Downwinders: Fatal Harvest

Lisa Perry:
The morning of April 27th, 1953. Started off as fairly routine for 22-year-old Sam Markowitz, a senior at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Sam began his day with baseball practice. He ended it having uncovered one of the worst known episodes of nuclear fallout in American history.

Lisa Perry:
After practice that morning, Sam headed to his radio chemistry lab to set up equipment for a routine experiment he was conducting for class. But when he turned on the Geiger counter, the meter was showing a strangely high level of radiation, three times higher than normal background levels, thinking that the calibration might be off. He tried other counters in the lab, but they all read the same. Moving around the lab to see if he could get different readings, the meter suddenly spiked even higher. He was pointing it at his baseball glove, which held the ball he had just been using at practice. Outside the building, Sam discovered dangerous levels of radiation with the highest readings coming from the downspouts and gutters, which were still wet from a major storm that had blown through the area the night before. Alarmed by his findings, Markowitz notified his professor, Dr. Herbert Clark. Dr. Clark, a radio chemist who'd played a small role in the Manhattan Project a few years earlier had an idea of what might have happened. Bill Heller, a journalist from the Troy area, explains what happened next.

Bill Heller:
Professor Clark knew that there had been an atom bomb test two days earlier in Nevada, and he called the Atomic Energy Commission office in New York to tell them he thought there was fallout from the test. And even though they knew Professor Clark, they basically said he was out of his mind and hung up on him. And of course, he was right and about an hour later, they called him back.

Lisa Perry:
What Markowitz had detected in the lab that morning in Troy, New York was radioactive fallout from shot Simon, a nuclear bomb test detonated 2300 miles away. In the Nevada desert test Shot Simon resulted in a massive 43-kiloton explosion, and the blast, which had occurred close to the ground, produced a colossal mushroom cloud that launched radioactive particles and debris eight miles into the stratosphere, responding to the unexpectedly dirty test, the Atomic Energy Commission scrambled to ground nearby aircraft from flying into the area and set up highway patrols around the test site to monitor cars for radioactivity. What the AEC couldn't control however was Mother Nature.

Bill Heller:
Basically what happened was, as with all the other atom bomb tests, the fallout was passing over on the jet stream from west to east, and when it got over the Albany Troy Schenectady area in upstate New York, it happened to intersect with what was the most violent thunderstorm in the history of the area. It washed the fallout literally out of the sky and onto the ground and onto the streets and into people's lives.

Lisa Perry:
Professor Clark and his students began to survey the local area measuring radiation levels in puddles tap water and reservoirs around Troy. Their findings were alarming with some readings showing levels thousands of times over safe drinking limits. These numbers were replicated by other experts all across the Tri-City area.

Bill Heller:
So there was a Mohawk Association of Scientists and Engineers, and because these people were scientists when they heard about the fallout, they all took their own individual readings and it showed a tremendous amount of fallout still being read 10 days later. And I believe after spending decades researching this, I think it’s the only independent scientific data ever obtained by people who knew what they were doing.

Lisa Perry:
To put these readings in context, the amount of radiation that these scientists were registering around the Troy Albany Schenectady area was nearly double the amount registered after the Chernobyl disaster.

Bill Heller:
The Atomic Energy Commission basically had a meeting about it. They thought the danger was what is called one rad, and they lied, and they told the public that it was 0.1 rad and there was nothing to worry about. Two days after the storm hit Troy, New York, there was an editorial in the paper there, the Troy Record, saying that there’s absolutely no way that it could have caused any problem for any vegetation people or anything else. And how do we know? Because we talked to the Atomic Energy Commission.

Lisa Perry:
Although the New York office wrote a report on what became known as the Troy incident, their findings would remain classified. The only public acknowledgment of the incident came in the AEC'S annual briefing published later that year. It summarized this situation in two sentences, briefly mentioning that there had been unexpected contamination in the Troy area after shot Simon, and then simply stating, the exposure has no significance in relation to health.

Lisa Perry:
I'm Lisa Perry, and you're listening to At the Brink, a podcast about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the stories of those fighting to protect us. Today's episode is Fatal Harvest. Part two of our examination of American downwinders.

