Historical Background

The Bitter Past, while very much a work of fiction, is also a story about America’s atomic infancy. During the 1950s, the United States was in a race with the Soviet Union, a race to develop the most powerful weapons the world had ever seen. It was a time of science, and it was a time of espionage.

If you’ve been following my journey the last couple of years, you know that my novel revolves around that whacky time in our history when we were figuring out just how fast we could destroy the world. After Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, atomic bomb testing was moved to the vast Nevada desert, where in the 1950s, about 100 nuclear weapons were detonated above ground. Radioactive particles rained downed from those mushroom clouds, poisoning the ground and water, and exposing people and animals to both immediate and long-term dangers. These people are collectively known as “Downwinders,” and their incredible sacrifice is an often-overlooked area of the country’s history.

An important section of The Bitter Past deals with actual events in 1957, when the ultra-secret Nevada Test Site was at the height of its development. Annie Jacobsen’s book, Area 51, details the government’s work better than perhaps any other source. There were many things about the dangers of nuclear weapons we did not fully understand then, but one thing we were sure of was that there was a chance that a nuclear bomber might one day have an accident. It might crash. We decided to conduct a test to see what would happen if the plutonium from a warhead cracked open and leaked all over someone’s living room. The test was called Project 57, and my novel does a “what if” of its own with it. Nine years later in 1966, a B-52 bomber collided with a refueling plane over Palomares, Spain. One of its four unarmed bombs fell into the Mediterranean Sea, while the other three rained mainly on a plain in Spain, two of which spilled plutonium over a nice farming village. Fortunately, the U.S. Government was able to clean most of it up and ship it to the state that drew the short straw—South Carolina! Here’s a fascinating article about this little-known incident.

Another great source of information about our nuclear history is The Atomic Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you are ever in the area, you should definitely add this amazing stop to your itinerary!