papers.

An Unusual Record of Safety:
Literary Journalism and the Legacy of Atomic Testing.

Lane D. Williams

I. Introduction.
In Utah's great Western Desert, my cousins' family ran a ranch. The land is some of the most barren anywhere. Sagebrush, scorpions and juniper rule. Yet, on one small desert mountain, a quiet spring emerges and small reservoirs were built. By running the water from the highest to the lowest, one family member ran a small electric generator for the ranch house in this remote corner of the American West. Such ingenuity and dedication are typical of small towns in Utah.
I can remember my visits to this old ranch house, where I was frightened of the mice and intimidated by the dusty furniture. I remember the car sickness traveling 60 miles over dirt roads. Yet, swimming in the largest lake and viewing the clear night sky in perfect serenity more than made up for the pain.
Such wonder amid such remoteness exists, but the greatest wonder in that land is neither the serenity nor the clear view. It is the dedication and accomplishment of these good people. Unfortunately, all the federal government ever really seemed to see in this part of the West was a good place "to dump used razor blades." And as for the people, they were simply "a low-use segment of the population."
These attitudes led to one of the greatest American tragedies since World War II and one of the country's least reported. For more than half a decade in the 195 Os, officials of the Atomic Energy Commission conducted open-air nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site spreading fallout, disease and death on thousands of rural residents of Southwestern Utah and Southeastern Nevada.
My relatives were spared the bulk of the fallout, but similar people in communities hardly two hours south were not. They were the victims of what has been described as an undeclared nuclear war.
The title of this paper comes from a 1957 Atomic Energy Commission flyer asking for the cooperation of the residents living in the area near the test site. It said that previous tests had “an unusual record of safety" because of the cooperation of residents. Unusual it was, by any standard.
Two important books that might be called literary journalism focus on this tragedy: John Grant Fuller's 1984 book The Day We Bombed Utah: America's Most Lethal Secret and Philip Fradkin's 1989 book Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy. Without doubt, the stronger work of the two is Fallout. The reporting is better, the writing is stronger and the emotional impact is more lasting.
In this report, I will examine the narratives; their literary and journalistic values. I will look at their place, if deserved, in the growing lexicon of literary journalism. I have concluded that each does, but it is not because of their literary strengths, but because of their journalistic strengths -- particularly Fradkin's piece.
Before this discussion, though, must come more background.
II. The Story.
Beginning in the Spring of 1951, the United States government began to test atomic weapons at the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. Government officials had considered tests far Out in the Pacific, but security concerns from the war in Korea and heightening tensions in Asia convinced planners of the necessity of a continental place to conduct nuclear tests.. . Nevada.
The tests proceeded to an important climax in 1953 with a series called Upshot-Knothole. These tests proceeded with great haste helping the United States become the first nation to build a hydrogen bomb in 1954. Open air tests continued in force through most of 1958, but these 1953 tests remain, in many ways, the central scenes in this historic tragedy.
The initial victims were sheep. The second worst test of the 1953 series, a shot named Nancy, couldn't have come at a worse time for Utah sheep ranchers. Their herds were returning from desolate winter ranges and could only make a few miles each day toward home. Their path headed straight across ground covered with fallout. They literally ate fallout, which collected radioactivity in their thyroid glands. The sheep began to bear strangely deformed, stillborn young, and then the mothers died, too. More than 4,000 sheep died, forcing their owners to the brink of financial ruin. Ranchers sought compensation from the U.S. government, but none ever came despite years of lawsuits.
It was the humans' turn with the worst test, Harry, or "Dirty Harry," as it was called. Fallout from Harry spread extreme levels of radiation across much of Southwestern Utah and neighboring areas in Nevada. Particularly hard hit was St. George, Utah. Leukemia cases began to rise. More cases of mental retardation began to appear.
It was difficult to prove the links between testing and disease. St. George espoused the virtues of hard work and clean living and had one of the lowest cancer rates in the country, but the links between disease and atomic testing were only common sense. The trouble was that the federal government didn't seem to want to see the connection, and these victims suffered in silence until the early 1980s when an important lawsuit pitted these citizens against the federal government. A district judge determined that some of the victims in the suit (though not all) deserved some compensation. This had also happened in the sheep case, but, as in the sheep case, the feds with their ability to obfuscate and hesitate ultimately prevailed on appeal. In the early 1 990s, however, Congress passed a law to reimburse some of the human victims. Fallout, in some small ways, may have been responsible for some of these reparations, and this little-read, powerful book had greater power than its limited initial circulation may indicate.
III. The Books.
The Day We Bombed Utah makes its focus the death of sheep and the subsequent legal maneuverings. It follows in great detail the legal and bureaucratic arguments surrounding these sheep deaths. The deaths and sickness of people is less important in this book, except for the story of the filming of a John Wayne movie called The Conqueror. This movie was filmed following an important nuclear test and apparently led to the deaths of a disproportionate number of the cast and crew from cancer, including John Wayne himself
John Grant Fuller, said Time magazine, really seems to be not one but two writers. One is the writer of a large body of substantial work. The other, to me, is something of a question mark. He is either someone obsessed in a paranoid way about poisons in our environment, looking for the big journalistic scoop. Or, he is a person bent on capitalizing financially on those fears in each of us.
He was born in 1913 and enjoyed a long and varied career until his death in 1990. His peripatetic vita includes two original plays produced on Broadway in the 1950s, a column for Saturday Review, and the production of numerous television documentaries and television comedies including episodes of Candid Camera. He won an Emmy for one of his documentaries, launched one television show, and won a national award from Sigma Delta Chi for another documentary. His writings included one novel and a large body of non-fiction, much of it extremely serious in tone.
But it is here in the non-fiction that the other Fuller seems to emerge. Consider some the titles of his works: We Almost Lost Detroit, (an examination of the dangers of the nuclear power industry), The Poison That Fell from the Sky (a tragic account of Seveso, Italy, which was ravaged by toxic chemicals), Incident at Exeter, Unidentified Flying Objects Over America Today, (about Unidentified Flying Objects in New Hampshire), Are the kids all right? (An analysis of declining standards of young people) 200,000,000 Guinea Pigs: New Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics, and at least one other book about UFOs.
Similarly, this is from the preface to Incident at Exeter:
"I knew that Exeter was only a microcosm, a reflection of a story (the biggest news break in history?) that was taking place or bound to take place in increasing frequency all around the world."
