Downwinders and the Radioactive West

(chiming) (dramatic somber music) - An atomic cloud rose over the Nevada desert on May 19th, 1953.

Soldiers and civilians watched as the plume was blown by prevailing winds.

The blast was a nuclear test conducted at the Nevada test site, 65 miles from Las Vegas.

Its name was Upshot Knothole Harry.

The wind direction changed from what was predicted.

Nuclear fallout was distributed across much of the United States and beyond.

St. George Utah and the small towns along the Utah Nevada border were about 140 miles away.

Nuclear testing in the 1950s started a decades long controversy that endures today.

People affected downwind by cancer, blame radiation fallout from the blasts.

They mistrust the government that ordered them.

On one side are radiation experts and government officials who say the fallout dose was not large enough to cause widespread cancer.

On the other are individuals who believe they are victims of nuclear exposure, and the government that was less than truthful.

People affected are known as Downwinders.

- To me, Downwinder means someone who lived down wind of the nuclear testing, which is the entire country which most people don't know.

And on a deeply personal level, it means years of suffering.

It means watching people I love die.

It means suffering myself.

It means caring for the sick.

It means advocating for them.

It means mourning them.

(gentle music) - Pulitzer prize, winning author, Phillip Fradkin wrote in "Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy."

"In the end, these people were betrayed by their government the ultimate sin in a democracy."

- And everyone that was living in St. George during the nuclear testing of the fifties, is a Downwinder.

- Mary Dickson wrote a play called Exposed.

It's about her experience as a Downwinder.

She's been involved in researching and reporting the story for 40 years.

She also developed thyroid cancer, which she attributes to radiation from nuclear testing.

- People always say to me well, but we won the cold war.

And I always say at what cost?

We sacrificed so many of our own people.

I had a friend Michelle Thomas who died last spring.

And Michelle Thomas always said, "you know, we're veterans of the cold war.

Only we never enlisted and no one will ever fold the flag over our coffins."

- Residents of Southern Utah describe mushroom clouds and fall out debris.

Journalist and author, Rod Decker researched the story.

- There are two versions of the Downwinders tale, a written version, and an oral version.

The written version begins with documents.

Doctor's reports, official reports.

The cancer registry.

The oral version begins with what people remember, what they think happened years after.

The written version checks out on the dosimetry the amount of radiation they measure checks with the amount of cancer they found.

The oral version does not check.

It would have taken 10 or 15 times more radiation to produce the number of cancers it found.

- Dr. Steven L. Simon and his colleagues at the national cancer Institute, have studied Downwinders and their exposure from nuclear testing.

- In my view, claims by Downwinders about their exposure, are indeed plausible.

I would limit that plausibility, however, to those people who were alive at the time of exposure.

That means at the time of the radioactive fallout.

Now plausibility does not necessarily mean that the claims are convincing.

(somber music) - Nuclear testing by the United States started in New Mexico with Trinity in July, 1945.

The crossroad series of three tests followed in the Pacific in 1946.

Nuclear testing at the Nevada test site began in 1951, with operation Ranger Able on historic lands of the Western Shoshone.

- Two, one.

(explosion) - St. George residents watched the explosions from rooftops and cliffs above the city.

- Back then in the fifties and sixties, it was a big deal and they were excited about it and they wanted to go see it.

- Nuclear testing was part of the escalating cold war, arms race.

Some believed that stockpiling and testing nuclear weapons could be a deterrent to world war.

- When I first heard about the Downwinders, it was when I came home from school one day when I was in high school and my father at that time had been elected governor.

And he was sitting in his office at a desk and he had a yellow legal pad in his hands, and it was handwritten list on there.

And he was going through the list and you're saying, that's a cousin.

That's someone I know, that's an uncle.

And it was a list that folks in Southern Utah had put together of people who died of cancer.

And that was my first introduction to this issue about some connection between nuclear weapons testing in Nevada and the fall out going down wind into Southern Utah and people contracting cancer.

- Physicist Albert Einstein wrote to president Franklin Delano Roosevelt on August 2nd, 1939.

Einstein told the president of new experiments regarding nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium.

Einstein wrote, "this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs."

The desert of New Mexico near Socorro, looked like much of the American West in the 1940s.

It was the location of one of the world's most dramatic events.

The wind blows here as if it has a story to tell.

A weather beaten ranch house is part of history.

That history changed the world.

