Radiation workers in
Ottawa, Ill., “downwinders” in Utah, unsuspecting veterans of the
Gulf War – these are among the populations profiled in
Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader. In the words
of editor John Bradley, the anthology offers a glimpse into stories
that “have been largely ignored, dismissed or
suppressed.”
Certain sections will be familiar to
readers who have followed nuclear history over the years: an
excerpt from Paradise of Bombs by Scott Russell
Sanders that offers a chilling account of growing up in the shadow
of the Ohio Arsenal; “The Clan of the One-Breasted Women” in which
Terry Tempest Williams remembers watching, in that hour before
dawn, a golden-stemmed cloud vibrating in the sky. The ash rained
down on her family’s car. And later, her mother – one of Utah’s
“downwinders” – died, causing Williams to question the Mormon faith
in which she’d been raised. “Blind obedience in the name of
patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives,” she
writes.
Blind obedience is also at the heart of
Mary Laufer’s essay, an account of what it’s like to be married to
a man who worked on a Navy submarine that had first-strike
capability. “I told myself that he didn’t work directly with the
weapons, so if they were launched in a war, he was blameless,”
Laufer writes. But that logic didn’t hold indefinitely, and Laufer
began to become troubled by her secondhand immersion in a nuclear
lifestyle. “What bothered me most,” she writes with candor of her
husband, “was that it didn’t seem to bother
him.”
Taken together, these stories bring to
horrific light this nation’s invisible nuclear history * a history
that is, sadly, all over the
map.
Learning to Glow: A Nuclear
Reader, edited by John Bradley, University of Arizona
Press, 2000. Paperback: $22.95. 330 pages.
Copyright © 2001 HCN and Marilyn
Abildskov
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Critical mass.
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