دانلود کتاب محیط‌های اتمی، فناوری‌های هسته‌ای، جهان طبیعی و سیاست‌گذاری، ۱۹۴۵-۱۹۶۰

During the spring of 1953, the United States Forest Service began a construction project in Nevada. Forest Service personnel were not clearing a campsite or hammering together benches, as they might have been expected to do during this boom period of national parks. Instead, they created a forest, of sorts. Workers selected 145 mature ponderosa pines from nearby “forest reserves,” harvested those trees, and transported them to a grove around 150 feet wide and 300 feet long. Once there, Forest Service personnel used cement to secure the pines into their best approximation of a natural forest environment. 1 In most woodland ecosystems, lush, verdant growth offers refuge and sustenance to many animals, birds, and insects. This forest was, by contrast, devoid of life. Into this sterile landscape, workers from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) scattered instrumentation about, effectively transforming the woods into an outdoor laboratory. Relying upon the knowledge and expertise of the Forest Service, the AEC saw the finished coppice as an idealized forest. But the agencies never intended their new forest to flourish in any traditional ecological sense. To the contrary, the Forest Service and AEC created the forest as a test laboratory that could be destroyed in a controlled and measurable fashion. In May 1953, the AEC carried out the Encore test shot of the Operation Upshot-Knothole test series and detonated an atomic bomb near the anthropogenic forest. Analyzing the forest’s demolition within a Cold War context, the AEC hoped to determine how much an atomic weapon damaged a stand of coniferous trees and in turn assess how much protection (or extra damage from shrapnel) the forest might provide nearby persons and materials.2 Creating an idealized forest, in this case, was actually more useful than a more natural space might have been because it allowed testers to isolate variables and gather data more easily. Hence while the AEC did not expect the forest to thrive ecologically, decision makers there did care a great deal about the forest for what it could tell them about the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Ecological knowledge, in this case, buttressed nuclear science. Planners hoped that the test would improve the nation’s understanding of how best to protect US resources and personnel during a nuclear war.3 Destroying the constructed forest arose, ironically, from an impulse to protect other US forests and the humans near them from harm. The Encore test itself created an impressive sight when it went off a mile or so from the newly manufactured forest. Initial heat from the nuclear detonation started a conflagration. The successive blast annihilated much of what remained. All told, the trunks, branches, and needles were severely damaged, which can be seen from a video recording of the test.4 How the blast would have affected root structures is indeterminable since those were surely mangled when the Forest Service uprooted the trees from their original location and cemented them back into the earth.