Overview of Atomic Pilgrim, a memoir

In 1982, I left behind my conservative, small-town background to walk halfway across the world for nuclear disarmament, only to discover after my return home that I had grown up downwind from America’s first and largest plutonium factory.

Atomic Pilgrim recounts my journeys along two trails. The first was the 6700-mile Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage across ten countries in 1982 and 1983. It was a walk and prayer for peace and nuclear disarmament. I was one of twenty pilgrims in the core group, in addition to the thousands of people who walked part of the way as we passed through their cities and towns.

The second trail was my pursuit of the truth about U.S. nuclear weapons, especially the production of those weapons at the Hanford plutonium factory in south-central Washington state. Assisted by mentors and colleagues, this pursuit led me on a path to discover that the American people betrayed by their government and its contractors.

The book opens on a cold winter night in 1981. Watching a documentary about Mother Teresa of Calcutta inspired me to quit my unfulfilling job in television and join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to serve people suffering from poverty in Seattle’s inner city. I wanted to do something meaningful with my life—to make the world a better place.

Two months after arriving in Seattle, during some of the darkest days of the Cold War, I awakened to the growing threat of nuclear war while watching a mime about the arms race. Knowing that the world could be destroyed within a few hours threw me into a deep depression. What was the use of helping people in poverty when the future of humankind was so perilous?

I received wisdom from Father Jack Morris, a Jesuit priest, who urged me to work for peace and disarmament to treat my depression. He invited me to join the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage, a 6700-mile walk across the United States, Europe, and the Holy Land, which was due to start in six months. A year earlier, Morris got the idea of walking to Bethlehem as he read an interview with Father George Zabelka. During World War II, Zabelka served as the Catholic chaplain to the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the interview, Zabelka talked of his vision of gathering world religious leaders to condemn nuclear weapons and all war.

Toward this end, we included the headquarters of religious leaders on our route: Salt Lake City, Washington, DC, Canterbury, Geneva, Rome, and Jerusalem. As the birthplace of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, Bethlehem symbolized the desire of all people to live in peace. Along the way, we asked local churches in each town we stayed in to organize potluck dinners after which we gave presentations about the increasing threat of nuclear war and the need for people of faith to support disarmament.

As I helped with preparations for the walk, I doubted whether I had the courage and toughness for such an arduous journey. Because of my conservative upbringing and love of comfort, it was hard for me to imagine myself as a vagabond—walking in all kinds of weather and sleeping in church halls or tents for the next twenty months. Initially I acquiesced to my fears and played it safe—I would stay behind in Seattle to staff the support office for the walk.

The story takes an unexpected turn on the first day of the pilgrimage—Good Friday, April 9, 1982. Starting from the gate of the Trident nuclear submarine base twenty miles west of Seattle, we were joined by five hundred supporters to walk the first six miles. For me, it was an exhilarating experience. I was captivated by moving my body in alignment with my desires and beliefs. I knew that day that something deep in me would die if I missed this opportunity to join the walk. The lead story on the front page of both Seattle daily newspapers the next morning affirmed the importance of our pilgrimage.

Due to the need to fulfill my volunteer commitment, it was August before I could join the walk. As I waited, I struggled with fears and doubts about facing the physical demands—as I heard of the hardships my friends endured as they walked across the West.

When I joined them in Kansas City, we were averaging twenty miles a day, six days a week. During the weeks of my adjustment to life on the road, I was repeatedly tempted to abandon the walk and return to the security of a job and the comforts of home. I kept going because I wanted a future, one free from the threat of nuclear war.

During 1982, the Nuclear Freeze movement became a national story and added to the news coverage of our pilgrimage. If a town was well organized, our arrival attracted several hundred people to our events. In a few towns, none of the churches were willing to host us, as our message of nuclear disarmament was deemed too controversial.

We timed our arrival in Washington, DC, to coincide with the November meeting of the U.S. Catholic Bishops who were debating the second draft of their major statement on nuclear weapons. We held a three-day prayer vigil and fast at their hotel, lobbying the bishops to make a strong statement against nuclear weapons.