Lisa Perry:
The word fallout originated in the atomic era. Today, the term fallout is synonymous with consequences. Over the course of a decade, our government conducted a hundred atmospheric nuclear tests in the continental United States, but for nuclear downwinders, the most significant consequences of those tests would not appear for decades after testing ended. In this episode, we look at the long-term impact of nuclear testing on the American citizens it was supposed to protect, and the efforts of victims to fight for recognition and compensation. In part one, we heard the stories of downwinders who lived in New Mexico near the Trinity test site, or in southern Utah, immediately downwind of the Nevada test site. But as Mary Dickson, a longtime down window activist explains our understanding of who is considered a downwind is far too limited.

Mary Dickson:
A downwind is someone who lived downwind up the Nevada test site during the years of nuclear testing because of the way the jet streams were, the winds were westerly, so the jet stream would pick up the fallout from atomic explosions and carry them all the way across the country. So people basically across this entire country are downwinders. Although I would say the vast majority of people will never know they are.

Lisa Perry:
Mary does not fit the definition of a downwinder as people commonly know it. She herself only came to the realization of her downwinder status later in life.

Mary Dickson:
I grew up in the fifties and sixties, a child of the Cold War. I grew up in Salt Lake City. I had this idyllic childhood. We would play in the rain puddle, all we would eat vegetables from the garden. My grandfather would let us drink milk straight from the cow sometimes.

Lisa Perry:
As Mary grew up, she found herself surrounded by cancer.

Mary Dickson:
A little girl down the street, Tammy, died of a brain tumor when she was eight. A few weeks later, her little brother who was four, died of testicular cancer. I had friends whose fathers had brain tumors, a friend who we just thought was a hypochondriac. She had bone cancer and ended up dying. We just thought that cancer and tumors were a normal part of life.

Lisa Perry:
In her late twenties, Mary would suddenly be confronted with her own cancer.

Mary Dickson:
I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer when I was 29, and they told me, well if you have to get a cancer, this is the best one to get. I thought, well, I wasn't exactly shopping, so I had the surgery, I had radiation treatment. It was a hard time, but I didn't really realize the impact of it, and I didn't connect it at all to nuclear testing because people just always assumed that fallout victims and down winds were pretty much just in Southern Utah. And I was in Salt Lake City, which is ironic because I was writing and interviewing downwinders and I just thought I had bad luck.

Lisa Perry:
Mary who worked as a journalist in Salt Lake would soon discover that her diagnosis was potentially more than just bad luck.

Mary Dickson :
So I was doing an article about a photojournalist from New York who had spent years collecting oral histories and photographing downwinders, and I was interviewing her when she started ticking off the list of the cancers you could get from fallout and she said thyroid cancer. I'm like, oh, I had thyroid cancer. And she said, well, where'd you grow up? I said, salt Lake. She goes, did you drink milk? I said, oh sure, from the local dairy. And she just looked at me. She said you're a downwinder. And I said, no, no, no. I grew up in Salt Lake, not southern Utah.

Lisa Perry:
The journalist showed Mary a map created by a researcher named Richard Miller. Miller had used AEC test reports and US weather service data to generate maps showing the estimated distribution of nuclear fallout generated by tests at the Nevada site.

Mary Dickson:
If you looked at it, Utah's almost completely blacked out and it spreads across the Midwest and all the way to the East Coast. That map was stunning. It was like being punched in the gut.

Lisa Perry:
To understand why that map was such a gut punch. It's helpful to understand what exactly fallout is, how we can be exposed to it, and how it impacts our bodies and our health.

AEC film clip:
The amount of energy generated by a nuclear explosion is enormous. Near the crater area, there is almost total destruction from blast and heat, and now large amounts of pulverized debris and molten earth are pulled up into the mushroom cloud. This is where radioactive fallout is formed. The radioactive atoms produced in the explosion joined with the particles of earth and debris. The mushroom-shaped cloud forms in climbs higher. It now contains billions of highly radioactive particles of matter that we call fallout. The strong winds of the upper altitudes go to work on the cloud, blowing it off in one or more directions. Gravity tugs on the particles, the larger and heavier ones sink toward the ground while the lighter particles continue to drift with the wind.

