Unmasking the Myth : While fighting for uranium miners, Stewart Udall came to startling conclusions about U.S. nuclear policy.

Stewart Udall is talking about 50 years of secrecy and deception by government officials obsessed with nuclear weapons, when he is interrupted by a phone call.

He spends several minutes in the next room talking to the family of one of hundreds of uranium miners he has represented in a 16-year legal battle with the federal government.

Udall returns looking glum.

“A new diagnosis of lung cancer,” he says. “They just keep coming in.”

The miners, many of them Navajos, were exposed to deadly concentrations of radon gas 40 years ago while digging uranium ore in several southwestern states for the nation’s expanding nuclear arsenal. The link between the radioactive gas and incidence of lung disease was established and, according to testimony before Congress in the late 1970s, the government knew many miners would develop cancer and other lung ailments, but never warned them of the risk.

Udall, a former congressman and Secretary of the Interior, led a drive for legislation after federal judges dismissed lawsuits brought by miners and cancer-plagued “down-winders” (people who lived near the Nevada Test Site) on grounds of sovereign immunity--the doctrine that the government cannot be sued without its consent.

Since 1992, the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has made reparations to some sick miners and survivors, but many claims are being rejected.

“They’re interpreting this law very strictly and denying half of them,” Udall says. “The Justice Department operates on the assumption that people would lie in order to qualify. That assumption is outrageous when you understand the Navajo Indians and their culture.”

Helene Goldberg, director of the Justice Department branch that administers the program, concedes that half the claims have been rejected, but says many of them were for illnesses not covered by the legislation.

“We have consistently gotten these criticisms from Mr. Udall and they’re just not founded,” Goldberg says. “More than occasionally, someone doesn’t qualify, but those eligibility standards were set by Congress.” The program has dispersed close to $200 million since 1992.

Udall, who took the cases on a contingent fee basis, paid for the expenses of litigation through fund raising and out of his own pocket and for years received no legal fees. He now receives fees out of the compensation program limited by law to 10% of whatever his clients are awarded.

Why did Udall, who earns a modest income from lecturing, writing and legal work, stick with the miners? “Where I come from, if you take on a job, you finish it,” he says. “Particularly when you look at the tragedy inflicted on these people--I just couldn’t let it go.”

Udall’s outrage at this and every other aspect of U.S. nuclear policy is expressed in his new book, “The Myths of August” (Pantheon), which grew out of his handling of the uranium miners’ claims.

Subtitled “A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom,” the book portray’s Udall’s view that leaders and scientists, intoxicated by the awesome power of nuclear weapons, forged a secret “national security state” answerable to no one.

His most startling conclusion is that, decades of official assurances to the contrary, there was no military need for the United States to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the assaults that ended the war with Japan in August, 1945.

For Udall personally, the 11 years he spent researching and writing the book forced an anguished reassessment of his heroes, including Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

At 74, Udall is well-suited to his subject.

He experienced war as a gunner aboard a B-24 bomber in World War II. He later became a lawyer, and in the 1950s served three terms as an Arizona congressman. As Secretary of the Interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Udall helped preserve vast tracts of wilderness and write far-reaching environmental legislation.

“I’m a preacher,” he confesses. “My wife says I preach too much.”

*

Udall’s passion for public policy debate is remarkable, given that he has been out of government for a quarter-century. He left Washington in 1979 for Phoenix to work on the uranium miner cases. Lee, his wife of 47 years, and four of their six children assisted as investigators and by doing legal work. The Udalls settled in Santa Fe a few years ago to be near several children and grandchildren (son Tom is New Mexico’s attorney general).

Despite his liberal political leanings and willingness to skewer sacred cows, Udall is the product of an old-fashioned upbringing.

He grew up in St. John’s, a town of 1,200 in northeastern Arizona not far from the Zuni and Navajo reservations.

Udall’s father was a Mormon lay leader and country lawyer who became chief justice of Arizona. With his five siblings (including brother Morris, who would succeed him in Congress), Stewart lived on a small subsistence farm.

“The Myths of August” relates Udall’s Cold War odyssey. Like many in his generation, he accepted the rationale for the arms race. Then he visited the Soviet Union in 1962, the first member of Kennedy’s Cabinet to do so.

Accompanied by his friend, the poet Robert Frost, Udall took an 11-day tour, meeting engineers and others who were developing the country’s resources. He and Frost also met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

“The center of Cold War thinking was that the Soviet Union was a monolith and it was reaching out to dominate the world,” Udall says. “I didn’t see any hostility. I didn’t sense any.”

