She Crusades for Nuclear ‘Downwinders’

It was 1953 and Janet Gordon was prouder than ever to be an American living in Orderville, Utah.

Then 12, Gordon had just watched a film at school made by the Atomic Energy Commission to reassure her and other civilians about the nuclear weapons tests that had begun upwind on the Nevada Proving Grounds.

Like many in southwest Utah descended from Mormon pioneers, she was already convinced--God and country first. The film drove the message home.

In it, she recalled a chaplain and a soldier, surrounded by cacti, having this conversation at the test site:

Chaplain: What’s the matter, son? Worried?

Soldier: Well, just a little bit, Father.

Chaplain: Well, there’s no need to be, son. Why, first you’ll see a brilliant flash, feel the percussion, and then you can open your eyes and look up, and you can see the familiar mushroom cloud as it ascends into the heavens with all the colors of the rainbow. A wonderful sight to behold.

Gradually, Gordon grew skeptical, then shocked, angry and bitter about such reassurance. From 1951 to 1963, 84 bombs were exploded above ground at the Nevada Test Site, and an additional 16 in unsealed shafts also released radiation into the atmosphere, according to the Department of Energy.

As Gordon now believes, more than 100 of her friends and relatives died as a direct result of the radioactive fallout. “We were expendable,” she says today.

Tonight Gordon will speak on “Radiation and Cancer: Is the Nuclear Industry Killing Us?” at UC Irvine. The program will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Engineering Research Facility and include the documentary “Dark Circle.” Admission is $3. Her lecture is sponsored by the Global Peace and Conflict Studies student organization and the Orange County chapter of Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament.

A resident of Cedar City, Utah, Gordon, 47, has become an anti-nuclear activist and outspoken leader of the “downwinders,” nearly 100,000 civilians who lived downwind from the Nevada test site.

“A lot of people are concerned about nuclear war and nuclear weapons,” Gordon said in an interview in Anaheim, where she was staying with friends. “Our point is, for us, nuclear war has already occurred (with the tests), and people are already dying.”

As co-founder of Citizens Call, an advocacy group for what they believe are the victims of radiation from U.S. nuclear testing, she has spent most of her recent years in a fruitless effort to win redress, or even admission of mistakes made, from the U.S. government. Its continued underground tests, she believes, still pose health threats to the population at large.

“I do not believe there will be any justice for the (downwind) victims until the testing stops,” she said. “As long as they are protecting the new weapons systems, they can’t acknowledge the real human costs,” said Gordon, whose brother Kent Carroll died of cancer at 26, five years after a nuclear test was held upwind from his family’s ranch.

The U.S. government has consistently denied that atomic testing fallout has caused illness or death in the downwinders. Moreover, the Department of Energy has argued that the government is immune from liability in any case under the doctrine of “sovereign immunity” and that the downwinders waited too long to file their suit, said Henry Gill, an attorney with the Department of Energy in Washington.

More than 1,000 downwinders filed a class-action suit against the United States in 1979. In 1982 U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins ruled that fallout had caused cancer in 10 of 24 representative claims and awarded $2.6 million in damages to nine of the 10 who were still living. The case is now under appeal in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

Earlier, in 1956, several ranchers sued the Atomic Energy Commission after nearly a quarter of the sheep herds in southern Utah and Nevada died in 1953. A judge ruled against them after the AEC attributed the deaths to “unprecedented cold weather.” Based on information that government agents had committed a “species of fraud,” the judge reopened the case, but last year the Supreme Court declined to hear it.

The family that lost the most sheep finally had to sell off its ranch last year, Gordon said. “They’d been struggling all these years.”

Gordon believes that radiation poses dangers to workers in all phases of the nuclear industry--from uranium miners, laboratory and weapons-related workers to those handling or living next to nuclear waste.

Last year she chaired the National Committee for Radiation Victims, a public information organization in Washington, and spoke in Japan at the 40th and 41st observances of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. She also traveled to Moscow to participate in the Year of Peace events and spoke to the Soviet Peace Committee.

Back in the Cold War and McCarthy era, most people believed what they were told by the government--that there was no danger, Gordon said. Many took dawn picnics to desert bluffs to watch the mushroom clouds; some children played in the gray fallout as if it were snow, she said.