Lisa Perry:
Here's a quick primer on nuclear physics. When you split the atom, you generate a whole pile of new isotopes. How someone will be affected by radioactive isotopes depends on several important variables. One is the dose, how much total radiation they were exposed to and for how long. Another critical factor is the root of exposure.

Dr. Steven Simon:
I'm Dr. Steve Simon. I work at the National Institute of Health, specifically in the Cancer Institute, and I've studied radiation-exposed populations all over the world. Now, external exposure, we call it gamma rays. Those are like X-rays, but they're more powerful. They penetrate your body pretty much all the way through and all the organs receive pretty much an equal exposure from the outside.

Lisa Perry:
When Barbara Kent was 13 years old, she was exposed to external radiation when she played in the fallout ash that rained down on her summer camp after the detonation of the very first atomic test Trinity, as we heard in part one, two-thirds of Barbara's camp mates would die of cancer at an early age. While Barbara herself managed to reach the impressive age of 90 years old, she did not escape unscathed by her exposure.

Barbara Kent:
I've had many, many cancers. I've had my thyroid taken out. I've had endometrium cancer. They found out I had cancer. It was in my nose, if you can believe, and I definitely contribute all of it to what happened to us with the atomic bomb.

Lisa Perry:
While Barbara Kent and her campmates were exposed to external radiation from the Trinity test, a larger percentage of down windows were exposed through more indirect means.

Dr. Steven Simon:
Another route of exposure is what we call internal exposure. And it occurs when people ingest contaminated foods or water or air. It takes much longer for the process to happen. It's much more complicated because there's lots of variables at work. Which way is the wind blowing and how much food is contaminated and what kinds of foods? And did you get those particular foods?

Lisa Perry:

The organ that is most associated with internal fallout exposure is the thyroid gland. Thousands of downwinders from around the world have suffered from thyroid damage or thyroid cancer, including Barbara Kent and Mary Dixon. The thyroid is a common target because of iodine 131, a radioactive isotope created in large quantities and nuclear fission. Iodine 131 is particularly treacherous for two reasons. First, iodine is necessary for the body to create thyroid hormones. So any form of iodine that you ingest is readily absorbed into the thyroid gland.

Dr. Steven Simon:
It is one of the few elements that our body actually needs. Our thyroid gland requires iodine for proper metabolism. So here you have a radioactive form of iodine and your body cannot tell the difference between the radioactive form and the non-radioactive form.

Lisa Perry:
The second reason radioactive iodine 131 is so dangerous is that it's water soluble, meaning that it can pollute rain contaminate watersheds, and what is probably the most insidious source of fallout exposure: milk. When fallout is deposited on grassland, which is then eaten by grazing cows, the iodine 131 becomes concentrated in the milk being produced by those cows. The same process occurs with nursing mothers who ingest fall at contaminated produce. This is known as the milk pathway. Ilene Hacker, who grew up 140 miles away from the Nevada test site in St. George, Utah recalls how her community never knew that their pastoral lifestyle could actually be slowly killing them.

Ilene Hacker:
You can talk to people all over the area, they'll tell you exactly the same stories. The fallout came, it landed on our crops. The cows ate the crops. We drank a lot of milk because we were kids and we ate the vegetables that were grown. I have 14 very close-knit girlfriends from my class of 70. We have gone to lunch together every month for at least 50 years. The one that went to high school with us 10th grade through 12th grade, was not born and raised in St. George. Her thyroid is working. The rest of us, 13 out of 14 very close-knit friends have suffered from some type of thyroid disorder.

Lisa Perry:
The milk pathway also had an outsized impact because milk is most regularly consumed by children.

Dr. Steven Simon:
Persons exposed of younger ages are oftentimes more susceptible to the radiation damage. After all, they got more cells that are dividing, and it's those dividing cells that are really gonna make the cells of the future. So if they become damaged, that damage could be transferred to new cells that are growing.

