Mary Dickson: Nevada Test Site Downwinder

Growing up a child of the Cold War in Salt Lake City, Utah, I ate vegetables from the garden, drank milk from a local dairy and ate the snow we mixed with sugar to pretend it was ice cream, having no idea that a silent poison was threading its way through my body. 

I watched as my eight-year-old friend came to school with her head shaved as a result of a brain tumor that soon would take her life, as her four-year-old brother died of testicular cancer just weeks later, and as other neighbors developed cancer and strange tumors. 

I was 29 when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Two other people I knew had thyroidectomies about the same time I did.  The diagnoses kept coming and they haven’t stopped. Growing up, we thought cancer and strange tumors were just another fact of life. 

I keep a growing list of people from the Salt Lake City neighborhood of my childhood who have become sick or died. It now numbers 54 and includes my older sister who died at 46 of lupus, my younger sister who is battling a rare stomach cancer, and another sister who is riddled with autoimmune disorders. 

Now, friends I worked with for years as an activist in support of victims of nuclear testing have died of their cancers. Sometimes I feel like I am forever piling up losses. 

I carry a laminated, credit card sized map of the United States in my wallet. From Richard L. Miller’s book, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing, it shows how far radioactive fallout went during the years of atmospheric testing when 100 nuclear bombs – all more powerful than those that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were exploded above ground in the desert of Nevada near the Utah-Nevada border. The black ink spreads all the way to upstate New York and into Canada, where it had devastating health consequences for unsuspecting Americans living downwind. After atmospheric testing ended in 1962, it moved underground until 1992 – some of the tests leaking large plumes of radioactive fallout into the air. 

I carry Miller’s map in my wallet to bear witness to what our own government did to us in the name of national defense and as a reminder to remain vigilant.  I know what fallout from nuclear testing did to people living in those areas of black on Miller’s map. I comfort those people, I mourn them, I am one of them. We were the expendable victims of the Cold War, lied to by a government that systematically covered up the truth about fallout.

This country has a responsibility to make right the injustices of the past.  Downwinders – too many of them already dead – have waited far too long for justice.  More importantly, 75 years after our use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we must resolve to do everything we can to rid the world at last of nuclear weapons.