Tests were canceled if winds were blowing toward the more populous areas of Las Vegas or Los Angeles, and some schoolchildren were given iodine pills (known to help counteract effects of radiation) before the tests, she said. Records of children’s thyroid conditions were classified, she recalled. Government blockades stopped and washed cars that had driven through particularly “dirty” (highly radioactive) areas after a test.

“We wondered what was going on,” she said. But then there were no TV sets in the rural area and only three telephones in her town. “People didn’t talk about those things,” she said.

The Atomic Energy Commission (discontinued in 1974 and replaced by the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) stated that it chose the desert area because it was sparsely populated and because the Rocky Mountains and other ranges provided a natural trap for the radioactive fallout, preventing it from spreading to other areas.

Gordon said she has obtained a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff stating that “the only way to get the U.S. public to accept nuclear weaponry is to move it closer to home.” She said the memo implied that by putting nuclear weapons in people’s backyards, they would get used to them.

In 1955, one AEC commissioner stated publicly, “People have got to learn to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout.”

In the spring of 1953, a 32-kiloton bomb called Harry was dropped at the site. Gordon’s brother Kent Carroll returned from the family ranch between Zion and Bryce National parks with facial burns and a bad headache, she said. He said he had ridden his horse into a ground fog that left a metallic taste in his mouth. He threw up all night, Gordon said.

A few months later, his horse died of no apparent cause, she said. More horses and sheep started to die. Lambs were born early in a weakened or deformed state; some developed sores around their mouths and eyes. Their wool came out in patches.

Kent Carroll’s hair came out in patches too.

He was eventually diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer. As the family had prayed early on for his survival, they came to pray for death to end his suffering, Gordon said.

Sometimes the image of her brother swollen and twisted on his hospital bed coincides in her mind with that of the reassuring chaplain and the soldier in the AEC film. Even today, the double image brings tears and anger.

“It’s not right,” she said. “They could have kept us indoors. They didn’t have to do it ever. They could have negotiated treaties. It was so insidious. They did it in secret, and then they lied to us about it.”

The year Kent Carroll died, 1961, clusters of childhood leukemia began to show up in downwind communities. By 1981 Colorado physician Carl Johnson wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that downwinders also had significantly higher levels of lymphoma and melanoma as well as cancer of the breast, thyroid, colon, stomach, brain and bone.

Gordon worries not only about the latent effects of radiation but about genetic damage, which may show up in one or two generations, she said. Her three children were born during that period; one of them has seizures and suffers from a condition similar to lupus, she said.

About two years ago, Gordon said she suffered a yearlong bout of depression. “I couldn’t face another phone call that someone had cancer,” she said. She became inactive with the movement for more than a year before beginning again.

“The Church (of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) is not involved in our activism,” she said. Some of her neighbors look askance at her activities, she said. But wherever she goes in southwest Utah, she is recognized by strangers and often thanked by them.

Nuclear testing moved underground after the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. The government does not announce all tests. The last known test, Feb. 3, was the 660th announced test at the site since 1951. Underground tests are continuing to vent radioactive fallout, Gordon believes.

“It’s the same policy, and if anything, it’s worse,” she said, adding that the government is “very secretive. They don’t act like they live in a democracy at all.”

Gordon believes that it would be useless for her to move.

“I’ve been irradiated since 1951. I’m probably carrying as much as I would get,” she said. “I’m not going to save myself.

“Besides, where would you have me move? Down here, next to one of your power plants?

“You can’t get away from it. Those fallout clouds go everywhere.”

Downwinder ranks may be thinning, but the movement has grown since the Soviet nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, she said. Protests at the Nevada test site have increased dramatically this decade. Government “abuses” such as the Iran- contra scandal, she said, make nuclear testing abuses seem more believable.

Gordon said she still believes in democracy but not in the people who run it. “It’s like we don’t belong to the same race,” she said.

“I believe we will look back on this time as we do now on the period of child labor. People will ask, ‘How could decent human beings have allowed this to go on and for so long?’ ”

Gordon said she has faith that the anti-nuclear movement will grow and bring about changes.

But, she said, “I seriously doubt I’ll live long enough to see them.”