WHAT DID YOU DO ON 6 APRIL 1953?

That was one of the days that a heavy dose of radioactive fallout descended on Las Vegas High School. It was heaviest around noontime, when we were socializing on the front steps.

The other days of heavy fallout were the 25th of April, the 8th and 19th of May of that 1953 year, and the 22nd of March 1955--after we had graduated. The fallout patterns on the maps (that have now been declassified) are alarming for those dates if you were a resident of Las Vegas, and liked to be outdoors at noontime.

I know where I SHOULD have been. I should have been inside working on an autobiography for Mrs. Volker's class. Reconstructing this time line from the document found in an old trunk my folks were kind enough to save, I see that the paper was due 10 April '53, and that I turned 7 pages in a "day late" and only got a "B". If I had been inside working on the paper it would have kept me out of the fallout and quite possibly saved me from a thyroidectomy and a shortened life span. But then, I should have stopped drinking the milk back then too--it may have been more dangerous than the fallout.

Life is full of "should haves" and "could haves", so it does no good to do anything but smile about it now. I could have been drinking V-8 juice, but I preferred milk back then. (It did my body no good). I just didn't know that it was laced with radioactive iodine 131 and strontium 90 from the pastures around Alamo, Mesquite, Moapa and St. George (where the Las Vegas milk came from.) Nobody knew back then, and when they began to test for I-131 they improperly burned it off in some faulty test procedures and didn't find out the true danger for years. Then there were the scientists who didn't want to alarm the populace for fear that the nuclear tests might be stopped. They should have been more honest.

There were eleven nuclear test shots just 73 miles outside of town that year: (12 in 1951, 8 in 1952, 17 in 1955, 1 in 1956, 27 in 1957, 24 in 1958, 6 in 1962, 1 in 1965, and 3 in 1968). So I can't be sure that it was the 6th of April 1953 that the flash woke me up. It may have been one of those other 30 tests while I was in high school. I do remember waking up to the flash of the atom bombs, so maybe I did on that day too. I would have watched the window shade which extended below the open window, for in a minute it would get sucked out almost to the screen (like a backdraft) and then blow into the room as the overpressure wave from the blast came through the room. This sequence had become routine for me, so I probably rolled over and went back to sleep.

When I got up the fallout was about half way to Las Vegas. When I got to school that morning, it began to fall. Between classes, on the walk to the gym, and from Frazier Hall to the main building, I breathed it in. It was on my car as I drove to lunch at Sills Drive in, having dropped Sandy Ragsdale and Diane Libby off at Sandy's. It was in the grass and on the front steps at the high school when we returned and sat around with the different groups socializing before afternoon classes began.

A few mornings later, the 19th of May 1953, another flash must have wakened me too. (By the bomb's early light; 5:05 a.m.) The LA TIMES noted that windows shook in Los Angeles from the blast. That was the day they stopped traffic on Highway 93 & 91 around Bunkerville (114 miles from ground zero) and St. George (160 miles from GZ), and washed the fallout off of cars. The school principals in St. George were told to keep the kids inside, and the rest of the 5000 citizens were warned by radio. According to the carefully researched book FALLOUT: an American Nuclear Tragedy. by Phillip Fradkin, a gas station attendant who washed almost 200 cars that day died a few years later from that radiation exposure. Others are well documented in the Utah Cancer, Thyroid, and Leukemia studies done by the University of Utah. Fradkin's book is less about radioactive fallout and cancer than about government betrayal of its citizens, although he didn't intend it that way.

That particular shot was part of the Upshot-Knothole sequence of tests known as HARRY. It is now infamous as "Dirty Harry" because of the heavy fallout. It distributed 1734 tons of fallout over the landscape, including its pulverized 300 foot tower. (What did you think made up those big mushroom clouds?) The radioactive monitoring equipment in St. George became too contaminated to measure how much radioactivity there really was. Two days later, new equipment was used and conservative estimates are that radiation reached 1230 times the permissible limit (a low-ball Atomic Energy Commission figure) and stayed that way for 16 days. It makes one wonder what it was like in Vegas that summer.

It was Dirty Harry that contaminated the film crew on the outskirts of St. George who were filming "The Conquerors." Directed by Dick Powell, it starred John Wayne as Genghis Khan, and Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead also appeared in it. They all died of cancer as did an unusually large number of those on the film crew and cast. The Deseret News found 91 out of the 220 died of cancer within 25 years, many in the prime of their lives. The producer of the film, Howard Hughes, fought the AEC and nuclear tests at every step, calling the Nevada Test Site "a cancer on Las Vegas."

