For decades, survivors of our government’s ambitious nuclear weapons program like myself have fought for justice and restitution. We have suffered—and continue to suffer—the ravages of radiation-related illnesses. Our long battle has been fraught with frustration and dashed hopes, but we now find ourselves the closest to justice we have ever been.
Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted more than 200 aboveground tests in New Mexico, Nevada, and the Pacific Ocean. Roughly half of these bombs were detonated in the atmosphere in the Nevada desert, many of them more powerful than those that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blasts spewed radioactive fallout far from the Nevada test site, where it was carried across the country by jet streams and randomly fell to the Earth in rain or snow, then made its way into the food chain and our bodies. Countless ordinary citizens developed cancer and radiation-related illnesses resulting from their exposure.
Growing up in Salt Lake City, I suffered from thyroid cancer and underwent surgery and radiation treatments in my late twenties. I watched my sister take her last breath at age 46 after suffering for nine years with Lupus. Another sister of mine is being treated for a rare stomach cancer. Our youngest sister is plagued with autoimmune disorders. All of these conditions are symptoms of radiation exposure. But despite our illnesses, my family has never been eligible for help from the federal government.
The 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) provided a lifeline to communities exposed to toxic radiation from U.S. nuclear tests and uranium mining. But it excluded far too many downwinders across the American West, as well as those in Guam, which received fallout from U.S. testing in the Pacific, and areas near former nuclear weapons-development sites.
In May, a Senate bill, sponsored by Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, Ben Ray Lujan, Democrat of New Mexico, and Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho, to finally expand RECA, passed with strong bipartisan support. But as the Senate bill languishes in the House of Representatives, RECA has lapsed and faces the possibility of permanently going dark without immediate Congressional action.
If we believe that it’s necessary to invest trillions of dollars in our nuclear defense, then we must also set aside a fraction of those funds to care for our own citizens harmed by these weapons. When signing RECA into law, President George H.W. Bush called it a “fiscally responsible” bill that provides “compassionate payments” for those who were harmed. As Utah Republican Mike Lee said on the Senate floor in May addressing cost concerns, “We don’t just not do this because it’s expensive. The whole thing is expensive. The loss of life is expensive.”
Downwinders are a population that is rapidly shrinking due to time and illness. For us, the Cold War never ended. Given the latency period between exposure and diagnosis, people are still getting sick. Cancers are returning. We face staggering medical bills, and the emotional toll illness takes is devastating. Too many of us have buried and mourned the dead, or lost loved ones and our trust in government—all because our own people were unwittingly sacrificed to the government’s nuclear ambitions.
I have to think our decades of work to correct RECA’s shortcomings have not been in vain. We are now at a unique crossroads. If the Senate bill comes to the House floor for a vote without delay, we have a real chance to see justice done.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.