Lisa Perry:
While most of the cellular damage from nuclear radiation occurs in the days and weeks following a test, the impact of that damage typically doesn't emerge for many years. For Ilene Hacker's family, the bill came due in 1977.

Ilene Hacker:
My father, if there ever was a dad that was the fun dad, he was it. He was the healthy dad. He was the one that was the life of the party. He had been water skiing at Lake Powell. He got muscles that ached and they just never got better. So he went to the doctor and we were laughing about it because I don't remember him ever going to the doctor because he was never sick.

Lisa Perry:
Ilene's father would be diagnosed with a cancer of the glandular tissues. His diagnosis, swiftly followed by his death, would rock Ilene's family to its core.

Ilene Hacker:
He's a 48-year-old man. He went to the doctor because he ached and he was dead a few months late. And we were not in any shape mentally, financially, anything, to have him leave us. All he did was suffer every single day. We took care of him at home. We watched him go from a strong, healthy, hardworking water skiing dad to, I'm not sure how much he weighed when he passed away, but we did not have an open casket because he was so thin and didn't look like himself. But it was a horrific experience.

Lisa Perry:
Even in St. George, Utah, which was close enough to the Nevada test site to see the flash of the detonations. Many in the community didn't recognize the pattern of disease that was emerging. For Eileen Hacker, it was her father's diagnosis that made her suddenly see what had been all around her all along

Ilene Hacker:
I remember hearing someone tell my mother, that is most likely from the Nevada test site, and she had that suspicion early on once he was diagnosed because Mrs. May down the street also had cancer. And Mrs. Bradshaw, she also had cancer, and we started naming all the people that were in St. George that had those same types of cancer. For a 25-year-old girl, it was just mind-boggling. Then the next thing I know, they're calling me and saying, we need to get organized. We need attorneys.

Lisa Perry:
The earliest attempts by Downwinders to organize and hold their government accountable for nuclear fallout had been focused on the damage to livestock since the impact of fallout on grazing animals appeared rapidly after testing. years later, as more people were falling ill with diseases linked to radiation exposure, some downwinders like Ilene Hacker and her family attempted again to find justice through the court system.

Judge Bruce Jenkins :
My full name is Bruce S. Jenkins. I was then a United States district judge. The case we're talking about, the Allen case, was filed in uh, August of 1979. It was an important case and probably the most intellectually demanding case that I then had or I've had since.

Lisa Perry:
Allen v. United States was a class action lawsuit of nearly 1200 plaintiffs from across Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. The lawsuit claimed that the US government negligently exposed them to radioactive fallout from nuclear testing. The case unfolded over five years and involved 13 weeks of court hearings, 90 witnesses, 16 multi-page exhibits, and 24 individual claims heard, in-full. Judge Jenkins spent over a year writing a 400 page ruling opinion, which begins like this.

Judge Bruce Jenkins:
This case is concerned with atoms with government, with people, with legal relationships, and with social evidence. It is concerned with the duty, if any, that the United States government has challenged people what it knew or should have known about the dangers to them from the government's experiments with nuclear fission conducted above ground in the brushlands of Nevada during those critical years

Lisa Perry:
In order to determine fault in such a large class action lawsuit. 24 individual cases were tried in full. 15 of those cases were dismissed as unrelated to fallout. But for the remaining nine, Judge Jenkins ultimately ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. This ruling was the first-ever formal acknowledgment that nuclear testing was responsible for harming American citizens. A bellwether moment for fallout victims.

News announcer:
Today in a landmark federal court decision, Judge Bruce Jenkins ruled the federal government was negligent in conducting above ground nuclear tests in the 1950s and sixties.

Lisa Perry:
One of the critical questions contested during the trial was whether the government could be held liable for its actions.

Judge Bruce Jenkins:
The high policy people said it's all right to hurt or to kill a few people for the ultimate benefit of the United States. I'm an old legislator on a state level but recognize that while government is appropriately insulated from a liability in some government activity, that other activity is justifiably compensable. So the king can do wrong.

