#xxix Beyond Citations | Remembering the dark days of nuclear explosive testing
How adverse health impacts from the Nevada test site were covered up by the US nuclear machinery
It all started with yet another Truth Social post by US president Trump. But this time it was not about imposing tariffs or threatening political opponents. Rather, it was about the most destructive weapons humankind has ever developed — nuclear weapons. Trump wants the US to resume nuclear testing after a halt of more than 30 years.
He posted this just before he met Chinese president Xi and ended up giving a number of concessions to the latter on supply chain warfare. One theory, propounded by Shekhar Gupta, editor of ThePrint, for instance, is that Trump posted a ‘shockingly disjointed’ truth ‘because he figured that he was being jujitsu-ed by China.’ Another theory is that Trump was responding to the Russian testing of a nuclear-powered and nuclear capable cruise missile. Or, maybe, Trump knows more through his intelligence apparatus which might be warning him about non-zero-yield nuclear tests being conducted by nuclear haves like China, Russia or Pakistan?
Beyond motivations, there’s a debate raging about what Trump means by nuclear testing? Is it non-critical explosions for testing associated systems, as the energy secretary has suggested? Or, is it about resuming nuclear testing underground or overground in a major way?
Irrespective of the motivations and the mechanics of nuclear testing, some predictable actors — apart from multitude of nuclear experts and disarmament activists globally — are deeply concerned about the revival of nuclear testing. Ask political representatives from the state which witnessed hundreds of nuclear test explosions at the infamous Nevada Test Site (now called Nevada National Security Site). A group of senators and representatives has already written to Trump and other key nuclear figures in the administration reminding the latter about the ‘darkest chapters in Nevada’s history’. And they do not mince their words; their letter begins as follows:
We write to express our outrage and unequivocal opposition to President Trump’s reckless directive to resume explosive nuclear weapons testing and to demand clarification.
Ask how the ‘downwinders’in the state of Utah, who were deeply impacted by radiation fallout from open-air tests, feel about the potential resumption of nuclear tests, even if underground?
There is a reason why the biggest opposition to explosive nuclear testing would come from within the US. For decades, multiple administrations either lied to or suppressed information about the actual impact of nuclear testing.
The following 1999 journal article documents the efforts of US nuclear machinery in suppressing the real harm from testing to the residents of the state of Utah:
Lyon, J. L. (1999). Nuclear Weapons Testing and Research Efforts to Evaluate Health Effects on Exposed Populations in the United States. Epidemiology, 10(5), 557–560. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3703346
Joseph L. Lyon is no ordinary author. As a scientist, he investigated and documented the prevalence of cancer in Utah due to radiation exposure from the Nevada Test Site (NTS). According to Lyon:
Between 1951-1958 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission detonated over 100 nuclear weapons at its test site in the Nevada desert. At least 25 of these detonations produced measurable radioactive fallout in populated areas of Utah and states farther north and east. One test in particular, Shot Harry, that detonated about 5:15 am on the morning of May 19, 1953, accounted for about 80% of the total radiation deposited in southwestern Utah.
It was not as if the US government was not aware of the concerns surrounding the adverse health impacts of radioactive fallout. Lyon discusses two studies conducted by the US Public Health Service 1960s onwards in southwestern Utah.
The first study ‘found a 3.29-fold excess among those under 19 years of age and a 1.5-increased risk of leukemia among residents of all ages’ when investigating deaths from leukemia in the period 1950-1964 in two counties in Utah that were closest to the NTS. The figures were alarming, but strangely the researchers did not link the higher prevalence with elevated doses of radiation that the residents may have received from the NTS. But even without the explicit linkage, the study findings were alarming enough for the US administrative machinery that its publication was blocked. As Lyon notes:
I believe the decision to do nothing after finding excess leukemia deaths among young people living in the two Utah counties that were known to have been most heavily exposed to NTS fallout was even more reprehensible than the decision to suppress the original paper. It meant that every Government official who thereafter offered reassurances to the people of Utah that there had been no cancers caused by radiation was knowingly or unknowingly lying to the public.
The design of the second study focusing on the thyroid neoplasms was rigged in a way that the findings were not inconsistent with the reassuring message that the authorities were spreading in the affected communities.
Even the study published by Lyon (in collaboration with other researchers) in 1979 in the New England Journal of Medicine invited disapproval from the US government. Unknowing expanding on the finding of the suppressed US government study discussed above, they found:
Children born in southern Utah between 1951-1958 experienced 2.44 as many deaths from leukemia as children born before and after above-ground bomb testing.
Even Lyon’s 1990 study that had some concerning data was spun as ‘inconclusive’. Lyon aptly summed up the pattern he noticed with how the US nuclear system dealt with the radioactive fallout studies:
The basic principles practiced are as follows: suppress any data that suggest a positive association between nuclear fallout and subsequent development of cancer in exposed populations; state as the motive for suppressing findings that the exposed population should not be alarmed unduly; cite only those studies that did not find an association so that those concerned can be reassured that their concerns are groundless; if positive results are reported, label them as inconclusive; do everything possible to ensure that no further scientific study is conducted that might contradict the official position of a lack of association.
It is for this reason that Trump’s statements about nuclear testing are bound to raise deep suspicion and fears in the state of Nevada and Utah, especially in counties that are located near the test site. Underground testing would not fully alleviate concerns, as even these may lead to ‘radioactive leakage in the air and soil’.