Slim Pickens (Louis Burton Lindley Jr.) in “Doctor Strangelove.” Pickens was a San Joaquin Valley native, born in Kingsburg, 1919, died of a brain tumor in Modesto, 1983.

I had just come back from a demonstration against a uranium mine near the rim of the Grand Canyon and talking to Native people from several tribes whose water, air and land would probably be polluted by the mine, the trucking, and the mill. Their struggle to protect their homes reminded me of my hometown, Modesto, only 50 miles from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and 35 miles from LLNL’s Site 300 High Explosives Testing Range.

None of us knew the dangers on the Colorado Plateau or in the north San Joaquin Valley or in the valleys around Livermore. In the 1950s, in the San Joaquin Valley we were using smudge pots to fight frost in the peaches and almonds. We had a bad polio epidemic in 1953 just before the Salk Vaccine came out and ended polio here. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring didn’t come out until 1962, and DDT was the best pesticide ever made: “It kills everything for 28 days,” the farmers said. Many of us got Valley Fever (Coccidioidomycosis) and still have to explain the lung scar to physicians far from agricultural areas. Occasionally the newspaper would announce a new case of Bubonic Plague in the Sierra Foothills. And, from the middle of WWII until the 1990s, we had our own (conventional) arms-manufacturing and storage facility 5 miles east of Modesto called Norris-Thermador, which employed up to 3,500 people when in operation but was best known for its long layoffs.

We had no idea that during those years over on the Colorado Plateau Navajo miners were working in unventilated uranium mines during the great uranium boom of the 1950s and the Navajo Nation still suffers from radioactive mine litter, waste and dust.

We knew nuclear bombs were being tested in Nevada near Las Vegas and on islands far away in the Pacific Ocean. We had no idea in high school in the middle of the Cold War that the bombs were being designed and developed 50 miles away from us. LLNL was shrouded in secrecy in those years. But after Sputnik at the start of my sophomore year, a lot of us were subjected to the awkward attempts of our excellent chemistry teacher to teach us physics. Nevertheless, we were nearly completely ignorant of the greatest environmental threat in our vicinity. But a few years later we learned an ominous new term describing several nearby locations: cancer clusters.

Analysis contained in an Environmental Impact Statement in accordance with the National Environmental Protection Act states that the effects of an accident at LLNL would spread 50 miles, as far north as Marin County, through San Francisco, the Peninsula, as far south as San Jose, and as far east as Tracy, Stockton, and Modesto. As many as 7 million people would be affected by plumes of either radioactive or chemically toxic particles. From an environmental safety standpoint it doesn’t make any sense for 90,000 people to live in Livermore, but many work at the lab, which has grown to completely fill its one square mile campus, and the Silicon Valley “high-tech/bio-tech engine for growth” employs many more. Tens of thousands of other workers commute daily across the 10-lane Altamont Pass (I-580) from cities in the northern San Joaquin Valley to jobs in the lab and other high-tech industries. Median home price in Tracy, at the eastern foot of the Altamont was $680,000 last month; in Livermore, on the western side of the pass, median price is $1.1 million.

All the energy, ambition, and traffic generated by high tech and nuclear weapons remind me of lines from Mandeville’s “The Grumbling Hive,” 1705:

A Spacious Hive well stock’d with Bees,
That lived in Luxury and Ease;
And yet as........

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