Trinity's Children: Living Along America's Nuclear Highway

Examines nuclear issues residents of the Western U.S. must confront on a daily basis, including Star Wars and the hazards of radioactive waste

Interstate 25 runs 1000 miles from the White Sands Missile Range (and Trinity, the first atomic bomb test site) in New Mexico to the high plains of Wyoming where 50 MX missile silos stand. In between lie numerous military installations and weapons research facilities. Bartimus and McCartney, reporters for the Associated Press, guide us through a stunning landscape in which instruments of massive death and destruction are manufactured and stored. Parts of the area are contaminated with radioactive waste; the authors note that weapons research and production yield four times more waste than commercial power plants. We see New Mexico ranchers who lost their land to the army, a Wyoming ranch wife who is in the forefront of the peace movement and missileers--men and women who work inside the silos--as well as Cheyenne Mountain, nerve center for NORAD, Rocky Flats (where plutonium triggers are made) and laser and Star Wars labs. This is a fascinating glimpse of an unusual intersection of nature and science with civilian and military life. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Eye-opening and evenhanded report by two AP journalists on the history of the nuclear-weapons industry in the Southwest and its effects on its employees and neighbors. The beauty of the high desert and mountains on either side of Interstate 25 as it winds north from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Buffalo, Wyoming, has always served a major function in luring nuclear physicists, supercomputer designers, and aeronautics executives to its thousand-mile stretch. Isolation has, of course, been another great advantage, as laser beams, Stealth Fighters, and hardened tanks play out war games, and as malfunctioning missiles prepare to detonate with only a few ranchers around to complain. Veering away from the moral issues presented by nuclear weapons work itself, Bartimus and McCartney prefer to concentrate on the industry's effects on the environment and the neighbors who share air, land, and water with the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, the nuclear weapons storage facility at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MX missile silos, and other facilities. Ordering their survey geographically from Trinity Site to the missile silos of Wyoming, the authors offer tales of lost ranch land, displaced citizens, poisoned employees, and terrified mothers, but are careful to include thought-provoking responses from within the nuclear industry (scientists, engineers, and commanding officers) as well. Brief descriptions of the latest breakthroughs in SDI research and development astound, but Bartimus and McCartney point out that the villain in this story is, and always has been, secrecy. Brisk, responsible, and wide-ranging work that goes at least part of the way in laying some nuclear secrets bare. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Interstate 25, dubbed "America's Nuclear Highway," runs for 1000 miles from New Mexico, where the first nuclear bomb was tested, to the Wyoming plains, where many of America's intercontinental ballistic missiles are still awaiting launching orders from Washington. In this book, which is both a travelog of the nuclear past and present and a sociological study of the people and places along this highway, the authors, both journalists, go into the homes of the people who work on the bomb or who simply live side by side with bunkers, silos, and the radioactive waste that threatens their health. While this cautionary tale of the continued dangers posed by nuclear weapons is an easy read, it is not superficial and will interest both general readers and nuclear specialists.
- Jennifer Scarlott, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.