The Story (7 page)

There was little debate about President Truman's decision to drop “the Bomb,” never mind two. Analysts declared that the use of nuclear weapons had forced Japan to surrender and saved a million American soldiers. Many Americans like me grew up believing that stockpiles of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were unsettling, but essential. Only decades later did I begin to doubt their utility, and the secrecy surrounding them.

In 2005, when I went to Las Vegas to write an article for the
Times
about the new Atomic Testing Museum, I was flooded with memories. The museum featured a collection of the iconic postcards that had drawn a record number of tourists to Las Vegas. My favorite was a black-and-white photo of the mushroom cloud rising behind Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn—the D.I., as everyone called it. I tasted my first cocktail there: a Shirley Temple with two cherries. At bars at the Sahara, the Flamingo, the Dunes, and the Sands, tourists and residents had sampled other “Atomic Cocktails” from the recipe book my mother favored,
Mixed Drinks for Modern Times
.

I was fascinated by a blowup from the June 21, 1952, edition of
Collier's
magazine. A dozen children were lying facedown in a schoolyard, hands cupped over their heads, abandoned bikes nearby. “A is for Atom,” the cover declared. I instantly recalled the drills at John S. Park Elementary. We “atomic kids” sure knew how to protect ourselves against “the big one.”

In the 1950s, most Americans trusted the government. Las Vegas was proud of its status as the capital of skin and sin. Vegas glorified the testing program and the scientists and technicians who worked at the Nevada Test Site, barely noticing that they had less and less interaction with the city's residents. Many of them would relocate for months on end to a top-secret test site town, appropriately named Mercury.

I spent the night in Mercury when I visited NTS as a
Times
reporter after 9/11 to report on the nation's biodefense and nuclear weapons complex. It was almost as empty as the growing list of Nevada ghost towns. Its pool hall, bowling alley, and movie theater, where scientists and other weaponeers once relaxed, were closed.

The Testing Museum displayed photographs of life at the site. By 2005, we had learned disturbing information about the tests. “Harry” was part of an eleven-shot testing series called Operation Upshot-Knothole. Beginning on March 17, 1953, and ending June 4, the climax was a sixty-one-kiloton test aptly called “Climax.” The eleven blasts unleashed a total force of over 250 kilotons in less than three months—about twenty times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Several of its “dirty” blasts had rained radioactive debris on the sparsely populated downwind towns of southern
Utah and Nevada, according to an early, comprehensive account of the testing, killing about 25 percent of the sheep.
⁵

In 1982, in a wrongful death suit filed decades earlier by twenty-four cancer victims and their relatives from St. George (population, 4,500), Frank Butrico, a US Public Health Service radiation safety monitor, testified bravely that the town had been doused repeatedly with “Dirty Harry” fallout, which sent his instruments “off the scales.” The Nevada Test Site's staff had ordered him to report that the radiation levels were just “a little bit above normal” and “not in the range of being harmful.”
⁶

As more information was declassified in the late 1970s and early 1980s through congressional hearings and lawsuits, we learned that the AEC's primary concern had not been our health and safety but securing information for the weapons program that only nuclear testing could produce. The AEC had been a shameless cheerleader for a health and safety monitoring program that the Pentagon had co-opted by 1953. At a commission meeting after yet another test had rained fallout on St. George, Gordon Dean, then head of the AEC, noted that at least one commissioner had been unhappy enough with what he called the “public relations” aspects of the test to argue for a testing delay. But the tests were “so important” to national security, Dean noted for posterity in his personal diary, that “we will have to go ahead. We just have to take a chance.”
⁷

By 1955, Lewis Strauss, Dean's successor, was battling a Nevada legislator who had introduced legislation demanding that the program be moved out of state. Other AEC commissioners joined Strauss in protesting such outrageous interference. “We must not let anything interfere with this series of tests—nothing!” Commissioner Thomas Murray declared.
⁸

As declassified documents would show, the AEC had consistently lied about the health and safety risks of radiation to between 250,000 and 500,000 American soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and civilians whom the Pentagon estimated were exposed to radioactive debris from the tests.
⁹
Published in 1980,
Atomic Soldiers
, a slender volume by Howard Rosenberg, a friend and investigative journalist for ABC, described how soldiers were ordered to conduct maneuvers right under the cloud, sometimes without protective clothing or glasses, to see how well they would perform their
missions. Describing the soldiers' subsequent battles with cancer and in court for compensation, Howard's book deplored the national security elitism that “allowed a few men to make decisions that affect us all.”

By the end of the 1970s, nearly a thousand people had sued the government for radiation-related damages in federal court. But records show that the Justice Department had yet to pay a penny in court-ordered nuclear-related compensation. Not until 1979 did the government concede in a federal lawsuit that there was “some risk associated with exposure to radioactive fallout.”
¹⁰

Some twenty-five years after the ranchers filed their suit seeking compensation for their irradiated livestock, the judge who had initially ruled against them ordered a new trial held when information secured under the Freedom of Information Act suggested that the commission had known almost from the start of the program that detonation yields were unreliable and that the testing was potentially unsafe.

Due partly to growing public alarm, atmospheric testing was outlawed in 1963 by the Limited Test Ban Treaty. But the detonation of more powerful weapons continued, underground, for almost thirty more years. By 1992, when a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing took effect, some 1,053 tests had been conducted, 90 percent of them at the Nevada Test Site. Given the paucity of epidemiological studies, we will probably never know precisely how much extra radiation the “downwinders” living so close to the site absorbed, or the nature or full extent of the damage done to us Las Vegas residents by repeated exposures.

