Mercury -- The 65-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 95 from Las Vegas to the town of Mercury, Nevada, has been called "the loneliest road in the world." It traverses a desert, where clumps of sagebrush and spiny Joshua trees poke sporadically through the dusty gravel. Legend has it that Mormons on a hot, arduous journey from Salt Lake City to the West Coast saw the trees and imagined the biblical figure Joshua with his arms outstretched in prayer to God.
Highway 95, until it was rebuilt in 1965, was also known as "the widowmaker." The frantic pace of traffic on the desolate two-lane road and the fatigue of workers returning home from Mercury after long hours of strenuous labor were a deadly combination. The culprit in their deaths, ultimately, was "atomic fever," the Cold War illness that propelled the race for bigger and deadlier bombs.
Mercury is a one-of-a-kind town. It has a sheriff's office, a narrow bowling alley, and a small Quonset-hut theater -- but no families, no children, no pets. Only persons wearing badges with proper security clearance are admitted across the cattle guard, over a white line, and beyond the front gate. Eighty to a hundred buses arrive each day, bringing workers from Las Vegas.
"A planet is a terrible thing to waste. Conserve," proclaims a sign just inside the gate. Here, it seems ironic. Here, by design and intent, a patch of the planet is being turned into a wasteland.
A Legacy of Protest -- "The notion of coming to the desert at Lent was very gripping," says Anne Symens-Bucher of Oakland, California, referring to her first visit to the desert in 1982. Two down jackets weren't enough to protect her from the frigid desert winds at dawn that snowy Ash Wednesday.
During that first Lenten experience at the edge of the Nevada Test Site, there were still rock paths leading to Camp Desert Rock, and stakes and bits of rope left on the desert ground from an earlier era. It was here that young soldiers kept camp and were marched onto the test site, to be intentionally exposed to above-ground nuclear tests during the 1950s.
"It was very scary to be aware of the radiation," Symens-Bucher says. "I said to myself, 'I'm here, breathing this air, walking on the same earth they walked.' " She adds, "It was a life-changing experience."
On Good Friday that year, Symens-Bucher and 18 others prepared to cross over onto the test site to protest the continuing testing of nuclear weapons. She was just finishing college, and, expecting to spend at least six months in jail, had brought a backpack full of books with the intent of writing three term papers behind bars. Mike Affleck, who along with Daniel Ellsberg was among the 19 who crossed the line, remembers Ellsberg saying that he expected to get more time in jail for this action than he did for releasing the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
The sheriff's deputies, under the direction of Capt. Jim Merlino, treated the protesters gently. In a Beatty, Nevada courthouse, Judge Bill Sullivan refused to put them in jail, stating, "I basically agree with you," according to Symens-Bucher.
These people of peace were following footsteps through the desert that had been laid down 25 years before. On August 6, 1957, the 12th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, a number of protesters including A.J. Muste, Ammon Hennacy, and Larry Scott made a witness there. According to Franciscan Sister Rosemary Lynch, these early protesters camped in tents by the test site and "during an above-ground test walked toward the mushroom cloud with Bibles in their hands."
Twenty years later to the day, Lynch went to the test site with a small group to protest development of the neutron bomb. "We got up very, very early in the morning, went right up to the test site, and posted ourselves on some folding chairs," she says.
The witness was highlighted by the visit of Japanese hibakusha, survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings. One elderly woman, who earlier had been surrounded by children whom she was teaching to make folded-paper peace cranes, brought a book of drawings, memories of the bombings, that she wanted to present to test site officials. A guard refused to accept it or shake her extended hand, which was covered with cheloid scars from radiation, until the crowd gently began chanting, "Take her hand, take her hand."
Franciscan priest Louie Vitale -- who in the mid-1950s had served in the U.S. Air Force's Air Defense Command and "realized then the awesomeness of the damage [nuclear weapons] could do, and the secrecy and lying" that surrounded them -- was also part of that witness. He says of nuclear testing, "The government found that when they did the most objectionable things in remote places, no one paid any attention." But people are paying attention now, as the persistent courage of a group of people of faith has exposed the truth of the Nevada Test Site.
Ground Zero -- The road into the heart of the test site winds out beyond Mercury, past another gate. During a nuclear weapons test, no one except essential personnel at a "control point" are allowed beyond this gate in what is termed the "forward area." Karen Randolph, a public affairs officer with the Department of Energy (DOE), says all tests "are planned in case of catastrophic failure of the test." The precaution is meant to be reassuring, but it serves as a chilling reminder of the power that is being unleashed here.
