The House voted Tuesday to acknowledge that the U.S. government harmed civilians in five southwestern states in the 1950s and 1960s by failing to take action to reduce effects of radiation from the atomic weapons program.
The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Wayne Owens, D-Utah, Rep. Jim Hansen, R-Utah, and other members from Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, would authorize compassionate payments of $50,000 to each person in the area downwind from the atomic weapons tests who developed a possibly radiogenic cancer, and $100,000 to each worker in an underground uranium mine who fell victim to radiation-caused cancer.Owens said the measure "restores the nation's honor" by repaying "a debt to civilian victims of the Cold War."
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Rep. Craig James, R-Fla., helped Owens and Hansen gain passage of the bill. Only a handful of members were on the House floor for the voice vote, and there were no nays.
The measure now goes to the Senate where it faces an uncertain future. A companion measure, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., has passed the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee but has opposition in the Judiciary Committee, which would routinely receive the House bill. Hatch could add the measure as an amendment to other legislation and avoid taking it to judiciary.
The House vote came nearly 13 years after the Deseret News reported the first scientifically credible evidence that radiation falling from open-air bomb tests caused cancer among exposed civilians. Evidence later accumulated that uranium miners, many of them Navajos, were suffering extremely high rates of lung cancer, eventually attributed to radon gas associated with uranium ore and not removed from the mines by ventilation.
For years in the late 1950s residents and anti-nuclear activists had accused the Atomic Energy Commission of harming civilians but were unable to present credible evidence. During the Kennedy administration the U.S undertook a study of thyroid nodules supposedly found in some schoolchildren who lived downwind from the testing, but the results were inconclusive. President Kennedy himself blocked action to halt testing early in his administration, though he subsequently signed with the Soviet Union a ban on testing in the atmosphere.
It was not until the Deseret News uncovered evidence in the National Institute of Health's Atlas of Cancer Mortality that there were several times the number of leukemia cases in southwestern Utah than would normally be expected that responsible scientists began to believe the testing had caused illnesses among civilians. Dr. Joseph L Lyon of the University of Utah published a noted study in 1979 that corroborated the newspaper's findings. The Deseret News subsequently uncovered data from formerly secret government documents that detailed U.S. negligence in monitoring the tests and informing civilians downwind from the Nevada Test Site.
During the Carter administration an interagency task force acknowledged that the tests had caused illness to off-site residents, but because of the impossibility of determining which cancers were caused by fallout downwind, the Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations declined to support compensation bills. The only legislation to pass Congress on the subject was a measure by Hatch setting up a University of Utah study, not yet published, of radiation in the area and establishing a cancer health center in St. George.
The nearest a compensation bill came to passage was in the Senate in 1982. Then Hatch failed by eight votes of adding compensation for downwind residents to an agreement to pay more than $1.5 billion to Pacific island natives affected by bomb tests there. The effort failed when downwind groups opposed the measure as inadequate and Democrats opposed it because passage might aid Hatch in his re-election campaign.
The downwind cancer victims won their suit in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City when Judge Bruce Jenkins found that the United States was indeed negligent and had caused injury to 12 downwind plaintiffs. The U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, however, ruled that the United States was immune to such suits.
During the House debate Tuesday, Owens agreed to accept a possible amendment to the bill in the Senate to cover underground uranium miners in Wyoming. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., has been the most outspoken critic of compensation but has recently found that uranium miners in his state have suffered unusual rates of lung cancer.