1. Although whale-hunting and sewerage are considered at length, the environmental impact of twentieth-century militarism is an inexplicably missing topic amongst the forty-two studies that comprise the landmark global audit: B. L. Turner et al. (eds.), The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years, Cambridge 1990.

2. This is the term used by Michael Carricato, the Pentagon's former top environmental official. See Seth Shulman, The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military, Boston 1992, p. 8.

3. Nuclear landscapes, of course, also include parts of the Arctic (Novaya Zemlya and the Aleutians), Western Australia, and the Pacific (the Marshall Islands and Mururoa).

4. Zhores Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, New York 1979; and Boris Komarov, The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union, White Plains 1980.

5. See D. J. Peterson, Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction, a Rand research study, Boulder 1993, pp. 7-10.

6. Ibid., p. 23.

7. Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR, New York 1992, p. 1.

8. Peterson, p. 248. Peterson also quotes Russian fears that western joint ventures and multinational investment may only increase environmental destruction and accelerate the conversion of the ex-USSR, especially Siberia, into a vast "ecological colony" (pp. 254-257).

9. Feshbach and Friendly, pp. 11, 28, and 39.

10. Indeed, their sole citation of environmental degradation in the United States concerns the oyster beds of Chesapeake Bay (ibid., p. 49).

11. Richard Misrach, Violent Legacies: Three Cantos, New York 1992, pp. 38-59, 86. Misrach's interpretation of the pits is controversial. Officially, they are burial sites for animals infected with brucellosis and other stock diseases. Paiute ranchers that I interviewed, however, corroborated the prevalence of mystery deaths and grotesque births.

12. An Irish nationalist who sympathized with the struggle of the Plains Indians, Mooney risked professional ruin by including the Ogalala account of the massacre in his classic The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington 1896, pp. 843-886. The actual photographer was George Trager. See Richard Jensen et al., Eyewitness at Wounded Knee, Lincoln 1991.

13. Richard Misrach, A Photographic Book, San Francisco 1979; and Desert Cantos, Albuquerque 1987.

14. Richard Misrach (with Myriam Weisang Misrach), Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, Baltimore 1990, p. xiv.

15. Misrach, Violent Legacies, pp. 14-37, 83-86.

16. Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction, Cambridge 1989, p. 189 (my emphasis).

17. William Jenkins, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, International Museum of Photography, Rochester 1975.

18. Mark Klett et al., Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, Albuquerque 1984.

19. San Francisco Camerawork, Nuclear Matters, San Francisco 1991.

20. See Adams's own account of how he retouched a famous photograph of Mount Whitney to eliminate a town name from a foreground hill: Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs, Boston 1983, p. 165.

21. Barry Lopez paraphrased by Thomas Southall, "I Wonder What He Saw," from Klett et al., p. 150.

22. Aside from Misrach, see especially Mark Klett, Traces of Eden: Travels in the Desert Southwest, Boston 1986; and Revealing Territory, Albuquerque 1992.

23. Revealingly, a decisive influence on the New Topographics was the surrealist photographer Frederick Sommer. His portraits of the Arizona desert were published in 1944 at the instigation of Max Ernst. See the essay by Mark Haworth-Booth in Lewis Baltz, San Quentin Point, New York 1986.

24. Jan Zita Gover, "Landscapes Ordinary and Extraordinary," Afterimage, December 1983, pp. 7-8.

25. The cold deserts and sagebrush ( Artemisia ) steppes of the Great Basin and the high plateaux are floristic colonies of Central Asia (see Neil West [ed.], Ecosystems of the World 5: Temperate Deserts and Semi-Deserts, Amsterdam 1983), but the physical landscapes are virtually unique (see Graf, W. L. [ed.], Geomorphic Systems of North America, Boulder 1987).

26. It is important to recall that the initial exploration of much of this "last West" occurred only 125 years ago. Cf. Gloria Cline, Exploring the Great Basin, Reno 1963; William Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863, New Haven 1959; and New Lands, New Men, New York 1986.

