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Activities: Context Activities Living with the Atomic Bomb: Native Americans and the Postwar Uranium Boom and Nuclear Reactions  Back to Context Activities
The Cold War arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States created a new U.S. need for uranium to be used in the production of nuclear weapons. The Four Corners area of the Southwest, including Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, is rich in uranium, much of it on Navajo lands. Struggling economically after World War II, the Navajo people welcomed the jobs created by a new emphasis on uranium mining. The impact of this Cold War development for these Native Americans and their lands has, however, had devastating effects in the areas of health and environment. A significant number of the men who worked in these mines, most of them Navajos, breathed in uranium dust and were consequently exposed to small but constant amounts of radiation. Many of the mines, in their first years of operation, were very poorly ventilated. The mineworkers, unaware of the dangers, often ate and drank down in the mines. In addition, the men would often arrive at their homes after work coated in uranium dust, exposing their family members to small doses of radiation. Some of the radioactive rocks from the mines were used to rebuild houses in the villages. The mill tailings from the mines entered the local environment, contaminating ground water in the surrounding areas. According to UREO (Uranium and Radiation Education Outreach), today there are nearly 1,100 abandoned uranium mines in this region, with only around 450 having been reclaimed to some extent. Much controversy surrounds the issues associ-ated with uranium mining. Native Americans point out that the government did not tell the Navajos about the dangers of radiation sickness for the men working in the mines and with the tailings. While studies show that cancer rates among the Navajo living near the uranium mine tailings are much higher than the national average, some government studies from the 1980s denied that there was any widespread problem with radiation contamination. Native American writers, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Sherman Alexie, have documented the trouble caused by uranium mining, with many of these pieces collected in American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (2001). Native Americans had other issues to address in the United States. By 1953, Native American unemployment was a major fact of reservation life. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) attempted to solve this problem by persuading large numbers of Indians to relocate into urban areas, using the lure of job training and housing brochures depicting Indian families leading a middle-class life. While the initial response was enthusiastic, within five years 50 percent of those who moved had returned to their reservations. Ironically, as with many other minority groups, Native Americans played important roles in helping to win World War II, only to be relegated to their previous status after the war was over. The story of the Navajo code-talkers is a fascinating one. This top-secret project consisted of Navajo men who joined the Marine Corps to allow their language to act as a code in military communications. Classified information was able to be more readily communicated using the Navajo code-talkers than through previous encryption methods. Windtalkers, a 2002 movie, uses the history of the code-talkers for its underlying story. The story of uranium usage and atomic power in the United States also touches on the cultural paranoia that was evoked by a fear of atomic weapons. As Paul Boyer puts it in By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985), "American culture had been profoundly affected by atomic fear, by a dizzying plethora of atomic panaceas and proposals, and by endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality." The culture of the Cold War, with political adversaries such as the Soviet Union after World War II, and later communist China, convinced much of the American public that a homeland attack was not just a possibility but, indeed, a probability. The arms race became all the more serious after the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and developed the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s. Americans and the world were all too familiar with the destructive power of nuclear weapons after they had been used against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring World War II to an end. American policy on the use of atomic weapons wavered over the decades. Truman vowed never to use them again as a "first strike" weapon; but the Korean War caused reconsideration of this policy. Both Truman and Eisenhower maintained that a major stockpiling of atomic weapons was necessary in the face of an expanding communist threat. The average American's fear of a nuclear attack increased even more when the Soviet Union successfully pulled ahead of the United States in what was the beginning of the "space race" by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Both countries had been improving their ability to launch and control rockets since World War II, and the success of Sputnik added to the fear that a Soviet attack could come from outer space itself. The government and the popular press urged average Americans to construct their own backyard bomb shelters to protect against a nuclear attack. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Life ran articles about shelter designs and described how Americans could seek refuge from falling atomic bombs. Many public and government buildings were designated as nuclear fallout shelters, and schools and civic organizations regularly practiced defensive drills for a possible attack. In "Cultural Aspects of Atomic Anxiety," Alan Filreis suggests that "the bomb generally made mid-century Americans fear more acutely what they always already feared: that things that had been whole in their lives would now split, and that such splitting could not be controlled. Fragmentation was one fear. The loss of control was another. The bomb symbolized the two fears in one." Fragmentation, disjunction, and broken verse were modernist innovations (e.g., the poetry of Gertrude Stein or the visual break-up in cubist paintings); however, the atomic bomb "took cultural or aesthetic aspects of modern life-a 'modernism' that could be safely imagined as something threatening but very far-off or at least contained, in Paris or New York-and seemed now to bring that incoherence dramatically home, or, indeed, into the home." In late 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the edge of an all-out nuclear conflict due to the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union had constructed a number of missile sites within Cuba, allowing for a much quicker first strike against the U.S. mainland. The United States demanded that these weapons be removed, and over the course of thirteen days of threats and negotiations, Americans prepared for a nuclear war. This incident marked perhaps the height of American fears of nuclear annihilation. Just a few years later, movies such as Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Fail-safe (1964) demonstrated how these fears continued to be a part of the culture of the times. Interestingly, the documentary film The Atomic Café (1982) nostalgically explores the world of living with the atomic bomb during the 1950s and 1960s. Questions
[5066] Anonymous, First 29 Navajo U.S. Marine Corps Code-Talker Recruits Being Sworn In at Fort Wingate, NM (n.d.), courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration. The Native American contribution to the Allied victory in World War II cannot be underestimated. Navajo "code-talkers" drew on their native language as a code for military communications; many Navajo words change meaning with their inflections, and to the untrained listener the language is incomprehensible. [5656] Anonymous, Eight Indian Marine Fighters Serving with the Marine Signal Unit (1943), courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. Photograph of Native American soldiers. Despite significant and multifaceted contributions to the war effort, Native Americans continued to be mistreated by the United States government. Many Navajo men, struggling economically after the war, took jobs mining uranium in the 1950s, with no warning about the dangers associated with working in these mines. Writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie have documented the trouble caused by uranium mining. [6467] U.S. Army, Frenchman's Flat, Nev. Atomic Cannon Test (1953), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-117031]. Atomic detonation and resulting fireball. After the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, poets, novelists, and other artists began to explore the ethical issues surrounding the use of such weapons. John Hersey's Hiroshima depicts the horrors of August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. [6635] Skeet McAuley, Fallout Shelter Directions (1984), courtesy of "Sign Language, Contemporary Southwest Native America" Aperture Foundation, Inc. Nuclear weapons have been tested in the Southwest for over half a century. For writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, weapons-testing is not respectful to the natural world and dims humanity's hopes for renewal and regeneration. |
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