Of course, that was a hot war for those killed all those years, and as it turns out, a hot war for the desert folks of Nevada.
"County asks help in reclaiming nuclear test sites and vast amount of water" by Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times | November 27, 2009
YUCCA FLAT, Nev. - Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and in some cases directly into aquifers.
Were the war-profiting lies worth it, America?
When testing ended in 1992, the US Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation. During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost as a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage....
Yes, it is a patriotic duty to let your government poison you. And never mind that thumping you here; just the founding father's of my nation rolling around in their graves.
Although the contaminated water is migrating southwest from the high ground of the test site, the Energy Department has no cleanup plans, saying it would be impossible to remove the radioactivity. Instead, its emphasis is on monitoring.... Still, Nevada officials reject the idea that a massive part of their state will be a permanent environmental sacrifice zone.
Was it all worth it, America? Is it?
Access to more water could stoke an economic boom in the area, local officials say. More than a dozen companies want to build solar electric generation plants, but the county cannot allow the projects to go forward without more water, said Gary Hollis, a Nye County commissioner. The problem extends beyond the contamination zone. If too much clean water is pumped out of the ground from adjacent areas, it could accelerate movement of tainted water.
Sounds like you are screwed, Nevada.
When Nye County applied for permits in recent years to pump clean water near the western boundary of the test site, the state engineer denied the application based on protests by the US Energy Department. The department did not cite environmental concerns, perhaps to avoid acknowledging the extent of the Cold War contamination.
Yeah, this is the SAME GOVERNMENT currently "protecting us" from "terrorists?"
One that LIES TO YOUR FACE and then WON'T OWN UP TO IT?
This OPEN TRUTHFUL GOVERNMENT that is CONCEALING THINGS from us?
That is POISONING US THEN and NOW!!!?
Just checking....
Instead, federal officials said the pumping could compromise security at the test site, which is still in use.
Still in use?
“Those waters have been degraded,’’ said Republican state Assemblyman Edwin Goedhart of Nye County, who runs a dairy with 18,000 head of livestock. “That water belongs to the people of Nevada. . . . I look at this as a matter of social economic justice.’’
Are you thirsty?
Long before the Cold War turned the landscape radioactive, the test site was a forbidding place, as empty a spot as any in the country. Creosote and sagebrush covered much of the gravelly terrain, punctuated by soaring mountains and crusty lake beds. In winter, snow covered Pahute Mesa, and wild horses roamed the high country. In 1950, President Truman secretly selected the site for nuclear testing and withdrew the federally owned land from public use.
In early 1951, atomic blasts started lighting up the sky over Las Vegas, then a city of fewer than 50,000. Each of the underground detonations, some as deep as 5,000 feet, vaporized a huge chamber, leaving a cavity filled with radioactive rubble.
Was it all worth it?
About one-third of the tests were conducted directly in aquifers, and others were hundreds or thousands of feet above the water table. Federal scientists say contamination above the aquifers should remain suspended in the perpetually dry soil, a contention that critics say is unproved....
Yeah, it is in the SOIL, AIR, WATER, EVERYWHERE!!!!
That's why government won't own up to it. How much longer are you going to take this s***-hole government lying and killing you, America?
I really wonder where you are sometimes. We are talking YOUR HOMES HERE, not some faraway place filled with "terrorists."
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FLASHBACK:
CENTRAL NEVADA TEST AREA - .... Just why the federal government detonated a bomb here is even more puzzling given that the sprawling Nevada Test Site, about 100 miles to the south, was already set up for nuclear testing.
Philip Coyle, the former test director of the Nevada Test Site, has rarely spoken about the issue, but he does know the answer. It involves a peculiar effort by the federal government to placate one of the wealthiest men in the world. In the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in an all-out nuclear arms race to see who could build and then detonate the biggest weapons - almost a nuclear war by proxy. But in this fight, each side bombed itself.
Every time a big hydrogen bomb was detonated on the Nevada Test Site, the tremors would shake the penthouse suite atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas about 75 miles away and the frayed nerves of its sole resident, multibillionaire Howard Hughes.
"Hughes fronted for CIA covert operations"
See: Howard Hughes : Biography
At the peak of testing, a bomb was going off about every three days.
No wonder the guy was anxious and nervous!
And what did all that do to the environment or the planet?
Before there was a national environmental movement, Hughes became the most unlikely - and no doubt most powerful - opponent of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War.
At the time, Hughes not only controlled the Las Vegas Strip and part of the nation’s oil drilling industry, but also one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft Co. Hughes wrote a rambling letter to President Lyndon B. Johnson, asking him to stop nuclear testing.
It's amazing how sanitized this "news" report is, huh?
And he dispatched aides with envelopes, each containing tens of thousands of dollars in cash, for many of the candidates for the presidency in 1968, according to the authoritative Hughes biography, “Empire.’’
It was long assumed that Hughes’s efforts were ignored. But Coyle said in a recent interview that the Atomic Energy Commission was under so much heat from Hughes, as well as other hotel owners, that the agency ordered the Faultless project to test whether moving big detonations farther away would reduce ground shaking on the Strip. It did not.
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