Mary Dickson was among the Salt Lake City schoolchildren in the 1950s who had to hide under desks, mistakenly believing it would protect them from a nuclear bomb. Little did they know, at that very moment in time, Mary Dickson and the rest of the nation was in the middle of a nuclear detonation at the United States Nevada Test Site.
Dickson and her neighbors, then, were considered downwinders, a term that was worth an entire lifetime of illness and grief. Dickson, herself, had thyroid cancer. Her sisters had lupus and also developed intestinal cancer. There was a time where, she counted-out of a five block area in her neighborhood-more than 50 people who had been diagnosed with cancer, autoimmune diseases, miscarriages, or birth defects.
Unfortunately, there is no way to tell what caused every illness, but all the science points towards the fact that all of these individuals had been radiated. Dickson has stated, “The Cold War never ended for us. We’re still living with its effects.” For her, the most troubling part was the lack of knowledge. With every lump or ache, there came the dread that cancer had come back.
Ever since the 1954 Castle Bravo, its radioactive fallout landing on Marshall Islands and coating its people, to Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and people paying to the Soviets for the use of their land to test excess of 100 bombs, there has always been a great level of anguish linked with nuclear testing.
Fallout across the world
The nuclear age began with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, however in the decades that followed, a lot of countries had nuclear weapons and tested in excess of 2000 of them. Most government went about the testing of bombs in areas which were considered to be remote, these are areas like, islands and deserts, the tundra. There was a population there though, but with no rights.
In the Pacific Ocean, the USA undertook 67 nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands, during these tests it was common to displace entire populations of islands. Later on, a portion of the radioactive debris, was turned into a small concrete structure and is called Runit Dome, this is on Enewetak Atoll. The US Department of Energy claims that the structure does not pose a threat to health, however the theory of climate change and rising sea waters does pose a great level of threat.
In Semipalatinsk, the test grounds were a close guarded secret, and for the people living there, their suffering was increased with high levels of cancer and infant mortality.
Activists like Togzhan Kassenova and the Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition are working to document and preserve the stories of families who suffered in silence.
Science and survivors
Some researchers assert that fallout from US tests alone has resulted in tens of thousands of Americans developing thyroid cancer. In the Marshall Islands, research headed by Columbia University’s Ivana Nikolic Hughes discovered that even today, over 60 years since the fresh water cisterns were irradiated, the food suply is radioactive.
Survivors still fight for justice. In the U.S., more than 27,000 downwinders have received $1.3 billion under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). While the program was extended in 2024, advocates like Dickson emphasize how most families do not have the 50-year-old documents that are crucial to making a claim.
Kazakhstan has also a national compensation program. However for most of the world, progress is much more lacking. France has not even begun to acknowledge for the nuclear crimes that were done in the Polynesia until 2010, and the UK is still directing veterans of its own nuclear tests to apply through war pensions to generalised compensation.
The reckoning that won’t end
To these people, nuclear testing has and still shape their lives.
Dickson explains the war never ended for them. The Runit Dome, the boarder of the Nevada desert, and the Kazakh steppe are still present today and with it, the responsibility to act.