Scars and Secrets: the Atomic Trail : Along the Nation’s Bomb-making Circuit, Illness and Poisoned Land Mark the Cold War’s Lethal Legacy

On a dark winter day, five elders eat a quiet lunch in the tribal Chapter House in Red Valley, Ariz., a dry corner of the Navajo reservation where most everything is dusted with the windblown earth. The meal is traditional mutton stew. The conversation, shared in the soft sound of Navajo, is filled with grief. These men, who dug uranium that powered America’s nuclear arsenal, have watched in anguish as more than 100 of their friends and family--all uranium miners--have been slowly killed by lung disease linked to radiation. And in the past week, lung cancer has claimed two more from their community of less than 2,000 people.

“They knew what they were doing to us,” says former miner Russell Jackson. A tall man dressed in drab coveralls and a baseball cap, Jackson sits on a folding chair and stares at the floor as he speaks. A translator turns his words into English. “They didn’t tell us uranium was used for bombs. They didn’t tell us it would make us sick. But they knew. We were expendable.”

Officials knew of the radiation hazard in the mines as early as 1951, but strict regulations protecting miners were not set until 1969 after congressional hearings on the issue. “The doctors were told not to tell them of the dangers, and they didn’t,” says Dr. Louise Abel, who works for the U.S. Public Health Service on the reservation. “An entire generation of men in some villages was decimated for the country’s nuclear effort. It’s an epic tragedy.”

Similar stories have echoed across the country in the communities that composed the front line of the Cold War. Uranium traveled thousands of miles as it was transformed from rock to bomb, and documents from inside the weapons complex indicate that at many stops along this route, radiation was released during accidents, deliberate experiments and routine operations. Though bomb production has ceased, all the major facilities are now toxic-waste sites--among them some of the most contaminated places in the Western World--and estimates for the 40-year task of cleaning up the pollution, which will be lethal for centuries, exceed $500 billion.

It is impossible to be certain about how the radiation releases will affect the health of the more than 1 million people exposed. But all along the atomic trail, which stretched from coast to coast, communities feel and fear the ravages of radiation-related illness. “Trust in the government and science has been a casualty for these people,” says Dr. John W. Gofman, a former government expert in radiation and health who is now an outspoken critic of the bomb makers. “A terrible political betrayal has taken place,” he adds. “Increased disease will occur because of it.”

As early as 1949, federal officials knew that radiation could be causing cancer in workers and people living near weapons plants. However, because virtually everything to do with atomic weapons manufacturing was classified as secret, much of the debate over radiation and health was kept from the public, which was, instead, reassured about radiation’s safety. “We were in a Cold War that was real,” says Newall Stannard, an expert in radiation and health who worked on many Atomic Energy Commission projects in the early years. Bellicose leaders of the former Soviet Union promised to “bury” the West, and the Soviets often matched or exceeded the United States in the race to build ever-more-horrifying weapons. The press reported on the competition to build better bombs and rockets as if it were an actual war. And to many people inside and outside of government, nuclear annihilation seemed possible at any moment.

“There was a real sense of urgency,” Stannard says. “People believed that things had to be done and done quickly to keep the effort going. And because of the pressure to do things fast,” he says, “many of us in the health and safety area weren’t listened to.”

Data on radiation found in communities near the bomb facilities was not widely disseminated. Health studies were often not followed up on. After two decades of radiation releases at the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in Washington, for example, doctors examined 5,500 children who lived nearby, but did not monitor them to see if any radiogenic illnesses developed later.

“They were treated like guinea pigs,” says Robert Schaeffer, a spokesman for the Military Production Network, a nonprofit national alliance that represents citizens groups at more than a dozen nuclear sites. “The government made an effort to study these people after they died, but did not protect them adequately from exposure. It looks like a massive experiment.”

The contamination that poured from the bomb factories and test sites during four decades dwarfs the radiation exposures in the medical experiments--many subjects were radiated without their knowledge or consent--that have received wide publicity recently. The government’s top nuclear weapons official, Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O’Leary, acknowledges that the lethal legacy of the atomic complex “is a much bigger problem.” The Cold War warriors did provide defense during the decades of dread. But, adds O’Leary, they also failed to safeguard the public from the more immediate hazards created by the production and testing of atomic weapons.

“They thought they could control it. They didn’t recognize the danger,” she says. And as more of the hidden history of the arms race is revealed, additional secrets--about radioactive pollution and experiments--may emerge. “There’s more to be discovered,” she adds. “That’s the thing I most fear.”

What is known about the sins of the nuclear past is frightening enough. After two decades of pressure, Congress acknowledged in 1990 that workers and innocent bystanders at the start and end of the atomic trail had been harmed, even killed, by radiation-linked diseases. Uranium miners who have certain cancers or lung disease, which can be caused by radon gases in mines, are paid $100,000 from a special federal program. Similarly, exposed soldiers or people who lived under the billowing mushroom clouds when aboveground nuclear tests were conducted in Nevada in the 1950s receive $50,000 if they develop certain cancers linked to the fallout. So far, more than $117 million has been paid to more than 1,600 of the sick and dying. But thousands of others who lived elsewhere along the atomic trail believe that they were irradiated, too. They also are seeking compensation through the courts.

At least five suits are pending and more may be filed by workers or neighbors at any of a dozen other sites. In each case, the lawsuits have been filed against the companies that ran the facilities. But the real target is the federal government, which, according to its contracts with the corporations, must pay all legal fees and any judgments. Legal fees alone are running in excess of $20 million a year.

In most cases, people exposed to radiation from the bomb complex generally allege only that they now have an increased risk of cancer. Experts seem to agree that whenever significant amounts of radiation are involved, risk is increased. But it is difficult to prove that an individual’s disease was caused by a specific source--uranium miners with lung cancer, for instance, may have used tobacco (which the miners’ compensation program takes into account by raising eligibility requirements for heavy smokers). “Unfortunately, cancers don’t come with a tag that says, ‘I’m from Hanford,’ ” says Tom Bailie, who has helped organize a suit against the operators of the Hanford complex. “But I think we know enough to say when someone’s risk has been significantly increased without their permission.”

Health studies that can more precisely measure the effects of the radiation exposures have commenced in areas near atomic bomb factories, but the results are years away. Nevertheless, experts such as Gofman are certain that the nuclear enterprise has spread disease across a wide area. Gofman, now a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, helped discover Uranium-233, founded the biomedical lab at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Northern California and was part of the Manhattan Project. But he gradually became one of the nuclear complex’s harshest critics because, he says, his warnings were ignored.

“There is no such thing as an absolutely safe dose of radiation,” he says. “They took risks, risks they had no right to impose on people without their knowledge.”

“The best science takes place in a very open environment,” adds Secretary O’Leary. And in the bomb complex, she says, “just the opposite occurred. Secrecy was the watchword of the day.” With the Cold War over, O’Leary wants to declassify documents and open the agency to outside scrutiny.

Her openness has raised expectations along the bomb-making circuit, where many see her efforts to tell the truth about medical testing--and the resulting public furor--as a sign that their experiences will become the focus of national concern. “There are far too many people who have died and are sick now for them to just be ignored,” says Janet C. Gordon, whose brother died of cancer in 1961, after repeated exposures to fallout near the Nevada test site. “There is a lot of attention being paid to the medical tests that were done, and they were serious. But I don’t want people to forget what happened here. Multiply what they did to our family by thousands of families. They knew what they were doing. There’s no excuse for it.”

THE URANIUM MINERS AT the Chapter House in Red Valley, remember spending long days in the excavations breathing cool air that was filled with invisible, odorless radon gases. They recall eating their lunches in deep tunnels that branched in every direction and ended in large caverns where the “working face” was broken with tools and explosives. They drank the water that trickled out of exposed underground springs, and some went home to houses built from the radioactive rocks discarded from the mines.

“We didn’t know what we were mining was for the military or the atomic bombs,” says former miner Kelewood Yazzie, who is now almost 70. “We knew that production counted. That was it.”

