Issac’s Story and the Fallout Trial.
Kern Bullock sat astride his horse early one spring morning. It was May,1953 and he was moving sheep from Nevada across the state line to Utah on the trail home to Cedar City two-hundred miles north, "kinda watching the sheep grazing. I heard this noise above me and I looked up and there were these planes flying overhead. They looked military - then a few minutes later there's this big flash and it just blinded me - I remember covering my eyes and then I seen this cloud going up and up and it just started spreading out across the sky'."
Between March 17 and June 4 that year, the United States government's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) detonated eleven atmospheric nuclear bomb tests. The series was code-named "Upshot-Knothole".
It was 1982 and I was traveling out west on assignment for Australian Broadcasting, tracking the story of the atomic bomb and the deadly hangover that follows. I'd read about a trial reopened to explore the legal ramifications of bomb testing and the subsequent spate of illness and death that ensued. I had the names of some of the witnesses and I drove through the back roads of Utah and Nevada to find them and record their story.
Issac Nelson sat back in his living room armchair, a serious burly red-faced man whose Mormon family settled in Cedar City, south of Salt Lake, three generations ago. At sixty-seven he retired from managing the local J. C. Penny store and now worked as a security guard at the local police station. His wife Oletta died from a brain tumor in 1965. He remarried and with the children from his second marriage counted thirty-three grandchildren. Isaac is one of the twenty-four plaintiffs in the fallout trial.
He lived in a modest house and as dusk gathered behind the hills he invited me inside. Snow was on the ground but inside it was warm. Isaac wore a polo shirt and hounds tooth trousers. He lived alone now in his well tended home where we sat to record his story.
“It was along about 1951 when the government first started testing down here in Nevada and everyone in Cedar and Parowan that you’d talked to was really excited about it."
Isaac Nelson spoke slowly with a western twang and he sat back in his chair as began to unwind.
“It was really a big thing, a big deal and we thought that we was going to be part of the national defense and that we was going to be able to help out in some small way and develop the bombs. We just felt a patriotic feeling towards our government that we were being of some use.
“I recall that the people, when they first started to do tests, were really excited. In the mornings they had the first tests, dozens of people would get in their cars and drive out west of town, the other side of the stock yards, and they’d walk up on the hillside. They had a clear view across the valley about ten of fifteen miles and we’d sit there huddled up in the early morning and along about five o’clock – why that would be before daylight – here would come this blast and the whole sky would just light up with this red-orange flash. If you’d had a newspaper you’d be able to read by it was so brilliant. Still the bomb exploded a good hundred miles from us.”
The largest test shot was code named "Harry", probably after the president who gave the go ahead to test the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The test would come to be called "Dirty Harry" because of the huge amount of radiation fallout it dumped across Utah. Like many tests, "Harry" was fired from a spindly three-hundred foot high steel tower planted at the Nevada Test Site in the desert. The explosion sucked tons of red desert dust into the sky to form a hazy pink and brown mushroom cloud. People many miles distant came to recognize those clouds as the unique signature of an atomic test. Within weeks, Kern Bullock's sheep began to die.
The events that morning began an historic court action that reached its denouement twenty-nine years later. For the first time in U.S. legal history, a district court judge reversed his decision made more than two decades earlier regarding compensation for the Bullock family and other ranchers.
Judge Sherman Christenson, still a sitting member of the federal district court in Salt Lake City in 1982 when I visited the area, had dismissed the earlier compensation charge in 1956 believing there was insufficient evidence to show that the sheep deaths had been caused by radiation fallout. But at the time he was unaware that the A.E.C. had seriously misled the court.
Just how far this deception went emerged slowly. The first indications came in a series of articles in Salt Lake City's evening newspaper, the "Desert News" owned by the Mormon's Church of Latter Day Saints and the oldest continually published newspaper in the state. In 1977 the paper published the results of a seven year old National Cancer Institute study that showed a doubling in leukemia incidents in the two counties nearest the Nevada Test Site.
Joseph Lyons, the co-director of the Utah Cancer Registry at the University of Utah told me he'd see the report but "given the prior negative studies of thyroid cancers and reassurance from the government, my assumption was that this was one of those periodic hysterias that we get in the cancer business." But to his surprise, Dr. Lyons discovered that follow-up studies in the New England Journal of Medicine in February, 1979, showed childhood leukemia in southern Utah near the test site was up 240 percent during the time of above ground testing. Yet cancer statistics in Utah were far lower than elsewhere in the U.S. by a factor of thirty percent.
The "Deseret News" published more stories gleaned though the Freedom of Information Act revealing the A.E.C. had been disingenuous in dealing both with the sheep case and the overall hazards to the general public of atomic testing.
And then Utah's governor, Scott Matheson drew the attention of the Carter administration to his concerns about radiation exposure to his constituents. With public pressure mounting, a joint congressional committee convened in Salt Lake City to investigate effects of low-level radiation and atomic testing. Utah’s governor dumped eleven pounds of testimony comprising 1,100 documents, in the laps of the committee. He told them it read like: “a case in government misfeasance and callous disregard for health and property.”
The documents revealed that the A.E.C. investigation had confirmed that the rancher’s sheep had been exposed to very high levels of radiation. Some thyroids tested at the time showed levels of radiation one-thousand times normal. Yet still the A.E.C. had refused to acknowledge that radiation could have played any part in the sheep deaths.
Governor Matheson continued: “This scientific myopia appears more sinister when other events are considered. Not long after the investigation of the sheep, a senior A.E.C. representative met with a number of scientists investigating the problem and pressed them to endorse a conclusion that the radiation was not a causative factor in the sheep incident. The A.E.C. representative told the scientists, most of whom were A.E.C. employees of Public Health Service, that unless the commissioners were presented with a satisfactory resolution of the sheep problem, the government would not open the purse strings for further continental testing. The ‘no cause’ conclusion that the A.E.C. representative suggested, was forwarded to the A.E.C. and as we know, the testing continued.”
