LDS Freedom Forum

The poem is made up of stanzas stitched together with quotes from The Nag Hamadi, a bit of astrology, some Bhagavad Gita by way of Oppenheimer, John Donne, and the words of people who have shivered under the shadow of the atom. That includes Africans who died mining uranium in the Congo, the White Mesa Ute tribe in Blanding, Utah, who still live three miles away from an open-air uranium tailings pond, the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Ukrainians and Belorussians exposed to radiation by Chernobyl, and the residents of the little Mormon towns downwind from the Nevada Test Site.

J. Preston Truman, November 1987, Salt Lake City, Utah, p. 299, American Ground Zero. This is the J. in the dedication to the poem; this quote is in reference to AEC propaganda: “I remember in school they showed us a film once called A is for Atom, B is for Bomb. I think most of us who grew up in that period, we’ve all in our minds added C is for Cancer, D is for Death. In my own life I try not to think about the future in a sense because I don’t know that the future is even there. The realization comes that you don’t really have a future.” Truman was part of a first generation of anti-nuclear activists. He is the head of Downwinders (downwinders.org), a nuclear watchdog organization founded in 1978.