UNLV Magazine

Voices from Nevada's Nuclear Past

Story by Erin O'Donnell
Photos courtesy of Lied Library Special Collections

MORE THAN 50 YEARS HAVE PASSED since the first nuclear tests bloomed ominously from the Nevada desert. In that time, more than 100,000 people worked at the Nevada Test Site while thousands more protested its existence and lived with the consequences of being its neighbors.

Mary Palevsky's mission is to make sure all of their stories are heard.

Palevsky directed the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project. The collection includes interview transcripts for more than 150 people on 335 hours of digital audio and video. It's all housed in Special Collections at Lied Library and on a vast multimedia website. The personal stories set the project apart from a traditional historical archive, Palevsky says.

"Our job was not to come up with a definite master narrative. Our job was to give voice to the multiplicity of narratives," she says. "There are many folks whose stories would never be in the historical record without oral history. They're not leading historical figures."

Not in a traditional sense. But to Palevsky and her team of investigators, everyone connected to the site contributed to the history of Cold War nuclear testing, which lasted from 1951 to 1992.

There are the scientists such as Harold Agnew, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which designed nuclear weapons. There are protesters such as Ian Zabarte, a Western Shoshone property owner. There are veterans and downwinders exposed to radiation, some of whom died soon after they were interviewed. There are laborers like miner Hank Peluaga, who got his job in 1957 by proving he was from Winnemucca (outof- state men were not to be hired).

Those are the details Palevsky wanted to hear. "People think you're probably not interested in the color, in the shape, in the subtleties of their experience. We took the time to say, 'Help me understand what that was. What did that look like? How big was it? How far was it? Were you able to talk to your family about your work?' These are the things people will gloss over and summarize for you because we live in such a sound-bite culture."

Grants from the U.S. departments of Energy and Education supported the four-year project. The research conducted in the College of Liberal Arts emphasized the historical and sociological significance of nuclear testing. More than 40 graduate students participated, and the university libraries and department of history were additional partners in the final year of work.

Oral history is a qualitative method of research, Palevsky says. It's not journalism, and it's not mere recording. Palevsky doesn't worry whether someone can remember every name, date, or detail. But she acknowledges that researchers struggle with eliminating their own biases. "The world we're looking at is highly contested and controversial. The urge to figure out who's right and to pass judgment is strong."

That task falls to those who listen to their stories. The verbatim print transcripts and complete audio files were made fully digital to allow students, researchers, and laypeople to browse with ease.

Cory Lampert, digitization project librarian, and her team of five worked with Palevsky and history graduate assistant Leisl Carr Childers for more than two years to organize the huge amounts of data. "The transcript is rich and comprehensive, but when you hear the voices, it connects with your imagination in a different way," Lampert says.

At the opening reception, Lampert says, "it was amazing to see Native Americans, to see scientists, to see people who had been struggling with their health, all together in the same room, maybe for the only time ever."

The group is a living paradox. There is a great sense of pride among those who worked on the nuclear tests — even among those who were eventually sickened by them, Palevsky says. "The conviction that they did absolutely what they needed to do, that they were Cold War patriots — that hasn't gone away. But in addition to that there can be disappointment, and in some cases, anger, about their experiences.

"What comes out in the interviews is that people are subtle, complex, and nuanced in their thinking. They really taught me something not only about the American spirit but about the human spirit."

Fall 2008

Voices from Nevada's Nuclear Past