What Goes Up Must Come Down

Lots of things were hazardous to us. We inhaled second hand smoke like nobody's business. Seemed like every adult you knew smoked; I even rode to the store on my Rixe to pick them up for my mother. Smoking was good for you, or so we were told, so no one thought much about it. Funny,'cause cigarettes were referred to as "cancer sticks" and "coffin nails", so people knew the truth, they just chose to ignore it.
We drove around in great big cars fueled with leaded gasoline without seat belts or airbags to protect us. There was lead in paint and probably in all of the toys we played with as well. When the mosquito trucks drove through our neighborhoods in the summer, kids would follow along, riding in the fog, inhaling DDT and heaven knows what else was in the mix. People did lots of crazy, stupid things that were dangerous without any regard of the risks involved.
There was one crazy thing people did that was really dangerous. They did it willingly, and some would travel hundreds, even thousands of miles to do it.
You would have to go to Las Vegas, you know, where adults went to drink and gamble and watch the Rat Pack do its thing up on the stage.
Las Vegas was known as "Sin City", because you could go there and do things that were illegal or at least considered immoral in the rest of the country. Las Vegas was also known as "Atomic City", because you could go out into the desert and watch something: something earth-shattering. You could gaze upon the awe-inspiring, extremely mind-blowing spectacle of a nuclear bomb exploding.
This was the era of atmospheric nuclear testing. Hydrogen bombs going off in the Nevada desert, or on islands in the Pacific with such unlikely names as Bikini and Christmas. From the late 1940s up until 1962 they would go off, and human beings were more than eager to offer themselves up as willing guinea pigs just to get a glimpse of a nuclear blast.
Armageddon as a tourist attraction! Stand in the glow, feel the force of the blast and get covered in radioactive dust. The thrill of a lifetime!
I guess no one thought that nuclear fallout was harmful. They showed us movies of soldiers who were covered in fallout dust, smiling as it was brushed off with a broom. Just sweep it away like pollen, nothing more to worry about, nothing to lose sleep over, anyway.
The bombs went off in Nevada, and Russia, and in the south Pacific too. They lit up the skies in the South Atlantic, over Australia and remote areas of North Africa.
The Russians had exploded the biggest bomb of all, the Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton monster just to show the world who was boss. They were going to make it 100 megatons, but even they were afraid of that; most of the radiation would fall on the Soviet Union, so they cut it in half.
Russia, America, France, the United Nations and eventually China were exploding nuclear weapons into our atmosphere, the consequences be damned. The radioactive dust would be carried on the winds, falling to earth willy-nilly, landing on us all without regard to race, creed or color or nationality.
We didn't feel it.
We couldn't see it.
But it was there, it was everywhere.
Spores carried on the wind.
Seeds of a bitter harvest sown.