But for the people who lived in these towns — moms and dads, farmers, teachers, businessmen and schoolkids — the toxic inheritance of these bombs still pays heavy interest today.

Four and five decades after bombs lit the sky 130 miles from Utah's Washington County, their heirs come today in cancers and tumors, in an impermeable mistrust of government and safety, and in the memories of bloody tears shed by children who died because of these atomic blasts.

"People who live here and go to funerals every week, we can't sit here and talk about it like we're talking about broccoli." — Michelle Thomas, 48, St. George.

It takes Thomas several minutes to walk a few yards over to her parents' grave site.

Her legs are heavy against the drag of thick cemetery grasses. The crippling disease is paralyzing her muscle groups, and although her brain asks her leg to lift and move forward, the muscles muster only a bumpy ride along the ground for her feet. One at a time, slow, slow.

Finally she arrives at the grave site of Irma Selina Nelson Thomas, the legendary anti-nuclear bomb activist who died in 1991. Thomas' mother. Her father Hyrum is here also, indeed everywhere she turns is a grave site that radiates memories and frustrations about the government's 12-year run of atomic tests.

"My aunt and uncle, there," Thomas directs her cane to the west. "They were downwinders. And my cute cousin over there too. . . .

"And those kids," she says, now gesturing to the north. "Didn't they have leukemia or was it Hodgkin's?" She's asking herself questions now, mentally running through decades of faces and cancers and illness.

She is emotional. Years and years of living with her own sicknesses and the poor health of others are taking their toll. "It's the constancy of it," Thomas says. "Every time I go out, I see someone else my age that's dying."

"My mom had a big chart and within a three-block radius it was amazing how many people got cancers. The Reichmans, the Freis, the Hafens, the Bradshaws, the Thompsons. Then there were cluster births and cases of sterility and Down's Syndrome. She tracked it all and marked it with an X on the map. When I got diagnosed with my muscle disease, she put an X on our house." — Michelle Thomas

Back when she was a child, Thomas did not appreciate her mother's crusading. Irma Thomas talked about dangers from the bombs incessantly. She wore rubber gloves and a mask and rewashed her sheets if they were out on the line when a fallout cloud passed.

"Everyone thought she was a lunatic," her daughter says now.

As it turns out, she had a right to be.