• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Allies
    • Board of Directors
    • Guiding Principles
    • Member Organizations
    • Mission & History
  • Membership
  • Request a Speaker
  • Volunteer
  • Contact Us
  • Contribute

The Colorado Coalition

Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

Click Here to Contribute

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • Events
  • Take Action
  • News
  • Perspective
  • Subscribe

PAUL JACOBS AND THE NUCLEAR GANG

January 9, 2022 By Bob Kinsey

PAUL JACOBS AND THE NUCLEAR GANG  -by Bob Alvarez–on facebook
Like many of my generation, we were indoctrinated about surviving a nuclear war. There were regular drills in school where we had to scramble under our desks and shield our eyes from the blinding flash. Most importantly, we had to be sheltered from radioactive fallout. I recall preparing for school in May of 1953 and watching Dave Garroway, the easy-going host of NBC’s Today Show, huddled in a trench at the Nevada Atomic Proving Grounds, making light about a nuclear explosion a few miles from ground zero– later known as “Dirty Harry” for its intense and widespread radioactive fallout.
Those memories returned at the first major event I organized, in May 1976 while working for the Environmental Policy Center (EPC). Building on my experience while working for Senator Abourezk, I convinced several members of the U.S. Congress to co-sponsor a seminar on low-level ionizing radiation. The proceedings were published later that year by the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. While my original intent was to stimulate a scientific debate over nuclear power plants, the discussion focused largely on the impacts of nuclear weapons. The seminar demonstrated that this debate over the legacy of radioactive fallout was far from over.
A month later, while in San Francisco, I met with the activist and journalist, Paul Jacobs, a close friend and colleague of Saul Landau at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). In 1957, after visiting rural areas close to the AEC’s Nevada Proving Ground, Paul was among the first reporters to document the disregard for the health and safety of residents nearby the nuclear test site from radioactive nuclear weapons testing fallout. Most importantly his lengthy article, “Clouds from Nevada,” provided a detailed investigative “road-map” that Congress would follow twenty years later. Only Congress can find these answers, Paul advised, which reaffirmed my conviction..
Paul told of how people living nearby the bomb tests who spent most of their time outside as ranchers, miners and farmers were contracting cancer, suffering from burns and loss of hair. In 1953, about 5,000 sheep died shortly following a test series, one which I saw on TV before school on the Dave Garroway show, released the most radioactive fallout of any tests at Nevada. Despite the AEC’s reassurances of safety, Jacobs discovered from AEC documents that the 4,245 residents of the town of St. George, Utah were exposed during a 24-hour period to radiation levels more than 1,000 times recommended for nuclear weapons workers.
The U.S. government spared no expense to fight lawsuits filed by people living close to the tests. Without exception, the courts ruled in favor of the AEC. Since the U.S. nuclear weapons program controlled all federal research of radiation health effects and kept radiation fallout data behind a curtain of secrecy, the deck was stacked against nearby bomb test “down-winders,” who had few resources and no security clearances. It became clear that secrecy, isolation, and privilege had corrupted science and violated the public trust- in order to amass the world’s largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
Official recognition of harm to Americans from nuclear weapons testing, was viewed a dagger aimed at the heart of the nation’s national security. In a 1981 letter to the U.S. Congress, William H. Taft IV, General Counsel to the Department of Defense asserted a Senate bill to help the atomic veterans “has the potential to be seriously damaging to the very aspect of the Department of Defense’s nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion programs.”
Twenty years later, Paul, a non-smoker, contracted lung cancer, which his doctors told him was likely due to radiation exposure during his visit to freshly contaminated areas near the Nevada Proving Grounds. He died in 1978, but not before was he returned years later to find out what happened to test site down winders, and military veterans who took part of the bomb tests for a documentary, “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,” made by Saul Landau and Jack Willis. Although Paul died before the film was completed, it won several awards including an Emmy in 1980.
