My grandmother kept a shoe box with mementos she’d saved over the years; birth announcements, funeral cards, Valentine’s Day cards from grade school days, and the like. At the bottom of this box, I found an article about the new B-50 bombers carrying the latest in atomic weaponry; the bombs that made, “the Nagasaki-Hiroshima job as obsolete as the Stanley Steamer.” Those older bombs dropped in August 1945 on an island nation far from my grandmother’s home seemed like “just toy balloons in comparison” to the new bombs discussed in the 1951 article. In fact, the writer of this article pointed out that, “there are more powerful ones to come.”
The Russian people, rather than the Japanese people, were the suggested target of these new bombs. When the writer of the article asked about the accuracy of the weapon, the atomic bomber replied, “suppose you were the manager of a strategic warehouse in the Urals. Suppose you had a ground-to-plane shortwave. You might hear the buzzer and it would be us on your wavelength. And we would say, ‘Here’s that A-bomb you ordered, Mr. Varonovsky. You want it on your front step or in your backyard?”
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The US (as far as I know) never bombed the Urals. Rather as Russia competed in an arms race with the US, the Mayak Production Association (a defense enterprise built in 1948 near Kyshtym that focused on the creation of new atomic weaponry) experienced a thermal explosion in a concrete reservoir containing highly radioactive waste material. This radioactive material then spread over 100km toward the northeast. Over ten thousand people living in this largely unpopulated area were moved from the affected districts because the area became dangerous to life. The land which is now the Eastern Urals State Nature Reserve was “taken out of economic circulation” and now serves as an ecological testing site for researchers studying the introduction of radionuclides to the environment.
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Mallinckrodt Chemical Works employees processed uranium for the first atomic weapons at the St. Louis Downtown Site (SLDS - once located in the area near the current Mckinley Bridge) and at the Weldon Springs Uranium Feed Materials Plant (once located on the current Weldon Springs Conservation Area in St. Charles County). Mallinckrodt stored the radioactive waste material in barrels on open ground at both the St. Louis Airport Site (SLAPS - once located just north of current Lambert Airport) and at the Hamburg Quarry along the Katy Trail in the Weldon Springs Conservation Area. This radioactive material likely ended up in the current West Lake Landfill Superfund Site located in Bridgeton.
This radioactive waste, which sat in barrels out in the open until the late 1970s, contaminated the groundwater. Currently, people living around Coldwater Creek experience higher than average rates of various cancers.
Coldwater Creek meets the Missouri River near Fort Bellefontaine. Approximately six miles downstream, the Missouri river meets the Mississippi. Six more miles downriver from this confluence site, one finds the Chain of Rocks Water Treatment Plant, which likely provides the water that comes from the tap in our homes.
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As my grandmother tucked away an article about bombs in a box, I don’t think she could have fathomed that her granddaughter would one day stand under the gaze of Pavel Bazhov’s Bust on Lenin Avenue in Yekaterinburg tickled to find street vendors selling copies of Mark Twain’s writings.
Tonight before I sleep, I will fold up this bit of writing and tuck it into a box to wait like a sort of magical spell or totem. I cannot fathom what kind world my ready descendant will find herself when she comes across this writing saved just for her like strange fitting jewelry kept in a malachite casket.
