After watching Oppenheimer in Missile City, WYO

After watching Oppenheimer with my daughter Annie

Storm clouds on the Wyoming horizon looked like giant mushrooms. No surprise as movie scenes roll through our minds. We recall Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Backdrop for the morality play spread before us, a prairie of missiles perched below ground each with a hundred times the killing power of Fat Man and Little Boy sculpted not far from here on a tableland at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. The statistics don’t really matter but I have lived my whole life in the Nuclear Age and so has Annie. The Strontium-90 in my bones will always reveal my origins, child of The Bomb, fallout drifted east to Colorado from desert tests, accidents at Rocky Flats and Hanford, a thousand tiny mistakes. Dr. Oppenheimer, I don’t cheer you as did the delirious nuke workers after Trinity. I don’t curse you. I can’t, father, I simply cannot.

In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

Nukes in the news -- again

Not enough people have seen "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

It's satire, sure, with a concept that a loony nuke base commander could trigger a nuclear war. General Jack D. Ripper is obsessed with Commies poisoning "our precious bodily fluids." His executive officer, a British captain, comes close to derailing the general's plans but, as we all know, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and mega-kiloton atomic warheads.

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Dr. Strangelove's closing lines, sung by Vera Lynn as the Russians' Doomsday Machine causes bombs to go off all over the world.

That's all, folks!

The movie's over. We laugh. Shake our heads. Punch the remote to "Bridgerton."

The premise seemed ridiculous to moviegoers in 1964. It seems ridiculous again. But not quite so. There is an unhinged megalomaniac in Russia threatening to use nukes if the West doesn't stop arming Ukraine. 

"Dr. Strangelove" got its start with a novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George. It's a thriller. I read it as a teen, that and "Fail-Safe," co-written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Also, Nevil Shute's "On the Beach." I read about nuclear Armageddon. It seemed so far-fetched. At the same time, I was reading the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. They sparked my imagination, turning me into a lifelong fan of fiction. Tom Swift's dirigible/biplane hybrid ("Tom Swift and His Airship, or, The Stirring Cruise of the Red Cloud") seemed as real to me as nuke bombers and missiles that could incinerate the planet. I was lost in a fantastic world that I never really grew out of.

At the same time, my father worked on installing Atlas missiles in hardened silos from Washington state to Kansas (Wyoming too). He was a contract specialist, an accountant with Martin Co. (Martin-Marietta). He was charged with making sure that the missiles and their underground homes were built correctly and within budget. We moved around with Dad and his work. I never really thought about how his job might lead to a cataclysm. But he did. He recommended that I watch Strangelove and read World War III novels. He didn't talk much about his work but I know he wanted me to be a reader and an informed citizen. 

Our family got a lot out of the Cold War. It never was a hot war, as some predicted, but it shaped me. 

So now, when Putin mouths off about nukes, I hear General Jack D. Ripper. I should take the guy more seriously as I live in the crosshairs of Nuclear Alley here in southeast Wyoming. If MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) arrives, I will have precious little time to worry about it. I never really stopped worrying nor did I learn to love the bomb. 

I revel in its absurdity.

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

Vera Lynn's singing takes us back to World War II. When Vera sang, British soldiers listened. They were in the fight of their lives around the globe. At home too, as Hitler waged a saturation bombing of a civilian population. Putin now saturates Ukraine with rockets and terror tactics. 

My father, a World War II G.I., liked Vera Lynn. Later, when I had a chance to think about it, I wondered if he minded that Vera Lynn's song had been used for a fiery conflagration that ended the world. He was especially fond of "The White Cliffs of Dover" which he must have heard many times in England as he trained for the Normandy invasion.

This:

There'll be bluebirds over/the White Cliffs of Dover/tomorrow,/just you wait and see

And this:

There'll be love and laughter/and peace there after,/tomorrow,/when the world is free

There may be a song like this for Ukraine. There should be.  

Meadowlarks, cabbage burgers, and Pine Bluffs experiences a nuke boom (the good kind)

So this is Nebraska

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Third stanza of a poem by Ted Kooser of Nebraska, one-time U.S. Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress. To hear him read the poem, prefaced with a short description of why he wrote it, go to  Poetry Foundation. To read in full, go to So this is Nebraska

I heard Kooser read this poem aloud along with other work at a Wyoming Writers, Inc., conference a few years ago. He's a short and unassuming man. You can't say the same adjectives for his poetry. His work tells stories of life in the Great Plains, Nebraska mainly. The poems are simple in construction but you can find worlds in "a meadowlark waiting on every post."

I traveled from Cheyenne to Nebraska last week, my first visit since before Covid-19 struck. It was a short visit. Family visitors who had never been to Nebraska wanted to see it, step foot in a foreign place. I told them Nebraska stories, how Chris and I got trapped in Kimball during a spring blizzard when lightning veined the sky and I skidded through mushy snow a foot deep on I-80 before snagging the last hotel room barely 60 miles from home. I gathered my family one spring break day and met friends from Lincoln in Red Cloud, Nebraska, home of Willa Cather. An odd choice for spring break if you're not an admirer of Cather and her work. But our friends got into the spirit of the day. The kids played in the playground while we toured Cather's old home undergoing restoration (I snagged a 100-year-old board) and poked around the library which checks out books, videos, and cake pans. Chris and I walked the quiet autumn streets of Lincoln, campus lights twinkling in the distance. I remarked that it took a victory by the visiting CU Buffaloes over the Mighty Cornhuskers to bring the silence of a graveyard to the capital city. 

We drove through Pine Bluffs and past the border into Nebraska. "Looks a lot like Wyoming," Eileen said.

We pull off at Bushnell. I glide to a stop on the paved road which probably morphs into a gravel road. Next to the sign for Bushnell (No Services!), with farm equipment clattering down the road, prairie grass waving in the hot wind, I read them Kooser's poem. Looking back, I should have dialed up the poet reading his work. His voice matches the scenery.

I hear traffic zipping down the interstate. Thousands pass this way every day bound for somewhere else. Those who do get off at this interchange take bio breaks and tend to a crying child. No need to seek succor in Bushnell (No Services). Winter winds or weather might cause high-profile vehicles to pull over. But a truck stop is just seven miles away across the border so why stop here? I can easily conjure a winter day near Bushnell because I have experienced them near Torrington and Muddy Gap and Sinclair and Meeteetse. 

