Nuclear WMD "WHAT IF's"...

[J.B. Stone]

IT JUST NEVER ENDS:

Atomic vets file class-action suit over radiation exposure

Lawyer claims government misled soldiers about risks of radioactivity

By David Pugliese, The Ottawa CitizenFebruary 3, 2009

Details of a class-action lawsuit for Canadian veterans of Cold War atomic testing was filed yesterday in a Saskatchewan court as former soldiers who were subjected to nuclear blasts prepare to do battle with the federal government for compensation.

Veterans who witnessed atomic tests in the U.S. and at other locations allege that various ailments they suffer from are the result of exposure to radiation from those experiments.

"The government made a series of false, reckless, and materially misleading representations about the extent of exposure to radiation and the risks it posed to members of the Canadian Armed Forces," according to the statement of claim filed yesterday in the Court of the Queen's Bench in Regina by lawyer Tony Merchant.

The lawsuit alleges that the veterans were not told about the dangers of radioactivity, were not provided with protective equipment and were not decontaminated after participating in a series of nuclear blasts. The allegations have yet to be proven in court.

Two former soldiers who witnessed atomic tests in Nevada in 1957, George Clarke of Victoria, B.C., and Arnold Clay, originally from Nipawin, Sask., but now living in Calgary, are specifically named in the court documents.

But Mr. Merchant estimates the class-action lawsuit could involve several thousand Canadians, including veterans and their family members.

So far, 141 veterans or members of their families have contacted Mr. Merchant's law firm. An estimated 900 military personnel were subjected to the atomic tests.

Last year Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who is named in the lawsuit, announced a compensation package that would award qualified atomic veterans a $24,000 lump sum payment.

In an e-mail, Mr. MacKay's office said he is "very proud of the ex-gratia payment announced this past September and being made available to former members of the Canadian Forces and certain civilian personnel who participated in nuclear weapons testing or assisted in the decontamination of the Chalk River nuclear reactor.

These ex-gratia payments will be made without proof of medical association and are available to the estates of deceased members or employees."

The minister declined to comment on the legal action as it is before the courts.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government started providing financial compensation to its atomic veterans, offering those who took part in the tests a lump sum payment of $75,000 each.

Mr. Merchant said for Canadian veterans it has been an uphill battle for decades.

"The government has been very resistant to doing anything of a meaningful nature with atomic veterans," he said.

"They're called atomic veterans, but they should be called atomic guinea pigs."

He said the tests were staged because various governments wanted to see whether soldiers could operate on battlefields contaminated by radiation from nuclear bombs.

The veterans' case was bolstered in 2007 when a Defence Department report determined that an estimated 900 Canadian military personnel were exposed to radiation during atomic testing and during a reactor mishap at Chalk River during the 1950s.

Mr. Clay was hospitalized for four days after one of the Nevada atomic explosions. Later he developed arthritis in his right shoulder, hip, ankles and knees and the effects of his exposure to radiation remain unknown, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Clarke was diagnosed with a hypothyroid condition but Veterans Affairs told him there was no connection between that and his military service.

Other veterans have died waiting for compensation.

One of those was Donald Bernicky, 74, of Smiths Falls, who went through six atomic bomb detonations and a battle with the federal government over whether he should be given a disability pension for the ailments he suffered as a result.

Mr. Bernicky had skin cancer and other medical problems his family attribute to his exposure to radiation during the Cold War tests. He died in 2007.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Atomi ... story.html

[J.B. Stone]

In 1970, after serving on the Granville Hall, YAG-40 during Project SHAD, I was attending the second half of my training to become a Nuclear Reactor Operator for the U.S. Navy. We were made to watch a "training film" about how human error CAN cause a nuclear reactor steam explosion and a subsequent melt down. I ALSO had the pleasure of "touring" the inside of the Reactor Compartment INTERIOR at the site where we had a real, fully operating nuclear reactor inside a section of sub hull in a giant indoor swimming pool so we could get "hands on" training. I dare say I was the only poster here who has ever sat at the controls of such a device and fiddled with the in-hold-out switch that determines the reactor's power level by repositioning the fuel rods in the core.

But, there's MUCH more to the story including MASSIVE contamination at the site and other defunct reactors which in some cases cannot be safely approached by humans. The jack rabbits are on their own....

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is an 890-square-mile (2,300-km²) complex located in the Idaho desert between the towns of Arco and Idaho Falls, at 43.52° N 113.0° W. It was established in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS). In 1975 the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was divided into the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The Idaho site was for a short time named ERDA and then subsequently renamed to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in 1977 with the creation of the Department of Energy (DOE) under President Carter. In 1997, the name was changed again to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). On February 1, 2005, Battelle Energy Alliance took over operation of the lab from Bechtel, merged with Argonne West, and is now known as Idaho National Laboratory (INL). At this time the laboratory's clean-up activities were moved to a separate contract, the Idaho Cleanup Project, which is managed by contractor CH2M-WG Idaho. Research activities were consolidated in the newly named Idaho National Laboratory. The lab currently employs about 8,000 people.

