The Story by Judith Miller Page B

commission’s two-pronged strategy sought to convince those near the site that the tests were safe and vital to national security. If the United States was to win the arms race against the Reds, we had to test. A March 1953 editorial in the Deseret News , the daily published by the anticommunist, progovernment Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, called the nuclear trials “tragic and insane.”However, it concluded, “so long as we live in an atomic world, we must and will continue to learn more about this power and how to survive it.” After the first test at the site two years earlier, the paper’s lead editorial, mirroring those of papers throughout America, had celebrated the dawn of the testing age: “Spectacular Atomic Explosions Mean Progress in Defense,” the editorial’s headline proclaimed. “No Cause for Panic.” 3
    Every detonation in Nevada, the AEC assured us, was being “carefully evaluated” to protect our safety. After six full years of open-air nuclear tests, the government claimed to have confirmed that fallout from the tests had “not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site.”
    America’s arsenal of thirteen weapons in 1947 had increased to fifty by the time I was born a year later. I memorized the names of the tests the way other kids learned the names of presidents. “Able,” in 1951, the first test at the Proving Ground, as the Nevada Test Site was then known, was followed twenty-four hours later by “Baker,” a more powerful, eight-kiloton device that awakened much of the city. Then came “Easy” and “Fox,” almost three times as powerful as “Baker,” the blast wave of which had shattered show windows in two Las Vegas car dealerships minutes after detonation.
    The bomb, like the radiation, was all around us—as much a part of my childhood as jacks, roller-skating, skipping rope, and, this being Vegas, strippers. A warning poster from the Clark County Civil Defense Agency was attached by magnets to our fridge door reminding us to keep a “well-balanced” supply of food on hand and a list of telephone numbers to call in an emergency. Since most Vegas homes had no basements, my parents argued for months about whether to build a bomb shelter in the backyard. My mother won. The underground, blast-proof shelter that my father purchased from a friend—“wholesale,” not “retail,” as he had boasted to my unimpressed mother—was not installed and was given to a friend.
    She did yield to my appeals to take us to J.C. Penney to see the display of some fifty mannequins two weeks before they were blown out of bed in a colonial two-story home, complete with aluminum venetian blinds, that had been built for a sixteen-kiloton test at the site. The plastic people were used to assess the impact of the blasts by the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which was subjecting US soldiers, animals, and plants toever more powerful bombs to determine blast and radiation effects. The mannequins were a major attraction for the department store chain, which proudly announced that it had donated their clothing for the test. Equally popular were the “before” and “after” photographs of the “Annie” house tests published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal , accompanied by a warning: “These mannequins could have been real people; in fact, they could have been you. Volunteer now for Civil Defense.” 4
    In 1956, ranchers who had lost sheep and other livestock sued the AEC in federal district court. The judge accepted the government’s argument that the animals’ deaths had been caused by “inadequate feeding, unfavorable winter range conditions, and infectious diseases.” The lawsuit received little publicity.
    By the late 1950s, as the novelty of atomic testing waned and alarm about safety and radiation was growing,