The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West - Paperback

by Valerie L. Kuletz (Author)

For decades, nuclear testing in America's southwest was shrouded in secrecy, with images gradually made public of mushroom clouds blooming over the desert. Now, another nuclear crisis looms over this region: the storage of tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste. TaintedDesert maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy.

Author Biography

Valerie L. Kuletz, the daughter of a weapons scientist, grew up near a Department of Defense research and testing center in the Mojave Desert. She has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and currently is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Her work on this book won the American Sociological Association's 1997 Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism.