Wind, Radioactivity, and the Subversive Nature of Atmosphere at Los Alamos

• In Event: Settler Ecologies, “Natural Resources,” and Unruly Responses to Extraction

Abstract

Albeit overlooked by historians, one of the earliest empirical tests to study the upper atmosphere took place in northern New Mexico, where scientists detonated radioactive bombs in Bayo Canyon. By the time the RaLa experiments at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory ended in spring of 1962, researchers had detonated 254 radioactive bombs in service of weapons research and development. Scientists and personnel managing the experiments used the canyon for its distance from Los Alamos, but fallout traveled well beyond federal borders. Researchers tracked clouds and weather to monitor the fallout, detonating bombs when winds were predicted to carry the fallout away from Los Alamos and over Pueblo communities instead. Clouds deposited radioactivity in bodies, water, and soil but disappeared relatively quickly from sight.
Efforts to predict wind complicated boundaries between federal and tribal lands when atmospheric behavior defied scientists’ predictions. Though scientists planned the detonations when winds were predicted to direct fallout over Pueblo communities, the clouds drifted in the wrong direction on multiple occasions, blanketing the highway and town with radioactive dust. Scientists’ inability to predict atmospheric behavior compelled its study while the unprecedented release of radionuclides provided novel ways to map the global atmosphere.

Researchers harnessing wind to distribute radioactivity unevenly contributed to environmental racism at Los Alamos. Their efforts reveal how measuring and controlling air as a natural resource both supported and subverted settler colonial control in the twentieth century. Making air into a natural resource required seeing it as a material rather than an immaterial resource, and as a finite rather than infinite one. Still, the fluid and dynamic nature of the atmosphere subverted efforts to fix the sky in place and undermined territorial jurisdiction. Although modern legislation made air a natural resource, the atmosphere remained interconnected with land in ways that complicated its regulation.

Author

• Alyssa J Kreikemeier, University of New Mexico