The Museum of Attempted Suicide

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/08/else.html

 

The Museum of Attempted Suicide

 

In these edgy times, when the possibility of nuclear

war seems a thing of the past, a visit to the Nevada

Test Site should be a requirement for holding public

office in America.

 

By Jon Else

 

August 12, 2004

 

An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and

forgotten on the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat. It is

ugly, and rusting, a big cookie jar from Hell -- yet

it is in some sense America's greatest monument to

hope and clear thinking.

 

That giant safe at the Nevada Test Site is a relic of

an Atomic Energy Commission experiment in 1957

( " Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading " ).

Filled with stocks and bonds, gold and silver, cash

and insurance policies, it confirmed that our official

valuables, contracts and financial instruments, could

survive nuclear war. The test must have seemed like a

good idea at the time, a masterpiece of

steel-and-concrete realpolitik. After all, safes had

tested well -- quite by accident -- at Hiroshima in

1945, when four Mosler vaults in the basement of the

Teikoku Bank near Ground Zero were discovered in the

ruins with their contents miraculously intact. In

fact, American troops entering Hiroshima some weeks

after the bombing, reported hundreds of small safes

resting in the city's ashes.

 

Today at the Nevada Site all that remains of the

vault's reinforced concrete " bank building, " itself

specially constructed for the test, are a few shards

of blasted concrete and a tangle of rusting, arm-thick

steel reinforcing rod, swept back like so many cat's

whiskers in the wind.

 

Just before dawn on June 24 1957, a 37-kiloton fission

bomb, code-named " Priscilla, " was suspended from a

helium balloon about half a mile from where the big

safe stands. In the path of Priscilla's shock wave the

Atomic Energy Commission had built its own tiny

twentieth century city. Priscilla rocked that

mini-civilization in southern Nevada with twice the

explosive force of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.

Its flash -- far brighter than the sun -- was

reflected back off the moon, and soldiers covering

their eyes in trenches two miles away claim they were

able to see the bones in their hands.

 

Domed shelters of 2-inch thick aluminum alloy were

flattened like so many soda pop cans stamped flat on a

job site. The shock wave hammered reinforced concrete

shelters, industrial buildings, cars in an underground

parking garage, community shelters, a railroad

trestle, a 55-ton diesel locomotive, parked airplanes,

dummies in Russian and Chinese protective clothing,

and a man-made pine forest rooted in concrete on the

desert floor. Anesthetized Cheshire pigs in little

protective suits were roasted alive in Priscilla's

thermal pulse. We'll never know for sure but

Priscilla's heat, like that of the Hiroshima bomb,

must have instantly incinerated unsuspecting ravens in

mid-flight. Later that morning, the fallout cloud

drifted eastward, where in the months to come it

mingled with residual radioactive products from other

atmospheric tests and eventually dispersed around the

globe. Today, anyone in the world born after 1957

carries in his or her bones at least a few atoms of

Strontium-90 fallout from Priscilla.

 

In 1957, at about the moment that human

self-extinction first became possible, many

policy-makers already believed all-out nuclear war

with the Soviets to be an inevitability. In fact, some

of those planning the Priscilla shot, and assumedly

curious to discover whether our stock and insurance

certificates could survive it, must have known that

full-scale nuclear war could theoretically end all

life on earth. That year, hardly a decade after the

atomic bomb had been but an exotic laboratory device,

it was already a commodity; Priscilla was just one of

6,744 nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. (The

Soviets had 660.)

 

Here at Frenchman Flat we rehearsed our failed attempt

at global suicide. It would have been a grand,

charismatic gesture, spectacular pornography -- the

human species going out with a great bang, nothing

dreary and plodding like AIDS or global climate

change. It would have been visible throughout the

solar system; and as Priscilla did indeed show, our

valuables, safely locked away, would indeed have

survived us.

 

The Nevada Test Site, a particularly desolate thousand

square miles of the Great Basin, was chosen in 1951

for our nuclear tests partly because it's ringed by

low mountains, naturally shielded from the prying eyes

of the outside world. Today, if you stand amid the

charmless wreckage at Frenchman Flat, another thing is

clear: It is also impossible to see out of the basin;

the place is disconnected from the rest of Nevada,

from America, from civilization itself. It is a

lifeless, humorless, Planet of the Apes location.

These could have been the ruins of a future we stopped

in its tracks -- the ruins of Las Vegas, Vienna, or

Tokyo, your town or my town, bombed back to the Stone

Age.

