[From the diaries by susanhu. Yes, we have a book club here. Inquire within. And don’t miss Kansas’s writing and her excerpts from the latest BooBooks selection here.]

What follows are excerpts from the non-fiction parts of the most recent BooBooks selection, a novel about the atom bomb. I have seldom read such powerful reminders that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that it is not possible to distrust our own government too much. When you next hear some credulous person say, “Why, people wouldn’t do that!” perhaps you can show them these reminders that “people” not only can, but they will. (The title of my diary is a nod to Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice.”)

Excerpted from Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, by Lydia Millet.

* Five percent of people killed in wars at the end of the nineteenth century were civilians.  In World War One this percentage rose to fifteen, and in World War Two it was sixty-five. This was nothing compared to the wars of the 1990’s. By that time the percentage would grow to ninety. (p. 231)

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*  It was soon after the end of the second World War that the American government began exploding atom bombs in the air. Now that the bomb existed it had to be improved and refined.

When the Soviet Union made its own bomb, a little later, it too would begin exploding the bombs in the air.  Both countries would reach thermonuclear fingers into the most remote and unsullied parts of the globe. They would look for places where they could explode their gadgets without obvious and immediate fatalities and quietly measure the gadgets’ effectiveness.  These tended to be places where only poor people lived, sparsely distributed and ill educated, unable or disinclined to speak up in their own defense.  Even if there was an outcry in such far-flung places, it would likely go unheard.  And even if by some fluke it was heard, it would not be heeded.

Such places could be found both far away and close to home.(p. 249)

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*  The atolls of the Marshall Islands, which had once been a paradise for the small number of natives who lived on  them. . .were re-christened by the American military. The new name was “Pacific Proving Grounds.”

. . .

In 1954 Shot Bravo, with a yield of fifteen megatons–about a thousand times the destructive force of Little Boy–spread lethal radiation over seven thousand square miles of the Pacific Ocean.  Fully one-hundred and twenty miles away from Ground Zero, on an atoll called Rongelap, radiation was so intense that people there doubled over to vomit.

Later, when burns were rising on their skin, the Atomic Energy Commission announced breezily to the press that “All were reported well.” (p. 256)

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*  Scientists at the Atomic Energy Commission took advantage of the testing in the Marshall Islands to study the effects of radiation on people.

In 1956, at an AEC meeting, one official admitted that Rongelap was the most contaminated place on earth. He said of the Marshall Islanders, “While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do–civilized people–it is nevertheless true that they are more like us than mice.” (p. 258)

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*  It was not until 1963 that Marshall Islanders exposed to Shot Bravo began to develop thyroid tumors. (p. 264)

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*  Before the worldwide ban on aboveground tests was imposed in 1963, one hundred and twenty-six aboveground tests were conducted in Nevada. (p. 267)

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*  One of the soldiers who witnessed Shot Hood, a seventy-four kilometer test in Nevada in 1957, told a story at the hospital where he was taken for radiation sickness.  After the test, he told his doctors, he had seen the burnt corpses not only of animals in cages but of men shackled to a chain link fence.

“I was happy, full of life before I saw that bomb,” he told a photographer years afterward, “but then I understood evil and was never the same.”

He was clinically paranoid, but other troops told the same story. (p. 268)

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*  America has always been the world’s leading designer, producer and tester of nuclear weapons, as it is the world’s leading designer of guns. Since 1945, more than two thousand nuclear tests have been conducted worldwide, of which about a thousand were conducted by the U.S. (p. 277)

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*  From the informational materials of the Nevada Test Site: “Pregnant women are discouraged from participating in Test Site tours because of the long bus ride and uneven terrain.”

The ride to the Test Site, which is not unduly rough since it travels smoothly along the interstate. . .lasts a little more than an hour each way. (p. 291)

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*  Peace Camp was a hub for civil disobedience actions while the Nevada Test Site was in full swing. (Demonstrations) involved more than thirty-seven thousand participants and resulted in nearly sixteen thousand arrests. (311)

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*  (From the fictional part of the novel): “On this site, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, said Szilard into the microphone, a program of involuntary human experimentation was carried out on the citizens of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona–in fact, even on the citizens of New York and Maine, for that is where the radioactive fallout clouds were carried by the wind.  The same people who brought you the war against Hitler and his genocide, these people treated and continue to treat the human race as their personal guinea pigs.”  (p. 319)

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* Each atmospheric test in Nevada, of which there were one hundred and twenty-six, released more radiation than Chernobyl.(p. 321)

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* That was then.  This is now. . .

Under the presidential administration of George W. Bush steps were taken to begin research and development of so-called “usable nukes.” (Other nicknames include “bunker busters” and “mini-nukes.”) These weapons, it is argued, might be employed in the battlefield to take out hardened targets.

At the same time the White House and Congress pressed to lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons in conflict. To ensure the military supremacy of the U.S., proponents of the nuclear weapons development in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories urged the U.S. to build nuclear weapons small enough not only to deter, but to use.

The construction of small nuclear weapons would therefore close the door on pure deterrence and open the door to the practical, feasible, and convenient nuclear war.
(p. 441)