Lessons from downwinders: Why government transparency is crucial for public trust

Navajo George Tutt started uranium mining in 1949 as a hand mucker. Hand muckers would procure uranium waste and ore from veins in the mountains, using basic tools like pickaxes and shovels and wheeling it out in wheelbarrows. Today, miners are well informed about the risks surrounding uranium mining, and many steps are taken to protect workers from its effects.

However, during Tutt’s time, such precautions were not taken. He recounts that there was never any communication about risks surrounding uranium mining, and even basic safety measures like the distribution of work gloves were unknown during his time mining in Colorado. Unsurprisingly, Tutt and many of his coworkers would suffer from cancer or other ailments directly related to uranium mining activities.  

Claudia Peterson was just five years old when she witnessed a large mushroom cloud rising about a hundred miles east of her southern Utah home. By the time she was thirty-five, Claudia was a cancer survivor who had watched her father die of a brain tumor, her six-year-old daughter Bethany die after three years fighting neuroblastoma (a rare type of cancer which primarily affects young children), and her only sister Cathy die of skin cancer. 

​Neither of these stories are simply anecdotes. Sarah Fox provides compelling evidence in her 2014 book Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), and uranium mining companies all were aware of the serious health risks surrounding radiation poisoning resulting from uranium mining or nuclear bomb testing as early as 1951, but failed to inform miners or other citizens. It would be another 39 years until President Bush would sign the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) into law, which finally gave compensation for those affected.

Across the states of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, tens of thousands of people have claimed compensation from RECA. That’s because from 1945 to 1962, the U.S. performed 100 above-ground nuclear tests, which released massive amounts of radioactive fallout across the continental U.S. Frustratingly, the AEC was the commission responsible for performing the tests and maintaining communication with the public about any potential risks from nuclear testing.

This led to a perverse cycle whereby many dangerous nuclear tests were performed with virtually no real public communication about said dangers. And the results were devastating: disproportionate cases of lung, stomach, thyroid, and other types of cancer; severe radiation effects on crops and livestock among a population which was made up of primarily subsistence farmers; many infants and children who died from cancer tied to radioactive isotopes that passed from their mother’s breast milk or cattle’s dairy into their lungs and stomach.

I do not have room here to recount more stories from individual downwinders. Thankfully, that project has been and will continue to be carried out by dedicated scholars like Fox. July 16^th is the 80^th anniversary of the first Trinity nuclear test. It is a good time for us all to reflect on the importance of government transparency. So long as the government is involved in a particular endeavor, it has the obligation to ensure that there are no serious public health risks from its activities. If there are any risks, the government has the obligation to tell its citizens so that they may vote, either with their feet or by the ballot.

The story of the downwinders is ugly, but it is an important commentary on the need for government transparency. If we fail to take such commentary seriously, we should not be surprised to read about many more George Tutts or Claudia Petersons in the future.