On January 3, 1961, the first and only fatal nuclear reactor accident in the United States occurred at the NRTS. An experimental reactor called SL-1 (Stationary Low-Power Plant Number 1) was destroyed when a control rod was removed incorrectly leading to core meltdown and explosion. All three men working in the reactor were killed. Due to the extensive radioactive isotope contamination, all three had to be buried in lead coffins. The events are the subject of a book published in 2003, Idaho Falls: The untold story of America's first nuclear accident.

http://www.search.com/reference/Idaho_N ... Laboratory

http://www.amazon.com/Idaho-Falls-Ameri ... 1550225626

The first major American nuclear accident wasn't at Three Mile Island in 1979 but rather at the military's National Reactor Testing Station at Idaho Falls, Idaho, in January 1961, killing three workers at the tiny reactor. Two of these men were later rumored incorrectly to have been rivals in a love triangle—which some conjectured might have affected their ability to work effectively and safely at the facility. Tucker (The Great Starvation Experiment) skillfully reveals the drama of the event. At the same time, he shows how the accident resulted from inadequate maintenance, poor training, negligence and ignorance. Tucker also profiles the inscrutable naval R&D power broker Hyman Rickover, who almost singlehandedly resurrected the potential of nuclear power after the 1961 disaster through a monklike and emphatic devotion to the highest skill in engineering and the best training.

http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-America-Ex ... gy_b_img_a

[J.B. Stone]

Veteran pushing for justice for nuke testing victims
By SHAWN LOGAN, QMI Agency

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010 ... 71301.html

CALGARY -- Still fighting for justice for Canadian veterans exposed to nuclear testing, a Calgary man is hoping reintroducing a documentary will put renewed pressure on the government.

Jim Huntley, 71, was one of 40 soldiers from the Queen’s Own Rifles who was part of top secret training in Nevada in 1957 that exposed the young men to high levels of radiation he blames for the cancer deaths of 16 of the group while giving cancer to three of the eight survivors.

A film documenting how the unknowing soldiers were exposed to nuclear fallout was shown Sunday at the Plaza Theatre in Kensington and will be replayed Monday at the Turner Valley Legion and Huntley said he wants to drum up more support in his effort to secure compensation for the remaining survivors and the families of those who passed away.

“Our government says ‘you have to prove that it’s the radiation before there’s any compensation,’” he said.

“They dropped the ball and now it will be up to a judge to decide.”

As an 18-year-old recruit, Huntley and his fellow soldiers flew into the area of a test explosion, with helicopters plunging through nuclear mushroom clouds before landing so the troops could simulate attacking a target less than 1,000 metres from ground zero.

For two years Huntley has been part of a class action lawsuit that may impact hundreds of Canadian veterans who were exposed to nuclear bomb testing in the U.S.

While he claims the government, which in 2008 handed out $24,000 apiece to some 900 soldiers exposed to nuclear testing, has continued to delay on dealing with the lawsuit, he hopes to have the case heard in front of a Calgary judge next month.

“Only once after everything did they call and say we needed to get checked out and all they did was take a blood sample and say nothing was wrong,” he said.

“All we want is recognition, compensation and pensions for the widows who were affected.”

Huntley served 26 years in the Canadian Forces and retired as a sergeant.

shawn.logan@sunmedia.ca

[J.B. Stone]

Heavy Things Are Happening.....and in this case, it's Strontium 90....

Radioactive fish near Vt. nuke plant deemed common

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... gD9G1C1300

By DAVE GRAM (AP) – 1 day ago

MONTPELIER, Vt. — When a fish taken from the Connecticut River recently tested positive for radioactive strontium-90, suspicion focused on the nearby Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as the likely source.

Operators of the troubled 38-year-old nuclear plant on the banks of the river, where work is under way to clean up leaking radioactive tritium, revealed this month that it also found soil contaminated with strontium-90, an isotope linked to bone cancer and leukemia.

Three days later, officials said a fish caught four miles upstream from the reactor in February had tested positive for strontium-90 in its bones. State officials say they don't believe the contamination came from Vermont Yankee.

Tritium was reported leaking from the plant in January, and since then has turned up in monitoring wells at levels 100 times the federal Environmental Protection Agency's safety limit for that substance in drinking water. Other radioactive isotopes have been found as well, including cesium-137, zinc-65 and cobalt-60.

Officials have said tritium has been flowing downhill from the plant to the adjacent river, though it is diluted quickly in the fast-flowing stream. Tests on river water have not produced measurable tritium readings. Now the question is whether strontium-90, generally considered a more dangerous isotope than tritium, may also have found its way to the river.

State health officials say Vermont Yankee most likely was not the source of the radioactivity in the fish, a yellow perch. Fish and other living things — including humans — around the world have been absorbing tiny amounts of strontium-90 since the United States, Russia and China tested nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the 1950s and 1960s. A fresher dose was released by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

"It's clearly consistent with the background levels from Chernobyl and weapons testing that went on until 1965," said Michael Dumond, chief of prevention services, which includes radiological health, for the state of New Hampshire. The river between the states is New Hampshire territory, though Dumond said New Hampshire has largely deferred to Vermont on testing samples from it.

Does that mean strontium-90 is present in fish caught around the world?

"Yes. It's everywhere," said John Till, president of South Carolina-based Risk Assessment Corp. and a consultant for more than three decades in testing for radioactive substances in the environment.

Till said he supports nuclear power but faults the industry for a lack of speed and candor in discussing its risks.

Should people limit fish consumption because strontium and other radioactive substances can collect in their tissue?

"Absolutely not," Till said, adding that the amounts are too tiny to be a concern. (Some states, including Vermont, have urged limits on fish consumption — especially by children and pregnant women — because of mercury contamination.)

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has determined that radioactive strontium is a human carcinogen, but the arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tracks toxic substances says exposures must be at high levels before the risk of cancer is elevated.

David Deen, a Vermont state legislator, Connecticut River Watershed Council river steward and fishing guide, is not mollified.

"As a guide, I'll tell you when the fish you're angling for are identified as having strontium-90 in them, it doesn't do much for the image of pristine fishing," said Deen, chairman of the House Fish and Wildlife Committee.

Some people think Vermont Yankee should not be let off the hook any more easily than was the fish that ended up in a Tennessee lab and tested positive for strontium-90.

William Irwin, radiological health chief for the state of Vermont, acknowledged that it was impossible to establish a baseline for strontium-90 in Connecticut River fish, because the state had not tested for it before this year. For that reason, it can't be determined for certain whether Vermont Yankee has been adding strontium-90 to the river

Irwin said the 59 picocuries per kilogram found in the perch's bones was actually at the low end of measurements taken from fish caught even much farther from nuclear plants.

Still, Irwin's comments troubled Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician by training, an internationally known critic of nuclear power and author most recently of a book debunking nuclear as a solution to global warming, "Nuclear Power is Not the Answer."

"What is the baseline level in fish from (bomb-testing and Chernobyl) fallout?" Caldicott asked in a phone interview from her home country of Australia. "What he's saying is fallacious. He doesn't have a baseline level, so to say it's the same as baseline level is not true."

Irwin said there was strong evidence that the strontium-90 in the fish was not from Vermont Yankee, but added it is impossible to say for sure.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith said the only spot on the reactor site where strontium-90 had been found was in the pit plant technicians had dug looking for the source of the tritium leak, in an alley between two plant buildings.

Irwin said strontium-90 appeared not to have migrated from there. "We did not find it in groundwater," he said. "We did not find it in river water." And it was not found in soil samples taken farther from the site of the Vermont Yankee leak.

Irwin said a study last year by the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation found levels of strontium-90 in Hudson River fish at up to three times the level found in the Connecticut River fish. That study looked at fish samples from much farther from the nearest nuclear plant — 80 to 90 miles upriver from Indian Point — and attributed the results to bomb testing and Chernobyl, Irwin said.

Caldicott was not convinced. "Fish can swim 80 miles," she said. "To say that the strontium-90 didn't come from Indian Point, I would be very suspicious."

Irwin said the fish seemed to have caught the public's imagination. Asked what species the fish was, he said he didn't know, but later said it was "a red herring."

Given his doubts that the strontium in the perch came from Vermont Yankee, Irwin said he considered it more important that he and his staff focus on testing roughly 2,000 samples taken since January closer to the reactor than the four-mile distance at which the fish was found.

"We're sampling groundwater, drinking water, river water, river sediments, soil and fish. Starting next week we'll be collecting vegetation," Irwin said. "We're going to be doing all of these analyses of all these samples for a very long time."

"We're in this for the long haul," he said. "We'll get more samples. We'll get more analytical data, and we'll get a better and better picture of what the truth is."

[J.B. Stone]

REUTERS:


U.S. Nuclear Weapons Have Been Compromised by Unidentified Aerial Objects

PR Newswire

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15

Ex-military men say unknown intruders have monitored and even tampered with American nuclear missiles

Group to call on U.S. Government to reveal the facts

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby. Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.

One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded.

Captain Salas notes, "The U.S. Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it." Col. Halt adds, "I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted—both then and now—to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation."

The group of witnesses and a leading researcher, who has brought them together for the first time, will discuss the national security implications of these and other alarmingly similar incidents and will urge the government to reveal all information about them. This is a public-awareness issue.

Declassified U.S. government documents, to be distributed at the event, now substantiate the reality of UFO activity at nuclear weapons sites extending back to 1948. The press conference will also address present-day concerns about the abuse of government secrecy as well as the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons.

WHO: Dwynne Arneson, USAF Lt. Col. Ret., communications center officer-in-charge

Bruce Fenstermacher, former USAF nuclear missile launch officer

Charles Halt, USAF Col. Ret., former deputy base commander

Robert Hastings, researcher and author

Robert Jamison, former USAF nuclear missile targeting officer

Patrick McDonough, former USAF nuclear missile site geodetic surveyor

Jerome Nelson, former USAF nuclear missile launch officer

Robert Salas, former USAF nuclear missile launch officer

WHAT: Noted researcher Robert Hastings, author of UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, will moderate a distinguished panel of former U.S. Air Force officers involved in UFO incidents at nuclear missile sites near Malmstrom, F.E. Warren, and Walker AFBs, as well as the nuclear weapons depot at RAF Bentwaters.

WHEN: Monday, September 27, 2010

12:30 p.m.

WHERE: National Press Club

Holeman Lounge

**Event open to credentialed media and Congressional staff only**

SOURCE Former U.S. Air Force Officer Robert Salas, and Researcher Robert Hastings

[J.B. Stone]

Here's some interesting footage I just fortuitously found:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBfjU3_XOaA

The USS Granville S. Hall, YAG-40, that I served on was within several miles of the blast zone on various occasions during the tests. The ship had a special "crow's nest" on the forward mast, designed to catch radioactive fallout. I can find NO record of the interior of the ship EVER being decontaminated, either during the 50's [nuke period] OR in the 60-70's [Bio-Chem period]. No joke, we used to set off alarms whenever we'd enter or leave the ship channel in Pearl Harbor due to the radioactive nature of the hull.

[J.B. Stone]

Veterans exposed to atomic radiation lose court ruling
August 25, 2006 - 7:20pm

WASHINGTON - Radiation exposure took Alice Broudy's husband a generation ago.

This week, a court ruling sliced away at her bid for redress.

In a quiet ruling that nonetheless resonates nationwide, a federal appellate court rejected efforts by Broudy and others seeking claims on behalf of "atomic veterans." The same court simultaneously rejected bids by other veterans exposed to biological and chemical agents.

Taken together, the dual rulings by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will likely impede many veterans hoping for compensation. At the very least, it will complicate future claims.

"It's a significant ruling," Washington-based attorney David Cynamon, who represented veterans in both cases, said Friday. "Unfortunately, it's a significantly bad ruling."

A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman couldn't be reached to comment.

Broudy, a resident of California's Orange County, has long been seeking full compensation for the death of her husband, a Marine major who was repeatedly exposed to radiation. She has company.

George Woodward, who lives north of Wichita, Kan., in the town of Miltonvale, was exposed to radiation during a 1955 test blast. Kathy Jacobovitch, a resident of Vashon Island, Wash., lost her father through exposure to contaminated ships in Puget Sound. Ernest Kirchmann, a 62-year-old Navy veteran who lives south of Minneapolis in tiny West Concord, who's filed a separate lawsuit, was exposed during a 1964 nuclear submarine accident.

"It isn't just my personal case," Broudy said Friday. "It's the entire veterans community. It makes me so angry."

Broudy married her husband, Charles, in 1948. Three years earlier, he'd walked the war-poisoned streets of Nagasaki. Within a decade, he was facing radiation in the Nevada desert. He died of lymphatic cancer in 1977. Though she has since received partial compensation, Broudy has been confronting the federal government for more. She has now lost three separate lawsuits.

"This closes the door," Cynamon said of the latest appellate court ruling, which was issued Wednesday. "It will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for individuals who are victimized by government cover-ups."

All told, an estimated 220,000 U.S. soldiers were allegedly exposed to radiation in the 1940s and 1950s. Some, such as William Yurdyga of Sacramento, Calif., claimed in an earlier lawsuit that they were exposed following the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic blast. Others claimed exposure during Cold War testing.

The three-member appellate panel wasn't ruling on whether the atomic veterans deserve compensation. A 1988 law provides that. To succeed, though, veterans must prove they were present at a radioactive site and that they contracted a radiation-related illness or were exposed to a cancer-causing radiation level.

Required military test records can be elusive. A 1973 fire destroyed many veterans' records, and veterans consider alternative "dose reconstruction" estimates inaccurate.

"You send a Freedom of Information Act request," Broudy said, "and you wait and you wait and you wait, and then maybe you get a piece of it, or you get nothing at all because they say it's classified."

The latest lawsuit sought to force Pentagon officials to release all relevant records. In the opinion written by Appellate Judge Thomas Griffith, appointed by President Bush last year, the court panel agreed unanimously that atomic veterans couldn't compel a massive release of all the Pentagon's relevant documents.

Instead, individual veterans must file individual claims.

If the Pentagon is "covering up records of medical tests that describe the amount of radiation to which these veterans were exposed, FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) provides a potential remedy," Griffith wrote.

A new study by Melinda Podgor for the Elder Law Journal found that 18,275 atomic veterans had filed for compensation as of October 2004. Only 1,875 claims were granted.

On a separate but related legal track, veterans such as Columbia, S.C., resident John Goricki and Homestead, Fla., resident Richard B. Holmes were pursuing claims following exposure during the Shipboard Hazard and Defense project of the 1950s and 1960s.

Project SHAD allegedly exposed up to 10,000 soldiers and sailors to biological and chemical agents. Like the atomic veterans, SHAD survivors claim that the Pentagon clings to secret information. Like the atomic veterans, they couldn't persuade the appellate court to order the release of all relevant documents.

The veterans "can still seek, through FOIA, the documents they believe they need to pursue their benefits claims," the appellate panel ruled.

---

(c) 2006, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

(C) 2006 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.. All Rights Reserved

WASHINGTON - Radiation exposure took Alice Broudy's husband a generation ago.

This week, a court ruling sliced away at her bid for redress.

In a quiet ruling that nonetheless resonates nationwide, a federal appellate court rejected efforts by Broudy and others seeking claims on behalf of "atomic veterans." The same court simultaneously rejected bids by other veterans exposed to biological and chemical agents.

Taken together, the dual rulings by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will likely impede many veterans hoping for compensation. At the very least, it will complicate future claims.

"It's a significant ruling," Washington-based attorney David Cynamon, who represented veterans in both cases, said Friday. "Unfortunately, it's a significantly bad ruling."

A Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman couldn't be reached to comment.

Broudy, a resident of California's Orange County, has long been seeking full compensation for the death of her husband, a Marine major who was repeatedly exposed to radiation. She has company.

George Woodward, who lives north of Wichita, Kan., in the town of Miltonvale, was exposed to radiation during a 1955 test blast. Kathy Jacobovitch, a resident of Vashon Island, Wash., lost her father through exposure to contaminated ships in Puget Sound. Ernest Kirchmann, a 62-year-old Navy veteran who lives south of Minneapolis in tiny West Concord, who's filed a separate lawsuit, was exposed during a 1964 nuclear submarine accident.

"It isn't just my personal case," Broudy said Friday. "It's the entire veterans community. It makes me so angry."

Broudy married her husband, Charles, in 1948. Three years earlier, he'd walked the war-poisoned streets of Nagasaki. Within a decade, he was facing radiation in the Nevada desert. He died of lymphatic cancer in 1977. Though she has since received partial compensation, Broudy has been confronting the federal government for more. She has now lost three separate lawsuits.

"This closes the door," Cynamon said of the latest appellate court ruling, which was issued Wednesday. "It will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for individuals who are victimized by government cover-ups."