A prospecting frenzy had erupted in the Southwest in the 1940s and ‘50s as the government’s demand for the raw material for atomic bombs soared. Soon after, studies funded by the federal government discovered radiation levels many times higher than what was considered safe. But decades passed before the government developed rules to protect the miners.

At the Chapter House, the miners say that in the late 1960s, many of their number developed lung cancer, virtually unheard of in Navajo territory until the uranium rush. It took about 10 years for them to surmise what was happening and pursue claims against the government, supporting their case with medical research that showed excess cancer for workers in their industry as early as 1964. But the courts ruled that the government could not be sued because the mines were operated for national security purposes.

Lawyers for the miners, led by former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, subsequently petitioned Congress for compensation. In 1990, the miners and their families were included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, in which Congress admitted that they were endangered and agreed to pay $100,000 to each miner who could prove he had worked in the mines for an extended period of time and developed lung cancer or other respiratory diseases. The Justice Department, which runs the program, estimates that 18,000 miners, nearly all of them in the Southwest, were exposed to radiation and are potentially eligible for payment. But thousands who labored in the mills where the uranium ore was crushed and refined into what’s called “yellow cake” are not covered by the act, though many claim that they, too, were exposed to radiation.

Of the 3,000 Navajos who worked in the uranium mines, more than 400 have died of lung disease, reports Timothy Benally, manager of the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers in Shiprock, N.M., which helps the miners file compensation claims. Benally says that proving a miner’s length of service has been a challenge. Documenting illnesses can be difficult because local health clinics still do not have equipment that will detect all types of lung ailments. “A lot of men die before they know their claim is going to be approved,” says Benally. So far, only 133 Navajo compensation claims of 301 filed have been granted. (Fourteen hundred non-Native American miners have also been paid.)

In many cases, the children of deceased miners have taken up their claims. On the day the Navajo elders meet in the Chapter House, Helen Johnson, a former case worker for the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers, is out on the windswept reservation visiting her clients. As she drives down the rutted dirt roads of Red Valley, Johnson recalls the slow death her father suffered when he was just her age--31.

“He was always getting sick,” she says. “Then a couple of other miners died and my mother got real scared.” Johnson’s father died in 1970, leaving five children between the ages of 3 months and 7 years. Her mother struggled to keep the family together as a single parent in a poor community. “She hasn’t really been the same since my father died,” Johnson adds, tears trickling down her cheeks.

The dying has continued. Last month, Helen Johnson attended the funeral of her uncle, 64-year-old Ray Joe Sr., another uranium miner, another victim of lung cancer. The funeral and service took place in the shadow of the mountains where the uranium mines were dug.

THE URANIUM THAT WAS seized from the earth in the Four Corners area of the Southwest was shipped east to be processed into fuel for bombs. At various stages, the rock was turned into uranium hexaflouride gas, enriched and converted into a metal. Until 1970, most of this work was done at facilities in Kentucky, Ohio and central Tennessee, at two of the Oak Ridge plants.

Once a secret government-owned community, Oak Ridge was built to supply enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project, a job that once consumed one-seventh of the electricity produced in the United States. Oak Ridge, population 30,000 in 1950, was protected by gates and fences until after World War II, when the city was opened to the world. Through the years, officials monitored many radioactive releases and traced contamination. But in a place where almost everyone’s livelihood depended on the nuclear enterprise, few challenged the government’s assertions that the public and atomic workers were perfectly safe. Yet last November, a state report noted that 1988-’90 cancer rates in Anderson County, where Oak Ridge is located, were “significantly higher” than the rest of the state.

As she navigates Oak Ridge’s winding roads to visit her doctor, Janice Stokes points to telltale landmarks that an outsider might miss: an incinerator that burns atomic waste, signs warning that creeks and ponds are poisoned, a ball field that was capped with extra soil to protect players from mercury contamination from an Oak Ridge plant. Stokes notes that some of the deer, frogs and even trees on the site are radioactive. (These problems have been confirmed by state and national officials.) She believes that Oak Ridge has contaminated her, as well.

