of getting justice are best if there are lots of other victims you can contact and organize. If you are alone or in small numbers, or if a lot of time has passed and your fellow victims have moved away, the responsible powers will roll right over you.

Biological

Probably the first recorded instance of germ warfare took place in 1346 when Tartar warriors catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls of the besieged city of Kaffa to infect their enemies within it. But what if you used a jet plane with an aerosol mixture of germs? What about explosive munitions? Would the germs survive the blast?

At least 328 open air experiments were conducted at Dugway to find out. Anthrax, Q fever, parrot fever, rabbit fever, undulant fever, valley fever, and other pathogens were used. Here they encountered the same problem as they had with nerve gas: how do you control it? During some of those tests the wind was blowing hard -- thirty to sixty miles per hour. In such cases, it was hard to land the germs on the test grid. Sometimes, no germs at all could be found on the test grids. As one test report stated, anthrax spores could not be found on four of the test plots "due in part to a heavy windstorm that cut into these plots and blew away surface soil and organisms."

Landing germs on targets was also problematic when height and speed were factors. In a test in 1958, forty gallons of a Q fever slurry was sprayed from an f-100a jet traveling just under the speed of sound. A single organism of Q fever can initiate a deadly infection and billions of organisms can be present in a mere drop of slurry. The army told the public there was no evidence that significant amounts of the germs they used ever migrated off base. But one report shows that although no Q fever was detected in local wildlife before it was introduced through Dugway, it had reached epidemic proportions in wildlife by 1960. Other internal documents indicated a concern by army officials that the deadly and disfiguring anthrax spores they were using were showing up by Route 40 (now Interstate 80).

By the 1980s, Dugway wanted a "bl-4 lab" for experimenting with anthrax, bubonic plague, botulism, and deadly new strains of viruses that had their DNA tweaked for maximum lethality and resistance to known cures. To their surprise and chagrin, the people of Utah did not roll over as expected. By then, Preston Truman, a tenacious survivor of atomic testing from Hurricane, Utah, who had founded Downwinders Inc., had a hard-earned distrust of military assurances. Truman grew up with kids who were dying of leukemia and had buried his mother when she died of cancer. Truman and his right-hand man and consummate activist, Steve Erickson, were organizing other survivors to get compensation from the U.S. government. When Dugway's plans for a death lab surfaced, they turned their attention hard on the new threat to public health and safety. The Utah Medical Association, local ranchers, and college students were enlisted to oppose the lab. The inability of Utah's medical facilities to handle an outbreak was underlined. The lab was stalled again and again. Every time it was beaten back, military planners would rally, readjust the lab's mission, and march their disguised death lab down the corridors of power yet again.

By 1998, the Pentagon finally found a costume that could get its monster through the door, and the new lab was finally built, though well below Dugway's expectations. The drumbeat for increased testing at Dugway has become louder as we are warned of the dangers of biological weapons in the hands of terrorists or Saddam Hussein. There is a proposal to build a full-scale town at Dugway that could be used for chemical and germ warfare training. The military wants better protective gear, detectors, and vaccines. This would all be "defensive," of course. But even those in the military who want bigger chemical and biological warfare budgets cannot say where the line between offense and defense is drawn.

So far, the only American casualties of biological and chemical warfare have been citizens harmed by the very military sworn to defend them, and Gulf War troops who put themselves in harm's way when they blew up Saddam's stash.

Even when workers were not voluntarily exposed, the exposure of Dugway workers seemed to be inevitable. Aside from working in an environment where nerve gas, pathogens, and radiation were always drifting about or contaminating the dust that blew in their faces and the ground they walked on, workers were constantly handling contaminated equipment. Protective clothing and ways to decontaminate equipment were tested. Workers collected the contaminated gear and washed down contaminated equipment with solutions that were themselves carcinogenic. Most accepted that exposure was part of the job and counted on the shots to protect them.

Today, many of Dugway's former employees are ill. Too many, says Bev White. She has a list of three hundred men who worked there who are now suffering cancer, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and strange debilitating symptoms. A survey done in 1995 of 177 former workers showed 55 had cancer, 52 had heart disease, and 18 -- ten percent -- had multiple sclerosis. Gerald Vowles, who supervised testing at Dugway, is confined to a wheelchair because of M.S. He suspects his illness is work-related because he knows he was exposed at least ten times to biological or chemical warfare agents. He got lots of experimental shots, too. Some were the same shots Gulf War vets suspect may have made them ill upon their return.

Most of the members of the Dugway League, organized by White to ask for compensation to help defray steep medical costs, cannot get their medical records. Some records were not kept, others were lost, and some destroyed when a warehouse in St. Louis burned. Vowles got his records, but the years 1955 to 1972 are missing. Another worker discovered that his records disappeared from his private doctor's office. White, a former state legislator, is appalled at how requests for medical records are met with excuses, denial, and obfuscation. Most of the men she has tried to help have been ill and ailing since they were in their thirties and forties. They are not, she insists, merely suffering the ravages of old age. They are proud individuals who are not inclined to complain. They trusted their government and now their government has abandoned them, ignoring their clear need for help and waiting, she fears, for them either to grow too weak to pursue their grievances or just to die off. The army has refused to do a follow-up study on the health of these men. Like the uranium miners, the atomic soldiers, and the downwinders, they are the unacknowledged casualties of the Cold War battles conducted in the deserts of the West.

Today thousands of bombs, rockets, shells, land mines, and half-ton containers are scattered across the desert landscape. While attention has focused on the chemical munitions stored in hundreds of reinforced bunkers in eight stockpiles from one end of the country to the other and how to get rid of them, these "non-stockpile" munitions must also be treated. The expense cannot be realistically calculated at this time, but it will be astronomical.


Skull Valley is quiet now. As in 1968, only a handful of ranches hang on now, most owned by distant corporations that need tax write-offs and run by hired hands. A small hand of Goshute Indians live on a reservation in the middle of the valley. Eastern and Midwestern utilities have offered to make each member a millionaire if they will agree to park spent nuclear fuel rods on their land. The band's leadership has decided to take the money and run. After watching from afar for so long, they now have a chance to win big in the great American economic sweepstakes. Some, however, have no price. Margene Bullcreek is leading a small group of "traditionals" who do not want their ancestral ground contaminated with civilization's most poisonous waste. "Mother Earth is not for sale," she declares.

In the 1980s Tooele County commissioners created a huge hazardous waste zone in the West Desert, just beyond Skull Valley and the reaches of the Dugway Proving Grounds. Today, two commercial hazardous waste incinerators, a hazardous waste landfill, and a radioactive materials landfill sit in that zone and generate handsome revenues. They form a kind of complementary infrastructure. But there is no need to get conspiratorial to explain the presence of so many highly toxic enterprises on the desert þoor. We have always used deserts that way. At the time of the first atomic testing, an armed forces magazine described the high desert plains of Nevada and Utah as "a damn good place to dump used razor blades."

That attitude still prevails. More than a dozen proposals to expand military training ranges in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are alive and well. Although each proposed expansion is pursued separately, they add up to one big Western American training range, an empire of millions of acres of bombing ranges, electronic target zones, airfields, radar facilities, and restricted air space. Groups like the Rural Alliance for Military Accountability, directed by Grace Potori, struggle to expose the deals and impacts, but it is an uphill battle. State and local political leaders almost always support home-state military bases because they provide jobs and economic activity that are especially hard to come by in rural desert areas.

Deserts are the carpet civilization sweeps its trash under. The military testing and bombing ranges were just a door opener. The military's desert kingdom set the pattern for the corporate colonizers who followed. Given our profound alienation from the West's less colorful and appealing deserts, it was a pattern that was easy to anticipate. The logical jump for a culture that is willing to load redrock canyons with cows and conduct a predator holocaust to killing antelope with nerve gas is an easy one to make. By the time we got around to incinerating hazardous waste and chemical weapons in the desert air shed, the pattern was more like a well-worn groove. Parking spent fuel rods that will be radioactive for ten thousand years on the desert þoor is just the next step.

Although it is already hard to remember, we once thought of the oceans that way. The first program to get rid of aging chemical weapons was labeled CHASE (an acronym for "cut holes and sink 'em"). The munitions filled with mustard and nerve gas were loaded onto old navy ships that were towed out to sea. Once they were far from land, holes were cut in the sides of the ships and they sunk with their toxic cargoes to the ocean þoor. Today we shake our heads in wonder that we could have ever been so ignorant and reckless. We understand that we cannot poison the oceans without risking grievous harm to our own landlocked well-being. We have not learned that lesson when it comes to our deserts. We act as if they are exempt from the dynamics of nature. As if the wind does not blow across their surfaces, carrying dust and churning what we have buried there. As if waters do not þow underneath them. As if what is out of sight does not exist. As if the collective decisions we make about what we allow into our air, water, and soil, even in deserts, are not eventually translated into someone's þesh and blood and daily experience.

Deserts are hard to defend because their local populations are often small, scattered, and desperate for economic advantage. They are no match for big government and its corporate allies with clever lawyers, fat public relations budgets, and professional lobbyists. Because the terms and criteria of our public debates over how land is used are "practical" or utilitarian, it is hard to protect ground that offers no obvious other economic benefit. Because politicians, policy makers, and the public are not ecologically literate, the connections between what happens in the "barren wastelands" and what shows up in the blood and cells of those who live downwind are also hard to convey.

Those of us who love deserts appreciate their spare qualities. Deserts are where the rhythms and patterns of nature are written on open landscapes beneath open skies. The desert is a canvas where wind, water, geological powers and the biosphere paint overlaying patinas that reveal the close interplay and relation of one to the other.

The history of the Cold War is also written into the sand and soil, but it is harder to read. You need sophisticated instruments to read the persistent fallout that can still be detected and measured in the attic dust of our homes. Although signs and fences mark the no man's land where biological warfare tests were done, it takes a lab to find the tiny spores of anthrax mixed into the soil. There is no measure for the fear, mistrust, and hatred that put them there.

Ultimately, it is our fate we are describing on the desert landscape. Cowboys in gas masks have dumped too many used razor blades in my backyard. The time has come to write new patterns there. It is time to heal the wounded and clear the air. *


Excerpted from Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, by Chip Ward (Verso Books, 2000).

A mild-mannered librarian by day, Chip Ward has cofounded West Desert HEAL, Families Against Incinerator Risk, and the Citizens Against Chlorine Contamination, and is a national spokesperson for the Chemical Weapons Working Group, an umbrella organization for grassroots groups opposing chemical weapons incineration. He lives in Grantsville, Utah.

For more information, visit the Downwinders at http://www.downwinders.org
 

This essay was published in the Winter 2000 issue of Orion.