After wintering in Philadelphia to organize the next leg of the journey, the book follows the pilgrimage across Europe. In these countries, where only four decades before war raged, the pilgrims were joined by Germans, Italians, and Japanese to walk for peace. Wanting to spend as much time in English-speaking countries as we could, our route went through Ireland, violence-torn Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England.

Walking across France for peace, I passed through areas my father had bombed during World War II when he served as a bombardier in a B-26. It wasn’t until my research into his military record for this book that I discovered that my dad was wounded in combat at least ten times. His physical and verbal abuse of me as a child stemmed from his war experience. I was a victim of intergenerational trauma.

Even though I didn’t understand it on the walk, I now see how heavy my childhood trauma weighed on my heart and soul. Fortunately, with each step as a prayer for peace, I began to heal. I became more in touch with my feelings and felt less inhibited in sharing them with my fellow pilgrims. I began allowing myself to experience life more fully. It was so liberating that one day, as I walked along an isolated stretch of a Greek island, I found ecstasy in the sheer joy of being alive. Despite growing fatigue, the generous love of my pilgrim community and our shared commitment to disarmament gave me the strength to persevere until we walked into Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 1983. That all thirteen of the pilgrims who began twenty months before were still together as a community testified to our witness for peace and disarmament.

Part Two of the book opens with my search for what to do after returning home. Within weeks, I saw a front-page news article about a radiation release from Hanford, a hundred and ten miles southwest of my home in Spokane. Hanford was one of the three original Manhattan Project sites and produced the plutonium used in the 1945 Trinity test (depicted in the Oppenheimer movie) and in the atomic bomb that killed more than 70,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan. Later that month, I saw the movie Silkwood (starring Meryl Streep and Cher). Streep played Silkwood who was killed because of the cover-up she found at the plutonium plant where she worked. I was surprised when the movie mentioned Hanford and the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF). I recalled that my high school physics class visited the FFTF a decade earlier. Intrigued by how these strands of my life were coalescing, I needed to find out more about Hanford.

Mysteriously, there was very little information available about Hanford in 1984. Because of its essential role in the Cold War, an iron curtain of secrecy cloaked Hanford. Within months, I joined other Spokane citizens who shared my desire to know more. Was Hanford safe? What had happened there since 1945? It took more than a year of community organizing and networking with Bob Alvarez (who helped investigate the Karen Silkwood case) to file an extensive request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and compelled the release of 19,000 pages of declassified documents spanning Hanford’s operational history. News articles detailing huge radiation releases shocked the entire Northwest.

Astonishingly, because radiation is invisible, people who were exposed had not known of the danger until these documents became public.

The book follows me into the Spokane library as I read each of those 19,000 pages, learning that airborne radiation from Hanford’s plutonium processing canyons blanketed four states with harmful fallout. The documents also revealed that Hanford’s nine nuclear reactors turned the Columbia River into the most radioactively contaminated waterway outside the Soviet Union.

As I turned each page, I kept a list of each referenced report. I completed my review of that first batch of Hanford documents the day before the Chernobyl disaster. During the summer of 1986, I typed up that list of references and, under the mentorship of Bob Alvarez, formulated a second FOIA request. Six months later, I received another batch of declassified documents to decipher—this one totaling 20,000 pages. Over the next twenty years, I filed more than 200 requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Page by page, I kept pursuing the truth about Hanford and America’s nuclear weapons production and testing. It was a lonely, often tedious effort, but my commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons and my outrage at the grave injustice to millions of downwinders drove me. Through persistence, I uncovered a pattern of secrecy and deception that stretched back to the dawn of the atomic age.

To give readers an understanding of the scope of Hanford’s 570 square miles, the book describes my first site tour shortly after the Chernobyl disaster. It includes a graphite-moderated reactor whose basic design is like the one that exploded at Chernobyl and a plutonium processing plant that was longer than three football fields and ten stories tall.

