Fact and Fiction in The Bone Seeker
SPOILER ALERT!
This work of fiction is partly inspired by true events. The idea of writing a mystery about ‘black ops’ nuclear testing first came to me as a result of several conversations over the years with people I encountered on three trips. The first was to the Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site or N2S2) in Nye County, Nevada, about 105 kilometres (65 miles) northwest of Las Vegas. The second and subsequent journey was to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, about 3,649 kilometres (2,267 miles) north of Toronto, Canada. The last and most recent was a trip to Alaska.
It was at N2S2, or rather, during my subsequent researches, most particularly in Carole Gallagher’s wonderful work of photojournalism, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, that I learned about America’s ‘Downwinders’; US citizens, Mormons mostly, living in remote hamlets in rural Utah, who were consistently lied to by the US Atomic Energy Commission. These people, who were referred to in a secret AEC memo as a ‘low-use segment of the population’, suffered horrendous after-effects of the above-ground nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1963. Many of the 126 fallout clouds which floated east on the prevailing winds brought with them radiation levels comparable to that at Chernobyl. They led to soaring rates of radiation-associated cancers and birth defects, whose effects are still being felt many decades on. Yet the Downwinders were not only reassured that these clouds were perfectly safe, but encouraged to ‘be part of history’ and watch them from their porches.
In Alaska I first learned about the nuclear tests at Amchitka, a volcanic and tectonically unstable island in the Aleutian chain. The removal of the US Atomic Energy Commission’s nuclear testing programme from the Nevada Test Site to Amchitka was in part a response to the growing public unease with conducting tests near population centres on the US mainland. Though there was no settled population on Amchitka it had been used by local semi-nomadic Aleut people for 2,500 years. Three tests were carried out on Amchitka, the last of which, Cannikin, was detonated in 1971. At five megatons, 385 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, it remains the largest underground test ever conducted by the United States. You can find footage of Cannikin on YouTube. Personally I cannot watch it without a feeling of awe and horror. The blast, which caused the eyes of hundreds of thousands of sea otters to explode and drove the legs of countless seabirds through their bodies as if they were spears, killed millions of marine creatures, triggered landslides and earthquakes and contaminated both the marine and terrestrial environments for decades, possibly for centuries, afterwards. Like the tests in Nevada, it was the subject of government cover-ups.
The horrors of Cannikin effected a sea change in public attitudes which led directly, among other things, to the founding of the environmental organization Greenpeace. (It’s perhaps ironic that Greenpeace is not much loved by Aleutians or Inuit these days.) But secret radiation experiments on human subjects, including pregnant women and schoolboys, without their knowledge or consent, continued throughout the 1970s in, among other places, Nashville, Cincinnati, Chicago and Massachusetts. The AEC was abolished in 1974 and many of its functions devolved to the Department of Energy and in 1993 President Clinton set up the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to report on both the scale of such experiments and the cover-ups which often followed.
Perhaps I am too much of a cynic but, in the face of the evidence, it’s hard not to be. In any case, it wasn’t too big a stretch for me to imagine that, after the public relations disaster that was Cannikin, the United States might move its nuclear testing programme somewhere even more removed from public notice. And where better than to the then almost uninhabited Canadian High Arctic? Canada has always denied conducting nuclear tests on its territories, but it was from the Great Bear Lake in the then Northwest Territories that some of the uranium used in Little Boy was mined, largely by Dene Indians, who were required to carry the uranium ore in sacking bags on their backs, despite the fact that the Canadian government of the time knew full well the impact of radiation on the human body. Later, during the height of the Cold War, the US Air Force stationed eleven Fat Man atomic bombs at a facility in Goose Bay, Labrador, with the full knowledge of the Canadian government, which at the time denied their existence.
For many decades after the Second World War, the American military presence in Arctic Canada was active enough to cause the Canadian government some anxiety. All the same, Canada did not have the resources to go it alone. In its Arctic territories in particular it depended very heavily on US military resources. During the fifties and sixties and beyond, the Canadian and US defence forces often conducted joint operations. Among these was the establishment and operation of the High Arctic Distant Early Warning (DEW) line of radar stations. Is it too fanciful to imagine that the pay-off for American military assistance might have been for Canada to facilitate or otherwise support a programme of nuclear testing in its Arctic territories? I don’t think so. And while there is no evidence to suggest this actually happened, it makes for a rich vein of imaginative possibility.
In using the United States’ nuclear testing programme as a stepping-off point for this mystery it is not my intention to single out that country, or any other, for opprobrium. Most – if not all – nuclear nations acted in a manner that with hindsight could be construed as highly irresponsible. Nor do I wish to ignore the Cold War context or the fact that, since the Second World War, we have managed to avoid all-out nuclear conflict. Finally, I am not trying to claim that Inuit are innocent of violence or in some way more ‘peaceable’ than those of us living in the south, which both their history and the current statistics on violent crime in the Arctic suggest they are certainly not. But neither will I forget the conversation I shared, late one summer night, in Grise Fiord, the most northerly permanently inhabited place on the American continent, with one of the Inuit elders who had seen pictures of the atomic explosions on a newsreel brought up by the annual supply ship in the early 1960s. ‘Of course I knew about the war,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t until I saw those mushroom clouds that I realized that human beings were capable of anything.’
The Bone Seeker: An Edie Kiglatuk Mystery (Edie Kiglatuk Mysteries) Page 35