by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Last night (Monday, October 21) I watched a quite challenging documentary on PBS, Downwinders and the Radioactive West, made by PBS Utah in 2022 and focused on the effect America’s above-ground nuclear tests from 1951 to 1963 and the underground tests that continued there until 1992 had on the surrounding populations. Narrated by Peter Coyote (whose smooth voice graces most of Ken Burns’s recent documentaries as well) and produced by John Howe (a filmmaker I can’t find a listing for on imdb.com; there are two people named John Howe listed, a director who died in 2008 and an art director/production designer on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings cycle and King Kong), Downwinders and the Radioactive West tells a chilling tale of how Americans were used by their own government as unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment to determine just how much atomic radiation people could stand. The documentary includes a thumbnail sketch of America’s history with atomic weapons, which began with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939 warning that recent experiments in splitting uranium atoms could pose a threat to the U.S.’s national security because “this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs.” Einstein was picked to write this letter, based on the researches of physicist Leo Szilard and others, because as the only nuclear physicist most Americans had actually heard of, his name on the letter would garner the best chance of a reaction in the upper levels of U.S. power. In 1942 the U.S. Congress authorized a program called the Manhattan Engineering District, whose actual purpose – to design and create an atomic bomb – was carefully concealed from virtually everyone, including Roosevelt’s last Vice-President, Harry S. Truman. Truman succeeded Roosevelt when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and only then did Secretary of War Harry Stimson tell him that the U.S. had an A-bomb which they would test in three months’ time. (Truman was so appalled at how little he had been told about basic government functions, especially regarding the war, that he started the tradition of having the candidates for President in the next election receiving secret briefings about the major issues that would face them if they got elected.)
When the first explosion of an atomic weapon – the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 – occurred, Truman was in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill (who in the middle of the conference lost his election and was replaced by his successor, Clement Attlee), anxiously awaiting word of the bomb test. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities – Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later – and Japan surrendered on August 15. For the rest of the 1940’s the U.S. continued to stage atomic bomb tests on atolls in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. They relocated the indigenous inhabitants of the Marshalls but allowed them to come back to their former homes – at least the ones that still existed on islands that hadn’t been utterly destroyed, like Elugelab in the Enewetak chain, site of the world’s first hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952 – with the result that a lot of them got cancer and other diseases due to the lingering effects of radiation and fallout (solid material made radioactive, left behind by the tests and carried by wind through the air). In November 1950, out of fear that such a remote testing location could be the subject of espionage, President Truman ordered the creation of the Nevada Test Site in the southeastern corner of Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles from Las Vegas. (Las Vegas casino-hotels often advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists and locals could watch the A-bomb blasts.) In a 1951 test called “Operation Buster-Jangle” (the cutesy-poo names of the tests are among the weirdest aspects of the story), the U.S. Army anesthetized dogs and put them in the middle of the blast to see what would happen to them.
On May 19, 1953 a test called “Upshot Knothole Harry” created havoc when the winds shifted and blew the fallout in a different direction from the one the people in charge of the test had predicted. It was the first of many tests that would drench the small town of St. George, Utah in radioactive waste and fallout. The residents of St. George first noticed the effects when the sheep they raised started getting sick and dying en masse. “I remember handling them in the corrals,” said sheepherder Mel Clark. “You'd grab hold of one to pull it into the corral or move it into a little pen, and their hide, the wool, the skin, everything just pulled right off from them.” Then they gradually noticed the effect on the human population as well. Mary Dickson, who became a playwright and wrote a play called Exposed about the plight of the Downwinders (as they came to call themselves), got thyroid cancer at age 29. Various populations in the St. George area showed much higher rates of cancer than epidemiologists expected. So did U.S. soldiers who were ordered to march into radioactive test sites, dig trenches and prepare for combat in hopes that the U.S. could use so-called “tactical nuclear weapons” in battle. And so, in one of the weirdest twists of this bizarre story, did the makers of the 1955 film The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes for RKO and starring John Wayne as Mongol leader Genghis Khan. To stand in for the Mongolian desert, producer Hughes and director Dick Powell picked a location near the Nevada Test Site – with the result that two-thirds of the people involved in making the movie, including director Powell and the four major stars (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead), died of cancer.
