the following images, words & sound will give you a taste of jeremy’s documentary to come . . .
images:
words: from chip ward’s canaries on the rim . . .
“they were waiting for the blinding flash of a distant atomic detonation followed minutes later by a wall of hot air. it would flatten their shirts against their chests, sweep their hair back, bend the trees in the backyard, and send clouds of dust swirling. sometimes a blizzard of hot ashes would fall later and the children would run, shout, and twirl in the summer storm of atomic debris.”
“between 1951 and 1969 there were 1,635 field trials. more than 55,000 chemical rockets, artillery shells, bombs, and land mines were blown up to understand how they could be used. airplanes flew over test grids and sprayed nerve agent to see how it was dispersed in various weather conditions and at various heights. all totaled, a half million pounds of nerve agent was released into the open wind. that’s the equivalent of 3.5 trillion lethal doses.”
“father north, at the dugway proving grounds in utah, the sons of poor farmers ran to their places on a grid that was laid out along the sagebrush flat by military scientists. they were shirtless under the hot desert sun but that was necessary. when the scientists released the mosquitoes, the men were told to stand still and wait to be bitten. the bites would be recorded and then injections given. the mosquitoes were carrying encephalitis.”
“those that ran the tests waited until the wind blew towards utah. utah was sparsely populated with mormons who, in the fifties, were still a small and unpopular minority, often regarded as odd outsiders within their own nation. official documents from the time actually describe them as a ‘low use segment of the population.’ mormons, in turn, were well aware of their status and self-conscious about their polygamist past. with their backs against the desert wall, they had built a proud society and culture that could endure hardship and they were now eager for acceptance and willing to sacrifice for inclusion.”
“scientists were sent in to reassure doubters. women who complained they were losing their hair were diagnosed as ‘neurotic’ or suffering from ‘housewife syndrome.’”
“soldiers who had just crouched in trenches near the blast climbed from their hiding places and marched slowly towards the bruise-colored mushroom cloud in front of them. with their naked eyes, they had just studied the x-rayed bones in their hands at the moment of destruction. it was the whitest light they had ever seen. for several moments they had unwittingly become transparent glowing angels in the nuclear hell of america’s cold war jihad. those who had defecated in their pants quickly tried to cover their shame. soon, the soles of their boots would melt under the crunching surface of hot sand that was melted into globs of glass by the inferno. they marched right into ‘ground zero.’ later, some vomited uncontrollably and bled from every orifice of their bodies. days after, their hair came out when they combed it. they were young, most of them, and their lives would be short. years later, their records were shredded and their sacrifices unacknowledged.”
“while children in the rest of the nation were being taught to ‘duck’n'cover’ to guard against exposure to an atomic blast, government officials and scientists actually encouraged the utah locals who were immediately downwind from the one hundred plus nuclear blasts they conducted to go outside and watch. they could ‘witness a moment in history.’”
“cancer ran rampant in those small towns that were downwind. there were respiratory, neurological, and heart diseases, too, and chronic illnesses that had no diagnosis.”
“you need sophisticated instruments to read the persistent fallout that can still be detected and measured in the attic dust of our homes. although signs and fences mark the no man’s land where biological warfare tests were done, it takes a lab to find the tiny spores of anthrax mixed into the soil.”
“deserts are hard to defend because their local populations are often small, scattered, and desperate for economic advantage. they are no match for big government and its corporate allies with clever lawyers, fat public relations budgets, and professional lobbyists. because the terms and criteria of our public debates over how land is used are ‘practical’ or utilitarian, it is hard to protect ground that offers no obvious other economic benefit. because politicians, policy makers, and the public are not ecologically literate, the connections between what happens in the ‘barren wastelands’ and what shows up in the blood and cells of those who live downwind are also hard to convey.”
sound: BLOODY MURDER/caribou