But today it is summer and it's beautiful.

We get back in the car and stop for lunch at Sadie's. A big weekend ahead for the town with Texas Trail Days. A parade, rodeo, concerts and a mud volleyball tourney. I order a cabbage burger because I never see that on any restaurant menus. Only time I've eaten one was at Germans-from-Russia events that feature the Dutch Hop Polka. 

We tour the Texas Trail Museum and find out that we just missed the brief stop of UP's rebuilt Big Boy steam locomotive as it began its cross-country travels. We tour the gigantic Virgin Mary statue at the east end of town, and then the archaeological dig site on the way back to Cheyenne.

A school teacher tending the info booth at the rest area tells us that there isn't a single apartment or house to rent or buy in Pine Bluffs. The town expects an influx of workers set to begin the first phase of the renovation of the area's nuke missile sites. This is part of a multi-year $3 billion project to bring our "nuclear deterrent" up to 21st century requirements. Nobody ever talks about the "peace dividend" anymore. That's so late-20th century. Not sure what the nukes can do to help the Afghans about to regress into the 5th century. The Taliban, it seems, are not impressed with our nuclear might lurking in burrows on the prairie.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars, 

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fender off

and settles back to read the clouds.

When your hope shrinks, do a small thing to let the sunshine in

I tried to write a piece about the massacre of 10 innocents at the King Soopers in Boulder. Few subjects make me speechless but mass shootings are one of them. Archivists in 2121 may come across articles about massacres of civilians in the U.S. and thank their lucky stars that sensible gun laws finally were enacted in 20__ and that we would never see headlines like this again. That's as hopeful as I can be, that someday the U.S. will lose its cruel streak and the NRA will be bankrupt and all of our gun nuts will die from natural causes. There's hope in that. I liked these lines from a Naomi Shihab Nye poem I came across on the Poetry Foundation web site: 

When your hope shrinks 

you might feel the hope of 

someone far away lifting you up.

I'll write about the hope of small things. 

I bought a small grow-kit from Amazon. Nothing fancy. Just a metal tray, soil, and three seed packets. The chives and Florence fennel sprouted and are on their way to summer salads and desserts. I stuck some basil seeds in with my pot of Thai basil and still waiting for those. I planted chive seeds from hometownseeds.com but got nothing. I’m going to plant again today in a new pot and see if they do better. I like chives and you can put it in all sorts of dishes. But I can’t get it to grow. Best thing to do is buy some chives that already are far along and try not to kill them.

My herbs have taken over the end of the dining room table up against a south-facing kitchen window. The table is Formica laminate and is a remnant of 1950s kitchens. It’s in the mid-century modern (Mid-Mod) school of furniture. We had tables just like it when I was growing up. A perfect match for mac and cheese and meatloaf. I look at the table and see my mother and all of the many Susie Homemaker mothers of the era. My mom also was Anna the Nurse and knew when and when not to patch up our many wounds. When I was 7, our exchanges went something like this:

Me: Mom, I’m hurt! 

Mom: Are you bleeding?

Me: No but… 

Mom (kisses my head): Go outside and play – you’ll be all right.

Sometimes I was bleeding. She applied Mercurochrome to the wound and sent me outside to play. Writing about “Mercurochrome Memories” in ScienceBlogs, dblum writes that the bright-red antiseptic is a mercury derivative of a red dye discovered in 1889. The antiseptic version was developed 20 years later by researchers at Johns Hopkins, source of many of our magic potions and miracle meds. The FDA declared mercury a neurotoxin and it’s no longer made in the U.S. But never fear:

Science tells us that if once you were painted with Mercurochrome, your body has probably stored at least a trace for you. Nothing apparently too dangerous, just a reminder of your chemical past.

My chemical past. As a Downwinder from Colorado and Washington state, I already have some bomb-blast radiation in my body. And traces of lead paint – can’t forget that. I also have mercury in my dental fillings. And then there’s DDT. Damn, if I had known all this, I wouldn’t have lived to be 70 and (I hope) much longer.

I gave up ground gardening a few years ago when a spinal injury prevented bending and stooping. I grow my veggies in containers now. I’ve been successful although gardening at 6,200 feet in a semi-arid region continues to be a work in progress. My seedlings don’t go outside until mid-May. Most insects aren’t a problem but hail and wind and drought are. I keep growing things because it brings joy and I like the challenge of the cherry tomato harvest in August. You can get good ones at the store or farmer’s market. But I like to pick and eat them when they are still warm from the sun. It’s like eating sunshine. We all could use more of the simple act of nurturing a small thing to "let the sunshine in..."

Cold War nuke site open for visitors on Wyoming’s high prairie

M as in Mike

I as in India

K as in Kilo

E as in Echo

That’s the spelling of my nickname in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the phonetic alphabet. You’ve used it if you have a commonly misspelled name, or if you find yourself on the end of a Mumbai-based IT help line. Help: H as in Hotel, E as …….

The alphabet is helpful but can be crucial in a military operation or if you’re a pilot on an international airline flight.

Or, let’s say the unthinkable happens and you are charged with the launch of a nuclear strike from a hole in the ground beneath the frozen Wyoming prairie. “Attention Quebec Zero One, we have some bad news for you and the rest of the planet….”

It never happened at the Quebec 01 Missile Alert Facility located about 30 minutes north of my house in Cheyenne. Coincidentally, that’s the amount of time it would take from missile launch in Wyoming to detonation in the former Soviet Union. On Friday, I thought about that as we returned from our tour of Q-01, now a Wyoming State Historic Site. Born in 1950, I’ve had nightmares about a nuclear apocalypse. But it’s been awhile since those duck-and-cover drills of elementary school and the very real scare of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

My father worked at Denver-based Martin Company, later Martin-Marietta and now Lockheed Martin. He supervised subcontractors building the earlier iteration of Minuteman and MX sites – Atlas and Titan. He did that job in Colorado and Wyoming and Nebraska and Washington State and Kansas. He dragged his big family along, which gave us a unique view of the western U.S. and fodder for future therapy sessions. 