“I’ve never worked near uranium, but I’ve got it in my urine,” she says. Stokes, born and raised seven miles from Oak Ridge, suffers from lupus and osteomalacia, a painful degenerative bone disease. “I’ve gone steadily downhill for the past eight years,” says the slightly built, soft-spoken woman of 47. “There’s just too much unexplained illness around here.”

Stokes’ doctor, oncologist William K. Reid, agrees. Reid joined the local hospital staff in 1990, and “right away I was dealing with five kidney cancers,” he says. “I wouldn’t expect to see more than one in a population this size.” Medical literature and consultations with outside specialists led Reid to suspect that radiation and other pollution from Oak Ridge facilities contributed to the illnesses he was treating--high rates of thyroid disease, immune disorders and cancers. (All of the kidney cancer patients were workers who had been exposed to radiation, he recalls.) But Reid says that every effort he made to raise concerns and conduct research in the hospital on Oak Ridge radiation and health was blocked.

“For years they had an unspoken policy that said doctors do not talk about this,” he says. “Once I started talking about this, I stopped being the doctor that they had tried so hard to recruit.”

Methodist Medical Center spokeswoman Nancy Harrison says Reid was never impeded in his research or discouraged from speaking his mind. And ophthalmologist Francis Reid (no relation), who was chief of staff until 1991, says that in his 15 years at Oak Ridge he saw no evidence that physicians were reluctant to discuss radiation and health.

Still, there are some who believe that the medical community may have been conditioned to sidestep the issue. The city’s only hospital was originally built and run by the Atomic Energy Commission. At the Department of Energy, the commission’s successor, officials confirm that doctors in Oak Ridge were expected to adhere to the code of secrecy that began in Manhattan Project days. “In a system like that,” says a senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy, “those who questioned the existing order were purged.”

Documents do show that the Atomic Energy Commission was deeply concerned in the 1950s about any claims relating to radiation exposure and illnesses. Such claims were reported to headquarters, and information about the cases was strictly guarded. But today, people such as William Reid who have raised doubts about the record of the Oak Ridge facilities have some evidence to support their fears. A study of more than 8,000 Oak Ridge workers turned up elevated leukemia rates. The report, published in 1991 in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., found a correlation between the cancer and radiation exposure and suggested that the risk associated with long-term, low-level radiation is higher than previously believed. Experts have long known that a sudden large dose of radiation can kill, sometimes quickly. But they have debated the effect of lower doses received steadily over long periods of time.

Late last year, the Tennessee Department of Health confirmed that Oak Ridge had frequently emitted radioactive elements and heavy metals into the environment. For decades, federal monitors had tracked the releases in the air and water off-site and even monitored the level of radiation in garden vegetables and milk collected near Oak Ridge. The state report included descriptions of numerous radiation releases that could, in the final tally, reach more than 1 million curies since the Manhattan Project. (In contrast, the Three Mile Island power plant accident involved about 17 curies and prompted the evacuation of thousands of people.) The Oak Ridge report recounts a long list of incidents in which radiation escaped from a nuclear reactor called the X-10 and from other facilities. But it did not estimate how those living downwind or downstream--more than 46,000 people lived in the study area near the Oak Ridge plants in 1960--may have been affected. A follow-up study is under way.

This research is of great interest to William Reid and his patients, who would welcome any new information. “As children, we went to the Museum of Atomic Energy they had here and they gave us all radioactive dimes. We laughed about it. The safety was just something you didn’t question,” says Shirley Harkins, 39, who grew up 10 miles from Oak Ridge and suffers from thyroid disease. “We were told that there was no problem, but we can’t trust that now.”

FARTHER ALONG THE ATOMIC TRAIL, IN FERNALD, OHIO, 18 MILES OUTSIDE Cincinnati, the innocuously named Feed Materials Production Center turned enriched uranium into fuel that was sent to atomic reactors for final conversion to plutonium. With its odd name, some locals thought the plant made feed for livestock. This impression was reinforced, no doubt, by the fact that a local dairy was allowed to pasture its herd on some of the plant’s property.