The sheep case was important in many ways. The series of bomb tests which contaminated sheep, obviously could contaminate people. A.E.C. commissioner, Eugene Zuckert, aware that the herds of sheep in the fallout path, were dying, stated in a commission meeting that a “serious psychological problem has arisen…in the present frame of mind of the public, it would take only a single, illogical and unforeseen accident to stop further tests in the United States.
On more than on occasion, residents of the small town of St. George, Utah, were warned to stay indoors following bomb tests because wind shifts blew exceedingly high levels of fallout of in their direction. It was important for the A.E.C. that the public not be unnerved by the testing program.
At the time of the congressional hearings in 1979, Peter Libassi, general counsel for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, stated that: “during the 1953 period, some 17,000 sheep died in Utah, something local veterinarians had never experienced”.
In the federal district court in Salt Lake City, Judge Bruce Jenkins heard the case. The landmark trial involved 1,192 plaintiffs of which twenty-four were selected as a representative sample. They were known as “downwinders” and they charged the United States government with negligently exposing them to radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests.
In the fall of 1982, Judge Jenkins heard at least 150 witnesses and took into evidence, more than 2,000 documents in the trial which was heard without a jury in accordance with federal tort claims rules.
The plaintiffs argued that those responsible in government had failed to adequately warn residents about the potential dangers from fallout and that that they had been told how to protect themselves should they be exposed. The government claimed that any radiation that may have reached communities was too low to have caused any problem. The government suggested that evidence from the twenty-four plaintiffs should not be admitted because they were “non-expert witnesses” unqualified to describe matters of radiation and cancer.
The government also claimed that it was immune from any court action under the statute of limitations because of the length of time taken for the plaintiffs to file the action. They called for a dismissal of the case on the ground that any responsibility to inform residents about radiation dangers, fell within the meaning of the “discretionary function” of the president. The discretionary function clause is designed to protect government officials forced to make difficult and controversial decisions believed to be in the best interests of the country, from subsequent claims.
It was hard for me to imagine a more interesting setting for such an emotionally loaded case as Salt Lake City, world headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints. Its citizens are scrupulously honest, hardworking and patriotic – more Utahans volunteered for the armed services that elsewhere in the country during war. They are suspicious of fads and radicals but the questions surrounding nuclear fallout was resting heavily on their shoulders. Distrust of government was in the air.
SAAC NELSON:
“I recall in 1953 after having gone out and watched one of these tests that later on in the day we noticed this cloud drifting up from the south-west. It was kind of a pinkish, tan colored cloud and it was strung out. If you’d ever seen one of them you’d never miss it because there is no other cloud that I’ve seen that looked like these radiation fallout clouds.
“The wife and I stepped out onto our driveway and we were standing there looking up at this cloud and she didn’t have any covering on her head. I had on my chauffeur’s hat that I wore when I was driving a truck. We must have stood there and watched this cloud for half an hour, forty-five minutes, maybe even and hour while it slowly drifted over Cedar. It took quite a while. It didn’t travel too fast.
“When I came home that evening, my wife was complaining of a severe headache, a very severe headache. Then she said she had been nauseated and had diarrhea and later on in the evening her face and her arms and her neck and everything that was exposed, just turned beet red, just very brilliant red and we figured that maybe she’d got sunstroke or too much sun and that’s the only thing we could figure out. We didn’t couple it with that radiation fallout at all. We never did.”
Behind Isaac Nelson, on a glassed in side-board, were pictures of his family, two boys and two girls from his first marriage, hand tinted by his wife Oletta. She worked at the local photography shop in Cedar City. There was another of her alone, a gently looking woman who Isaac described as “as very active, outdoor type of a girl – she liked the outdoors; she liked being out in the sun; she liked to hunting and fishing.
They would go on camping trips together after they were married and “we’d take our sleeping bags and throw ‘em down on the ground and have the stars for a ceiling and cook our meals out over an open pit camp fire.”
Isaac looked down at the floor thinking back to those times and the to the day that cloud would cruelly change their lives. He remembered his wife’s pain and red skin that night in 1953.
ISAAC NELSON:
“I told her to take some aspirin and maybe that’ll help your headache and she took various medications and she put some lotions on her face, some sunburn cream and it just didn’t seem to alleviate it at all.
“So I called Dr. Presswitch he was our family doctor. He’d delivered all the babies and took care of us for years and he says: ‘Bring her to the hospital. I’m on shift tonight and I’ll look at her.’ So we went to the hospital and he examined her and he said she had symptoms for sunstroke and sunburn ‘but I don’t like the look of that color’. It didn’t look like sunburn.
“It went on for a period of three weeks or a month or such a matter and one day I was sitting in the living room and she was in the bathroom washing her hair and all at once she let out the most ungodly scream you could imagine. I couldn’t imagine what was so wrong with her and I rushed in there and her hair had slipped right off to about halfway back on her head and it was just laying there in the wash basin.”
Isaac didn’t look at me as he told this story. His eyes were downcast avoiding mine but he spoke without hesitation in long, rhythmic sentences.
“She had beautiful, black, shiny hair just so black when it was in the sun it just glistened almost green like a raven’s wing – beautiful hair, long hair. You can imagine the reaction a woman would have to lose all her hair and just see it there laying in the wash basin.”
Isaac drifted back to a time before atomic testing, a time of sepia memories and scratchy country music in small town county halls.
ISAAC NELSON:
“We’d always enjoyed going square dancing and she was the dance director in our ward. We danced a lot. We went to jamborees all the way down to Flagstaff in New Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona and Tuscon and Las Vegas; all the way up through the state to Salt Lake and Provo. We’d even gone to a world square dance jamboree at San Diego where there were five-hundred going at once.
“She was very active. She loved life. But now she was becoming listless and she didn’t want to do anything and by 1960 I finally prevailed on her to to see another doctor – that was Dr. Malin Corey.
