ST. GEORGE — Like thousands of Americans across the land, I watched director Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” this past weekend.
The movie portrays the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb.
As an amateur film critic, I marveled at the acting and compelling visual tapestry that Nolan weaves together to tell a very human story.
More important than the film’s technical achievements, however, is the discussion it has engendered in popular culture about the history and ethics of using nuclear weapons.
Most critically, does the movie whitewash history? Did it really happen that way? Indeed it has been argued that “Oppenheimer,” through its simplification of the personalities and relationships it portrayed, does its own whitewashing.
These questions are as important now as at the end of World War II, and their roots go deep into the past of St. George.
“St. George accounts for one-fifth of the cumulative external gamma radiation exposure imposed nationwide upon the public,” writes New Mexico State sociology professor James C. Rice in his article “Atmospheric Atomic Testing in Nevada, Shot Harry, and the Agency of Nature.”
“There was no place in the country hit harder than St. George,” he writes.
He goes on to cite a 1965 U.S. Public Health Service draft report stating that in Iron and Washington counties between 1950 and 1964, “… there was a statistically significant threefold excess of leukemia among those under nineteen years of age and a 1.5-increased risk of leukemia among residents at all ages.”
How did this happen? Professor Rice sat with St. George News July 18 to talk about it.
The Nevada Test Site and Shot Harry
“Oppenheimer” focuses on the Trinity test at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and portrays an ultra-realistic depiction of that critical moment in history.
But after World War II, as the U.S. government and military continued to test nuclear bombs, one of the main testing grounds was at the Nevada Test Site.
The Atomic Energy Commission conducted over 100 atmospheric atomic detonations between 1951 and 1962 at the Nevada Test Site.
“It’s about 135 miles from St. George, as the crow flies,” Rice said. “Established in 1950, testing began in January of 1951.”
The site was far enough in the middle of nowhere, officials believed, that fallout from the tests would never harm the nearby rural towns and farms scattered throughout Nevada and Utah.
“There were indications that things were not going according to plan, that fallout was a little more capricious and unpredictable than they thought,” Rice said.
Those indications manifested most dramatically in 1953, during several tests in Nevada called the Upshot-Knothole series.
And one of those devices tested, called Shot Harry, exploded May 19, 1953. It had 32 kilotons of explosive yield, twice that of the device detonated over Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.
“Fallout basically landed right on St. George,” Rice said. “There’s a lingering controversy about the timeline of Shot Harry landing in St. George. There have been persistent efforts over time to really whitewash this timeline. My article is really an effort to stake out, once and for all, that timeline.
“I think there’s always an institutional effort to try to put the best face forward,” he added. “This article is just an effort to counterbalance that ongoing institutional momentum covering these things up. I think history matters. Getting it right matters.”
Rice’s article is published in the academic journal “The Western Historical Quarterly” and is a chapter in his recently published book, “Downwind of the Atomic State: Atmospheric Testing and the Rise of the Risk State.”
History matters
“I’ve always been a big believer that history is present in, and shapes the present, in ways that we’re simply not aware of,” Rice said. “That history is not just some meaningless academic pursuit. There’s a lot of dynamics and patterns, long-standing patterns, that are worth confronting.”
Rice said that he grew up in St. George and has family that lives here, and that is why he wanted to write his book, which took 10 years to complete.
“I felt it was part of that need to push back. I hate the idea that there are people out there that are trying to simplify, and are continuing the institutional pressure to simplify, complex history. And in that sense totally overlook the imposition upon everyday people,” he said.
This history matters to me because I live in St. George.
And because my grandfather W. George Goold, who I was named after, was at Los Alamos in 1946 and 1947. He was a special agent for the FBI, and his job was conducting security checks on the scientists who worked there.
It’s very likely that my grandfather wrote significant portions of the FBI security file on J. Robert Oppenheimer, which plays a huge role in the movie.
Whether my grandfather took part in the whitewashing of history that Rice speaks of, I’ll never know.
But what I do know is that my grandfather wrote in his autobiography about when Army Gen. Omar N. Bradley, World War II hero and the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a speech at Los Alamos after the United States became the one and only country in the history of the world to use atomic weapons.
Granddad wrote that Bradley expressed his sorrow that men had not learned to live together in peace, and, “He suggested that we return to the simple words of the Master and try to live them so that society could benefit from our scientific knowledge rather than be destroyed by it.”
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