Downwinders: The Ultimate Patriots

Lisa Perry:
There's this photo I found when I was researching one day and at first glance, it doesn't seem particularly remarkable. It's an old black-and-white photo showing several young women playing in a river at a girl's sleepaway camp in the summer of 1945. In the center of the photo, a young teenage girl is propping herself up on a sunlit rock, like a mermaid. She's got her eyes closed and her face is turned into the sun, so it almost looks like she's glowing. Her dark hair is coiffed in perfect pin curls and she's got this big open-mouth smile that just has this look of pure summer bliss. Behind her, you can see five other young women standing half in the river talking and laughing with one another. On the surface, it shows an idyllic summer scene from a bygone era, but what you can't see in the photo would end up claiming the lives of every single person in it before the age of 30, except for one.

Barbara Kent:
My name is Barbara Kent, and I grew up in El Paso, Texas on July 16th,1945, I was 13 years old and at the time I was in Rio Dosa, New Mexico.

Lisa Perry:
It's Barbara who is sitting on that rock, a would-be mermaid. Today at nearly 90 years old, Barbara Kent, or Barbie as her grandkids like to call her, has lived a life full of memories. Yet that day in the photograph still haunts her after all these years.

Barbara Kent:
I was at camp in Rio Dosa and Karma Dean was my dance instructor and every year she would take 12 girls to the camp from El Paso and we would be there for around a month.

Lisa Perry:
During the day the girls would learn tap dancing and ballet and at night they would sleep in a rustic cabin near the river. One day, very early in the morning, they were awoken from their sleep by a deafening boom that shook the whole cabin.

Barbara Kent:
Anyone on the top bunk, we all fell out of bed completely when this happened and Karma came running in and she said, run outside quickly because we think a water heater burst. So we ran outside. Well, first it was dark cuz you know it was like what, 5:15 in the morning. All of a sudden we would see this big cloud come up and a bright sun. In fact, it was so bright it hurt our eyes.

Lisa Perry:
Locals would be told that the incident was the result of an accident at the ammunition dump and that there was no cause for concern. In reality, at 5:29 AM on July 16th, 1945 at the Alamogordo bombing range in New Mexico, 50 miles southeast from where Barbara and her campmates slept, the United States detonated Trinity, the world's first-ever nuclear bomb.

Barbara Kent:
That afternoon we were in the art department and all of a sudden somebody came running up and said, hurry, it's snowing, and come and look. So we went and looked and there was just like snow and we asked Karma if we could go in the water and we all went outside and we were, oh, just taking the snow and putting it all over our faces. But what we couldn't figure out at first is instead of the snow being cold, it was hot. You know, we had a real good time and we figured the reason it was hot, it was July and if it was in December, it would've been cold <laugh>. That's what I remember very vividly.

Lisa Perry:
It's that fateful afternoon in the river that was captured in the photograph with Barbara in the middle blissfully unaware of the danger that surrounded her.

Barbara Kent:
You see where the snow fell on the rocks if you see the picture, the ones in the back.

Lisa Perry:
What Barbara and her campmates could not have possibly imagined was that the hot snow was actually radioactive flakes of soot and dirt churned up by the Trinity detonation and launched in the atmosphere by the giant mushroom cloud, which towered 38,000 feet above the desert. Even after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would occur less than a month later, people in the area did not understand for years that what they had experienced was a nuclear detonation.

Barbara Kent:
It was probably 10 years before we ever knew anything happened, but oh my gosh, when I found out that this was fallout instead of snow, I was very upset what the government had done. They told us there was an explosion at the dump, which was, you know, not true. Everyone should have been evacuated and many, many lives could have been saved.

Lisa Perry:
For Barbara, when she sees that photograph today, she can't recall that summer joy. Now that photograph represents the day she lost her friends--young women who were unwittingly the very first victims of the nuclear age.

Barbara Kent:
I was the only survivor of any of the girls that were at camp. One was my very best friend who died and you know, you feel terrible. They all died. They died when they were in their twenties and three and fourths of them all died of cancer.

Lisa Perry:
I am 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. In our first season At the Brink, we covered some of the big questions of nuclear weapons, what they do, who controls them, and how they threaten our planet. This season we are zooming in on more personal stories, the ones you may not have heard about on the news.