All told, an estimated 220,000 U.S. soldiers were allegedly exposed to radiation in the 1940s and 1950s. Some, such as William Yurdyga of Sacramento, Calif., claimed in an earlier lawsuit that they were exposed following the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic blast. Others claimed exposure during Cold War testing.

The three-member appellate panel wasn't ruling on whether the atomic veterans deserve compensation. A 1988 law provides that. To succeed, though, veterans must prove they were present at a radioactive site and that they contracted a radiation-related illness or were exposed to a cancer-causing radiation level.

Required military test records can be elusive. A 1973 fire destroyed many veterans' records, and veterans consider alternative "dose reconstruction" estimates inaccurate.

"You send a Freedom of Information Act request," Broudy said, "and you wait and you wait and you wait, and then maybe you get a piece of it, or you get nothing at all because they say it's classified."

The latest lawsuit sought to force Pentagon officials to release all relevant records. In the opinion written by Appellate Judge Thomas Griffith, appointed by President Bush last year, the court panel agreed unanimously that atomic veterans couldn't compel a massive release of all the Pentagon's relevant documents.

Instead, individual veterans must file individual claims.

If the Pentagon is "covering up records of medical tests that describe the amount of radiation to which these veterans were exposed, FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) provides a potential remedy," Griffith wrote.

A new study by Melinda Podgor for the Elder Law Journal found that 18,275 atomic veterans had filed for compensation as of October 2004. Only 1,875 claims were granted.

On a separate but related legal track, veterans such as Columbia, S.C., resident John Goricki and Homestead, Fla., resident Richard B. Holmes were pursuing claims following exposure during the Shipboard Hazard and Defense project of the 1950s and 1960s.

Project SHAD allegedly exposed up to 10,000 soldiers and sailors to biological and chemical agents. Like the atomic veterans, SHAD survivors claim that the Pentagon clings to secret information. Like the atomic veterans, they couldn't persuade the appellate court to order the release of all relevant documents.

The veterans "can still seek, through FOIA, the documents they believe they need to pursue their benefits claims," the appellate panel ruled.

---

(c) 2006, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

[J.B. Stone]

Area 51 'Uncensored': Was It UFOs Or The USSR?



May 17, 2011

Seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas sits a land parcel in the middle of the desert. Called Area 51, the parcel is just outside of the abandoned Nevada Test and Training Range, where more than 100 atmospheric bomb tests were conducted in the 1950s. Officially, the U.S. government has never acknowledged the existence of Area 51. Unofficially, it has become a place associated with conspiracy theories, alien landings and tiny spaceships.

Journalist Annie Jacobsen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the site has remained classified for many years — not because of aliens or spaceships, but because the government once used the site for top-secret nuclear testing and weapons development.

In Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, Jacobsen details how several agencies — including the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense and the CIA — once used the site to conduct controversial and secretive research on aircraft and pilot-related projects, including planes that traveled three times faster than the speed of sound and nuclear-propelled, space-based missile launch systems.


Operation Plumbbob

In the summer and fall of 1957, a series of atmospheric nuclear tests — called Operation Plumbbob — were conducted above ground at the Nevada testing and training range, located just outside of Area 51. Twenty-nine explosions were set off while tests were conducted on troop readiness, accidental detonations and the effects of flying debris on living targets, according to documents declassified by the Department of Energy that Jacobsen details in her book.

During the explosions, security officer Richard Mingus stood guard outside many of the weapons-testing sites, including one with the largest atmospheric bomb that has ever exploded in the United States.

"The bomb goes off. Richard Mingus is at ground zero, safe away in a bunker somewhere, and suddenly someone realizes, 'My God, Area 51 is unsecured,' " Jacobsen says. "And so they send Richard Mingus through ground zero, 45 minutes to an hour after this nuclear bomb has exploded, so that he can get to Area 51 to guard the gate."

Mingus survived, as did many other atomic veterans who stood close to ground zero during other Plumbbob tests.

"You can absolutely drive through an atmospheric bomb test and not be affected," Jacobsen says. "Richard Mingus also stood guard at a test at a subparcel of Area 51 ... [during] a dirty bomb test."

During the dirty bomb test, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission simulated a plane crash where plutonium was dispersed on the ground, to see what would happen if an aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon were to crash on American soil. The resulting fallout and structural damage made much of the land uninhabitable.

"The area out at Area 51 that was part of the Operation Plumbbob test continues to be contaminated," she says. "It was not cleaned up until the '80s. And at that point, they sent in men in hazmat suits to scrape the land."


Rockets Into Space With Nuclear Powered Explosions

The nuclear tests at Area 51 gave the Department of Defense ideas about how the technology could be used to help the United States' newly minted space program. And during the space race with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the Department of Defense proposed using space itself as a weapon, according to declassified documents that Jacobsen found. One of its ideas was to develop a nuclear-powered space-based missile launch system that would sit outside Earth's atmosphere and have the capability to launch missiles — from outer space — into the Soviet Union.

"This didn't end up happening, but it almost did," Jacobsen says. "They were testing the rocket to see whether it would actually work. And to do that meant spewing vast quantities of radiation into the air. It's very controversial [and] it was kept very top-secret."

After the U.S. ratified the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear testing in the atmosphere, the tests continued to take place.

"It comes right up to the edge of violating the treaty when an accident occurs," she says. "In one example, a 148-pound chunk of radioactive debris shoots up into the sky and lands, rending [a subparcel of Area 51] a place that no one could go, not even in a hazmat suit, for six weeks."

