Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves
The city of Reno is debating whether to become a "nuclear free zone." Remember in the 1980s when, one after the other, cities and counties in the San Francisco Bay Area declared themselves "nuclear free zones"? It seemed like a good idea until you remembered that the "place the bombs call home," in the immortal words of Tom Robbins, is Nevada.
In those days, the Energy Depart-ment was still exploding atomic bombs in the southern Nevada desert. Now, of course, Nevada wants to get in on the "nuclear free" act. It comes as no surprise. Nevadans have been doing a good job of convincing people that "Nevada is not a wasteland," at least judging by the numbers of Californians flocking here, that we've come to believe our own rhetoric.
Nevada is in a state of denial. The whole debate about nuclear waste makes me wonder what, if anything, we've learned in the half a century of the atomic age. This is also the question at the center of a yearlong program of events on "Nevada in the Nuclear Age," organized by the Nevada Humanities Committee. The short answer, unfortunately, is probably very little.
As we all know, not so long ago, Nevada embraced the Atomic Age. Michon Mackedon, an English teacher at Western Nevada Community College, has investigated the history of the "Shoal" test, an underground nuclear explosion in the desert east of Fallon in 1963. She describes the circus atmosphere that was part of the "Atomic Cafe" culture of the times, which included atomic hairdos and atomic cocktails.
Now in our era of postnuclear ambivalence, we recoil from the notion that our society's legacy will be a danger to the future for millennia. The simplest solution is denial. We don't want to have anything to do with it. It's not our problem. Anyway, how could we presume to know enough to do anything about it?
"How on earth can anyone use present knowledge to say anything about how things will be in 10,000 years?" asked Yale sociology professor Kai Erickson, in a recent "Nevada in the Nuclear Age" lecture. "We do not know. We cannot know. We dare not act as if we do." Therefore, Erickson says we should "do the least we can, leave the waste where we can, as long as we can."
Erickson says the correct attitude to take toward nuclear waste is, "Holy
shit!" The New York Times excised that from an essay he wrote. But Erickson
says, "We must abandon the cool measured language, and erase the words permanent
disposal' from our vocabulary and never use them again."
Michon Mackedon tells a revealing story. A sign was placed at the Shoal site, she says, "to keep it in the eyes of the community in perpetuity." But the sign didn't last. "I've walked all over the site," she says. "If you were to try to find ground zero there's not a clue as to where you should or should not stand.
"There are no repositories of knowledge in the communities," says Mackedon. "We have federal bureaucracies that maintain their repositories of knowledge. And the attitude is: We know what's good for you. We have the knowledge. You don't have the brainpower to assess our knowledge. We will design the programs. We will make the scientific assessments. We will determine your fate.' Unless we reverse the way in which we look at our nuclear events, and look at them as extraordinary, long-term events that require stewardship, not from the federal government, but from the local people who contain the repository of local knowledge, I fear that we're in for some really drastic consequences."
Unfortunately, between theatrical antinuclear protests and impenetrably boring meetings of the high priests of the nuclear technocracy, we have very little in our civic culture that helps us deal with this millennial responsibility. The closest we get is the emergency medical teams in communities near nuclear waste routes, who are getting extra training and equipment, just in case.
What we get, instead, is denial. Activists call for "nuclear free zones" in a state that is already pockmarked with unlicensed nuclear waste sites left by atomic explosions and radioactive dumps. Our governor promotes the "Extraterrestrial Highway," making a side show of the deadly serious, if no longer secret Air Force base at Groom Lake on the test site.
We live in a short-term political world where we are making decisions for millennia. We don't need symbols that will last 10,000 years. They won't last. What we need is a social commitment to create a society that will take responsibility for its holy shit.
In The Temptations of St. Ed and Brother S, Frank Bergon's novel about a hermitage downwind of the test site, St. Ed concludes that, "faith in eternal time had to undergird spiritual communities in the postnuclear age. Our choice is simple: to have faith in the mushroom cloud or in the Cloud of Unknowing. The business of the world is our business. We will choose the Cloud of Unknowing -- in this world."
That seems to be Nevada's answer to the nuclear age. But it's not enough in this postnuclear world.