The test site was created in December 1950 during the administration of President Harry Truman. During the late 1940s, following World War II, most U.S. nuclear tests were performed above-ground in the Pacific Islands. But during the Korean War, according to DOE's Chris L. West, director of external affairs, considerations of security and logistical ease had officials looking for a test area within the United States. This 1,350-square-mile area of the Nevada desert (a little larger than the state of Rhode Island) was chosen.
The first test at the Nevada Test Site, a one-kiloton bomb dropped from an Air Force plane, took place on January 27, 1951. It was dropped over Frenchman Flat, a dry lakebed that had been chosen as ideal for above-ground testing, according to a DOE handbook, because it provided the best views for observing and photographing detonations and fireballs.
The wooden bleachers still remain on an embankment across from Frenchman Flat, where invited dignitaries who had been issued protective glasses applauded the power and beauty of the colorful mushroom clouds that rocketed into the sky in the 1950s. Nearby is News Knob, an unusual rise of rock where the likes of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow scrambled with other young reporters to get the best view, according to Karen Randolph.
Frenchman Flat itself could be described as one of the eeriest places on earth. It is littered with relics of the above-ground nuclear tests of the '50s. A black, metal stairway left in the desert leads to nowhere. Domes and bunkers of various sizes and shapes are scattered over the landscape, constructed with concrete of varying thicknesses to test the effects of nuclear blast. "Aluminum domes" mentioned on the test site map are nothing more than scraps of twisted metal.
The entrance to an underground parking garage, carved out of the desert to test the effect of a nuclear blast on cars, remains. A bank vault stands alone, its concrete facade blown away by a blast -- but the money and documents inside remained safe. A 37-kiloton bomb called Priscilla, dropped from a balloon on June 24, 1957, blasted away buildings and curved the girders of a bridge, now rusting on Frenchman Flat.
Ropes encircle seemingly nondescript patches of desert, some very large in area. Yellow signs strung along the ropes warn, "Caution. Radioactive Contamination Area." These areas are "closer to ground zero," explains Randolph. Far in the distance, beyond the ropes, a ship's mast juts weirdly out of the desert floor.
A dirt road in another part of the test site leads to "Survival Town." A decaying brick house is all that remains of this town described in the DOE handbook with ironic precision as a "boom town" in the spring of 1955. Cars, school buses, food supplies, a power system, and firefighting equipment were all brought in to create the town, which on May 5, 1955, went up in the blast of a 29-kiloton bomb from a 500-foot tower 6,600 feet away.
For those who remember the family of mannequins blown away from the supper table in the civil defense films of the late '50s and early '60s, this was their home. And the perhaps equally chilling memory of a vast stand of trees being blasted over like matchsticks originated here as well. The trees were "brought in and anchored down, probably with concrete," according to Randolph, to test the effects of a nuclear explosion on forests.
Randolph believes that the Cold War thaw has not changed the nation's need for a policy of nuclear deterrence. "Once the power of nuclear is there, it's a matter of who controls it," she says. "Do we have confidence in ourselves, or in other powers?
"Nobody has a right to hurt anybody else," she continues, "but given our imperfections as human beings, we are as a people going to continue to hurt others. It is important to minimize that, to keep it under control. This capability does deter us -- and deter others -- from vast harm."
Randolph is confident that the United States will never use nuclear weapons in a first strike, "because we, better than anybody else," she says, "understand its power."
The lone brick house standing in the desert wasteland brings to mind pictures of the cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan, standing alone among the rubble after the United States dropped its second atomic bomb on that nation, on August 9, 1945. Perhaps the Japanese would take issue with Karen Randolph's last statement.
A Growing Witness -- Beginning with the first Lenten Desert Experience in 1982, the protest at the test site had a distinctly Franciscan flavor to it, with a deep grounding in nonviolence and belief in the sacredness of the earth and all creation. St. Francis of Assisi turned 800 that year, and Franciscans all over the globe had been discerning how to commemorate the event.
Mike Affleck, at the time a student at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, was prompted by a visit from Jesuit peacemaker Daniel Berrigan to ask for a small stipend from the Franciscans and organize the first Lenten Desert Experience (LDE). Everyone involved thought of the 1982 witness as a one-time event.
But LDE evolved and grew. When Louie Vitale was named Franciscan provincial of the Santa Barbara province, much of the organizing shifted to Oakland, California, and Anne Symens-Bucher was hired as a full-time organizer.
During Lent of 1984, according to Symens-Bucher, the organizers invited Jim Wallis of Sojourners to the test site to help give the campaign a national profile and bring other faith-based peace and justice organizations on board. Wallis, Vitale, Symens-Bucher, and LDE staff member Duncan MacMurdy were given a tour of the test site by the DOE, the conclusion of which has reached the annals of LDE legend.
