The Day We Bombed Utah

This is my father's side of a phone conversation. I asked him about the nuclear tests that occurred in the 1950's just a few miles from his home, specifically timed while the wind was blowing away from Las Vegas - and towards St. George, Utah.

"My boss, Art Crosby, was out looking for uranium [that day], he thought he’d get rich quick. Wave of the future.

"He left his Geiger counter sitting on his desk [at the gas station]. I set it to its lowest setting and the needle just slammed against the stop. I thought I’d broken it. And that was inside. The government came around and gave news conferences telling everyone not to worry...but they also offered to wash everybody’s car.

"I stayed inside. I didn’t go out much those days. The president of Dixie college in those days had been a biology teacher and an outdoors guy, best teacher I ever had, and he took his family out on some mountains like 40 miles closer to ground zero to watch the explosions, get up at 3 o’clock in the morning.

"He died of some type of leukemia, his daughter wrote a book about her family’s problems with various kinds of radioactive related diseases…she tried to have kids and had weird miscarriages. The dad died really young. Her mom died fairly young. Her sister died too. And she could never have a child.

"And then there’s the sheep. Sheep out in the hills eating the grass, it’s fallout. Literally radioactive particles. The sheep would lie down in the dirt, and all over southwestern Utah there were all stories of sheep born with 3 legs and 2 heads, miscarried lambs,

"That was ’54. ’57 through ’59 I was on my mission. When I came back I was in school, driving the truck, on the radio. But from ’59 on I was in school in northern Utah. Moved to California in ’68.

"There were studies that indicated the leukemia was some number of times greater.

"They waited until the wind wasn’t blowing towards Las Vegas.  The population of all of Washington County might have been only 10,000 people, Cedar City even less. Kanab was a town of 2 or 3 thousand people…there’s just nothing. I remember when the state hit a million population. 

"It’s a purely statistical evaluation.

"It was just – not too thick or anything – but definitely dust falling from the sky, collecting on everything, on the roads, on your yard, the garden, everything. Just rinsed it down. We suspected that it was dangerous, but what do you do? You stay inside, try to avoid it.

"I was a little concerned about having kids. You guys turned out to be FAIRLY normal. I did think – I was suspicious – and did what I could to avoid being outside on the days the cloud went over and the few days following. It was like a cloudy day, if you didn’t know what it was…

"It was on the news when they were contemplating having the tests. One of the times I woke up and waited in the west window of the little house upstairs to see if I could see the flash. I saw the flash over the mountain and would feel a little bit of a rumble, an earthquake. It felt like road blasting maybe half a mile away…you’d see the flash and a few seconds you’d hear the noise …about 90 miles away? If you were to drive there by the shortest roads it would be, like, 90 air miles. Las Vegas was only about 50 miles from the site, southeast, and St. George was 90 miles due east.

"So…guinea pigs."