The U.S. government conducted about 100 above-ground atomic weapons tests in southern Nevada during the Cold War between 1951 and 1962. The fallout drifted hundreds of miles and it, along with uranium manufacturing, has sickened untold numbers of people for decades.
Today, those known as downwinders throughout the Southwest and on tribal lands continue to suffer from a broad spectrum of serious radiation-related illnesses. Congress allowed a compensation program for them to expire last summer but victims and some lawmakers are continuing the fight for federal help and recognition.
Victims of the nuclear age
On a windswept desert hillside overlooking Kingman, Cullin Pattillo looks northwest toward the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas, a little more than 120 miles away as the crow flies.
“This is essentially what you’d have been looking at in the 1940s or 1950s,” he says.
From these hills, Kingman locals could witness the nuclear detonations in the distance or catch glimpses of the atomic glow in the pre-dawn hours.
“At least on several occasions, my father and his peers all had stories of watching a bomb blast,” he says.
Pattillo’s family moved to the area in the late 19th century, but mysterious illnesses plagued them in the decades after the tests.
“Both my father and my aunt died of strange, weird cancers that my grandparents didn’t, but my dad and aunt both did,” Pattillo says. “They pretty much killed an entire generation of my family.”
Families throughout Mohave County have similar stories. Jean Bishop served as a county supervisor for 10 years and worked in law enforcement for decades. She is one of seven siblings — each one of them has suffered from cancer and other diseases.
“We believe it’s because of the radiation that floated over the mountains into this area from the nuclear test site in Nevada,” she says.
Bishop, along with her sisters, is a breast cancer survivor. Her late husband was a cattle rancher from an Arizona pioneer family that has lost dozens to radiation-related cancers.
“What else can you do other than keep burying your family members and thinking this was preventable?” she asks. “What do we have to look forward to if the government doesn’t right the wrongs? Where does it stop?”
An incomplete compensation program
Despite its proximity to the test site, this area of western Arizona was never covered under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The 1990 law, known as RECA, was meant to provide some financial relief to downwinders suffering from lung, thyroid, colon, pancreas and several other cancers and diseases. To date, the program has paid out nearly $2.7 billion to victims. But the original version, and updates made in 2000, left out population centers like Kingman and Las Vegas as well as some tribal lands.
“For them to ignore Mohave County as not being touched by this radiation is bizarre and that’s what we’re trying to correct,” Bishop says.
“What’s really interesting is, you know, arguably, we’re one of the most impacted areas at the time,” says Pattillo. “They’ve callously excluded southern Mohave County.”
Reviving RECA in Congress
Last summer, the House of Representatives allowed RECA to expire altogether after the Senate had overwhelmingly passed bills to expand it to finally cover downwinders in Kingman and elsewhere. Leading the charge was Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.
“It’s a moral argument,” he tells KNAU. “It’s about doing right by the people who love this country and, in many cases, gave their lives for this country, gave their health for this country.”
Residents of Hawley’s home state have also been radiation victims. St. Louis was the site of a major Cold War-era uranium processing plant and people there have suffered from cancers and diseases from radioactive waste dumped into landfills.
Earlier this year, Hawley, along with Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and New Mexico Democratic Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich, again introduced RECA legislation that would significantly expand downwinder eligibility and boost payouts.
“It’s got big bipartisan support in the Senate. The House needs to act and we need to get this done. Really, hundreds of thousands of Americans are depending on it,” Hawley says.
The cost of the bill could stretch into the tens of billions of dollars. But a slimmer version that would add Mohave County and Clark County, Nevada was introduced just last week in the House by Arizona Republican Congressman Paul Gosar. It all makes some advocates think RECA, in some form, has a chance.
An uncertain future amid austerity
“I think it’s going to come down to whether or not Speaker Johnson has the appetite for introducing a bill on the floor that will add to federal spending,” says George Daranyi, a Tucson-based attorney who has filed thousands of claims on behalf of downwinders.
Speaker Mike Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
In the midst of the Trump administration’s aggressive cost-cutting, RECA’s fate will hinge on support from the very congressional leaders who let it lapse. Both versions of the bill are in the early stages of the legislative process, so it remains to be seen whether RECA will be revived.
But Daranyi says radiation exposure is an issue that ultimately cuts across ideologies and has impacted nearly every U.S. state.
“It is a continuing unfolding national tragedy,” he says. “We bombed ourselves. We did this to our own people. And the consequences continue to play out every day.”
