<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Geonerd @ Jan 24 2010, 03:36 AM)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}><div class='quotemain'>This reminded me of the army veterans and hapless citizens that were unfortunate enough to be sent to, or live downwind from, the Nevada Test Site. (Every country, every government, 'does it to their own.') To intentionally expose US citizens and soldiers to radioactive fallout, more or less 'to see what happens,' is about as bad as it gets. Hundreds, possibly thousands of veterans, and thousands of citizens in Nevada and Utah have been poisoned and/or killed. Given that the US is supposed to be some grand, open democracy, this sort of cynical policy is all the more abhorrent.
I have driven NW out of Vegas up to Mt.Charleston Lodge, and if you turn onto Highway 158 you skirt the flank of the mountain and come to Desert View Point. From here you are looking at the Nevada Test Site. To put this in perspective to those in the UK, it would be like living in London whilst the government are detonating atomic bombs in Bedfordshire. During the sixties families would drive up there for picnics to watch the tests. The Spring Mountains were supposed to act as a shield, between the test site and Vegas, but actually if the conditions were right and the City was downwind they provided no protection at all. I never appreciated that those living in nearby communities were used by government as guinea pigs - I just thought that it was sheer ignorance of the effects. I don't think it was until the 1980's that these detonations were driven underground, and they continued up to the early '90's. Recently, there was a much mooted proposal to sink thousands of tons of nuclear waste in the desert at Nellis Air Force Base - hopefully this has been quashed as there is an ancient faultline that underlies the area which could rupture at any time.
The Test effects were such an irritation to Howard Hughes who was living in The Sands at the time, that he attempted to buy the ABC news network so that he could campaign against the testing and gain public support. Ironic, since one of his movie productions had been 'The Conquerer'. Of the 220 persons who worked on location of this film in Utah in 1955, something like 90 had contracted cancer as of the early 1980s and 50 died of it, including stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead, and director .... Powell. According to scientific opinion on the matter the experts insist under ordinary circumstances only 30 people out of a group of that size should have developed cancer. In 1953, the military had tested 11 atomic bombs at Yucca Flats, Nevada, which resulted in massive clouds of fallout floating downwind. Much of the deadly dust fanned into Snow Canyon, Utah, where a lot of The Conqueror was shot. The actors and crew were exposed to this toxic .... for 3 months, doubtless inhaling a fair amount of it in the process, and Hughes later shipped 60 tons of hot dirt back to Hollywood to use on a set for retakes, exacerbating the situation further.
Although many people on set knew about the radiation (there's a picture of Wayne himself operating a Geiger counter during the filming), no one took the threat seriously at the time. Thirty years later, however, half the residents of St. George had contracted cancer, and veterans of the production began to realise that something was wrong. Hughes was said to have felt "guilty as hell" about the whole affair, although being so hard to substantiate the damage in a Court of Law, he escaped legal proceedings. He did however withdraw The Conqueror from circulation, and for years thereafter the only person who saw it was Hughes himself, who was alleged to have screened it night after night during his paranoid last years.
There are some very remote areas in the vast Nevada basin, and although Vegas was not the huge conurbation that it has become today, these tests at Nellis were only 50 odd miles from the residential subdivisions which were already encroaching on the desert.