Looking at the fallout maps for DIXIE 4/6/53, SIMON 4/25/53, ENCORE 5/8/53 (also part of Upshot-Knothole tests) and BEE 3/22/55, I wonder how much fallout Las Vegas really got. The Department of Energy's Las Vegas Operations office did a retroactive study in December 1985 ("Historical Estimates of External Gamma Exposure and Collective External Gamma Exposure from Testing at the Nevada Test Site through 1958") in which they said:

"The greatest collective exposures occurred in three general areas: Saint George, Utah; Ely, Nevada; and Las Vegas, Nevada. Three events, HARRY (May 19, 1953), BEE (March 22, 1955), and SMOKY (August 31, 1957) accounted for over half of the total collective estimated external gamma exposure."

While the estimates were to include gamma and beta exposure from fallout (external) and from inhalation and ingestion (internal) it did not consider the intake of radioactive isotopes in the local milk supply. What they considered "over half" the exposure turns out to be 57 percent, but that other 43 percent could have kept us bathed in fallout during all of our most vulnerable years. Again, that says nothing of the milk supply from the cow feed exposed over all those years.

Fallout charts for SIMON show that it detoured over Las Vegas on its way to New York state. We got its heavier stuff. In an article in SCIENCE magazine by Ralph Lapp, a nuclear physicist and an early critic of the AEC, he calculated that the thyroids of 10,000 infants in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area could have received from 10 to 30 rads; enough to produce from 10 to 100 cases of thyroid cancer over the next 20 years. This would have been from the radioiodine in their milk, caused from the rain induced fallout in that state. SIMON had exceeded its expected yield up to 43 kilotons, nearly four times the yield of Hiroshima.

Secrecy surrounded the nuclear test for many reasons, but national security should have been the only one. Unfortunately, it was evoked to protect fallout miscalculations and to keep from alarming nearby residents in Las Vegas. In one case a Las Vegas milk study was kept secret because it was part of a larger "PIKE incident" (3/13/64) in which a nuclear device was fired 390 feet below ground. A dense, black radioactive cloud vented through a fissure in the earth for about one minute and then drifted over Las Vegas and was tracked to the Mexican border and beyond. That was a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty--radioactive debris crossing an international border, so the incident was hushed up and to this day does not appear on the released schedule of tests. There were deliberate lies in the press release to the Review Journal and another dozen such incidents which were not uncovered until 1980.

We didn't know about it in Las Vegas, but scientists from UCLA shook up the AEC when they tracked fallout from SMOKY to Rock Springs, Wyoming. They returned a year later to find the strontium 90 in the bone marrow of rabbits equal to that of rabbits 2 miles from ground zero. On another occasion, clouds dropped the heavier particulates over Las Vegas on their way to contaminate Los Angeles, which recorded the highest background readings (120 times normal) ever recorded outside the immediate test site area. According to the DESERET NEWS, LA mayor Norris Poulson called the White House to complain.

Our city and state officials could only see the high tech jobs created by the test facility, and didn't want the tourist trade inhibited by any talk of radioactivity.

In the fallout pattern 155 miles past Las Vegas in a northeasterly direction is the town of Fredona, Arizona. When it reported leukemia deaths 20 times the national average, it makes one wonder why no one tabulated those type of statistics for original Las Vegas residents.

Original reports (once scientists outside the AEC got interested) were that the radiation dosage to the thyroids of children in St. George who drank one liter of fresh milk daily was 1,200 rads, while those in Salt Lake received 100. Final reports were watered down by pressure from the AEC. Under AEC auspices, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory published a document in May 1966. It estimated doses (1952 thru 1957) to thyroids of children as: St. George, 120 rads; Roswell New Mexico, 57; Salt Lake City, 46; Grand Junction Colorado, 33; Amarillo and Boston, 19; Albany, 15; Cleveland, 8; and New York City, 5 rads. One report in 1964 describing just one shot--HARRY--squelched the estimated 120 to 440 rads for children in St.George. Nobody checked Las Vegas, but maybe they didn't have to: we got our milk from St. George and areas closer to ground zero.

There is no "safe" dosage of radiation, and even X rays are cumulative on your body. Radiation affects each individual differently. Those whose bones were susceptible to strontium 90 got leukemia, those whose thyroids sucked up iodine 131 got a wide variety of illnesses, some of which haven't even happened yet. Cancers can be induced by exposure to as little as a few rads. Generally, the greater the dose the greater the chance of contracting cancer. Exposure does not automatically produce cancer, which can skip one person and land on another, with no rhyme, little reason, and no certainty about its cause, according to "Cancer: Science and Society" (John Cairns 1978). Some people's cells repair themselves, other people's eventually become malignant. It is a little like asking you how many colds you had back in 1953 to see who at LVHS was most vulnerable, not that there is any correlation.