It does say something powerful about a writer when he thinks UFOs are the biggest news story in history. Seems a little bit exaggerated and may cast a wee bit of doubt about his credibility.
The Day We Bombed Utah fits in many ways into the work of both John Fullers. It is filled with good reporting and important analysis about what happened. Yet its message gets shrill.
Ultimately, it is sadly ironic that this prolific, talented man died of the disease most feared by environmental activists, paranoid or otherwise -- cancer.
Philip Fradkin's work Fallout follows the other half of the tragedy, the death of humans. He structures his story as a crime story and follows it to its conclusion in the courts.
Philip Fradkin spent a decade as a reporter assigned to newspapers in California. His work covering the Watts riots for the Los Angeles Times in 1966 garnered him a shared Pulitzer Prize. His writings on the environment gave him two more Pulitzer nominations. He spent four years as a war correspondent in Vietnam and worked as assistant secretary for the California Resources Agency. He has taught writing at both Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. He has written 4t least three other works of non-fiction, all about Western issues. Particularly notable is his 1981 book A River No More, published by Knopf, which focuses on the issues facing the Colorado River.
Fradkin' s first written words in Fallout, following the dedication are, "This was a difficult book to get published." Difficult is an understatement. He told Pacific Sun magazine the work shows the "complete irrationality of the American publishing scene."
In 1981, after an initial examination of the story, he made a tentative proposal to Knopf about the book, and his editor seemed warm to the idea, yet the company rejected a formal, written proposal. For the next year, his agent shopped the story with few leads. Fradkin told Pacific Monthly, "It wasn't an idea that had yet sparked the New York mentality. It was a bunch of remote people out in the desert dying, and [publishers] really weren't very concerned about that."
In 1982, he got a break. The New Yorker agreed to a two-part series about the legal trial unfolding in Salt Lake City involving the fallout. Now, publishers beat a path to his door. He went back to Knopf and the company agreed to publish his final manuscript.
Things again changed. The New Yorker rejected his work after Fradkin submitted the first 1,000 words. They paid a generous kill fee, but the disappointment was real. Following that, Knopf, too rejected his manuscript, following three rewrites. Fradkin told me he believes that Knopf got cold feet after Fuller beat him to the publishing punch, and officials at Knopf were probably looking for an excuse to not publish his work, so executives blamed it on style. Other publishers rejected the work, too, including one who mistook it for a novel.
His manuscript sat on the shelf for several years until a friend convinced him to pick up the quest again. The University of Arizona Press agreed to print it. Despite objections from one of the people in the story, Gordon Dunning, the book came out in 1989 to uniformly positive reviews.
Fradkin made the cover of the Washington Post Book World, which said, his book was a 'meticulously documented report" that has lessons "we ignore at our peril." The San Francisco Chronicle called it "compelling, lucid and a vital contribution to American history . . . unassailable." The Los Angeles Times called it well crafted and well written. Nancy Herington, indexer, said, "Emotionally, I found it difficult to work on this book. It is very powerful and I often had to stop and walk around and just calm myself down." Kirkus Reviews said "this work deserves a wide audience."
Unfortunately, despite the glowing reviews and an appearance on the Today Show, the book did not draw much of an audience. Fradkin says only about 6,000 copies were ever sold, and the money he made failed to cover his expenses. (He describes sales as "spectacularly unsuccessful.") Yet, he felt vindicated from his earlier rejections and felt that his work made a small, but significant contribution. A copy of his book was sent to each member of Congress while they debated whether to compensate the testing victims. The compensation bill passed.
For the sake of the book, in some ways delay was a good thing. Between 1984 and 1989, an appeals court overturned a ruling of a lower court, and the government won its case. A happy ending became a sad ending. The injustice became more clear. Accordingly, the book is more powerful.
IV. Literary qualities.
I looked at two other works on this subject. Howard Ball's 1986 academic work Justice Downwind, and Carole Gallagher's piece of photojournalism American Ground Zero. Gallagher profiles the victims in a beautiful, but poorly documented book. Though both are useful and interesting in their own ways, neither can be, in any meaningful way, classified as literary journalism. Hence, they are not included in this study.
I will examine five elements of literary style in Fallout and The Day We Bombed Utah:
characterization, narrative, foreshadowing, symbolism and irony. Without a doubt, irony is the most powerful element here. We'll save it for last. Then, we'll examine the question of whether these works can be fully categorized as literary journalism.
In the comparisons that follow, it will be clear that I prefer Fradkin's book. Yet, it's unfair to say that Fuller's work is poor. His reporting is solid and much of his story compelling, but the work's flaws are more evident . . . perhaps because it was written in greater haste..
V. Characterization.
Both authors seemed to try to find some central character to tie the works together, but they settle not for a victim or some government planner. Instead, each chooses an attorney. Fuller chooses Dan Bushnell, the sheepmen's attorney, as the most recognizable lead character. Fradkin chooses Tucson attorney Dale Haralson. Neither is elucidated fully. Bushnell emerges as something of a stereotype - the crusading, idealistic attorney. The facts do show some truth in this image because Bushnell tackled the Atomic Energy Commission twice on the same case. Still, we get little true insight into his character and feelings.
Haralson is more well-rounded. He takes the case believing it to be the most important of his career. In the midst of the case, he contracts cancer and feels that it will help him relate to his clients more closely. He does survive. He is a dedicated, detail-oriented lawyer who differs from the secondary attorney, Stewart Udall, a former Secretary of the Interior, in his breadth of detail and understanding of the specifics of the case. Still, Haralson is not a full enough character to carry the story along by himself.
Villainy was, of course, significant in this terrible episode. Both Fradkin and Fuller found the same villain, a mid-level bureaucrat named Gordon Dunning. I found myself wanting to understand more about this person. Fradkin notes that Dunning had an undistinguished background. His master's degree and Ph.D. were both in science education, not nuclear physics or biology, but somehow his work with the Atomic Energy Commission was always the role of lead scientist. When questions were asked, Dunning answered them. When the department's policy needed analysis, Dunning analyzed it. When 'safe" levels of radiation needed development, Dunning developed them. So, it was Dunning whose work ultimately led to the need for a cover-up, and he did much covering himself. With Fuller, Dunning is the scientist who pressures others to follow the AEC line and the scientist who also dismisses the dangers of radioactive iodine to children and sheep. In Fradkin's work, Dunning emerges as a "mystery man" who may have been involved with some sort of intelligence agency.2 Fradkin says:
"One way to survive and prosper within a bureaucracy is to master a complex and important but narrowly focused subject. Dunning did just that. Bosses came and went, but the technician remained. His role was that of advisor, cajoler, interpreter, note taker, and when it became necessary, decision maker."