News announcer:
The ruling is vindication for the people of Southern Utah. A federal judge said today with the people of Southern Utah have been saying for a long time that in the interest of national security, the government sacrificed some of the people of the West.

Lisa Perry:
While the Allen v. United States ruling was a moral vindication for the downwinders, unfortunately, the Court of Appeals overturned the decision before any compensation was paid to the plaintiffs. But the narrative that the government had sacrificed its people to develop nuclear weapons was growing louder, and the action was moving from legal challenges to potential legislation. In 1979, congressional hearings were initiated to look into the health effects of fallout exposure. The result of the hearings was a report entitled The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, a bold and unequivocal indictment of the government's failure to protect its citizens in its quest for nuclear security. It concluded, the greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that the only victims of US nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people. The report called for the government to accept what it deemed compassionate responsibility for injuries sustained by downward residents and advocated for a legislative solution that would work to compensate victims. Finally, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act or RECA was signed into law in October 1990, 28 years after the end of atmospheric testing, those who passed the rigorous application process could be awarded up to $50,000. For many, including Ilene Hacker. RECA was not so much about the money as it was about what the money symbolized.

Ilene Hacker:
They gave my mother after I filled out the forms and sent them off for her, I believe seven different times, they gave her a check for $50,000. It was exactly a slap in the face to me for them to give my mother $50,000 for my dad's life. He was worth so much more than that. That is not compensation. But the reason that she went ahead and let me file the claim was to make sure that the government knew that we knew that they had killed our loved ones because of their negligence at the Nevada test site. We love our country. I still love our country, but to make them be accountable, the only thing we could do is tell them that they had to compensate us. It makes them, the government, realize that, no, you didn't get away with it. And as weak as their apology has been at least the money lets you know and be able to tell your kids and grandkids, guess what? They're paying us off because they knew that they owed us something.

Lisa Perry:
Perhaps the biggest challenge of RECA was how to determine who was owed something. This is because proving that nuclear fallout was the cause for any one individual's disease is close to impossible, as Dr. Steven Simon explains.

Dr. Steven Simon:
One of the big scientific questions in radiation health research is the probability of developing a cancer from that exposure. And if the probability, let's say is 10%, you could say, what does that mean for me? 10%? I can't say what it means for you. It just means that you're risk of getting leukemia, which you already have because you're a living person, is 10% higher. In terms of the science, I can figure out the risk to the population, but I can only estimate the risk for a person

Lisa Perry:
To handle this complicated dilemma. RECA adopted a presumptive position. If you could prove residency in one of the designated counties during the period of atmospheric testing and prove a diagnosis from a type of cancer from the approved list, then it was presumed that you were a victim of fallout and deserving of compensation.

Dr. Steven Simon:
RECA is a political solution. It has to make compromises in the scientific information. It makes compromises on behalf of the public to give them the benefit of the doubt, which I don't argue with. It doesn't mean that radiation caused an individual's cancer. It doesn't mean that radiation caused all those cancers equally. It just means that it's a possibility. And given the benefit of the doubt, we compensate people for that possibility.

Lisa Perry:
Further complicating the quest for justice is the fact that radiation exposure is correlated with a number of diseases other than cancer, including diabetes, cataracts, thyroid malfunction, reproductive issues, and autoimmune diseases. RECA legislation as it stands limits compensation to only those people who developed certain types of cancers. But for many, the broader question remains: is their pain and suffering a result of nuclear fallout? For Mary Dickson, this is a dilemma that hits close to home.

Mary Dickson:
My sister has my oldest sister. She really was the core of our family and she kept getting sick. She was tired all the time. She couldn't get off the couch. The sun bothered her. It took them probably nine years to diagnose that she had lupus.

Lisa Perry:
Lupus is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes a person's immune system to turn on its own body. Studies have shown higher rates of lupus in groups exposed to ionizing radiation. When Mary's sister Anne was diagnosed with lupus, they had been working together to document cancer cases like Mary's within their small neighborhood in Salt Lake City. In order to prove that their community represented a fallout cluster. To Mary and her sister, the lupus diagnosis was just one more data point.