Shot SMOKY was studied in 1977 by the Cancer section of the Center for Disease Control. By 1980 they tracked 2459 soldiers who had participated in that single shot, and found 9 cases of leukemia when there should have been only 3.5 by national averages. They found 2 more in '82, and concluded there was a greater effect than formerly thought possible from low-dose levels. This is an ominous finding for us permanent downwinders in Las Vegas. If there is even one more leukemia death in the class of '53 beyond those of which we are only vaugely aware, we would be at thirty times the national average. Even if it were three times the national average, we would be equal to the carefully researched data for southern Utah.

So I may be a little fuzzy on what I did on the 6th of April in 1953, but I am certain that it was one of the days at Las Vegas High School that had a profound effect on the long term health of many of the students there.

Health Survey Results Interesting

Results of the Class of '53 Health Survey are interesting, even if it did not turn out to be scientific enough in a statistical sense. More than the 40 that were returned (out of 200 sent out) would have been needed to make it accurate enough for medical authorities.

The objective of the survey was to ascertain if the condition of our health during the past 40 years was affected by nuclear fallout we received during the testing in the '50's, and by whatever milk we drank which may have been contaminated by radioactive iodine 131 and strontium 90. It was to be compared to national averages and the 3 studies done in Utah on cancer, thyroid disease, and leukemia.

Respondents of the survey were not specific enough in their reporting disease to be able to make definitive conclusions, except in one instance. Three thyroidectomies for a growth on the thyroid gland put us in the same category as those living in St. George and Cedar City Utah: 3 per 40 instead of the national average of 2 per 1000 may well be as significant as the southern Utah statistics done on thyroid disease by the University of Utah and the Utah Cancer Registry.

The survey also pointed out the need to study death certificates in order to find cases of leukemia, since there seems to be a high incidence in those reported, and many deaths in which the cause has not been remembered or reported. Utah studies showed those under 20 to be the most vulnerable, with deaths to have occurred in the first 15 years. Further study on this might be accomplished next winter (enroute through Las Vegas on a ski vacation in Utah).

Incidental information seemed to leap out of the survey. Over half of the 21 women reporting had hysterectomies (probably normal for a group of 60 year olds). Five men, but only 2 women reported perfect health. Of those who wrote down their height and weight, 5 men and 10 women were overweight by 20 pounds or more. Three men and 5 women reported low thyroid activity (in addition to the those 3 who had their thyroids removed). Six men and 3 women were taking medication for high blood pressure. Two each men and women had knee surgery. One man and 3 women had their gall bladder removed. Three men had prostate cancer, another had a 4 way bypass operation on his heart. Two men and one woman have diabetes. Three women reported very big problems before being diagnosed with rare diseases: Celiac disease, Polymyositis, and a rare blood disease.

Other problems reported by both men and women were: skin cancers, hemorrhoids, appendectomies, ulcers, osteoporosis, hives, psoriasis, heart rhythm, gout, tumors, growths, and back trouble.

It makes one wonder about the health of the 160 that didn't respond to the Health Survey. It also makes one grateful just to be alive.

Warm regards, Hank Rilling.

LeRoy's Note: Hank got a poor response from his 1953 Las Vegas High School classmates and therefore quit pushing his work. He originally got interested in this subject when his thyroid swelled to golfball size and he had to have a big part of it removed. I personally have had to take thyroid medicine for over two decades. My Father died of colon cancer a few years ago. Were these things caused by our ingestion of the products of atomic bomb testing, no one can prove that. What has been proven is that the "downwinders" who lived in eastern Nevada and Southern Utah during the tests are suffering from cancers and other health problems that are far beyond the national average. Congress awarded the downwinders cash compensation ($50,000) for their troubles. We were excluded from the downwinders group for political and tourism reasons, but we are certainly as vulnerable as the downwinders are. Whether we should get compensation or not is less important to me than to get the message out to fellow Las Vegans of the fifties that they need to have yearly screenings for various cancers and if they have mysterious health problems, their doctors need to be told of their radiation exposure.

E-Mail me at lwentz@juno.com if you have comments; want to know more; want to contribute to Hank's data base; have your own story to share; or just to say hi.

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