Dunning was proper, controlled and well dressed, even debonair. The image of a perfect bureaucrat emerges -- professional, competent, faceless and a little frightening. His averageness came to represent to me the capacity each person has to do things with great and terrible consequences.
Who was he? How did he feel about the results? Why did he do what he did? I would love to know. Fradkin reports in his endnotes that Dunning provided detailed responses to his manuscript and offered to speak with him, but Dunning demanded the presence of a third-party. . . an attorney. . . and wanted much of the discussion to be off the record. Fradkin could neither afford an attorney nor had much use for off-the-record remarks, so he declined, using instead Dunning's 60-pages of written responses. This process left some holes in the description of this man's personality. Fradkin's interpretation today is that Dunning was the perfect servant, dedicated to his masters in the atomic world without being able to see the bigger picture, much the way Anthony Hopkins' character was unable to break with his silly loyalty in the movie Remains of the Day.
Of all the ironies in Fradkin' s work, few strike a deeper chord than the ironic twist in Dunning's life. By the time of the trial in the 1980s, Gordon Dunning had contracted cancer -- the disease of nuclear testing. Fradkin has since lost track of Dunning's life.. . he would be in his 80s today if he is still alive. I did a Lexis/Nexis search for him and found no obituaries or anything else recently mentioning his name. This, too, is a powerful lesson of what happens to misdirected loyalty.
If I had written this book, I think I might have chosen a different focus on characters. Instead of directing my focus toward attorneys and the general history, I might have chosen one of the victims and followed his or her story as a background for the events that unfold in court and at the test site. This is what Alex Kotlowitz does in There are no Children Here. By focusing on the lives of two young boys in the Chicago projects, he is able to give insight into the lives of all children who live in urban poverty, and thereby make each plight real. This might have been a powerful device here.
Fracikin says he toyed with that idea, yet he, like Fuller, chose instead to let the court cases be the central events in the text, to let attorneys be the most dominant characters. "I certainly gave it a lot of thought," Fradkin recollects from his home near San Francisco. "I wanted a Greek Chorus effect. I wanted those people to speak as a chorus rather than focusing on an individual. I thought if you spoke that way, they would be more powerful in the aggregate." He chose attorney Haralson because he felt he was the most interesting character of the attorneys.
Characterization is not the biggest strength of either of these pieces. Only a couple of characters emerged so that I could actually feel that I knew them in a real way. Particularly memorable was the story of victims Kent and Jane Whipple. Though we only visit them for a couple of pages, we come to know of his vast courage and her deep pain, thanks to Fradkin's simple details. Part of their story went like this:
"[Kent Whipple] never complained of the pain and took no medication for it. Near the end Whipple called out from his bed at home, 'Jane, help me, help me. It's killing me. It's killing me. Help me.' Jane said, 'I couldn't do anything for him, and it's the first time he asked for help. So I just crawled in bed and put my arms around him and held him, and he slept."