After the tour, including at their request a stop to pray at a test crater, the four felt compelled to return to Camp Desert Rock, where they were arrested and charged with trespass. In the sheriff's car on the way to the Beatty jail, while the deputy was trying desperately to read them their rights, Louie's Mickey Mouse watch launched into a rendition of the famous Disney theme song. Louie, handcuffed, could do nothing to stop it, and the deputy only shouted more loudly and furiously.
Lent of 1985 brought Larry Scott, organizer of the first demonstration at the test site in 1957, into the life of LDE. One day he simply walked into the small LDE office, humbly introduced himself, and, seeing a need, "fixed our stopped-up toilet," says Anne Symens-Bucher. Plans were in the works for an August Desert Witness that year on the 40th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Scott decided to bring back together as many of the early-era protesters as he could locate.
Not many came. But on the opening day of the August witness, with tears in his eyes, Scott gave a moving testimony and received a standing ovation. The next day an "atomic veteran" of the above-ground tests, who had had his arm blown off during a test and then sewn back on, told his story. People were weeping as he spoke. It was "like a moment of glory for Larry," says Symens-Bucher.
That night, August 7, 1985, Larry Scott was killed in a car accident on his way home. On hearing the news, the LDE staff called up Capt. Jim Merlino and said, "We need to come back out to the test site for Larry." Usually, getting a permit involved a lengthy, red-tape process, but Merlino said simply, "Come."
A cross planted on August 6 was still there. As they knelt around it, they were "very much feeling his presence," says Symens-Bucher. That same day, for the first time, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution for a conditional moratorium on nuclear testing. "We like to think," says Symens-Bucher, "that Larry's first act in heaven was to affect the U.S. Congress."
Before long, witnesses were being held all year long, and the name of the campaign was changed to Nevada Desert Experience (NDE). New Year's Day became an event at the test site. Protesters burned tax forms and dollar bills in April on Tax Day, indicating their objection to their money being spent on nuclear testing. St. Francis' birthday, and celebrations of Dorothy Day and Gandhi, were commemorated regularly at the site. On Grandparents Day in September 1987, 60 Grandmothers for Peace were arrested.
The witness became decidedly ecumenical in character, with various groups and church denominations sponsoring events. A Brethren footwashing service, a Jewish Passover Seder, feminist liturgies, sharings of bread and wine, and Catholic Worker vigils have taken place at the site, often accompanied by the regular drumming of Buddhist monks.
Secular organizations began to take an interest in protests at the test site as well, including Greenpeace, the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, and American Peace Test, an organization that broke off from the Freeze over the Freeze's opposition to civil disobedience. NDE staff found that working with such groups, with their clash of philosophies and perspectives on protest and violence, both added momentum to the witness at the test site and brought all the challenges, tensions, and difficulties inherent in coalition work.
FROM THE BEGINNING, NDE HELD a commitment to reach out to test site officials and authorities. Establishing a pattern of "loving the enemy" that continues today with dialogue and mutual respect, Rosemary Lynch made an appointment before the first witness to see Gen. Mahlon E. Gates, a World War II veteran who was director of the test site. She expected five minutes of his time; he gave her an hour and a half.
Lynch invited him to join the vigil at the test site to pray. He declined, but said he would pray with her in the office, which they did. Shortly afterward, Gates resigned from his position at the test site; though he didn't state why, it is widely believed that the peaceful witness had a deep impact on his decision.
Karen Randolph, who has frequent contact with the NDE staff, says of them, "I think these are people of conscience who are asking us to seek a different way. I firmly believe that we all have the ultimate goal of a peaceful world -- we just have different perspectives on how to achieve that."
But clearly not everyone has been so open to the witness. For a time in 1984 and '85, Lynch received a number of anonymous threatening letters, including one with news clippings of grisly murders and the threat, "This will happen to you unless you learn to love the bomb."
Repeated efforts have been made to reach out to test site workers, including NDE staff serving them donuts as they boarded buses in Las Vegas one year. The reaction has been, predictably, mixed. During one August witness, a different note was found under a rock every day at the protest site, suggesting that the protesters should see the Russians about getting a flag to fly, and stop wasting taxpayers' money on their arrests.
But, in another spirit, a worker once stopped on the road to Mercury and handed Anne Symens-Bucher a bag with fruit juice inside, saying, "Sorry, if I'd known it was so cold out here, I would have brought coffee." And once a white government car on the road turned around and came back to give the protesters a large box of donuts. They received at least a few smiles and waves when NDE staff member Peg Bean parked a 5-foot-tall, pink Easter bunny on a chair along the road at dawn one year, holding a sign saying, "I'd rather be sleeping."
