A term referring to individuals and communities who are exposed to
radioactive contamination or nuclear fallout from atmospheric or underground
nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear accidents.
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Back in Utah, siblings three, four, and five were added, brother #2 in
1954, one of 4.075 million; sister #2 in 1956, one of 4.218 million; and
brother #3 in 1961, one of 4.3 million. It is enlightening to map these years
onto a Margaret Sanger time line and plot out just when medically prescribed
birth control became legal but that also is not relevant to this story. Not all of us kids remember
life in cold war Utah with the same degree of clarity, but my “Irish twin”
verifies most of my recollections.
Our elementary school did hold bomb drills where all students marched down to the crawl space beneath the school to sit in the dirt until we
heard the “all clear.” We all carried a Clorox bottle full of water, empty of chemical but
not rinsed before it was filled. We never had to drink. The water
was saved for the real thing. Perhaps all those bottles still sit, lined up in rows, underneath the floors of old
schools.
At the State Fair, we wandered through bomb shelter models, and when my dad filled out a form, the salesman came and talked to us in our living room. Bomb shelter walls could be made of 5 inches of lead or 3 feet of concrete. Surprisingly there were no doors on fallout shelters, only long L-shaped entries as radiation could not turn corners, could only travel in straight lines. My dad’s engineering logic kicked in and he decided that if a bomb really hit and we didn’t die from the explosion, the radiation would be the least of our problems. We did not build a shelter. What we didn’t understand was that radiation from the Atomic testing in Nevada was already routinely drifting overhead, settling down over Utah cities, farms, and livestock. We were already downwinders.
At the State Fair, we wandered through bomb shelter models, and when my dad filled out a form, the salesman came and talked to us in our living room. Bomb shelter walls could be made of 5 inches of lead or 3 feet of concrete. Surprisingly there were no doors on fallout shelters, only long L-shaped entries as radiation could not turn corners, could only travel in straight lines. My dad’s engineering logic kicked in and he decided that if a bomb really hit and we didn’t die from the explosion, the radiation would be the least of our problems. We did not build a shelter. What we didn’t understand was that radiation from the Atomic testing in Nevada was already routinely drifting overhead, settling down over Utah cities, farms, and livestock. We were already downwinders.