This story did add to the Greek chorus effect, and, for me, provided the most lasting image of the entire story. As it turned out, Kent died of lung cancer and the judge in this case did not feel there was sufficient evidence that fallout had led directly to his death, so his widow was excluded from the judgment that followed the lawsuit.
VI. Narrative.
Both books take the third-person approach to narrative. Both writers begin with anecdotal tales of the effects of the testing, and then progress into the legal, historical and technical details of the stories. (That these works follow contemporary trials makes them current journalism, not history.) Fradkin makes a deliberate and clear attempt at making his work a crime story. The Prologue chapter is called, "The Crime." Both finish with the appeals courts overturning original rulings that had been favorable to the plaintiffs/victims.
Yet, the similarities in many ways end there. Fradkin is skillful in his organization of a complex legal. scientific and historical issue. He makes it easy to follow the lives of the characters. He also is more thorough in his documentation (54 pages of detailed notes versus 2 pages of general notes for Fuller). Fuller's characters, too, get lost in a technical jungle of his own making. He quotes extensively from legal interrogatories and obscure memos without much emotional context or clear description. The story drags. I got lost more than once.
And at the end, Fuller takes on the tone of a preacher. After citing some powerful statistics from the United Nations estimating that more than 80,000 people across the world have died as a direct result of nuclear testing, he starts to preach:
'For the first time in history, man is capable of destroying the planet. All previous political and military thinking is utterly outmoded. Political and military boundaries have become utterly senseless. This universal cloud of deadly isotopes -- formed without a single shot being fired in anger -- has created a challenge that the leaders of the world must meet above all other issues, if there is to be a world at all. No provincial or parochial or nationalistic issue can take precedence over it. It cannot be met with insults or acrimony or saber rattling. If the challenge is not accepted by the world leaders, the bells of the sheep on the winter range -- and the sounds of civilization as a whole -- will never be heard again."

