For America's Victims of the Atomic Age, Relief
Congress Reauthorizes Funds for the Cancers Caused by Years of Nuclear Testing
History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself. Sometimes history takes time to unfold.
This past Wednesday, August 6 and today, August 9, mark the end of World War II, accomplished 80 years ago with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, by the world’s first nuclear weapons, delivered by and made in the USA.
Every anniversary is a day of reverence in Japan for the hibakusha, the survivors of the horrific bombings that killed an estimated 250,000 in a rain of fire and brimstone of biblical proportions.
Over the past year, I have been a guest at virtual meetings with extraordinary men and women who are the hibakusha of our country. They are survivors of nearly 40 years of the nuclear arms race that bled radiation across the American West. The method of the madness of the Atomic Age was Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. It remains the catchphrase for today’s standoff with nuclear countries, Russia, in particular, but also China. And wannabes like Iran and North Korea.
Until the federal budget talks in 2024, they were among the 41,000 Americans (and counting) eligible for medical funding through RECA, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 and bipartisan in votes and support since then.
But last year House Speaker Mike Johnson prohibited its reauthorization for being too costly, creating a frenzy of calls, meetings and rallies at the Capitol by RECA recipients and supporters, including the weekly meetup hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a longtime ally.
RECA recipients receive a one-time payment for medical expenses related to their exposure to a list of 20 different cancers known to be caused by the radiation emitted from nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Range 65 miles north of Las Vegas.
Some were known as Downwinders, another way of saying collateral damage. They were born and grew up where the radioactive fallout lingered in the air, in the soil, in the milk from cows that ate radiated grass.
More than 950 bombs were tested in Nevada during the Cold War years, approximately 125 were atmospheric, which accelerated the spread of fallout. Downwinders lived under a continuous plume of radiated particles that spread on the wind from Nevada across the West and beyond the Mississippi River.
The first sign that something was amiss were the 4,400 sheep that died of gruesome wounds and deformities in southern Utah. Another sign was the growing number of thyroid cancers in states including Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Idaho and Colorado. All within the radius of radiation contamination.
Even the underground tests, which began in 1963, were strong and shallow enough for radiation to leak and take flight.
Diné Maggie Billiman, from Sawmill in Navajo County, Arizona, represents another group of Americans receiving RECA funding: Native Nation uranium miners like her late father, Howard Billiman Jr., a famed Code Talker during WW II. When he came home to the reservation, he worked in the mines. He died of stomach cancer. When Maggie, in her 60s, went to DC to petition for RECA’s reauthorization this past January, she was recovering from gallbladder surgery, was waiting to hear the results of liver tests and had been told she had three cysts on her pancreas.
In tears, at times clutching a portrait of her parents, Maggie told the crowd of equally tearful supporters at a press conference this past July 8 that she had promised her father she would never give up the fight.
She didn’t, they didn’t, and after immeasurable stress and activism, RECA was reauthorized in Trump’s massive ugly bill, the one bright, beautiful light in an otherwise gaudy gift to the rich.
It is not just the funding that these survivors appreciate, it is the acknowledgement that they exist and that the government is responsible.
RECA Adds to Its Ranks
RECA’s reauthorization identifies eligible applicants by zip code within states including Arizona, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Tennessee and Missouri. Arizona counties with Downwinders and uranium miners include Coconino, Yavapai, Navajo, Apache, Gila and, in the revised bill, all of Mohave County. Once only partially covered by the RECA health benefits, extending it to all of the county has been a longtime goal, now reached, of Rep. Paul Gosar (R).
It also added locations that house victims: Salt Lake City, Utah, Tularosa, New Mexico and St. Louis, Missouri. In St. Louis, a precedent has been set: Its claim to exposure is a site used by the Manhattan Project to dump leftover, highly radioactive uranium waste.
Inclusion of St. Louis could open doors for RECA eligibility to other cities identified as Cold War dumping grounds.
Mary Yakitis is a Downwinder from Salt Lake City. Now in her 80s, she says “our fates were sealed” by the Cold War testing. A sister died of breast cancer, another of ovarian cancer. A brother fought prostate cancer; another brother, exposed in utero, was born with no permanent teeth, a deformity related to radiation poisoning. He later died of liver cancer. Mary fought breast cancer, lung disease and precancerous tumors of her thyroid and small intestine. She was infertile. A next-generation Yakitis family baby was born without one limb and with no permanent teeth.
