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Downwinders — Deserve compensation and reveal pernicious long term damage of Nuclear Weapons

January 31, 2023 By Bob Kinsey

All Downwinders deserve justice from US

Flawed Radiation Exposure Compensation Act excludes far more victims than it covers

BY TINA CORDOVA

CO-FOUNDER, TULAROSA BASIN DOWNWINDERS CONSORTIUM

In response to the Dec. 29 column “Congress must do more for those on borrowed time,” the writers miss the broader context of current legislation to expand and extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. Passed in 1990, RECA excluded far more people than those who have ever been acknowledged. We know too well how devastating that exclusion has been. We are members of frontline communities who have suffered and lost loved ones as a result of nuclear weapons development and testing but who have been excluded from compensation. Individually, we have worked for decades to expand and extend RECA so that justice is served. For the past several years, we have worked as a group on the expansion of RECA.

Our government exploded more nuclear weapons — 928 of them on our own soil at the Nevada Test Site — than did any other nation. Nuclear testing, which began in 1945 with detonation of Trinity in the south central desert of New Mexico, had devastating consequences for ordinary citizens who lived and worked downwind as well as for test-site workers and atomic veterans stationed at the Nevada Test Site. We wholeheartedly support the inclusion of post-1971 uranium workers in legislation to expand RECA, but we cannot forget the many innocent civilians poisoned by fallout who are dying as they wait for justice. The New Mexico downwinders have waited more than 77 years.

RECA was always exceedingly limited in scope. Currently, it compensates only Downwinders who lived in 22 largely rural counties of Arizona, Utah and Nevada between 1951 and 1958 and the summer of 1962 who developed leukemia or one of 17 kinds of cancer. Studies since 1990 have clearly shown that fallout did not stop at county or state borders. There were no lead walls that blocked the lethal radiation. The new bill would include all of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Guam. It would finally include those harmed by fallout from Trinity, which took place in populated areas of New Mexico.

The bill would increase the amount of compensation from $50,000 for Downwinders and $100,000 for uranium workers to a uniform $150,000. But what is a human life worth? This amount does not begin to make up for a lifetime of suffering, health complications, financial hardship from staggering medical bills and the loss of one’s ability to make a living, nor for the heartbreaking loss of far too many loved ones. Each year, our government spends $50 billion just to maintain our nuclear arsenal. Our lives are worth more than the civilization-ending weapons that harmed us.

Consider this. Congress recently approved $857 billion for the 2023 defense budget — that’s just one year. In the last 32 years, RECA has paid out only $2.5 billion to roughly 39,000 eligible survivors. We are veterans of the Cold War, only we never enlisted and we have paid an enormous price. We are hard-working, taxpaying American citizens who were harmed by a government we funded and trusted as it developed and tested nuclear weapons. Any government that knowingly injures its own citizens must be held accountable. Those elected leaders, especially members of Congress, who do not stand with American Downwinders are complicit in one of this nation’s most tragic injustices. Justice is long overdue. Time is running out.

This guest column was also authored by Mary Dickson, Utah Downwinders; Tona Henderson, director, Idaho Downwinders; Loretta Anderson, Southwest Uranium Miners Coalition Post 71; Phil Harrison, Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee; and Robert N. Celestial, president, Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors, Guam

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Disarmament Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

“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

"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

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

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