These are significant sentiments, but stated in such a way that even Upton Sinclair might have been proud. It sounds as preachy as The Jungle's conclusion.
Fradkin, on the other hand, was much more subdued in his approach. He calls it leaving the book with a "twanger." In Fallout, he pulls a quote from the opinion of the appeals court that overturned the favorable ruling. The appellate court said, "however erroneous or misguided these deliberations [about the testing] may seem today, it is not the place of the judicial branch to now question them." [Emphasis mine.]
Fradkin asks "whose responsibility was it" to question?
"[The legal doctrine of] sovereign immunity had prevailed, but at a terrible cost. In these times, given this case study and other examples of malfeasance, the government seemed more intent on pursuing its hidden policies than on benefiting its citizens. The disease of deceit was the most verifiable malignancy in these cases, and very few came away from this story without being contaminated."

This terse question and comment affected me deeply. . . That was Fradkin' s intent. He says he tries to leaves his readers with something to think about, to haunt them, and to inspire to further action. "That's always the way I prefer to leave a subject," he says.
VII. Foreshadowing.
John Fuller's best literary device in his book is foreshadowing. Funny, then, how it became the tool of the biggest disappointment in this work, also. The entire first chapter of The Day We Bombed Utah is the story of the tests from the victims' point of view. Particularly noteworthy are the sheepmen herding their animals home from the winter range. The chapter ends with this piece of dramatic foreshadowing of sheep deaths to come:
"One of the adult sheep was standing by the manger, apparently stock still. On closer inspection, Kern found that the sheep's head had dropped down, its muzzle buried in the feed. It remained motionless as he went to it. Then he tried to lift it by the wool on its back. The wool pulled out easily, in an enormous clump. All around its mouth, nose, and ears were large scabby sores. Its hooves were hardened. There were running sores along its back, with large pustules. Standing at the manger like a motionless statue, the sheep was dead."