Mary Dickson:
We would say something definitely happened to us then proving that you're a cluster is pretty hard. But there were just, it was just too many people. There was definitely huge correlation that the chances of that being accidental are pretty slim.

Lisa Perry:
In a dark irony that's familiar to many Downwinders, Anne's advocacy work with Mary had to take a backseat as she dealt with her own growing health problems.

Mary Dickson:
She was so worried. She said, I just, I don't want it. I've got three kids. I've got three kids to raise. And she got sicker and sicker.

Lisa Perry:
Desperate to remedy her deteriorating condition. Anne underwent a procedure to try and control her lupus. Unfortunately, one of her medications led to an unexpected and tragic complication.

Mary Dickson:
That was like the worst weekend of my life when that doctor came in and said, what do you want us to do? And her husband just started crying and said, I can't decide this. How am I supposed to decide this? And they said she's not gonna recover. She's not gonna wake up. Um, and so he said, take her off everything. So we were all standing around her when she died. And um, that was so devastating for my family. It was devastating. And in her obituary, which I had to write, hardest thing I ever wrote, I said she was a downwinder.

Lisa Perry:

Part of the tragedy of nuclear testing is that true justice will always remain an elusive goal. The hard statistics of science offer little solace when faced with the reality of human suffering. Although scientists correctly claim that we cannot know for sure whether the pain that families such as Mary Dickson’s have undergone is directly attributable to nuclear testing, we also cannot know for sure that it's not. This is the curse that nuclear testing has cast upon downwinders. The unanswerable question of whether their life would’ve gone differently had their government protected them. For Mary, her sister’s death only impressed upon her the need for her to continue the work that they started together.

Mary Dickson:
I've been working on this issue probably 30 years. Sometimes people tell me I'm the collector of sorrow because people come to me with their stories and there are always more and more coming. There was one day a woman called me to tell me about the three children she had lost to leukemia as infants, and that now her two surviving adult children have cancer. And that one just did me in. I, I just got on the couch and my husband came in and said, you've gotta stop doing this. You're gonna get sick again. And I just said, I can't, don't you see, I can't. And every time I think I wanna stop doing this work because it is emotionally exhausting and draining and so many of the people I've worked with have died. And I think sometimes that knowledge is a responsibility. I think I have to keep doing it. And one of the women I had worked with on this issue who ended up dying of pancreatic cancer, she had said to me, you have to keep doing this. The rest of us are too sick. And I, I do feel I have this responsibility because I did get better and I am healthy now.

Lisa Perry:
In her decades of working on this issue, Mary’s learned the facts about nuclear testing backwards and forwards. But she says those details aren't really what get people to pay attention.

Mary Dickson:
I can tell those numbers to people. I can give them all the studies that have been done. I can give them the, the data. But I don't think anything is as meaningful or as powerful as telling them your story. They have to see that human connection because numbers just become too big to fathom.

Lisa Perry:
In 2007, Mary would tell her own story as a downwinder in a play that she wrote, entitled Exposed. The docudrama follows her personal journey from her cancer diagnosis to her discovery of the dark history of nuclear testing in the United States. In it, she recreates moments pulled directly from declassified Atomic Energy Commission minutes in her midst with personal stories of down winders she's met throughout her time working on the cause.

Character in play:
Believe me, there is a lot of damning evidence in those documents. Wait, here's one you need. It's a 1954 agreement, the AEC made with the Public Health Service. It barred the health service for releasing any information to the public about radiation from the test. Right here: disclosing information not approved under AEC directives could subject the public health service, its agents, employees, or subcontractors, to criminal liability. That stayed in effect until 1970.

Lisa Perry:
In the years since the play first debuted, many of the Downwinders Mary profiles in the play have since passed from fallout-related illnesses.

Mary Dickson:
There was a man, I worked with him very closely all these years. I called him a one-man movement. He worked out of his little farmhouse in Idaho and had this brilliant mind. He remembered every fact. He had all the documents. He came to see it. He's sitting up in a balcony and I acknowledged him at the end and, and I thank God. Now he's gone. He's he's gone. They're all gone.