Mary’s father was a US Public Health Officer assigned to oversee the uranium miners in Arizona and Utah, where later analysis found that parts of Utah had “higher radiation than the Death Zone in Chernobyl,” she said. Her father was one of the first to warn of the dangers, and later helped create RECA. He died of lung disease from radiation poisoning.
Tina Cordova literally grew up in the shadow of the nuclear age, in Tularosa 30 miles from the Alamogordo Bombing Range in central New Mexico. It is a scrub brush valley that locals call Jornada del Muerto, Dead Man’s Trail.
Located 200 miles south of Los Alamos lab where the bomb was born, residents there, mostly farmers, were the first unsuspecting Americans to be poisoned by radioactive isotopes uranium-238 and plutonium-238.
The bomb was called Gadget, the code name for Trinity, a plutonium-driven device that was more efficient and had “greater yield” than uranium. Trinity was the model for Big Man, which leveled Nagasaki 80 years ago today at 11:02 a.m., altitude 1,650 feet, with a yield of 21 kilotons, which was “40 percent greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb.”
The Atomic Age had begun and with it, gray shadows that hid the reality. Tina has been telling the story for 20 years, but it was only this year that their sacrifice has been recognized and acknowledged. As of this past July 2025, Tularosa Downwinders have joined the somber club.
“Children there watched the fallout for days, it was like rain,” said Tina of the rural community. “We lived an organic life. Fallout went into our cisterns, ponds and creeks. We had dairies and crops.” The radioactive dust “was on our clothes, stayed in our hair and on our skin. We inhaled it, we ingested it, we absorbed it.”
“We’ve been dying ever since,” she said. Her two great-grandfathers died of stomach cancer. Both grandmothers died of cancer. Her father as a child “drank prodigious amounts of milk” from the cows eating radioactive grass. He suffered from oral tumors and died of prostate cancer. She has fought thyroid cancer. A brother died of kidney cancer.
“It seems like when we bury one, someone dies or gets diagnosed. There is a human cost,” she said.
The senator who got RECA back on track in Trump’s spending bill is Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a Trump-aligned Republican. He pushed it through and succeeded in adding St. Louis to the list of Cold War participants. In this case, it was uranium waste from Manhattan Project labs that had been shipped to St. Louis and stored outside, getting older.
Dawn Chapman and Karen Nichols met during Dawn’s campaign to, first, find out what the awful smell was and remedy it. The foul odor came from a nearby waste facility, an eyesore, but much deadlier than either woman suspected. The steel drums, rusted and leaking, held 50,000 tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project, dumped in the landfill illegally.
That radiated detritus was contaminating a favorite city swimming hole, Coldwater Creek, where kids would splash and play.
Dawn and Karen formed Just Moms STL, a powerhouse of political and social willpower, to let the city and its resident know what was happening. When they first began spreading the word, the EPA, they said, treated us “like [our] fears were hysterical.”
It was personal for Karen, who had grown up near the polluted creek and knew neighbors and friends who were getting sick with leukemia and cancers of the brain and appendix. Four sets of conjoined twins were born in polluted neighborhoods like Karen’s, reports Lacy M. Johnson, an unsettling statistic for an exceedingly rare condition.
Speaking alongside Dawn and Maggie Billiman at the outdoor press conference held in St. Louis, Karen motioned to the view and said, “We are here today in the very park that made me sick. I grew up on that street right there. A place where I played as a child, never knowing the danger from radioactive atomic bomb waste.”
“This land holds memories of my childhood,” she said. “But it was also the beginning of a long painful journey of illnesses and loss. Not just mine, but my family, neighbors, friends and so many others. I've carried this fight in my heart and in my bones for over a decade.
“And honestly, there were times I didn't know if we'd make it.”
Postscript
Not one Democrat voted for the Trump bill — and, consequently, not for RECA either — including Sen. Mark Kelly and Sen. Ruben Gallego, both RECA supporters. Understanding the dilemma, the war in Washington continues to widen the gap between what is politically expedient and what’s honorable.
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