The Oxcart

In addition to testing nuclear weapons, Area 51 was often used as a training ground for overhead surveillance planes, says Jacobsen. One plane, called the Oxcart, was designed by the CIA to travel three times the speed of sound at 90,000 feet to spy on the Soviet Union and Cuba.

The Oxcart, in use from 1963 to 1968, worked beautifully, though it was never used over the Soviet Union or Cuba. Never once shot down, it was used in missions over North Vietnam and during the Pueblo Crisis with North Korea.

"It absolutely kept us safer and kept us out of nuclear war," Jacobsen says. "The idea that Area 51 was this test facility working to move science and technology faster and further than any other nation is true and is one of the great hallmarks of Area 51. There are other areas of the base that are controversial — but they both exist simultaneously — out there in the desert."

The secrecy surrounding Area 51 has made it fertile ground for conspiracy theories, including one about a UFO cover-up and another about the moon landing having never happened. Jacobsen addresses these conspiracy theories in the book and speculates about what led to them. She says her book is based on interviews with 74 individuals with rare firsthand knowledge of the secret base. Thirty-two of the people she interviewed lived and worked at Area 51.

On flying discs and conspiracy theories

"The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2 intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had allegedly created [a] flying disc. ... American intelligence agents fanned out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact, they had made this flying disc.

"The idea behind it remains, why? Why were they looking for a flying disc? And conspiracy theorists have had their hands on this declassified file for over a decade now, and they say it proves that this flying disc came from outer space. If you read the documents, the takeaway that I found fascinating was that at the end of it, the Army admits finding the Horten brothers, and that the Horten brothers admitted their contact with the Russians and that's where the file ends. Everything after that is classified."

On why Area 51 is actually classified, according to a source

"The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. ... There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

"The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there's a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, 'Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.' And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there's no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg."

On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about

"The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman's bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn't compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. ...

"What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin."

On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax

"The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack."
Excerpt: 'Area 51'

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base
By Annie Jacobsen
Hardcover, 544 pages
Little, Brown and Co.
List price: $27.99

Prologue: The Secret City

This book is a work of nonfiction. The stories I tell in this narrative are real. None of the people are invented. Of the seventy-four individuals interviewed for this book with rare firsthand knowledge of the secret base, thirty-two of them lived and worked at Area 51.

Area 51 is the nation's most secret domestic military facility. It is located in the high desert of southern Nevada, seventy-five Miles north of Las Vegas. Its facilities have been constructed over the past sixty years around a flat, dry lake bed called Groom Lake. The U.S. government has never admitted it exists.

Key to understanding Area 51 is knowing that it sits inside the largest government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the Nevada Test and Training Range. Encompassing 4,687 square miles, this area is just a little smaller than the state of Connecticut — three times the size of Rhode Island, and more than twice as big as Delaware. Set inside this enormous expanse is a smaller parcel of land, 1,350 square miles, called the Nevada Test Site, the only facility like it in the continental United States. Beginning in 1951, on the orders of President Harry Truman, 105 nuclear weapons were exploded aboveground at the site and another 828 were exploded underground in tunnel chambers and deep, vertical shafts. The last nuclear weapons test on American soil occurred at the Nevada Test Site on September 23, 1992. The facility contains the largest amount of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium in the United States not secured inside a nuclear laboratory.

Area 51 sits just outside the Nevada Test Site, approximately five miles to the northeast of the northernmost corner, which places it inside the Nevada Test and Training Range. Because everything that goes on at Area 51, and most of what goes on at the Nevada Test and Training Range, is classified when it is happening, this is a book about secrets. Two early projects at Groom Lake have been declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency: the U‑2 spy plane, declassified in 1998, and the A‑12 Oxcart spy plane, declassified in 2007. And yet in thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports, the name Area 51 is always redacted, or blacked out. There are only two known exceptions, most likely mistakes.

This is a book about government projects and operations that have been hidden for decades, some for good reasons, others for arguably terrible ones, and one that should never have happened at all. These operations took place in the name of national security and they all involved cutting-edge science. The last published words of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, were "Science is not everything. But science is very beautiful." After reading this book, readers can decide what they think about what Oppenheimer said.

This is a book about black operations, government projects that are secret from Congress and secret from the people who make up the United States. To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.

Building the bomb was the single most expensive engineering project in the history of the United States. It began in 1942, and by the time the bomb was tested, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico high desert on July 16, 1945, the bomb's price tag, adjusted for inflation, was $28,000,000,000. The degree of secrecy maintained while building the bomb is almost inconceivable. When the world learned that America had dropped an atomic weapon on Hiroshima, no one was more surprised than the U.S. Congress, none of whose members had had any idea it was being developed. Vice President Harry Truman had been equally stunned to learn about the bomb when he became president of the United States, on April 12, 1945. Truman had been the chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program when he was vice president, meaning he was in charge of watching how money was spent during the war, yet he'd had no idea about the atomic bomb until he became president and the information was relayed to him by two men: Vannevar Bush, the president's science adviser, and Henry L. Stimson, the nation's secretary of war. Bush was in charge of the Manhattan Project, and Stimson was in charge of the war.

The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the nation's electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one knew the Manhattan Project was there. That is how powerful a black operation can be.

