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The extent of Army radiation testing in Utah became
a little clearer last weekend with the release of several documents
kept secret for at least 50 years.
But Utahns still are peering through a cloudy looking glass when
trying to understand how much harm their own government put them in
during the aftermath of World War II.
Placed in the context of other documents uncovered in recent years,
the latest discovery seems likely to be only a small part of the
total.
With the Cold War becoming a distant memory, the time has come for the
government to come clean. Time and a changing world have weakened or
removed all the excuses for keeping such information secret.
Deseret News reporter Lee Davidson pried the latest information from
the government using the federal Freedom of Information Act. What he
found was evidence of up to 600 tests, although the documents revealed
details of only 27 of them. Those details, however, are chilling. They
show the smallest test released 6.7 times the radiation of the Three
Mile Island nuclear reactor disaster near Har-ris-burg, Pa. The
largest test released 2,000 times more.
The tests each released between 1,500 and 30,000 curies of radiation.
A curie, named for Madam Curie, is a measure of radioactivity. One
curie is about the most she ever was exposed to in her lab, and she
died from leukemia.
While the 27 tests were confined to small areas at the Dugway Proving
Ground, radiation may have been spread by wind, or it may have worked
its way into the food supply as animals ingested radioactive pellets
or dust specks.
Add this to evidence discovered in recent years of germ-weapons tests,
nerve-agent releases during an accident in 1968 and above-ground
nuclear explosions in nearby Nevada, and a disturbing picture emerges
of a government so obsessed with countering a Soviet threat that it
placed many of its own citizens at risk.
Utahns deserve to know the full extent of these tests, and they
deserve to know what the federal government intends to do about it.
The Deseret News has asked for more detailed information. However,
officials at the Defense Department say compiling the data would
require a lot of research and won't be done in the immediate future.
The whole matter seems low on the government's priority list.
But the government won't be allowed to get away with such responses
for long. Utahns clearly were not the only victims of radiation
testing during the early years of the Cold War. President Clinton has
ordered the formation of a commission that will study the extent of
all such test
Let's hope the truth is known before the entire generation that
suffered from these tests has passed on. |
