Chapter 3 Bringing the Bombs Home
"Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne."
Brower recalled that Pearson "told me . . . that the AEC could under no circumstances afford to have a claim established against them and have that precedent set. And he further indicated that the sheepmen could not expect under any circumstances to be reimbursed for that reason."
In Cedar City, Utah, a U.S. Public Health Service veterinarian, Dr. Arthur Wolff, studied area sheep in June 1953. "My main concern was whether there was radioactivity involved," he recalled. "We autopsied a couple of animals, and I took some specimens back with me and took some [radiation] measurements. I was able to determine, yes, there was a relatively high level of radiation in the Iodine-131 in the thyroid and some radiation on the wool of these sheep.
Cedar City sheepherder Kern Bulloch described what happened with his herd in 1953 this way:
We were over at Coyote Pass right next to the bomb site just herding our sheep. One morning we were sitting in the saddle there, and some airplanes come up and one of them dropped a bomb. Jesus, it was bright! I put my hands up like that and you could doggone near see your bones. And then that cloud come right over top of us, it mushroomed right over our camp and our herd. And we were sitting there--'course we didn't know a thing about radiation or bombs or anything else. Pretty soon here comes some jeeps with Army personnel, and they said to us, "My golly, you fellas are in a hot spot." We didn't even know what they were talking about.
Then we started driving the sheep back to Cedar [City], and we just started losing them. We got them in the yard there to get their lambs out, and gosh, every time you'd go in there, there'd be 20 or 30 dead sheep. The lambs were born with little legs, kind of potbellied. Some of them didn't have any wool, kind of a skin instead of wool. We figure we lost between 1,200 and 1,500 head close to half our herd.
Later, the scientists come, we took them up to a pile of bones and I remember putting a Geiger counter down. Somebody said, "Are they hot?" And one of the scientists said, "Hot? I'll say! This needle just about hit the post."
Kern Bulloch remembered, nearly three decades later, "we just started to losing so many lambs that my father--[who] was alive at that time--just about went crazy. He had never seen anything like it before. Neither had I; neither had anybody else."
Twenty-seven years passed before some semblance of the full story reached beyond the memories of downwind herders and officials privy to classified government files. In 1980 the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations provided the sort of overview kept from a national spotlight for decades.
The committee reported that, at the time of the two heaviest fallout tests in Nevada during the spring of 1953, there were 11,710 sheep grazing in a zone from 40 miles north to 160 miles east of the test site. "Of these sheep, 1,420 lambing ewes (12.1 percent) and 2,970 new lambs (25.4 percent) died during the spring and summer of 1953."
This sheep mortality rate was considerably above normal. But the government denied that there was anything amiss--refusing to admit radiation was involved. "It seemed like a policy decision had been made, and federal officials were there to implement it," Dr. Brower told us. "The government just wanted to cover up."
Although the AEC profusely insisted in its public statements throughout the 1950s and beyond that fallout had nothing to do with sheep ills, a different assessment later came from Dr. Harold Knapp, a scientist who served with the AEC Fallout Studies Branch in the early 1960s. "The simplest explanation of the primary cause of death in the lambing ewes is irradiation of the ewe's gastrointestinal tract by beta particles from all the fission products that were ingested by the sheep along with open range forage," Dr. Knapp concluded. Radiation doses to the sheep internal tracts "are calculated to be in the range of thousands of rads, even though the external gamma dose to the sheep was within the 3.9 r limit per test series established by the Atomic Energy Commission as acceptable for persons living in areas adjacent to the test site."
The 1980 House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee report disclosed that its researchers had uncovered "substantial documentation from the files of the Government veterinarians and scientists assigned the task of investigating the 1953 sheep deaths, which revealed the Government's concerted effort to disregard and to discount all evidence of a causal relationship between exposure of the sheep to radioactive fallout and their deaths."
Recently declassified minutes of a secret June 10, 1953, AEC meeting verify that the commissioners were aware that "sheep grazing in an area approximately 50 miles from the site were determined to have beta burns in their nostrils and on their backs and 500-1,000 out of a total of approximately 10,000 were reported to have died while being moved to grazing lands in Utah."
But the AEC commissioners proved more concerned with publicity than health problems of either sheep or humans. At a July 7 meeting Commissioner Henry Smyth observed that public concern could be allayed by comparing bomb fallout "to radiation incurred in the normal medical use of X-rays." It was a public-relations angle that proved to be a favorite for the AEC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and utilities operating nuclear power plants across the nation in future decades.
