They Were Told There Was No Danger : But the government was lying, and now it has decided to pay up--sort of

They were the silent casualties of a war that was never fought, victims of an anxious age and their own government’s deceit.

Last week, these Americans--betrayed by the very officials to whom they looked for protection--were voted a tardy, grudging measure of compensation by Congress. President Bush is expected to sign the bill, which will provide cash payments to Americans who died or were made ill after being exposed to radiation released during their country’s race to develop nuclear weapons.

The measure will pay $50,000 to as many as 1,100 people--or their survivors--who contracted radiation-related illnesses, mainly cancer, because they lived in parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah exposed to fallout from the open-air nuclear tests conducted by the government between 1951 and 1958 and for a month in 1962. An estimated 150,000 civilians were allowed to remain in these so-called “down-wind” areas, even though federal officials knew they were at risk. In many instances, authorities assured people they were in no danger, though the perils of radiation were, by that time, known.

The bill also provides payments of $100,000 to as many as 500 uranium miners exposed to massive doses of radiation while extracting ore for nuclear bomb production between 1947 and 1971. They, too, were uninformed or even deceived about the hazards. The mines were located in the Southwest and many of the miners were Navajo Indians, lured out of reservation poverty by the promise of a job that amounted to digging their own graves.

Republican Rep. Jon Kyl of Arizona called the bill “an opportunity to compensate for one of the great wrongs that we Americans committed against our own citizens.”

Sadly--indeed, unforgivably--it is an opportunity realized only in part. The levels of compensation are low compared to those many of the victims would have achieved had the federal government not fought them at every turn. Now, with this settlement, the victims have forever lost their right to pursue their own court actions. The categories of eligibility have been drawn far too narrowly: Miners who also smoked can expect to have their claims challenged; the estimated 220,000 military personnel who also were exposed to fallout from nuclear tests are not included at all. They will be compensated separately, at an even meaner rate.

Given such defects, it is not unreasonable to consider this bill not so much a remedy as another link in a cold chain of injustices.