“He checked her over and called on Dr. Garth Chaterly and he examined her eyes and said right off the bat: ‘There is something definitely wrong with this woman. There is pressure behind her eyes.’
“The injected some needles into her viens and the arteries in her neck, some isotopes and they followed them with x-rays and finally they centered in the back of her head and another doctor comes in and says: ‘We’ve pinpointed probably what’s the trouble. She’s either got a massive blood clot there or she’s got a large tumor in the base at the back of her skull’.
“They said they’d have to operate and I gave my permission and on a Saturday morning they operated and took out a huge malignant tumor that was almost as large as a large grapefruit. It had been imbedded so deep in her brain tissue that the doctor said he couldn’t get it all out but they did they best they could. He told me it was probably terminal.
The Department of Energy’s Nevada Operations Office was in Las Vegas. In the 1980’s there were about 240 on staff in Las Vegas though, including private sector laboratories and university affiliates and corporations involved in running bomb tests, there were about 7,000 people directly involved in weapons testing.
Most of them lived in Las Vegas and drove Highway 95, flat and straight through the gray desert, driving north sixty-five miles to the small town of Mercury at the entrance of the Nevada Test Site.
The test site covered an area about the size of Rode Island, about fifty miles from north to south and thirty miles, east to west – 1,350 square miles. The Nellis Air Force bombing range bordered the site and greatly increased the secure area of the test site. It was established in December 1950.
Before the tests moved to mainland America it took 10,000 men and a large flotilla of naval vessels to conduct tests in the Pacific on the flat coral atolls of Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia.
The United States conducted 106 (CHECK) nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, the largest, a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb in 1953. Islanders took the U.S. government to court claiming injury to themselves and damage to their islands.
In 1969, the French came to test nuclear weapons in their colonial territories in the Pacific. They detonated 41 atmospheric shots until citizen outcry from their Pacific nations, including Australian and New Zealand with active participation by Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior, forced the tests underground.
France abandoned nuclear testing in the atmosphere in 1974 and moved testing underground. What followed were 147 underground nuclear tests conducted at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls . Shafts were drilled deep into the volcanic rocks where the nuclear devices were detonated. The practice created much controversy when cracking of the atolls was discovered, and fears that the radioactive material trapped under the atolls would eventually escape and contaminate the surrounding ocean and neighboring atolls. Mururoa atoll slowly collapsed and leaked radiation into the sea.
From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. tested 67 nuclear weapons, in the on the Marshall Islands, including Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear test the U.S. ever conducted,. In 1956, the Atomic Energy Commission regarded the Marshall Islands as "by far the most contaminated place in the world".
While most sources do not think that the exposure was intentional, there is no dispute that the United States carefully studied the exposed Marshallese, but never obtained informed consent from the study subjects. As a 1982 Defense Nuclear Agency report explained, the purpose of the bomb testing project, was both medical and for research purposes:
Several ranchers sued the Atom Energy Commission in Federal District Court in Salt Lake City in 1956, claiming that fallout from Upshot-Knothole had killed their livestock. The Government successfully argued, in Bulloch v. United States, that other factors, including ''inadequate feeding, unfavorable winter range conditions, and infectious diseases,'' caused the deaths.
In 1982, Judge A. Sherman Christensen, who ruled against the plaintiffs in 1956, ordered the new trial based on information revealed in 1979 under the Freedom of Information Act. Government agents in the earlier case ruled Judge Christensen had committed a ''species of fraud'' against the court. But he was overruled on appeal and the Supreme Court refused to order the reopening of the case.
Although the deaths of the sheep generated little comment in the press at the time, beginning in the spring of 1953 fears about radiation became a staple of press coverage of the atomic tests. In an editorial, The Deseret News complained that ''the public is never told just what levels of radiation are reached in this area.'' In May, The Iron County Record published a letter from a local reader who felt ''morally obligated'' to advise his neighbors of ''the possible irreparable damage that may have occurred or may in the future occur as a consequence of the continuing series of nuclear explosions in Nevada.'' Radiation, he warned, ''may very well be injurious. Your health, your children's health, and the health of generations yet unborn, are at stake.''
BREAK
In the tall , dark wood paneled court of Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in Salt Lake City, the government call General Kennith D. Nichols (ret.) to the stand. For days government lawyers have been trying to convince Judge Jenkins that because the Nevada Test Site was established withing the meaning of the discretionary function limitation, the case should be dismissed.
Three times the government asked the judge to dismiss the case and three times he refused stating: “The court elects at this point, to wait until I hear all the evidence….very, very, very serious questions have been raised”.
Settling in to the witness box, the seventy-five year old General Nichols looks like an English military officer with a clipped mustache, ruddy cheeks and a genial dispostion and he takes to the question with alacrity.
It was in the June 1942 that the Manhattan Project was spawned and it was General Nichols’ task to take charge of design and construction of the plans to produce the “feed material” to feed the Bomb.
Government laywer, Jake Chavez, phrases his questions in careful detail guiding his witness to make the strongest impression. The court is being admitted to the inner sanctum and secrets of the birth of the atomic bomb.
General Nichols explains that after the war, he was assigned to the Armed Forces Special Weapons project, responsible for developing nuclear missiles. The weapons needed to be tested. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted the testing done in the continental United States. It would be quicker, easier and cheaper and more secure that a test site, 5,000 miles away in the Pacific.
But the army had no authority to order such a move. If testing was to move to the mainland the civilian, Atomic Energy Commission would wrest control of nuclear weapons development from the military. But it was and then chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, David E. Lilienthal, a powerful and admired figure in the inner circles for decades, was appointed the first chairman of the A.E.C and he took control of the former Manhattan Project and its 43,000 emplyees.
Lilienthal dreamed that the atom could be used peacefully and he hoped to separate the cilvilian and military components. He had been against moving the testing to the mainland.
But the Cold War was beginning to congeal. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. Berlin was under a blockade. The communist Chinese were on the move. And in September 1949, the Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb.