Lisa Perry:
We'll be exploring how the nuclear industrial complex has claimed the lives of thousands around the globe before any missile was even launched, how the legacy of these weapons may be felt for generations and how some experts have been breaking new ground in the struggle to create a world without nuclear weapons. This episode is part one of Downwinders: Hidden Victims of the Nuclear Age. You've probably seen a picture of a nuclear explosion before: the iconic mushroom cloud, an enormous pillar of smoke and fire rising up from the ground. You've maybe even watched grainy video footage of a nuclear detonation showing fake houses filled with 1950-style mannequins blown back in a raging storm of dust and wind. These visuals depict the history of atmospheric nuclear testing in the United States, where from 1945 to 1963, the US conducted a hundred above-ground nuclear weapons tests. What you can't see in these photographs are the hundreds of thousands of Americans like Barbara Kent who were unknowingly exposed to radioactive fallout as a result of these tests. These people are called downwinders. In today's episode we'll hear the stories of these hidden victims of the nuclear age and how, as the US government was attempting to win the Cold War nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union, its own citizens became the collateral damage. How in order to achieve that ultimate goal, the United States under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission would go on to conduct one of the deadliest programs of public deception in US history.

Lisa Perry:
Most often people use the term downwinder to refer to people who lived downwind of the Nevada nuclear test site where the majority of US atmospheric testing was conducted. Tina Cordova has spent the last 20 years trying to challenge that understanding.

Janet Gordon:
My name is Tina Cordova and I'm the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium and I am a downwinder, I'm a cancer survivor.

Lisa Perry:
The Tularosa Basin is a long stretch of country in southern New Mexico, about a three-hour drive south of Albuquerque. This desert region is home to several small towns that have been in existence since Spanish settlers arrived in the region in the early 1600s and inhabited by the Apache people for generations prior.

Janet Gordon:
I grew up in South Central New Mexico in a very small village named Tularosa. Tularosa is a village of about 3,500 people, primarily Hispanic people. Everybody knew everybody else and where we all pitched in to help each other and we were all very close and we loved our little small-town existence.

Lisa Perry:
Despite this small-town existence, the longtime residents of the town of Tularosa and their neighboring communities in the basin have been suffering from an outsized scourge that has been claiming the lives of these people for decades. Every July for the past 13 years, Tina has helped to organize a candlelight vigil in the Little League baseball diamond next to the high school. In the center of town memorial photos of neighbors and family members are plastered on homemade posters and hung around the bleachers. As you scan the posters, which lists the cause of death, a pattern quickly emerges. Breast cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, brain cancer, uterine cancer, liver cancer. At sunset, candles are lit in paper bag luminarias scattered around the baseball diamond, and a list of names is solemnly read aloud to the gathered crowd

Vigil:
Garcia. Garcia Garcia.

Lisa Perry:
As you listen, you can't help but notice the same last names coming up again and again In this small-town community where no family has been left unaffected. In Tina Cordova's family alone, which represents six generations of Tularosans, besides her own battle with thyroid cancer, she has two great-grandfathers, both grandmothers, two aunts, both parents, a sister and a cousin who have all suffered from various forms of cancer.

Janet Gordon:
And we read the names of close to 700 people in a little town of 3,200. And I always say if I could go door to door there and document everybody that's ever passed away since 1945 from cancer, we'd read thousands of names.

Lisa Perry:
The vigil is a memorial for people who are believed to have been affected by radioactive fallout from the Trinity test like Barbara Kent and her campmates. The Alamogordo bombing range where Trinity was detonated is 45 miles northwest of the town of Tularosa. To this day, the US government has never acknowledged that there have been any illnesses or deaths as a result of radiation exposure from the Trinity test. These families want their lost loved ones to be recognized as victims of Trinity.

Janet Gordon:
It always bothers me so deeply that we were relegated to nothingness, that they were able to look away from us so easily because we're human beings. We were taxpaying American citizens. We pledged allegiance to the flag and I just, I don't know how a government, our government has been able to suppress this story, look away without acknowledging the mistakes. And lately, I've been saying, why can't we just tell the truth? Why can't we admit the mistakes? We were enlisted into the service of our country without consent or knowledge, and the government has completely walked away from us. And I heard a downwinder once say, you'll never see a, a flag draped over our coffins, but we were the ultimate patriots.

