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Atom bomb tests renew fear, debate
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Atom bomb tests renew fear, debate
Fri Aug 6, 9:40 AM ET
By Judith Graham Tribune staff reporter
Fifty years ago, Karen Turner Martin would toddle outside with her family to watch brightly colored remnants of atomic bomb mushroom clouds drift over the red rocks of southern Utah.
A generation of children from that time and place, including Martin, never have forgotten their awe at those Cold War atomic tests just over the border in Nevada. Nor have they recovered from the shock of betrayal years later, when they learned the government knew the tests were dangerous but told people they were safe.
Today these so-called downwinders--named for the winds that carried atomic debris from the Nevada Test Site to other areas in the 1950s and 1960s--still are searching for a full accounting of how many people were subjected to fallout and what happened to their health.
It isn't just a matter of setting the historical record straight. To this day, people exposed to fallout during atomic tests are developing cancer and other illnesses they believe were caused by radioactive elements.
Martin, 53 and a mother of five, is among them. Doctors recently found a tumor on her thyroid, and she's having a biopsy in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration's plans to spend millions of dollars upgrading the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas is provoking deja vu and anxiety among downwinders. The administration has also budgeted millions of dollars to design "bunker buster" nuclear bombs and low-yield nuclear weapons. The 2004 federal budget appropriated $25 million for improving readiness at the site, but officials say there are no plans to test weapons.
"Before this country spends another red bloody dime on nuclear weapons, it needs to take care of all the citizens who became unknowing victims" during the Cold War, Martin said last week, days after former President Bill Clinton warned of the dangers of new nuclear weapons in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
"The public needs to know what happened to us so they can ask themselves, `Do we want to go down this road again?'" said Preston Truman, 53, whose first memory is of sitting on his father's lap in Enterprise, Utah, and listening to horses panic as a reddish cloud from a bomb blast filled the sky. Truman heads a national group of downwinders opposed to any new nuclear testing.
However distant, the prospect of renewed nuclear testing evokes such passion here that it has become an issue in Utah's 2nd Congressional District race. The Republican Party has identified the contest as its best chance nationwide at grabbing a House seat from the Democrats.
The race pits Rep. Jim Matheson, the only Democratic member of Utah's delegation, against Republican John Swallow, a lawyer and former state legislator. Matheson is the son of former Utah Gov. Scott Matheson, a downwinder who died in 1990 at age 61 of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. Matheson and his family believe his father's exposure to radiation from atomic tests was the cause.
In Congress earlier this year, Matheson introduced the Safety for Americans from Nuclear Weapons Testing Act, which would require congressional approval and extensive safety and environmental studies before nuclear weapons could be tested. The bill has not been heard in committee.
Call to expand payments
In Utah last week, Matheson called on the federal government to recognize that far more people were affected by nuclear tests than previously recognized and to expand its compensation program.
"This country doesn't understand how much of the nation was subjected to fallout," he said, addressing a hearing in Salt Lake City sponsored by the National Academies of Science. Combined with the testing issue, this is "my No. 1 legislative priority and I'm going to keep working on it."
Swallow, whose Web site says he is committed to "conservative ideals" and national defense, could not be reached for comment.
For its part, the National Academy of Sciences is looking at whether the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed in 1990 largely at the insistence of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and other Western members of Congress, goes far enough in recognizing the geographic spread and health consequences of radioactive fallout from atomic tests. The academy plans to issue a report on the subject next summer.
The United States conducted about 100 above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950s and the 1960s. Underground tests continued until 1992.
To date, the compensation program has paid $775 million in claims filed by downwinders, uranium miners, uranium millers, ore haulers and workers who participated in above-ground atomic tests. Funding sometimes has been problematic, and the program expects claims to exceed its budget by $72 million next year, according to government estimates.
Especially disconcerting to many is how the program defines who is eligible for payments. To qualify, a person must have lived in southern Utah, northwestern Arizona or eastern Nevada--only 21 counties are covered--during the period of above-ground testing and subsequently have contracted leukemia or thyroid, brain, ovarian, pancreatic, breast, lung or liver cancers, among other illnesses.
That excludes people in the most populous swath of Utah--the Salt Lake Valley--even though government studies performed after the law's passage confirm that area received higher radioactive fallout than many areas in southern Utah.
A 1997 study by the National Cancer Institute of citizens' exposure to Iodine-131 shows that northern Utah, parts of Idaho, Montana and western Colorado as well as counties as far away as in Iowa, Tennessee and New York received significant amounts of radioactive iodine, which has been linked to cancer. Iodine-131 is one of more than 100 radioactive elements in nuclear fallout.
Lynn Anspaugh, a professor of radiobiology at the University of Utah, is one of the leading experts on calculating radiation doses, and he worked on a 2001 National Cancer Institute report examining 20 radioisotopes distributed by atomic fallout.
Utah Legislature's request
"I don't know how [Congress] can avoid expanding the compensation program if they follow their own logic," he said at last week's hearing in Salt Lake City's downtown library. "The [radiation] doses in the Salt Lake Valley were higher than many places where Congress said people should get payment."
The costs, though, could be huge, totaling tens of billions of dollars, he warned.
Recognizing the issue, Utah's Legislature voted unanimously this year to request that Congress grant payments to residents across the entire state who were exposed to atomic tests and later became ill.
Though cancer has been the focus of nuclear testing compensation for downwinders, recent research argues that the potential health effects are much broader and should be considered for compensation as well, Anspaugh said. He cited a June article in the journal Radiation Research by Japanese researchers who followed survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Friday marks the 59th anniversary of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The researchers found that survivors' risk of having heart attacks and developing cataracts or hypertension, thyroid disease, chronic liver disease and uterine myoma was 20 times greater than their risk of contracting cancer from radiation exposure.
"These illnesses are occurring later in life, and that's why it's taking longer to see these things in research studies," Anspaugh said.
The findings come as no surprise to the dozens of older men and women who attended last week's hearing in Salt Lake City.
One by one, they stood up to tell of friends and family members who had become ill years after being exposed to fallout and their suffering; of children laid in their graves from leukemia and other diseases; of their lack of trust that the government would do the right thing.
Among them was Tony Pickering, 63, who grew up in Payson, 60 miles south of Salt Lake City.
His thyroid cancer was discovered three years ago; now the cancer has moved into both lungs.
"How can they say the fallout went only in some counties and stopped at the county line? This stuff goes where the wind takes it and it went right to the earth, to the vegetables I ate and the milk I drank," said Pickering, who described himself as "totally against" any more nuclear tests.
In fact, many of these illnesses may well have occurred even without any exposure to nuclear test fallout. The problem is, for any given person there is no way of distinguishing sicknesses caused by fallout from those with more natural origins, said Anspaugh, the radiobiology professor.
"A lot of these problems, they're probably not connected to the fallout, but we can't tell which is and which isn't," he said. "It's a very difficult situation."
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