Irradiated Test Workers
Bennie F. Levy was thirty-two years old when he began working at the Nevada Test Site in 1951, the first year of
nuclear explosions there.
Born and raised on an Arizona cattle ranch, he had left college to volunteer for the Air Corps soon after Pearl
Harbor, helping to service B-24s and other Allied bombers at Pacific Ocean bases. After the war, he became an
ironworker, on jobs at dam construction along the Colorado River, then electrical transmission lines in the
Southwest. A member of the Structural Ironworkers Union, he was laboring on a dam project in the Pacific
Northwest when he first heard about a big new source of employment.
"I was in Walla Walla, Washington, when I got a letter from a friend in September 1950 to come to Las Vegas,
Nevada, that there was a big job breakin’ here," Levy recalled in an interview.109
In autumn 1951 Levy’s career as a Nevada Test Site ironworker got under way. "We were workin’ a lot around
radiation," he told us. "We asked, ‘Is it safe to go in?’ They say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s safe, nothing wrong with it, it’s
safe.’"110
Levy and other ironworkers built towers the atom bombs would be perched on for detonation. In early 1952 he
helped set up a test for the first time. "We got everything ready and then we came home." From the town of
Henderson, nearly a hundred miles away, he watched the orange light glow of the atomic blast. "It was pretty. It
was a pretty shot. They were all pretty."111
The work settled into a routine. After a nuclear detonation a few ironworkers would be directly involved in
retrieving instrumentation from ground zero. On a rotating basis Levy and fellow ironworkers "were recovering the
data for the scientists. And we’d go in anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour after the event, after the shot. And
the fallout—we went right through it." Levy paused. "Of course we were ‘rad-safed’ with cotton coveralls and a
little cap." How about protection for mouth and nose? "Never wore a respirator," he replied.112
During the early and middle 1950s Levy personally went on the reentry mission dozens of times—"at least thirty,
forty, maybe more than that." And, as a matter of course, along with coworkers he ate lunch in "forward areas" hot
with radioactive particles, including plutonium. "On occasion," he remembered, "monitors would come by with
Geiger counters and get readings on my lunch pail or tools. This common occurrence leaves no doubt in my mind
that I was breathing and swallowing radioactive debris all the time. We had no facilities to wash our hands or face,
and we could not leave the contaminated areas for lunch as that would take an extra thirty minutes."113
Bennie Levy had been employed at the test site for about a year when—unbeknownst to him or his fellow
workers, or the general public—Atomic Energy Commission policymakers met to discuss their working conditions.
In the words of then-secret AEC minutes, "the commissioners expressed concern that workers might be exposed to
radiation hazards for too long a time."114 At a follow-up meeting two weeks later, AEC records show, the
commissioners heard that "the means used to determine the intensity and duration of exposure are not always as
reliable as might be desired and in general it cannot be said that exposure problems at the test site have been
completely solved."115
But test site employees like Bennie Levy heard nothing of the sort from official quarters. They continued at their
high-paying jobs, believing their work shored up national security. Yet Levy noticed a few odd things. "Although
we were assured that there was no danger, I thought it was a bit curious that supervisors and AEC personnel did not
remain in the area. I questioned them on various occasions and was told that they did not have to remain."116
When the nuclear testing program shifted underground in the early 1960s, Bennie Levy took part in drilling tasks.
In the process, "I was involved in operations which caused me to be exposed on many occasions." Often the
underground shots leaked badly, scattering radiation, "but we continued to work in these same areas as if there was
no danger at all."117
And caverns left by the nuclear blasts seeped radiation for days—even years—afterward.118
Mounting cancer and leukemia deaths among test-site workers became conspicuous to those who had labored side
by side. But the government conducted no health study of test-site employees. "In fact," according to Levy, "any
suggestion that radiation had caused cancer was fought bitterly. In my own craft, the ironworkers, I do not need to be
told that cancer has been caused by radiation. I have seen my fellow workers die before my very eyes."119
In the late 1970s, after more than twenty-five years of employment at the test site, Levy left the job and began to
research the health of people with whom he had worked. Levy documented that, out of only 350 fellow ironworkers
at the test site, two had died of leukemia.120 Among 350 men, even a single instance of leukemia would have been
unusual under ordinary circumstances.
