American Casualties of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program, Part 2.

 

The crash site near Goldsboro, N.C., where two nuclear weapons fell when a B-52 crashed in 1961. In the public domain.

By Lawrence S. Wittner*

Workers in nuclear weapons plants constitute only a fraction of Americans whose lives have been ravaged by preparations for nuclear war. A 2002 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services maintained that, between 1951 and 1963 alone, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons—more than half of it done by the United States—killed 11,000 Americans through cancer.  As this estimate does not include internal radiation exposure caused by inhaling or swallowing radioactive particles, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research has maintained that the actual number of fatal cancers caused by nuclear testing could be 17,000.

Of course, a larger number of people contracted cancer from nuclear testing than actually died of it.  The government study estimated that those who contracted cancer numbered at least 80,000 Americans.

Who were these Americans? Many of them were “downwinders”—people whose towns and cities were located near U.S. nuclear testing sites and, thus, were contaminated by deadly clouds of nuclear fallout carried along by the wind.

During the 1950s, the U.S. government conducted close to a hundred atmospheric nuclear explosions at its Nevada test site.  Nearly 30 percent of the radioactive debris drifted over the towns to the east, which housed a population of roughly 100,000 people.

The residents of St. George, Utah, recalled that a “pink cloud” would hang over them while they worked amid the fallout, walked in it, breathed it, washed their clothes in it, and ate it.

“Even the little children ate the snow,”recalled one resident. “They didn’t know it was going to kill them later on.”

*Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany.  His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark?