Don't let anyone tell you...

…that nuclear weapons haven’t killed Americans.

Don’t let anyone get away with the implication that the US government hasn’t killed Americans with nuclear weapons on US soil.

Don’t let anyone get away with the implication that the US government hasn’t killed with nuclear weapons those people whose lands they have taken in “trust.” The Diné, whose lands were tainted mining the uranium and whose water tainted. The Marshallese, whose lands were destroyed and who were exposed in Pacific tests.

Nuclear weapons are very much on my mind right now, as this dangerous idea or assertion or implication that I imbibed from textbooks and narrative, as you may have too.

I don’t allege that they dropped bombs on cities intentionally. Nor that real cover-ups exist.

Forgetting is much easier than a cover-up.

Forgetting the people of St. George, UT, the Downwinders. Forgetting those exposed through their work at places like Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, or Los Alamos… or even those whose family members worked there. Or who were unfortunate enough as to live in a town where this occurred.

The destruction wrought by the development, testing, and production of nuclear weapons in the US doesn’t have the same shock of a “pikadon.”1

But is it any less being killed by the weapons to have your life-span shortened? Is it any less being killed by the weapons to die of cancer which they caused over time instead of in that moment? To starve, perhaps, or to have your liver fail or another vital organ?

I say it is not.2

I think we must not forget. Nor must we allow people to imply that the Cold War arms race somehow meant no Americans were killed by nuclear weapons on our soil…

Americans were killed by nuclear weapons on US soil throughout the Cold War and beyond. It was just our own government that did it.


Some recommended reading:


  1. Anglicization of the Japanese word for the flash (pika) boom (don) of a nuclear explosion. And, truly, the horror and harms caused by its use on Japanese people (civilians, soldiers — all of them human lives) should have been horror enough to never do it again… the anticipated horror enough to never do it in the first place. ↩︎

  2. I recently finished Radium Girls, an engaging tale, but one which missteps at the end by noting safety rules put in place for Manhattan project thanks to what they learned from the titular “girls’” case. This struck me as off in two ways. First, the author did not make a necessary comment that the scientists did know about this case and still choose to make the bomb that would kill so may people this way. Second, while she qualified our country’s nuclear weapons production industry wasn’t without safety faults, she didn’t emphasize how harmful it was in the big picture (if not as harmful as radium paint brushes in the mouth). She’s British so I don’t blame her for not knowing. But I do blame us. ↩︎