How Our Weapons Have Hurt Us : FALLOUT : An American Nuclear Tragedy <i> by Philip L. Fradkin (University of Arizona Press: $24.95; 300 pp.; 0-8165-1086-5) </i> : URANIUM FRENZY : Boom and Bust on the Colorado Plateau <i> by Raye C. Ringholz (W. W. Norton: $18.95; 265 pp.; 0-393-92644-2) </i>

There is no doubt that the research and development of military technologies, such as the atmospheric atomic testing program at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s, posed a greater risk of technological catastrophe than do most of the society’s civilian risky technologies. Furthermore, America’s governmental leaders, from the scientists and technicians at Los Alamos to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, believed they had a fundamental obligation to continue the development of state-of-the-art military technology--no matter how risky the technology was to persons and the ecosystem.

If the military technology program is perceived to be essential to the “national security,” then governmental secrecy, duplicity and deception will be present in order to continue the operation of the risky technology. For, if the truth were known, that humans and the ecosystem were mortally endangered by the very risky military technology, then public pressure would probably have forced the government’s atomic testing program to be severely curtailed or possibly shut down.

Philip L. Fradkin and Raye C. Ringholz have written penetrating accounts of the U.S. government’s decade-long successful effort to continue a risky technology, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site, in the face of mounting evidence--collected by federal bureaucrats (Public Health Service doctors and Atomic Energy Commission monitors and scientists)--that the program was a risky one that was spreading dangerous amounts of radioactive fallout far beyond the confines of the test site itself.

They join a number of other authors, including Titus, “Bombs in the Backyard”; Miller, “Under the Cloud Ball”; Ball, “Justice Downwind”; Fuller, “The Day They Bombed Utah,” and Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” as well as the staff authors of congressional committee reports on the subject, in presenting, in chilling terms and using the government’s own documents, a solid, insightful indictment of the government’s cold, calculating actions against its own citizens--both civilian and military.

Ringholz’s book, “Uranium Frenzy,” is a folksy yet very ominous account of the federal government’s efforts to encourage mining companies and starry-eyed 20th-Century Gold-Rusher types to look for uranium in the Four Corners area of America’s West and then to mine the uranium once it was discovered. The tale is well told of how the uranium prospectors were encouraged by the government to look for uranium and of the many pitfalls that awaited these hardy souls who eagerly sought the mother lode.

After the uranium has been found by a very few lucky prospectors, the author, with a writer’s patience that allows the reader to absorb the horror of the government’s cruelty, then describes how U.S. Public Health Service emissaries repeatedly pleaded with the Atomic Energy Commission to have the mining companies follow some fairly simple safety standards that would remove the dangerously radioactive powder, radon daughters, from the mine shafts so that uranium could be mined safely. They also wanted the health reports released so that people would be aware of the danger of mining uranium in unventilated mines.

This was not done for, as the government said, in the 1985 Barnes litigation brought by miners’ widows whose husbands had died of lung cancer, to do so would have cost the mining companies additional funds and they may have left the uranium mining business. (By 1985, 31 of the 111 miners who had worked in the Marysville, Utah, uranium mine had already died of lung cancer. These mines were called “cancer factories” by an outraged union official who attended the trial.) Further, had the miners realized the danger to their health working in such conditions, they would have left the mines for other employment. Should that have happened, America’s military atomic research and development would have been halted--and at a time when the country was in a hot and cold war with the Communists. That could not happen, and so the emergence of the tragedy of the nuclear miners whose story Ringholz recounts for the reader.

Fradkin’s book, “Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy,” is a well-crafted morality essay that describes the emergence of a major 20th-Century American technological catastrophe. Perrow has written that such events are rare “not because risky systems are safety conscious but because it takes a combination of infrequently occurring conditions to produce a catastrophe. It is not so much that we have been lucky not to have had more disasters, which is the usual observation, but that it is difficult to have them.”

Fradkin, using government documents, carefully reviewing court records, and after interviewing many of the major participants in the tragedy, chillingly describes these conditions that overcame the difficulties and that inexorably led to an American tragedy: “Dirty” bomb blasts with heavy off-site contamination, rain storms that brought down the radioactive fallout in dangerous ways, poor monitoring of the blasts by the AEC, lack of safety warnings to the people downwind of the blasts, cover-up and falsification of documents by government agents to minimize the political “fallout” from these bad tests, lying in court so egregiously that the judge said there was a “species of fraud committed” by the government in his court, etc. It is a carefully researched and well-written book on the pathology of a military-technological tragedy.

Both books are well worth reading; they complement each other. There was the fundamental need to mine the uranium, without stopping to deal with safety problems in the mines, in order to get on with the military research and development of atomic weapons at the Nevada Test Site. There were risks in the technology but, as an AEC commissioner claimed before a congressional committee in 1957, there were greater risks for the nation if the AEC could not test its atomic devices in Nevada. The tragedy occurred due to the actions of men and women entrusted with the safe implementation of the governmental program. Unfortunately, as Fradkin and Ringholz point out, “safe implementation” of such a risky military technology is a killer oxymoron.