Character in play:
My earliest memories are of sitting on my father's lap to watch an atomic blast. I used to go with my uncle to help change the batteries and the fallout monitor he kept in his store. That monitor stayed there until the day he died. But I didn't need a monitor to see what the fallout did. The clouds came and went, and then the cancer came and the people went.

Lisa Perry:
The performers would close the show with a reading of a list of people who have lost their lives to fallout with Mary's sister at the very end. Each performance, Mary would invite viewers to add the names of people they knew who had been impacted by fallout.

Mary Dickson:
While we started adding these other names before hers, we had to stop because there were just so many names. There were just too many. We couldn't keep adding them.

Character in play:
Clifford Saundra, Maxine Barlow Saundra, Seaton Prince, Frederick Prince, Susan Sorenson, Della Truman, KD Montague, Katherine Blackett Tempest, Diane Dickson Tempest, my sister Ann Dickson Dibuck.

Lisa Perry:
Mary's sister's family was not eligible for RECA compensation because she didn't die from cancer. But even cancer victims like Mary herself aren't eligible. That's because RECA limited compensation eligibility to just a handful of counties close to the test site. While areas in southern Utah like St. George, where Eileen Hacker and her father lived, are included most of northern Utah, including Salt Lake City, where Mary and her sister grew up, was left out entirely.

Mary Dickson:
It was such a narrow area that they compensated part of Northern Arizona, part of southeastern Nevada, part of southern Utah. There were basically 23 counties and they're all primarily rural. Well, they had asked for a much broader area for all of Utah early on, and they just thought if we go into those urban areas, they didn't think it would pass. So, so those boundaries for compensation were political.

Lisa Perry:
Not only is most of Utah not represented, but the entire state of New Mexico where the very first atomic bomb test was conducted was also excluded from the Bill. Barbara Kent, who can recall playing in the radioactive ash from the Trinity Test as a child, and who has suffered from numerous cancers over her lifetime, is not eligible for RECA.

Barbara Kent:
After 76 years, we're still trying to be compensated. And it's, you know, it's terrible that this hasn't happened years ago. It's been 76 years.

Lisa Perry:
Tina Cordova, lifelong New Mexican and co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium notes that Fallout doesn't recognize political boundaries.

Lisa Perry:
When they established RECA for the first time, they never included the people of New Mexico. And I always say we were the first people ever exposed to radiation any place in the world. The compensation for Downwinders ends right at the Arizona-New Mexico border. I always say as if exists there a lead curtain that protects us somehow. So if you live one mile into Arizona, you're taken care of. But if you live one mile into New Mexico, you are not

Lisa Perry:
Downwinders and grassroots organizations like the Tularosa Consortium have been working for years to expand the scope of RECA and correct this glaring omission.

Tina Cordova:
For the last 10 years, bills have been introduced in Congress to amend RECA, to include the people of New Mexico and other downwinders that have been left out through the work of Representative Nadler and Senator Lujan from New Mexico, we actually finally had a hearing in the House Judiciary.

Sen. Ben Ray Lujan:
So I'm Ben Ray Lujan, United States Senator, uh, from New Mexico. I've not been given a good answer from anyone, not even an excuse as to why New Mexico was left out of downwind status. It's imperative that the responsibility that the United States bears be recognized and admitted and, and what I mean by that is there's never even been a formal apology by the United States of America, by our government to these families. That's why we are all working together to continue the progress that was made in recognizing these injustices. It's imperative that all of this get adopted as soon as possible.

Lisa Perry:
In the spring of 2022, downwinders successfully lobbied Congress to pass a two-year extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which had been set to expire. And while the bill did not expand eligibility as Senator Lujan and downwinders have urged, it did keep the process alive for potential future expansion.

Sen. Ben Ray Lujan:
For the families of folks like Tina Cordova and countless other families, it will never make them whole. There's no action that the United States of America can take that will fully recognize the cost that was barred by these families. But the United States should recognize that we should be providing support to them. I'm sure that people will point to the cost of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act from a dollars perspective. But again, I point back to the cost that these families have had to endure. You can't put a price on that.