Lisa Perry:
Tina Cordova has spent the last two decades as a fierce advocate for downwinders. She travels the state and country giving lectures, lobbying Congress, and leading the fight to bring recognition and relief for Trinity test victims through her work with the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium,

Janet Gordon:
I have talked to many people who experienced the event and they said it was maybe the most terrifying thing that they ever experienced. The blast produced something like 10 times more heat than the sun and five times more light than the sun. And the explosion rocked homes all over New Mexico. It broke out windows, it knocked things out of cupboards and it knocked people out of bed. It was huge. No one knew at the time what they had experienced. Many people told me that their mothers gathered them up and made them kneel down and pray. They thought it was the end of the world.

Lisa Perry:
What they thought was the end of the world was actually the beginning of the nuclear age. The Trinity Test was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret race to beat the Germans to build an atomic bomb. In the spring of 1945, the US succeeded in manufacturing a prototype nicknamed the Gadget. Despite the recent German surrender, the decision was made to test the design before the Potsdam Conference in order to strengthen the US negotiating position. The test, codenamed Trinity, was a scientific success, exploding at 5:29 AM with a force equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT. The light from the explosion was seen up to 200 miles away and the shockwave was felt as far as Albuquerque. Unlike the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs which were detonated at altitudes above 1500 feet, Trinity was exploded on a short tower near the ground, which greatly increased the amount of fallout generated.

Janet Gordon:
The fireball rose seven miles into the stratosphere and then it rained down for days as a radioactive ash that that got on everything on the, the, the soil, on the plants, on every living being human and animal. And back in 1945, we had significant rainfalls. The bomb was detonated at 5:30 AM in between two major thunderstorms. And the reason that that's so important is because we didn't have running water. So what we counted on was the collection of rainwater. The water that we used for cooking purposes for cleaning, for bathing, for every purpose was now fully contaminated, not only with plutonium but with other radioactive isotopes like cesium and strontium and iodine

Lisa Perry:
With many houses having no running water, bathing was more infrequent, meaning many locals were covered in radioactive dust for days. And when it stopped raining, people would hang their clothes to dry contaminating their clothes with the dust blowing through the desert. In addition to these sources of contact contamination, the rural population of New Mexico was particularly vulnerable to radiation exposure due to their dependence on subsistence agriculture.

Janet Gordon:
We didn't have grocery stores, so everybody had a garden and everybody had either a milk cow or they went to the local dairy and then they raised chickens for eggs and for, for poultry. And in July it would've been the peak of the harvest and the women would've been canning as much as they could get their hands on for the upcoming winter. And so all of that was then contaminated.

Lisa Perry:
This widespread contamination of food, water, and clothing had a particularly devastating effect on children.

Janet Gordon:
In the months right after Trinity, New Mexico saw this huge spike in infant mortality, we went from something like 30 babies per thousand dying here to over a hundred babies per thousand dying here. It was the absolute highest in the nation. Their small little bodies couldn't overcome the radiation load. And if you couple that with the fact that all mammals concentrate radiation in their mammary glands and their mothers would've been breastfeeding them and essentially poisoning them. It's amazing to me how many people, even people from my own family have come forward to admit that their family lost a child then and, and that they had no idea why. But nobody ever talked about it again. It's heartbreaking to me. And so, I always say we had casualties from the Trinity test and they were our babies.

Lisa Perry:
While Trinity was the first-ever nuclear test, it would be far from the last. Less than a year later, the US resumed the testing of nuclear weapons in an effort to solidify its nuclear hegemony. The first two tests, dubbed Operation Crossroads, were done in the remote Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands on the Bikini Atoll. By 1947, control of US nuclear weapons was in the hands of the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. The AEC was concerned about the logistical and financial challenges of testing in the distant Pacific proving grounds and pushed to establish an additional atomic test site in the continental United States. One of the key factors in the discussion was wind patterns. Since the majority of the country is subject to prevailing westerly winds, that means that winds blow predominantly from the west towards the east. Of the many sites considered, a location on the coast of North Carolina was thought to be the best choice for radiological safety purposes, as the prevailing winds would blow fallout into the ocean where it would be carried away by the Gulf Stream. Dr. Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist, has spent the better part of the last four decades studying the impact of nuclear testing and production. His research into the AEC's decision process would go into inform congressional hearings on nuclear testing in the 1990s.