But the analogy--comparing X rays with radioactivity from nuclear fission--is highly misleading. An atomic bomb, or a nuclear reactor, produces radioactive alpha and beta particles that can be deadly if inhaled or swallowed even in minute quantities; the alpha and beta "internal emitters" are not present in the penetrating X rays used for medical purposes. The comparison with X rays also falsely assumes that bomb fallout or emissions from nuclear plants are evenly distributed in the population. A number of factors--including weather conditions and radioactive contamination of the ecological food chain--can subject some animals or people to higher amounts of radioactivity.
Twenty-six years later the report by congressional investigators quoted from the AEC's conclusive press statement about the sheep, issued on January 6, 1954:
On the basis of information now available, it is evident that radioactivity from atomic tests was not responsible for deaths and illness among sheep in areas adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds last Spring, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission reported today.
The AEC findings, reached as the result of extensive research studies, was concurred in by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Bureau of Animal Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Prior to issuance by the AEC, the report was reviewed by the Department of Health, State of Utah. Special studies were conducted by veterinary and medical research scientists at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and Hanford Works and the University of Tennessee to determine whether radioactivity contributed to the deaths.
But some of the AEC's own experts disagreed. Veterinarian Dr. Richard Thompsett, for example, reported that lesions on downwind sheep typified effects of beta radiation--and that the atomic tests had been a factor in the mass deaths of sheep. Dr. Thompsett's report was never published. Dr. Stephen Brower recounted that Thompsett's "report was picked up--even his own personal copy--and he was told to rewrite it and eliminate any reference to speculation about radiation damage or effects."
Follow-up research by scientists at the Los Alamos lab--C. Lushbaugh, J. F. Spaulding, and D. B. Hale--concluded that among sheep downwind from the Nevada Test Site "the skin lesion was remarkably similar, histologically, to severe beta ray burns as demonstrated experimentally." The researchers added, "It would appear from these gross observations that this and similar lesions seen in the field . . . confirm well enough to a presumptive diagnosis of a radiation-produced lesion." Publicly the AEC stuck to its story--a story that would be repeated time and again to farmers and ranchers downwind from nuclear facilities.
In his role as county agricultural agent in southwest Utah, Dr. Brower accompanied sheep rancher Doug Clark to talk with federal administrators. "Doug raised some questions with the team of scientists, one of whom was a colonel," Dr. Brower remembered many years later. The colonel "seemed to be the leading spokesman to kind of press this issue that it couldn't have been radiation. Doug asked him some fairly technical questions about the effects of radiation on internal organs that he'd gotten from other veterinarians."
In response the colonel called Doug Clark a "dumb sheepman" and told him he was "stupid--he couldn't understand the answer if it was given to him, and for just 10 or 15 minutes, just kind of berated him rather than answer the question."
A week after the Atomic Energy Commission's unequivocal public denial that sheep had been harmed by atomic test fallout, AEC officials faced angry livestock owners in a conference room of the Cedar City firehouse. The January 13, 1954, meeting included a dozen or so federal officials and a roughly equal number of area livestock owners.
"We know that practically all the sheep that range in that area had these effects," said a local rancher. "We fed these sheep corn and tried to keep them up. I couldn't keep my sheep up where they were able to raise a lamb. I had never seen it before.
"We would like to have an answer for you," responded AEC biological medicine chief Dr. Paul Pearson. "We don't have any explanation for it. There have been instances of disease coming in that caused different effects, we don't know what happened."
"There is very little protein in corn and they could be low in protein," interjected Leo K. Bustad, a General Electric Company envoy from the AEC-controlled Hanford Nuclear Reservation, prime production center for weapons-grade plutonium. "How was their flesh?"
Refusing to be drawn into a discussion about his sheep's flesh with the GE representative, the rancher said that his sheep got all the protein they needed from grazing. "Range is white sage and black sage. . . . Sage is very high in protein."
And so it went. "The body dose radiation that these sheep got is around five roentgens," explained GE's Bustad midway through the meeting. "You can get more roentgens from a fluoroscope or an X-ray machine than these sheep got through body radiation." Bustad failed to note that the sheep ingested radioactive particles into their bodies, which does not occur during an X ray. Nor did he mention that five roentgens is a hazardous dose in either case.
A year later the Bulloch family filed suit in federal court, suing the U.S. Government for the loss of fifteen hundred sheep because of fallout. When the case came to trial in 1956, the federal government presented testimony that the sheep died of natural causes. During initial investigations the Bullochs had heard researchers attribute the sheep deaths to radiation. "A lot of those scientists that checked the sheep and admitted it, when they got to court they had a different story," commented McRae Bulloch.
