Nevada Learns to Say No

For half a century, the armed services have been accustomed to using vast portions of Nevada and California pretty much as their own private preserve for all sorts of exotic operations, ranging from practice bombing runs to missile shots. In sparsely-populated Nevada in particular, military spending has been a critical part of the economy. And the military used to have such avid supporters as Sen. Howard Cannon representing the state in Congress. Rarely, if ever, did Nevada say no to anything the military wanted.

Nevada no longer is quite so vast in space and short on people--or so tolerant of being the playing board for supersonic war games. The state’s representation has changed, as witness the decision of Sens. Harry Reid and Richard H. Bryan, both Democrats, to seek legislation blocking new military expansion in the state for two years. Reid said the military still is welcome in Nevada, but only as long as it recognizes the state’s growth and its sensitivity to being buzzed, strafed and bombed, even if it is all in the name of keeping pilots sharp and ready for anything.

The Navy recently announced plans to double its 10,000 square miles of air space devoted to training based at the Fallon Naval Air Station 70 miles east of Reno, and to add 380,000 acres to its Fallon bomb and missile ranges. Before going to sea, Navy carrier pilots train at Fallon to hone their ability to strike targets on land, Times staff writer Kevin Roderick has reported.

The Navy has pumped $260 million into the sophisticated Fallon electronic warfare range since 1983, when operations over Lebanon convinced the admirals their pilots needed to be better prepared for air-to-land battle. The new expansion was announced even in advance of the issuance of an unprecedented report on the health and environmental impact of military operations on Nevadans.

Capt. Rex Rackowitz, the base commander at Fallon, noted in an interview: “We’re meeting with a lot of resistance that we didn’t see in the past.” Indeed, a group known as Citizen Alert is protesting any expansion of war games over Nevada, collecting complaints from remote ranchers and Indian groups. The complainants obviously have the sympathetic ear of Nevada’s senators. Rackowitz thinks the opposition is a sort of fallout from Vietnam War days, when citizens began questioning what the military was doing. It could be, too, that Nevadans simply seek some peace and quiet in their homes on the range--and not the bombing range.