Political shockwaves reverberated across the U.S. and the country was momentarily stunned and terrified by the news. Pressure grew enormously for Edward Teller’s “super bomb”, a hydrogen bomb, thousands of times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Japan. There was an urgent call for more tests.
General Nichols sits forward and tells this story enthusiastically. He recalled a time when President Truman called him to the White House during the Berlin crisis when he was ushered in to meet the president who was speaking with David Lilienthal .
The president turned to them both: “I know you hate each other’s guts, but if I promote you to major-general and tell you, Lilienthall, that the primary work of the A.E.C will be to develop weapons – Dave – you’ll have to put aside your desire to put a bottle of milk on every doorstep. Will you cooperate?”
Lilienthal resigned form the A.E.C. soon afterwards, on February 15, 1950. He was not on track with the president’s policy.
General Nichols was promoted and sat as a member of the Military Liaison Committee responsible for mapping out the criteria for a continental nuclear test site. At the forty-seventh meeting it was decided that Nevada would be the location for a continental test site.
The first test occurred and the Nevada site, January 27, 1951. It was a one kiloton device dropped from an air force plane onto Frenchman Flat, a desolate valley, sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Judge Jenkins turns slowly to face the witness. The judge has a sagacious and sad appearance. He frowns a lot, concentrating behind his severe, plain eye glasses. He leans back into his comfortable, revolving chair as he immerses himself deeply into the complexities of the case. His hair is thick and black yet he is well into his fifties.
Judge Jenins: “The government went in with its eyes open? There would be some risk?
General Nichols: “Yes, some risk.”
Judge Jenkins: “Radiation risk?”
General Nichols: Fallout could occur but the degree of radiation would be low. What limitations do you make? It’s a matter of judgement.”
Judge Jenkins speaking softly, leans forward over his papers and address the witness directly. His voice twangs a little around its edges like a rancher’s and his questin rolls out across the somber court room: “Did you consider that you may lose some people?”
General Nichols: “I don’t believe that we did. We did consider other areas but it narrowed down to Nevada. North Carolina had been considered because there were few people there and it was near the sea – the fallout would have gone out to sea.”
Judge Jenkins: “It was not a riskless operation.”
General Nichols: “Very few things in life are riskless. We’re a different breed of cats. We look more towards the contingencies of war. That’s our job.”
Judge Jenkins: “Potential biological risks, were they ever discussed?”
General Nichols: “Not really. Lilienthal was move concerned about public relations. I still have difficulty understand radioactivity and I’ve been in the business since 1942. All you can go by is the experts.”
ISAAC NELSON:
“She always wore a covering after her hair had slipped off. She pretty much always wore a covering for a long time until after her hari grew back and she let it grow so she could work it over to cover as much af the bald spot as she could.
“When they operated they had to put a steel plate in the back of her head. Anytime she went outside she had to wear that head covering because in the summer, the sun hitting that steel plate would just heat it up and it would be unbearably hot and in the winter it would be so cold. She really had to watch this.
“She seemed to do pretty good for about two years after the first operation and then the tumor started coming back and she really started doing downhill fast. We’d had her in and out of hospital several times. She had to go back in about two or three times a month. It was really quite a problem.
“Poor kid. She was just so miserable. She didn’t know if she was coming or going. Its sad. Its really hard to see someone you love so much and they just get weaker day by day and they are slipping from your grasp and you’ve got to stand idly by. It really tears you up.
“She went to bed that night and it was along about three o’clock in the morning and she woke up and she was really sick, poor kid. She wanted to to to the bathroom so I picked her up and carried her and I helped her all I coult in there and I got her some medications and finally she said she’d better go back to bed and I covered her up and she looked up at me and she says, ‘Oh Isaac, I wished I could go.’
For eleven weeks, Federal District Court judge Jenkins, listened to witnesses like Isaac Nelson. Their stories were a harrowing litany of trust and naiveté; of the flash and thundering crack and rumble of atomic explosions and the rattling crockery on the kitchen shelves. Sometimes windows were blown out. There we stories of the fallout clouds and illness and nausea and blinding headaches and later, hair falling in clumps from the scalp, of silent, deadly cancers that struck the children who’d played in the open air and the dirt all day in the gorgeous desert climate.
All around them people were dying from cancers that had begun after the tests started. And they asked government officials what might be happening their families and always they were reassured and men came in twos and threes, with their instruments and then they went away and never told people what they’d found. But people felt it in their bones when they were told: “There is no danger.”
IRMA THOMAS
Irma Thomas was an energetic, straightforward person. She smiled a lot behind her horn-rimmed glasses but insidem she carried a lot of pain. She lived in St. George, Utah and government documents revealted that the area has received the highest twenty-four hour, average concentration of radiation fallout ever recorded. It was after the test shot, “Dirty Harry” and Irma Thomas soon observed a growing number of her friends and family sickening.
“I was astounded at what was going on just within a one block radius of my home”, she told me, “Right now there are thirty-eight victims and fourteen of them have died.”
She spoke matter-of-factely because sadly, her story was so commonplace in that part of southern Utah. St. George was one-hundred and fifty miles east of the Nevada Test Site.
“They told us we were active participants in this situation, which indeed we were – not by choice, we didn’t have a say in it – this was just done to us and nobody mentioned it.”
She pulled a yellowed newspaper clipping of an old government announcement which appeard in the Las Vegas Sun in the early 1950’s with says; “No public announcements of the time of testing will be made.”
First her brother and his wife died; then her sister and her husband too. The all died from cancer. And Irma Thomas’ seven children have not been spared. Two daughters had miscarriages and still births, three had ovarian cysts removed and hysterectomies and Irma’s husband, Hyram had cancer.
Her brother, Wesley used to own a sporting goods store in St. George. On the shelves were geiger counters for sale to uranium prospectors. On some days the fallout was so bad that Wesely had to cover the windows of his store with taupaulines to try to keep the poisonous dust out. Irma told me that her brother knew there was a lot of “stuff” around because the geiger counters were clicking to hard. Wesley later died from cancer too.
