In 1957, Five Men Agreed to Stand Under an Exploding Nuclear Bomb (2012)
Both my paternal grandparents were some of the downwinders in Utah it alludes to. They were exposed to fallout from around 200 atmospheric nuclear tests, the vast majority of which were far more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy. That is an amount of radiation many orders of magnitude greater than Fukushima. I&#x27;ve researched it extensively and am convinced it is genuinely one of the darkest and most disturbing parts of US 20th Century history and one that remains glossed over to this day<p>The Atomic Energy Commission had plenty of evidence to believe that the fallout would be harmful to anyone downwind yet reassured the local populations that it was actually healthy due to &quot;hormesis&quot; and encouraged them to watch the detonations and drink contaminated milk while they themselves wore protective gear and followed proper protocol. There were several proposed test sites that would have sent the fallout relatively harmlessly into the Atlantic yet they chose one in an extremely dusty area upwind of population centers which were almost entirely Native Americans and Mormons. At best it was a blatant disregard for human life that prioritized the budget of the AEC over minimizing harm to innocent people and at worst it was an intentional case of unethical human experimentation. It certainly was when they forced infantry to march through mushroom clouds without any decontamination or protective gear.<p>As for my grandparents, one lost his stomach and gallbladder and went from a muscular ~200 lb outdoorsman to a 90lb skeleton dependent on a feeding tube. Our grandmother died unexpectedly from a horrific variety of lung cancer 10 years later. He lived another 10 years in absolute misery. There are thousands of stories like these in Utah, many of them even more tragic. Despite their oncologists testifying that it was essentially impossible for their cancers to have been caused by anything other than nuclear weapons exposure, neither received the paltry $50,000 compensation because of bureaucratic technicalities.