Sarah Alisabeth Fox
328 pages, hardcover: $29.95.
University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West
constitutes an unofficial history of the atmospheric testing era
(1951-1992) — the human stories that were never part of the record.
Sarah Alisabeth Fox, a folklorist, spent eight years talking to people
from the Four Corners region of the West. Their accounts bear witness to
a series of personal tragedies: lung disease, late-term miscarriage,
children with rare leukemia. Though government-collected data found
clear links with radiation exposure, the findings were buried to
reassure citizens of the safety of nuclear development. The scientists
succeeded in splitting the atom; in turn, the downwinders’ stories split
apart the “official fictions” created to hide the consequences.
In St. George, Utah, for instance, 5-year-old
Claudia, playing on her swing set, watched a “big red ball come up over
the horizon.” Decades later, her father and sister succumbed to cancer,
her own toddler to monoblastic leukemia. Animals were affected, too: In
1953, sheep and lambs in Cedar City died en masse. Over time, these
individual tragedies morphed from possible coincidences into discernable
patterns. “As modern-day observers, our first question … is invariably…
of scope: How many bombs? How much uranium? How much sickness?” Fox
delivers a seminar in Nuclear History 101 with intelligent clarity,
drawing from “declassified federal documents, archival records,
journalistic coverage, and epidemiological studies,” and merging the
results with downwinders’ stories.
Officials condescendingly dismissed the
downwinders’ experiences, Fox notes. Regarding the sheep die-off, she
writes, “Raising sheep is not something one does on a lark while sitting
atop a horse, contemplating wide-open western spaces.” Outsiders might
have a “preconceived notion of rural ignorance,” but the ranchers
themselves rely on “a cultural system of common sense drawn from local,
experiential knowledge of forage conditions, weather patterns, plant
characteristics, diagnosis and treatment of a variety of diseases,
predator management, breeding, and lambing.”
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