PIPE SPRING Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History

Cold War Background

By the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as two superpowers, each championing opposing ideologies. A continuous pattern of confrontations was set into motion between the "Free World" and "Communist Bloc" that continued to feed on itself. The United States' first use of atomic weapons against the Japanese forever changed the nature of war, challenging later political leaders to keep conflict to conventional, pre-atomic levels. The resulting tension and political posturing between nations is known as the "Cold War." Its effects span three decades, by the reckoning of some historians. [1493] The foreign policy groundwork for the Cold War was laid between the end of World War II and 1952, by which time the United States was vigorously engaged in the above-ground testing of atomic weapons and in supporting the exploration for and mining of uranium sources. Both activities would have significant impact on parts of Utah and Arizona during the early 1950s, not only because of these states' physical proximity to and location downwind of the Nevada Test Site, but because areas within these and other southwestern states became the prime targets of uranium prospectors. The Nevada Test Site is located in south central Nevada, surrounded on three sides by Nellis Air Force Range. Its southern boundary is about 63 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected to office in 1952 and reelected in 1956, led the country during this period. While the early Cold War environment set the political stage for the Korean War, the communist "witch hunts" of the McCarthy era, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war in Viet Nam, this chapter will only address ways in which its effects were experienced in the area of Pipe Spring National Monument during the 1950s. While these effects were arguably only tangential to the everyday management activities of Custodian Heaton, they provide a rather unsettling backdrop to his day-to-day activities, and to those of predominantly Mormon and Indian families in surrounding communities, which is unique to that particular place and time.

In the introduction to Carole Gallagher's American Ground Zero, The Secret Nuclear War, Keith Schneider wrote,

Minutes before the first light of dawn on January 27, 1951, an Air Force B-50 bomber banked left over the juniper and Joshua trees and dropped an atomic bomb on the desert west of Las Vegas. The flash of light awakened ranchers in northern Utah. The concussion shattered windows in Arizona. The radiation swept across America, contaminating the soils of Iowa and Indiana, the coastal bays of New England, and the snows of northern New York.

Thus began the most prodigiously reckless program of scientific experimentation in United States history. Over the next 12 years, the government's nuclear cold warriors detonated 126 atomic bombs into the atmosphere at the 1,350 square-mile Nevada Test Site. Each of the pink clouds that drifted across the flat mesas and forbidden valleys of the atomic proving grounds contained levels of radiation comparable to the amount released after the explosion in 1986 of the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. [1494]

On April 6, 1953, an 11-kiloton atomic bomb nicknamed "Dixie" was dropped from a B-50 bomber onto Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed at the Nevada Test Site. The drop was part of a secret mission, called "Operation Upshot-Knothole." [1495] When Utah sheepherders conducted their spring roundup that year, they found their ewes and lambs with unsightly burns, lesions in their nostrils and mouths, and so sick many could barely stand. At the lambing sheds, ranchers witnessed the births of spindly, pot-bellied lambs that lived only a few hours. Of the 14,000 sheep on the range east of the Nevada Test Site, roughly 4,500 died in May and June of 1953. Convinced that the losses were due to radiation from atomic tests, the ranchers filed suit in Federal District Court in Salt Lake City in 1955, seeking compensation from the federal government. They lost the suit in September 1956. [1496]

It was only in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter ordered the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to make public its operations records that the truth began to emerge about the costs of the country's defense and foreign policies during the Cold War's early years. In 1980, 24 years after the Utah ranchers lost their case, the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce investigated the sheep deaths and concluded the AEC had engaged in a sophisticated scientific cover-up aimed at protecting its testing program. It is only with hindsight that we can now appreciate the grave dangers posed by the testing of atomic weapons in Nevada, particularly to the residents of Utah and Arizona. Representatives of the federal government told everyone that the tests posed no threat to their well being and many people believed them.

The above-ground atomic tests of the 1950s and early 1960s then, along with their more observable effects - tremendous noise, earth-shaking vibrations, unusual cloud formations, and weather changes - became objects of curiosity, something to be noticed or written about in one's daily journal, as well as a completely novel topic of conversation. During these years, Custodian Heaton gives us just a glimpse of what it must have been like to live on the Arizona Strip at that time through his faithful daily recording in the journal he kept for the monument. What is impossible to gauge is what (if any) level of fear or worry lay beneath the surface of Heaton's observations or those of others like him. Residents of the Arizona Strip went about their daily work of tending crops, minding sheep and cattle, and raising a new generation of children. Such testing would not end until 1963, when tests started being conducted underground.