Irma Thomas was seventy-seven when I interviewed. She told me she’d lived in St. George her whole life. Her grandparents were amongst the first settlers. When the Mormons established St. George, they found a barren rocky plateau surrounded by craggy red cliffs. But they saw the soil was fertile and the climate good year round. St. George became the summer locale of Mormon founding father, Brigham Young.
The crops they planted were those of the south – cotton and warm weather fruits. Brigham Young, a legend in these parts, supervised the construction of the first Mormon temple, a tall, white, ornate building in the center of town.
Irma Thomas’ house was nearby on Tabernacle Street. It’s a neat gingerbread place with a carefully pruned Cyprus bushes on either side of her front door. Inside, its cluttered with books and papers on the nuclear debate. Her dining
“It was along about 1951 when the government first started testing down here in Nevada and everyone in Cedar and Parowan that you’d talked to was really excited about it."
Isaac Nelson spoke slowly with a western twang and he sat back in his chair as began to unwind.
“It was really a big thing, a big deal and we thought that we was going to be part of the national defense and that we was going to be able to help out in some small way and develop the bombs. We just felt a patriotic feeling towards our government that we were being of some use.
“I recall that the people, when they first started to do tests, were really excited. In the mornings they had the first tests, dozens of people would get in their cars and drive out west of town, the other side of the stock yards, and they’d walk up on the hillside. They had a clear view across the valley about ten of fifteen miles and we’d sit there huddled up in the early morning and along about five o’clock – why that would be before daylight – here would come this blast and the whole sky would just light up with this red-orange flash. If you’d had a newspaper you’d be able to read by it was so brilliant. Still the bomb exploded a good hundred miles from us.”
The largest test shot was code named "Harry", probably after the president who gave the go ahead to test the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The test would come to be called "Dirty Harry" because of the huge amount of radiation fallout it dumped across Utah. Like many tests, "Harry" was fired from a spindly three-hundred foot high steel tower planted at the Nevada Test Site in the desert. The explosion sucked tons of red desert dust into the sky to form a hazy pink and brown mushroom cloud. People many miles distant came to recognize those clouds as the unique signature of an atomic test. Within weeks, Kern Bullock's sheep began to die.
The events that morning began an historic court action that reached its denouement twenty-nine years later. For the first time in U.S. legal history, a district court judge reversed his decision made more than two decades earlier regarding compensation for the Bullock family and other ranchers.
Judge Sherman Christenson, still a sitting member of the federal district court in Salt Lake City in 1982 when I visited the area, had dismissed the earlier compensation charge in 1956 believing there was insufficient evidence to show that the sheep deaths had been caused by radiation fallout. But at the time he was unaware that the A.E.C. had seriously misled the court.
Just how far this deception went emerged slowly. The first indications came in a series of articles in Salt Lake City's evening newspaper, the "Desert News" owned by the Mormon's Church of Latter Day Saints and the oldest continually published newspaper in the state. In 1977 the paper published the results of a seven year old National Cancer Institute study that showed a doubling in leukemia incidents in the two counties nearest the Nevada Test Site.
Joseph Lyons, the co-director of the Utah Cancer Registry at the University of Utah told me he'd see the report but "given the prior negative studies of thyroid cancers and reassurance from the government, my assumption was that this was one of those periodic hysterias that we get in the cancer business." But to his surprise, Dr. Lyons discovered that follow-up studies in the New England Journal of Medicine in February, 1979, showed childhood leukemia in southern Utah near the test site was up 240 percent during the time of above ground testing. Yet cancer statistics in Utah were far lower than elsewhere in the U.S. by a factor of thirty percent.
The "Deseret News" published more stories gleaned though the Freedom of Information Act revealing the A.E.C. had been disingenuous in dealing both with the sheep case and the overall hazards to the general public of atomic testing.
And then Utah's governor, Scott Matheson drew the attention of the Carter administration to his concerns about radiation exposure to his constituents. With public pressure mounting, a joint congressional committee convened in Salt Lake City to investigate effects of low-level radiation and atomic testing. Utah’s governor dumped eleven pounds of testimony comprising 1,100 documents, in the laps of the committee. He told them it read like: “a case in government misfeasance and callous disregard for health and property.”
The documents revealed that the A.E.C. investigation had confirmed that the rancher’s sheep had been exposed to very high levels of radiation. Some thyroids tested at the time showed levels of radiation one-thousand times normal. Yet still the A.E.C. had refused to acknowledge that radiation could have played any part in the sheep deaths.
Governor Matheson continued: “This scientific myopia appears more sinister when other events are considered. Not long after the investigation of the sheep, a senior A.E.C. representative met with a number of scientists investigating the problem and pressed them to endorse a conclusion that the radiation was not a causative factor in the sheep incident. The A.E.C. representative told the scientists, most of whom were A.E.C. employees of Public Health Service, that unless the commissioners were presented with a satisfactory resolution of the sheep problem, the government would not open the purse strings for further continental testing. The ‘no cause’ conclusion that the A.E.C. representative suggested, was forwarded to the A.E.C. and as we know, the testing continued.”
The sheep case was important in many ways. The series of bomb tests which contaminated sheep, obviously could contaminate people. A.E.C. commissioner, Eugene Zuckert, aware that the herds of sheep in the fallout path, were dying, stated in a commission meeting that a “serious psychological problem has arisen…in the present frame of mind of the public, it would take only a single, illogical and unforeseen accident to stop further tests in the United States.
On more than on occasion, residents of the small town of St. George, Utah, were warned to stay indoors following bomb tests because wind shifts blew exceedingly high levels of fallout of in their direction. It was important for the A.E.C. that the public not be unnerved by the testing program.
At the time of the congressional hearings in 1979, Peter Libassi, general counsel for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, stated that: “during the 1953 period, some 17,000 sheep died in Utah, something local veterinarians had never experienced”.