27. The aeolian processes of the Colorado Plateau have provided valuable insights into the origin of certain Martian landscapes (Julie Laity, "The Colorado Plateau in Planetary Geology Studies," in Graf, pp. 288-297), while the Channeled Scablands of Washington are the closest terrestial equivalent to the great flood channels discovered on Mars in 1972. (See Baker et al., "Columbia and Snake River Plains," in Graf, pp. 403-468.) Finally, the basalt plains and calderas of the Snake River in Idaho are considered the best analogues to the lunar mare (ibid.).

28. There were four topographical and geological surveys afoot in the West between 1867 and 1879. The Survey of the Fortieth Parallel was led by Clarence King, the Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian was under the command of Lieutenant George Wheeler, the Survey of the Territories was directed by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, and the Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region was led by John Wesley Powell. They produced 116 scientific publications, including such masterpieces as Clarence Dutton, Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon, Washington 1873; Grove Karl Gilbert, Report on the Geology of the Henry Mountains, Washington 1877; and John Wesley Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West, Washington 1873. John McPhee has recently repeated King's survey of the fortieth parallel (now Interstate 80) in his four-volume "cross-section of human and geological time": Annals of the Former World, New York, 1980-1993.

29. Cf. R. J. Chorley, A. J. Dunn and R. P. Beckinsale, The History of the Study of Landforms, Volume I: Geomorphology before Davis, London 1964, pp. 469-621; and Baker et al.

30. Stephen Pyne, Grove Karl Gilbert, Austin 1980, p. 81. (He is referring specifically to the renowned geologist, Clarence Dutton, another member of the Powell survey.)

31. Ann-Sargent Wooster, "Reading the American Landscape," Afterimage, March 1982, pp. 6-8.

32. Consider "relapsing chasms," "wilted, drooping faces," "waving cones of the Uinkaret," and so on. See Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, Boston 1954, chapter 2.

33. Ibid., chapter 3. The ironic legacy of Powell's Report was the eventual formation of a federal Reclamation Agency that became the handmaiden of a western powerstructure commanded by the utility monopolies and corporate agriculture.

34. Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, Boston 1993.

35. Peter Goin, Nuclear Landscapes, Baltimore 1991; and Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, New York 1987. See also Patrick Nagatani, Nuclear Enchantment, Albuquerque 1990; John Hooton, Nuclear Heartlands, 1988; and Jim Lerager, In the Shadow of the Cloud, 1988. Comparable work by independent filmmakers includes John Else, The Day after Trinity (1981); Dennis O'Rouke, Half-Life (1985); and Robert Stone, Radio Bikini (1988).

36. Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus, New York 1938; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Boston 1941; Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, New York 1937.

37. Gallagher, p. xxiii.

38. Ibid., p. xxxii.

39. Israel Torres and Robert Carter, quoted in ibid., pp. 61-62. Gallagher encountered the story about the charred human guinea pigs (prisoners?) ''again and again from men who participated in shot Hood" (p. 62).

40. Delayne Evans, quoted in ibid., p. 275.

41. Issac Nelson, quoted in ibid., p. 134.

42. Ina Iverson, quoted in ibid., pp. 141-143. Gallagher points out that molar pregnancies are also "an all too common experience for the native women of the Marshall Islands in the pacific Testing Range after being exposed to the fallout from the detonations of hydrogen bombs" (p. 141).

43. Jay Truman, quoted in ibid., p. 308.

44. The literature is overwhelming. See House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, 96th Congress, 2nd session, August 1980; Thomas Saffer and Orville Kelly, Countdown Zero, New York 1982; John Fuller, The Day We Bombed Utah: America's Most Lethal Secret, New York 1984; Richard Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing, New York 1986; Howard Ball, Justice Downwind: America's Atomic Testing Program in the 1950s, New York 1986; A. Costandina Titus, Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and Atomic Politics, Reno 1986; and Philip Fradkin, Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy, Tucson 1989.