America's first atomic bomb was assembled here at the McDonald Ranch.

It was top secret.

World war II was in full force.

Espionage was rampant.

The bomb received the code name, Trinity.

Scientists had figured out how to split atoms, creating a nuclear explosion.

The device was capable of devastation not seen before in world war.

Trinity was about to be exploded as a test.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer nervously chained smoked cigarettes in the ink black desert night.

He drank copious amounts of strong black coffee.

Stress had reduced Oppenheimer to a mere 100 pounds.

Some acclaimed scientists worried a nuclear explosion might incinerate the Earth's atmosphere.

Experts knew radiation fallout would accompany the explosion.

They didn't know how far it might go or the potential hazard to humans and livestock.

With Oppenheimer in the viewing trench was Brigadier general Leslie Groves.

Both worked for the Manhattan project, which had designed the bomb.

The Manhattan project was named for its headquarters in New York, but the scientific lab was based in Los Alamos New Mexico.

General Groves was under tremendous pressure for success.

Significant amounts of money and time had been spent to get to this point.

General Groves tried to calm the nervous Oppenheimer who worried about the ramifications of what they were about to do.

Oppenheimer named the implosion plutonium test, Trinity from the Christian poetry of John Donne.

With Oppenheimer at Trinity, were some 425 people.

They included some of the top physicists, scientists and military technicians in America.

(somber music) President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage at his retreat in warm Springs Georgia on April 12th, 1945.

Vice president Harry S Truman became president.

The Manhattan project was so secret that even the vice president had not known of it - Truman when he became president knew nothing about the atomic bomb project and so-called Manhattan project.

Roosevelt had not bothered to tell his own vice-president about the greatest of all war time secrets it's only when secretary of war Henry Stimson briefs Truman about that, that Truman learns for the first time in April of 1945.

That the United States had been developing this super weapon and is about to be in a position to use it.

- President Harry Truman was waiting for word of the explosion at the Potsdam conference in Germany.

(explosion) - July 16th, 1945.

Upon detonation the fireball illuminated the sky, forming a unique mushroom cloud never seen before.

It scorched the earth around it.

Oppenheimer later wrote, he knew at that instant, the world was forever changed.

(explosions) - He was the top scientists there at the Manhattan project.

He was part of creating the bomb and then he felt very very disenchanted at the end of his life.

(explosion) - The United States now had the ultimate weapon that could end the war.

FDR had guided America through the devastation of World War II.

It would be up to the new president, as to whether to use the atomic bomb.

- When Truman became president, within the first week or two of becoming president, he said to the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden.

He said, "I'm here to make decisions and whether right or wrong, I'm going to make them."

Truman seemed to assume deeply assume, that one of the ways to be presidential was to be decisive and not to be seen as agonizing over this that and the other thing.

- President Truman wrote, "I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

(gentle music) The Trinity mushroom cloud would not be the last, the world would see.

August 6th, 1945.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb named Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

The B29 transporting the bomb was piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets.

Tibbets trained his crew at the Wendover Airfield in Utah.

He named the bomber Enola Gay after his mother.

- Among them, 31 died in Hiroshima.

The Enola Gay begins the bomb run.

The bomb has left.

Enola Gay climbs away in high speed.

50 seconds later, 15 miles from Guangzhou, the Enola Gay is rocked by the blow.

(explosion) - Tosh Kano's mother was pregnant with him at the time of the Hiroshima blast.

She was 12 weeks along.

- August 6th 1945 was Monday morning.

It was very hot and muggy, even though it was blue skies not a single cloud in the sky.

- Tosh Kano's mother survived the nuclear blast.

His brother was killed.

- She crawled out of the house and to a shock because to her left, there was a Hiroshima castle stood there.

All the time that she was there disappear.

80,000 people perished instantly.

(explosion) All of the heat from the ground went up in the air, including the radiation.

And start to cool and come down in a form of hail and black rain.

- A B29 called Bockscar dropped a nuclear device named Fat Man on the city of Nagasaki.

(explosion) It was three days after the Hiroshima bombing.

Tosh Kano describes his father at the end of the war.

- He was wishing the war to finish.

So when the bomb dropped, even though thousands of people died, I think that's why he said the bombs ended war quickly.

- Japan surrendered on August 15th, 1945.

President Truman and secretary of war Henry Stimson appeared to know little of radiation sickness before the blast.