I was 11 when he arrived home from work in Wichita laden with canned goods and water jugs and commanded us all to get down in the basement. That spooky, musty place was where we were going to ride out the nuke firefight unleashed by the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The fear was real. History provided a better ending, thankfully. We avoided life as cellar dwellers or death as crispy critters. Two years later, we moved to Florida. Dad’s work with nukes was over and he now turned his attention to getting Americans to the moon.

Our family history is part of the fabric of American history. Maybe that’s why I was so anxious to take my visiting sister Eileen to the state’s newest historical site. She loves history, as do I. She is eight years younger than me, so we experienced those times in dramatically different ways.  But, as curious historians, we both know what happened in the world since World War II. The nuclear age began with the twin bombings of Japan that ended World War II. The arms race began between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that many thought would end with M.A.D. – Mutually Assured Destruction. 

The western U.S. played a major role with Los Alamos and the first tests in the New Mexico desert. Many nuke tests followed, their fallout drifting over many cities, including Denver. We were all downwinders. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant was established between Denver and Boulder. Coloradans built plutonium triggers there. It was the site of at least one major accident that created a crop of local downwinders.

According to interpretive exhibits at Quebec 01, the government chose the interior West as hidey holes for its missiles for several reasons: Low population density (more antelope than people}; distant from the coasts and possible Russki nuclear sub strikes; the northern Rockies and Plains were closer to the Arctic Circle, the quickest missile route to Moscow and Red nuke sites. 

B-52s took off from western sites on their way to their fail-safe lines. Many a missileer did stints in the frozen wastelands of Minot and Great Falls and Cheyenne and still do. You can forgive a young airman/woman from Atlanta getting orders for Cheyenne and saying something about going to the middle of nowhere.

But I live there and it’s not so bad. I spent much of my working life touring Wyoming on behalf of the arts. You might be surprised by the art that’s created in this big semi-empty space. The humanities play a major role in our lives. Thus, we spawn some fine state parks and historic sites, even have a state agency to oversee them. Wyoming State Parks and Historic Sites employees staff the sites spread around the state. They are based at Quebec 01 to conduct tours and answer many questions posed by the curious. The site opened just three weeks ago after the feds gifted it to the state in 2010.  Staff say that it was stripped to the bone after being decommissioned in 2005. The Air Force brought back some items. Former missileers, retired airmen, and just plain collectors donated other items, such as the VHS player located next to one of the launch chairs (the TV is no longer there). The space looks fine now but it still a work in progress, according to our guide.

There are entrance fees, as there are at most state sites. If you are disabled and use a wheelchair or a walker as I do, call ahead and staff will deploy ramps over the challenging spots in the underground launch capsule. An elevator takes visitors from the topside facility and its historic exhibits to the capsule. Step off the elevator and pass through the gateway that, back in the day, could be sealed by a 30-ton blast door.

For background, go to https://wyoparks.wyo.gov/index.php/places-to-go/quebec-01. The site includes photos going back to its building in 1962 all the way to the recent renovation.

Our history, and maybe your family’ history, is just a short drive away.

Cheyenne girds its loins for first boom since Hell on Wheels

I am surrounded by nuclear missiles. They lurk in their hidey-holes on the rolling prairie of Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado. I give little thought to them on most days. I sometimes drive past F.E. Warren AFB's main gate and see the three Cold War missiles that greet passers-by. Convoys of missileers pass me on the highway on their way to their `24-hour shifts underground. A recent CBS 60 Minutes piece spoke of the antiquated launch equipment at Warren. This gave me pause, as "antiquated equipment" is not a term you want to associate with our nuke strike force. It's bad enough when films of the 1960s scared us with untoward nuke launches. Col. Jack D. Ripper went a little funny in the head and plunged us into a celluloid Armageddon. While the fail-proof fail safe system showed its flaws, our bomber crews carried out their mission. And the Russkis Doomsday Machine went off without a hitch.

So, when 60 Minutes showed that our local launch equipment is falling apart, that our airmen and airwomen are using computers from the Stone Age to take care of Space Age missiles, the Pentagon sprang into action.

It's a good thing that the U.S. Government is funneling taxpayer dollars ($90 billion) to Boeing and Northrup-Grumman to modern our nuclear capabilities. Cheyenne is agog that at least $5 billion of that will be spent locally. Boeing, one of the contractors, will hold a meeting April 11 for businesses "to learn about program support and Boeing supplier needs." N-G cannot be far behind with its own round of meetings..

I scrolled through the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent web site -- GBSD Bound. In flowing language, the writers describe the past, present and future of this program. The Chamber eloquently supports all this. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades. Really good shades, as the flash of a thermonuclear fireball can melt the eyeballs.

It is good news for Cheyenne. Our capital city has experienced incremental growth the past five years. Many here say that this is the spillover effect from Colorado's boom. Cheyenne is the northern terminus to the Front Range. As such, it benefits when billions are being invested into infrastructure and businesses in Fort Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs. That same boom has caused Coloradans to question their devotion to a Denver filled with overpriced housing, crazy traffic, and herds of shaggy hipsters roaming the territory as bison once did prior to 1859. "This isn't the Colorado I knew" is a common refrain among family and friends in the Centennial State. They ponder moves to the wide-open spaces of Wyoming and Montana and Idaho if only someone would buy their two-bedroom house for $500,000 and some visionary start-up would pay them bundles of cryptocurrency to telecommute from Laramie. The cryptocurrency/blockchain thing is no joke. Our legislature has passed a dozen bills in support of this as-yet unproven e-currency but is scared shitless with the thought of brown or transgender people moving into their neighborhood. And damn that federal gubment (except when it brings $5 billion to town).

Despite my peacenik roots, I am fond of missiles and rockets. My father fed his large family by planting ICBM sites through the West. He worked as a contract specialist with the Martin Company, later Martin-Marietta. He didn't so much build the sites as find reliable people to do so. He later did the same job in Florida for the space program, helping get Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969, the year I graduated from high school. I saw Apollo 11 blast off. I canoodled with my girlfriend on the beach as we listened to the crackly car radio announce that "The Eagle Has Landed." My brother Dan and I spent our childhood building missile models and memorized all the names of the U.S. arsenal. I read all the Tom Swift books, in which rocketry played a key part. I watched Sputnik arc across the night sky. We were looking up, all of us. We did it together, maybe the last time that Americans were together on any one thing.

