And yet of course, it did. It did first of all under Dow Chemical’s twenty-six years of supervision—there were at least two devastating fires involving weapons-grade plutonium, most particularly the isotope 239Pu. This form of the metal has to be one of the most dangerous substances known. It is highly radioactive. Its radioactivity has a half-life of 24,110 years. If you fashion it into a ball four inches in diameter and weighing a little under eleven pounds, it has the potential to go critical and explode. With sufficient sophisticated engineering—although the kind of sophistication only available to a sovereign nation—a critical mass can be reduced to the size of a tennis ball. Pieces of it are formidably difficult to machine: it catches fire with consummate ease, it burns ferociously hot. It did so in the two Dow Chemical fires at Rocky Flats, burning through both the gloves used to handle it and the Plexiglas shields of the chamber in which the operator was trying to cut and shape and polish it. On burning, the metal releases—and out into the atmosphere, if not caught by scrubbers—millions of particles that if breathed in will cause (not can cause; will cause) human cancers so quickly that it has been calculated that a pound of the material will easily kill two million people.* Plumes of the burned plutonium escaped from chimneys after those fires in 1957 and 1969—the latter taking two years to clean up—and were spread by the prevailing westerly downslope winds onto the fields and farms and tract-house lawns of western Denver. In 1972, and to help contain any further spread of contaminants, the federal government bought a further five thousand acres as a buffer zone around the plant, then five thousand more acres a little later. Problems within the plant began to spiral out of control—leaks were found in barrels of radioactive waste, elevated tritium levels were found in local water supplies, wind-blown plutonium was found in local soil samples, health officials in Denver began to complain, housing developments in the western suburbs were slowed—and soon after that the protests began. Hundreds and then thousands of anxious Colorado citizens were at the gates, some breaking in and getting themselves arrested. Some local landowners sued the government for contamination of their properties. All adding to the publicity of a plant that was fast going rogue.

  Plutonium triggers for America’s growing arsenal of atomic weapons were made at the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver until a pollution scandal closed the site in 1992. Years of cleanup followed.

  Dow Chemical was relieved of its duties in 1976 and Rockwell International—a once vast conglomerate involved in a spectrum of manufacturing, ranging from space shuttles to television sets, truck axles to yachts, GPS devices to coffeemakers—was given the new contract. From 1975 until 1990, the company could add to its portfolio of products the plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs—the making of which required a set of tasks and skills in which the company turned out to be utterly lacking. In fact, Rockwell proved so incompetent, corrupt, and irresponsible a manager that in 1989 something quite unprecedented took place, all the more remarkable considering that the Rocky Flats plant was, essentially, a federal agency, part of the atom-bomb-responsible Department of Energy for which Rockwell had been given operating responsibility.

  What took place on the morning of June 6, 1989, will long stand tall in the annals of the American bureaucracy. A team of FBI agents, cleared through the plant’s formidable security barriers, arrived for an ostensibly routine talk with plant bosses about putting in place protocols to deal with any potential terrorist threats. Perfectly ordinary. No drama. Just normal.

  But suddenly, after the managers were all comfortably seated, the FBI leader revealed just why they were actually there. He formally announced that This Is a Raid. It was the beginning of a criminal investigation that had been given the official name of Operation Desert Glow. He came armed with a search warrant, which he promptly took out of his briefcase and laid it on the table in front of the suddenly shaken, instantly white-faced managers. Federal agents, he said, were at that very moment piling out of buses to break down every door to every one of the 800 buildings and raid every filing cabinet and open all cellars and use crowbars to crack open storage facilities, and all to find out exactly what was going on inside the Rocky Flats factory—because it was suspected that at the very least the country’s pollution laws were being systematically and seriously violated, and that legions of criminal conspirators were busily covering up breaches of the law that had been occurring for many years previously.