Arjun Makhijani:
Radiological considerations were obviously quite primary. This is noted in the memoranda and evaluations of the time, but they decided to not select North Carolina in large measure, despite its very important radiological favorable characteristic that fallout would blow over the ocean because it was mostly privately owned land and it would take too long and probably be too controversial.

Lisa Perry:
Instead, the AEC would select a new home for the atomic bomb in the Nevada desert, not far from the Los Alamos National Laboratory where the first nuclear weapons were created.

Arjun Makhijani:
It was chosen out of convenience more than safety because it was already in the control of the military, it was closer to Los Alamos and they did it with a full knowledge that any western site, including the Nevada site, would blow fallout essentially over the whole country.

Lisa Perry:
One of the clearest pieces of evidence we have that the AEC prioritized convenience over safety comes from the government's own research. After the Trinity detonation, the military commissioned an investigation into the impact of radioactive fallout from the test. That report was created by the Chief radiological safety officer of the Manhattan Project, Colonel Stafford Warren. He studied the radiation levels of nuclear fallout, how long fallout lasted in the air, and what directions it traveled.

Arjun Makhijani:
The conclusion of this memorandum was very stark. The conclusion was that in view of the radiological finding, no tests should be done within 150 miles of human habitation in the future. And that, of course, was blatantly violated in the selection of the Nevada test site.

Lisa Perry:
Amidst an escalating arms race, speed rather than safety was seen as the greatest priority. Despite the clear warnings from Colonel Warren's report about the potential range of radioactive fallout, the AEC moved forward and established the Nevada test site in January of 1951. Almost immediately after the nuclear tests were initiated at the new Nevada test site, indications were already showing that radioactive fallout was being carried east. In fact, evidence was showing that it was traveling much further than even Stafford Warren’s conservative 150-mile safety radius. The first warning signs came in the form of X-ray film. In 1951, the Eastman Kodak film company noticed that batches of their unexposed X-ray film were coming out streaked and fogged. Kodak had seen this problem before. In the summer of 1945, investigators determined that the cardboard used to package the film had become radioactive, and discovered that the source of the radioactivity was the water used to make the cardboard at their plants in Iowa and Indiana. Eventually, they concluded that the local watersheds had been contaminated by radioactive particles from the Trinity test earlier that month, which had occurred over a thousand miles away. Now that the problem had returned, they decided to take action.

Arjun Makhijani:
Kodak threatened to sue the Atomic Energy Commission if they continued testing in a way that would damage their film and therefore their sales and profits. And throughout the atmospheric testing program, the Atomic Energy Commission gave advanced notice to the photographic film industry about expected fallout patterns so that they could protect their film. So when the Atomic Energy Commission was informing the photographic film industry about expected fallout patterns, they knew that the whole country would be contaminated. Not only that, you know, there's plenty of documentation that they encouraged people and told them that there was no risk, and to rest assured that they would be informed if there was a risk. They wanted to protect the ability to continue testing above all.

Lisa Perry:
While the Atomic Energy Commission was secretly protecting commercial interests from the impact of nuclear testing, at the same time, they were not so secretly telling the local public that there was no need for protective measures. And no community was the target of more reassuring AEC messaging than the town of St. George, Utah,

Announcer:
St. George, Utah, population 4,562. Just a short way from the state line of Nevada. It's pre-dawn, five in the morning, pretty deserted at this hour. Everything is closed down. Everyone's asleep. Only our night owl saw that great flash in the western sky, an atomic bomb at the Nevada test site, 140 miles to the west. But it's old stuff to St. George. Routine. They've seen a lot of them ever since 1951. Nothing to get excited about anymore.

Lisa Perry:
St. George Utah is a small scenic town located about 140 miles due east of the Nevada test site. Surrounded by beautiful red rock cliffs, temperate St. George is known by locals as the place where sun comes to vacation for the winter. Ilene Hacker, who was a young child during the era of above-ground testing, remembers it as paradise.

Ilene Hacker:
Growing up in St. George, Utah was magical. I knew where everyone lived, everybody knew where I lived. It was a magical childhood. We live in one of the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth.

Lisa Perry:
In the 1950s, atomic testing became a regular part of life for St. George residents. Being so close to the Nevada site, some locals would head up the mountainside on the far side of town to watch the scheduled detonations for entertainment.

