Prospect of Nuclear testing stirs memories, fears

Fifty years ago, Karen Turner Martin would toddle outside with her family to watch brightly colored remnants of atomic bomb mushroom clouds drift over the red rocks of southern Utah.

Children from that time and place, including Martin, never have forgotten their awe at those Cold War atomic tests just over the border in Nevada. Nor have they recovered from the shock of betrayal years later, when they learned the government knew the tests were dangerous but told people they were safe.

Today these so-called downwinders — named for the winds that carried atomic debris from the Nevada Test Site to other areas in the 1950s and 1960s — still are searching for a full accounting of how many people were subjected to fallout and what happened to their health.

It isn't just a matter of setting the historical record straight. To this day, people exposed to fallout during atomic tests are developing cancer and other illnesses they believe were caused by radioactive elements.

Martin, 53 and a mother of five, is among them. Doctors recently found a tumor on her thyroid, and she's having a biopsy in a few weeks.

Deja vu

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's plans to spend millions of dollars upgrading the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas is provoking deja vu and anxiety among downwinders. The administration has also budgeted millions of dollars to design "bunker buster" nuclear bombs and light-yield new nuclear weapons. The 2004 federal budget appropriated $25 million for improving readiness at the site, but officials say there are no plans to test new weapons.

"Before this country spends another red bloody dime on nuclear weapons, it needs to take care of all the citizens who became unknowing victims" during the Cold War, Martin said this past week, days after former President Bill Clinton warned of the dangers of new nuclear weapons in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

"The public needs to know what happened to us so they can ask themselves, 'Do we want to go down this road again?' " said Preston Truman, 53, whose first memory is of sitting on his father's lap in Enterprise, Utah, and listening to horses panic as a reddish cloud from a bomb blast filled the sky. Truman heads a national group of downwinders opposed to new nuclear testing.

However distant, the prospect of renewed nuclear testing evokes such passion here that it has become an issue in Utah's 2nd Congressional District race. The Republican Party has identified the contest as its best chance nationwide at grabbing a House seat from the Democrats.