Reports began to surface in the Japanese population concerning illness and latent cancers, after the initial explosion.

(gentle music) - The populations that we're exposed to the radioactive fallout we're at increased risk for leukemia beginning about two years after exposure.

And that really peaked around the seven to eight year period for other solid tumors.

Individuals were at increased risk, probably about 10 years post.

- Nuclear weapons proliferated.

The fate of millions were now in the hands of super powers like the United States and the Soviet Union.

Each would soon have hundreds of nuclear warheads ready to strike major cities.

Nuclear testing was a way to flex that might.

Approximately 2000 nuclear tests globally followed the 1945 Trinity test.

Nuclear fallout spread globally with each test.

(gentle music) The United States tested nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1962.

Indigenous Marshall Islanders were displaced.

They returned to contaminated islands.

They were studied without informed consent.

(explosion) Entire Atolls were vaporized by atomic blasts.

Elugelab in the Enewetak chain was destroyed by the world's first true hydrogen bomb.

On November 1st, 1952.

Indigenous inhabitants were left with lasting health issues, such as cancer.

The Marshall Islands were deemed too far away from the United States.

They were vulnerable to espionage.

A closer location was sought by the United States government.

- I have all the atomic energy commission minutes, where they decided to move testing to the continental US from the Pacific.

And there were commissioners and research like high drama.

There were commissioners in there who were saying I don't feel so good about this.

Are you sure we wanna move this to the continental US?

- Without a continental test site, we would now find ourselves years behind our present atomic development.

- The Nevada proving grounds was created by President Truman in December, 1950.

(explosion) There had been a section of Nellis Air Force Base on land claimed by the Western Shoshone.

The name was changed to the Nevada test site in 1955.

- And this is why the Nevada test site is absolutely essential as a backyard workshop.

Okay?

So Nevada is important.

So we have to test bombs out there for national defense.

- The landscape of the Nevada test site is harsh.

Heat in summer may surpass 110 degrees.

Craters remain from the detonations of America's nuclear history.

(gentle music) It probably did seem like a place where time stood still in the 1950s.

(gentle music) - I understand that we've got to protect our country and we live in a dangerous world.

But we can't put the life and safety of our own residents, people right here in Utah in harm's way, and knowingly cut short their own lives because of that.

- The only country that ever bombed our citizens with nuclear weapons was our own government.

We killed our own, they killed their own.

And for what, for what?

(gentle music) - Remnants from atomic testing punctuate the landscape.

(gentle music) Whether beaten bleachers remain where people once watched dramatic events.

Frenchman flats was the site of mushroom clouds on the skyline.

Steel girders of an experimental bridge are twisted from the strength of a nuclear blast.

Dilapidated houses sit alongside the road with shattered windows.

They were constructed to measure the effects of a nuclear blast on the families inside.

Operation Buster-Jangle took place in late 1951, in the Yucca flats areas of the Nevada test site.

Dogs were used as test subjects.

They were loaded into cages for experiments.

- Well these are living, breathing, beings.

Although still completely out from the effects of anesthesia, they can only go so long without food and water.

- US army units took part in the test.

They dug foxholes and defensive placements in relatively close proximity to the blast.

- Everyone kneel down in your foxholes.

(upbeat music) (explosion) (upbeat music) - But that's one of the very very worst things that I think our government did to us, was put those soldiers in those foxholes.

- And those people did get some exposures, but I have yet to see any exposures that were high enough to be of concern.

- The Western Shoshone and Paiute Native American reservations were in close proximity to nuclear testing.

- There were native American populations within the range of fallout that were clearly ignored just like all other Downwinders.

I don't think any consideration was given to protect folks from those risks on those reservations.

And it's just another chapter in this story of where the government put people's lives at risk in the name of developing nuclear weapons.

- The 1863 treaty of Ruby Valley, defined ownership of Western Shoshone land.

- Testing at the Nevada test site historically has been conducted in secret.

It is a violation of the treaty of Ruby Valley.

We began experiencing adverse health consequences known to be plausible from exposure to radiation, soon after the weapons testing began.

- Native Americans were also working and dying in the uranium mines needed to make nuclear weapons.

They were called muckers and paid a wage of $2 an hour.

- What a lot of people don't seem to understand, we had to mine uranium to make bombs.

- Mines were filled with radon gas and carcinogens, leading to cases of latent lung cancer.

- Environmental racism is racism.