After the war ended, Congress — the legislators who had been so easily kept in the dark for two and a half years — was given stewardship of the bomb. It was now up to Congress to decide who would control its "unimaginable destructive power." With the passing of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, a terrifying and unprecedented new system of secret-keeping emerged. The presidential system was governed by presidential executive orders regarding national security information. But the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, formerly known as the Manhattan Project, was now in charge of regulating the classification of all nuclear weapons information in a system that was totally separate from the president's system. In other words, for the first time in American history, a federal agency run by civilians, the Atomic Energy Commission, would maintain a body of secrets classified based on factors other than presidential executive orders. It is from the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that the concept "born classified" came to be, and it was the Atomic Energy Commission that would oversee the building of seventy thousand nuclear bombs in sixty-five different sizes and styles. Atomic Energy was the first entity to control Area 51 — a fact previously undisclosed — and it did so with terrifying and unprecedented power. One simply cannot consider Area 51's uncensored history without addressing this cold, hard, and ultimately devastating truth.

The Atomic Energy Commission's Restricted Data classification was an even more terrifying anomaly, something that could originate outside the government through the "thinking and research of private parties." In other words, the Atomic Energy Commission could hire a private company to conduct research for the commission knowing that the company's thinking and research would be born classified and that even the president of the United States would not necessarily have a need‑to‑know about it. In 1994, for instance, when President Clinton created by executive order the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission, certain records involving certain programs inside and around Area 51 were kept from the president on the grounds that he did not have a need‑to‑know. Two of these programs, still classified, are revealed publicly for the first time in this book. One of the Atomic Energy Commission's former classifications officers, Donald Woodbridge, characterized the term born classified as something that "give[s] the professional classificationist unanswerable authority." Area 51 lives on as an example. Of the Atomic Energy Commission's many facilities across the nation — it is now called the Department of Energy — the single largest facility is, and always has been, the Nevada Test Site. Other parts of the Nevada Test and Training Range would be controlled by the Department of Defense. But there were gray areas, like Area 51 — craggy mountain ranges and flat, dry lake beds sitting just outside the official borders of the Nevada Test Site and not controlled by the Department of Defense. These areas are where the most secret projects were set up. No one had a need‑to‑know about them. And for decades, until this book was published, no one would.

Excerpted from Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen. Copyright 2011 by Annie Jacobsen. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Co.

[J.B. Stone]

Secret Government Experiments Come to Light
Analysis by Amy Enchelmeyer
Tue Sep 13, 2011 12:25 PM ET

The government may not want you to know that it set off nuclear bombs willy-nilly in the atmosphere or tested LSD on unwitting subjects, but at least the Science Channel does!

In case you believed that elaborate government conspiracies were merely the driving force behind X-Files episodes, the Science Channel is setting the record straight. As a compendium to their latest show, "Dark Matters," which explores the darker side of science, the Science Channel has published introductions and full transcripts from government hearings on some of the most unbelievable -- yet true -- conspiracies, including the highly-controversial MKULTRA project.

VIDEO: The Philadelphia Experiment

According to the 1977 transcript of the hearing before Congress, MKULTRA projects on behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing took place over the better part of a decade, from 1953 through 1964.

Perhaps best known for administering the psychedelic drug LSD to unwitting participants, MKULTRA actually was composed of 149 (known) projects, across 86 universities and institutions, that dabbled in everything from harmless hypnosis to horrific human testing.

No one was spared. The CIA was an equal-opportunity abuser. The report details it as an “extensive testing and experimentation" program that included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign."

SCIENCE CHANNEL: Top 5 Mad Scientists

The gory details will probably forever remain unknown. In 1973, all the MKULTRA files were supposed to have been destroyed. But, in a Hollywood-science-fiction-movie twist of fate, seven boxes of financial files were categorized differently, and so overlooked. Shortly thereafter, they were discovered during a routine Freedom of Information Act request and turned over to the public.

A few hardworking senators in various congressional committees and subcommittees set out to compile what they could. If you’ve got the time, the curiosity or the wherewithal to never trust your government ever again, then it’s worth the full 173-page read -- or at least a quick scan.

Need further conspiracy theory fodder? Look no further than the Science Channel. You can also read the reports on the USSR’s Controlled Offensive Behavior (for the sake of simplicity, let's just call it mind control) and U.S. High-Altitude Test Experience (how and when the U.S. set off nuclear bombs in the atmosphere).

Watch "Dark Matters" on the Science Channel, Wednesdays at 10pm E/P.

[J.B. Stone]

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/ ... mb?ps=cprs

by Robert Krulwich

Updated July 18, 2012: We have added an update to this post, which you can find below the original. Click here to read about what happened to the men.

They weren't crazy. They weren't being punished. All but one volunteered to do this (which makes it all the more astonishing).

Atom Central/YouTube

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They'd marked the spot "Ground Zero. Population 5" on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

As we watch, directly overhead, two F-89 jets roar into view, and one of them shoots off a nuclear missile carrying an atomic warhead.

They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he's wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.

Who are these guys? And why is the narrator joyously shouting, "It happened! The mounds are vibrating. It is tremendous! Directly above our heads! Aaah!"

This footage comes from our government's archives. It was shot by the U.S. Air Force (at the behest of Col. Arthur B. "Barney" Oldfield, public information officer for the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs) to demonstrate the relative safety of a low-grade nuclear exchange in the atmosphere. Two colonels, two majors and a fifth officer agreed to stand right below the blast. Only the cameraman, George Yoshitake, didn't volunteer.

The country was just beginning to worry about nuclear fallout, and the Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons to counter similar weapons being developed in Russia. (They didn't win this argument.)

The Silence

Watching this film, there are many things to wonder (and worry) about, but one of the stranger moments is how the bomb bursts in complete silence. We see a sudden white flash. It makes the soldiers flinch. Then there's a pause, a pregnant quiet that lasts for a beat, then another and then — there's a roar. ("There it is! The ground wave!"), after which the sky above seems to go black and the air turns to fire.