Among the interviewees on the show was Jon Huntsman, son of a former Utah Governor from the 1950’s who himself was elected Governor from 2005 to 2009. “When my dad was governor and he got more and more evidence about the incidence of cancer deaths in Southern Utah being so high, that really piqued his interest,” Huntsman said. “As governor, he was part of an effort to get a lot of documents declassified at the Pentagon. The importance of that was those documents indicated that the government only did the testing when the wind blew the fallout to the least populated direction which was Southern Utah. So in the 1950’s the government said, don’t worry, this is all safe. But the release of these documents in the Pentagon show that the government actually knew there was risk. And that’s why they had the testing take place, only when it blew in Southern Utah.” By 1955 the Downwinders started seeking redress in the courts, but they faced three major obstacles. One was the widespread belief, fostered by decades of government propaganda, that the atomic bomb tests were “necessary” for “national security,” and therefore whatever health effects they were facing were for the greater good. Another was the scientific near-impossibility of proving that any particular case of cancer was caused by a particular sort of exposure to carcinogens. Epidemiologists can and do say that a particular cluster of cancer cases, in numbers well above what would be expected in that population from normal exposure, indicates an environmental factor that raises the risk of people in that area getting cancer, but not that a particular case of cancer came from that exposure. The third obstacle was the old doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which states that the government can basically do whatever it wants to its citizens and they have no legal recourse in the courts.
The first legal action was brought by the sheep ranchers in 1956 and was heard by Judge Benjamin Christensen, who found for the government. Later, in 1982, he re-heard the case and this time found for the plaintiffs after newly declassified government documents revealed that the government had known all along that fallout posed a risk to the sheep. “I think the stories about the impact on sheep from the nuclear fallout are quite compelling,” said Judge Christensen. “The courts found that there was a connection between the fallout and the damage to the sheep herds. And I think that was the right outcome.” But later he was reversed by the Court of Appeals. A much larger case dealing with the human cost of the tests was heard by Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in 1979. The case was brought by Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President John F. Kennedy, who brought suit on behalf not only of the Downwinders but the Navajo miners who had dug for the uranium needed to produce America’s atomic arsenal in the first place. Judge Jenkins found for the plaintiffs, but like Judge Christensen, his ruling was reversed by the Court of Appeals. “Sorry I'm saying it, [but] it came with the discretion of the function on the part of the United States to do what they did,” Judge Jenkins said of the Court of Appeals’ ruling. He called it “a fairly shallow opinion,” and the show’s narration noted that it did not dispute Judge Jenkins’s findings of fact in the case.
In 1990 Congress passed a law, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), sponsored by then-Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Representative Wayne Owens (R-Utah) that set up a fund for partial compensation for the Downwinders: $50,000 to individuals with disease who resided near the Nevada test site or worked there, $75,000 is defined for test site workers, and $100,000 for uranium miners. In the documentary, Mary Dickson denounced the paltriness of the awards: “My dad’s life is worth so much more than $50,000. It was the only thing, tangible thing, that I could get back a little bit from what they had taken away from me.” And in 2022 RECA was scheduled to expire anyway, leading one Downwinder to complain in the documentary that the government is just waiting for them all to die. Watching this documentary in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which one of the major-party candidates, himself a former President, is declaring near-authoritarian powers to destroy media outlets that publish stories that displease him and pledging to be “a dictator on day one” to enact a draconian anti-immigration policy and plunder the environment for increased energy production, proved especially timely. The fact is that even in a country that loudly proclaims itself to be a “democracy” (which it isn’t, and never has been; the framers of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a republic, not a democracy, and were quite explicit about the difference), the government can do pretty much whatever it wants, including poisoning large numbers of its citizens, and there’s no way to hold it to account.