Americans really have had a hard time dealing with native Americans with other than a gun and abuse.

- 928 above and below ground nuclear tests at the Nevada test site were conducted by 2010.

- We were all aware that these were occurring because the communities would be warned.

And there were literally, you could hear, and sometimes feel when the explosions would occur.

The test site might've been 80 miles but you set off a nuclear device, 80 miles away, you're going to feel it.

And then after a fashion, there was a bit of excitement about it.

- Operation Tumbler-Snapper was a series of atomic tests which started in April, 1952 at the Nevada test site.

- Yield 20 kilotons.

Height of burst, 100050 feet.

(trumpets playing) - St. George Utah defined small town America in the 1950s.

Stunning red cliffs and landscapes surrounded the town.

It was close to Zion National Park.

Native Americans of the region described it as spiritual.

It was home historically to the Virgin River, ancestral Pueblo and Southern Paiutes.

(gentle music) - Ladies and gentlemen we interrupt this program to bring you important news.

Word has just been received from the atomic energy commission that due to a change in wind direction, the residue from this morning's atomic detonation is drifting in the direction of St. George.

It is suggested that everyone remain indoors for one hour or until further notice.

There is no danger.

This is simply routine atomic energy commission safety procedure.

To prevent unnecessary exposure to radiation, it is better to take cover during this period.

Parents need not be alarmed about children at school.

- They were American small towns.

Utah then was a defense state.

World war II pulled Utah out of poverty.

We welcomed Nerve Gas to Tooele.

We welcomed the Anthrax to Dugway.

We were patriotic, but it was also how we made our living.

- St. George Utah had a population of just over 4,500 in 1950.

It was a time some are nostalgic for.

Mom and pop businesses were popular on main street.

- I grew up in Cedar city in the fifties and the sixties.

I was born in 1951.

Cedar city was a very small town at the time, maybe 5,000 people.

I tell people that if they can remember the sitcom, Leave It To Beaver, and the 1950s Bonanza.

If you put those two together it's a pretty good picture of my life in Cedar city.

- Some of the testing blasts were more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

- They'd actually let us out of school, take us out on the lawn so we can watch that mushroom cloud come across.

A sight, kind of to see.

But then I remembered after the night had passed you'd go outside in the mornings and there'd be ash all over the cars, all over the sidewalks or everywhere.

- There were all kinds of stories of pink clouds, of green clouds, of fallout falling like snow of it falling on the hoods of trucks and eating the paint off the hoods of trucks.

Of little children, eating fallout.

None of those seem to have any documents from contemporary times.

I don't think you can find a single document that says green clouds or fallout like snow.

There was dirty Harry with a little visible fallout, mostly on cars and Nevada.

Other than that, there were lots of stories of immediate sickness, of fallout.

Those stories are folklore I think.

- The demand for nuclear testing was amplified by current events of the era.

(cheering) The world may have come closest to nuclear war, in October, 1962.

The United States learned the Soviet Union had placed nuclear warheads in Cuba.

It was 90 miles from the United States mainland.

- This government has promised- - President John F. Kennedy became president in 1960.

He came of age in the era of World War.

Kennedy opted for negotiation with the Soviet Union, rather than retaliation.

He ordered a blockade of Soviet ships heading for Cuba.

The Soviet ships turned back.

The Soviet Union later removed missiles from Cuba.

- To me, it was all about scaring the Russians.

And if you think about it, the Russians were doing the exact same thing.

They were testing saying that they had to keep up with us.

I mean the whole arms race was a nuclear war.

I mean, it was a nuclear war.

- Was the testing necessary in defense of our nation?

Absolutely.

Unequivocally.

- Residents of St. George and Cedar city were extremely patriotic.

They had little worry about nuclear testing.

Most were happy to be part of the government's mission for national defense.

- I am just your regular average American girl.

I am a descendant of very hardworking people.

Patriotic, wave the flag, American girl.

- Jim Matheson is the son of former Utah governor Scott Matheson.

- My dad lived there, he was in Cedar city, actually in the 1950s.

And I remember him telling me how when the nuclear weapons testing was going on, that you'd get up in the morning and you'd watch the sky light up from the test.

And he talked about how it was a time when it was something that was being promoted as something you should be proud of.

This was where America was making progress.

And people in Southern Utah felt that pride and patriotism.

And that was the attitude that took place where that testing was going on.

- The atomic energy commission was concerned about the direction of the wind.

