Congress must act now to help Americans still suffering from the legacy of nuclear tests

Nearly 80 years have passed since the atomic bomb created by J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project was secretly detonated in central New Mexico. The Trinity explosion not only ushered in the nuclear age and triggered the Cold War arms race, it spread deadly radioactive fallout across dozens of states

Thousands of Americans are still living with the tragic consequences of Oppenheimer’s bomb. For us, the Cold War has never really ended. Generations of us are still suffering today.

But Congress now has a unique opportunity to take care of many of those harmed by decades of nuclear weapons production and testing. Our government detonated 928 nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site outside Las Vegas, 100 of which were above ground. Most of these nuclear blasts were far more powerful than the atomic bombs that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear tests on our own soil spewed deadly radioactive fallout across the nation and beyond, leading to increased rates of cancer and other radiation-related illnesses for millions of Americans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons workers, uranium miners and residents of communities in dozens of states were also poisoned by the wastes produced by the Manhattan Project and the massive weapons complex that was part of the nuclear arms buildup that followed. We are the real legacy of Oppenheimer’s bomb.

Government secrecy and denial obscured the human costs of nuclear weapons for decades, but thanks to dogged pressure from the public and dedicated members of Congress, the true scope of the widespread health damage became impossible to ignore. By the late 1980s, it led Sen. John Glenn of Ohio to write: “Our nuclear weapons production system has become nothing less than an environmental time bomb. And it will do us little good to protect ourselves from our adversaries if we poison our own people in the process.”

Far too many Americans who have suffered or lost their lives because of the effects of radiation exposure from the U.S. nuclear weapons program have been forgotten or ignored by the federal government.

This week, however, if House Speaker Mike Johnson allows a vote, Congress has an opportunity — and a moral obligation — to approve new legislation that would begin to address the shortcomings and omissions of the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which has excluded far too many of those harmed. RECA provides compensation for some, but certainly not all, of America’s nuclear “downwinders” who can document specific radiation exposure-related illnesses.

The new bill, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act, put forward by Sens. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), would extend RECA for six years and, crucially, expand partial compensation to communities that have been excluded. The Senate passed the bill by a 69-30 margin with strong bipartisan support. Now it is up to the House to take up the bill.

If considered by the House, the bill would very likely win approval, and President Joe Biden has said he would sign it. The House has no time to waste — the current RECA program expires this month. Any other path forward would be a dereliction of duty, not only to those who have been excluded, but to communities currently covered by RECA that would lose critical health screenings.

The current RECA program provides limited compensation only to those who lived in 22 largely rural counties of Utah, Arizona and Nevada between 1951 and 1958, and the summer of 1962, who developed leukemia or one of 17 other kinds of cancer. It also covers uranium workers from 1942 through 1971 who can document a subsequent diagnosis of a specified compensable disease.

But numerous health studies since 1990 have shown that fallout from past nuclear tests didn’t stop at the county or state lines recognized under the original RECA program. For instance, Northern Utah — the most populated area of the state, where one of the authors of this piece grew up and still lives — has never been included in RECA.

Incredibly, the many downwinders of Trinity in New Mexico, mostly Hispanic and Native American, were never warned, never acknowledged and never included in RECA. Uranium miners working after 1971 and communities in the Navajo Nation and other Western states whose land and water is still poisoned by uranium mining contamination have been ignored as well. So have residents whose homes and schools are contaminated by radioactive waste from former Manhattan Project–era sites around St. Louis, and other former weapons-related sites across the country that created radioactive contamination and other toxic residues.

Under the Lujan-Hawley-Crapo bill, RECA would be extended to eligible downwinders in seven western states and Guam. It would also add additional uranium workers and residents in Kentucky, Alaska, Tennessee and Missouri who are living in or near areas contaminated by the effects of nuclear weapons production.

The money spent on additional compensation amounts to a sliver of the estimated $756 billion price tag for modernizing the massive U.S. nuclear arsenal over the coming decade. It is only right that the cost of those weapons includes people they have already harmed, who have borne a terrible burden.

Cost should not be an issue. This is a matter of simple justice.

We come from opposite ends of the country, yet both of us are cancer survivors who grew up in communities poisoned by the radioactive fallout and contamination from nuclear weapons testing and production. Along with many thousands of others from affected communities and organizations — including the Western Governors Association, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the American Public Health Association — we join to call on members of the House from both sides of the aisle to implore Speaker Johnson to bring the Senate bill to the House floor for a vote without further delay.

Americans who have been endangered by the government’s nuclear weapons production and testing without their knowledge or consent deserve justice and accountability.

Mary Dickson is a Salt Lake City writer and downwinder advocate for radiation-exposed individuals who were harmed by nuclear weapons testing. Daryl Kimball is director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C.