- A 21 kiloton nuclear test conducted at the Nevada Test Site in November 1951 as part of Operation Buster. It was the first US nuclear field exercise conducted on land. Troops shown are a mere six miles from the blast.
The United States conducted 1,032 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992: at the Nevada Test Site, at sites in the Pacific Ocean, in Amchitka Island of the Alaska Peninsula, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
The Nevada Test Site
Between 1951 and 1958, around 100 nuclear weapons tests were conducted in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Located about 100 km northwest of Las Vegas, the NTS was larger than many small countries, offering some 3,500 square km of undisturbed land.
The average yield for the atmospheric tests was 8.6 kilotons (kt). The fallout from the tests contained radionuclides and gases which were transported thousands of miles away from the NTS by winds. As a result, people living in the United States during these years were exposed to varying levels of radiation.
- Sedan nuclear explosion, 6 July 1962.
Little information was released during this time about human exposure to the fallout. For example, in the November/December 1997 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Pat Ortmeyer and Arjun Makhijani stated that the U.S. government failed to share the results of research conducted in 1950 indicating that milk would be contaminated by fallout.
Radioactive fallout from Sedan explosion
Video of Sedan Nuclear Weapons test
A number of underground tests were also carried out from September 1957, with all testing going underground after 1962. “Storax Sedan” was part of the Operation Plowshare programme to investigate the use of nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes such as mining. It caused more radioactive fallout contamination than any other nuclear explosion conducted in the United States. Detonated on 6 July 1962, Sedan released roughly 880,000 curies of Iodine 131 into the atmosphere. Detected radioactivity was especially high in parts of Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Illinois, exposing millions of people to radioactive fallout. It also created the largest man-made crater in the United States, displacing over 12 million tons of earth.
- Crater caused by the Sedan explosion carried out at the Nevada Test Site on 6 July 1962.
A significant amount of radiation was also vented by around 30 other underground tests. The radionuclides contained in this fallout were carried thousands of miles from the NTS.
Increase in number of leukaemia cases
The lethal potential of the nuclear tests was not immediately apparent to downwind residents. An increasing number of leukaemia cases started occurring in people living downwind of the NTS, according to the 1982 publication Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon.
In an article entitled Cancer Among Military Personnel Exposed to Nuclear Weapons, the American Cancer Society explains: “In the late 1970s, a higher than usual number of cases of leukemia (4 expected, 10 found) was seen among the 3,000 troops present at the "Smokey" nuclear test in Nevada in August 1957. The question arose as to whether these cases were caused by radiation from the nuclear tests….A recent study compared about 1,000 veterans who received the highest doses of radiation to other veterans who were minimally exposed. The risk of dying from some blood-related cancers (certain leukemias and lymphomas) was more than 3 times higher in those exposed to radiation, and the risk of dying overall was also slightly higher (about 22%). However, the risk was not increased for other types of cancers known to be caused by radiation, and the overall risk of dying from any form of cancer was not higher.”
Philip Fradkin also describes in Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy, how two nuclear tests (Dirty Harry and Shot Nancy in 1953) resulted in the deaths of 1,420 lambing ewes and 2,970 lambs in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona from severe radiation injuries.
