Museum excludes downwinders

Columnist Lee Benson ("Atomic test museum wins over a Utah visitor," April 8) touts his experience at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas as "positive and enlightening." Granted, the museum is positive in its portrayal of nuclear testing because the victors write history while the victims remain nameless and therefore invisible.

Ultimately, the museum is sadly remiss in its accounting of the devastating human consequences of the nuclear testing "enterprise."

Countless Americans — not just Utahns — were affected by the 904 nuclear tests conducted in Nevada between 1951 and 1992. We'll never know for certain how many of us were downwinders because definitive proof is so difficult to establish.

Too many, however, like my own sister as well as neighbors and friends, likely died as a result of fallout exposure from those atomic blasts. I am in touch with downwinders from across this country who fight for their lives every day and who are convinced the actions of their own government made them sick. Had we become sick or died as soon as those bombs in Nevada exploded, our numbers would have been considered a national catastrophe. Instead, we become a forgotten chapter of American history.

Benson calls the Cold War "a war we won by shooting off bombs at nothing and nobody." His statement is paramount to the government calling us a "low-use segment of the population." I would hardly call hundreds of thousands of Americans living downwind "nobody." Nor would I call the deserts of the West "nothing." Testing a bomb means using a bomb. Those bombs were used, and the people they ended up being used against were us.

A National Cancer Institute study released in 1997 concluded that every county in the continental U.S. received some level of fallout from the tests in Nevada and concluded that as many as 212,000 lifetime cases of thyroid cancer alone may be linked to testing.

Unfortunately, apart from the NCI study, studies that would establish the link between fallout and cancer have been scarce. Even more unfortunately, the CDC recently yanked funding for one long-term study being conducted by University of Utah researcher Dr. Joseph Lyon.

Bill Heller, an Albany, N.Y., journalist, spent more than a decade researching how one nuclear test (Shot Simon, 1953) at the Nevada Test Site rained out 2,300 miles over upstate New York and is still causing health problems there today.

None of this story, however, is included in the Atomic Testing Museum. By excluding our story, the museum is essentially saying we were not only expendable, but that we do not deserve a place in history.