The Day We Bombed Utah

You want a good book about a government conspiracy against its own citizens? Look no further! John Fuller leaves nothing out. The Day We Bombed Utah instantly found its way to the favorite section of my nonfiction bookshelf. Detailed, captivating, and unrepentant, this edge-of-your-seat story of injustice and negligence is the history they don't want you to know about. Fantastic.

I grew up in the area, my dad died of a brain tumor associated with nuclear fallout in Nevada, Classmates and friends in school died of a Leukemia rate 500% higher than national averages. This book also gives relevant dates and times concerning the deaths by eventual cancer of almost everyone involved in the making of "The Conquerors" Staring John Wayne, Agnes Moorehead etc. which was shot on location in So. Utah shortly after the blast and fallout. I read this book in college in Salt Lake in the 70's and it was WIDELY available then. I find it quite odd that it is impossible to find a copy of it in any library or any booksearch I have repeatedly attempted over the course of the last two years. The book also details and suggests fallout patterns from weather anomalies that affected Los Angeles and Las Vegas, that resulted in "smog" advisories for LA way ahead of its truly smoggier years. We used to be notified of blast times and would go upstairs to watch the blast wave spill water out the end of the pool and all the swag lamps swing. Fun Hunh?VERY spooky book and its unavailability spookier.

Read the book years after my own experiences with fall-out in both northern and Southern Utah. Fuller tackles his subject with depth and emotion, caring for the subjects he interviews and writes about. This book was a thin wedge which finally opened the US Government's files on Atomic Testing and the low-level and high-level fall-out we all live with. Particularly liked the way the book begins with an ordinary day or what had become an ordinary event --- the explosion of a nuclear bomb in Nevada. His focus on the little people working in mines, ranches, and local farms. He makes us feel that they are important and that what happened to them is just as important as the election or assasination of a president. I found it quite moving the way the ranchers and sheepmen held out hope that this was an accident and that their government would, of course, do the right thing. Fuller follows these people from the original event (a bomb called Dirty Harry) to the interviews with the Department of Energy, the reports back and forth and the subsequent lawsuits. This is a MUST book because it is this case which led to a ruling by Judge Jenkins that there had been a gross mis-carriage of justice in the original trials because crucial information had been deliberately with-held from the defendants. His ruling in turn led to the Compensation Act which grants some money to surviving victims of a few couties in Utah if they have the right kind of cancer and can prove they were in the area at the time Dirty Harry.