Radioactive Clouds of Death Over Utah: Downwinders Fallout Cancer Epidemic Updated

RADIOACTIVE CLOUDS OF DEATH OVER UTAH

From 1950 to the 1958 moratorium on atmospheric testing, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated over 100 atomic bombs at the Nevada Test Site. The inhabitants of St. George, Utah--the so-called downwinders--were repeatedly in the fly zone of these toxic, windblown clouds--so much so that St. George became known nationwide as Fallout City, USA.

In the fall of 1979, Stewart Udall, along with a team of lawyers, came to St. George to announce plans for a class-action lawsuit against the United States because the local people were struggling with tragedies inflicted by a cancer epidemic foisted on them by the Atomic Energy Commission. After interviewing 125 people during a four-day period, the Washington lawyer said that cancer rates in the area were three or four times greater than normal.

Many people in southwestern Utah believe that thousands of citizens throughout the West are still dying from radiation-exposure inflicted on them by fallout from the Nevada Test Site during the 1950s.

The author has spent decades investigating the Test Site issues. He was living in St. George, Utah during the atmospheric testing period in the 1950s. He knows the people. He has read every local paper from the period, counted the tombstones, tracked the anecdotes to ground and studied the dozens of scientific studies on the impact of fallout on the health of the local people. This book is the result of that investigation.

The author, Dr. Daniel W. Miles, Professor Emeritus, Dixie State College, received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1967. He taught upper division physics including radiation physics at Westminster College from 1968 to 1985 and continued his teaching career at Dixie State College. He is the author or coauthor of fortytwo publications in peer reviewed scientific journals.