American Ground Zero

American Ground Zero is the extraordinary product of one photojournalist's decade-long commitment, a gripping, courageous collection of portraits and interviews of those whose lives were crossed by radioactive fallout. For twelve years beginning in 1951, the United states government conducted aboveground testing of nuclear weapons in the deserts of Nevada. For more than four decades it has tried to cover up the human and environmental devastation wrought by this testing. In American Ground Zero, Carole Gallagher has penetrated the veil of official secrecy and anonymity to document the incredible untold story of the Americans whose misfortune it was to live downwind of the nuclear detonations - those citizens described in a top-secret Atomic Energy Commission memo as "a low-use segment of the population"--And of civilian workers and military personnel exposed to radiation at the Nevada Test Site. The aboveground nuclear testing was "the. Most prodigiously reckless program of scientific experimentation in United States history," as Keith Schneider notes in his foreword to the book. Many of its 126 fallout clouds floated across the American West and eastward with radiation levels comparable to those released at Chernobyl. Yet residents of the downwind areas were consistently told that there was no danger, and were even encouraged to "participate in a moment of history" by coming out to watch these fallout. Clouds drifting over their homes.