As we revamp our nukes, we are faced with new problems. The main one is in the White House, Donald Trump, buddy of the old Soviet spy who runs Russia. We have the North Koreans and Iranians. Saudi shenanigans. Dirty bombs from terrorists. Clean bombs from China. "Paranoia strikes deep/Into your life it will creep/It starts when you're always afraid/You step out of line, the man come and take you away."

We've come a long way from the so-called peace dividend we expected with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Remember that?

Cheyenne hasn't been a boom town since the Iron Horse rolled into town and Hell on Wheels was born. Its incredible growth back then earned it the nickname of "Magic City of the Plains."

Let's hope we're ready for this boom.

Miss Atomic Bomb did not exist -- but she could have

Hubba hubba! Alas, this Miss Atomic Bomb never really existed. She has a neat story though at http://digital.library.unlv.edu/objects/nts/1226

Ground zero, baby!

That phrase would look good on a T-shirt. Mushroom cloud in background. "Welcome to Cheyenne" logo on there somewhere.

Cheyenne is ground zero should the Russkis ever get tired of harassing Ukrainian grandmothers and get back to their Cold War role of harassing humankind. Laramie County has loads of Minuteman IIIs, baby. And despite the fact that some nuke officers heads rolled over recent cheating improprieties (did you see last Sunday's "60 Minutes" piece about our local missile ranch?), armed missiles still dwell on our prairie, ready for launch.

F.E. Warren AFB went nuclear in 1958. Several generations of Cheyenne residents have been hatched since then. Which begs the question: why aren't there more signs of The Nuclear Age in our fair city? We have the base, sure, and there's an impressive array of missiles flanking the main entrance. And Missile Drive snakes its way a short distance through town. But where are the Atomic Cafes and the Nuclear Sushi Bars? If I was starting a craft brewery, I would call it Nuke Brews or Atomic Brewing. I'd name my beers after Cold War icons -- Red Scare Ale, Fail-Safe IPA, Pershing Porter. Our motto: "Glow-in-the-dark goodness."

There is an Atomic Advertising listed in the Yellow Pages. And we have the venerable Atlas Theatre downtown, as well as the Atlas Motel  (not so venerable), Atlas Towing and Atlas Van Lines. Thing is, those places named Atlas may have the same namesake of Atlas the rocket -- the great god Atlas of Greek mythology, the Titan who held up the world. Titan -- another great name for a missile. 

If NYC can have a big-ass Atlas statue, why can't we?

What other towns can claim ground zero honors? Minot, N.D., and Great Falls, Mont. That's good -- we can all be the three points of a Rocky Mountain Nuke Tour. T-shirts all around. We are getting a state park at a former nuke control center north of town. That's a start.

Nukes are no joke, you might say. But the dark humor tradition demands that we turn mutually assured destruction (MAD, like the magazine) into 21st century kitsch.

The Cold War years were 1947-1991. That's a 44-year span, a couple generations worth of humans living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. There's some history to preserve there, many memories.Consider that Cheyenne was established as a railroad camp in 1867 and Wyoming became a state in 1890. The Cold War era represents 30 percent of the time the city's existed and 35 percent -- more than one-third -- of the time we've been a state. If I just consider my time on earth, two-thirds of my life was spent as a noncombatant but a very real target of the Cold War. I don't want a medal. I just want that time to be remembered for what it was.

For the military, the Cold War went from September 1945 -- the month after the end of the hot war -- to Dec. 26, 1991. The Cold War Veterans of America are lobbying Congress to make May 1 a Cold War Remembrance Day. I suppose it's no coincidence that May 1 was once a national holiday in the Soviet Union. My father was on occupation duty in Germany through the end of 1945, which makes him a Cold War veteran. Korea and Vietnam and even Gulf War I military are Cold War veterans -- those first two would never have happened without without the paranoid fever engendered by the commie menace. Veterans also want to build a monument to the Cold War -- lest we forget. Millions of Americans have been born since the end of 1991 -- my daughter, for one -- and they have nary a clue about the Cold War. They have the residue of their own wars to deal with.

We need to remember the Cold War right here in Cheyenne. I would love to see Cold War-themed public art. Not boring old representational bronzes. Let's use some imagination, as much creativity as went into Mutually Assured Destruction and the fail-safe device and "peacekeepers" and bomb shelters and "Dr. Strangelove" and Red Scares and "Star Wars" defense systems and blacklists and Richard Nixon and the domino theory and the Miss Atomic Bomb pageant and all the rest. It's a mother lode of material. Let's use it before it's forgotten -- or whitewashed. 

Sunday morning round-up

Beautiful morning. Sun, light winds, no snow.

So what am I doing inside?

Collecting random thoughts on a Sunday morning.

Received a fund-raising e-mail this week from Markos Moulitsas at Daily Kos. Ads and other funding mechanisms not paying the freight these days. So I contributed $10. Not much but it's something to help this feisty 11-year-old blog:

Can you chip in $5 so that Daily Kos can keep fighting?

If every one of our readers this month chipped in two cents, we’d be all set. If every reader chipped in a dollar, we’d be able to finance operations for two years.

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I blog infrequently under Cheyenne Mike at Kos. My average readership is a lot higher there, but it takes time to do blogging well. To do it well, you have to pay attention to your platform. You have to read the posts of others and respond. While Kos is the blog is read most regularly, I seldom have time to do it justice. Go check it out. Engage!

Article in Wyofile (reprinted in today's Wyoming Tribune-Eagle) about a new book by writer Porter Fox with Jackson roots. Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow is the story of the rise of the ski industry and how global warming may spell its demise. Interesting to note that three Jacksonites hatched the idea for the book while surfing in Nicaragua. Skiing may be doomed, but the surf will be bitchin' in L.A. and NYC! We'll be surfing, surfing in the streets....