Fradkin also uses foreshadowing. In fact, his first line is a good example: "Everything that could go wrong with shot Harry went wrong." This sets the scene for the entire book.
Fuller's foreshadowing is also useful as he describes the filming of the John Wayne movie, The Conqueror, describing first how actors thrashed around in radioactive dirt and how giant movie fans carried contaminated dust into their lungs. Then, a few chapters later, we note that three of the four main actors in the story had died of cancer leaving John Wayne alive. He, of course, contracted cancer later and died. At that point, Fuller brings out the statistics of the large proportion -- nearly half-- of the cast and crew who had contracted cancer and the number of those who had subsequently died.
But Fuller missed the mark with foreshadowing elsewhere, sort of like setting a gun on the table in a murder mystery and having no one use it. Through many of the first portions of the book, we learn in great detail of the life of the Sheahan family of the Groom Mine in Nevada. They lived closer than anyone else to the Nevada Test site, where they experienced some of the worst effects of the testing. This piece of foreshadowing then emerges:
"Almost reluctantly [Dan Sheahan] found that he had no other recourse than to file suit against the AEC for the loss of his home and livelihood. But beyond that, he entered another and more important suit. Mrs. Sheahan had developed cancer."

After reading that, I wondered what would happen to the Sheahans. Would they prevail in court? Would Mrs. Sheahan die? I read a few pages. . . and a few more. . . and fmally could stand it no longer. I turned to the index and, unfortunately, found that was the last we ever heard of the Sheahans.3
VIII. Symbolism.
Richard Preston, in his short piece Mountains of Pi shows how the power of symbolism can be a great writing tool. Pi comes to symbolize God, and the computer comes to symbolize the quest for Him and our search for meaning.
These books seemed to have the same potential for symbolism. The Bomb is such an overriding theme in the modern world that I wondered going in how these authors might use its potential for symbolic power. Strangely, neither Fradkin or Fuller seemed to use the Bomb as any kind of symbol. . . not of God's judgment or man's stupidity or anything I could discern.
That was disappointing, but not totally unexpected. The Bomb is so overwhelming an image that, perhaps, the symbolic tone it would take could not be subtle, and, therefore, fall flat from being overwrought. Alex Kotlowitz's scene of poor children chasing a rainbow through the streets of Chicago proves how difficult such a symbolic scene can be to execute. Some have thought the scene was deeply moving, myself included, while others found it too obvious and intentionally sentimental.
When I talked to Fradkin about symbolism, he initially didn't remember any deliberate use of this device in Fallout, until we read the ending together, which talks about the "disease of deceit" being the most evident "malignancy." At that point, he remembered deliberately inserting the symbol of cancer into the narrative. Lying and deceit is the disease that kills governments and kills morality, much like cancer kills people. Other than this, the use of symbolism was limited in these books, a real disappointment.
IX. Irony.
In the last act of Shakespeare's great history Henry V, Shakespeare leaves the battlefield of Henry's miraculous victory at Agincourt and moves, almost strangely, into the quiet courts of France to show Henry wooing Princess Katherine. This scene is, at its heart, a great ironic piece of drama, notes irony scholar D.C. Muecke. All Henry's effort, all his great achievements, were gone in a generation. His son, Henry VI, bumbled. The irony is that Henry's efforts to secure his victories through love, were actually the downfall of the future. Irony adds to the power of Shakespeare. . . and irony in this story adds much to the power Fradkin' s work.
"Irony has a basic corrective function," says Muecke, adding,
"It is like a gyroscope that keeps life on an even keel or straight course, restoring the balance when life is being taken too seriously or, as some tragedies show, not seriously enough, stabilizing the unstable but also destabilizing the excessively stable. Or we might think of it as a sine qua non of life and repeat what Thomas Mann quotes Goethe as saying, 'Irony is that little grain of salt that alone renders the dish palatable', or agree with Kierkegaard that 'as philosophers claim that no true philosophy is possible without doubt, so by the same token one may claim that no authentic human life is possible without irony."

Fradkin says of irony simply, "It is one of my most important tools. I always think that if you understate something, you can be more powerful."
The remarkable ironies of this tale do lead the reader down the path of understanding what a monstrous crime occurred. Fradkin chooses the illustrations carefully. I believe it is his use of the ironic device that raises this book above the simply commonplace in non-fiction.
There's humorous irony.
"Haralson happened to mention what he was working on to his next-door neighbor, whose father, Heinz Haber, had written a children's book entitled The Wait Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom. The book was of little use to Haralson since it did not mention fallout."

