Report from ground zero - Carole Gallagher, author of 'American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War' - Interview

Common Cause Magazine, Summer, 1993 by Vicki Kemper

Photographer Carole Gallagher left New York to pursue a story most Americans would like to forget.

When the Atomic Energy Commission began exploding nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert in the early 1950s, it described the area's residents -- the farmers and ranchers, schoolchildren and homemakers, Mormons and American Indians who would live under massive fallout clouds, bury their dead livestock and drink radioactive milk -- as "a low-use segment of the population." Such was the official rationale for detonating 126 atmospheric nuclear bombs, some more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some 800 underground nuclear "tests" over a 40-year period.

So it was not surprising that almost all of the hundreds of "downwinders," testsite workers and veterans of atomic blasts interviewed and photographed by photo-journalist Carole Gallagher (pictured opposite) expressed feelings of betrayal, mistrust and anger about their involuntary role in America's nuclear exercises. They and their families have suffered an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, sterility, immune system diseases and painful, untimely deaths.

Gallagher searched for eight years and was turned down by more than 30 publishers before MIT Press agreed to publish American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. Her work was financed by her personal savings and grants from several foundations, including the Columbia Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The result -- in which these "undecorated casualties" tell their own stories, underscored by dramatic black-and-white photographs of their deformed bodies, scarred tissue and courageous faces -- is a powerful chronicle of suffering, deception and the destruction of lives and lands at the hands of the U.S. government.

"Out of this blind silence, a brief whisper of the voices of the living and the dead can be heard rising from these pages," Gallagher writes in the book's prologue. "The nuclear war that claimed their gentle lives is no longer a secret. They leave their memories to us as a warning."

Gallagher spoke with Common Cause Magazine from her home in New York City.

Common Cause: When did you first become interested in the history and the victims of this country's nuclear testing?

Gallagher: When I was a child. I grew up in New York, and we were the obvious ground zero for a first strike from the Soviet Union. I'm a duck-and-cover baby. I was born in 1950, and by the time I was in school people were hysterical about communism and nuclear war. I was very aware as a child that nuclear testing was going on in the West, because there were newsreels about it. And people in my neighborhood would gather at night and talk over the backyard fence about the fallout. So I was sitting in my little army tent doing my little things after dinner, and I would hear that. And it made a big impression on me. This was preschool; that would have been '54 or '55.

Another thing that really made me sensitive to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was 12, and I was educated at a monastery in Brooklyn, and the nuns were cloistered and we were being prepared for the hereafter in a rather strenuous way, especially on that day. We were all looking at the clock waiting for 11 o'clock to happen, when we were supposed to either be blown up or not.

It all sort of congealed in my mind and then went to the back burner for a number of years -- until Three Mile Island happened. I had my suitcase packed; I was going to get in the car and leave at the first sign that the thing had blown. I felt we were being lied to then.

So I think when you have experiences in childhood where you face annihilation in a very blatant way it works on you for the rest of your life. And eventually one wants to cope with the source of that fear, which I did.

Common Cause: When and why did you decide to do the book?

Gallagher: I decided at the end of '81, beginning of '82. I had been a fine arts photographer and had had some success in the art world. But it wasn't deep enough for me, and it wasn't honest enough.

So it was very cathartic for me to change careers to journalism. And it was coupled with this rather obsessive need to find out what happened out there. I was very curious. I wanted to be sure I had the truth of it, but you couldn't have the truth from just reading books. So I went out there.

Common Cause: A lot of people will acknowledge that the government's nuclear testing program represents a dark chapter in our nation's history, but they say there's no point in continuing to talk about it. You obviously feel differently.

Gallagher: What's hidden festers. Ignoring things does not make them go away. This issue ties into a lot of other human issues through history -- a human genocide syndrome: We're going to do what we want no matter who we kill. It's placing the well-being of an entire nation and perhaps the planet on some shadowy ideals. It's less about ideals, I think now, than about money. We actually have a nuclear industry that has metastasized throughout the military and the commercial world.