I spent the past year as a literary slacker.  I wasn't reading books -- my heart just wasn't in it. I've been trying to catch up. Nosferatu by Jim Shepard has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. Finally picked it up and dove head-first into a fine story based on the life of silent film director W.F. Murnau. While a World War I German Air Force pilot, he imagined a movie camera that moved with the freedom of an aircraft. Cameras in those days were bulky monsters. Murnau went on to direct ground-breaking films such as Nosferatu, based on a term in Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Stoker's estate sued Murnau for purloining the vampire concept. He kick-started the German film industry after the war (and before Hitler) and made his way to Hollywood where he directed Sunrise, a film included in many top 100 lists.If you don't know Shepard's work, he's a fantastic short story writer. This novel was based on one of the stories included in his first collection, Batting Against Castro.

Most of my reading of Nosferatu took place seated in 21st century airplanes surrounded by young guys playing war games on laptops, I kept thinking that the anniversary of the start of World War I is next year. Some great books written about The Great War. That's another post entirely. What are your favorites?

I'm catching up on old copies of The Missouri Review. One of the best of the literary mags, TMR takes risks and also features some of the best writers. In the winter 2012 issue, "The Unnatural World," I read an essay entitled "Under the Cloud" by pathologist Susan E. Detweiler. It was well-written personal essay about her Cold War experiences. It also contained some fascinating history. While the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age, many of the stories surrounding the decision to go atomic have been neglected or maybe misunderstood. You would think it was a no-brainer for Japan to surrender after the death of so many of its citizens. It had already lost hundreds of thousands in combat and in the terror bombings of Tokyo and other cities. Surrender, however, was not a part of its warrior code. The U.S. and its allies knew that millions on both sides might die in an invasion of the home islands.

The Japanese may have seen the atomic blasts as supernatural forces outside the realm of modern war-making. So Japan surrendered in the face of another kind of "divine wind."

Fascinating.

Is Cheyenne on the map yet?

Dan Danbom was waxing quite eloquently Thursday in The Denver Post about "putting Denver on the map." It was a clever piece about the phrase "putting ______ on the map," the ______ in this case being Denver.

I am a Denver native and I know Denver's need to be on the map, to be a part of the national conversation. Denver has always had a knack for keeping itself on the map. When the Union Pacific bypassed the burgeoning mining supply town in favor of a Wyoming cross-continent route, William Byers and fellow civic boosters cajoled politicians into getting a spur built from Cheyenne to Denver. Byers was the founder of The Rocky Mountain News and newspapers needed growth for advertising revenue and transportation was essential for that. The railroad beat the heck out of thousand-mile covered-wagon or horseback treks or just plain walking.

Denver had already proven itself to be a breeding ground for hucksters with the great gold rush of 1859. Gold was discovered along Cherry Creek and Denver City entrepreneurs blared the news to the rubes back East, who had no clear idea of the difference between an actual gold field and golds flecks embedded in a river bank. The madding crowd rushed to Cherry Creek with their picks and shovels, only to find that the gold was way up yonder in Central City and Gold Hill and Idaho Springs. While you're in Denver, prospector, why not avail yourself of our white lightning and fleshpots and buy some supplies while you're at it?

Denver was born, and got a place on the map.

By the time I was born in Mercy Hospital almost 100 years later, Denver had not only managed to survive but thrive. It had weathered the boom and bust cycle a dozen times and, in 1950, was booming, thanks to all those WWII vets who had trained in Colorado, liked it and decided to desert their villages in Illinois and New York for life at 5,280 feet. The suburbs and the ski industry was born, which eventually led to the birthing of many Baby Boomers such as myself. We transformed Denver into a pretty cool place to be in the sixties and seventies. Boulder became a counterculture Nirvana and Denver a sports-loving, ski-crazy city with Red Rocks and Rainbow Music Hall and a singles scene with lots of wet T-shirt contests. Gentrification followed, and then came the lattes and craft beers and the Broncos, at long last, winning a Super Bowl and putting Denver on the sports map.

I digress.

I'm not sure why Danbom needed to write about putting Denver on the map at this late date, unless it was to cast stones at other, less map-worthy burgs such as Cheyenne. Here's his comment about Cheyenne:

You have to wonder: Why does Denver have to be on the map? When someone promises that something will put us on the map, the implication is that we are currently not on the map and instead in some sort of obscure, anonymous place that no one has ever heard about and therefore is destined to dry up and blow away. Like Cheyenne.

Danbom may not have been up north in awhile. But Cheyenne is still here. Yes, it is dry and the wind blows, but thus far it has not picked up Cheyenne and blasted it to smithereens -- or to Nebraska. We are pretty well anchored here in southeast Wyoming, just across the border from Colorado. We don't plan on going away any time soon.

Yes, life is slow in Cheyenne. We are a Capital City just like you, but growth is slow in this place and that is how many Wyomingites like it. Not me, but, to borrow a nicely-turned phrase from the Pope, "Who am I to judge?"

Wyoming has always gone its own way. If growth comes at all, it comes slowly. The search for oil and gas and precious minerals often fuel the booms. Just look at Gillette. If the coal gives out, or those dern Obama EPA bureaucrats get their way, Gillette may be as ephemeral as Jeffrey City, the uranium boom town that has pretty much dried up and blown away, except for the crazy artists at Monking Bird Pottery and the barflies across the street at the Split Rock Bar & Cafe.

Cheyenne has been on the map for many years, but maybe not for the reasons that urban hipsters imagine. No, not for Cheyenne Frontier Days, although that's what the organizers imagined when they nicknamed it "The Daddy of 'em All." And no, not for our legislature which has become one of the nuttiest in the West.

We got on the map big time during The Cold War, when the Russkis had Cheyenne and its nukes as one of its primary targets. That's one heck of a map. It may be getting a bit frayed around the edges since The Wall came tumbling down. But maybe not. Putin's Syrian policies and Mr. Snowden and Pussy Riot and anti-gay legislation could dust off those old maps and give us all a reason to live again.

Live, or die.

Thanks to Ken Jorgustin at the Modern Survival Blog for this cool map. Here's what he had to say: "Oh, and there is no way I would want to be living near the three large zones in Montana, North Dakota, and the corner of Wyoming-Nebraska-Colorado where there are evidently numerous nuclear missile silos."

