decades earlier by twenty-four cancer victims and their relatives from St. George (population, 4,500), Frank Butrico, a US Public Health Service radiation safety monitor, testified bravely that the town had been doused repeatedly with âDirty Harryâ fallout, which sent his instruments âoff the scales.â The Nevada Test Siteâs staff had ordered him to report that the radiation levels were just âa little bit above normalâ and ânot in the range of being harmful.â 6
As more information was declassified in the late 1970s and early 1980s through congressional hearings and lawsuits, we learned that the AECâs primary concern had not been our health and safety but securing information for the weapons program that only nuclear testing could produce. The AEC had been a shameless cheerleader for a health and safety monitoring program that the Pentagon had co-opted by 1953. At a commission meeting after yet another test had rained fallout on St. George, Gordon Dean, then head of the AEC, noted that at least one commissioner had been unhappy enough with what he called the âpublic relationsâ aspects of the test to argue for a testing delay. But the tests were âso importantâ to national security, Dean noted for posterity in his personal diary, that âwe will have to go ahead. We just have to take a chance.â 7
By 1955, Lewis Strauss, Deanâs successor, was battling a Nevada legislator who had introduced legislation demanding that the program be moved out of state. Other AEC commissioners joined Strauss in protesting such outrageous interference. âWe must not let anything interfere with this series of testsânothing!â Commissioner Thomas Murray declared. 8
As declassified documents would show, the AEC had consistently lied about the health and safety risks of radiation to between 250,000 and 500,000 American soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and civilians whom the Pentagon estimated were exposed to radioactive debris from the tests. 9 Published in 1980, Atomic Soldiers , a slender volume by Howard Rosenberg, a friend and investigative journalist for ABC, described how soldiers were ordered to conduct maneuvers right under the cloud, sometimes without protective clothing or glasses, to see how well they would perform theirmissions. Describing the soldiersâ subsequent battles with cancer and in court for compensation, Howardâs book deplored the national security elitism that âallowed a few men to make decisions that affect us all.â
By the end of the 1970s, nearly a thousand people had sued the government for radiation-related damages in federal court. But records show that the Justice Department had yet to pay a penny in court-ordered nuclear-related compensation. Not until 1979 did the government concede in a federal lawsuit that there was âsome risk associated with exposure to radioactive fallout.â 10
Some twenty-five years after the ranchers filed their suit seeking compensation for their irradiated livestock, the judge who had initially ruled against them ordered a new trial held when information secured under the Freedom of Information Act suggested that the commission had known almost from the start of the program that detonation yields were unreliable and that the testing was potentially unsafe.
Due partly to growing public alarm, atmospheric testing was outlawed in 1963 by the Limited Test Ban Treaty. But the detonation of more powerful weapons continued, underground, for almost thirty more years. By 1992, when a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing took effect, some 1,053 tests had been conducted, 90 percent of them at the Nevada Test Site. Given the paucity of epidemiological studies, we will probably never know precisely how much extra radiation the âdownwindersâ living so close to the site absorbed, or the nature or full extent of the damage done to us Las Vegas residents by repeated
As more information was declassified in the late 1970s and early 1980s through congressional hearings and lawsuits, we learned that the AECâs primary concern had not been our health and safety but securing information for the weapons program that only nuclear testing could produce. The AEC had been a shameless cheerleader for a health and safety monitoring program that the Pentagon had co-opted by 1953. At a commission meeting after yet another test had rained fallout on St. George, Gordon Dean, then head of the AEC, noted that at least one commissioner had been unhappy enough with what he called the âpublic relationsâ aspects of the test to argue for a testing delay. But the tests were âso importantâ to national security, Dean noted for posterity in his personal diary, that âwe will have to go ahead. We just have to take a chance.â 7
By 1955, Lewis Strauss, Deanâs successor, was battling a Nevada legislator who had introduced legislation demanding that the program be moved out of state. Other AEC commissioners joined Strauss in protesting such outrageous interference. âWe must not let anything interfere with this series of testsânothing!â Commissioner Thomas Murray declared. 8
As declassified documents would show, the AEC had consistently lied about the health and safety risks of radiation to between 250,000 and 500,000 American soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, and civilians whom the Pentagon estimated were exposed to radioactive debris from the tests. 9 Published in 1980, Atomic Soldiers , a slender volume by Howard Rosenberg, a friend and investigative journalist for ABC, described how soldiers were ordered to conduct maneuvers right under the cloud, sometimes without protective clothing or glasses, to see how well they would perform theirmissions. Describing the soldiersâ subsequent battles with cancer and in court for compensation, Howardâs book deplored the national security elitism that âallowed a few men to make decisions that affect us all.â
By the end of the 1970s, nearly a thousand people had sued the government for radiation-related damages in federal court. But records show that the Justice Department had yet to pay a penny in court-ordered nuclear-related compensation. Not until 1979 did the government concede in a federal lawsuit that there was âsome risk associated with exposure to radioactive fallout.â 10
Some twenty-five years after the ranchers filed their suit seeking compensation for their irradiated livestock, the judge who had initially ruled against them ordered a new trial held when information secured under the Freedom of Information Act suggested that the commission had known almost from the start of the program that detonation yields were unreliable and that the testing was potentially unsafe.
Due partly to growing public alarm, atmospheric testing was outlawed in 1963 by the Limited Test Ban Treaty. But the detonation of more powerful weapons continued, underground, for almost thirty more years. By 1992, when a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing took effect, some 1,053 tests had been conducted, 90 percent of them at the Nevada Test Site. Given the paucity of epidemiological studies, we will probably never know precisely how much extra radiation the âdownwindersâ living so close to the site absorbed, or the nature or full extent of the damage done to us Las Vegas residents by repeated
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