Customer Reviews

The Day We Bombed Utah (Signet)

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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.

a very good book on the lying of the gov in the 50's 60's 70's 80's and on and on

Well written historic view of the damage done during our nuclear testing. A must read for every American.

I haven't read the book yet, but have it. I noticed it didn't have any information related to it, so I am posting information from the dust jacket.

From the inside front flap of the dust jacket:

It was in the early 1950s, a few years after Russia had announced its own atomic bomb, that the Atomic Energy Commission conducted a series of atomic bomb tests in Southwestern Utah and Eastern Nevada--a sparsely populated area inhabited mainly by sheep farmers. Most of the test shots were more powerful than the Hiroshima explosion, and AEC press releases stated plainly that fallout did not constitute a serious hazard outside the test area.

THE DAY WE BOMBED UTAH tells in full, for the first time, the shocking story of these tests--a story of government error and cover-up, and its grim consequences in terms of life and truth.

It tells of government representatives who assured a highly conservative, staunchly patriotic local population that there was no danger at all from the fallout even when newborn lambs emerged deformed and sheep began to die in the thousands.

It tells how the government denied responsibility even as a plague of cancer and leukemia spread through the human inhabitants--a plague that persists to this day.

It tells of the filming of The Conqueror in Utah's radioactive desert sands. All four superstars--John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Dick Powell, and Agnes Morehead--subsequently died of cancer, and nearly one hundred members of the cast and crew contracted cancer, and half of them also died.

It tells how the government and its hired scientists altered or totally suppressed all evidence of guilt in continuing bomb tests and subsequent court trials and investigations--until the facts at last were slowly brought to light by those who refused to let the case die with the victims.

Without sensationalism and with absolute certitude, THE DAY WE BOMBED UTAH tells a story as important as it is unsettling--a story that is a powerful, stinging indictment of government callousness and willingness to sacrifice the safety and lives of American citizens in the supposed interest of national security. It is the riveting, chilling story of one incredible chapter in our nation's history that no reader will ever forget.

This book tells of the atom bomb experiments in the 50's. I don't believe they (the U.S. government) had any idea what radiation was, or underrated it. The blast is what was impressive. The public were invited to watch the detonations.

It has been a long time since I have read the book and am looking for it again in Kindle format. I have the book somewhere in my collection. I believe it also covers how the government started experimenting with radiation by purposely spilling radiation from the Hanford reactor and studying the surrounding animal, human and vegetation for reactions to exposure.