Fallout: Part II of V Government told residents tests blasts were safe
By Linda Stelp Miner Staff Writer.

In 1956 Kingman residents Dorothy and Leslie "Bud" Burrows sat in their living room while the United States government deliberately released radioactive material during a series of nuclear bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"Our parents told my sister and I about sitting in their living room and how the lights from the bombs would light the whole room up," said Roxanne Burrows Kinsey, 44.

"My father had a Geiger counter. He would take it outside and the needle would go all the way over. The radiation would max it out."

Kinsey's mother contracted cervical cancer in 1967 and bladder cancer in 1991. Both cancers are on a list of cancers that can be caused by radiation exposure. She died in 1996 of osteoporosis complications.

In 1989 Kinsey's father died of throat cancer, which is also associated with radiation exposure.

The Burrows' were one of many Mohave County families who watched clouds from nuclear test bombs fill the skies over Las Vegas during those years.

The United States developed and tested nuclear weapons during the Cold War with most of the above ground United States nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 to 1963.

As a result of these tests, potentially health-harming radioactive materials were released into the atmosphere and produced radioactive fallout, according to information from the National Cancer Institute.

Iodine-131, which can be carried thousands of miles away from the test areas on the winds, was among the radioactive materials released by the atomic bomb tests.

Because of wind and rainfall patterns, the distribution of fallout varied widely after each test, according to the National Cancer Institute.

More than 100 above-ground nuclear tests and five so-called "safety tests," that involved dispersing plutonium, were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, according to a 1989 government assessment of nuclear testing.

The wind patterns of such tests, which often had code names such as "Plumbbob" or "Smoky," were tracked by the National Weather Service.

Six radioactive cloud track maps produced by the weather bureau show wind patterns for the "Operation Plumbbob" series of tests conducted in 1957.

Dated May 28, June 2, Aug. 31, Sept. 6, Sept. 8 and Sept. 14 the maps track radioactive cloud positions at six-hour intervals across the United States from the time the bombs are first detonated.

Radioactivity from the "Wheeler Shot" of the Plumbbob series of tests, detonated Sept. 6, 1957 at the Nevada Test Site, was tracked across the United States for seven days, as clouds carried radioactive material to New England states.

An Office of Technology Assessment report states that 12 billion units of radioactivity were released during above ground tests at the Nevada Test Site.

In the book "American Ground Zero, The Secret Nuclear War," Carole Gallagher explains that between 1951 and 1963 the Atomic Energy Commission detonated 126 atomic bombs into the atmosphere at the Nevada test site, releasing more than five metric tons of plutonium - the most toxic element in existence - into the atmosphere.

Chet Stellar, chairman of the American Legion's National Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Commission, stated in 1998 that plutonium enters the body through food or inhalation and is the only radioactive material released in nuclear explosions that can be measured in the human body years after exposure.

Above ground testing of atomic bombs was banned in 1963, but underground testing at the Nevada Test Site continued.

A front-page story about an underground nuclear test with a yield between 20 -150 kilotons to take place on the following day appeared in the Feb. 9, 1978 edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The test, with the code name "Reblochon" was said to be the 312th announced underground test since atmospheric detonations were banned by treaty in 1963, and the 486th announced test since experimentation began at the site in 1951.

At that time detonations were announced only when the possibility existed that some ground motion would be felt outside the test site boundaries.

Preston Truman, the director of "Downwinders" a group that has been working on behalf of people who contracted cancer as a result of atmospheric radiation, said underground nuclear testing is just as harmful as above ground testing.

"It has been proven that radiation from underground nuclear tests have leaked into the atmosphere," Thurman, a Utah resident said. "They are absolutely not safe."

A report released by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, describes fallout experiments and contamination that occurred at the Nevada Test Site even before 1951.

The 19-page document - which twice mentions the Nevada Test Site - states that Air Force planes routinely monitored airborne radiation "in conjunction with the many nuclear bomb tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific Ocean during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s."

The second reference describes "dirty fallout effects" - first noticed in 1946 - as a result of nuclear testing.

During the 1950s and the early 1960s the government assured the public that radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing was harmless, said Clarissa Lewis, who remembers when tests were conducted.

"Seems like we were able to go outside and different colors would fill the air," Lewis, who has lived in Mohave County for 54 years, said. "The sky would change colors over toward Vegas."

Lewis' husband, Jim, also a "downwinder" who lived on a Mohave County ranch, died of colon cancer nearly five years ago.

But at the same time the government was claiming the fallout was harmless, it was also conducting human experiments to determine the effect of radiation, according to a report printed June 28, 1994 in the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Tom Brodersen, in a report published in the Daily Courier in Prescott Aug. 25, 2002, states that one out of every seven nuclear tests dumped radioactive fallout on northern Arizona.

Brodersen worked at the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives in Yavapai County, one of many counties on the U. S. Department of Justice official list of counties affected by radiation fallout.

The museum has helped downwinders in Yavapai County with claims for federal compensation.

People living or working "downwind" of the Nevada Test Site - in parts of Northern Arizona, southern Utah and most of Nevada - for at least two years between Jan. 21, 1951 and Oct. 31, 1958, or in the month of July 1962 may have suffered cancer and other diseases caused by exposure to radiation.

Although counties in Nevada, California, New Mexico and Arizona are on the map, Mohave County is not.

Roxanne Burrows Kinsey said nothing can erase the pain of losing a loved one to cancer, but it will help to have the U.S. government acknowledge that Mohave County was affected by radiation testing.

"I think it is ridiculous that Mohave County is not on the list, because of all the people who lived at that time and were exposed to the radiation," Kinsey said. "It is upsetting when all the counties surrounding Mohave County have been included. It makes no sense."

Part III of this series will include information on health problems associated with exposure to radioactive fallout.


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