In the federal district court in Salt Lake City, Judge Bruce Jenkins heard the case. The landmark trial involved 1,192 plaintiffs of which twenty-four were selected as a representative sample. They were known as “downwinders” and they charged the United States government with negligently exposing them to radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests.
In the fall of 1982, Judge Jenkins heard at least 150 witnesses and took into evidence, more than 2,000 documents in the trial which was heard without a jury in accordance with federal tort claims rules.
The plaintiffs argued that those responsible in government had failed to adequately warn residents about the potential dangers from fallout and that that they had been told how to protect themselves should they be exposed. The government claimed that any radiation that may have reached communities was too low to have caused any problem. The government suggested that evidence from the twenty-four plaintiffs should not be admitted because they were “non-expert witnesses” unqualified to describe matters of radiation and cancer.
The government also claimed that it was immune from any court action under the statute of limitations because of the length of time taken for the plaintiffs to file the action. They called for a dismissal of the case on the ground that any responsibility to inform residents about radiation dangers, fell within the meaning of the “discretionary function” of the president. The discretionary function clause is designed to protect government officials forced to make difficult and controversial decisions believed to be in the best interests of the country, from subsequent claims.
It was hard for me to imagine a more interesting setting for such an emotionally loaded case as Salt Lake City, world headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints. Its citizens are scrupulously honest, hardworking and patriotic – more Utahans volunteered for the armed services that elsewhere in the country during war. They are suspicious of fads and radicals but the questions surrounding nuclear fallout was resting heavily on their shoulders. Distrust of government was in the air.
SAAC NELSON:
“I recall in 1953 after having gone out and watched one of these tests that later on in the day we noticed this cloud drifting up from the south-west. It was kind of a pinkish, tan colored cloud and it was strung out. If you’d ever seen one of them you’d never miss it because there is no other cloud that I’ve seen that looked like these radiation fallout clouds.
“The wife and I stepped out onto our driveway and we were standing there looking up at this cloud and she didn’t have any covering on her head. I had on my chauffeur’s hat that I wore when I was driving a truck. We must have stood there and watched this cloud for half an hour, forty-five minutes, maybe even and hour while it slowly drifted over Cedar. It took quite a while. It didn’t travel too fast.
“When I came home that evening, my wife was complaining of a severe headache, a very severe headache. Then she said she had been nauseated and had diarrhea and later on in the evening her face and her arms and her neck and everything that was exposed, just turned beet red, just very brilliant red and we figured that maybe she’d got sunstroke or too much sun and that’s the only thing we could figure out. We didn’t couple it with that radiation fallout at all. We never did.”
Behind Isaac Nelson, on a glassed in side-board, were pictures of his family, two boys and two girls from his first marriage, hand tinted by his wife Oletta. She worked at the local photography shop in Cedar City. There was another of her alone, a gently looking woman who Isaac described as “as very active, outdoor type of a girl – she liked the outdoors; she liked being out in the sun; she liked to hunting and fishing.
They would go on camping trips together after they were married and “we’d take our sleeping bags and throw ‘em down on the ground and have the stars for a ceiling and cook our meals out over an open pit camp fire.”
Isaac looked down at the floor thinking back to those times and the to the day that cloud would cruelly change their lives. He remembered his wife’s pain and red skin that night in 1953.
ISAAC NELSON:
“I told her to take some aspirin and maybe that’ll help your headache and she took various medications and she put some lotions on her face, some sunburn cream and it just didn’t seem to alleviate it at all.
“So I called Dr. Presswitch he was our family doctor. He’d delivered all the babies and took care of us for years and he says: ‘Bring her to the hospital. I’m on shift tonight and I’ll look at her.’ So we went to the hospital and he examined her and he said she had symptoms for sunstroke and sunburn ‘but I don’t like the look of that color’. It didn’t look like sunburn.
“It went on for a period of three weeks or a month or such a matter and one day I was sitting in the living room and she was in the bathroom washing her hair and all at once she let out the most ungodly scream you could imagine. I couldn’t imagine what was so wrong with her and I rushed in there and her hair had slipped right off to about halfway back on her head and it was just laying there in the wash basin.”
Isaac didn’t look at me as he told this story. His eyes were downcast avoiding mine but he spoke without hesitation in long, rhythmic sentences.
“She had beautiful, black, shiny hair just so black when it was in the sun it just glistened almost green like a raven’s wing – beautiful hair, long hair. You can imagine the reaction a woman would have to lose all her hair and just see it there laying in the wash basin.”
Isaac drifted back to a time before atomic testing, a time of sepia memories and scratchy country music in small town county halls.
ISAAC NELSON:
“We’d always enjoyed going square dancing and she was the dance director in our ward. We danced a lot. We went to jamborees all the way down to Flagstaff in New Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona and Tuscon and Las Vegas; all the way up through the state to Salt Lake and Provo. We’d even gone to a world square dance jamboree at San Diego where there were five-hundred going at once.
“She was very active. She loved life. But now she was becoming listless and she didn’t want to do anything and by 1960 I finally prevailed on her to to see another doctor – that was Dr. Malin Corey.
“He checked her over and called on Dr. Garth Chaterly and he examined her eyes and said right off the bat: ‘There is something definitely wrong with this woman. There is pressure behind her eyes.’
“The injected some needles into her viens and the arteries in her neck, some isotopes and they followed them with x-rays and finally they centered in the back of her head and another doctor comes in and says: ‘We’ve pinpointed probably what’s the trouble. She’s either got a massive blood clot there or she’s got a large tumor in the base at the back of her skull’.
“They said they’d have to operate and I gave my permission and on a Saturday morning they operated and took out a huge malignant tumor that was almost as large as a large grapefruit. It had been imbedded so deep in her brain tissue that the doctor said he couldn’t get it all out but they did they best they could. He told me it was probably terminal.
The Department of Energy’s Nevada Operations Office was in Las Vegas. In the 1980’s there were about 240 on staff in Las Vegas though, including private sector laboratories and university affiliates and corporations involved in running bomb tests, there were about 7,000 people directly involved in weapons testing.