- 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 peaked his interest.

And as governor, he was part of an effort to get a lot of documents, declassified at the Pentagon.

And 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 1950s the government said, don't worry, this is all safe.

But the release of these documents were in 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.

- The first sign of trouble came from the sheep.

The sheep were dying.

The ranchers, suspected radiation.

- And I remember handling them in the corrals.

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.

Just like they'd been baked in a microwave or something.

You know what I mean?

Just burnt.

- Ranchers also noticed burns and bleeding lips.

Livestock near the Trinity test site in New Mexico, also displayed burns.

The atomic energy commission blamed poor range conditions as the cause of the sheep deaths.

The sheep were likely in a radiation hotspot, documented by Geiger counter readings.

- I remember us having dead piles of lambs and dead piles of sheep out there.

And we'd take more on the other side of the farm, and buried them in a hole over there.

And it was the majority of what we owned was gone.

- The Utah ranchers were convinced, the source of their problems was radiation.

They believed the fallout came from nuclear testing.

- Everybody knew at the time and still knows that the atomic energy testing is what killed all the livestock.

- The atomic energy commission vigorously defended their actions.

The AEC reported that radiation fallout wasn't the cause of the sheep deaths.

- But it's hard to defend at this point that the magnitude of the things that were happening, the sheep that were dying, the mutations that they'd began to see.

That all of that was occurring as a matter of coincidence.

- They just assumed we were all Cowboys and Indians, and a bunch of Mormons out here that, and you know, we didn't matter.

We were expendable.

We really didn't matter.

- The sheep ranchers claimed over 4,000 animals died in 1953 due to nuclear testing.

They mounted lawsuits against the federal government.

The ranchers lost in 1956 in a trial rife with tension and drama in a Salt Lake city courtroom.

Federal judge A Sherman Christensen sided with the government.

Judge Christensen reversed himself in hearing the case again in 1982.

New documents were revealed.

The Utah sheep reportedly had high doses of radiation in their thyroids.

Judge Christensen ruled that fallout was a factor in the death of the sheep.

- I think the stories about the impact on sheep from the nuclear fallout are quite compelling.

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.

- The Downwinders prevailed only to see the verdict in their favor, overturned on appeal.

That appeal was sustained by the Supreme Court in January, 1986.

Downwinders speculated cancer was caused by nuclear testing radiation.

- Because they were told that by lots of people.

They were told that by the media, they were told that by attorneys, they were told that by their elected officials.

And generally told that without any science to go along with it.

- Studies on childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer among the Downwinder community, later reinforced their initial concerns.

- So many people of my age around here, have all died from cancer.

They've all died from cancer.

There's hundreds of them.

- Communities such as St. George noticed cancer was affecting many families.

Clusters were often in the same neighborhood.

- My dad Arville Wardle who has a name and a face, and you can see him right behind me.

He was the fun dad.

The fun, fun dad that always gave all my friends a ride home after the movie.

I absolutely attribute my dad's death to the radiation.

He died of adenocarcinoma pancreatic cancer.

And so many other people had that same kind of cancer, the same kind of glandular cancer.

He worked in road construction.

He was a patrol, a grater operator.

He was out in the dirt every day where the radiation landed.

And I know that is the death of my father.

- Some politicians and military officials felt continued nuclear testing was needed.

- You know, you can't blame people for feeling that their own government thought that they were expendable.

That they were disposable and maybe pieces on a chess board that were used in a larger global game.

(explosion) - There was concern that radiation from nuclear testing entered the food chain.

Contamination of milk with the radio isotope iodine 131 was suspected.

Iodine 131 has a radioactive half-life of about eight days.

- Iodine 131 gets absorbed into the thyroid.

Other radioisotopes get absorbed into the bone.

And so it can lead to different types of cancer risk.

- You know sometimes they just squirt the milk into your mouth, which milk straight from the cow doesn't tastes that great.

But I mean, who knew that what we were drinking, could later make us sick.

And then I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer the spring before my 29th birthday.

- Really what you have to consider is there's global fallout which was due to all of the cold war testing.

There were many different types of nuclear testing going on.

We were doing testing in the atolls.

There was quite a bit of fallout happening and it wasn't just due to the Nevada test site.

- The limited test ban treaty was implemented in 1963.

It halted above ground atmospheric nuclear testing.

Over 800 underground tests took place.

The nuclear testing era in Nevada span from 1951 to 1992.