Lisa Perry:
The expansion of RECA that Senator Lujan and others are still fighting for would not only include Trinity victims in New Mexico, but would also extend to downwinders exposed in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and broaden the coverage to all of Utah. The choice of these four additional states isn't random. It's actually based on the government’s own research on fallout distribution, explains Mary Dickson.

Mary Dickson:
There was a government study that the National Cancer Institute did. They basically concluded that every county in the continental US got some level of fallout from testing. They had a map that showed the hot zones and estimated dosages, and they said that up to 212,000 people in the US would develop thyroid cancer from testing. So that study was another big gut punch.

Lisa Perry:
While the proposed expansion of RECA includes some of the most significant hotspots identified in the NCI study, s still limited to a fraction of the country subjected to fallout from nuclear testing. For decades, the AEC argued that exposure to low levels of fallout had no impact on health because it was similar to levels of background radiation. That was the reasoning the AEC gave for not warning the citizens of the Troy, New York area after fallout from Shot Simon had been discovered to have rained down after a major thunderstorm. And yet 10 years after the Troy incident, a study in the Albany Troy Schenectady area found that the rates of fatal leukemia in children quadrupled starting four years after Shot Simon and then declined eight years later. An identical pattern had been previously demonstrated in Hiroshima survivors.

Lisa Perry:
We'll probably never know the full extent that nuclear testing has had on people across the country. The Troy incident was discovered because of a fluke. But analysis of weather patterns and testing data has revealed that there were likely major fallout events across the country from cities as far as Boston, Massachusetts, and Albuquerque, New Mexico to Knoxville, Tennessee, and Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. And that is just from the testing that occurred in the continental United States. Atmospheric testing was also conducted by the US in the Marshall Islands as well as the Soviet Union in Northeastern Kazakhstan and Siberia, the French in Algeria and French Polynesia, the United Kingdom in the islands off the coast of Australia, and China in the northwest of the country. By the late 1960s, there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice. And although the contamination occurred many years ago, the consequences are still being felt today.

Mary Dickson:
This story isn't over. We're still living with fallout. I mean, people got sick, developed other illnesses later, they had health complications, their cancers return. You know, people are still being diagnosed because there's this latency period from exposure to diagnosis. And sometimes it can be up to 30, 40 years later that the cancer shows up.

Lisa Perry:
For Mary and her fellow downwinders. The fight continues.

Mary Dickson:
As the farmer from Idaho, who was my mentor, said, he said, all our victories are temporary. They always have been. And sure enough, you see people talking up in administrations about resumed testing. Trump was talking about it. You see them talking about updating our nuclear arsenal. And when you look at the money that's spent every year just on updating our nuclear arsenal, and then you look at what's been paid out to downwinders as compensation, it’s a pittance. It’s just a pittance.

Lisa Perry:
The greatest irony of nuclear testing is that it was conducted in order to defend our country, but in the end, we only attacked ourselves.

Mary Dickson:
One thing that I always say is that the Cold War had casualties. We were casualties. Nuclear testing did not prevent nuclear war. It was a nuclear war.

Lisa Perry:
At the Brink is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Special thanks goes to all of our guests for their time and their tireless work on this issue. Bill Heller, Mary Dickson, Ilene Hacker, Tina Cordova, Dr. Steven Simon, Barbara Kent, Judge Bruce Jenkins, and Senator Ben Ray Lujan. To learn more about the current status of RECA and the efforts of downwinders to expand compensation, go to our website www.atthebrink.org. To learn more about the Troy incident, check out Bill Heller's two books on the subject: A Good Day Has No Rain and Stolen Lives: Albany High class of 53-54. This episode was written by myself and David Perry. Production support was provided by Jeff Large and Maggie Fischer from Come Alive Creative. Isador Nieves is our audio producer and Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. Production assistance was provided by Maggie O'Brien and Katherine Leede. And finally, a thank you to our listeners. You’re helping us to try and save the world one podcast at a time. I'm Lisa Perry. Thanks for listening.