The Story by Judith Miller Page A

reported were connected to the blast, the commissioners told us. Even the radioactive “snow” found as far away as Rhode Island did not stir much debate.
    I remember Harry—or “Dirty Harry,” as the test was eventually called. Trudy Siebenlist, our nanny, had set my alarm for a quarter to five in the morning to ensure that I wouldn’t miss the historic event. It was pitch-black when I crept out of the bedroom. I slipped out the front door of the ranch house we had recently bought near the Las Vegas Strip.
    I sat with our cat on our crabgrass and cactus lawn, waiting. At exactly five o’clock, night became day. Was I dreaming? Did I really see or just imagine the flash that lit up the skies? It wasn’t the familiar yellow, pink, and lavender of a Nevada dawn. In my childhood memory, it was ripe red—beautiful, and irresistibly terrifying. Brighter than a thousand suns, as nuclear historian Robert Jungk wrote later.
    The flash was followed by stillness, a slight smell of iron in the air, and a metallic taste on my tongue; the sensation you get from licking a spoon after the ice cream is gone. TV broadcasters said the test was visible as far away as Idaho.
    I was only six and in first grade, but I sensed that the bomb was special. I knew that being so close to something so dangerous made us different: I was living next to what American officials told us was a major “battlefield” of the Cold War on the “frontier of freedom.”
    There was a debate in Las Vegas about whether it was wise to test nuclear bombs in the atmosphere so close to a major population center. But skeptics were drowned out by the media and our town fathers, my own among them. Nuclear testing was our patriotic duty, insisted Hank Greenspun, the influential publisher of the Las Vegas Morning Sun. His closenessto the AEC and Pentagon officials and access to “inside” information had influenced my father and other Vegas entrepreneurs about the need to continue testing on American soil to “maintain our lead” over the “Reds.” Atoms, Greenspun said, were as “American as apple pie.” 2
    People concerned about the safety of testing were unpatriotic and undermining the city’s economy, Greenspun argued in his influential column, Where I Stand, which was required reading in our household. Las Vegas depended on tourists. The testing was one of the city’s “natural” attractions. President Truman’s designation of Las Vegas as an area “critical to national defense” made it eligible for federal funds for housing and infrastructure that were paying for its phenomenal growth. Frivolous accounts and rumors spread by a few “sensation-seeking reporters” threatened not only America’s national security but also the city’s welfare. When the AEC issued a press release attributing the death of sheep in Utah to “unprecedented cold weather,” Greenspun warned that “panic can spread where no danger exists.”
    My mother said nothing, but was not persuaded. Occasionally she would confront my father about her fears. I listened to what became a familiar refrain behind their bedroom door: Vegas was no place to be raising children. The Mob, drinking and gambling, drugs and whores were bad enough, but now her children were exposed to radiation. She missed New York. She hated the sun and the sandstorms, the dry air, the cactus. She had found a dead rattlesnake in the garage. Could radiation have killed it? Had my father heard about the blue goats? Or the dog that had melted? Couldn’t we move, as we did eventually, to Los Angeles?
    The AEC’s public relations campaign aimed at making Nevadans “feel at home with neutrons trotting around” and to encourage “local pride in being in the limelight,” according to now declassified government memos written shortly before the tests began, was effective. The