After three years of volunteering with the Hanford Education Action League (HEAL), the citizens group I help found, I became an employee. A few months later, I appeared on Good Morning America with House Majority Leader Tom Foley. Atomic Pilgrim describes my interactions with Hanford downwinders including my first appearance before Congress. Using the downwinders’ own words taken from the Congressional record, courtroom transcripts, and oral history interviews, I recount their decades of suffering from Hanford’s radiation and the betrayal they felt at their own government releasing the radiation but keeping it secret for over forty years.

Woven with the personal stories of downwinders, the book summarizes my major research and presents quotes that are the basis of my conclusion that Hanford managers hid behind an iron curtain of secrecy. Their public stance: Hanford was safe. The documents reveal how dangerous the managers knew the radiation releases to be. They feared how the public would react if they knew the truth. But even today, the federal government continues to withhold details of the infamous Green Run (the largest release to the air). The book will reveal the names of two Air Force intelligence officials who authorized the December 1949 experiment.

Because I had not resolved my childhood trauma during the pilgrimage, the memoir covers the deaths of my parents. Following Dad’s death, I continued to believe I didn’t have to confront my repression of the emotional wounds of my early years. Three years later, my mother was struck and killed by a drunk driver. This violence brought my long-repressed emotions to the surface. I underwent months of grief counseling and was finally able to own my responsibility for the burdens I has carried so long. In making peace with my memories of my father, I had the courage to testify in court when the drunk driver was sentenced.

In 1993, a peace group in Japan invited me to speak at a conference on plutonium processing and to meet with atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since Hanford has produced the plutonium that destroyed Nagasaki, the center of Catholicism in Japan, I experienced profound sadness there. Because Father Zabelka walked through the ruins of Nagasaki several weeks after the atomic bombing and who died less than a year before my visit, I felt particularly close to him, standing where he had stood. I imagined him looking down on me and urging me to keep digging into Hanford’s deception. In both cities destroyed by atomic bombs, I was impressed by the concern of the hibakusha for the suffering of Hanford downwinders.

Then in 1997, a group of attorneys including those who won the Erin Brockovich case hired me to work on the Hanford downwinder litigation. Several months later, the National Cancer Institute published a major report on the atmospheric fallout from the Nevada Test Site. After fifteen years of nuclear disarmament involvement, I was astounded to discover that my sister and I were exposed to radioactive iodine as young children in central Montana adjacent to the county with the highest fallout in the country. Now I was a downwinder, too. My sister’s decades of health problems now had a cause: radioactive fallout.

As I worked on the third draft of this book, Seattle Archbishop Paul Etienne called to invite me to accompany me on the Pilgrimage of Peace he was planning with Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester. The trip would include participation in the August commemorations marking the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both archbishops had issued statements in 2022 calling for nuclear disarmament. Archbishop Etienne wanted me to serve as his expert, helping draft his public statements. Immediately accepting, I marveled at how amazing it would be to return to Japan, thirty years after my first visit – and now with an even deeper knowledge of the depths about America’s nuclear arsenal and its incumbent deception. There was greater sadness, too, from the deaths of so many downwinders I had collaborated with and a few who had become dear friends.

The trip was nothing less than the culmination of my four-decade effort to abolish nuclear weapons and reveal the hidden truth about the radioactive wasteland left behind by America’s plutonium factories. One instance during the two-week trip to Japan that tied up my whole pursuit of peace was meeting Nobel Laureate Setsuko Thurlow in Hiroshima. In 2017, she was one of two people who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for its work promoting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). When I told Ms. Thurlow that I had walked to Bethlehem with Father George Zabelka, her eyes lit up and she exclaimed, “Oh, he stayed at my house.” In the 1980s, Thurlow had invited Zabelka to speak at a peace event she organized in Toronto. Given Thurlow’s inspiring commitment to travel the world for peace at her age of 91, I know I must continue my pursuit of disarmament.