Ilene Hacker:
They would go up on the hillside, up on the Red Hill. And they would know when they were going to set off the blasts. And these were big blasts. They could see the flash. And in small-town America, there weren't a lot of really exciting things happening, so that was an exciting thing for us.

Lisa Perry:
Of course, the residents enjoying the impromptu light show had no knowledge that they were directly in the path of the radioactive fallout from these tests. Throughout the process of choosing the Nevada site and in the years of testing that followed, the AEC repeatedly failed to provide the residents of St. George and the public in general with accurate information about the dangers of radioactive fallout. Instead, they chose to minimize the risks and boost support for testing through a heavy-handed public relations campaign, relying on pamphlets, press releases, and propaganda films.

Announcer:
Testing of atomic weapons goes on for a vital reason: our national defense. We have no choice. The testing of atomic weapons at Nevada is essential in the world of today, to our existence as a nation. The towering cloud of the atomic age is a symbol of strength, of defense, of security for freedom-loving people everywhere, people who want peace.

Lisa Perry:
Ironically, the residents of the largely conservative majority Mormon community of St. George, Utah didn't need much persuading. The early fifties was a time of profound cold war anxiety. The nuclear arms race with the Soviets had begun in earnest and McCarthyism and fear of communism became intertwined with the nuclear effort. Supporting atomic testing was seen as patriotic as Ilene Hacker remembers.

Ilene Hacker:
We grew up waving the American flag and putting our hand across our heart and saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. You couldn't have found a more beautiful hometown setting and people that just had such a sense of patriotism. During the Cold War, I think there was a great sense of pride because remember, we were in a race. We were in a race to create the biggest and the strongest nuclear weapons on the face of the earth.

Lisa Perry:
Claudia Peterson was interviewed for the Downwinders of Utah archives about her experiences growing up in nearby Cedar City in the fifties. Claudia can recall the omnipresent, patriotic fervor that surrounded nuclear weapons that filtered into the everyday school curriculum. But looking back, what stands out to her more was what wasn't talked about.

Claudia Petterson:
The main thing was we needed to fear the Russians. It wasn't about what was being done to us or what we needed to be aware of for our safety. Our safety was totally disregarded. When we watched the propaganda films of school, they would show us the film of them blowing up the mannequins down at the test site and what would happen, the horrific nature of it, but it wasn't about, they were testing out at the Nevada test site and somehow there'd be health effects for us.

Announcer:
Some of the tiny radioactive particles settle back to earth. As the wind disperses the cloud, these particles are called fallout. The radioactive fallout beyond several miles from the test site has not been known to be serious. It has not constituted an appreciable danger to persons, animals, crops, property, or industry.

Lisa Perry:
Sometimes, but not always, the AEC would alert downwind communities in advance of a test. However, their precautionary instructions were minimal at best.

Ilene Hacker:
They would tell people that when they were going to do the test, they would say, go inside, there's no danger, but stay inside. There's no danger. We believed our government.

Lisa Perry:
Despite their claims that fallout posed no danger to the surrounding communities, the actions of the AEC suggested that they knew otherwise. Regular public health surveys were conducted on local school children to monitor radiological exposures, but the results of these surveys were kept top secret. For Ilene Hacker, being tested for radiation became a part of normal everyday life as a child in St. George, Utah.

Ilene Hacker:
They would send doctors down from Salt Lake City, from the University of Utah and they would test our thyroids. We grew up with a saying, take a sip, swallow, take a sip, swallow. And the doctors and their assistants would feel our thyroids through our necks and they charted us. They kept track of us. Most of us had no idea that they had to have known something was going to affect us. We were Guinea pigs.

Lisa Perry:
Perhaps the clearest proof that the AEC knew that followed from testing presented a genuine risk was that official policy was to halt any test if the wind was blowing from the east towards the larger cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Ilene Hacker:
They knew how terrible these weapons were and they still tested. They waited for the wind to blow from the Nevada test site towards the east before they let the test go off. Before they detonated those giant nuclear blasts, they made sure the wind was blowing towards Utah because we were less populated. So it adds up to all of us today that we were expendable.

Lisa Perry:
St. George residents would soon learn just how expendable they were in May of 1953, when one test went spectacularly wrong, a test that would go on to become known as Dirty Harry.

