Are Utah fallout stories grossly exaggerated?

As a retired physics professor who has spent the majority of his life in and around a place that has been called "American Ground Zero," "America's Most Lethal Secret" and "An American Nuclear Tragedy," Daniel W. Miles of Washington County, Utah, is in the decided minority when he says the tortured stories of "downwinders" are mostly just urban myth: alarming, horrible and sad but also grossly overstated and largely untrue.

"People in this area believe hundreds and hundreds of people died from fallout," says Miles, who received his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Utah in 1967 before teaching physics over nearly four decades at Westminster College and Dixie College. "I estimate that it was maybe five to 10."

His estimates are based on scientific data compiled by researchers who have systematically combed through southern Utah medical records and death statistics from 1952 through 1981 — a time period extensive enough to chronicle most of the resultant damages from atmospheric nuclear testing that took place "upwind" at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 through 1958.

While it is possible — although not a proven statistical fact — that St. George and the surrounding area experienced an increased cancer rate during that period, Miles says the data suggest it was very slight. Certainly it was considerably less than the 5 percent cancer increase verifiably recorded among survivors of the atomic bombs that fell on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945.

"The truth is, the scientific community that does research in this area has never been interested in using St. George data to provide risk estimates for the danger of radiation," says Miles. "The percentages are too small. If Japan had a 5 percent increase in their rates, where the exposure was 10 times greater, why should we expect anything more than a 1 or 2 percent increase?"

If you think Miles is making sense, you're in good company. The Forum on Physics & Society, a quarterly publication of the American Physical Society, has published an article he has written on the subject in its October newsletter.

In "The Great Fallout-Cancer Story of 1978 and Its Aftermath," Miles presents his case that pits science against anecdote. He charts his personal history growing up in St. George during the above-ground nuclear tests in the 1950s and largely rebuffs the popular tales that have become accepted fact over the years about "children playing in fallout snow," "hair loss," "skin burns" and "paint burned off the hoods of trucks."

More to the point, he rebuffs the extension of these anecdotes: that fallout-caused death and destruction have plagued Washington County and the surrounding area ever since.