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My former student is only beginning to discover the horrors of the nuclear landscape. Shredded, irradiated pigs aside, the region around the site remains one of the most devastated terrains in the United States, with at least 12 billion curies of radiation having been released into the air and soil through atmospheric and underground nuclear events. In 1959 alone, the Air Force staged at least eight reactor meltdowns in Utah, with total radiation outputs that exceeded - 14 times over - that of the Three Mile Island accident.

Moreover, in New Mexico as many as 244 "simulated" nuclear tests were conducted in the vicinity of Native American and Hispanic communities during the 1940s and 1950s. These radiolanthanum (RaLa) tests were only performed when winds were blowing away from Los Alamos, where thousands of white professionals labored on behalf of the Cold War. Affected communities were not told of the tests beforehand and were never advised that soil, air and water contamination would linger for years.

The American Indian populations who reside in this landscape have born the weight of these tests. Throughout the Cold War, the mining and milling of uranium took place in the Navajoan desert, on lands traditionally occupied by Navajo, Hopi, Pueblo and Ute peoples. Additional ancestral lands have been withdrawn from Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute and other communities to construct the nuclear West, including the Nevada Test Site. Other facilities such as Los Alamos and White Sands are adjacent to Pueblo and Apache land. The disposal of high- and low-level waste has been centered on reservation land held by Mescalero Apache, Skull Valley Goshute and San Ildefonso Pueblo, among other tribes.

Open-air radiation tests were accompanied throughout the Cold War by institutional research conducted with breathtaking disregard for human dignity. In 1994, the Clinton administration created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to document the history of deliberate radiation releases. The final report, published in October 1995, was a depressing catalogue of moral lapses by medical professionals, Department of Energy scientists, officials at the Department of Defense and other federal entities. From 1944 to 1974, unethical experiments were routinely conducted on a variety of groups including soldiers, prisoners, disabled children and Alaska Natives, scores of whose thyroids were intentionally destroyed with iodine-131 in 1956 and 1957 for the absurd purpose of studying how humans acclimate to cold temperatures. Participants in these and other experiments were never adequately informed about the purposes and possible effects of the research.

Participants in the Alaska study earned $10 each. Prisoners in Washington and Oregon received $25 (plus an additional $25 for submitting to vasectomies after the tests were complete). When lawsuits were filed on their behalf during the 1970s, nine plaintiffs eventually shared $2,215 in damages.

Americans are used to pondering the effects of a nuclear weapon, which we usually imagine being lobbed at us from afar. We are less accustomed to thinking of the United States as a danger to itself. Some people, in these uncertain days, claim that the world's most dangerous regimes cannot be trusted with the world's most dangerous weapons. Reflecting on this history, I can only agree.

• David Hoogland Noon is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau.