Legacy of Radiation Illness Stirs Objection to Nevada Bomb Test

[donsu]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020601606.html?nav=rss_nation


When the baby boomers of St. George were children, radioactive ash from nuclear test explosions in Nevada regularly drifted toward the red bluffs of their town and fell like snow. They played in it and wrote their names in it on car windows.

The federal government reassured the townspeople they were in no danger as it detonated 952 bombs in Nevada over four decades. But thousands of people who lived downwind of the test site got radiation-related cancer, and the town of 50,000 has its own cancer-treatment center today.

-snip-

At a series of emotional meetings last month in Las Vegas, St. George, Salt Lake City and the Idaho capital of Boise, people who live downwind of the Nevada Test Site expressed fear that if the government goes ahead with its code-named Divine Strake test, radioactive dust from previous tests will blow their way.

"People here have been exposed to radiation already. We don't need any little extra push," St. George native Michelle Thomas said in her home last week.

-snip-

The Pentagon plans to test a 700-ton ammonium-nitrate-and-fuel-oil "bunker buster" weapon on the Nevada Test Site, a 1,375-square-mile chunk of desert. Divine Strake will demonstrate the impact on deeply buried tunnels should a U.S. complex be attacked, or should the United States attack a bunker in another country. No date for the test has been set.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) planned to conduct Divine Strake last June, but a Reno lawyer got an injunction to stop it. Robert Hager filed suit in April in federal court on behalf of the Western Shoshone tribe and people living downwind of the test site. A status hearing on the suit is scheduled for March 2.

-snip-

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) planned to conduct Divine Strake last June, but a Reno lawyer got an injunction to stop it. Robert Hager filed suit in April in federal court on behalf of the Western Shoshone tribe and people living downwind of the test site. A status hearing on the suit is scheduled for March 2.

-snip-

Like others in southern Nevada, he speaks bitterly of declassified documents that show the government did not detonate nuclear bombs when the wind blew toward Las Vegas. They waited until the wind blew toward St. George.

"The people in Utah have long memories," Matheson said. "They've been lied to before. The people in Utah are so patriotic, they're among the most supportive of the government in the nation, and the government has taken advantage of that. So I'm always skeptical when someone tells me not to worry about the testing of weapons."
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crimes against humanity

[Bobbieo]

1. The Western Shoshone Tribe, Utah and Mohave County AZ Downwinders are not giving up

in their fight against the Divine Strake. It is their lives and the health of their families that concerns them.

They need all the support they can get, right now, as the Bush administration seems bound and determined to set off that 700 ton bomb test.

Is this a prelude to Iran?

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. I still think the "700 ton bomb" is a phoney, and it will actually be

a detonation of a bunker-buster mini-nuke -- and now, they've successfully set up the expectation that there will be fallout stirred up by the explosion so when radiation levels surge they'll have a handy explanation: "Oops, guess you were right about that".

And it is a prelude to Iran - testing the bombs they want to use there.

IMO.