May I Have an Atom Heart, Mother?

My dream heart

I was treated to an echo cardiogram at CRMC on Wednesday. If you're not a heart patient, you might know the "echo" as the Ultrasound test performed on pregnant women. "Hooray -- it's a boy." or maybe "Good God -- triplets."

My echo was scheduled to determine the shape of my heart following a Christmas heart attack and an early January angioplasty and stent placement in my LAD artery (a.k.a. "The Widowmaker"). I "presented late" (as my doc puts it) due to the fact that I was futzing around with our family doctor who didn't know what he was doing so my heart muscles were damaged. Ideally, heart attack patients get to the ER ASAP so the blockage can be cleared or so the docs can get to work on a bypass. I was late to the ball. But I got my stent, a dozen or so medications, 36 weeks of cardiac rehab and lots of TLC.

Wednesday's echo showed that my heart still had some healing to do. The docs think I should have a defibrillator implant but I'm a bit unsure. I'm going to get a second opinion from heart docs down in Colorado.

Or I might get an atomic heart. The story, according to The Atlantic:

In 1967, the National Heart Institute and the Atomic Energy Agency began a ten-year effort to develop an artificial heart powered by plutonium-238. The atomic hearts would have pumped human blood with the energy provided by the radioactive decay of that isotope. The effort failed thanks to technical challenges, intra-governmental infighting, and the souring of the public mood about both medical devices and atomic energy, but it remains a fascinating episode at the confluence of two grand American dreams.

This is the story told by Shelley McKellar, who teaches the history of medicine at at the University of Western Ontario in the most recent issue of the quarterly journal Technology and Culture.

The Federally funded programs continued for a decade, sometimes at cross-purposes, and they foreshadowed the rhetoric that came to surround later attempts at creating other types of artificial hearts in the 1980s. There are lessons to be learned, McKellar implies, about how people receive a particular technology changes along with the social and regulatory environment. Ideas that make sense one decade can seem totally ridiculous ten years later.

But, you might be asking yourself, "What in the hell was anyone even thinking trying to stick a radioisotope generator into a human being's chest cavity?"

 Because, that's why.

JH Weekly: Wyoming downwinders nervous (again) after two incidents at Idaho facility

Jake Nichols reports about two separate incidents at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) nuke facility across the border in Idaho. Read all about it here

Robert Greer's "Astride a Pink Horse" explores the twisted legacy of Wyoming's atomic era

Robert Greer

Robert Greer left Gary, Indiana, as soon as he could to attend college and eventually become the only international cancer specialist and best-selling African-American mystery writer to raise cattle in Platte County, Wyoming.

Not a bad claim to fame.

Robert has a new book coming out in March 2012:

ASTRIDE A PINK HORSE North Atlantic Books Hardcover: March 27, 2012, ISBN-13: 978-1583943694 

The Cold War ended years ago, or did it? 

For Thurmond Giles, a decorated African American Air Force veteran found dead, naked, and dangling by his ankles inside an entry tube to a deactivated minuteman missile silo in desolate southeastern Wyoming, the answer is no. The labyrinthine investigation that follows, led by Air Force fighter pilot Major Bernadette Cameron and ex-college baseball phenom-turned-reporter Elgin "Cozy" Coseia, reveals how the atomic era's legacy has continued to destroy minds and lives. 

Set in contemporary times, Astride a Pink Horse follows Bernadette, Cozy, and Cozy's eccentric boss Freddie Dames as they match wits with a gallery of unforgettable murder suspects: a powerful, politically connected cattle rancher, long bitter over government seizure of his land for defense purposes and the expulsion of his son from the U.S. Air Force Academy; a declining 76-year-old WWII-era Japanese internment camp victim and her unstable math professor nephew; an idealistic lifelong nuclear arms protestor; and a civilian Air Force contractor with a 20-year-old grudge against the murder victim. Do three amateur detectives stand a chance against these characters and the conspiracy that may be behind it all? 

Robert Greer's trademark mix of vivid eccentrics, surprising plot twists, and political edge makes this one of his most memorable thrillers.

Little nukes on the prairie: how our Air Force missileers are being trained

A slide from a PowerPoint presentation for nuclear missile officers cites St. Augustine's Just War Theory to teach missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons. Image: United States Air Force. Re-posted from truthout.

Very interesting set of blog posts today for those of us who are neighbors to the many nuke missile silos that dot the Wyoming prairie.

The U.S. Air Force has pulled a missileer training course that enlists former Nazi Party member (and one of the architects of the U.S. space program) Wernher von Braun as a moral authority and leans heavily on the Bible (and St. Augustine) to justify throwing nukes at our neighbors.

Truthout broke the story and now notes today that the USAF has pulled the Powerpoint program. I was first alerted to the story by problembear at 4&20 blackbirds. This is appropriate since Montana and North Dakota and Wyoming are home to the majority of U.S. land-based nukes.

First read problembear, and then move on to truthout's original piece and today's follow-up.

And then go read The Confessions of St. Augustine (I read it in the eighth grade to little effect) and see what he has to say about throw weights and MAD and nuclear winter.

UPDATE: Read problembear's post and then spend time reading the incendiary comments. Yowzir!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Satirist Tom Lehrer's take on Wernher von Braun' opportunistic politics at http://youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio

It was a Cold War -- but the art was hot!

A nuke explodes in April 1953 at the Nevada Test Site. Looks like a painting, doesn't it?

As the Cold War recedes into the past, it's tempting to be nostalgic. Gee, the planet didn't go up is smoke, as it did with the Doomsday Device in "Dr. Strangelove" or in dozens of sci-fi books. The Russkis are sort of our friends now, fellow travelers in the world of unbridled capitalism and swarthy mob bosses. Those of us on the far side of the Iron Curtain did have some good times, though. We had hula-hoops and rock'n'roll and PCs and moon walks (the real kind) all happening during those halcyon years. Art, too. Lots and lots of art.

The University of Wyoming Art Museum launches an exhibit of Cold War art on Aug. 21:

"Cold War in America: Works from the 1950s - 1970s, Selections from the Art Museum Collection" opens to the public Saturday, Aug. 21, at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. A free public reception for all the fall exhibitions is scheduled at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 17.

