Drifting Toward Catastrophe : Fallout from America’s nuclear testing : SAVAGE DREAMS: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West, <i> By Rebecca Solnit (Sierra Club Books: $22; 402 pp.)</i>

Most people who have experienced the detonation of a nuclear bomb report that they could never think about life in the same way again. Indeed, there should be something memorable about an atomic bomb, yet over the past 50 years we have rid ourselves of its presence in much the same way that good Germans refused to see the floating ash and smell the acrid odor of bodies burning in the death camps of the Holocaust. Some might suggest that this is the core nature of original sin, our need to avert eyes from atrocity, deny responsibility and feel self-righteous, all in the same pathetic moment. In this respect, no nation is without guile.

And so it is refreshing to notice during the past half-dozen years that there are a few books being published that chronicle such clandestine chinks in the American character. I am being kind. It has been easier to burn at the stake than to publish hard truth, especially if it is written in a serene, intelligent, prophetic voice. A latter-day Rachel Carson would be unintelligible to the addicts of Rush Limbaugh or similar hyper-materialist facilitators for the legions of couch-rooted Americans whose birthright is a sense of entitlement.

Yet such a rare, quiet voice of warning is Rebecca Solnit’s, whose intelligent meditations may awaken us from our self-congratulatory coma, whose prose is often poetry, and whose mind is fertile, wide-ranging and capable of integrating the bewildering deluge of fact, political delusion, flights of genius, inconceivable danger and cunning deceit that has characterized the nuclear age. Her book, “Savage Dreams,” sojourns through two of “the hidden wars of the American West,” those brutal yet covert agendas for human nuclear experimentation and ecocide for which we have constructed every conceivable exculpatory rationalization. It is an historical travelogue, a memoir that rounds out stories of Solnit’s own travels with geographical and anthropological anecdotes.

The first object of Solnit’s contemplation is our continental nuclear test site northwest of Las Vegas and the fragile garden of moral resistance that has grown up around it over the years. Many more than 1,000 nuclear devices have been detonated here from 1951 to 1992, blanketing the downwind areas with highly toxic radioactive fallout. During the McCarthy era and the Cold War, a system of secrecy and propaganda was in place that made it possible to explode nuclear weapons in the open air as often as once a week, with most of these blasts exposing Americans to radiation comparable to that released by the reactor accident at Chernobyl. It was far worse than unpatriotic to question such a practice at that time, but for Solnit such opposition fulfills the ethical demands of heroic citizenship at its very best.

Solnit’s second meditation explores the “American capacity for amnesia” and its effects on the once-proud but failing natural monument of Yosemite as well as on the aboriginal people who were once the stewards of our wilderness. In a text notable for the underpinnings of its research in history and literature, and admirable for its restraint, no overt condemnations are made. One can enjoy its often puckish tone, such as a quotation from a letter to John Muir from Emerson, whose rather glandular approach to wilderness occasioned his belief that it was “a sublime mistress but an intolerable wife.”

Solnit notes that the pioneers’ westward “invasion was described in highly erotic terms. The land was virgin, untouched, undiscovered, unspoiled, and its discoverer penetrated the wilderness, conquered it, set his mark upon it, claimed it, took possession of it with the planting of his flag.” Sixty-eight percent of the American West is now owned by the federal government, which has despoiled it with military installations, bombing runs, missile silos, nuclear test sites and biological warfare labs, with future plans for a geologically unsound high-level radioactive waste repository. Solnit gently yet effectively makes her case that the national agenda for our natural treasures has never been anything but “eco-whoredom.”

It is of some small comfort finally to see here the stories of a few legendary trailblazers of the nuclear resistance, whose efforts to stop testing and the ensuing radioactive contamination of our lives always seemed the equivalent of spitting into the ocean in order to raise the water level. Laboring under the restrictions of poverty and media ridicule, thousands of conscientious objectors have held Gandhi as their mentor over their 40 years of civil disobedience at the Nevada Test Site. Their efforts to thwart the nuclear Goliath, the Atomic Energy Commission and its wily spawn, the Department of Energy, resonate simultaneously as heroic and pitiful. By the end of the Cold War more than $30 million a year was allocated to the Nevada Operations of DOE for “public relations” to reassure a doddering public that exploding nuclear weapons in the womb of mother nature was a healthy and benevolent procedure.

By comparison, those encamped near the test site, who during the ‘80s were being arrested by the thousands in the largest demonstrations of civil disobedience in U.S. history, considered themselves fortunate if they could afford Gatorade for hydration in the searing desert heat. Their efforts to stop the detonations of nuclear weapons were successfully ignored by the government and, for reasons one can only guess, “realizing that trivialization and obliviousness are its most effective weapons . . . the media overlooked us and everything else that took place in the state of Nevada.” One can never forget, however, the image of a young handcuffed protester being dragged by snarling Wackenhut guards across the cacti and other thorn-bearing desert foliage to a holding pen. With stoicism bred by the Nuremberg Principles as the ethic for halting Nevada’s monthly nuclear detonations, often 10 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb, she suffers her wounds silently. Reading this tract, and picturing her comrades removing the bloody shards and splinters from her body with their clumsy, manacled hands, the aura of an American gulag rises from these pages with a stench.

In an age when even one of our most cherished educational institutions, the Smithsonian, has caved in to military wishes for a celebration of the Enola Gay and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on the 50th anniversary of these tragedies, it is clear that as a nation we long for a historical cleansing of the embarrassing facts. In an age of proliferation and potential nuclear terrorism, of burgeoning nuclear waste and not even a thought of reducing the world’s atomic arsenal to zero, we should be grateful for the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s book, which explores with elegance the ugly truth of Einstein’s now-familiar warning: “The unleashed power of the atom changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes.”