45. Gallagher, pp. xxxi-xxxii.

46. Fradkin, p. 57; Peterson, pp. 203 and 230 (fn. 49).

47. See "From the Editors," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1990, p. 2.

48. Colonel Langdon Harrison, quoted in Gallagher, p. 97.

49. Peterson, p. 204; see also Feshbach and Friendly, pp. 238-239.

50. See my "French Kisses and Virtual Nukes," in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 7(1), March 1996.

51. Cf. Kealy Davidson, "The Virtual Bomb," Mother Jones, March/April 1995; Jacqueline Cabasso and John Burroughs, "End run around the NPT," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September-October 1995; and Jonathan Weissman, "New Mission for the National Labs," Science, 6 October 1995. On protest plans: interview with Las Vegas Catholic workers, May 1997.

52. See Tracey Panek, "Life at Iosepa, Utah's Polynesian Colony," Utah Historical Quarterly; and Donald Rosenberg, "Iosepa," talk given on centennial, Salt Lake City, 27 August 1989 (special collections, University of Utah library).

53. Ronald Bateman, "Goshute Uprising of 1918," Deep Creek Reflections, pp. 367-370.

54. Barton Bernstein, "Churchill's Secret Biological Weapons," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February 1987.

55. See Ann LoLordo, "Germ Warfare Test Subjects," (first appeared in Baltimore Sun ), reprinted in Las Vegas Review-Journal, 29 August 1994; and Lee Davidson, "Cold War Weapons Testing," Deseret News, 22 December 1994.

56. Lee Davidson, "Lethal Breeze," Deseret News, 5 June 1994.

57. For fuller accounts, see Jeanne McDermott, The Killing Winds, New York 1987; and Charles Piller and Keith Yamamoto, Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies, New York 1988.

58. Steve Erickson, Downwinders, Inc., interviewed September, November 1992 and January 1993.

59. Downwinders, Inc. v. Cheney and Stone, Civil No. 91-C-681j, United States Court, District of Utah, Central Division.

60. Erickson refers to information revealed in December 1990 by Ted Jacobs, chief counsel to the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer and Monetary Affairs.

61. Interviews with Steve Erickson and Cindy King (Sierra Club), Salt Lake City, October 1996.

62. Ibid.

63. Schulman, p. 7.

64. The estimate is from figures in Schulman, appendix B.

65. Interview with Triana Silton, September 1992.

66. Interview with Chip Ward, Grantsville, Utah, October 1996.

67. For a description of the WDHIA and its natural setting, see Barry Wolomon, "Geologic Hazards and Land-use Planning for Tooele Valley and the Western Desert Hazardous Industrial Area," Utah Geological Survey, Survey Notes, November 1994.

68. Jim Wolf, "Does N-Waste Firm Pay Enough to Utah?" Salt Lake Tribune, 10 January 1997.

69. Ralph Vartabedian, "Start-Up of Incinerator is Assailed," Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1996.

70. Lee Davidson, "An Accident at TAD Could Be Lethal," Deseret News, 23 May 1989; and Lee Siegel, "Burn Foes Fear Outbreak of Gulf War Ills," Salt Lake Tribune, 12 January 1997.

71. Joseph Bauman, "Former Tooele Manager Calls Plant Unsafe," Deseret News, 26 November 1996.

72. West Desert Healthy Environment Alliance, The Grantsville Community's Health: A Citizen Survey, Grantsville 1996; Diane Rutter, "Healing Their Wounds," Catalyst, April 1996. See also "Listen to Cancer Concerns," editorial, Salt Lake Tribune, 6 April 1996.

73. Interview with Chip Ward, Grantsville, Utah, October 1996.

74. Ibid.

75. Interview with Chip Ward, January 1997.

76. James Brooke, "Next Door to Danger, a Booming City," New York Times, 6 October 1996.

77. Interview with Chip Ward, January 1997.