  One federal agency was, in other words, investigating a brother agency, and on charges of criminal incompetence and collusion. Such a thing had never happened before. But the FBI, it turned out, had ample reason for doing so—its agents knew well what they were doing: for over the previous twelve months they had been conducting surreptitious surveillance, flying planes over the plant to gather radiation evidence, asking whistleblowers to step forward, to bring photographs, recordings, and leaked files. A grand jury was convened. Charges were brought, deals were done, secrecy was generally preserved (except for a superb exercise in investigative journalism performed by a then stripling magazine called Westworld, which blew the lid off what could have been a major judicial scandal as well), and Rockwell was forced to pay some millions in fines. Senior managers escaped criminal conviction and jail sentences, and the whole affair left a lingering impression of justice denied in the vaguely expressed interest—this being the atomic bomb industry—of national security.

  Then, in the 1990s, Rockwell was sacked and the plant was scheduled to be closed down. The U.S. navy announced it no longer had a need for plutonium triggers for its latest generation of submarine-launched missiles, and so the business of producing pits at Rocky Flats vanished, almost overnight. Four thousand workers were laid off, a further four thousand were transferred to what became the principal business of the facility—cleanup. Plutonium was shipped off to other plants, waste material was set in concrete and shipped elsewhere, and the multiyear billion-dollar program of remediation and restoration so familiar to other nuclear sites—Hanford in Washington, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima—got ponderously under way. By October 2005 it was declared that, to the best of the federal government’s knowledge, all was clean and uncontaminated once again, and life would be allowed to resume. Except—no digging below three feet deep, since only the upper thirty-six inches of soil in Rocky Flats had been fully cleaned or replaced.

  There have been lawsuits aplenty in the years since, and monies have been awarded—$375 million in one case—to homeowners claiming that plutonium pollution has spoiled their health or lowered the value of their homes. Part of the site has been made into a wildlife refuge, the opening of which was much delayed and which many Denver parents will not allow their children to visit. And at the time of this writing, the town of Bloomfield says it is not permitting an extension of the Denver Beltway, the long-interrupted E-470, to pass through its section of the former Rocky Flats site. Residual radiation is too high, the town insists.

  The stewardship of land is a complicated business—and enclosure or clearance, fencing or wilding, all have their adherents and their critics. But none of these phenomena have, for good or ill, a permanent or even a very long-standing effect on the land itself. Fences are built and then come down, ownership changes, rules relax or tighten, populations ebb and flow, wild animals and plants populate and decimate, then populate again, wildfires rage and seeds sprout once the flames have died down—landscape is all a part of an ever changing world, and it forgives or forgets almost all of the assaults that mankind willfully or neglectfully imposes upon it.

  Except, as it happens, in the matter of radioactivity. The soils of the front ranges in this beautiful part of the state of Colorado are now speckled with traces of plutonium 239. This diabolical man-made substance will remain in place for thousands upon thousands of years—a near permanent stain on the planet, a reminder of how cruelly mankind deals with his lands and his landscape.

  Colorado happens to be one of the states in the union with the fewest Native American reservations, having no significant number of resident tribal peoples penned up on federal lands. Once there were Cheyenne and Arapaho, Apache and Shoshone. But no longer. Perhaps it is as well. Considering how the invading white man has dealt with the land that the native people have so long revered, they would all in concert bow their heads, and weep.

  Part IV

  Battlegrounds

  1

  The Dreary Steeples

  Acts of injustice done

  Between the setting and the rising sun

  In history lie like bones, each one.

  —W. H. AUDEN, The Ascent of F6, ACT II, SCENE V (1936)

  When I was a young correspondent in Belfast in the early 1970s, we employed as our babysitter a young Catholic girl whom I’ll call Mary. She lived in Andersonstown, at the time one of the most notoriously Republican outer suburbs of the city, where almost every house (including Mary’s) provided safe haven for men from the IRA and a secure hiding place for their weapons. Mary and my family kept in touch long after I left Ireland, and eventually at the urging of her parents she left the violence of Belfast behind her and immigrated to Canada, settling in Vancouver.

