Just last April, after sifting through countless scientific studies and taking testimony from experts and downwinders, the National Academy of Sciences Board on Radiation Effects Research acknowledged that because fallout affected people in every county in the country, limiting compensation to geographic boundaries makes no sense.

The rub has always been in the proof. Definitively establishing cause and effect, as any scientist will tell you, is impossible, whether it be fallout causing a myriad of health ills or smoking causing lung cancer. What scientists can show is a clear correlation as well as a high probability that one leads to the other.

We will never know for certain how many downwinders were created by nuclear testing. But we can be certain that fallout from 100 atmospheric tests and 828 underground tests made far more than five to 10 Americans sick. The government, incidentally, conceded that 11,000 cancer deaths during the years of testing were related to fallout.

A reliance on numbers, however, overshadows the truth of our lives. The compelling testimony of American downwinders is important evidence. Our bearing witness to the painful facts of our nation's past does not represent an inability to "separate fact from fiction," nor is it a recantation of "popular tales," as Benson implies. Our surgeries, suffering, radiation and chemotherapy treatments are very real. The death of our loved ones are not fiction. The headstones in cemeteries are not anecdotes; they are the only plaques downwinders have to the casualties of the Cold War.

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Mary Dickson of Salt Lake City is the author of "Downwinders All" in the anthology "Learning to Glow, A Nuclear Reader."