• Los Alamos, Livermore, and the Nuclear Testing Regime

The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was constructed on 43 miles of narrow mesas in deep canyons in northwestern New Mexico illegally seized from the indigenous Tewa of the pueblos San Ildefonso and Santa Clara.  To the Tewa, Los Alamos was always “the place of fire.”  The lab is located on the eastern flank of The Valles Caldera (Caldera is the Spanish word for cauldron), one of the world's largest dormant volcanoes.(20)

The first successful detonation of a nuclear warhead – the 'Trinity Test,' on July 16, 1945 – also took place on indigenous land; in this case, that of the Apache, in the White Sands desert near Alamogordo, NM. As UC and Manhattan Project scientists Ben Benjamin described it, the Los Alamos-designed bomb was "brighter than 20 suns and the most spectacular sunrise ever seen."(21)  The test site adjoined the Mescalero Apache Reservation; much of the fallout from “Trinity” still resides there.(22)

The precedent was thereby set, and indigenous peoples’ lands have served almost exclusively as the proving grounds for the power and efficacy of the US nuclear stockpile for the past six decades.    Ward Churchill notes:

“While the official rationale for selecting these sites was always that distance from urban centers was essential to the secrecy of the research and production, this does not account for why they were not set in sparsely-populated areas like western Kansas. A better explanation is that from the outset, planners were concerned that the nuclear program embodied substantial risks to anyone living close to it. By the 1940s, most people living in the central plains belonged to the settler society; almost all the people living at San Ildefonso, Mescalero and Yakima were native.”(23)

The Los Alamos test of "Trinity" was, of course, overseen by the University of California, albeit in the fashion of “a benevolent absentee landlord.”(24)  The UC’s role in subsequent US nuclear testing operations was no less significant.  

“The Most Bombed Nation on Earth”

The vast majority of US nuclear tests occurred between 1952 and 1997 at the

Nevada Test Site (NTS), located on a Rhode Island-sized chunk of land illegally seized from the Western Shoshone nation in contravention of the Treaty of Ruby Valley.(25, 26)  Signed by representatives of the US and the Western Shoshone in 1863, the treaty recognizes Shoshone territorial sovereignty to roughly 43,000 square miles of land in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah.  The US – as well as the British government, which has also conducted many nuclear blasts there -- have ignored the treaty virtually at will.  No fewer than 928 nuclear detonations have occurred at the Nevada Test Site in all, 100 of them above-ground.(27)

Although government studies of the near-unthinkable quantity of radioactive fallout from the tests have been haphazard, the health consequences for the nation’s inhabitants have manifested irrefutably for over 50 years.  The vast majority of the 12 million curies of radioactivity from the bombs now reside on Shoshone land, where it will remain carcinogenic and mutogenic for over 250,000 years.(28)  The nation’s residents suffer from widespread cancer, leukemia, and other radiation-induced diseases as a result.  At the Western Shoshone reservations at Duckwater and Ely, which are within a fifty-mile radius of the NTS, residents have reported unusual animal deaths, hair loss and gardens turning black almost instantly following many of the explosions.(29)

An independent 1996 study found that the aquifer that serves as the only reliable source of water for all three Western Shoshone reservations – Duckwater, Yomba, and Timbisha – as well as the Las Legas Paiute Colony and the Pahrump Paiute, Goshute and Moapa Paiute reservations was contaminated at 3,000 times “safe” levels.(30) 

An aerial view of the Nevada Test Site.

The survivors within “The Most Bombed Nation on Earth” now face the prospect of having a national nuclear waste dump being placed on their land, at Yucca Mountain.  If constructed, the dump would cause an additional 77,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste to be indefinitely stored within their territorial boundaries, invariably leading to additional cases of cancer and leukemia.  According to its proponents, Yucca Mountain is "the perfect place for a nuclear burial ground"(31) due to the level of radioactive contamination that already exists there.

Western Shoshone efforts to resist the radioactive contamination of their territory have been gaining traction for several decades.  The Western Shoshone Defense Project was founded in 1992, to protect, preserve, and restore “Newe [Western Shoshone] rights and lands for present and future generations based on cultural and spiritual traditions.”(32)  Corbin Harney, Western Shoshone spiritual leader and founder of the Shundahai Network (which has a similar purpose), noted in 2004: "It's in our back yard... it's in our front yard.  This nuclear contamination is shortening all life.  We are going to have to unite as a people and say no more! We, the people, are going to have to put our thoughts together to save our planet here. We only have One Water...One Air...One Mother Earth."(33)

The RaLa Tests

The Western Shoshone have succeeded in gaining at least a modicum of recognition within the wider nuclear abolition movement for their struggle.  Victims of nuclear testing that occurred on a smaller scale are still struggling to achieve any sort of public recognition whatsoever.

