Carole Gallagher, Conifer, Colorado, first began her odyssey on the nuclear trail on March 28, 1979, the day of the Three Mile Island accident. Noting beads of sweat on the brow of Walter Cronkite as he reported on it, she packed her car, ready to travel far from the potential plume that could soon have enveloped her home town, New York City.
Shortly after that, she began research on the effects of atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada, which had been an interest since childhood “duck and cover” maneuvers at her grammar school in the 1950s. Wondering what really happened to people downwind of the Nevada Test Site, she began research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York with a library pass supplied by a doctor who taught there. Recently declassified documents from the Atomic Energy Commission revealed that federal authorities considered those people “a low-use segment of the population,” much the same as test site workers and atomic veterans exposed at close range to nuclear bombs as they detonated in the open air. Abandoning her life as a successful photographer and writer, she moved from downtown Manhattan to southern Utah, a spot considered most damaged by fallout, to observe and document what she called “American Ground Zero.”
After a dozen years on the road, based in Utah, “American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War” was published by The MIT Press. A slightly abridged paperback edition was published by Random House the next year, thanks to Harold Evans, “as a personal act of conscience.” There was a companion traveling exhibition of this documentary organized by the International Center of Photography in New York with seven venues nationally and numerous others abroad.
Gallagher has been working on book projects concerning the environmental destructiveness of war in the Persian Gulf (1991), another on nuclear testing in the West, and monographs on similar issues connecting health with environmental pollution.
www.americangroundzero.blogspot.com
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