The end of World War II in 1945 marked the beginning of a new conflict, the Cold War. This ongoing state of political conflict, military tension and economic competition continued primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Abstract expressionism, color field painting, pop art and minimalism all came of age during the Cold War period, representing a radically new engagement with materials and space, and redefining the role and purpose of art.

Abstract expressionist artists, such as Willem de Kooning and James Brooks, who based their works on the pure expression of ideas relating to the spiritual, the unconscious and the mind, will be included.

Color field painting is characterized by large fields of flat, solid color creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. It will be represented by the work of artists such as Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb.

Pop art in the United States, considered a reaction to abstract expressionism, will be represented by artists Alice Neel, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Lee Krasner and Larry Rivers.

For more information on exhibitions and programs, call the UW Art Museum at (307) 766-6622 or visit the museum's Web page at www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum or blog at http://www.uwartmuseum.blogspot.com/.

The museum has a great blog that's updated regularly. Great visuals, too, as you'd expect.

Wikipedia lists the era of the Cold War as 1947-1991. The U.S. military recognizes Cold War veterans as those serving between September 1945 and December 1991. Other sources say it began in 1948, with the Berlin Airlift.

No matter when it started, the end came with the dissolution of the Soviet empire. I wasn't born until 1950, but by then the struggle was going full force. The Korean War had started earlier in the year, pitting the North Korean and Chinese Communists on one side and South Korea, the U.S. and various allies on the other. North Koreans live in the Stone Age while South Koreans drive KIAs and eat sushi. The ChiComs are all capitalists now.

BTW, North and South Korea are still fighting.

The Cold War is becoming an easy way to mark an era. Historians seem to like dealing with handy chunks of time, such as World War II or the sixties. But a span of 44 (or 46) years seems unwieldy, as if you were talking about the the Ice Age or the Jurassic Era. For now, historians like their Cold War subjects in smaller bites. But one day, it will seem as remote as The Day the Dinosaurs got Clobbered by the Comet.

So that's what gives the Vegas Strip its unusual glow...

Just finished reading John D'Agata's book, "About a Mountain." It's a nonfiction account of the on-again, off-again status of Yucca Mountain, where the U.S. wants to store its nuclear waste.

But, in the tradition of creative nonfiction, D'Agata combined this journalistic journey with his own Las Vegas story -- and that of a young man who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of the Stratosphere Hotel.

Seems like an odd juxtaposition of subjects. But the author ties it together neatly with facts and speculation.

Nevada Sen. Harry Reid comes off looking like a bad guy. It's odd that Reid recently faulted Pres. Obama for not being tough enough against Republicans, especially when it came to the battle over health care reform.

Burying tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste under Nevada rock won't impart many health-giving properties to Nevadans. It will bring jobs, no doubt about that. Those jobs will have health insurance, which is a good thing. There will be accidents in shipping and handling, which won't cost you any extra but could cost you your life.

Sen. Reid did a pretty nifty job of rolling over for the nuclear power conglomerates and home-state cheerleaders for Yucca Mountain.

But Harry has enough problems, what with Nevada Tea Party types hounding him at every turn.

The book's most compelling sections are these:

1. What happens when a truck carrying radioactive waste wrecks on the overcrowded Vegas freeways and catches fire?
2. How do you make signage for a nuclear repository, a sign that will be understood by humans 10,000 years in the future.

The answer to number one is: Shitstorm.

The answer to number two is a thoughtful treatise on human communication. A panel of artists and linguists and teachers and scientists were asked to come up with effective signage. The challenge was a huge one. Where was humankind 10,000 years ago? Battling sabre-tooth tigers in caves and trying to stay warm during the Ice Age. They weren't doing much recreational reading -- nor consulting any signs.

In 10,000 years, we may be back in caves. That cave may be in what used to be Nevada. There will be a sign that warns of terrible danger if you go any further into the cave but humans may not understand the sign. They may say to themselves, "Hey, this cool sign says there's a nifty surprise at the bottom of this cave." "Great -- I love surprises."

John D'Agata's book comes at a good time. The U.S. is now contemplating building more nuke plants. Uranium is being mined again in Wyoming and Colorado. Turck and rail shipments from the East Coast will have to come through either Wyoming or Colorado.

Read the book for its angst-producing sections. Read it for its fine writing.

"About a Mountain" is published by W.W. Norton, 236 pages, $23.95.

To read the L.A. Times review of the book, go to http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/14/entertainment/la-ca-john-dagata14-2010feb14

Great example of nuke animation

As I was saying just the other day, there are not enough YouTube videos on thermonuclear annihilation:

Sunlight of a Cheyenne autumn morning

Driving my daughter Annie along I-25 this morning to visit a friend. She commented that she liked this part of the morning, about 9 a.m. The way the light looks and feels, the way it lights up the prairie. I had to admit that it was a beautiful November morning. Great light for an artist. Wispy horsetail clouds lit up on the eastern horizon. Even the gray Wyoming steppes looked brighter.

As I drove home alone, I paid more attention to the light. On top of the College Drive overpass, I saw a UP train traveling east, its dozens of white freight cars lit up by the sun. I wondered if it was a coal train. How funny that a coal train chugs east under the bright blades of Cheyenne's wind farm just west of the hulking white Wal-Mart distribution center. Between the rail line and the wind farm, I-80 stretches out, trucks pulling uphill toward the Laramie Range Summit and some all the way to San Francisco. Eastbound truckers are damn happy to be out of the mountains and Wyoming's crappy late-autumn weather and wild winds.

Not sure why autumn's morning light made me think of energy and transportation. But the College Drive overpass on top of I-25 gave me a great view of Cheyenne's reasons for being. Highway crossroads. Railroads. Wind farm to the west and Frontier Refinery to the east. If I look hard enough, I can see a few pumping oil wells out in the county. Up north is F.E. Warren A.F.B. and its many nukes. Guess you could call this an energy issue, although Warren's nukes are wrapped up in strategic metal and pointed at targets in the former Soviet Union. Odd to think that the former Commie powerhouse may now be a bigger threat as an energy-producing giant than it was as a Cold War "We Will Bury You" opponent.

