I am a downwinder. Like many Americans, I grew up under the clouds of fallout from nuclear testing.
I was raised in Utah, drinking milk from a nearby dairy, eating fresh vegetables from the garden, mixing sugar with snow to pretend it was ice cream, and playing in puddles of rainwater. How were any of us to know that a silent poison was threading its way through our bodies?
Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. government tested more than 920 nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. An estimated 100 of those were detonated above ground. Atmospheric testing was banned in 1962, but the tests didn’t stop—they were moved underground.
Radiation does not respect arbitrary lines on a map. Material from the explosions was picked up by the shifting winds and carried to nearby cities such as St. George, and then across the country, where it fell to the ground in rain and snow and worked its way into the food chain. That’s how it reached and was measured in Salt Lake City, the Midwest, and even New York state—2,500 miles from the Nevada Test Site. We know now that exposure to this radioactive fallout can cause cancer.
My personal world shifted the spring before my 30th birthday when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a cancer associated with fallout exposure. The news was even worse with these two words: “It’s malignant.”