Then Fradkin says in his endnotes, with less humor, how the Atomic Energy Commission seriously considered approaching Disney about making a movie about fallout, but this was rejected because it would appear to be too blatant a form of propaganda.
In another humorous irony, Utah experienced a uranium mining boom in the 1950s. Prospectors went around with Geiger counters and some struck it rich. The fallout left high radiation in some areas, and prospectors using Geiger counters tricked others into paying exorbitant prices for worthless claims.
There's direct irony. In a candid meeting among Department of Energy officials in the early 80s, government experts discussed the notion that many federal scientists didn't actually believe that no civilian had been harmed by fallout in the 1950s. Fradkin writes:
'Another PHS [Public Health Service] monitor, Oliver R. Placak, added later at the workshop: You can't underestimate the importance of public relations when you are trying to dump radioactive material on people [the transcript noted laughter at this point], and we worked at it strenuously."

A quarter century earlier, during a debate among the commissioners of the AEC, one commissioner, chemist Willard Libby, said it was a good idea to leave a nuclear test site in Nevada despite the disasters of 1953. Libby said, "people have got to learn to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout."
To that Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss replied, "it is certainly all right, they say, if you don't live next door to it." Strauss added that the fallout clouds tend to go over St. George, "which they apparently always plaster," adding, "I have always been frightened that something would happen which would set us back with the public for a long period of time." His concern is for the program, not the people.
At another meeting, Gordon Dunning told the commission to adopt a radiation exposure standard of 10 roentgens because that amount had not been exceeded. If the commission established a lower standard, then the commission must explain why the standards had been exceeded.
There's tragic irony. The month before the worst tests was cancer awareness month in St. George.
There's moral irony. We find that Strauss himself died of leukemia -- the disease most commonly associated with nuclear fallout.
Fradkin also points out how John D. Lee was executed about a century earlier for his alleged role in a massacre in the hills of Southern Utah not far from St. George. in 1857, President James Buchanan sent federal troops to Utah. In the fear of war. . . much like the fear of war that gripped the United States in 1957. . . Mormon settlers and Indians fired on a wagon train of Arkansas people crossing the country. More than 100 people were killed in a horrific story of American history. John D. Lee was attorney Stewart Udall' s ancestor.
One other irony goes as follows:
"During the summer of 1950, the 5,470-square-mile Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range northwest of Las Vegas emerged as the favored site. It was a typical slice of the southern portion of the Great Basin, where the first human habitation occurred some 24,000 years ago. The Paiute Indians roamed across the range, leaving behind them the first traces of weapons -- carefully honed obsidian arrowheads."

X. Is it Literary Journalism?
Are these works part of the trend of literary journalism? Well, yes and no. Let me explain.
Some reasons why not: Tom Wolfe speaks of New Journalism as something on the edge of the writing profession . . . writing in ways no journalist has before. Without question, neither has writing that fits this category, though the books do break important historical ground.
A second notion is that literary journalism tends to focus on ordinary people. This is true here, but both works, particularly Fuller's, go more toward the broader legal issues and, issues of character get left behind. Similarly, symbolism isn't too strong.
A trouble with literary journalism, however, is that no one really has a definition for it that everyone can agree on. Still, most know when they see it. (Some say it is equally difficult to define a novel.) Perhaps so. Given this, would these works be judged as grand examples of literary journalism? Frankly, no.
Many elements of literary journalism, however, show themselves in Fallout, and to a lesser extent in The Day We Bombed Utah. Fallout is a compelling piece of journalism and research. The work is clearly as accurate as one could expect from a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist.
Immersion, another vital part of literary journalism, occurred in aspects of the trial.
As seen in the conclusions of both books, each author has a clear, noticeable voice.
From these three points alone, these books can and should find a corner in the growing industry of literary journalism.
It is, ultimately, unfair to judge these works solely as literary journalism, however. Did Fradkin deliberately set out to write such a work? "Definitely not," he says, "I wrote the book to fit the material." (Fradkin knows the genre well; having used Norman Sims as a text in an advanced writing course he has taught at Berkeley.) The material, he notes, is far more important than any literary concern. His only important literary genre, he said, was non-fiction. Writing non-fiction to him, ultimately, doesn't consist of one school or another. it consists of being fair, accurate, clear and interesting. in these, Fradkin succeeds admirably.
Alexander SoLzhenitsyn, in his Nobel Prize lecture delivered in abstentia in 1970 said,
"Who will give mankind one single system for reading its instruments, both for wrongdoing and for doing good, for the intolerable and the tolerable as they are distinguished from each other today? Who will make clear for mankind what is really oppressive and unbearable and what, for being so near, rubs us raw--and thus direct our anger against what is in fact terrible and not merely near at hand? Who is capable of extending such an understanding across the boundaries of his own personal experience?. . . Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are all powerless. But, happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature."