Are nukes one of the solutions to the energy crisis? Right now, uranium is being mined again in northeast and central Wyoming. An in-state nuke plant could be in our future.

Deep thoughts on the day before Thanksgiving. Autumn's morning light shines on the present, provides clues to a possible future which often doesn't look so bright.

Livin' not always easy on 1960s Space Coast

My father's work with the U.S. space program ended about the same time as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Thousands of Americans worked for the space program. Some, such as my father, got their start in ICBMs. Nukes used the same missile that took astronauts to the moon -- the Atlas. It didn't take much to jump from the jargon of throw weight and megatonnage to space capsules and lunar rovers.

Besides, my father was an accountant and not an engineer. He kept the books and one line item on a spread sheet is pretty much the same as the other.

They revelled in the mission. Put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Can-do, boss. Give us a challenge and lots of dough and good people -- and we can do anything.

I was proud of my father's work, whether he was tallying costs of blast-proof silos on the prairies of Colorado or Kansas -- or counting Atlas booster widgets in a sweltering war-surplus Quonset hut on Florida's east coast. He lost his ICBM job in 1964 once most of the Atlas rockets were parked underground throughout the West.

That's how we got to Florida. Five years later, he was laid off from his space job in July 1969. His work was done. From 1967-69, thousands of NASA amd G.E. employees and space workers of every stripe from Florida's "Space Coast" were transferred to other less-exotic locales such as Schenectady and Cincinnati and Houston. Our Daytona neighborhood had a dozen homes for sale. They weren't selling because people were moving out, not in.

Those who stayed were laid off (such a strange word) and had to find other employment. My father went to work with the state as an accountant. That move entailed a 180-mile round-trip daily commute to Jacksonville. He finally ended up renting a small apartment and staying up there during the week. Other laid-off spacers opened small businesses or pumped gas like one of my father's engineer friends. Some tried other jobs for awhile and then moved on anyway.

You have to remember that 1969 Central Florida was pre-Mickey Mouse and beachside condo-building craze. Orlando was the size of Tallahassee, Florida's sleepy capital city. Air conditioning was fairly new -- we never had A.C. nor did any of our friends. Retirees had been coming to Florida for years, but mostly lived in rural trailer parks or dilapidated downtown hotels in St. Pete or Miami. Most real jobs were still located in Detroit and Cleveland and Newark and St. Louis and Chicago and L.A. These postwar-boom auto and steel workers were still raising their families and not yet ready to join the huge waves of Florida-bound retirees in the 1980s. At the same time, Rust Belt industries began collapsing under the weight of their own stupidity and Reaganomics. Younger workers headed to new opportunities in warmer climes. Many more followed.

Florida still has a space industry. Smaller now, and much less exotic. It's tempting to romanticize that Apollo 11 mission of four decades ago. I've seen that happening this week on cable news, with paeans to the astronauts and our can-do spirit on getting to the moon. "Moon landing -- 40 years later." But there were also headlines like this: "Moon -- one giant leap or one very small step?"

It was both, I suppose. One giant leap for the imagination. I still support the space program and was briefly encouraged by George W. Bush when he announced future missions to Mars. Then we discovered that he meant Mars, Iraq, and the wind went out of our sails.

I hold out hope for future leaps of the imagination. Look up! Imagine other worlds! Build spacecraft and go forth!

Wyoming Cold War residue could harm "our precious bodily fluids"

In "Dr. Strangelove," when Col. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) starts talking about commies poisoning "our precious bodily fluids," Group Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) realizes his commander is nuts. So nuts, in fact, that Ripper has launched World War III.

Col. Ripper says this: "Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face? On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason."

Baby Boomers probably remember that the John Birch Society made hay with the conspiracy theory that commies somehow arranged to fluoridate our water to neuter God-fearing Americans in time of war, cold or hot.

But the Birchers should have been more concerned with the trichloroethylene (TCE) used to clean our own nukes, here in Wyoming and elsewhere. TCE has been poisoning our precious bodily fluids for 50 years, rendering us useless against attacks by commies, Saddam Hussein's WMDs, swine flu, feminists, wayward Yellowstone wolves, atheists and any other menace (real or imagined) wingnuts can devise.

A plume of TCE, maybe one of the largest in the country, is moving toward Cheyenne. One of these days, it may lurk right under our house near Yellowstone Blvd.

Actually, we already have contamination in our neighborhood from Cold War chemicals used on Wyoming Air National Guard's aircraft. TCE and carbon tetrachloride have been seeping from the sprawling Guard base south of us since the 1960s. To the Guard's credit, it has been on this issue since I moved to the neighborhood back in 2005. I receive frequent mailings on the clean-up status. There's a monitoring station in Mylar Park, just a 10-minute walk from our house. A trench 100 feet long and 35 feet deep is being dug in the park to try to contain the seeping solvents. Groundwater that flows into the trench will be treated and discharged into nearby Dry Creek. The goal, according to an Air Guard release from 2008, "is to prevent further underground contamination and keep the chemicals from getting into the creek."

But the TCE plume at F.E. Warren AFB is more problematical. Between 1960-64, USAF personnel used thousands of gallons of the chemical to clean Atlas rocket engines once the fuel had been removed. The used solvent went into unlined pits and eventually trickled down into the aquifer. For many years, the Air Force and the Army Corps of Engineers refused to acknowledge a problem. Then tests were conducted by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality. The Corps still did nothing. And in 2007 Sen. John Barrasso got involved. Amazing the difference a U.S. Senator can make when he sets his mind to it. Studies were conducted on this substance that may cause cancer. The obstinate Corps chief was replaced by one more accountable to the citizenry. A a major report detailing clean-up solutions will be issued in September. You can hear the details at a public meeting July 28, 6 p.m., in the Cottonwood Room at the Laramie County Public Library in Cheyenne.

The reason I bring this up? Jared Miller wrote an excellent series of articles for today's Casper Star-Tribune about this threat from the bad old days of the Cold War. Read the series at http://www.casperstartribune.com/articles/2009/07/12/news/wyoming/813bd62b38077e9b872575f00020f944.txt