Between 1946 and 1961, the UC-paid scientists at Los Alamos carried out a little-known nuclear experimentation program known as “RaLa.”  In an effort to “measure the degree of compression and symmetry of the implosion used to trigger the atomic bomb,” nearly 250 mock nuclear bombs containing Lanthanum 140 as a source of radiation, rather than plutonium, were exploded in Bayo Canyon, roughly three miles outside of Los Alamos.  Lanthanum 140 has a half-life of only 40 hours but emits a high-energy gamma ray in its decay that generates highly radioactive fallout.  The communities downwind were the San Ildefonso pueblo Indians, located roughly eight miles from the test site, in the Rio Grande valley, and several Pueblo Indian and Spanish-speaking communities located roughly 12 miles away. 

The identities of the fallout victims was not an accident.  As Los Alamos activist Tyler Mercier commented during hearings conducted by the Clinton administration’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, most of the "shots were fired when the wind was blowing to the northeast.  At this point in time, that's where most of the population of this region lived.  I mean, half of it is Spanish and half of it Native Americans in our community."

No public study of the health consequences for the residents of these areas has been conducted, least of all at the Los Alamos laboratories.  However, based on the program’s health impact on the Los Alamos chemists who administered the RaLa tests, it is fairly certain that the impacts have been extremely detrimental, especially given the extent to which these communities rely on the water, air, and food naturally available in their community.  Many of the chemists were found in the late-‘1940s and 1950s to have “lymphopenia,” or severely depressed white blood counts.(34)

Fallout Over Alaska

In the late-1950s, highly-influential UC Berkeley physicist Edward Teller devised a nuclear testing program called “Project Chariot” -- part of a more ambitious program known as “Project Plowshare.”  Plowshare arose in the late-1950s in response to public protests against atmospheric nuclear testing, and was intended to demonstrate that "clean" nuclear explosives would provide safe, peaceful uses of atomic energy. 

For the location for Project Chariot, Teller's team selected a site in northern Alaska at Cape Thompson, roughly thirty miles from Inupiat Eskimo village of Point Hope.  There, he and his collaborators sought to commence the excavation of an Arctic seaport through a series of nuclear explosions.  This was to be one of the “safe” uses of nuclear weaponry that he claimed would be of great benefit.  The proposal died in 1962 in the fact of popular opposition, but not before researchers from the US Geological Survey conducted several studies involving the intentional release of substantial quantities of radioactive toxins such as iodine 131, strontium 85, and cesium 137. 

As Caroline Cannon, an Inupiat Indian resident of Point Hope, told the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments at a public meeting in Santa Fe, NM:

"I have lived in Point Hope all my life and eaten the food from the sea and the land and drank the water of Cape Thompson, along with the others.  I have to wonder about my health, what impact the poison on the earth will have all through my lifetime, emotionally, physically, and most of all for my children and my grandchildren." 

Many area residents speculate that classified experiments involving even more deadly toxins might have occurred in secret, which, given the government’s pattern of secrecy in these matters, certainly cannot be ruled out.(35)

In 1971, the largest underground nuclear detonation ever conducted by the United States took place, in Amchitka, Alaska, hundreds of miles southwest of the Point Hope experiments.  It was one of three detonations to occur at Amchitika that year. Despite initial government assurances that the radiation would be contained below-ground, research conducted by Greenpeace and other independent organizations demonstrates that significant quantities of americium-241 and plutonium 239/240 leaked from at least two of the test cavities into nearby ponds, creeks, and the Bering Sea.(36)

The thirteen tribes of the Aleutian Island chain have inhabited this region for thousands of years.  According to Greenpeace, dozens of Aleutians natives have died of radiation-linked cancers.  Meanwhile, the parties responsible have covered up and denied any connection to the deaths or health problems among the indigenous Aleutians.  The results of a 1998 joint sampling investigation by the DOE with the State of Alaska have remained sequestered at Los Alamos for going on eight years.(37)

The Marshall Islands

It would, of course, be impossible to adequately overview the history of U.S. nuclear weapons testing -- and the UC-managed laboratories’ complicity in it -- without addressing the wide-ranging nuclear experimentation program in the Marshall Islands.

