I was living in Las Vegas, making films for the Gas Company, my first real job. I had met other video producers working for local companies like EG&G. EG&G contracted with the Department of Defense to provide video documentation of various practices, like how to track a suitcase nuke. They were ”spooks,” as we called them.

Other friends and colleagues, living in town, had similar connections. A cinematographer, Greg, shared tales of his cousin, an engineer at the Nevada Test Site.

Watching Bernie Sanders announce the United States’ attack on Iran’s nuclear sites brought it all back. In a world before the internet, information was exchanged primarily on a person-to-person basis. We were used to secrecy. We countered that with a strong counter-culture ethos, hippies with jobs, confiding in each other quietly as we smoked weed.

Nuclear engineering staff apparently were fond of eight balls, a mix of crack-cocaine and heroin. We’re just setting the tone of the era here, in 1986, Las Vegas.

When Bernie Sanders completed the reading of President Trump’s announcement, the crowd roared with chants of “No more war.” In 1986, also, resistance was personal. That slogan was prominent. Greg’s cousin had a large aquarium, black lights, aluminum foil on the windows, and cryptic plaques on the wall. His was an inner world. Outside, it was 115 degrees.

The plaques were artfully made, symbolic, semiotic references to “spook stuff,” that couldn’t be discussed, not even with weed. Mainly, they had to do with different blasts, test nuclear explosions 85 miles up the highway at Frenchman’s Flat, outside Mercury, Nevada. Engineers secretly exchanged them following these nuclear explosions, and such strange images referenced the secret details of these experiments for the inner engineering circle.

I used to take a drive up north to the backside of Mt. Charleston, to a place called Cold Creek, on Sunday afternoons. I would park, open the car doors and windows, and turn up Fleetwood Mac on the Blaupunkt Stereo. It was a higher elevation and there was a welcome breeze. It was a place to think.

Cold Creek overlooked the test site, or “proving grounds.” I thought about radioactivity from the blasts and wondered if I could pick up a “hot rock” in my shoe, or in my tire tread. When I got back to town, I began taking iodine, not knowing what was getting into my pores, lungs, ears, or mouth from the breeze, or from changing my tire or eating a sandwich.

I was thinking about the plaques at Greg’s cousin’s. Yes, they were secret communications, but why were they secret? Perhaps it was more than fraternal comradeship. What didn’t we know?

It was about that time that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine melted down. It was a dire reminder of Three Mile Island and the movie “Silkwood.”

The United States was slowly coming to the end of its above-ground nuclear testing program, but it had not yet concluded. The next blast coming up was called “Mighty Oak.” It was to be a test related to Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative. It was before the Soviet Union fell.

The Mighty Oak nuclear test was a U.S. weapons-effects test conducted on April 10, 1986, at the Nevada Test Site. It involved a blast 1,300 feet below the surface of Rainier Mesa in the T-tunnel complex. The test resulted in a containment failure, with radioactive materials escaping into the tunnel complex. While it was claimed there was no accidental release of radioactivity to the atmosphere, the incident “led to a controlled purging of the tunnel, releasing some radioactive noble gases.”

A year later, the New York Times released an article titled, “U.S. REPORTS THE DETAILS OF BOTCHED NUCLEAR TESTS.”

“The report did not say what went wrong. But experts said last year that some of the doors in the pipe failed to close or did not close at the right time. As a result, the equipment was destroyed and the tunnel was contaminated.

‘Most equipment – experiment, diagnostic, and construction – within the tunnel complex was lost,” according to the report, which said that the destruction was due to ”high temperature and radiation.”

The report said that radioactive gas within the tunnel was later ”purged.” In this process, the air inside the tunnel is vented through a charcoal filter that absorbs the radiation. The report said that “a minute quantity of radioactive gas was released into the atmosphere, but that the amount was not dangerous.”

At that time, according to my recollection, Chernobyl radiation was monitored by the EPA as it travelled in the jet stream around the world. There was evidence of higher-than-normal readings in the Pacific Northwest as snow fell across the Cascades.

However, UPI, United Press International, had a different view. An article by RICHARD TAFFE Jr. titled “DOE used Chernobyl to cover up radiation, scientist says,” confirmed suspicions as we zoned out watching Blue Bettas navigate underwater castles.

“It was opportunistic venting … so they could blame it on the Russians,’ Rosalie Bertell, a biostatistician who heads the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in Toronto, said in an interview Wednesday.”

Rosalie went on to say, ‘The U.S. Department of Energy apparently took advantage of the Chernobyl accident to vent radioactive debris from the failed Mighty Oak nuclear test blast at the Nevada test site’ on April 10.”

Bertell has served as a consultant to both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission and was a member of the citizens advisory committee to the president’s commission on the accident at Three Mile Island.

She said the DOE delayed venting of the April 10 test until April 27, the day after the Chernobyl accident, and “seriously contaminated’ Salt Lake City and Spokane, Wash., with high levels of radioactive iodine 131.” Both cities are downwind from the Nevada test site.

Unless my recollection fails, there was also a spike on Mt. Charleston, Nevada, roughly in the vicinity of Cold Creek.

She said the data was based on the EPA’s Chernobyl Federal Response Data Information Sheet. The DOE, which runs the Nevada test site, has never made complete spectrum breakdowns public, she added.

Bertell questioned the DOE’s May 6 admission there had been the release of only xenon 133 — a much less dangerous radioactive gas — from the Nevada test.

‘This information was shabby, not very credible,” she said.

‘There was an extremely high level of iodine in Las Vegas, and if iodine got out, then other things got out,’ she said, adding, ‘That would be a first-class scientific miracle if no other radioactive matter was released.”

Taking iodine prevents further absorption by the thyroid. My instinct was, it turned out, appropriate.

As we enter uncharted nuclear waters with the United States’ “bunker busting” at Fordow and other sites, and with Iran’s nuclear stockpile unaccounted for, it’s good to remember we’ve been lied to before.

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