Where were you and your extended family during the American Nuclear War. My extended family missed the Marshal Islands and New Mexico. Mom was one of the elementary school children in Nevada sent outside to witness the 1951 aerial bombs. Granddad had the pleasure of wiping down the Air Force planes, used to observe the explosions, without any protection or procedures to reduce radiation exposure to him or the family.

Los Vegas

My family was one of the luckier ones. Grandad's pituitary gland quickly responded and the family was sent to San Antonio for medical treatment and then home both outside the major fallout region. My great grandmother who spent days in the medical floor with him was the first cancer fatality. Most military personnel, their families and civilians were responsible for their own medical care in communities across the nation and unaware of their personal amount of radiation exposure. The tragedies of cancers, stillbirths, birth defects, personality disorders, learning disabilities, immune system dysfunction, thyroid problems and other multiple generational problems have been born in isolation by individuals and their families.

Los Angeles

additional pictures

It has taken me three months to read this short excerpt from They Never Knew: The Victims of Atomic Testing by Glenn Alan Cheney. Flashbacks to family events, patients I met in rural Oregon and knowledge where some C99ers have mentioned they live kept flooding my mind.

One hundred and forty-nine atomic bombs have exploded over American soil. No one knows how many people, if any, these bombs have killed. The initial heat and shock of the explosions probably killed no one. Open-air atomic explosions, however, have more lasting and distant effects. They create and release tremendous amounts of highly dangerous radioactive materials. Radiation causes cancer, leukemia, cardiovascular problems, cataracts, immunological weakness, genetic defects, pre-natal problems, mental retardation, and many other problems. Any deaths caused by radiation normally occur only years or decades later. Estimates of deaths worldwide from American, Soviet, British, French and Chinese nuclear tests range from something near zero to several million.
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Since the tests were so important, the AEC did not want to raise protest by revealing possible dangers. It was more important that the public have confidence in its government and the safety of atomic explosions in their country. On the same day that President Truman approved the Nevada Test Site, members of the AEC met to plan not safety but the higher priority issue of public relations. According to a report on the meeting, the talks focused on "the questions of exploring radiological safety aspects in order to make the atom routine in the continental United States and make the public feel at home with atomic blasts and radiation hazards." Years later, a Public Health Service radiation monitor reflected the cynicism of the time when he said, "You can't underestimate the importance of public relations when you are trying to dump radioactive material on people, and we stressed it continually." The surrounding population consisted of nearby ranches and, beyond that, to the east, several small cities and towns in Utah. East of Utah, of course, lay most of the United States. As it would turn out, the radiation was by no means restricted to the Nevada Test Site. Fallout was detected all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and, depending on which way the wind blew, the it also floated north as far as Canada, south as far as Mexico, and west as far as the Pacific Ocean. In fact, the H-bomb tests in the South Pacific also sent detectable and possibly dangerous levels of radiation across the United States, not to mention the rest of the northern hemisphere.

New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.

USA is credited with 1032 of the world's 2053 nuclear bomb explosions between 1945 - 1998.
[video:https://youtu.be/LLCF7vPanrY?t=800]

The Press

As golden anniversaries go, it's a somber occasion. In a forlorn expanse of desert scarcely an hour's drive northwest of Las Vegas, on Jan. 27, 1951, the Nevada Test Site went into operation by exploding an atomic bomb.
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It was a popular theme among prominent commentators like syndicated columnist David Lawrence, whose wisdom appeared in the Washington Post and other leading newspapers. "The truth is," he wrote in spring 1955, "there isn't the slightest proof of any kind that the 'fallout' as a result of tests in Nevada has ever affected any human being anywhere outside the testing ground itself."

By then, children and others living in downwind areas were beginning to develop leukemia. As time passed, people in affected areas suffered extraordinarily high rates of cancer and thyroid ills. Functioning in tandem, the news media and the federal government continued to deny that nuclear testing was a health hazard.

The bombs alone did not provide enough data so direct spraying of radioactive particles was done on population groups..

'The study was secretive for reason. They didn't have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I'll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles,' said Professor Martino-Taylor to KSDK.

Through her research, she found photographs of how the particles were distributed from 1953-1954 and 1963-1965.

In Corpus Christi, the chemical was dropped from airplanes over large swathes of city. In St Louis, the Army put chemical sprayers on buildings, like schools and public housing projects, and mounted them in station wagons for mobile use.
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She (Lisa Martino-Taylor https://www.lisamartinotaylor.com/) accrued hundreds of pages of declassified information, which she has made available online.

In her research, she found that the greatest concentration of spraying in St Louis was at the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, which was home to 10,000 low income residents. She said that 70 per cent of those residents were children under the age of 12.

Professor Martino-Taylor became interested in the topic after hearing independent reports of cancers among city residents living in those areas at the time.

I have not read Professor Martin-Taylors book Behind the Fog yet.

Martino-Taylor said the offensive radiological weapons program was a top priority for the government. Unknowing people in places throughout the US, as well as parts of England and Canada, were subjected to potentially deadly material through open-air spraying, ingestion and injection, Martino-Taylor said.

According to Martino-Taylor, other testing in Chicago; Berkeley, California; Rochester, New York; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, involved injecting people with plutonium-239.

Civilian authority has been required to drop the bomb since WWII.

The day after Nagasaki, Truman issued his first affirmative command regarding the bomb: no more strikes without his express authorization. He never issued the order to drop the bombs, but he did issue the order to stop dropping them.

President Truman gave the orders for testing the effect of nuclear bombs on US civilians, foreign civilians and military personal. First in the Marshal Islands and then on US soil in Nevada. This was after the US military had conducted medical testing on the survivors in Japan.

Unclassified military plans include nuclear bombings to gain control of China and Russia.

The 1964 plan doesn’t specify the anticipated enemy casualty levels, but – as the researchers note – an earlier estimate from 1961 projected that a US attack would kill 71 percent of the residents in major Soviet urban centers and 53 percent of residents in Chinese ones. Likewise, the 1962 estimate predicted the death of 70 million Soviet citizens during a “no-warning US strike” on military and urban-industrial targets.

President Johonson prevented using nuclear bombs during his term.

In one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, the top American military commander in Saigon activated a plan in 1968 to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam until he was overruled by President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to recently declassified documents cited in a new history of wartime presidential decisions.

President Nixon may have talked about using a nuclear bomb in Vietnam, but he did prevent Russia from bombing China.

Then US president Richard Nixon intervenes. Secretary of state Henry Kissinger tells the Soviet ambassador in Washington that as soon as the Soviets set off their first missile against China, the US will launch nuclear missiles at 130 Soviet cities.

President Carter kept quite about the Israeli tests.

On September 22, 1979, US satellite Vela 6911 detected a ‘double flash’ near the Marion and Prince Edward Islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Ever since, there has been speculation that it was actually a nuclear weapon test carried out by Israel. According to the memoirs of then-US President Jimmy Carter, this was also the assumption of American generals who briefed him on the incident.

Nuclear bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow discussing her personal experience of the bombing of Hiroshima.
[video:https://youtu.be/8wUSq92ek-A?t=61]

Why the venture into past history? In July, once again top Democratic leaders spoke out against national healthcare. I rephrased the question "Why can't USA provide national healthcare?" to "How does it benefit the TPTB (the powers that be) to not have a national system?". Answer: it is easier to spot unusual occurrences and trends in a large system collecting mega data when lots of eyes are looking.

Would the radiation testing been discovered earlier by the victims?
or the biologic testing?
Would the military have to move back to doing tests on foreign soils sooner? Georgia?

On a personal note, I discovered the probable answer to why my Mom thought some doctor told her she would loose all her teeth by the time she was thirty, if she lived that long. She was a child at the time, I thought she misunderstood, never considered radiation poisoning. unfortunately I can't ask her, cancer caught up with her when she was 65.

Interesting fact on the use of fluoride in cancer patients receiving radiation to the head and neck.

The patient should be given preventive home care instructions that include rigorous oral hygiene (including interdental techniques such as flossing), daily self-application of topical fluoride, restricted intake of cariogenic foods, and remineralizing mouth rinse solutions or artificial saliva preparations. Daily topical 1.0% sodium fluoride gel application by means of custom-made fluoride carriers is recommended for reducing caries occurrence.[33,34] The classic study by Dreizen et al.[35] showed an application of a 1% neutral sodium fluoride gel applied daily in custom trays could significantly reduce caries in irradiated patients. Neutral fluoride containing mouth rinses have also proved to be beneficial in preventing caries occurrence.