  In due course she married. Her husband, also a Belfast refugee and now also living in British Columbia, was a Protestant. I am calling him Gerald, and he was not just a Protestant, but a truly militant congregant of one of the churches led by the formidably anti-Catholic pastor Ian Paisley. Gerald had lived in that area of Belfast called the Short Strand, arguably the most aggressively loyalist part of town, a recruiting-ground for the Ulster Volunteer Force, a bastion of the Orange Order. He, in short, was everything that Mary would have feared and despised; she was, in Gerald’s eyes, the embodiment of papist evil.

  Mary and Gerald have been married for forty-five years, are at the time of this writing on the verge of retiring, have raised three children, have an assortment of grandchildren, and are pillars of the Vancouver civil service, Mary involved in childcare, Gerald in highway maintenance. The fact that one is Catholic and the other Protestant barely signifies; nor does the fact that they come from areas of Belfast that remain as unbridgeably hostile today as they were fifty years ago. In Canada, none of this matters. The Irish argument ended the moment they each stepped out onto the Vancouver airport tarmac. Because as both now agree, and as most who think about the political situation of Ireland north and south do as well, the argument in which each were unknowing participants was really all about land.

  Gerald and those who thought like him believed, so long as he remained in Belfast, that it was his God-given duty to defend to the death the idea that the land in which he lived would remain eternally under the invigilation of London and would remain steadfastly and loyally part of the United Kingdom. Mary, so often frightened and beleaguered by gunfire as she sheltered in her little council house in Andersonstown, had no such wish, but dreamed instead that one distant day all of the island of Ireland would be peacefully united, as geography suggested it should be, under the equally warm supervision of Dublin.

  The argument had little to do with religion, in any meaningful sense. It had very much more to do with such concepts as rule, possession, organization, sovereignty, independence, political union, separation, legal systems—and all of those things that were to be determined by who, in the end, ruled the land on which these two, and all those in Belfast, all in Fermanagh and Tyrone, Armagh and Antrim, Derry and Down, lived out their days. Distance the people from the land and the argument diminished; return them, and all the old fighting would resume.

  It is possible to be too glib about the importance of place to peoples who inhabit lands that are burdened with deep historical fractures. One can, however, point to the relative serenity of at least some of the diasporas around the world, in which those involved were once at each other’s throats. The Tutsi and Hutu who fled the genocidal miseries of Rwanda in the mid-1990s seem today to be somewhat more amiably disposed to one another where many now live in Alberta and North Dakota. Serbs and Kosovars in Chicago seem no more hostile to one another today than do those Indians and Pakistanis who live at either end of Devon Avenue on the city’s north side. Return each group to east Africa, the Balkans, or the subcontinent and sparks might fly; keep them away from the land that gave birth to their conflict, and an uneasy peace often returns. This is by no means always true, with one noted exception in the next chapter. But all too often enmity subsides with distance and is replaced by the greater notion that all inhabitants of the land surface are simply humans, with more reason to be united than divided.

  Such is very clearly the case for Mary and Gerald, who with no family now left in Ireland, seldom go back. Canada is their home, and there are no arguments of such depth and magnitude and longevity there, nor are there ever likely to be. They can just get on with living, and such interest as they have in land now is purely with how best to plant the half-acre plot that surrounds their little retirement house in the foothills of the Rockies. That for them and for now is quite sufficient.

  2

  The Unholy Land

  The futility—not to mention the danger—of Balfour messing himself up with things between Arabs and Jews is beyond castigation. There’s bound to be unnecessary trouble there—before long.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, LETTER TO H. RIDER HAGGARD (1925)

  It was on the afternoon of Friday, September 26, 1947, in the former wartime headquarters of the Sperry Gyroscope Company in the Long Island community of Lake Success, that a British government minister—a dedicated socialist, trade unionist, rock climber, and hill walker named Arthur Creech Jones—made an announcement that, though its consequences were unanticipated or, at best, underestimated, would lead to the creation of the most intractable land dispute in the world.

