![]() ![]() The early 1960s were the peak years for building fallout shelters. I clipped the pages of Life magazine and made a scrapbook with pictures of Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and President John F. I remember the Soviet premier threatening to “bury” us. I remember the spooky wail of the Beacon Hill air raid siren every Wednesday at noon. Sixty years ago, I was 8 years old and attending John Muir Elementary School in Seattle’s Mount Baker neighborhood. But unlike a threat like climate change, which is rolling out over decades, nuclear war, he says, “remains capable of destroying human civilization in an afternoon.”Īll this frightening stuff has me feeling scared, but oddly congruent with my younger self. ![]() The threat of nukes is very real, Olson reminds us. During a recent interview on the PBS program The Open Mind, Olson reminded us that not only is the Puget Sound region home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, at Bangor in Kitsap County, but, “All of our current nuclear weapons have plutonium inside them that was made at Hanford.” The site is decommissioned but its legacy lives on, and so do long-term problems with radioactive and chemical contamination.įrom the very beginning, Washington state has been at the center of the creation of nuclear weapons, thanks to the Columbia River, Grand Coulee Dam’s hydropower, and the lonely desert of Eastern Washington where Hanford’s reactors were built to feed the atomic arsenal. dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, the last time a nuke was deployed against people. It was Hanford plutonium that fueled the bomb the U.S. His book, The Apocalypse Factory, details the history of Hanford, the nuclear production complex whose role in the 1940s Manhattan Project was to churn out plutonium for the first atomic bombs. Seattle author Steve Olson knows this well. We would likely be nuked off the map very early in that exchange. For those of us who live in the Northwest, it has also been an unsettling reminder that we live at one of the centers of potential conflict - a ground zero if an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia should erupt. ![]()
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