Operation Upshot Knothole was a series of 11 nuclear tests conducted in the spring of 1953. The ninth test was Code-named Harry. Shot Harry was testing a new bomb design to increase the size of the detonation and it succeeded beyond expectations, exploding with almost twice the intended yield. The explosion generated 2,000 tons of radioactive microparticles of dirt, sand, and steel that were sucked up like a giant vacuum cleaner into the towering mushroom cloud. After the detonation, the deadly cloud began drifting east directly towards St. George, Utah. The AEC’s response to this emergency situation? They released a radio announcement.

Announcer:
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you important news. Word has just been received from the Atomic Energy Commission that due to a change in wind direction, the residue from this morning's atomic detonation is drifting in the direction of St. George. It is suggested that everyone remain indoors for one hour or until further notice. There is no danger. This is simply routine Atomic Energy Commission safety procedure.

Lisa Perry:
But it was in fact far from routine. Later studies found that the amount of ionizing radiation that fell onto St. George after shot Harry was comparable to that experienced by Ukrainian citizens in the vicinity of the Chernobyl meltdown. Frank Butrico was stationed in St. George as a radiation safety monitor for the AEC at the time. In an interview from the 1992 documentary, Bound by the Wind, Butrico recalled the immense amount of radiation that they were detecting in St. George after Dirty Harry.

Frank Butrico:
The instruments were off the scale and the scale of the instrument was the maximum, was 300.

Lisa Perry:
In the wake of Harry, Butrico's superiors instructed him to destroy his clothes and to take multiple showers in order to reduce the amount of radiation on his body. But when he asked whether similar instructions should be passed along to residents, he was told no.

Frank Butrico:
The feeling at the test site was that we had to tell people something and best we not create any panic that there was any excessive amount of radiation that could be harmful.

Lisa Perry:
The actions of the AAC following Dirty Harry emphasize that they were not willing to jeopardize the testing mission for the safety of downwind citizens. Even though Butrico's testimony and internal documents from the time demonstrate that the organization understood the scope of the Dirty Harry disaster, their response would continue to be one of managing public reaction. Soon after the detonation, the AAC recruited Butrico and a number of St. George residents to play themselves in a propaganda film about the incident intended to reinforce the need for continued testing and reassure the residents that it remained safe.

Announcer:
Actually, when the invisible cloud had passed, the total amount of radiation deposited on St. George was far from hazardous. Then you may ask, why were the people asked to stay indoors? For a very simple reason, the Atomic Energy Commission doesn't take chances on safety.

Lisa Perry:
One of the locals recruited to play a part in the film was Ilene Hacker's uncle.

Ilene Hacker:
They show my uncle Grant Whitehead as a happy milkman and his milk truck and just going about his daily business and people listening to the radio telling them they're going to have these nuclear tests but stay inside

Announcer:
Everyone’s asleep. Everyone that is, except a milkman. Been delivering over the same route for 12 years, never missed a day.

Lisa Perry:
Elmer Pickett, a St. George Local, who was also interviewed inbound by the wind, remembers the dark irony of the film that despite its claims of safety, many of its participants would later succumb to radiation-linked diseases.

Elmer Pickett:
A lot of those people who are in that film have since died from cancer. I've lost 13 members of my immediate family, including my wife, my sister, niece, mother-in-law, uncles, aunts, cousins who have, have died from cancer. Go back as far as we can in our family histories, we have not had one single case of any kind of cancer prior to this fallout. Since then, we've, we've just filled it.

Lisa Perry:
There is another film that figures into the history of atomic testing and St. George, as downwinder Richard Whitehead recounted in an interview for the Downwinders of Utah Archive.

Richard Whitehead:
They filmed The Conqueror here when I was a teenager and my father had a dairy, and so I was often asked to go out and deliver milk to the onsite filming, mostly up in Snows Canyon, not, not far from here, where obviously the retention of radioactive things is a little higher than maybe in other kinds of areas.

Lisa Perry:
The Conqueror is considered by some as one of the worst films ever made. But the infamy of the movie would extend well beyond horrible casting choices and cheesy dialogue. The picture, which depicted the story of Genghis Khan, questionably portrayed by American icon John Wayne, was shot in a canyon just a few miles from the Nevada test site. The big-budget blockbuster was filled with elaborate scenes of hordes of horses and their riders galloping through the desert dust.

John Wayne:
You do well, Tumic, for while I have fingers to grasp, a sword, and eyes to see, your treacherous head is not safe on your shoulders nor your daughter in her bed.