In April 1980, we organized a National Citizen’s Hearings for Radiation Victims out of the EPC office. It was a collaborative effort involving Norman Solomon, a journalist advocating for US troops who entered the city of Nagasaki, right after the atomic bombing; Pam Solo, with the American Friends Service Committee Rocky Flats Action Group, Mile Jendreczyk with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Eleanor Walters from EPC. We brought together atomic veterans, test site downwinders, including people from the Marshall Islands, Navajo uranium miners, and nuclear workers to share their experiences. This was the first time for many of the participants, who were struggling alone, and had not connected with others sharing the same plight.
Kee Begay, a Navajo, worked in the mines for 29 years and was dying of lung cancer. “The mines were poor and not fit for human beings,” he testified at the hearing. Begay also lost a son to cancer. “He was one of many children that used to play on the uranium piles during those years. We had a lot of uranium piles near our homes –just about fifty or a hundred feet away or so. Can you imagine? Kids go out and play on those piles.”
Our efforts to put a human face on the legacy of the nuclear arms race, while creating a movement-building event exceeded our expectations. The Citizen Hearings gave rise to the organization of groups of test site downwinders, atomic military veterans, and nuclear workers that descended on Washington to push for justice.
By 1990, twelve years after Paul’s death, the U.S. Congress enacted the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for test site downwinders, tribal uranium miners, and atomic military veterans. What made this law unique was, in addition to providing funds, it contains an explicit formal apology by the U.S. government for sending Americans into harms’ way. No other nuclear weapons state has done this. As of January, 2021 8,885 uranium mining workers received a total of $889 million and 23,916 “downwinders” received nearly $2 billion in compensation.
As the primary buyer of uranium until 1971, the U.S. Government was responsible to ensure the safety of the miners and their communities. This is why RECA is funded entirely by the USG. Diseases associated with exposure in the mines was “totally avoidable” declared Merrill Eisenbud, a former Chief AEC health scientist in 1979. “The Atomic Energy Commission …is uniquely responsible for the death of many men who developed lung cancer as a result of the failure of the mine operators, who must also bear the blame, because they too had the information, and the Government should not have had to club them into ventilating their mines.”
Even though there was a significant body of evidence spanning decades of deliberate negligence by the U.S. government, federal courts denied claims by the miners and others exposed to radioactive fallout from Nevada nuclear weapons testing, on the grounds of sovereign immunity stating, “all the actions of various governmental agencies complained of by plaintiffs were the result of conscious policy decisions made at high government levels based on considerations of political and national security feasibility factors.”
Private companies were let off the hook by the AEC’s negligence. Robert S. Kerr and founder of Kerr McGee held sway over atomic energy matters as a U.S. Senator from the late 1940’s until his death in 1963. By 1948, the year Robert Kerr was elected in Oklahoma to the U.S. Senate, Kerr McGee became the first oil company to take advantage of the uranium boom opening mines on the Navajo reservation created by the U.S. government’s lucrative price guarantees. By 1954, the company dominated the U.S. uranium market.
Next year, RECA is due to expire and more needs to be done for scores of victims of U.S. nuclear arms development who are still denied justice. Besides areas close to the nuclear test site in Utah, Arizona and Nevada there were other parts of the country, such as the upper mid-west, Iowa, New Mexico and Idaho – areas where large deposits of measurable fallout occurred.
Perhaps, the most egregious example are the down-wind counties of New Mexico where heavy fallout came down on unwitting people, not only from the Nevada tests but also following the first nuclear weapons explosion on July 16, 1945. In terms of uranium miners, there are other diseases of the lung and kidneys that need to be included; and miners who dug and processed uranium ore after 1971 deserve compensation. Congress should not close the book on the human legacy of America’s race to build nuclear arms and subsidize commercial nuclear power.
.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About Bob Kinsey

Primary Sidebar

Receive Instant Updates

Enter your email address to subscribe to The Colorado Coalition and receive notifications of new events and posts by email.

Contact Us

Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

Copyright © 2023 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design