AEC Denials
In the 1950s few Americans knew of the health risks associated with bomb fallout. The test program had been
cast in a patriotic light by the official releases that the press circulated. For those who feared ill effects from
radiation, government assurances were profuse. Year after year media conveyed U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
announcements to downwind residents: "There is no danger."33
But sheep, thousands of them, abruptly sickened and died. Country dwellers noticed that wildlife, from deer to
birds, thinned from expansive rangelands regularly dusted with fallout from the Nevada Test Site upwind. And in
one small community after another, people died from diseases rarely seen there before: leukemia, lymphoma, acute
thyroid damage, many forms of cancer.
"My father and I were both morticians, and when these cancer cases started coming in I had to go into my books
to study how to do the embalming, cancers were so rare," remembered Elmer Pickett, a lifelong resident of St.
George, Utah. "In ’56 and ’57 all of a sudden they were coming in all the time. By 1960 it was a regular flood."34
As latency periods came due, towns like St. George began to reap a grim harvest sown by the atomic whirlwinds.
They were mostly populated by Mormons, devoutly obeying their Church’s instructions not to smoke tobacco or
drink alcohol. Cancer had never been a noticeable problem before. But, as the 1950s wore on, and for decades
afterward, the ravaging effects came like a pestilence in serial form: the leukemias, usually quickest to result from
radiation exposure, came first; numerous types of cancer, emerging in body organs or in bones, tended to arrive later.
Despite its claims that neither the detonations nor fallout were harmful, the Atomic Energy Commission routinely
waited until the winds were blowing in the "right" direction.35 That meant away from big cities like Las Vegas and
Los Angeles. Occasionally at the last minute shifting breezes dumped fallout on large metropolitan areas—Las
Vegas was sprinkled with radioactivity in 1955, for example, and three years later fallout clouds dropped on Los
Angeles. But for the most part America’s continental nuclear tests went according to plan. The most deadly
concentrations of fallout came down in rural areas of Nevada, Utah, and northern Arizona.
After southern Utah sheepherders lost massive numbers of their livestock, they unsuccessfully brought suit
against the federal government in 1955. In court the government response was that "a combination of factors
including malnutrition, poor management, and adverse weather conditions" led to the animals’ deaths.36 (Two
decades later complaints near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, the Rocky Flats weapons
production facility in Colorado, and other atomic installations would meet similar explanations.) Internal memos to
the contrary from AEC researchers were suppressed. Sworn statements by sheepherders, who testified such
epidemics among their livestock had never happened until the mushroom clouds rose upwind, were discounted.
However, the sheep were a kind of early-warning system for what was to follow. Starting in the mid-1950s,
leukemia became a household word in Utah towns like St. George and Enterprise and Parowan; the same held true
for communities like Tonopah in Nevada, Fredonia in Arizona. Children were especially vulnerable.
As early as 1959 a study disclosed higher radioactive strontium 90 levels in young children living downwind of
the atomic tests.37 In 1965 another suppressed study—this one by U.S. Public Health Service researcher Dr. Edward
Weiss—correlated radioactive fallout with an inordinately high leukemia rate among downwind Utah residents.
Weiss’s report concluded: "An examination of leukemia death records in southwestern Utah" during the years of
heavy fallout "shows an apparently excessive number of deaths."38
A joint AEC-White House meeting about the Weiss report took place in early September 1965; AEC
representatives criticized the study. A week later the AEC’s assistant general manager told AEC commissioners that
researching such topics as downwind leukemia rates would "pose potential problems to the commission: adverse
public relations, lawsuits and jeopardizing the programs of the Nevada Test Site."39 Although atmospheric testing
had been banned by then, underground tests were still releasing radioactivity into the air. And the AEC was gearing
up for the civilian nuclear power program, predicated on the contention that low levels of officially permitted
radiation were harmless.
The White House shelved the Weiss report in 1965, and blocked any follow-up research.40 In fact there were
many nuclear-testing-related documents and AEC meeting minutes that remained secret until 1979, when they were
made public by journalists or Senator Edward Kennedy.41 For the Weiss study that meant staying locked up in
federal vaults for a full thirteen years.42
In 1979, however, University of Utah epidemiology director Dr. Joseph L. Lyon independently confirmed the
validity of the Weiss report. In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Lyon and
associates documented that children growing up in southern Utah during the aboveground atomic weapons tests
suffered a leukemia rate two and a half times higher than for children before the testing began and after it ended.43
In early 1981 results of the federal executive branch’s Interagency Radiation Research Committee inquiry were
made public—stating that a profusion of childhood cancer in southern Utah "remains unexplained on grounds other
than possible fallout exposure."44
Health risks of living downwind from the nuclear tests were shared by Indians—particularly Duckwater
Shoshones north of the test site, and Southern Paiutes to the east. Poor medical record-keeping has handicapped
efforts to assess fallout effects. But in 1981 Paiute Tribe of Utah vice-chair Elvis F. Wall blamed the radiation for
adding to health woes among tribe members.45
Through it all, during three decades that started with the first mushroom clouds over Nevada in 1951, the U.S.