While the rolling acres outside the plant may have seemed pristine, in fact the landscape was polluted with more than a million pounds of uranium. Inside, work areas were often contaminated by uranium dust. According to the documents of the company that ran the Fernald plant, officials were aware of the contamination and damage to the workers’ health as early as 1952. One memo from that time called for an end to practices that allowed many workers to be exposed to radiation levels higher than the plant’s own standards. A second referred to 17 workers who were exposed to uranium and reported that all “showed urinary damage” and was followed a year later by a report that conditions had “gone from bad to worse” because supervisors had focused “chiefly on production requirements.” A 1960 report found workers exposed to radiation levels 97,000 times higher than the plant’s limit. On the basis of such information, more than 6,000 former employees are suing the operators of the plant for endangering their health.

The workers’ claim that radiation exposure frequently exceeded health standards and that they suffer excessive risk of cancer is contested by Kevin Van Wart, the attorney for Fernald’s former operator, NLO Inc. The workers want a formal health program, but Van Wart says that it would be unnecessary because it would offer “nothing they don’t already get from family doctors.”

NLO no longer operates the Fernald plant and it exists only as a shell of a corporation. Its main activity is fighting the lawsuit, with its legal defense funded entirely by the federal government. Nevertheless Van Wart feels a moral commitment to defend the people who once managed Fernald. “These are real people who live in the Cincinnati area and they are emotionally affected by what has been said about them,” he adds. He doubts that the government will agree to a settlement. “I want to go to trial,” he says, “because I think we would win on the scientific merits.” Van Wart says the plant was safe and that scientists would testify that the radiation to which the workers were exposed was not dangerous.

In 1988, federal officials admitted that Fernald had emitted thousands of tons of radioactive waste into the air, the ground water and a local river as part of routine operations. The revelations came as the government agreed to pay $78 million to end a lawsuit filed by Fernald’s neighbors. Under the terms of the settlement, people who live near the plant will be compensated for the loss of property value and the psychological pain of not knowing what effect the radiation may have on their health. Payments have started at $16,000 for distress and have topped $500,000 for loss of property values. As part of the settlement, the Department of Energy is also funding research to estimate the radiation dose received by the approximately 28,000 people who lived within a five-mile circle outside the Fernald fence. The particles of radioactive material released at Fernald could be dangerous if ingested, which is what Angie Supe fears happened to her husband, Terry, who was raised 2 1/2 miles downwind from the uranium plant. He drank rainwater from a cistern beside the farmhouse. Last October, he died of kidney cancer, the same cancer William Reid is treating in several Oak Ridge patients. Terry Supe was 40.

On the country lane where her husband grew up, eight cases of cancers have been found in six households. Terry “was healthy, had no risk factors, and they were putting uranium out all the time he was growing up near the plant,” says his widow. “Now he’s gone and my daughter is so young she’s going to forget him pretty soon. If you ask why, you have to consider the plant.”

A similar connection is being made by workers and neighbors at Ohio’s other major atomic facility, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon. Hidden on 3,800 acres of trees and hills, the 10-million-square-foot plant is described by the Government Accounting Office as “among the largest industrial facilities in the world.” Beginning in 1954, it had provided enriched uranium for Fernald, which closed in 1989. And thousands of pounds of uranium have been released into air and water around the plant.

Like the residents of the Fernald area, the neighbors of the Portsmouth plant want compensation for contamination, declining property values and the potential health effects of the pollution. More than 300 people have signed on to yet another suit, which attorneys say is still more than a year away from trial. If a settlement similar to the Fernald agreement is reached, it would likely provide medical monitoring and compensation for more than 15,000 people who have lived near the plant.

THE HANFORD ATOMIC WEAPONS PLANT IN WASHINGTON STATE BECAME the world’s largest nuclear complex after World War II, with nine reactors that turned the fuel from Ohio into plutonium, which was then refined and set along the atomic trail to be fashioned into bombs. The community surrounding Hanford, known as the Tri-Cities, takes pride in its Cold War role. One of the cities, Richland, was built by the government and embraced its image as an atomic city. People there still bowl at Atomic Lanes and shop at Atomic Foods. The Richland high school teams--the Bombers--still use the mushroom cloud as an insignia and, until recently, the symbol of the atom adorned the granite pillars at the entrance to the Richland cemetery.

But Tom Bailie and his family were less exuberant in their embrace of the region’s nuclear identity. They didn’t move into a home next door to the Hanford atomic weapons complex in Washington state; the bomb makers came to them. In 1942, as the Manhattan Project began its race to make the first atomic weapons, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased the land next to the Bailie farm in the town of Mesa, along with acreage up and down the Columbia River--a total of more than 560 square miles.

Tom Bailie was born in 1947, three years before the first reactor began operating, at a time when local health authorities were recording an increase in stillbirths. Bailie was sickly as a child and suffered from respiratory problems. At age 5 he endured a mysterious paralysis and survived only with the help of an iron lung. Much later he discovered he was sterile.

Though the Atomic Energy Commission assured the public that all was right at Hanford in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, roughly 1 million curies of radiation were being released into the environment. Scientists have already determined that the Bailies and their neighbors, who lived directly across the Columbia River from Hanford, probably received the largest dose of radiation that left the site. It came in the air they breathed, the water they used to irrigate their farms, the local food they ate. Throughout its 40-plus years, Hanford technicians tested all of these “pathways,” which carried the contamination to the human body, and found radiation in every one. No warnings were ever issued.

“We were like guinea pigs,” says Bailie, now 47. He has thick gray hair and bright blue eyes. As he talks, he looks out over hundreds of acres of apple trees and beyond to the Columbia River and then the hulking concrete carcasses of Hanford’s now-defunct reactors. “I was given thyroid exams in school. And thousands of kids were put through whole body counters so they could check for radiation. Where are they now that people are sick?”

In the early 1980s, Bailie began to collect stories about deformed animals, stillbirths and cancers, and he began asking questions about Hanford. Activists from as far away at Spokane and Seattle joined the debate, met by intense opposition from Tri-Cities residents who’d drawn their identity from the atom and placed their faith in government assurances about the reactors’ safety.

But even as the angry confrontations unfolded, the government began declassifying reports that showed the extent to which Hanford had irradiated the region’s air, water and land. Accidents, routine dumping and experiments had poured radiation into the environment even as officials claimed that no pollution left the site. The Hanford releases included a 1948 experiment in which as much as 11,000 curies of Iodine 131, known to be especially harmful to children, was intentionally released into the air. Known as the “Green Run,” this experiment was intended to simulate plutonium production methods in the former Soviet Union so that instruments used on spy planes to detect the enemy’s production levels could be calibrated. The secret Green Run spread radiation as far north as Spokane and south into Oregon.

A study similar to the ones under way at Oak Ridge and Fernald will attempt to tell citizens like Bailie precisely how much radiation they received. Preliminary reports suggest that as many as 20,000 children who lived downwind from Hanford were hit by a significant amount of radiation--the equivalent of 30 chest X-rays--in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Another 250,000 people lived in the direct path of the radiation releases. A larger health study involving the actual examination of about 2,000 people who lived near Hanford during radiation releases, is also being conducted. In the meantime, plutonium production has ended. Hanford is now the country’s largest environmental restoration project with a budget of about $2 billion a year and 15,000 workers.

More than 2,000 people have joined a “downwinders” lawsuit that seeks compensation for those exposed to the plant’s emissions. They want medical monitoring and compensation for pain and suffering. So far the federal government has paid $20 million for the lawyers defending the companies that operated Hanford and are named in the suit. It is not expected to go to trial until 1995.