  This rotund, bespectacled, mild-mannered, and otherwise somewhat forgettable functionary stood that day to inform the General Assembly of the United Nations—whose delegates were meeting in this insalubrious industrial site while their permanent headquarters was being readied on the East Side of Manhattan—that the United Kingdom would henceforth be ending its quarter century of hapless supervision of the former Ottoman territories of Palestine, and would withdraw all British troops from it by the middle of May 1948.

  Arguments over the disposition between Jew and Arab, of these five million acres of hitherto British-mandated Levantine land—with its olive farms and citrus groves and the goatherds’ oases and the rock-strewn deserts, with its ancient, ancient cities of unparalleled religious importance, and which lay, mostly fertile and full of promise, between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, from the frontier with Lebanon in the north down to the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea—would bitterly obsess millions for decades to come, would spur wars and assassinations and acts of terrorism that continue to this day. But after Mr. Jones’s singular announcement on that early autumn Friday of 1947, which was the lead story in all the serious British newspapers on Saturday morning, all that really mattered to my family in London was that my father would now be coming home.

  As a young soldier he had already had a distinctly trying war. It had begun with some promise: he had commanded a tank squadron in the North African desert in 1943, engaging in a number of modest skirmishes—but then had been unexpectedly summoned back to England for secret training for what turned out to be the D-day invasion, and had then successfully landed with his men on Omaha Beach on the famous June 6 start of Operation Overlord. His luck ran out three days later, however, when he stumbled into an ambush in the deep lanes of the Norman countryside, and was captured and sent eventually to an officers’ POW camp, Oflag 79, in the Saxon city of Braunschweig, where he spent the remaining months of the war. When in March 1945 he was liberated by American soldiers he was sent home to London, only to be confronted by two surprises: first, that the family house had been demolished by a V-2 flying bomb, and second, that I had been born.

  The War Office was a body little given to sentimentality; and in the pitiless ways of the times, my father was promptly ordered away from London and his ruined house and his newborn child, was placed onto a troopship, and was sent off by way of Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus to the Levantine port of Haifa, in Palestine. There he would remain for two further uncomfortable and dispiriting years, until shortly after Mr. Jones’s announcement to the United Nations when, like ten thousand others, he was given his marching orders and told that at last, his duties now all faithfully discharged, he could go home, for good. He’d be given a slim metal commemoration bar to add to the ribbon of his single campaign medal, he would be slathered with thanks, formally demobilized, and allowed to return to life as a civilian.

  My father’s posting was to a territory suffering through the second of its three most recent iterations. The first had commenced early in the sixteenth century; starting then, and for the next four centuries, this vast acreage—5.5 million acres in full extent, or to use the old Turkish areal unit still employed in Israel, 22 million donum*—had been administered as part of the Ottoman Vilayet of Syria. Since 1516, when the Ottomans had displaced the Egyptian Mamluks, it had been dreamily ruled by a Turkish wali who sat on a golden throne in Damascus, and had as his notional deputy a French-speaking Turk who ran (though he answered directly to the viziers of the Sublime Porte back in Constantinople) what was called the Mutesarrifate of Jerusalem. Up until the mid-nineteenth century these Holy Lands—though substantially peopled by Jews at various periods in antiquity—were almost wholly Arab. In 1850 perhaps 4 percent were Jews, most of them deeply religious scholars buried deep in the souks of the Vilayet’s ancient cities. But toward the end of the century these numbers started to climb. They did so for two reasons: a seemingly state-sponsored campaign of pogroms against Jews living in Tsarist Russia, and the formal birth in 1897 of the philosophical notion of Zionism—the dream of stateless Jews around the world to return to the hills of Jerusalem on which the city of David had been built, and re-create a homeland there.