For Mary Laman, protesting along the road had particular impact; her husband, David, was on one of the buses that entered the test site every morning. "The economy was so bad," says Mary Laman, "that the only place to get work was the test site. The day he signed in to go to work, I was there at the Lenten desert protest."
Eventually, David's conscience wouldn't allow him to continue the work. Since test site workers are well paid and enjoy good benefits, "a lot of people thought he was out of his mind for quitting," says Mary. In fact, the DOE "sent him to the company psychiatrist," she says.
It was an uncertain time for the family, with two young children. David, an electrician, was out of regular work for eight months, but the family survived with friends giving David odd jobs to do. "Every time he didn't have a job, that morning the phone would ring," says Mary. "The Lord works in wondrous ways."
Mary has many friends who work at the test site. "I don't want to judge," she says, "but they have bought into this lie of peace through strength ... If we're to follow Christ, I just don't think that to kill people is a way to make peace."
Frank Strabala has undergone one of the greatest conversions among people connected to the Nevada Desert Experience. He was a self-described "young upstart engineer" who got into the atomic bomb business in 1949. His credits include the design for the switch that sets off the bombs and photography for the atmospheric tests of the '50s. In 1958 he was given charge of the U.S. testing program.
In 1970 a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission was killed in a plane crash over Lake Meade. The flight, according to Strabala, was a "boondoggle" in a plane borrowed from the Forest Service. Word came from the general manager of the AEC, says Strabala, that no more than $50,000 was to be spent recovering the body.
But the recovery cost half a million dollars. Strabala was told to "hide the rest," but because his conscience wouldn't allow him to "spread $450,000 over the test site," Frank Strabala says he was fired from his job.
Strabala knew Louie Vitale from the days he hired Vitale as a consultant for labor issues at the test site. "The night I got canned," says Strabala, "Louie came over to the house for a celebration." He says of his journey, "I've shifted over from the world to the kingdom, slowly, slowly."
Capt. Jim Merlino of the sheriff's department began working at the test site 18 years ago, expecting to take care of enforcing speed limits in Mercury and other "run-of-the-mill law enforcement." He smiles broadly when he talks about the way his job has changed.
Merlino is notorious for his respectful way with NDE protesters, having once been overheard by a reporter telling his deputies to treat the protesters as if they were his children. "This is their God-given right to do this," he says of the protesters. "They're doing what they feel they should do -- and we're doing what we need to do. They set the tone, and we respond."
For the first few years, protesters were allowed onto the test site at Camp Desert Rock. After a while an arbitrary white line was painted on the road as the point that could not be legally crossed. Now, the demarcation is a cattle guard even further from the test site.
Merlino and DOE project engineer Bob Barner keep a makeshift office in a trailer parked by the cattle guard. From time to time, they say, their work includes dealing with cows on the test site. Last year they thought the job might be aided if they moved the cattle guard, and they sent a request to DOE. After a long wait, they received back "a 10- to 15-page 'Domesticated Quadruped Survey,' " says Barner, laughing.
Sometimes ideologies clash at the cattle guard. Barner remembers the day when both protesters and test site workers on strike showed up. Fortunately, the worst part, says Barner, was having to deal with the cacophony of a Dixieland band on one side of the road and Buddhist monks beating drums on the other.
Merlino and Barner admit that a lot of stress comes with their work. It would cost millions of dollars and be impractical to put a fence around the test site, so helicopters and vast stretches of forbidding desert are the only deterrents to intrusions. It hasn't kept protesters away, including three women from Greenpeace who once made it to ground zero at the time of a scheduled test and delayed it by a couple of hours.
The Nye County judicial system was as unprepared as the sheriff's office for the deluge of protesters who began showing up in its court. Judge Bill Sullivan, who also serves as the head of the volunteer fire company in Beatty, runs an informal, small-town court. His son serves as bailiff.
In the early years, most protesters were sent to the Beatty jail, which consists of three small cells and a larger one. One year jailed protesters were put to work cleaning tumbleweeds from the local cemetery. A desolate four-hour drive into the desert beyond the test site is Tonopah, where "overflow" protesters have been sent after large actions. The Tonopah jail is the brig off an old ship with a stone building around it.
Large holding pens, made of chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, appeared at the edge of the test site in 1987. Since that time, most protesters who have crossed over the cattle guard have been placed in the pens, then processed and cited in waiting sheriff's cars, and sent a letter in the mail sometime later informing them that charges have been dropped. As ominous-looking as the pens are, they are a hopeful monument to the growth and impact of the protests over the years. As one official put it, there "weren't enough jail cells in Nevada" to keep all the protesters.
Countdown -- The earth resembles a moonscape at Yucca Flat, pockmarked with craters of varying widths and depths. Since August 5, 1963, when the Partial Test Ban Treaty prohibited nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space, all tests at the test site have been underground.
The massive Sedan crater measures 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet in diameter. It was formed when a 100-kiloton bomb buried 635 feet deep was exploded on July 6, 1962. The explosion, designed to test the nuclear bomb's capacity for moving earth, displaced 12 million tons.
Workers use huge precision drills with bits up to 12 feet in diameter to make a shaft in the ground up to 6,000 feet deep for a test. A tower, monitoring equipment, and cables that feed electronic signals from the blast are all put into place.
The nuclear weapon (or "device," in DOE language) is attached to the bottom of a canister, set for detonation by an "arming party," and lowered to the bottom. Then the shaft is filled back up with sand, gravel, and concrete to "plug" the radiation. "The best way of looking at it is as a giant parfait sundae," says Chris West.
DOE literature states that each test costs "from a few million to about $10 million," and preparation of a ground zero site takes 18 months to two years, according to Karen Randolph. But it is all over in "milliseconds."
Vibrations from an average test can be felt up to 25 miles away. A large test can be felt a few minutes after detonation in Las Vegas, according to Randolph. Occasionally, says West, the DOE has had to pay claims for damage to high-rise buildings.
A network exists for contacting personnel in Las Vegas' tallest buildings before a test, to ensure that no workers are on scaffolding or washing windows. Personnel from the Environmental Protection Agency, who "know every farm and every mine for up to 50 miles," according to Randolph, make sure that no one is in a mine during a scheduled test.
Target dates are set well ahead of time, but the testing schedule is by necessity flexible. Most tests are scheduled for early morning, when the wind is generally calmest and potential delays can be factored in. Only optimal conditions are acceptable; the wind must be blowing toward the least populous area north-northeast of the test site, according to Randolph.
Throughout the test site are signs asking, "Is everything secure?" The radio in the car Randolph is driving bears the label "Warning: This Radio is not secure. Do not discuss classified or sensitive information."
The testing schedule is classified information, but by law any test over 20 kilotons must be announced. For these tests, local media and wire services are called, and press releases are issued from the DOE. Often, says Randolph, the DOE offers a "live countdown" that local TV and radio stations can feed into. In 1990 the DOE announced eight tests, 15 in 1989. But an unknown number go unannounced, says Randolph, "to preserve an option that we don't have to tell everybody everything."
A small sign on a pole, hand-lettered in red, with an arrow pointing to a ground-zero site being prepared, reads "Floydada." Test names, all approved by DOE headquarters in Washington, are "designed to not mean anything to anybody," according to Randolph. Test series have been named after cheeses, cars, cocktails, colors, nautical terms, tools, famous scientists, and small mammals. The current series, Randolph explains, is named after Western ghost towns and historical places. Floydada, she says, is somewhere in Texas.
Several serious accidents have taken place at the test site, including the December 14, 1970 Baneberry test, which "vented," sending a radioactive mushroom cloud 10,000 feet into the air. During the April 10, 1986 Mighty Oak tunnel test, two of the three doors designed to prevent the release of radioactive material to the atmosphere failed, causing $32 million in radiation and heat damage to experimental and diagnostic equipment. Lawsuits from test site workers exposed to excessive radiation have been pending in the courts.
But many people have an equal concern about "intentional" radioactive contamination. DOE's Chris L. West admits that "there is ground water contamination," although he claims that government studies have determined that, by the time the water migrates, "any radioactivity is within federal drinking water standards."
He does admit, however, that, "unfortunately," there are "no guarantees." Over the next five years the DOE plans to build 100 monitoring wells at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, according to West, "to be more sure that what we believe is true."
Karen Randolph acknowledges that the test site "will never be public property for a long, long time to come -- just because of what we have out here and what we have done out here." Chris West says it will be "closed to the public for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years" because of all the radioactivity that has been put into the ground. But, he adds, "that's what the Nevada Test Site is there for."
By the road a young coyote circles some food left in the desert, battling a party of huge crows for the morsels. Randolph mentions that the federal government has recently designated the test site a research park, explaining that the weapons tests take up a small area of the test site, and "the rest is pristine desert."
She talks about the visitors who come to the test site. "If there is any typical response," she says, "it is, 'We had no idea of the massiveness of the weapons testing program.' "
It is just after noon on March 7, 1991. A makeshift sign hangs on the door to the cafeteria in "Area 12." Written with a black marker on a styrofoam cafeteria tray, and attached with masking tape, the sign reads: "Cafeteria closed 1600 hours. Evacuation."
Karen Randolph is not at liberty to divulge the meaning of the sign, but it is all-too-obvious. Within 24 hours, there is going to be a nuclear test.