THE NEVADA TEST SITE, 50 MILES NORTHWEST OF LAS VEGAS, WHERE ABOUT 100 bombs were detonated above the ground between 1951 and 1963, was the last stop on uranium’s journey to oblivion. Before getting to Nevada, the material that had become plutonium at Hanford was milled at Rocky Flats, near Denver, and placed in a weapon at a facility near Amarillo, Tex. Rocky Flats has been the site of widely publicized radiation pollution and incidents in which workers were exposed to radiation. Local citizens also claim to suffer health effects caused by the bomb factory. In 1981, one researcher, Carl Johnson, reported elevated cancer rates in an area around the plant that includes much of Denver. Johnson, whose work has been challenged by other researchers, suggested that significantly higher cancer rates occurred in the neighborhoods closest to the facility, where about 40,000 people lived during the heaviest releases.

But it is the people who live downwind from the Nevada test site who have become the symbol of all that went wrong in America’s rush to build the biggest and best nuclear arsenal. They felt the rumble and saw the blossoming mushroom clouds produced by the tests. They were among the first to say that something might be wrong. And their struggle for recognition and compensation shows just how difficult it may be for other groups to win redress for what was done to them by the bomb complex.

It took more than a decade of litigation and negotiation before the government finally admitted that it was the likely cause of Arlene Davis’ breast cancer. Davis, who recently underwent a mastectomy, grew up under the clouds of radioactive fallout that drifted from the Nevada test site across southern Utah. Born in 1955, she and more than 60,000 others living in parts of Utah, Nevada and Arizona were exposed to significant fallout radiation from the bombs that were detonated, as Congress has acknowledged.

“We used to eat dinner on our back lawn to watch the fallout clouds roll in,” Davis says. “They told us we were safe. And if we saw the clouds, we’d call the whole neighborhood to watch. I remember my mother taking her finger and drawing on the dust that fell on the cars.”

Government documents confirm that the Atomic Energy Commission was made aware of the fallout hazard in 1946, before the testing began in Nevada. Reports by one of the commission’s health experts, Dr. Stafford Warren, warned that even minute bits of fallout material absorbed by a person’s body could produce cancer years later. “This is an insidious hazard and an insidious lethal effect hard to guard against,” Warren wrote. He advised the commission to discuss the danger openly, but instead, officials conducted an extensive public-relations campaign, showing films to schoolchildren to calm their fears about the bomb blasts and distributing booklets to communities near the test site that described local citizens as participants in atomic science. “Your best action,” one booklet advised, “is to not be worried about fallout.”

As early as 1961, studies of the downwind population suggested that Warren’s predictions were coming true. Though held secret by the Atomic Energy Commission, the report found excess leukemia in the part of southern Utah that had received heavy amounts of fallout from the bomb tests.

Such studies fueled a landmark campaign that year in which a limited group of test-site downwinders, alleging that the government had been negligent in its atomic testing, sought damages for illness related to the fallout. If the case prevailed, it would establish government responsibility for the safety of people living near bomb-complex facilities and open the door for lawsuits all across the country. At trial, attorney Stewart Udall, the former Interior secretary, relied on a convincing expert witness, Dr. Joseph Lyon, a University of Utah epidemiologist who discovered a 300% increase in childhood leukemia in the fallout region. Udall also used testimony from a former Public Health Service officer, who told the court that the Atomic Energy Commission had doctored his reports on fallout to cover up exceptionally high radiation readings in populated areas in southern Utah and obscure the fact that schoolchildren playing at recess were exposed.

The trial court judge ruled in favor of some of Udall’s clients, but the decision did not stand. In 1988, an appeals court found the government was immune to downwinders’ claims, as it had been to the uranium miners’, under laws protecting its actions in the area of national defense. The Supreme Court agreed.

Frustrated and angry, Udall went to Congress, where he had served as a representative in the 1950s, to make one last plea. And this time he prevailed. In 1990, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act became law, providing both an apology and $200 million for uranium miners and the downwinders. Anyone who lived in the downwind area during the Nevada tests and develops one of several cancers is eligible for the program. More than 800 claims have been paid since 1990.

Arlene Davis submitted her claim under the act two years ago. “Last February (1992) I’m getting in the bathtub and I see this big lump,” she says. “On April third I had the operation. My mother told me right away that I should get the papers together and file them because the fallout was probably the cause.” She was paid $50,000, but “of course,” she says, “it doesn’t make up for what has happened to me, for losing a breast. You feel it every time you look in the mirror. Money can’t make up for that.”

