The Empire has always considered its own citizens & subjects expendable -- perhaps more expendable than its enemies sometimes. For instance, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US government has never actually consigned its enemies to radioactive deaths (though it has threatened to do so repeatedly); citizens and subjects of the Empire, in contrast, have suffered gravely from America's secret nuclear war:
***** American Ground Zero by Carole Gallagher The MIT Press, 1993 464 pages; $50.00
Iris Poliski
Carole Gallagher is a professional photographer whose work includes photographs of people downwind from the nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. American Ground Zero is a collection of startling photographs of the people in the western United States who were affected by the radioactive fallout from atomic blasts at the Nevada test site from 1951 to 1963.
Six states -- Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and New Mexico -- were most directly downwind from the nuclear tests. The greatest concentration of deadly dust fell on Utah, where people, animals, and land suffered the most. The experiences relayed by the people who Gallagher photographed testify to the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) disregard for the lives of U.S. citizens and for the consequences of its actions. It is a population with high levels of cancer, leukemia, and other types of radiation sickness and mutation.
In a declassified "top secret" memo, the AEC described the "downwinders" as "a low-use segment of the population." The agency characterized the enormous areas of the southwest that lay in the fallout path as "virtually uninhabited" -- dismissing farms and American Indian communities alike. The Energy Department, inheritor of much of the AEC's nuclear responsibility, still seems uninterested in compensating surviving victims, some of whom are military veterans and test site workers.
Utah's population is primarily Mormon. Gallagher believes that the Mormon culture made many of the people who speak from the pages of American Ground Zero perfect victims. Brought up to believe that they, their church, and their government were specially created by a higher power, they could not -- and in some cases, would not -- believe that their government could possibly have been party to such bad things.
Their own bishops, legislators, and sometimes their doctors denied any link between their mysterious diseases and deaths and the radioactive fallout that covered animals, crops, homes, food, and skin. There were a few whistleblowers; the AEC threatened them with jail, the church with excommunication. The Mormon hierarchy remains officially silent on the testing issue.
Echoes of "believe-what-we're-told" attitudes are not lost on Gallagher, who asks whether we have mutated into a "numbed nation of 'good Germans,' unwilling to see." Energy and Defense Department personnel should be required to read American Ground Zero aloud to their families.
Iris Poliski is the senior editor of the Bulletin.
<http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1993/j93/j93reviews.html> *****
Trust the power elite at your own risk. -- Yoshie
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