SAGA OF A DOWNWINDER

By Michael Shay

Nukes are back in the news.

President Bush had abandoned international arms treaties. This allows Peacekeeper missiles and their silos to be dismantled, but keep the warheads stashed in smaller hidey-holes for later use.  These holes are exclusively in the western U.S., primarily at my friendly local facility, Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo.

Trains carrying waste from Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation and the national nuke lab near Idaho Falls may soon pass through Wyoming (why is everything destined to pass through Wyoming?) on their way to the WIPP site in New Mexico. Trucks bearing nuke waste already motor through Cheyenne on a regular basis. Those trips will increase once Congress’s new energy bill starts pumping more money into nuclear power plants, spawning still more radioactive waste.

Meanwhile, a new humongous nuclear depository will be built north of the Las Vegas strip to provide a centralized site for nuke waste. This allegedly is to prevent terrorists from grabbing handfuls of the stuff from one of many less secure sites and fashioning it into a dirty bomb.

And here's the kicker: the Bush administration wants desperately to resume nuke underground testing in my neighborhood, which is the West. He may get his wish. Bush and his warhawks, fresh from the trouncing of Saddam Hussein’s rag-tag army, have received permission from the Senate Armed Services Committee to develop tactical nuclear weapons and to resume underground nuclear weapons testing.

Guess where those tests will be?

No, not Crawford, Texas. Not the eastern seaboard. Where else but that large swath of “Big Empty” located between the Rockies and the Sierras?

Get ready for another generation of downwinders.

Downwinders, of course, are those of us who grew up on the downwind or eastern side of a nuclear facility or a nuclear test site. For anyone coming of age in then postwar West, "downwinding" was more an inherited lifestyle than a chosen one.

I spent my first ten years in the vicinity of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Denver. I was outside cavorting on the school playground in September 1957 when a fire at Rocky Flats spewed plutonium into the air.

At the same time, our family lived downwind of dozens of nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. Unlike Utahns and Nevadans, we couldn't actually see the rising plumes of bomb tests. But their fallout drifted over the Rockies, sneaking into our rooms as we slept, invading our lungs and bones and our mother's milk.

It's a bit of a stretch, but you could also say that millions of us Westerners also were downwinders from atomic tests in the Pacific.

From 1960 until 62, I lived in eastern Washington downwind of the Hanford site. Moses Lake was an hour northeast of Hanford, so we weren't affected as directly as the smaller farming communities east along the Snake River Valley. But Hanford's effluvia got into the air and the water and the food for all of us.

For the next two years, I lived in Wichita, Kansas, downwind from Colorado and surrounded by ICBM missile silos and B-52s with their nuke payloads.

Then, for 14 years, I took a break from the west, living in Florida where solar rays from the distant sun was about as much nuke exposure as I got.

When I elected to move back to Denver in 1978, Rocky Flats still was making plutonium triggers. My wife and I bought a house in south Denver that happened to be where tailings from uranium milling had been used as landfill. A dedicated gardener, I always wondered why my tomatoes had such a healthy glow.

My mother, a Denver native, died at 59 from a virulent form of ovarian cancer. My father, also a Denverite, died from prostate cancer. I bring this up because downwinders have an increased lifetime risk from cancer. Exposure to that single burst of plutonium from the Rocky Flats 1957 fire doubles, triples, even quadruples your cancer risk, depending on what part of the metro area you were on the fateful day. No sign of cancer yet in me or my many siblings. But give us time, I say while knocking on wood, give us time.

So, if I seem as paranoid as some survivalist in the Wyoming outback, I have good reason. As the old saying goes: "You ain't paranoid if someone really is following you." Present circumstances show that the nukes really are following me, and closely. If the surplussed MX warhead doesn't get me, a truckload of Hanford waste will. Nevada, upwind from my family, is being primed for multi‑megaton tests and the storage of all the country's nuke waste.

My request to the Bush and his pro-nuke cohorts: Before making any big plans, ask the downwinders in Wyoming or Colorado or Washington whether they want to see the resumption of a nuclear arms race, a return to those good ol' days of the Cold War.

And I have a request of my own: keep the darn stuff out of my neighborhood. One of these days, I want to again grow tomatoes, and not the glow-in-the-dark variety.  

Copyright 2003 Michael Shay