Basic physics explains the pause. Because light travels quicker than sound, you see light first, you hear sound later. In most movies (even in government-released atomic bomb blast films), the sound is artificially time shifted to make the flash and the sound appear simultaneous.

'A Long, Thundering Growl'

But that's not what it's like if you are actually there. Science historian Alex Wellerstein has found an undoctored and deeply frightening recording — which he just posted on Restricted Data; The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

He got it, he says, from "a Russian correspondent" who was searching the U.S. National Archives. (Why not? Our past is open to all.) The Russian found a recording of an American atomic test in 1953, which shows an enormous flash of white, so white it blanks out the entire sky, then thick clouds of ash (or maybe dirt?) tumble up, a fireball appears — all of this in total quiet. Thirty seconds pass. And then, says Wellerstein,

Put on some headphones and listen to it all the way through — it's much more intimate than any other test film I've seen. You get a much better sense of what these things must have been like, on the ground, as an observer, than from your standard montage of blasts. Murmurs in anticipation; the slow countdown over a megaphone; the reaction at the flash of the bomb; and finally — a sharp bang, followed by a long, thundering growl. That's the sound of the bomb.


It's a sound you would never want to hear in real life, but this a safe way to eavesdrop. Just one warning: For the first two minutes of this video, nothing happens, nothing I could hear, anyway. Then there's a countdown, and at 2:24 from the top ... the bomb bursts; at 2:54 the blast hits.

Operation Upshot-Knothole ANNIE nuclear test, 1953

A Postscript: What Happened To The Guys In The Bomb Video?
By ROBERT KRULWICH & ALEX WELLERSTEIN

A lot of you wrote in to ask what happened to the five men in the blog post above, who, in 1957 stood under an exploding atomic bomb. Did they get cancer? Did they suffer later on? Are they still with us?

We checked, of course. I did find a list of the people who were in the film.

Col. Sidney Bruce
Lt. Col. Frank P. Ball
Maj. Norman "Bodie" Bodinger
Maj. John Hughes
Don Lutrel
George Yoshitake (the cameraman, not seen)


Googling through the list, we quickly discovered (as did many of you) that George Yoshitake, the cameraman, was alive, at least as of two years ago. In 2010, he was interviewed in the New York Times and talked about his fellow cameramen who took pictures of atomic bombs. "Quite a few have died from cancer," he told reporter Bill Broad. "No doubt it was related to the testing." Yoshitake's nephew also wrote in and didn't mention his uncle's passing, so I'm guessing that he's now 84 years old and still with us.

As for the others, that's trickier. It's hard to know if a match in names is a real match and I didn't want to make an awkward mistake. I turned to my sleuth friend, science historian Alex Wellerstein (now at the American Institute of Physics) for help here. He told me "Military folks who have died can be found in the Department of Veteran's Affairs Gravesite Locator — and since we think all the video guys were Army and all World War II veterans, we might find some matches.

Alex looked, and here's what he found:

Col. Sidney C. Bruce — died in 2005 (age 86)
Lt. Col. Frank P. Ball — died in 2003 (age 83)
Maj. John Hughes — very common name, but I'm guessing he is Maj. John W. Hughes II (born 1919, same as the above) — died in 1990 (age 71)
Maj. Norman Bodinger — unclear (not listed in the database), he may still be alive?
Don Lutrel — I think this is a misspelling of "Luttrell." There is a Donald D. Luttrell in the DVA database, US Army CPL, born 1924, died 1987 (age 63). Seems like a possibility.


If any of you reading think we've messed up, and someone we call dead is alive or alive is dead, please write me immediately. But this is our best effort.

Then there's the matter of perspective. It's a mistake, I think, to focus on six people as if they represent everyone who was exposed to bomb radiation. As Alex said in an email to me, it's more complicated than that.

..lots of people associated with Nevada Test Site operations got cancer over the years, some $150 million has been paid out in compensation to 2,000+ "onsite participants" of nuclear testing, under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

The thing is, in that particular explosion, those guys would have been in a pretty safe position. The bomb itself was a small one (by nuclear standards — 2 kilotons) and it was way, way above their heads. They weren't in a zone to be too affected by the immediate radiation. The bomb was small enough and high enough that it wouldn't have sucked up dust to produce much fallout. The remaining cloud would have been full of (nasty) fission products, but it would have been extremely hot and most of it would have stayed aloft until it cooled down, by which point it probably would have been spread more diffusely.


At least the folks in the films volunteered to be there (George excepted) and were given some pre-film training (not terribly useful, but still). That was not the case for a little community downwind from the Nevada Test Site, a place called St. George, Utah.

The folks in St. George were repeatedly hit by uninvited fallout. Alex wrote me that in 1953, one test, codenamed "Harry" actually deposited quite a lot of fallout on St. George, to the point where residents were forced to stay inside for many hours, and prohibited from washing their cars until they became less radioactive.

Over the years, says Alex, the U.S. government has paid some $813 million to more than 16,000 "downwinders" to compensate them for illnesses presumably connected to the bomb testing program. So it is clear that tests like these — often done to demonstrate the safety of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere — were not safe at all.

Some of you may have noticed the nuclear missile video says the explosion took place 10,000 feet above our group of soldiers. Apparently, the video is wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council checked the numbers and says the explosion, part of Operation PLUMBBOB, was actually at 18,500 feet. The second explosion can be found in its original form in the National Archives here.