- They, I mean our government, they're just waiting for us to die because pretty soon we're all gonna be gone.

They knew what was going to happen and those tests were made anyway.

And didn't matter to them.

We're all gonna die pretty soon.

And pretty soon nobody will know this story.

- Stewart Udall was a lawyer and former Congressman from Arizona.

He had been secretary of the interior in the administration of president John F. Kennedy.

He agreed to take the legal case of the Downwinders.

The Downwinders were documenting increased cases of cancer.

Senator Tom Udall is his son.

- He cared about people that had been hurt by the government when they shouldn't have been hurt.

Downwinders case and the Navajo uranium miners case felt that there was real injustice.

And there were very strong cases that were put forward.

- The case of Allen versus the US government was a landmark ruling in the story of Downwinders.

Irene Allen's name was used because of alphabetical order representing many.

The case was presided over by federal judge Bruce S. Jenkins in the salt Lake city courtroom on August 30th, 1979.

- There were 1,192 plaintiffs in that case.

- They agreed to try 24 cases as bellwether cases to work out what was going on.

50,000 pages of exhibits.

Judge Jenkins deliberated for 17 months, wrote a 225 page opinion.

- Judge Jenkins ruled in favor of the Downwinders.

- The court of appeals reversed me.

Sorry I'm saying it, it came with the discretion of the function on the part of the United States to do what they did.

In what I thought was a fairly shallow opinion.

- He was overturned in the court of appeals but they didn't question what he found as the facts.

What they said is there are government policy questions and government can't be sued for them.

This is a policy question.

The suit can never be brought.

(gentle music) - Former Utah governor Scott Matheson died from the bone cancer multiple myeloma in 1990.

His family believes the cause was exposure from nuclear testing.

- Iodine 131 gets absorbed into the thyroid, other radio isotopes get absorbed into the bone.

And so it can lead to different types of cancer risk.

They have longer rates of decay.

And so they're around for a much longer time.

It could be, they would be around in an individual's body for their entire life course.

- Governor Scott Matheson was in the forefront of the Downwinders struggle to have their story told.

- I've had a number of extended family who, since they lived in Southern Utah, who were effected by this fallout and passed away from cancer.

My grandmother died of cancer.

My father died of cancer.

Several uncles, cousins, second cousins.

It's affected this family in a significant way.

- Epidemiology is the scientific study of disease and health in the population.

It attempts to decipher the cause and explanation for variation in disease.

Research has taken place to look at disease in the Downwinder community.

- Once you are exposed to radiation you can either have internal exposure which is essentially where you're breathing it in.

You're ingesting it with your food, it's entering through essentially through your skin.

Or external radiation where you're being contaminated from something that's deposited on the ground.

Those radionucleotides will enter into the body, and inflict damage upon the cells.

- Cancer affects many families.

It's hard to determine the cause of specific disease.

There is not a medical test that measures radiation exposure.

- There's no way you can have a direct proof that a specific individual contracted cancer due to exposure from the fallout from the nuclear testing.

You can look at the body of all the people who've been diagnosed with cancer in the higher incident.

And that's what makes the case that the fallout had some impact.

So we'll never know with a hundred percent certainty that the fallout caused my father's cancer.

But he was certainly in a category where it fits with the story.

And I think I will assume it happened.

(explosion) - Families of Downwinders search for answers to complex questions.

Scientists have not been able to unravel the mysterious cause of many cancers.

- I will tell you right now that as a scientist, trying to pinpoint the cause of disease in an individual is very, very difficult.

It may even be impossible most of the time.

It really would push the limits of science.

And that's because that disease particularly cancer can occur in an individual for many different reasons.

And we really don't have those reasons for it in a single person.

- Memories and anecdotal stories of local residents, are important to correlating that data.

- You have a cancer, you can't tell what caused that cancer.

They study two things.

They study dosimetry, how much radiation you got.

They study epidemiology, how many more cancers there were than they expected.

You need to remember, before the testing, during the testing and after the testing Utah had less cancer than America as a whole.

- Lots of people believe fallout caused their cancer.

But epidemiological evidence seems to show that it's unlikely that it caused anything other than childhood leukemia or thyroid.

Caused some but not very many.

- Downwinders report cancer clusters.

Families in a single neighborhood or community, may report increased occurrence of disease.

Mary Dixon grew up in salt Lake city.

- There were so many people getting sick where I was.