Downwind -- According to a Greenpeace document, in 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) assured the public that there was no cause for concern about nuclear testing because the downwind area was "virtually uninhabited." An editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle made this observation: "This creates an interesting new class of citizen: 'virtual uninhabitants.'"
Janet Gordon grew up in Orderville, Utah (population 500), 150 miles downwind of the Nevada Test Site, in a family of sheep ranchers. She was 11 years old when the testing began in January 1951. In 1955 she began attending high school in St. George, 65 miles closer to the test site. She remembers that her school classes were taken outside to watch the mushroom clouds. "It was an exciting thing for us," she says. "We were part of history in the making."
In the spring of 1953, after a highly explosive test, Gordon's older brother, Kent, came into the sheep camp one night with a severe headache, nausea, diarrhea, and burns on his skin. He remembered that in low, bushy areas, his young horse had sweated and stumbled through a ground fog that had a metallic taste.
In a few weeks, Kent's hair began to fall out. His horse died. Many of the sheep developed sores on their muzzles and bodies, and their wool began to come out in clumps. Some of them died, and others gave birth to stillborn and deformed lambs. That spring the deer began to disappear, and the desert became littered with the empty shells of desert tortoises, which became an endangered species.
Eight years later, at the age of 26, Kent died of cancer of the pancreas, a disease usually found in elderly men. Of the eight men at the sheep camp, six are now dead, one from pneumonia and the rest from cancer. Gordon's father is being treated for cancer.
Janet Gordon, who today is chair of the National Committee for Radiation Victims and director of the downwinders' Citizens Call, says she knows "no more than half a dozen families in the whole area who haven't had a loss from cancer or a radiation-related disease." Most families have suffered several. She has seen many families destroyed "physically, financially, and spiritually."
Compensation from the federal government has been a major issue, but it has not come easily. Gordon learned that lesson back in 1955, when the sheep ranchers, many of whom were on the verge of financial collapse, took their case to court. They lost. In August 1982, 27 years later, the original judge reopened their case, based on recently declassified documents that indicated that the AEC had "perpetrated fraud upon the court" in the original trial by withholding and misrepresenting data, coercing witnesses, and lying under oath. But his judgment was overturned by an appeals court.
In 1983, 24 representative cases involving leukemia, breast cancer, thyroid problems, brain tumors, and other radiation-related illnesses were brought to court. "We won 10 of the 24 cases," says Gordon. But a court of appeals overturned all of them on the basis of "sovereign immunity." In Gordon's words, the ruling means, "The government has the right to do whatever it wants -- even if they kill us -- for the cause of national security."
The first legislation for compensation to nuclear victims was introduced into Congress in 1979. After 11 years, a bill was passed last fall and signed by President Bush on November 15, 1990. Passage of the bill is an important step, but Gordon points out its limits and flaws. To receive compensation, limited to $50,000 for downwinders and $100,000 for uranium miners, requires proof of exposure and other documentation that is difficult to gather some 40 years after the fact.
"Deliberate decisions are being made that I would consider nuclear war," Gordon says of U.S. testing policy. "The government declared war on my people -- and we're still under siege."
She says that radiation victims usually live in isolated areas and have little political clout. "We need to band together, all along the nuclear chain," she continues. Speaking of her work, she adds soberly, "There is a very high attrition rate."
Her eyes well with tears as she mentions her losses by name -- family members, childhood friends, and recently the leader of the radiation victims group from the Marshall Islands. She describes a circle of stones in the desert, across the road from the Nevada Test Site. It is "a spiritual place where we gather," she says. "It is where I remember my brother."
Both Gordon and her sister have had thyroid problems, as well as hysterectomies for pre-cancerous conditions."I'll get cancer -- no question," says Janet Gordon. "It's just a question of what kind, how painful it will be, how long I will have to suffer."
A Decade in the Desert -- The word of God came saying, "Go out and stand in the desert, in the presence of God." Then a great and awesome fire swallowed the sky, but God was not in the fire. After the fire came a mighty wind, but God was not in the wind. After the wind came blasting explosions under the earth, shattering rock and melting sand; but God was not in the blasting. After the blasting came a gentle whisper. "What are you doing here?" (1 Kings 19:11-13).
This adaptation of the text of God's encounter with Elijah was chosen as the theme of "Lenten Desert Experience X: A Decade in the Desert." The witness began on Thursday evening, March 7, 1991, with a Franciscan festival, a celebration of earth, fire, wind, and water through symbols and ritual.
The next day, at 1:08 in the afternoon, as participants sat eating lunch, NDE co-director Peter Ediger made an unscheduled announcement. A nuclear weapon had just been exploded at the test site. There was silence for a time of prayer.