Most of them lived in Las Vegas and drove Highway 95, flat and straight through the gray desert, driving north sixty-five miles to the small town of Mercury at the entrance of the Nevada Test Site.
The test site covered an area about the size of Rode Island, about fifty miles from north to south and thirty miles, east to west – 1,350 square miles. The Nellis Air Force bombing range bordered the site and greatly increased the secure area of the test site. It was established in December 1950.
Before the tests moved to mainland America it took 10,000 men and a large flotilla of naval vessels to conduct tests in the Pacific on the flat coral atolls of Bikini and Enewetak in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia.
The United States conducted 106 (CHECK) nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, the largest, a 15 megaton hydrogen bomb in 1953. Islanders took the U.S. government to court claiming injury to themselves and damage to their islands.
In 1969, the French came to test nuclear weapons in their colonial territories in the Pacific. They detonated 41 atmospheric shots until citizen outcry from their Pacific nations, including Australian and New Zealand with active participation by Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior, forced the tests underground.
France abandoned nuclear testing in the atmosphere in 1974 and moved testing underground. What followed were 147 underground nuclear tests conducted at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls . Shafts were drilled deep into the volcanic rocks where the nuclear devices were detonated. The practice created much controversy when cracking of the atolls was discovered, and fears that the radioactive material trapped under the atolls would eventually escape and contaminate the surrounding ocean and neighboring atolls. Mururoa atoll slowly collapsed and leaked radiation into the sea.
From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. tested 67 nuclear weapons, in the on the Marshall Islands, including Castle Bravo, the largest nuclear test the U.S. ever conducted,. In 1956, the Atomic Energy Commission regarded the Marshall Islands as "by far the most contaminated place in the world".
While most sources do not think that the exposure was intentional, there is no dispute that the United States carefully studied the exposed Marshallese, but never obtained informed consent from the study subjects. As a 1982 Defense Nuclear Agency report explained, the purpose of the bomb testing project, was both medical and for research purposes:
Several ranchers sued the Atom Energy Commission in Federal District Court in Salt Lake City in 1956, claiming that fallout from Upshot-Knothole had killed their livestock. The Government successfully argued, in Bulloch v. United States, that other factors, including ''inadequate feeding, unfavorable winter range conditions, and infectious diseases,'' caused the deaths.
In 1982, Judge A. Sherman Christensen, who ruled against the plaintiffs in 1956, ordered the new trial based on information revealed in 1979 under the Freedom of Information Act. Government agents in the earlier case ruled Judge Christensen had committed a ''species of fraud'' against the court. But he was overruled on appeal and the Supreme Court refused to order the reopening of the case.
Although the deaths of the sheep generated little comment in the press at the time, beginning in the spring of 1953 fears about radiation became a staple of press coverage of the atomic tests. In an editorial, The Deseret News complained that ''the public is never told just what levels of radiation are reached in this area.'' In May, The Iron County Record published a letter from a local reader who felt ''morally obligated'' to advise his neighbors of ''the possible irreparable damage that may have occurred or may in the future occur as a consequence of the continuing series of nuclear explosions in Nevada.'' Radiation, he warned, ''may very well be injurious. Your health, your children's health, and the health of generations yet unborn, are at stake.''
BREAK
In the tall , dark wood paneled court of Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in Salt Lake City, the government call General Kennith D. Nichols (ret.) to the stand. For days government lawyers have been trying to convince Judge Jenkins that because the Nevada Test Site was established withing the meaning of the discretionary function limitation, the case should be dismissed.
Three times the government asked the judge to dismiss the case and three times he refused stating: “The court elects at this point, to wait until I hear all the evidence….very, very, very serious questions have been raised”.
Settling in to the witness box, the seventy-five year old General Nichols looks like an English military officer with a clipped mustache, ruddy cheeks and a genial dispostion and he takes to the question with alacrity.
It was in the June 1942 that the Manhattan Project was spawned and it was General Nichols’ task to take charge of design and construction of the plans to produce the “feed material” to feed the Bomb.
Government laywer, Jake Chavez, phrases his questions in careful detail guiding his witness to make the strongest impression. The court is being admitted to the inner sanctum and secrets of the birth of the atomic bomb.
General Nichols explains that after the war, he was assigned to the Armed Forces Special Weapons project, responsible for developing nuclear missiles. The weapons needed to be tested. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted the testing done in the continental United States. It would be quicker, easier and cheaper and more secure that a test site, 5,000 miles away in the Pacific.
But the army had no authority to order such a move. If testing was to move to the mainland the civilian, Atomic Energy Commission would wrest control of nuclear weapons development from the military. But it was and then chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, David E. Lilienthal, a powerful and admired figure in the inner circles for decades, was appointed the first chairman of the A.E.C and he took control of the former Manhattan Project and its 43,000 emplyees.
Lilienthal dreamed that the atom could be used peacefully and he hoped to separate the cilvilian and military components. He had been against moving the testing to the mainland.
But the Cold War was beginning to congeal. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. Berlin was under a blockade. The communist Chinese were on the move. And in September 1949, the Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb.
Political shockwaves reverberated across the U.S. and the country was momentarily stunned and terrified by the news. Pressure grew enormously for Edward Teller’s “super bomb”, a hydrogen bomb, thousands of times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Japan. There was an urgent call for more tests.
General Nichols sits forward and tells this story enthusiastically. He recalled a time when President Truman called him to the White House during the Berlin crisis when he was ushered in to meet the president who was speaking with David Lilienthal .
The president turned to them both: “I know you hate each other’s guts, but if I promote you to major-general and tell you, Lilienthall, that the primary work of the A.E.C will be to develop weapons – Dave – you’ll have to put aside your desire to put a bottle of milk on every doorstep. Will you cooperate?”
Lilienthal resigned form the A.E.C. soon afterwards, on February 15, 1950. He was not on track with the president’s policy.