By 1981 he had accumulated a list of 132 men who died of cancer or blood diseases, out of 3,100 constructiontrades
employees working in highly contaminated forward areas at the Nevada Test Site. Three men on the list—
Clarence Crockett, Robert Sendlein, and Warren Snyder—died of multiple myeloma bone-marrow cancer during
1977 and 1978.121 And in just three months of spring 1981 three who worked in the test-site drilling division died of
brain cancer.122
Eighteen of the men on Bennie Levy’s list died of leukemia, a rate of approximately five times the normal.123
Two others—caught in thick radiation clouds after the Baneberry underground test venting—died of acute myeloid
leukemia.124
In 1981 the U.S. Government was still denying that the Baneberry blast’s radiation caused the leukemia that
killed those two workers, test-site guard Harley Roberts and welder William Nunamaker. They had been among
eighty-six workers taken to the site’s center for treatment after being covered by radioactive clouds that erupted out
of the shaft.125 The two leukemia deaths, out of eighty-six individuals, vastly surpass normal rates of incidence.
"We just would like it to be on record that we know our husbands died of leukemia by radiation," widow Louise
Nunamaker told a congressional subcommittee in 1979 as she sat next to Dorothy Roberts. "I saw a very well,
healthy man die, a beautiful person that loved his country, served his country in the war and also was in the field
from 1957. . . . I don’t think anyone will know the hell we have been through with the testimony and [the
government’s] saying that the records of my husband have been destroyed and so forth and so forth. Things we
know are untruths. It was very, very difficult for both of us."126
Bill Nunamaker, his widow recalled, "never said anything until his deathbed. He said, ‘Mother, you know what I
died from. Go get them.’"127
Louise Nunamaker and Dorothy Roberts tried. When the DOE turned a deaf ear to their entreaties, they went to
federal court with a lawsuit. But the two widows had meager financial resources to use against a courtroom
adversary with virtually unlimited funds. When a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner asked the U.S.
Justice Department’s head attorney on the case, William Z. Elliott, how much the government was spending to defeat
the Nunamaker/Roberts suit, he replied, "As much as it takes to win."128
109. Bennie Levy, interview, December 1980.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid.
114. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, September 23, 1952, p. 504.
115. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, October 7, 1952, p. 536.
116. Levy, interview, December 1980.
117. Ibid.
118. Final Environmental Impact Statement, Nevada Test Site, pp. 2-99, 2-106. In addition to leakage from "drillback" operations, the EPA has conceded that
craters left by Sedan and other subsurface blasts have continued to seep radiation. (EPA, "Off-Site Environmental Monitoring Report for the Nevada Test
Site and Other Areas Used for Underground Test Detonations," Las Vegas, 1977, 1978.)
119. Levy, interview, December 1980.
120. Joe Naves and Raymond Browers.
121. "Deceased Nevada Test Site Workers," list provided by Levy, 1981.
122. Levy, interview, June 1981.
123. The usual rate of leukemia among a comparable number of American males as determined for the Smoky bomb test participants study cited in Chapter 2,
would be less than four cases—in contrast to the eighteen instances of leukemia found by Levy among test-site building-trades workers.
124. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 11, 1979.
125. Ibid.
126. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, "Testimony of Louise Nunamaker
and Dorothy Roberts," Las Vegas, April 23, 1979, unpublished transcript.
127. Ibid.
128. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 11, 1979. In 1980 and early 1981 a total of 263 suits were filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of former Nevada
Test Site workers, seeking compensation payments for cancer and other radiation-linked illnesses. (San Diego Evening Tribune, Associated Press, November
14, 1980; Las Vegas Sun, February 26 1981.) In 1980 the Nevada Test Site Radiation Victim Association came into existence with Bennie Levy serving as
president. (NTSRVA, P.O. Box 18414-192, Las Vegas, NV 89114.)