More details came later that evening. It had been a 10-kiloton bomb buried 1,100 feet in the ground at Yucca Flat. The explosion registered 3.8 on the Richter scale. Thirty-eight minutes after detonation, a crater 600 feet in diameter, described officially as a "cookie cutter," formed in the desert floor.
It was a sobering time for the more than 500 people of peace from all over the country who had gathered at a church in Las Vegas, buffeted first by the winds of Desert Storm and now by an explosion in a much closer desert.
Dom Helder Camara, the humble archbishop from Brazil, had traveled a long way to be part of the gathering. On his first visit to the test site, he had called it "the place of the greatest violence on earth." And he added, "This must be the place of a great expression of nonviolence."
The Nevada Desert Experience has helped to fulfill that hope. In a study done on 10 years of witness, Mike Affleck described the campaign at the Nevada Test Site as "the largest sustained antinuclear citizens' movement in the country, [with] the largest participation in acts of civil disobedience in the past decade of any social movement in the United States."
The witness has also inspired a movement against nuclear testing in the Soviet Union. The Soviet citizens involved call themselves the "Nevada Movement."
"That was the biggest shot in the arm I think I've ever had," says Louie Vitale. "They took the lead from our little fledgling thing. We were just being faithful, and we helped create a major movement in the USSR."
A March 10, 1990 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the Soviet Union, "bowing to extraordinary political pressure from its citizens" after the "unexpectedly swift development of 'Nevada,' a powerful, grassroots movement," decided to end underground nuclear explosions at Semipalatinsk, its primary test site. The Soviet movement's success further inspired a growing international movement against nuclear testing.
Lenten Desert Experience X was a time to celebrate such victories, wrestle with defeats, and share a decade's worth of stories. One that was told with relish was the "reclaiming the chapel" witness.
After dark on Good Friday 1989, Louis Vitale and 10 others crossed the fence onto the test site and headed across the desert for Mercury. Arriving late at night, they waited until dawn on Holy Saturday, carrying with them a sense that they were "searching for Jesus," preoccupied with the scriptural question, "Where have they laid him?"
Vitale remembered from his days as a consultant at Mercury years before that there had been a chapel there. Trucks roaming through Mercury kept them wary as they wandered the town. The 11 finally saw the distinctive architecture of the chapel, now labeled as offices of the Los Alamos nuclear research laboratories.
They shared their qualms about the possibility of having to break into it -- the front doors, they had been told, were always chained shut during non-work hours. They began to jog around the track not far from the chapel, trying to appear inconspicuous, and then, at just the right moment, "we made a break for it," says Vitale.
"We went up to the main doors. They were paneled, with turquoise inlaid in wood. And we found that they were open." They found an old pew in the vestibule, which had been turned into a locker room. They could tell where the altar had been.
"We read the passage about the women coming to the tomb and finding the stone rolled away," continues Vitale. "We thought," he says of their easy entrance, "it must have been the same angel." He adds, with a smile, "We learned later that the Los Alamos office had chosen that morning to have the carpets cleaned, and the cleaners had neglected to lock the doors behind them."
They prayed in this former chapel, located on Trinity Avenue, named for the first nuclear bomb test. They blessed and renamed the building "Holy Trinity Chapel."
Remembering that the women in the Bible account of the resurrection had run and told the disciple Peter what they had seen, they decided to call Peter Ediger and announce that they had made it to the chapel. Ediger informed local media, and officials at the test site learned of the presence of the "intruders" while listening to a live radio interview with them.
"People started coming up the walk with automatic weapons," says Vitale. "When they got there, we saw that they were the sheriff's people. We decided to pray until they arrested us. They didn't want to arrest us until we were done praying." Vitale and friends spent three days in the Beatty jail, where he celebrated Mass using the toast from breakfast and small packets of grape jelly for "wine."
"I honestly believe," says Vitale, "that, in the end, God wins ... But part of bringing about the new creation is our effort -- God gives us a part.
"The monstrous weapons of destruction to protect our empire cannot stand in the sight of God," he continues. "These too will fall. But what do we do? ... We have to 'hunker down in the desert,' pulling into our deepest religious roots to see how God intends us to be and act.
"We may have a feeling of total powerlessness. But we are part of God's plan to transform the world. Sitting in that chapel, sitting on that pew, throwing a little holy water around -- I knew that somehow, someday, God would triumph."
"Throughout spiritual history," says Peter Ediger, "the desert has been a very significant place for confronting God -- or God confronting humanity ... It is holy ground."
"Unlike any other place," adds Anne Symens-Bucher, "it encompasses the struggle of good and evil in the world. If we are open to the struggle, we find an incredibly transforming experience."
