"Dirty Harry"
Some downwind residents became apprehensive after the Simon blast when they witnessed the official concern
over fallout levels on the highways outside of the test site. But the worst was yet to come that spring when the U.S.
Government detonated a thirty-two-kiloton atomic bomb from atop a tower at the Nevada Test Site. The code name
was Harry; people downwind now remember it with bitterness as "Dirty Harry."
As sixty-eight-year-old St. George resident William Sleight recorded the event in his diary:
May 19, 1953:
Beautiful morning. We left St. George at 4 a.m. for Las Vegas, Nevada. We were watching for the ABomb
explosion on the desert north of Las Vegas. At 5 a.m., just dawn, we saw the flash which lit up the
skies, a beautiful red, visible for hundreds of miles away. It was a beautiful sight, a hundred miles or more
away from it. I had my car radio on and at 5:01 a.m. the announcer on KFI, Los Angeles, Calif., said at 5
a.m. the bomb had been exploded and that it was visible at that station, and also in Idaho. I drove for ten
minutes, then stopped the car on the roadside, got out and soon after we heard the report of the blast. It
rumbled as thunder, not quite the same as other blasts we have heard. This is the 9th in a series of ten,
another next week. It makes me shudder when I think of what misery we may face when men start dropping
these terrific bombs on our cities. Some fanatics are now clamoring for their use in Korea.
After we came back on Highway 91, we were stopped and a young man examined our car with an
instrument to see if we had picked up any radioactive dust while traveling on the Highway. Found none so
we missed a free car wash (which would have been appreciated). . . . Returned to St. George in a high wind
which seems to always follow these explosions.88
Winds easily carried radioactive fallout the 135 miles to William Sleight’s home in St. George. Atomic Energy
Commission monitors picked up readings of six thousand milliroentgens in the town, where news bulletins broadcast
the agency’s sudden advice to stay indoors from 9:00 A.M. till noon. Monitoring crews stopped about one hundred
cars heading north from St. George; many vehicles were washed down in an attempt at decontamination. The
fallout was coming down so hard, AEC scientists later reported at a confidential government conference, that the
commission’s workers gave up on washing off the cars in St. George until the radioactive particles stopped falling.89
The AEC, meanwhile, told area media that "radiation had not reached a hazardous level."90
In St. George the blanket of fallout left a bad taste in many people’s mouths—in more ways than one. Lifetime
residents of the town reported, for the first time, an oddly metallic sort of taste in the air.91 (This condition would
surface again at Three Mile Island, twenty-six years later.)
Forty miles farther east, according to another secret AEC report, at least five residents developed symptoms
matching signs of radiation sickness from high doses. The classified AEC report also said that in the town of La
Verkin, twenty miles northeast of St. George, goats turned blue after clouds of fallout wafted through their grazing
area.92
The day after Dirty Harry, downwind residents barraged the AEC with complaints. "Reverberations from the
atomic tests in Nevada Tuesday echoed in Washington Wednesday as Southern Utah residents protested to
Representative Douglas R. Stringfellow (R-Utah) about radiation contamination in the area," narrated The (Salt
Lake) Tribune.93 Congressman Stringfellow followed up by asking the AEC to stop the Nevada test program
because of fallout. The AEC refused. (The next year Stringfellow lost his race for reelection.)
Two days after the Harry explosion, while AEC commissioners discussed the heavy fallout dumped on St. George
and vicinity, an AEC worker tried to obtain names of milk producers in the area and failed. "It was just as well," he
reported in an agency memo. "I was afraid it would create a disturbance."94 Rulan (Boots) Cox, operator of Cox
Dairy in St. George for thirty years beginning in 1949, had radiation monitoring equipment at his dairy the entire
time of atmospheric nuclear testing upwind. He sent samples to federal addresses on a regular basis, but was never
informed of results.95
New downwind samples of milk initially showed high levels of radioactivity. By the time the milk was boiled in
Las Vegas and Los Alamos laboratories, AEC researchers found little radioactivity; the iodine 131 was being
destroyed in the lab heating process.96
After the Harry test the AEC was faced with a new problem. Commissioner Henry D. Smyth, according to
agency minutes, "was concerned about the public relations aspects of the tests, especially in view of the St. George,
Utah, incident and the large number of shots already fired." The other AEC commissioner in attendance, Eugene M.
Zuckert, also perceived nascent difficulties. "A serious psychological problem has arisen, and the AEC must be
prepared to study an alternate to holding future tests at the Nevada Test Site. In the present frame of mind of the
public, it would take only a single illogical and unforeseeable incident to preclude holding any future tests in the
United States."97
The Pentagon, however, pushed hard for the AEC to stand firm. At a joint meeting in late May 1953, according
to classified minutes, Defense Department representatives conveyed "the opinion that AEC is making a serious
mistake in over-emphasizing the effects of fall-out resulting from recent tests." One general criticized official
measures such as washing down cars and urging residents to stay indoors for a few hours after the Harry test; he
complained that "the precautions taken by AEC were extreme and caused undue public concern."98
Meanwhile, on the morning of May 27, AEC chairman Gordon Dean met with the Commander-in-Chief.
President Eisenhower, Dean recorded in his diary, "expressed some concern, not too serious, but made the suggestion
that we leave ‘thermonuclear’ out of press releases and speeches. Also ‘fusion’ and ‘hydrogen.’" In the wake of
hydrogen explosions in the Marshall Islands during the past year, and with more sophisticated nuclear weapons tests
scheduled, Eisenhower instructed the AEC’s top executive to keep the public "confused as to ‘fission’ and
‘fusion.’"99
88. William Sleight, diary, made available to authors with permission of family through Citizens’ Call organization.
89. Chicago Tribune, April 1-5, 1979, published as booklet "Radiation," p. 11.
90. Washington County News (Utah), May 21, 1953.
91. Preston Truman, interview, February 1981. As state director of Citizens’ Call and a lifelong resident of Utah, Truman said he had heard many accounts by St.
George residents recalling a metallic taste after the Harry test.
92. Deseret News, September 5, 1979.
93. The Tribune (Salt Lake), May 21, 1953.
94. Chicago Tribune, April 1-5, 1979, "Radiation," p. 9.
95. Ibid.
96. Deseret News, September 5, 1979.
97. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, May 22, 1953.
98. AEC-MLC Joint Meeting Minutes, May 28, 1953. At the same meeting Military Liaison Committee chairman Robert LeBaron said that the government
"must avoid arousing public fears to the point of large-scale public opposition to the continental tests."
99. Gordon Dean, diary, May 27, 1953.