THOSE LOOKING FOR A WAY out of the morass of legal and moral issues surrounding America’s nuclear legacy may consider the approach used by Udall for the miners and test-site downwinders. In that instance, Congress was persuaded to act because of the moral weight of the historical facts. Energy Secretary O’Leary says that some people in Congress are interested in righting the wrongs done to others along the atomic trail. But aides to Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), who chairs the committee that oversees weapons factories, say that no compensation is being considered now though they may be interested in the coming months.

Still, O’Leary has held public meetings in the past few months with groups of downwinders, irradiated workers and whistle-blowers. She has also met privately with families who believe that they have been stricken by illness and death caused by the bomb complex. “Previous secretaries never met these people and I think that was a mistake,” O’Leary says in an interview. Some of these meetings have been emotionally wrenching, she says, but she sees them as a necessary part of healing the past.

“President Clinton recognizes this is a serious problem,” she adds. “He has spoken to me about it several times.”

Nevertheless, one of the most seasoned legal minds in this arena remains skeptical. Stewart Udall began fighting for radiation victims in 1978, and he has found what he calls “a galling attitude toward this issue” in every administration since. All along, he says, “the Justice Department has played ‘smash-mouth hardball,’ trying to deny the claimants everything they could.”

“Hazel O’Leary may be sympathetic,” he continues. “But the key department is the Justice Department. I have tried to get (Atty. Gen.) Janet Reno’s attention but have not gotten a response.”

O’Leary’s spokesman, Michael Gauldin, says the entire Administration supports O’Leary’s efforts to right the wrongs ot the nuclear past. “Secretary O’Leary and Atty. Gen. Reno and budget director Leon Panetta have talked about these issues and they are supportive of her,” he says. However, Gauldin says, the compensation program for miners and test-site downwinders is “not a model” for resolving other claims “but something to learn from.” The Administration is moving “methodically because we know people don’t trust the government,” he says, adding that any future attempt to help people injured by the weapons complex “will not be just monetary, but would include something like medical monitoring and something as simple as an apology.”

Udall is pleased that a high-level committee has been formed by the White House to investigate the bomb complex, but he wonders “if they’ll go into a closet for a year until all the furor subsides.”

“There’s an old saying in law: ‘Justice delayed is justice denied,’ ” Udall says. “I’m afraid that is something that could easily happen in these cases. In a sense, it already has.”

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1. For 18 years, Navajo uranium miners in Red Valley, Ariz., were not informed by the government about the radiation hazards of their work. More than 100 in a community of less than 2,000 have died of lung diseases linked to their exposure.

2. Uranium from the Southwest was shipped to sites including the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where it was enriched--refined and blended. Radiation releases from the site over three decades were 59,000 times higher than that at Three Mile Island, and officials are conducting studies to determine the effects on those who lived in the area.

3. In Fernald, Ohio, the uranium was processed into fuel that would be sent to atomic reactors and converted to plutonium. The government has admitted that the plant emitted thousands of tons of radioactive waste into the air, and current and former workers are suing the Fernald plant operators for endangering their health.

4. The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Piketon, Ohio, also supplied enriched uranium to Fernald. It, too, released thousands of pounds of uranium into the air and water, and 300 people are seeking compensation for potential health effects of the pollution, as well as declining property values.

5. The fuel from Ohio became plutonium at the Hanford Atomic Weapons Plant in Washington state. Though the government repeatedly told residents that there was no danger, recently declassified reports show that the plant released roughly a million curies of radiation. Cleanup cost for the site: $2 billion per year.

6. Plutonium from Hanford was milled at Rocky Flats, near Denver, which manufactured the balls of uranium and plutonium used to trigger the bombs’ nuclear chain reactions.

7. Facilities around the country shipped parts to the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Tex., where the final assembly of nuclear weapons took place.

8. Aboveground nuclear tests at the Nevada test site exposed more than 60,000 people to fallout radiation while the government reassured them that the blasts were safe. Childhood leukemia in the fallout region increased 300%.