She remembers when 30 people went out to the test site on the day of a scheduled test. "We joined hands and moved to the ground. People were weeping. There was an incredible sense of our bodies being vessels pouring into the earth.
"Everything in us was being called forth to heal the earth -- every ounce of power and love we had in us. At a certain point, we were just spent.
"We need to continue to bring people to pour that energy into the earth," she continues. "When we have enough, it will be transformed. I really believe that's the reason we haven't blown ourselves up. People all over the world have been willing to open up to grief and despair, and offer healing to stop the violence.
"It has been an incredible privilege to hear over and over again, 'This has changed my life.' I've witnessed the power of what happens at the test site."
Anne Symens-Bucher is not talking about the power of the bombs -- the power to move 12 million tons of earth with a single blast or spew a mushroom cloud 10,000 feet into the air. She is referring to a stronger power.
It is the power that comes when people of faith are open to listening to the gentle whisper of God, willing to trek that "loneliest road in the world" and be tested in the desert. When they, like the Joshua trees, lift their arms in supplication to God, they proclaim their belief that the world will indeed be transformed.
It's a power that has already been unleashed. And it's spreading -- like the prophet's vision for streams flowing in the desert, recorded in Isaiah 35: "For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; ... And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way."
Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
'This Land Belongs to the Creator'
Within the area of the Nevada Test Site are sacred sites, burial grounds, and artifacts of the Western Shoshone Nation. The DOE has a contract with the University of Nevada Desert Research Institute for archeologists to come in and examine the ground surrounding each potential test area to make sure that no sacred sites or artifacts will be "disturbed."
This is little consolation to William Rosse Sr., chair of the Environmental Protection Committee of the Western Shoshone National Council. According to the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty, all the land covered by the test site belongs to the Western Shoshone Nation. In 1979 the U.S. government agreed to give the Shoshones $26 million in damages, but they refused to take it. "If we accepted it, it would be equal to selling the land," says Rosse. "The land belongs to the Creator; we're just custodians." The money, now $65 million with interest, remains in an escrow account.
Rosse recounts the suffering of Native people as a result of radiation, including children who played among uranium tailings. "The government didn't tell us it was hazardous to our health," he says. His own granddaughter, whose family lives on the Yomba reservation downwind of the test site, was born blind and suffering from a thyroid condition.
William Rosse Sr. has become actively involved with the Nevada Desert Experience. He issues permits to all protesters planning to cross onto the test site, granting access to Shoshone land for peaceful purposes. His presence, and that of other Native peoples, has been a strong reminder of the sacredness of the land and the violation that continues in the desert.
-- JH
Silencing the Test Sites
In May 1990, Nevada Desert Experience co-directors Mary Lehman and Peter Ediger joined scientists, physicians, activists, and radiation victims from 21 nations at the International Citizens Congress for a Nuclear Test Ban, held in the Soviet Union. From that conference, the Global Anti-Nuclear Alliance (GANA) was formed, united to work for total cessation of nuclear testing, to aid radiation victims around the globe, and to educate the public.
An appeal from the conference to the leaders of the nuclear nations -- the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China -- called for a Comprehensive Test Ban as "the first essential step in reversing the nuclear arms race." Stating that "the world aches under the burden of massive health, environmental, and social problems" as a result of testing and the siphoning off of resources from other needs, and claiming to "reflect the aspirations of people everywhere," the appeal pleaded "in the name of humanity" for "the silencing of nuclear test sites worldwide."
"The conference," says Ediger, "brought into focus that the United States is really out of step with the rest of the world." That sentiment became even more blatant at the Partial Test Ban Treaty Amendment Conference in January 1991 at the United Nations. Says Mary Lehman, who was a participant, "I was in a situation where I realized that every other country was taking it more seriously than we were." U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering never appeared, according to Lehman. "Time after time, the U.S. was indicating it put very little value on this conference," which had been called by more than 100 of the world's nations to try to enforce the nuclear powers' cooperation with existing treaty agreements to move toward nuclear disarmament.
As the conference progressed, it became clear that if a vote were taken to amend the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty to include a ban on all nuclear testing, the United States and Great Britain would veto it. Instead, a vote was taken on a commitment to reconvene the conference at a later time and continue working toward a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Only the United States and Great Britain voted against it.
DOE spokesperson Chris L. West says that "there has been a lot more peace in the world" because of the U.S. nuclear deterrence policy, and testing is a necessary part of that policy. Elaborating, he explains that "Europe has not had a major war since World War II." Since 1969, when the United States and the Soviet Union began negotiating for strategic arms reductions, according to The Defense Monitor, the number of long-range nuclear warheads has more than quadrupled.
-- JH
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