I had a friend when we were in junior high, who had bone cancer.

She ended up dying.

My sister and I started counting all these people, as the years passed.

We had a list that was at about 29 people.

Since then, it's at 54.

It's in a five block area.

And we definitely thought something happened to us.

We thought there's something going on here that this many people get sick.

And it wasn't just cancers and tumors, it was strange immune system disorders that took forever to be diagnosed.

- Everyone's story is important.

The question remains of cause and effect.

It's difficult for even the most noted scientists to decipher.

- There are no keys when you look at a cancer to tell you what was its origin.

But in a population, we can understand what a risk factor is and how large that risk is.

- A groundbreaking study on cancer in the Downwinders community was done by Dr. Joseph L Lyon at the University of Utah.

The report was published in the new England Journal of Medicine on February 22nd, 1979.

Dr. Ken Smith from the University of Utah's, Huntsman Cancer Institute participated in Dr. Lyon's original study.

- And there were many studies.

They basically found that the higher the exposure to the radionuclides, the consequences of the detonation, the higher the rates of leukemia, and the higher rates of thyroid cancer.

The effects were greater if you were exposed as a child.

- I don't think there's any question about, that there are health penalties paid by the population that was exposed.

- A congressional hearing took place in Salt Lake city, in the spring of 1979.

It was chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Kennedy said, "there is no question the government has covered up the health aspects from radiation fallout, during the atmospheric nuclear testing."

- My father had to see justice be done.

It was something that continued with him from the very first meetings with those individuals in the late 1970s, all the way to his death in 2010.

- Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act or RECA in 1990.

The act included Downwinders living in the area between 1947 and 1961.

It included the original US army soldiers who witnessed previous tests.

The downwinders efforts had an impact on Congress.

The Allen case was a victory even though overturned on appeal.

The publicity from that trial brought attention to the issue.

- There was legislative benefits provided for an expanse group of people who had indeed been exposed to low level radiation.

- Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Wayne Owens from Utah sponsored the bill that was signed into law by president George H. W Bush on October 15th, 1990.

The RECA act provides $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.

- 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.

- Over $2 billion in claims have been paid as of April, 2018.

(gentle music) RECA includes language that Congress apologizes on behalf of the nation.

- We hear Congress apologizing for a genocide, apologizing for radiation exposure to Native Americans.

We need following the law.

That's what we need.

- There's no question the government lied to everyone in Southern Utah about the potential risks of nuclear weapons testing from exposure to fallout.

No question at all.

Documents that have been declassified since that happened, validate this.

So the downwinders have a legitimate complaint that the government lied to them and the government ought to be held accountable.

- RECA expires in 2022.

- We estimated that about 49,000 extra thyroid cancers occurred in that population across the entire United States.

Now that's a large number.

But I don't want to be exaggerated because that number is present against one and a half million thyroid cancers in those people, that would have occurred without any radiation exposure.

(gentle music) - Downwinders are part of the legacy of nuclear testing and the uncertainty that comes with it.

It's a part of America's history.

Did the government expose its own people?

Protests have taken place at the Nevada test site throughout its history.

Painful memories resurface as interest in new nuclear testing is reported.

- Shoshone people are hard to kill.

We endure, you will never know what's going to kill you when it's done in secret.

- America's history in the nuclear age is a defining moment.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are events that changed the world.

Atomic blasts in the Pacific and at the Nevada test site followed.

- The thing that's the hardest for me, is how many people I've lost, and all the work I've done.

I've probably been at this for 40 years.

And all the work I've done, the people I worked most closely with, they're gone, they're just gone.

They've died.

- What will the lessons of the past mean to the future?

- It is absolutely the worst weapon that we ever produced.

It is just absolutely unthinkable.

So we absolutely cannot use it ever again.

- Physicist J Robert Oppenheimer is known as the father of the atomic bomb.

The events of July 16th, 1945 in the stark yet beautiful New Mexico desert changed the world.

Oppenheimer appeared to think of Trinity in sacred terms.

He realized that one of the mysteries of the universe had revealed itself.

He pondered the future and prophesied.

He knew the world would never be the same.

A few people laughed.

A few people cried.

Most people were silent.

(dramatic upbeat music) (orchestral music) - Five, four, three, two, one, zero.

(explosion) - Support for Downwinders and the Radioactive West, is made possible in part by the contributing members of PBS Utah.

Thank you.