Lisa Perry:
The film was shot in the summer of 1954, just one year after some of the largest detonations conducted at the Nevada test site, including Dirty Harry. There's an infamous photo of John Wayne on location in Snows Canyon. Wayne is standing in the desert brush with his teenage sons casually holding a Geiger counter as another man leans over to adjust the controls. It said that Wayne was complaining he thought the device was broken because it wouldn't stop making so much noise. For Ilene Hacker, her memories of Hollywood in St. George are permanently colored by what would unfold in the years that followed

Ilene Hacker:
When they came to town to make the movies, it was a big deal. It was really exciting for us. But looking back on the different types of cancers that people got from the filming of The Conqueror, what a tragedy that was.

Lisa Perry:
Out of a cast and crew of two hundred and twenty ninety-one people, or almost half the production, would go on to develop various forms of cancer, and 46 people would die from it, including both John Wayne and his co-stars, Susan Hayward and Agnes Morehead, as well as Director Dick Powell. Even John Wayne's two teenage sons who visited him on the set would both later struggle with their own bouts of cancer. It's been reported that Howard Hughes, the movie's famously eccentric producer, was so racked with guilt about exposing the crew to radioactive fallout that he spent 12 million dollars to purchase, purchase every remaining copy of the film so it could never be shown again. While the outrage about the cancer-riddled cast of The Conqueror is often brought up today to support anti-testing sentiment, at the time, the first signs for the community that testing was not as benign as they'd been told was what was happening to their animals, as Janet Gordon describes in an interview from 1980

Janet Gordon:
Well, I would say that probably some of the effects showed up almost immediately. For instance, in 1953, there were large numbers of sheep and other animals that died. In fact, there was a lawsuit brought in 1955 by some of the sheep ranchers who had lost thousands ahead of sheep. The spring of ’53 was the spring that my brother was exposed to the radiation.

Lisa Perry:
Janet Gordon's older brother, Kent Gordon was 19 years old when shot Harry was detonated. He was working on their father's sheep farm outside of Cedar City. He was often outside for days at a time.

Janet Gordon:
When my brother was exposed, he said that the cloud from the test site was hanging in the drawers where the brush was and it was almost like a ground fog. You could feel it on your skin and you could almost taste it, it had a metallic taste, and as he was riding in the brushy areas, his horse would sweat and stumble and fall. And when they'd get up on a ridge where there was a little wind blowing, then there wasn't any of that. Well, he came back into camp that night with nausea and throwing up and a very bad headache, and a rash on his skin. And he was sick all night and his horse was sick and the horse died within a few weeks.

Lisa Perry:
Like Janet Gordon's brother, many people worked with livestock in southern Utah, including Claudia Peterson's neighbors.

Claudia Petterson:
I heard about it from the sheep. Our neighbors were sheep herders and there was a lawsuit against the government for the loss of all the sheep from Dirty Harry in 53. And my parents knew the farmers and the people that had lost their sheep and they talked about it. We witnessed piles of dead lambs, two heads, deformed. But we just thought that lambing season, that's what happened. A lot of the baby lambs died. Little did I know that that typically doesn't happen.

Lisa Perry:
The lawsuit that Claudia and Janet referred to was one of five suits filed in 1955 by several local sheep ranchers. They claimed that nuclear fallout had contributed to the deaths stillbirths and grotesque deformities of nearly 10,000 local sheep, which represented 25% of local herds. The Atomic Energy Commission denied that the sheep deaths were related to testing and instead blamed the unprecedented losses on malnutrition and cold weather. All five lawsuits were eventually dismissed. But several decades later, declassified documents would reveal that the AEC had in fact deliberately concealed evidence and pressured witnesses to testify in their favor. These astonishing revelations would prompt a congressional investigation into the testing program.

Janet Gordon:
There was a report issued in 79 entitled The Forgotten Guinea Pigs wherein Congress found that the behavior of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been shameful. That when they had a choice to make, that they had made the choice in favor of continuing the testing at the expense of the health and well-being and welfare of the citizens.

