American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War

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Description

American Ground Zero is the strange product of one photojournalist’s decade-long commitment, a gripping, courageous selection of portraits and interviews of those whose lives were crossed by radioactive fallout.

For twelve years beginning in 1951, america government conducted above ground testing of nuclear weapons in the deserts of Nevada. For more than four decades it has tried to cover up the human and environmental devastation wrought by this testing. In American Ground Zero, Carole Gallagher has penetrated the veil of official secrecy and anonymity to document the improbable untold story of the Americans whose misfortune it used to be to live downwind of the nuclear detonations – those citizens described in a top-secret Atomic Energy Commission memo as “a low-use segment of the population” – and of civilian workers and military workforce exposed to radiation at the Nevada Test Web site.

The above ground nuclear testing used to be “the most prodigiously reckless program of scientific experimentation in United States history,” Keith Schneider notes in his foreword to the book. Many of its 126 fallout clouds floated across the American West and eastward with radiation levels comparable to those released at Chernobyl. Yet residents of the downwind areas were consistently told that there used to be no danger, and were even encouraged to “participate in a moment of history” by coming out to watch these fallout clouds drifting over their homes.

Abandoning her career as a successful New York photographer, Carole Gallagher moved to Utah in 1983 and spent the next ten years networking among radiation survivors’ groups and finding people willing to be photographed and tell their story. She covered six downwind states in all, including Test Web site workers and atomic veterans. The result is a striking gallery of the undecorated casualties of an undeclared war. Never exploitative, Gallagher’s photographs only rarely convey the subjects’ considerable physical sufferings: as a substitute, they invite the viewer to witness the beauty and value in these odd lives.

Carole Gallagher is a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries and museums world wide. She is currently living in New York City.

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