Besides the 67 above-ground nuclear detonations that took place in the Marshalls between 1946 and 1958, documents released by the U.S. government in recent years have shed light on other cruel aspects of the U.S. nuclear testing program there.  For several decades following the inception of the program, U.S. scientists – many of them employed at Los Alamos and Livermore -- conducted extensive human radiation experiments using native Marshallese people as the guinea pigs. Many were injected with or coerced to drink fluids laced with radiation.  Others were resettled on islands highly contaminated by the weapons tests, so as to monitor how human beings absorb radiation from their foods and environment.  The people of Rongelap Atoll were evacuated by the U.S. government for earlier smaller weapons tests, but the government purposefully decided not to evacuate them prior to the detonation of the BRAVO test – up to that point, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever detonated by the U.S. 

Tony de Brum, who grew up in the Marshall Islands in the shadow of the nuclear testing program, explained the horrors he and his family and neighbors endured, at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference at the United Nations in May 2005:

“Much of this human experimentation occurred in populations either exposed to near-lethal amounts of radiation, or to “control” populations who were told they would receive medical “care” for participating in these studies to help their fellow citizens.  At the conclusion of all these studies, the United States still maintained publicly that no positive linkage could be established between the tests and the health status of the Marshallese. Just in the past few weeks, a new US government study has predicted 50 precent higher than expected incidence of cancer in the Marshall Islands resulting from the atomic tests.

...Throughout the years, America’s nuclear history in the Marshall Islands has been colored with official denial, self-serving control of information, and abrogation of commitment to redress the shameful wrongs done to the Marshallese people.  The scientists and military officials involved in the testing program picked and chose their study subjects, recognized certain communities as exposed when it served their interests, and denied monitoring and medical attention to subgroups with the Marshall Islands.  I remember well their visits to my village in Likiep where they subjected every one of us to tests and invasive physical examinations which, as late as 1978, they denied ever carrying out.”(38)

The Role of the UC

Since their inceptions, the Los Alamos and LIvermore laboratories have been responsible for certifying the “reliability” of the nuclear weapons stockpile.  In other words, every nuclear weapons test conducted by the U.S. has been authorized by officials at either of the two UC-managed labs. 

The role of lab officials in facilitating the U.S. nuclear testing program – indeed, the production and proliferation of nuclear weapons in general -- goes much further than that, though.  For nearly six decades, Los Alamos and Livermore officials have been among the primary political forces driving the nuclear testing regime, ensuring that political conditions for nuclear testing in the U.S. remain ripe, while undermining any serious efforts to oppose them. 

Edward Teller meets with Ronald Reagan at the White House.

In 1957, for example, the aforementioned Edward Teller (then Executive Director of the Livermore lab) and two fellow nuclear scientists met personally with President Dwight Eisenhower at the White House to try to talk him out of agreeing to a several-year testing moratorium, which had been proposed by the Soviet Union.  A few years later, Los Alamos and Livermore scientists succeeded in writing a proposed ban on underground tests out of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.  Similar instances have occurred multiple times through the years.

As Sacramento Bee writer Deborah Blum noted in 1987, “Since President Eisenhower first tried to end testing of nuclear bombs, the California-run weapons laboratories have taken on every president through Carter who pursued that goal.  The labs stand undefeated.”(39) They still stand undefeated; 16 years after the end of the Cold War, "subcritical tests" continue to tak place periodically at the NTS.

By virtue of its reputation as a premier institution for scientific research, the UC provides a fig leaf of academic legitimacy to the labs’ work while also shielding them from meaningful Congressional oversight.  These have been critical factors in forming the aura of scientific infallibility from which lab officials derive much of their political power.  Thus, the systematic carnage wrought on the Western Shoshone, Marshall Islanders, and other indigenous cultures continued for nearly 60 gut-wrenching years.

Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - "Manifest Destiny" and the Founding of the UC
Part 2 - Los Alamos, Livermore, and the Nuclear Testing Regime
Part 3 - Uranium Mining, the UC, and the "Privatization of Genocide"
Part 4 - Ending Radioactive Colonization
Appendix "A" - Indigenous Peoples Who Inhabit(ed) Present-Day UC Lands
Appendix "B" - Additional Reading and Resources
Works Cited