The Bulloch family lost their court suit. Twenty-five years later no downwind rancher had been able to collect a penny from the federal government for a single dead sheep.
Unwanted Controversy
Anxious to counter its increasing credibility problems, in 1954 the Atomic Energy Commission entered into an off-site radioactivity surveillance agreement with the U.S. Public Health Service.
Not until 1979 did the terms of the AEC-PHS arrangement become public knowledge. After award-winning journalist Gordon Eliot White, Washington correspondent for the Salt Lake City daily The Deseret News, dislodged more than fifteen thousand A-test documents he reported that "PHS furnished trained personnel who worked under AEC funding and under strict AEC control." Their mission was not to ensure public health, but rather "to protect the test site from controversy."
The 1954 pact prohibited the PHS from any public release of its radiation data or "dissemination of information connected with activities under this agreement, except as prescribed by the AEC . . ." At the end of the year AEC tossed in a stipulation that any unauthorized release of information to the public could subject "the Public Health Service, its agents, employees, or subcontractors, to criminal liability" under the Atomic Energy Act.
The AEC-PHS off-site monitoring agreement remained in effect not only during the last nine years (1954 to 1962) of atmospheric nuclear blasts at the Nevada Test Site, but also for the first eight years (1963 to 1970) of large underground nuclear bomb tests in Nevada. Those underground detonations also spewed large quantities of radioactivity downwind for hundreds of miles.
Despite the intense and pervasive downwind fallout from the Nevada Test Site in 1953 Washington remained enthusiastic for more continental nuclear weapons detonations. The prevailing sentiment at the federal level was aptly expressed in a letter to the acting chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Thomas E. Murray, written by AEC Biology and Medicine Advisory Committee head Dr. Elvin C. Stakman on March 25, 1954:
Paraphrasing General Forrest's famous saying, "Victory goes to the nation that gits there fastest with the mostest and bestest weapons." This is no less true in the atomic age.
It is therefore essential to continue the Nevada Proving Grounds in order to achieve maximum speed in the development of weapons. Speed is essential to national survival.
In emergencies such as this some risks, immediate and long term, must be accepted. These risks should be frankly and publicly acknowledged. However, the policy of minimizing these risks must be continued in both the local and national interest.
Perhaps some unlikely victims of the Nevada test program were the Hollywood cast and film crew of Howard Hughes's production The Conqueror. In 1954 John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead, and producer-director Dick Powell filmed on the sandy dunes outside of St. George, Utah. They were there for three months.
A quarter century later John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Dick Powell had all died of cancer. Wayne, a heavy smoker, succumbed to cancer of his lungs, throat, and stomach in 1979; Hayward died of skin, breast and uterine cancer in 1975; Moorehead passed away from uterine cancer in 1974. Another star of the movie, Pedro Armendariz, developed kidney cancer in 1960 and was later struck with terminal cancer of the lymphatic system. Dick Powell died from lymph cancer when it spread to his lungs in 1963.
The coincidence of these cases was placed into a larger pattern when People magazine researched the subsequent health of the entire Hollywood entourage that had worked on location in St. George. They found that out of 220 people in the cast and crew, ninety-one had contracted cancer by late 1980, and half of the cancer victims had died of the disease. (This survey did not include the couple of hundred local American Indians who served as extras in the film.)
"With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic," remarked University of Utah radiological health director Dr. Robert C. Pendleton. For two decades Pendleton had been warning that radioactive "hot spots" remained in numerous Utah locations, even after atmospheric testing had ceased. Added Dr. Ronald S. Oseas of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center: "It is known that radiation contributes to the risk of cancer. With these numbers, it is highly probable that the Conqueror group was affected by that additive effect."
Ellen Powell, Michael Wayne, and Susan Hayward's son Tim Barker had accompanied their parents to the set in 1954. Tim Barker told of his mother's protracted cancer: "She was in a fetal position, and she had lost her swallowing reflex, she had pneumonia and she had lost her hair." In 1968 he had a benign tumor removed from his mouth. Michael Wayne later suffered from skin cancer. Barker echoed the sentiments of many residents downwind from the test site when he asked, "If the Government knew there was a possibility of exposure, why didn't they just warn us?"
Federal nuclear authorities had long been aware of the deep resentment that had taken hold in numerous communities within a radius of several hundred miles of the Nevada Test Site. But the specter of culpability for the cancer deaths of such popular public figures caused concern at usually stolid government bureaus. At the Pentagon one official of the Defense Nuclear Agency responded to the news by murmuring, "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne."