Nuclear Attack in Kingman, Arizona

“We were watching history being made,” says Eleanore Fanire, thinking back 50 years to her childhood days in Kingman, and back to the days when Route 66 was still America’s favorite highway. “The teachers told us it was like a science project, and we’d stand in the schoolyard and watch.”

She and her classmates were learning firsthand that light travels faster than sound, as they saw the “bright yellow” flash before they ever heard the “boom.” To this day, she doesn’t need to close her eyes to see the brilliant mushroom cloud that rose up, up, up and ignited the sky less than 150 miles away. And she clearly remembers the “pink dust” that always came after the glow, clinging to the sweaters and jackets and shoes of children who giggled with glee at such an unbelievable sight.

Sometimes there were Geiger counters at the school doors, and the needle would swing wildly, and some kids were chosen to wear badges that measured radiation, but nobody was concerned. “The government said this was safe, that there was no-thing to worry about,” Fanire recalls. “The tests were like a celebration – in Las Vegas, they served ‘boom burgers’ on test days. Our teachers didn’t know, either.”

From the time she was 8 years old until she was a high school graduate – from 1952 through 1963 – Fanire and her family and friends saw that scene again and again and again. And for a long time, standing in the schoolyard watching a nuclear bomb explode at the Nevada Test Site was one of those happy childhood memories of growing up in Kingman. Just like those Saturday street dances, where everyone brought potluck and made the town feel like a family.

“Nobody ever thought the government would poison its own people,” Fanire says now, with both sadness and anger.

The cancers came 10, 15, 20 years later, taking one person after another, showing up in the children eventually born to those kids on the playground. They say you can walk down Spring Street, with its lovely antique architecture, and recite the cancers house by house.
Experts say five generations will suffer before all that radiation will finally stop its slaughter.

For Fanire, the effects are felt in first person. By the time she was 33, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer – she’s now in remission. By the time she was in her mid-50s, she’d lost her father and mother and brother to cancer. Then, at the age of 11 months, her granddaughter was diagnosed with leukemia. As Fanire approaches 60, she says, “Half my high-school classmates are gone.” And she hasn’t even suffered the most.

That dubious distinction goes to Danielle Stephens. As a teenager, this fourth-generation rancher would saddle-up “Bommer” and ride with her dad and uncle, brother and cousin to a mountain on their property. They had an unobstructed view of the spectacular plume that reminded her mom of the aurora borealis. They thought nothing of it when the pink dust hit them, even though her dad was suspicious.

Stephens eventually lost her father to both kidney and colon cancer; she lost that uncle, Dale Cofer, to throat cancer; she lost that cousin, Clint, to lung cancer; and her brother has prostate cancer. Although she herself isn’t sick, she lost her 36-year-old daughter to an illness so mysterious that nobody ever really figured out what it was. At last count, not including her daughter, Stephens has lost 26 of 31 family members to cancer, a number so stunning – a reality so awful – that when she talks of it now, it’s through the fog of unbearable pain.

“Nobody has lost as many family members in a war,” she says. “Not even the Sullivan family in World War II – they lost five brothers and two cousins. I’ve lost more than that right here in Kingman.”

The mothers, the fathers, the sons, the daughters, the aunts, the uncles… they’re called “Downwinders,” and their story is a piece of American history that’s hard to comprehend. Perhaps even more perplexing, however, is the fact that history is about to repeat itself – the federal government wants to resume nuclear testing at the same test site.

The funding for the program was buried in the military appropriation that provided money for the troops in Iraq. It’s gone mostly unnoticed, but the appropriation, which totals approximately $34 million, is in place to remodel the Nevada Test Site and prepare it for tests of the “new” nuclear bombs that America plans to develop – bombs that have already received millions of dollars in research money.

Although the appropriation hasn’t been front-page news, the Downwinders of Mohave County are well aware of it, and they have two simple questions for their president and their congressional delegates: What in the world are you doing, and haven’t we suffered enough already?

Even those who lived through it are astonished to learn the extent of the federal government’s nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. The numbers are unbelievable. Consider this: The “Little Boy” H-bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, was 20 kilotons – the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. It killed 66,000 people and injured at least as many. The “Fat Man” H-bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, was another 20 kilotons. It killed 39,000, with an equal number of casualties.

But starting just seven years after that war ended and going on for more than a decade, the United States government exposed Americans to 50 times more radiation than was released with either of the bombs dropped on Japan – unleashing in the Nevada desert 129 above-ground nuclear tests totaling 986 kilotons. That’s the equivalent of 986,000 tons of TNT.

Some bombs were set off at night – Fanire remembers them lighting up the sky like a “giant firecracker.” Some came in the early morning, and some in the midday. And almost every one of those tests was scheduled during the school year.

As it turned out, those atmospheric tests sent fallout across most of the United States, reaching all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Today, the Centers for Disease Control says that everyone living in the contiguous U.S. since 1951 has been exposed to radiation fallout from those tests.

But the worst of the fallout was in the Southwest, including six counties in Northern Arizona. (In addition to the above-ground tests, 804 underground tests – some of which breached the surface and created their own atmospheric plumes – were conducted into the 1980s.)

The devastating cancers that came later were so obviously tied to those tests that in 1990, Congress approved settlement payments to the victims of America’s nuclear testing program. Congress decided that each death was worth $50,000 to the immediate family. Parents could collect on dead children; children on parents; spouses on each other. But not sisters for brothers, nephews for aunts.

Congress also decided that only a very small area – some of Utah and Nevada, and just a sliver of land known as the “Arizona Strip” – would be covered. Amendments in 2000 added the Arizona counties of Yavapai, Gila, Apache, Navajo and Coconino, but amazingly, not Mohave County, even though it is the closest Arizona county to ground zero, and records some of the highest cancer rates in the state.

Governor Janet Napolitano and several state lawmakers are trying to get Mohave County included in another amendment – trying to get compensation for the people who have given their lives for their country – but for the most part, the Downwinders of Mohave County have been left to fend for themselves.

A magazine in Spain recently ran a feature story on the Downwinders. They called it “America’s Chernobyl.” So, in Spain, they know, but here in the U.S., most people are clueless about the Downwinders – or that there were catastrophic side effects of the government’s aggressive nuclear-testing program after World War II.

Back then, national newsmagazines printed pictures of people sitting on lawn chairs at the test site, their eyes covered with dark glasses, watching the show. Back then, newspapers would reassure the public with pronouncements from the Atomic Energy Commission that the nuclear tests were harmless.

“‘Baby’ A-Blast May Provide Facts on Defense Against Atomic Attack,” the Las Vegas Sun waxed eloquent before a test in March 1955. A few days later, it noted that “fallout on Las Vegas and vicinity following this morning’s detonation was very low and without any effects on health.”

It would be easy to surmise that the government just didn’t know the danger of an atomic bomb, but this country had al-ready used similar bombs in Japan. And even though the public knew very little about the horrors of those bombs – relieved instead that they led to Japan’s surrender – those inside the government were well aware of what radiation did to human beings.

Cancer researcher Dr. Alan R. Cantwell Jr. put it this way in a recent magazine article: “In the nuclear arms race, government doctors and scientists brainwashed the public into believing low-dose radiation was not harmful. Some officials even tried to convince people that ‘a little radiation is good for you.’ But totally ignored was the knowledge that the radiation from nuclear fallout could lead to an increased risk of cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, immune system diseases, reproductive abnormalities, sterility, birth defects and genetic mutations…. The full extent of this radiation damage to the American public during the Cold War years will never be known.”

The test site sat in the middle of federal land – in an area without a dense population – and records show that tests were timed so the winds would carry radiation away from Los Angeles. Records also reveal one contemptuous bureaucrat surmising that the site was an area containing “a low-use segment of the population.”

Although no one knows for sure, some believe the tests even led to the death of an American icon – John Wayne. His death from lung cancer was attributed to his smoking, but historians have noted that he and 90 other people on the Utah set of The Conqueror in 1954 developed various types of cancer.

Fourteen years ago, the federal government owned up to what it had done, thanks in large part to the work of former Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Wayne Owens. Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was signed by the first President Bush. In addition to the Downwinders, it compensates workers at the Nevada Test Site and uranium miners.

The legislation states in part: “Congress recognizes that the lives and health of uranium miners and of innocent individuals who lived downwind from the Nevada tests were involuntarily subjected to in-creased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interest of the United States…. The Congress apologizes on be-half of the Nation to the individuals… and their families for the hardships they have endured.”

To date, nearly $660 million has been distributed to almost 16,000 victims and their families. However, not a penny has gone to the Mohave County victims, and it appears they’ve been left out by an unimaginable mistake – a typo.

Someone back in Washington, D.C., misspelled “Mohave” County, which in Arizona is spelled with an “h.” Instead of “Mo-have,” it was spelled “Mojave,” with a “j,” as it is in California. But that California county isn’t downwind of the tests, so, therefore…. Although it would seem an easy fix, the typo has become vexing.

“The Department of Justice and President Bush could rectify this,” Fanire says with certainty, befuddled why this mistake hasn’t been fixed. “I want to tell President Bush he’s made an unjust decision.”

Prescott Attorney Laura Taylor, who’s helped many individuals in other counties file for benefits, says it could be years be-fore Congress revisits those boundaries. She notes that a panel from the National Academy of Science has been holding open forums for the past 18 months with the prospect of expanding the list of covered cancers. As it is written, the compensation act acknowledges leukemia, lung cancer, multiple myeloma and lymphomas, but so many other cancers have shown up with frightening frequency. For instance, the act now covers ovarian, but not uterine cancer; colon, but not prostate cancer.
The academy is supposed to present its findings to Congress by the end of this year, but Taylor is convinced nothing will change in the compensation program until Congress deals with these new recommendations. No one needs additional statistics to acknowledge what is happening, she argues, and Mohave County needs help now. “To fail to do so,” she says, “denies the obvious and gives no hope to those suffering in the greatest numbers.”

State Senator Linda Binder admits to being flabbergasted when she finally took the time to listen to the Mohave Downwinders and realized their problem. She’d originally blown them off, seeing their plight as a “federal issue,” but they kept bombarding her with information. “I was horrified,” she remembers. “There were lots of cancers… there was a high incident of breast cancer in men… so many had died.”

She ended up championing their cause in the Legislature, getting a “postcard to Congress” passed and signed by the governor that decries the omission of Mohave County from the compensation act.

Meanwhile, with her attention focused on the effects of 50-year-old nuclear tests, she was even more astonished to learn from Downwinders that the government intended to do it all over again – this time with underground testing.

“The Bush Administration is counting on the fact that nobody can believe the U.S. would do this to our own people – it boggles the mind,” she declares.

As chair of the state Senate Natural Re-sources & Environment Committee, Binder started asking questions. Lots of questions. And she kept getting the same answers: Nobody knew anything about new tests, and if they did, they assured her, “Don’t worry about it.”

And then on May 25 of this year, the Associated Press released a short story saying that an underground nuclear test was being conducted by the government that particular day at the Nevada Test Site.

So Binder called a press conference to decry the test. “All the boys [in the capital press corps] came, but nobody wrote about it,” she says.

Binder then found out that nobody in state government had any idea this was happening, either – not the Homeland Security folks, not the Health Department, not the water resources people, not the environmental departments. “This should not be done in secrecy,” she says. “There should be an open debate so we know what is happening. But we should never, ever test in the United States and subject our citizens to fallout.”
Of course, it will come as no surprise that the Downwinders oppose the new tests, too.

“They can’t take care of the people from the last 50 years, how can they take care of the new people who will be affected?” Fanire asks. And if they must test, she has a suggestion: “Why doesn’t Bush put it in his back yard?”

More surprising, however, is that the conservative Mohave County Board of Supervisors is adamantly opposed to the new tests. The Board even passed a resolution declaring their position last May – they called the planned nuclear tests a “threat to life, health, tourism and the economy of Mohave County.”

The Arizona Public Health Association is also on record as opposing the new tests: “By developing new weapons, resuming testing of nuclear devices and breaking the test-ban treaty, the U.S. would fuel a new cycle of global nuclear weapons proliferation that could lead to a public health catastrophe.”

And The New York Times, one of the few media voices in the country to speak out on the tests, editorialized in June: “The only research involving nuclear weapons should involve finding ways to discourage their spread. It’s mind-boggling that the administration seems more interested in finding new uses for them.”

Kingman’s Mountain View Cemetery isn’t a pretty place. It was way out in the boonies when it was first established a century ago, but now it sits along a busy four-lane road, and it’s easy to miss as you whiz by, like everyone else, breaking the 35 mph speed limit.

Over the years, the city leaders planted plenty of trees, but, to save money, they eliminated the grass, and today, the sand and gravel looks too harsh for the headstones and plastic flowers that mark the graves of loved ones.

Still, almost all of the surviving Downwinders have family there. Danielle Stephens has so many relatives buried at this spot, she can spend a good part of a morning visiting all the graves. Same goes for Fanire, who scattered some of her brother’s ashes there in 2002, so William E. Logas could be with his parents.

“Billy was a hero in his hometown,” Fanire says with sisterly pride, and she’s not just bragging, as evidenced by the 500 people who came to a party his family threw for him five months before he died. “It was all potluck, and there was so much food we fed five fire and police stations and the children’s shelter with what was left over.”

“Billy” Logas died after battling glioblastoma – an incurable brain cancer – for 19 months. He was 58 years old, and a husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, great-uncle, great-great-uncle and friend. He’d begun life in 1944 as the first baby born at the Kingman Army Airport housing project, where his dad, “Buster,” and mom, Hanna, were stationed during World War II.

He was a mechanic, putting in 20 years for the city of Kingman, where he was shop maintenance foreman. His obituary noted that Billy’s heart was in his patriotism: “Billy’s love for his country went way beyond the call for duty, as he joined the Arizona National Guard in 1964. He served as an active member for 38 years.” At the time of his death, he was chief warrant officer for the 1404 Transportation Co., which is stationed at the Navajo Army Depot in Flagstaff.

Despite Billy’s many accomplishments, Fanire knows her brother died too young, and isn’t sure she’ll ever get over the bitterness of his death. “I feel it is so strange that the country he loved so much… that same country killed him with radiation fallout from the mushroom clouds of the Nevada Test Site.”

Danielle Stephens never made the connection between those nuclear tests and her family’s sad history of early death until very recently. One day she sat down with a cup of coffee and a small tablet she had bought at the grocery store, and started making a list. “I started with my dad, and then thought, ‘Oh, my grandpa, and my uncle, and my cousin… and my husband’s family had so many, too,’ and I thought, ‘This is significant.'”

Her list now includes 31 family members who have gotten cancer – 26 of them have died. Most had funerals in the old Methodist Church in downtown Kingman – the same church where Stephens was married 44 years ago – a graceful, elegant building that now houses county offices. After the final ceremony at the cemetery, her family and their friends would gather at the Elks Club or a family home for a bite to eat and a chance to reminisce.

She lost her maternal grandfather to stomach cancer, her mother-in-law to breast and lung cancer, an uncle to throat cancer, and the list goes on, through first and second cousins, through aunts and uncles.

Her mother, Jennielee Bishop, has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and her husband, Frank, with prostate cancer. She has a brother fighting prostate cancer, too, and a cousin with bladder cancer.

And while she and her son are cancer-free, she can’t help but wonder if her exposure didn’t contribute to her only daughter’s mysterious illness. “We took her to UCLA and the Mayo Clinic and everywhere we could go, and nobody could name it – it was an orphan disease.” Marilee was only 36 when she died in 2001, leaving behind a husband and a daughter and a mother who doesn’t ordinarily swear, but will admit to being “pretty damn mad when my daughter died.”

Despite all of the deaths, Stephens still thought it was just happenstance – bad luck in a family that didn’t deserve such a lousy hand. And then she saw the flier that appeared in the summer of 2003: “Radiation Fallout,” the large red letters on the flier read. “Have you had cancer? Do you know anyone that has had cancer? Know someone who has lost their cancer battle?” It announced a gathering at an adult center and invited all to attend.

When Stephens walked into that meeting, she remembers, “It was like a class re-union for me.” There were so many from her Mohave County Union High School Class of 1957. All of a sudden, the dots started connecting, and Stephens realized that the childhood memory of sitting on her pony on that mountaintop was actually the first scene of a real-life horror movie.

“I was hoping maybe 25 people would show up,” Fanire remembers from that inaugural meeting of the Down-winders. “But 100 people showed up. Nobody could believe how many had already passed – we couldn’t believe the people who came who had cancer.”

In their shared astonishment and their shared grief, these people – most of whom had grown up together and remembered the “Bulldogs” as their high school team – began the slow process of dealing with the hand their government had dealt them.

They immediately appealed to their Congressional leaders, and expected to get some results, considering that by then, both Arizona senators were powerful Republicans in Congress. But initially, neither John McCain nor Jon Kyl did much. (“They didn’t acknowledge it until we made some noise,” Stephens says, surmising that it took so long because “it didn’t affect them personally.”)

As a backup, they appealed to state lawmakers – again, getting a tepid response until they proved they wouldn’t go away and the information they’d amassed was too horrible to ignore.

These days, you can see the Downwinders coming by the thick three-ring binders they carry, filled with government re-ports and terrifying maps of exposure – Fanire has so much information, she hauls it around in a suitcase on wheels. Early on they’d discovered that knowledge is power and facts are strength, and they’ll go almost anywhere to tell their sad stories. To date, they’ve testified at hearings in St. George, Utah, and Window Rock, Arizona – going there because no one’s ever come to Kingman to hold a hearing on this issue.

In addition, they have addressed the Senate Health Committee. “In memory of the victims of radiation fallout who have died of cancer, please wear our Black Hat,” said Downwinder Gloria Richhart as she put on the hat she’s covered with the names of the dead. “For the victims whose cancer is in remission, please come walk in our boots,” she added, as she put a pair of children’s cowboy boots on the podium.

She remembers the senators sitting there, “shaking their heads” in disbelief as she laid out what had been done to American civilians by the atomic tests.

“We believe that we as radiation fallout victims, or the families of victims, are not only entitled to recognition and compensation, but also to unqualified appreciation, gratitude and support for our sacrifices, bra-very and courage,” she said.

To date, the Mohave County Downwinders display 164 black hats in memory and 36 boots in hope. About 120 people are actively involved in the year-old group, and Fanire estimates that from 2,000 to 4,000 people in their county were sickened by the nuclear tests.

A volunteer named Johnny Sean created the group’s website, explaining, “I am angry about the names in Hats and Boots. Those are not simply names on a list. They are people I have known, worked with, partied with, cried with and loved.”

“Even if we get the money, it won’t give us another Christmas,” Fanire explains. “It won’t give us another anniversary, it won’t give us a fourth-generation picture, it won’t give us what’s missing in our hearts.”

Really, it’s not a very big payment, and $50,000 gets even smaller when you consider how costly cancer can get. “The people who died in the Twin Towers on September 11 suffered a few moments and the government paid their families $1.8 million,” Fanire says. “Our people have suffered 40 to 50 years – some have lost their homes because of this, some have been ruined – and if they get the money it’s not even $1,000 a year.”

Stephens says it isn’t the money that’s important, it’s the principle – the acknowledgement that this devastation was visited upon the good people of her county. “It’s the right thing,” she says.

And so the people of Mohave County keep on fighting, in big ways and small.

Lately, they’ve been handing out packets of seeds, hoping concern and understanding will grow and nobody will ever forget what has happened to them and what was done to them.

The packets show a field of blue and yellow flowers, and the name offers a haunting message: Forget-Me-Not.