As I think most people know by now, “Oppenheimer,” the movie, has garnered widespread praise and commentary. I have not seen it. One thing frequently mentioned in relation to the movie was the radiation fallout that occurred as a result of the tests leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima.
Those tests did not stop with the end of the war. Aboveground tests in the USA and around the world continued into the early 1990s. Over 500 of them, according to Wikipedia. What follows is a kind of sidebar, a footnote if you will, to one possible consequence of the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada during the 1950s. It’s an excerpt from my book, “The Winding Road: My Journey Through Life and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”
To put the excerpt in context, during the late 1970s and early 80s, I tried to get several projects made into movies and/or TV series. This was one of them.
Finally, there was the story of Butch Bordoli. It was first told to me by a friend who’d been born in Nevada and had firsthand knowledge about the effects of the above-ground nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s.
Butch was just 7½ years old when he died on October 24th, 1956, at a hospital in Reno, Nevada. Officially, the cause of his death was leukemia, a diagnosis that had only been made earlier that month. His illness first appeared in 1953 following the Upshot-Knothole series of above-ground tests of atomic bombs while he and his parents lived on their ranch near Ely, Nevada, a small town about 250 miles east of Fallon, NV, where my ex-wife and I had spent part of our honeymoon. Almost immediately after the tests, he started getting sick. At first, there were terrible leg cramps. Then a constant fever and stomach cramps. Nose bleeding. A diagnosis of appendicitis and a pill. Another of a virus. A pill for his bleeding nose. A doctor suggested arch supports for his shoes. Butch could only drink milk by then, and his fever was over 101°. And then he was dead.
Few doctors in Nevada knew anything about radiation disease, much less had been told that they might expect to see cases of radiation poisoning in their practice. Neither the Truman nor the Eisenhower administrations wanted to warn anyone that they would be affected by the above-ground tests. So, when they said that there would be little effect, no one noticed that they didn’t say that there would be no effect, and no one thought to ask, “Could that be me?” And in fact, it is not a certainty that Butch died because of exposure to radioactive fallout. But, on the other hand, no one ever had another plausible alternative. The federal government steadfastly refused to admit that it was possible. To recognize the possibility might mean there might be some liability, some responsibility for having caused his death. It wasn’t because they had intentionally killed Butch, but because his anonymous death served a larger, greater, more important purpose than his life, present or future. Butch’s life may have been precious, but when it came down to it, not all that precious to anyone except those who loved him.
In the 1950s, both Democratic and Republican presidents decided that the deaths of some American civilians were a necessary cost of the Cold War. They just didn’t want to say that to any American, much less the most likely sacrificial lambs. It was only in the mid-’80s, after the courts and then Congress decided and/or admitted that there really was culpability, that some grudging admission of liability and accountability was offered.
There was nothing new about this behavior, this unwillingness to level with the American people. We’ve seen it repeatedly by presidents of both parties. This is particularly true when it comes to things like war. We were lied to by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon about Vietnam and George Bush 43 about Iraq and Afghanistan. Even Barak Obama doesn’t escape unscathed. As for Donald Trump, the real difficulty was always trying to figure out what he didn’t lie about. We are poorly served by so many of our national leaders regardless of party. By letting them get away with it over and over again, we are also to blame. Their lies have cost us dearly. Thousands of lives were lost, trillions of dollars wasted. Perhaps you’d prefer a softer word. Why is it easier to lie than to tell the truth? Do we prefer to be lied to? It can be much easier to accept the lie rather than deal with the inevitable complexity of the truth.
By the way, the Butch Bordoli film never got made. I don’t know why. Some “important” people in Hollywood were very interested over several years. There were meetings and discussions, telephone calls, and other things that happen in the preliminary stages of a Hollywood project. But, still, it never quite got over some invisible threshold.
At lunch one day many years later, I asked another friend who was working for a talent agency why none of these projects made any real headway. She said she didn’t know. She always thought they were good projects, all of them. Maybe it was timing, or because my agent didn’t have enough clout despite or because he was the son of Nat Weiss, the head of William Morris’s movie department. Could it be that I wasn’t a good enough writer? Or because I lived in New York? My personal favorite: An absence of four-leaf clovers.
“The Winding Road: My Journey Through Life and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” can be ordered online or through your local bookstore.
You have to see the movie. It touches all the moral questions you address -- without providing any welcome answers. Is there any way to avoid sacrificing innocents for a greater good?