This is the realm of the journalist in literary journalism. Without a doubt, Fradkin, particularly, and Fuller, to some extent, play this role, and this role is how these works best fit cleanly into the category of literary journalism.
XI. Conclusion.
There is a school of thought that goes something like this: "We won the Cold War because we had a credible deterrent. That credible threat of nuclear confrontation kept the peace for more than four decades." You can accept that as truth or not. Part of me does. . . another part wonders if peace is slightly more complicated. Yet, the facts remain, peace survived between the United States and the Soviet Union and nuclear war remained only a grim possibility. The pain of these people in the Southwçst played a very real role in that, and there is a debt of gratitude to pay. Fradkin and Fuller have helped to pay part of that debt.
Fradkin's work was, as he said, disappointing in its lack of popularity, yet Solzhenitsyn would be proud. In his speech in the 1970s, he concludes with a Russian proverb applicable to this impressive effort. "One word of Truth outweighs the world."


Bibliography
Ball, Howard, Justice Downwind: America's Atomic Testing Program in the 1950's, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Contemporary American Authors, Volume 107, article about Philip Fradkin, volume 133, obituary about John Grant Fuller, and New Revision Series vol. 2.

"Fallout': The Book No One Wanted to Publish." Cover story from Pacfic Sun magazine, August 11, 1989.

Fradkin, Philip L,. Fallout: an American Nuclear Tragedy, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, c1989.

Fuller, John Grant, incident at Exeter; the Story of Unidentified Flying Objects over America Today, New York, Pumam [1966].

Fuller, John Grant, The Day we Bombed Utah . America's Most Lethal Secret, New York : New American Library, ci 984.

Gallagher, Carole, American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, ci 993.

Hersey, John, The Writer's Craft, edited by John Hersey, 1st ed., New York, Knopf [ci 974] This contains several essays and excerpts about writing, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn 's Nobel Lecture.

Interview with Philip Fradkin.

Kotlowitz, Alex, There are no children here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America, 1st ed., New York : Doubleday, c 1991.

Lexis/Nexis search for Gordon Dunning.

Literary journalism : A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction / edited and with an introduction by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, 1St ed., New York : Ballantine Books, ci 995. Including The Mountains of Pi,

Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century / edited by Norman Sims, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Muecke, D. C. (Douglas Cohn), Irony and the ironic, 2nd ed., London ; New York : Methuen, 1982. Richard Preston.

Selected Reviews courtesy of Philip Fradkin.

Wolfe, Tom, The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson., 1st ed., New York, Harper & Row 1973.



Notes:
1-This comes from Carole Gallagher's book. She lists no source for the second quote. I was unable to confirm it in other documents either.
2-Dunning sent Philip Fradkin some 60 pages of notes about the manuscript of this text. It is interesting to note that Fradkin did not change this text. . . evidently because Dunning does not argue this point at all. Perhaps he was a part of the intelligence hierarchy.
3-Fradkin also leaves us hanging at this point in the Sheahan's story as well. He, however, didn't build them up nearly so much, so the disappointment is less visible.