From the book, “The Myths of August”
As survivors and first-responders fight cancers and other illnesses associated with the toxic air from the 9/11 attacks, thousands of Americans have sought and now receive financial help as victims of our Cold War with the then-Soviet Union. They were never told that the weapons being built to “save” them were killing them, just as authorities in New York failed to alert the public to the airborne threat to their lives 25 years ago.
From the moment the US began to build the first atomic bomb, we lived in what Arizona congressman and environmental hero Stewart L. Udall called the “Big Lie” that had perpetrated a “trail of tears.”
The lie was feigning responsibility. The sorrowful path is the one followed by Americans innocently and fatally poisoned by the bombardment of nuclear fallout spreading from the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas across the United States, with a deadly cluster polluting the West.
Civilian victims of radiation are known as Downwinders, including those in Arizona where an effort has been launched to locate more of the state’s victims than those who are currently registered.
No Escape
Carried on the wind, settling on fields and pastures and in bodies of water, the fallout from more than 100 above-ground tests was a plague of killer radioisotopes, the extent of which is recognized today but not then, when fallout was a highest-level military secret. After atmospheric tests ended in 1962, another 828 nuclear bombs were exploded underground. Radiation escaped, nonetheless.
A rating above 172 microcuries per square meter is over 850 times higher than the baseline safety screening level from NASA. Map courtesy of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
It was Udall who opened the lock that had hidden the truth of mass radiation exposure to a public brainwashed by the politics of war. Radiation wasn’t that bad, we were told; besides, what’s a little strontium-90 in the milk supply compared to securing our military dominance.
Udall’s 1998 “The Myths of August” was his expose of the “masterpiece of obfuscation” directed and wielded by the Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The motto was, he writes of the official code of silence, “seek not, and ye shall not find.”
Secretary of the Department of Interior under Pres. John F. Kennedy, Udall was also a lawyer and with the late Tucson attorney Dale Haralson successfully sued the government in 1984 over the cancers that Arizona and New Mexico uranium miners, many of whom were Navajo and Hopi, suffered after the mines ramped up production in the late 1940s through the 1980s. Haralson argued that the government’s lie was “the nation’s greatest civilian tragedy since the Civil War.”
Udall’s Role in Reparations for Downwinders
Udall and Haralson’s landmark lawsuit, Allen v. United States, played a major role in what happened six years later: passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). The government thought it was wiser to admit fault, to a degree, and avoid more costly lawsuits by offering one-time lump sums to those who had lived in officially designated “hot zones” of fallout and developed one or more of the 19 cancers related to radiation poisoning.
Established in 1990, RECA was reauthorized in the 2025 spending bill and included new recipients — those exposed to Manhattan Project uranium waste in St. Louis, MO — and doubled the initial $50,000 in medical reimbursement to $100,000. To date, RECA has awarded more than $3.3 billion in benefits to 51,994 approved claimants, with 41,152 pending. Not forgotten are heirs and spouses, who are entitled to payment if the patient has already died from their initial contamination.
At some point in the upcoming Congressional session, an amendment to RECA will make the rounds in the House and Senate. More contaminated locations are added — including all of Arizona, not just the currently covered counties in the state’s uranium belt. The update raises financial allocations to $150,000.
Udall’s Effort Comes Home
If you huddled under your desk during “duck and cover” air raid drills, as I did at Adah Lineweaver Elementary in Tucson, this new push to include all of Arizona speaks to us, the Boomers. How many of our classmates in the Downwinder years between 1951 and 1962 have died or fought cancers that may be linked to government-induced radiation poisoning?
We won’t know unless the amendment to RECA passes.
Radiation deaths are bipartisan. Urge Arizona lawmakers to support the new Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act of 2026, introduced by Rep. James Moylon of Guam, who is seeking RECA authorization for his country, which was doused by the fallout from some of the largest detonations in the Pacific region’s Marshall Islands.
Arizona Rep. Greg Stanton is a cosigner and recently Rep. Adelita Grijalva signed on as the second Arizona co-sponsor. Still to join: David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Yassamin Ansari, Juan Ciscomani (Pima County), Abraham Hamadeh and Paul Gosar. Rep. Andy Gibbs is running for governor. Find their contact information here.
Be Prepared
Until more news on the amendment comes in, see if you meet Downwinder criteria at justice.gov/civil/reca as a first step in the application process
For now, applicants must have lived in Yavapai, Navajo, Apache, Gila or Mohave counties for at least one year between January 21, 1951, and November 6, 1962. Or the entire period from June 30 to July 31, 1962. The dates are the same in the new RECA.
The monthlong 1962 tests identified in RECA was a period when shallow underground tests included one so powerful that it exposed more U.S.-wide residents to radiation than any explosion in the entire decade of atmospheric testing.
It was called Storax Sedan, which was part of the government’s Plowshare program to see if nuclear bombs could help build dams and lakes, or perhaps blow up mountains for copper. The program’s name is a play on the Old Testament “swords to plowshares” vision for “ultimate peace.”
But what Sedan accomplished in size was overshadowed by what it created: more radioactive fallout than any domestic test and primarily made up of iodine-131, which affects the thyroid gland. Sedan’s radiated waste traveled east to Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Illinois.
Sedan shut down the government’s plans for peaceful industrial-grade nukes. Not forgotten, the crater, which is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
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The Sedan explosion and the crater it left behind.
To read Stewart Udall’s “Myths of August” online for free, link to the Internet Archive. You will have to subscribe (no cost) to check out the book.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA): Current
Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act of 2026: Update
Dept. of Justice RECA
Alan v United States