A major but often unacknowledged event in the sixth and seventh decades of the 20th century history of America, Maine and the Norumbega bioregion was the contamination of our environment and our food chain with nuclear weapons testing derived fallout. The ubiquitous spread of this contamination throughout the biosphere of the northern hemisphere beginning in the late 1950s mark the end of the Industrial Revolutionand the beginning of a new era of chemical fallout. These contamination events have a disquieting synchronicity with the two hundred year cycles that seem to characterize the chronology of Maine history:
1560 - 1760: European conquest and the demise of Maine's Native American communities
1760 - 1960: the rise of an Industrial Revolution that in its later stages left Davistown and the central Maine coast on its periphery
1960 - ?: the beginning of a post-industrial age of chemical and nuclear fallout characterized by the nuclear weapons arms race and a military - industrial - commercial cyber-culture, the international complexity of which may engender an age of terrorism that proliferates the weapons of mass destruction so abundantly produced after 1960
The number of casualties from increasing rates of breast and brain cancer, lymphoma and other diseases after 1960 in Maine and elsewhere as a result of weapons testing and chemical fallout will never be known. The cumulative fallout index completed by the RISO National Laboratory in Denmark makes an appropriate starting point for an abbreviated bibliography on anthropogenic radioactivity that will be continued in RADNET, the second component of the environmental history archives of The Davistown Museum.
Cumulative Fallout Record
The RISO National Laboratory in Denmark has measured the annual fallout record for 137Cs and 90Sr since 1950. The United States government also measures fallout rates, but the information is classified. The cumulative fallout record for Maine is probably slightly higher than that for Denmark since we are closer to the testing sites both in the western United States and in central Russia. Prevailing winds brought Russian fallout across the Pacific or possibly over the north pole; prevailing winds in the United States from west to east resulted in the highest fallout rates in two locations: those close in to the Nevada Test Site, but on the easterly side of the site, and anywhere in the United States where high levels of rainfall tended to wash out weapons testing-derived and Chernobyl-derived radioactive contamination.