Government nuclear weapons testing spokespeople continued to proudly observe that federal authorities had never
lost a lawsuit based on radioactive fallout.46 With about a thousand plaintiffs seeking damages in federal court as the
1970s ended, U.S. Justice Department attorneys were anxious to sustain their "perfect record" of eluding judicial
pronouncements of atomic fallout culpability.
In 1979 plaintiffs accused the federal government of failing to inform area residents that fallout from the tests
could cause cancer. Federal statements filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City denied the charges, stating that
citizens were told "there was some risk associated with exposure to radioactive fallout" during the 1950s.47
Those denials infuriated citizens, who produced numerous written proclamations distributed by the federal
government throughout the 1950s, claiming the radioactive fallout posed no danger. One widely posted statement,
dated January 1951 and signed by AEC project manager Ralph P. Johnson, read: "Health and safety authorities have
determined that no danger from or as a result of AEC activities may be expected . . . All necessary precautions,
including radiological surveys and patrolling of the surrounding territory, will be undertaken to insure that safety
conditions are maintained."48
In March 1957 the AEC distributed a booklet titled "Atomic Tests in Nevada" among downwind residents. "You
people who live near Nevada Test Site are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation’s atomic test
program," the federal pamphlet said. "You have been close observers of tests which have contributed greatly to
building the defenses of our country and of the free world. . . . Every test detonation in Nevada is carefully evaluated
as to your safety before it is included in a schedule. Every phase of the operation is likewise studied from the safety
viewpoint." Readers were assured that after six full years of open-air nuclear tests upwind, "all such findings have
confirmed that Nevada test fallout has not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site."49
And, in an effort to keep the local citizenry from looking too closely, the AEC included in its booklet a drawing
of an unshorn, bowlegged cowboy raising his eyebrows at a clicking meter in his hand. "Many persons in Nevada,
Utah Arizona, and nearby California have Geiger counters these days," the pamphlet counseled. "We can expect
many reports that ‘Geiger counters were going crazy here today.’ Reports like this may worry people unnecessarily.
Don’t let them bother you."50
Few residents of Utah, or Nevada, or northern Arizona were surprised by the conclusions of a 1980 report issued
by the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations: "The Government’s program
for monitoring the health effects of the tests was inadequate and, more disturbingly, all evidence suggesting that
radiation was having harmful effects, be it on the sheep or the people, was not only disregarded but actually
suppressed."51
33. Jack Willis and Saul Landau, Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang (New York: New Time Films, 1979), transcript p. 1.
34. Life, June 1980, p. 36.
35. This policy was reflected in numerous AEC deliberations and decisions; for example, commissioners’ meetings of March 1 and March 14, 1955.
36. Life, June 1980, p. 38.
37. Washington Post, April 14, 1979.
38. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and Senate, Labor and Human
Resources Committee, Health and Scientific Research Subcommittee, and the Committee on the Judiciary, Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation, 96th
Cong., 1st sess. Serial No. 96-42, April 19, 1979, Vol. 2, p. 2195 (hereafter cited as Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation).
39. Washington Post, April 14, 1979.
40. Deseret News, February 27, 1979; Washington Post, April 14, 1979.
41. See Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation, Vols. 1 and 2.
42. Washington Post, April 14, 1979.
43. Joseph L. Lyon, et al., "Childhood Leukemias Associated with Fallout from Nuclear Testing," New England Journal of Medicine, February 22, 1979, pp.
397-402. Lyons’s study has been criticized by nuclear proponents because in spite of the increase in leukemia rate among children in Utah, the rate was still
below the U.S. average. This attitude seems to assume that every area of the U.S. "deserves" to be as polluted as the East Coast, where synergistic effects of
multiple carcinogens and wash-out of radioactive chemicals from contaminated clouds compound the health problems.
44. The Oregonian, Associated Press, January 1, 1981.
45. Elvis F. Wall, vice-chairperson, Interim Tribal Council, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Cedar City, Utah, printed statement, undated, distributed May 1981.
46. Deseret News, February 15, 1979.
47. The Tribune (Salt Lake), December 17, 1979.
48. "WARNING," sign dated January 1951, obtained from Citizens’ Call organization in Utah.
49. AEC, Atomic Tests in Nevada, March 1957, pp. 2, 4, 15.
50. Ibid., p. 23.
51. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, 96th
Cong., 2nd sess., Committee Print 96-1FC 53, August 1980, p. 37.