General Nichols was promoted and sat as a member of the Military Liaison Committee responsible for mapping out the criteria for a continental nuclear test site. At the forty-seventh meeting it was decided that Nevada would be the location for a continental test site.
The first test occurred and the Nevada site, January 27, 1951. It was a one kiloton device dropped from an air force plane onto Frenchman Flat, a desolate valley, sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Judge Jenkins turns slowly to face the witness. The judge has a sagacious and sad appearance. He frowns a lot, concentrating behind his severe, plain eye glasses. He leans back into his comfortable, revolving chair as he immerses himself deeply into the complexities of the case. His hair is thick and black yet he is well into his fifties.
Judge Jenins: “The government went in with its eyes open? There would be some risk?
General Nichols: “Yes, some risk.”
Judge Jenkins: “Radiation risk?”
General Nichols: Fallout could occur but the degree of radiation would be low. What limitations do you make? It’s a matter of judgement.”
Judge Jenkins speaking softly, leans forward over his papers and address the witness directly. His voice twangs a little around its edges like a rancher’s and his questin rolls out across the somber court room: “Did you consider that you may lose some people?”
General Nichols: “I don’t believe that we did. We did consider other areas but it narrowed down to Nevada. North Carolina had been considered because there were few people there and it was near the sea – the fallout would have gone out to sea.”
Judge Jenkins: “It was not a riskless operation.”
General Nichols: “Very few things in life are riskless. We’re a different breed of cats. We look more towards the contingencies of war. That’s our job.”
Judge Jenkins: “Potential biological risks, were they ever discussed?”
General Nichols: “Not really. Lilienthal was move concerned about public relations. I still have difficulty understand radioactivity and I’ve been in the business since 1942. All you can go by is the experts.”
ISAAC NELSON:
“She always wore a covering after her hair had slipped off. She pretty much always wore a covering for a long time until after her hari grew back and she let it grow so she could work it over to cover as much af the bald spot as she could.
“When they operated they had to put a steel plate in the back of her head. Anytime she went outside she had to wear that head covering because in the summer, the sun hitting that steel plate would just heat it up and it would be unbearably hot and in the winter it would be so cold. She really had to watch this.
“She seemed to do pretty good for about two years after the first operation and then the tumor started coming back and she really started doing downhill fast. We’d had her in and out of hospital several times. She had to go back in about two or three times a month. It was really quite a problem.
“Poor kid. She was just so miserable. She didn’t know if she was coming or going. Its sad. Its really hard to see someone you love so much and they just get weaker day by day and they are slipping from your grasp and you’ve got to stand idly by. It really tears you up.
“She went to bed that night and it was along about three o’clock in the morning and she woke up and she was really sick, poor kid. She wanted to to to the bathroom so I picked her up and carried her and I helped her all I coult in there and I got her some medications and finally she said she’d better go back to bed and I covered her up and she looked up at me and she says, ‘Oh Isaac, I wished I could go.’
For eleven weeks, Federal District Court judge Jenkins, listened to witnesses like Isaac Nelson. Their stories were a harrowing litany of trust and naiveté; of the flash and thundering crack and rumble of atomic explosions and the rattling crockery on the kitchen shelves. Sometimes windows were blown out. There we stories of the fallout clouds and illness and nausea and blinding headaches and later, hair falling in clumps from the scalp, of silent, deadly cancers that struck the children who’d played in the open air and the dirt all day in the gorgeous desert climate.
All around them people were dying from cancers that had begun after the tests started. And they asked government officials what might be happening their families and always they were reassured and men came in twos and threes, with their instruments and then they went away and never told people what they’d found. But people felt it in their bones when they were told: “There is no danger.”
IRMA THOMAS
Irma Thomas was an energetic, straightforward person. She smiled a lot behind her horn-rimmed glasses but insidem she carried a lot of pain. She lived in St. George, Utah and government documents revealted that the area has received the highest twenty-four hour, average concentration of radiation fallout ever recorded. It was after the test shot, “Dirty Harry” and Irma Thomas soon observed a growing number of her friends and family sickening.
“I was astounded at what was going on just within a one block radius of my home”, she told me, “Right now there are thirty-eight victims and fourteen of them have died.”
She spoke matter-of-factely because sadly, her story was so commonplace in that part of southern Utah. St. George was one-hundred and fifty miles east of the Nevada Test Site.
“They told us we were active participants in this situation, which indeed we were – not by choice, we didn’t have a say in it – this was just done to us and nobody mentioned it.”
She pulled a yellowed newspaper clipping of an old government announcement which appeard in the Las Vegas Sun in the early 1950’s with says; “No public announcements of the time of testing will be made.”
First her brother and his wife died; then her sister and her husband too. The all died from cancer. And Irma Thomas’ seven children have not been spared. Two daughters had miscarriages and still births, three had ovarian cysts removed and hysterectomies and Irma’s husband, Hyram had cancer.
Her brother, Wesley used to own a sporting goods store in St. George. On the shelves were geiger counters for sale to uranium prospectors. On some days the fallout was so bad that Wesely had to cover the windows of his store with taupaulines to try to keep the poisonous dust out. Irma told me that her brother knew there was a lot of “stuff” around because the geiger counters were clicking to hard. Wesley later died from cancer too.
Irma Thomas was seventy-seven when I interviewed. She told me she’d lived in St. George her whole life. Her grandparents were amongst the first settlers. When the Mormons established St. George, they found a barren rocky plateau surrounded by craggy red cliffs. But they saw the soil was fertile and the climate good year round. St. George became the summer locale of Mormon founding father, Brigham Young.
The crops they planted were those of the south – cotton and warm weather fruits. Brigham Young, a legend in these parts, supervised the construction of the first Mormon temple, a tall, white, ornate building in the center of town.
Irma Thomas’ house was nearby on Tabernacle Street. It’s a neat gingerbread place with a carefully pruned Cyprus bushes on either side of her front door. Inside, its cluttered with books and papers on the nuclear debate. Her dining
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