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Memorial Day makes me think of what we forget. My colleagues reported Friday that the Trump administration is discussing whether to test our nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992, when we ceased underground testing (we stopped exploding them in open air in 1963). (1/x)
A nuclear weapon, which is unlike any other weapon, is nevertheless still a device. It's made of parts. It relies on physics, chemistry & engineering that need to be tested. We tested over 1,000 of them—both on U.S. soil & out in the Pacific—at great cost. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/nuclear-tests/
Hiroshima itself was a test. The type of nuclear bomb we dropped over the city in 1945 had never been detonated before. But our calculations told us it would work, & it did: 160,000 Japanese people were dead, dying or injured in an instant. Quite a test.
From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. conducted 67 tests in the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific. These were enormous bombs. If the combined explosive power of those detonations was parceled evenly over that 12-year period of testing, it would equal 1.6 Hiroshima-size explosions EVERY DAY.
Here is my story from 2015 on the Marshall Islands and our tortured relationship with them, all born of nuclear testing (which still continues, in non-explosive fashion, with unarmed ICBMs fired from California). https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/11/27/a-ground-zero-forgotten
We do not really memorialize the generations of Marshallese people who were exiled & sickened by the tests. We forget that American pilots were instructed to fly into mushroom clouds to collect data, that U.S. service members, in cleanup efforts, toiled in radioactive waste.
We’ve ignored & gaslit nuclear veterans for generations; their narrative is not as tidy as D Day’s. “When the job was done, they threw my bulldozer in the ocean because it was so hot. If it got that much radiation, how the hell did it miss me?” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/us/troops-radioactive-islands-medical-care.html
Over 1 million Americans, military & civilian, were involved in the detonation of nuclear weapons from 1945 to 1992, aboveground & underground. Hundreds of thousands more helped manufacture, transport, guard & clean up. And scores of bystanders were affected too.
I featured some of them, American and otherwise, in my 2016 book. Here is a thread on Setsuko Thurlow, who survived Hiroshima, moved to Canada, and dedicates her life to abolishing nuclear weapons. https://twitter.com/MrDanZak/status/939880654849957888
Here is a passage on Lemeyo Abon from the Marshall Islands, whose people were treated like guinea pigs.
Lemeyo died in 2018. I remember her today. “At the UN in 2012, when she began to read her statement to the Council and gathering of the world’s nations, she caused a busy room of self-important people to stop and truly listen...” https://marshallislandsjournal.com/farewell-bravo-survivors-voice/
Here is Kevin Garland, who worked for years at a plant outside Denver that milled pits of plutonium for nuclear weapons. The Garland family has multiple members who were stricken with disease, who died premature deaths.
Here is Michelle Thomas, a “downwinder” from St. George, Utah, which was in the fallout path of nuclear testing in Nevada, just north of Las Vegas (where people used to drink cocktails on casino roofs and watch the detonating colors on the horizon).
I did not realize until now that Michelle died last year. She was fierce. “I was a veteran of the Cold War,” she said, “only I never enlisted and no one will ever fold a flag over my grave.” Listen to her StoryCorps with her friend Martha Ham here: https://www.upr.org/post/encore-su-storycorps-fallout-city-downwinder-story
Many people suffered & died because of nuclear testing; the suffering is ongoing, even 57 years after we’ve stopped open-air testing. It is unclear what kind of testing the Trump administration is now considering, or whether the chatter itself is the end goal.
Sometimes we do “subcritical” tests — meaning no nuclear chain reaction that yields the huge explosion — in sealed chambers 1,000 feet underground in Nevada. This allows us to study things like “plutonium hydrodynamics.” Here’s a fun brochure on that: https://www.lanl.gov/discover/publications/1663/2014-august/_assets/docs/1663_22_sub.pdf
Some people argue that there’s no better way to test a nuclear weapon than by, well, testing a nuclear weapon. Trump has been absurdly cavalier in his public statements about nuclear weapons, but in this thread Tom Nichols points to something deeper: https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1264014947144609804?s=20
We are talking about testing at the same time we are pulling out of international arms-control treaties. Here is former Defense Secretary William Perry on the notion that the Trump administration is the vehicle for a renewed arms race:
Here’s a thread on testing from Jon Wolfsthal, a former senior director on Obama’s National Security Council: https://twitter.com/JBWolfsthal/status/1264006921209745410
And here is a thread by my favorite nonpartisan authority on nuclear weapons, Amy Woolf of the Congressional Research Service, who reminds us that it all comes down to money. https://twitter.com/Woolaf/status/1264192997958303744
