THOUSANDS STILL DYING FROM CANCER IN THE WEST
In a narrow sense, a "downwinder" is a person who lived or lives in southwestern Utah, Nevada and parts of Arizona, Montana and Idaho during the above ground nuclear testing era. However, the term really applies to far more people than that, a group of citizens labeled "low use segment of the population" during the Eisenhower administration. Specifically, the topic is above-ground nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950's, in which the government knowingly released toxic clouds of radioactive dust into the air. More than 90 Above-ground nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site during those years produced radioactive fallout that drifted over the region, exposing an estimated
22,000 people in the southwestern part of Utah. Testing in Nevada did not conclude until 1992, after more than
700 tests.
That's alot of people. Imagine what we would do to terrorists responsible for such and act. But this was the US Government. Thuis was not during a time of "war", although the atmosphere during the McCarthy/Hoover era was similar to that manufactured by the Bush administration.
During the 20th Century, the government of the United States conducted numerous experiments on its citizens in scenarios that would embarrass the author of a 1950's Nazi Scare comic book. Perhaps the most disturbing is the Tuskegee Study, a project that charted the stages of untreated syphillis in black men in Alabama.
Read about the Tuskegee
Study