A few years later, Udall watched skeptically as Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam.

“Most of us in the domestic side of the Cabinet in those last five years under Johnson were doves,” Udall says. “I think he knew that, but our opinions weren’t sought.”

*

By the time Udall took the miner cases in the late 1970s, his conversion to distrust of government was complete.

“Just having to dig out the facts about these tragedies made me question all my assumptions,” he says. “The harder I looked at it, the more I saw this culture. They proudly lied because they were patriots defending the nation.”

“The Myths of August” is most riveting when Udall probes the use of atomic bombs on Japan in August, 1945.

It has long been said that if the bombs had not been used, as many as a million Americans would have died invading the Japanese home islands. But according to materials Udall cites from the National Archives, secret military estimates at the time put the number at between 20,000 and 46,000 deaths in action--if an invasion were needed.

“One of the myths of August is we faced another year of a brutal war if we didn’t do it,” Udall says. “You talk to anybody who was a soldier in that war. It’s embedded in their mind that the bomb ended the war and saved their lives.”

But Japan was already defeated. With its Navy lying at the bottom of the Pacific and Allied bombers established within easy range of the home island, Japan could not import the petroleum and raw materials needed to continue fighting. It was only a matter of time before Japan capitulated, Udall argues.

Udall thinks the man most responsible for the bombings, which killed more than 100,000 Japanese civilians, was Stimson, a distinguished elder statesman who had honorably served a long line of Presidents, beginning with William Taft.

“I think the war lasted three months longer, with all the killing and everything else, because he thought it was important to see what kind of weapon this was,” Udall says.

*

In the months after the bombing and Japan’s surrender, another of what Udall regards as the myths of August, 1945 took shape: a well-orchestrated government public relations effort to tout the peaceful use of atomic energy. The promise of cheap, reliable energy led to the headlong construction of heavily subsidized nuclear power plants in the 1960s.

Also, with the onset of the Cold War, the development of bigger, better nuclear weapons took on new urgency. Yet the whole process was shrouded in secrecy, overseen by the Atomic Energy Commission, Udall says.

“The AEC people really developed an attitude that they were the front line of defense,” he says.

The first casualties of that mind-set were American ideals of honesty and fair play, Udall says.

The Cold War era “was really a replication of World War II,” he says. “Deception became a way of life. They justified it on the basis that this was a war situation and you had to sacrifice morality.”

Some scholars who have studied the origins of America’s nuclear policy question Udall’s conclusions. John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who studies nuclear policy, contends that the development and deployment of nuclear weapons maintained the peace, brought the Soviets to their knees and helped preserve a civilian-controlled government in the United States.

“Nuclear weapons are the ideal middle-class weapons for Americans,” he says. “They provide massive amounts of deterrence on the cheap. If we hadn’t had nuclear weapons, we would have had to have a much larger conventional army.”

Mearsheimer also thinks that the emphasis Udall and others have placed on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is misplaced, because the March 10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more than 80,000 civilians, was easily as destructive.

Mearsheimer says critics of America’s Cold War strategy have forgotten how serious the Soviet threat once appeared.

“Now that the Cold War is over with, it’s kind of hard to take the Soviet Union seriously,” he says. “We won, period. We ran them into the ground and that was the name of the game. It was a strategy of preponderance.”

With “The Myths of August” behind him, Udall still represents miners with claims under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. He still spends most mornings writing. He tends to legal business in the afternoon, checking in with his youngest son, Jay, who runs the office, interviews clients, and researches medical records and employment histories.

“My dad doesn’t pay a lot of attention to details,” Jay confides. “He’s the heavy hitter when the Justice Department needs a tongue-lashing.”

*

Lately Udall senior has been trying to get the compensation law liberalized by arguing that the miners were really subjects of a gruesome medical experiment.

Udall keeps a low profile locally out of deference to his attorney general son, but he recently joined other residents in dissuading actress Shirley MacLaine from building a controversial home on 37 acres of ridge-top land adjoining the national forest.

He also couldn’t resist proffering political advice to Roberto Mondragon, a former Democratic lieutenant governor running for governor on the Green Party ticket.

Meanwhile, he’s learning to enjoy the perspective that accompanies elder statesman status.

“The great advantage of old age,” he says, “if you keep your mind open and lively and thinking and arguing, is you can see more of the landscape.”