In 1997 and 1999, reports by the National Cancer Institute determined that atmospheric tests at NTS had spread radioactive iodine 131 across much of the United States, particularly in 1952, 1953, 1955 (the years my family lived in Vegas), and 1957. The 1999 report concluded that although scientists thought the exposure levels had still been very low, the increased I-131 from the Nevada atmospheric tests would probably wind up producing “between 11,300 and 212,000” additional cases of thyroid cancer in the United States. The downwinders, vindicated by the panel's belated link between cancer and the testing, noted that I-131 was only one of scores of isotopes produced by nuclear fissioning. The studies had not examined
isotopes such as strontium 90, cesium 137, zirconium, and other atomic debris, most of which had even longer half-lives than I-131. We would probably never know, wrote Preston J. Truman, who created Downwinders, an early antinuclear group, “how many innocent, unwitting, and unsuspecting Americans had died” because of the tests.

I got my job as a reporter in the
New York Times
Washington bureau in 1977 through affirmative action. It was the job of my dreams.

It was also a job for which, by
Times
standards, I was unqualified. But the paper hired me anyway. It needed women.

Three years earlier, seven
Times
women had filed what became a class action suit on behalf of some 550 women at the paper, accusing the
Times
of sex discrimination. Their case was rock solid. So was that of the plaintiffs in another suit also filed in 1974—the paper's minority employees, who accused it of racial discrimination. The
Times
's leaders, who had always thought of themselves as liberal and enlightened, were alarmed.

In their depositions and public statements, the paper's lawyers had derided the women's charges as “frivolous” and “devoid of substance and rationality”—women who protest too much were often dismissed then, and even today, as hysterical. But employment statistics did not lie, and they were devastating.

Nan Robertson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who later chronicled the paper's sexual discrimination, summarized the case.
¹
No women appeared on the paper's masthead of twenty-one names at the top of the
editorial page, nor were there any female vice presidents or even women in a position to advance to that post. There were no female columnists, photographers, or members of the eleven-man board. None of the twenty-two national correspondents was a woman. There was only one female foreign bureau chief: Flora Lewis, the brilliant former wife of a
Times
executive; she had just been appointed to Paris. Only 4 of the paper's 31 cultural critics were women. There was only one woman sports reporter. Four of the 75 copy editors were women. The
Times
, which employed some six thousand people at the time, had 385 male reporters, and 40 women, 11 of whom worked in the Family/Style Section. In the largest, most prestigious bureau, Washington, only 3 of the 35 reporters were women. “There were no women in the pipeline for power,” Robertson concluded.
²

But discrimination against women ran deeper. Although the paper was subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the few women who had managed to win jobs at the paper were paid substantially less than their male counterparts for the same work. The gap between the average salaries of male and female reporters was $59 a week—or some $3,000 a year.

Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known affectionately as Punch, claimed to be shocked by the evidence that the Women's Caucus presented at a meeting with him and other senior executives in the spring of 1972. Robertson described how the caucus confronted Punch with “hard truths” about the plight of women toiling on the Sulzberger “plantation.” Promises had been made, she told me years later. But although several women were subsequently hired—including me—the salary disparity between male and female reporters expanded. By the time the women finally filed suit in 1974, the gap had grown from roughly $3,000 to $4,800 a year.

While such discrimination was fairly standard in the sixties and seventies, the
Times
's record was egregious given its sanctimonious editorials blaming others for such sins. While women composed 40 percent of the American labor force, they represented only 26.2 percent of full-time
Times
employees. And according to census figures, while women held 41 percent of all “editors and reporters” jobs in the nation, they held only 16 percent of these posts at the
Times
.
³

I had heard little about the women's suit when John Finney and I
had one of our occasional lunches in May 1977 at the Army-Navy Club, a male bastion near the White House. Finney was an avuncular fixture in the paper's Washington bureau, and we talked mostly about national security. I sought his advice on a story I was writing about Stealth cruise missile technology. Finney took pride in mentoring young reporters, most of them male. He complimented me on my recent articles about the Middle East, defense issues, and nuclear proliferation threats for the
Times
's Sunday magazine, the
Washington Post
, and the
Progressive
, the nation's second-oldest monthly, published in Madison, Wisconsin, since 1909. That surprised me, because the
Progressive
, originally an organ of Robert La Follette's Progressive Party, was left-wing, especially on national security issues. I didn't think of Finney, a Pentagon correspondent who was rather conservative, as a
Progressive
reader.

Getting a reporting job in Washington in the mid-1970s was not nearly as tough as it became later. In my case, Erwin Knoll, the
Progressive
's Washington editor, had chosen me to succeed him when he moved back to Madison to become the magazine's editor. I had done several freelance pieces for him. The job didn't pay much, but my association with the well-established journal guaranteed me credentials at the White House and most federal agencies—almost as valuable a commodity as money in the nation's status- and access-hungry capital. Knoll, a fervent civil libertarian who was deeply suspicious of government, was close to I. F. Stone, the irreverent journalist whose newsletter broke many a story about political finagling in Washington. Stone's scoops were usually based on information contained in the thousands of documents that agencies published but that few reporters had the time or energy to read. Since I shared “Izzy” Stone's interest in Israel and the Middle East, I had sought him out for advice before my own first trip to the region. Erwin later told me that Izzy had lobbied him relentlessly to offer me the job—not the last time I would benefit from an influential man's support.

Erwin knew that I had not always been so liberal. Having grown up, like Hillary Clinton, as a “Goldwater Girl,” I had inherited some of the conservative
convictions of my parents. But the official lies told to protect atomic testing in Vegas and then the Vietnam War shattered much of my trust in the government. At Ohio State University in Columbus and later at Barnard College in New York, I came to believe, as did so many in my generation, that the war was not only unnecessary but also immoral—a betrayal of the country's traditions, policies, and values.