Lisa Perry:
Among other things, the newly released documents showed that the sheep had tested at radiation levels of over 150 times higher than normal. The ruling judge in the 1955 cases went on to vacate his decision and denounced the AEC as having, quote, perpetrated a fraud upon the court. What these cases represented for many Downwinders was the beginning of a realization. A realization that not only was fallout a genuine danger, but also that their government was aware of that danger and was trying to conceal it. If they would fight to admit any liability in the deaths of livestock, what were they covering up when it came to humans?

Janet Gordon:
When this kind of experimentation on people without their consent in Germany in World War ii, we think that's terrible and criminal and shouldn't be accepted. But they've done that to us. They didn't ever ask our permission. They didn't ever tell us what was going on. Well, that's not, they're right in a democracy. They shouldn't have that option.

Lisa Perry:
Over time, growing public concern about the safety of nuclear testing prompted President Eisenhower to pause atmospheric testing in 1958. The reaction to this order by the AEC was to cynically squeeze in as many tests before the deadline as possible. They would go on to conduct 29 nuclear tests that final month and four on the last day. A more permanent end to aboveground testing came with the signing of the Partial Test Ban treaty by President Kennedy in 1963. But despite the test ban, the damage was already done. Although most didn't know it yet, the impacts of radioactive fallout was already underway in the people of southern Utah. Janet Gordon's brother Kent, who was exposed to Dirty Harry while working in the sheep fields, would be one of the earliest casualties. We heard Janet before from an interview in 1980, many decades later, Janet's pain when she remembers what happened to him has not dulled.

Janet Gordon:
My brother was young and strong. He was an athlete. He took good care of himself and he was 26. He was at home when he died and he had a cancer that was as big as a basketball in his abdomen and he couldn't stand to lay his legs out flat. He, and he was a little bit more comfortable if you lay if somebody laid beside him and held his legs. But I remember laying beside him the night before he died and prayed for him to be able to go. For years we'd been praying for him to live. We thought if we could keep him alive long enough, they'd have a cure for it. Every piece of information we gathered made us realize that they knew what was gonna happen to us and that they made the decision to go right ahead anyway. And it just made me so angry, it lit a fire inside of me that won't, hasn't gone away yet. It's not right. Your government shouldn't have a license to kill you, and the name of National Security doesn't cut it.

Lisa Perry:
The sheep died within days or weeks after being exposed to radioactive fallout. Janet's brother lasted five years. But for most downwinders, the ultimate consequence of fallout-induced cancer would take decades or more to manifest. Claudia Peterson, like Janet Gordon, would go on to lose family members to radiation-related illness, starting with her father from a brain tumor, followed by her sister from melanoma, and then her own daughter to leukemia.

Claudia Petterson:
My family was so fractured, we were so heartbroken. And the worst thing about this is it's my story isn't any different than a lot of people’s story here. It's not any more tragic. It's not any more sad than I see all the time with families.

Lisa Perry:
Although atmospheric nuclear testing ended in 1963, the US government would continue to deny the impact of fallout on the downwind communities for decades. For most people who lived downwind, it would be years before they would begin to understand what they had been subjected to in their own backyard. And as people begin to recognize the troubling patterns of cancers and thyroid disease within their small communities, a powerful grassroots movement began to emerge among downwind in order to fight for recognition and compensation. In part two of Downwinders, we'll hear from experts about the different mechanisms through which nuclear fallout impacts human health. We'll hear from Downwinders about how they're still grappling with repercussions from testing even today. And finally, we'll explore how the reach of nuclear fallout from testing was actually far greater than was ever imagined, and what that could mean for the rest of us. At the Brink is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Special thank you to Barbara Kent and her daughter, Casey Kent, Tina Cordova, Dr. Arjun Makhijani, and Ilene Hacker.

Lisa Perry:
This episode featured several interviews from other organizations. Our thanks to Director David Brown for allowing us us to use clips from his fantastic 1992 documentary on nuclear testing, Bound by the Wind. Our gratitude to the J. Willard Marriott Library Downwinders of Utah Archives for providing us with recordings of Claudia Peterson and Richard Whitehead. Thank you to Rob Burke for allowing us to feature his interview with Janet Gordon from 2012 made possible by the Utah Humanities Council. The 1980 interview of Janet Gordon was graciously provided by the Pacifica Radio Archives. This episode was written by myself and David Perry. Production support was provided by Jeff Large and Maggie Fisher from Come Alive Creative. Isadore Nieves is our audio producer, and Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. Production assistance was provided by Maggie O'Brien and Katherine Lede. 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.