 

Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four

bombs or six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember

that in 1957, only 12 years after the Trinity test,

the United States was manufacturing ten nuclear bombs

per day, 3000 fission and fusion bombs every year. The

largest in our '57 arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21,

powerful enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujas

or Oaklands) at a pop.

 

Filling that vault with stocks and bonds in 1957 now

seems a surreal gesture of hope, a vain defense

against a future that never happened: Imagine the

survivors -- a hairless, sterilized post-nuclear Adam

and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive feral dogs

that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) --

crawling toward the bank vault in their bloody rags,

trying to remember the combination, praying for their

Chrysler stock, or grandpa's gold watch, or their

Prudential personal liability policies.

 

Or imagine another future, one in which no humans

remain to open the vault. This is the Twelve Monkeys

future in which the global suicide only rehearsed at

the Nevada Test Site in 1957 actually succeeds and no

one mops up the radioactive slop or collects the

insurance -- with only ants and cockroaches left to

puzzle over a warm, blasted vault on the radioactive

sands of what was once Nevada.

 

But cooler heads prevailed. Someone drifting off on a

47-year nap in 1957, when nuclear war seemed

inevitable, might wake today startled to find that

those crimes against the future have so far been held

at bay. Our nuclear arsenal peaked at 30,000 weapons

in 1966, and has stood at about 10,000 for the past

five years. We have -- so far -- spared ourselves that

future, mainly because of the hard work and clear

thinking of two generations of leaders who understood

what the wreckage at Frenchman Flat meant. Give them

credit. Give credit to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Henry

Cabot Lodge for introducing a plan for nuclear

disarmament in 1957, only weeks after the Priscilla

shot; and give credit to JFK for the Atmospheric Test

Ban Treaty; to Richard Nixon for the SALT and ABM

treaties; to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and

Mikhail Gorbachev for negotiating START I and START

II. Give credit to Carter and Ford for signing

strategic arms limitation agreements with Brezhnev.

Give credit to thousands of dissident scientists,

activists and ordinary citizens whose relentless

pressure helped tip the balance away from madness.

Above all, give credit to hundreds of clear thinking

selfless men and women in the U.S. and Russia who

recognized a slippery slope to Hell when they saw one,

and were willing to do the hard work of negotiation

and compromise.

 

The insects and sagebrush have returned to the silent

desert at the Nevada Test Site, and ravens once again

circle above the vault. But the nuclear dog sleeps

with one eye open. Weapons far larger than Priscilla

are on alert today, no more anachronistic than rifles

or anthrax. Twenty miles north of Frenchman Flat, the

tower for " Ice Cap, " a shot put on hold in '92 when

George Herbert Walker Bush suspended American nuclear

testing, still stands patiently ready to receive its

bomb. As mandated in George W. Bush's current " Nuclear

Posture Review, " the Nevada Test Site is today in the

process of ramping up its " ready status " from 2 years

to 18 months.

 

Meanwhile, the United States and 70 other nations

maintain thousands of deeply buried, hardened

underground bunkers for their top military and

civilian officials, a defense against future nuclear

war. This is the Frenchman Flat vault scenario writ

large. And just in case -- after withdrawing support

for the ABM treaty -- the Bush administration is

aggressively pursuing the development of " usable

bunker busters, " the first new generation of nuclear

weapons since the Cold War. On the grounds of the

Nevada Test Site, five miles west of the bank vault,

stands the just finished $100,000,000 Device Assembly

Facility, poised for either the disassembly of weapons

from our stockpile, or for the assembly of new

weapons.

 

In these edgy times, when the possibility of nuclear

war seems a thing of the past, a visit to Frenchman

Flat should be a requirement for holding public office

in America. To stand amid the rusty junk, amid the

ruins of a ghastly future that was turned back --

deliberately and methodically turned back by statesmen

-- is to reach a deep understanding of what is

possible. This is the bone yard of a very bad idea,

recognized for what it was.

 

Copyright C2004 Jon Else

 

This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.

.. What do you think?

 

Jon Else is a documentary cinematographer and director

whose films include Cadillac Desert, Sing Faster, and

The Day After Trinity. He teaches in the Graduate

School of Journalism at the University of California,

Berkeley. Earlier this year, for a new film about

nuclear weapons, he spent several days working at the

Nevada Test Site and so visited, not for the first

time, the vault at Frenchman Flat.