Growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the 1950s and 60s, Mary Dickson was among the millions of American schoolchildren taught to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear war.
“I just remember thinking, ‘That’s not going to save us from a bomb,’” she told CNN. At that time, Dickson didn’t know that nuclear weapons were being detonated in the neighboring state of Nevada as the US tested its new stockpile. She lived downwind, in the direction much of the radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests traveled.
She says she has suffered from thyroid cancer; her older sister passed away from lupus in her 40s; her younger sister was recently told that her intestinal cancer has spread to other parts of her body; and her nieces have health issues too.
Dickson says she once counted 54 people from her five-block childhood neighborhood who had suffered from cancer, autoimmune diseases, birth defects or miscarriages.
It’s unclear what caused their cancer, since it is difficult to ascribe direct responsibility, but it is generally accepted in the medical community that radiation exposure increases heightens the risk of cancer, depending on the level of exposure.
“Radiation exposure increases the chance of getting cancer, and the risk increases as the dose increases: the higher the dose, the greater the risk,” says the US Environmental Protection Agency, citing studies that follow groups of people exposed to radiation.
Collectively, those who lived and were exposed in the states surrounding the Nevada testing site, including Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington State and Idaho, became known as “downwinders.”
“It’s devastating,” said Dickson, a playwright and advocate for survivors of nuclear weapons testing in the US. “I can’t tell you how many friends I’ve had, and their cancers have come back… The psychological damage does not go away. You spend the rest of your life worrying that each lump, each pain (means) it’s back.”
“The Cold War for us never ended,” she added. “We’re still living with its effects.”
The nuclear age began 80 years ago when the US dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War II. The bombs killed about 110,000 people instantly and helped set in motion the Cold War-era arms race in which the US and the Soviet Union, as well as Britain, France and China, all scrambled to develop ever more powerful nuclear weapons.
They conducted more than 2,000 tests between 1945 and 1996, each establishing their own nuclear deterrent which, depending on your point of view, either underpins or undermines the world’s security to this day.
And as in Japan, where hundreds of thousands of people died from injuries and radiation-related illnesses in the years after 1945, these nuclear tests damaged the lives, health and land of people living nearby.
Later, India, Pakistan and North Korea carried out their own tests, too, before a series of international treaties almost completely curbed the practice. Only North Korea has tested nuclear weapons in the 21st century – most recently in 2017 – and no atmospheric tests have taken place since 1980.
Still, “it’s not a problem of the past,” said Togzhan Kassenova, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies nuclear policy.
Although these nuclear weapons were detonated decades ago now, “many people are still paying the price,” she told CNN.
‘We share the same stories’
The earlier nuclear powers tested their bombs in places they deemed remote and sparsely populated, often in territory they had colonized, far away from their own major population hubs.
“Their priorities (were) such that they believed testing was absolutely necessary for national security reasons and if you take that as an absolute truth and everything else is a sort of ‘who knows, we don’t know, it’ll probably be fine,’ it’s very easy to get into a situation where your default response is to do it,” Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, told CNN.
The US conducted its nuclear testing mostly in Nevada and the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific Ocean; the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan and in the Arctic Ocean archipelago of Novaya Zemlya; the United Kingdom in Australia and the Pacific atoll of Kiritimati, formerly known as Christmas Island; France in Algeria and French Polynesia; and China in Lop Nur, a remote desert site in western Xinjiang province.
The Soviet Union tested more than 450 bombs at its Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan from 1949 to 1989, in top secret towns, built for nuclear testing. The residents nearby “didn’t really know the whole extent of it,” Aigerim Seitenova, a nuclear justice and gender equality expert who co-founded the Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition, told CNN.
“So many of my relatives, they were passing away so early when I was a child and I didn’t understand why they were passing away in their 40s and 50s,” she said, adding that she and many members of her family suffer from chronic health issues. “At the time, I thought they were old.”
Years of secrecy surrounding the test site have given way to years of taboo, Seitenova said, adding that making a documentary about the intergenerational impact of Kazakhstan’s nuclear legacy on women was a “process of healing” for her, as she sought to restore their agency.
And Seitenova adds that when the film was translated into Japanese and shown in Hiroshima, it underscored for her that the “experiences of the Kazakh people are not unique.”
“We share the same stories from the Pacific French Polynesia, Marshall Islands, Australia,” she said.
“We are the main experts in the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons,” she added, lamenting that while scientists from the West consider themselves experts, “those with actually lived experiences are not always taken seriously.”
Understanding the full impact of nuclear testing is difficult – it is both contested and hard to quantify, given the difficulty in ascribing health issues to any one cause, and in assessing the wider social consequences for communities. Various studies have tried to measure these effects, often producing results which contain large uncertainties.
One study conducted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1997 estimated that above-ground nuclear weapons tests in Nevada between 1951 and 1962 would have produced between 11,300 and 212,000 excess lifetime cases of thyroid cancer; a subsequent review of its findings concluded that the number of excess cases was likely to be at the lower end of the range.
Studies conducted in the region surrounding the Semipalatinsk test site found that cancer mortality rates and infant mortality rates during the most intensive period of nuclear testing, from 1949 to 1962, were higher than elsewhere in Kazakhstan. Kassenova said that when she returns to the region, she meets children who are fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of those who lived through that period and have health issues they attribute to nuclear contamination.
Another NCI study conducted in the Marshall Islands projected that between 0.4% and 3.4% of lifetime cancers among Marshallese living there between 1948 and 1970 might be caused by radiation exposure. That figure rises to between 28% and 69% for the 82 people living on the atolls of Rongelap and Ailinginae on whom radioactive fallout fell like snow after a 1954 test code-named Castle Bravo.
Equivalent to 7,232 Hiroshima bombs
As well as impacting people’s health, these tests have had significant environmental consequences. Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 known nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, which had a total explosive yield equivalent to 7,232 Hiroshima bombs.
The US relocated the Marshallese living on or near the atolls being used as test sites and some still have not returned to their homeland, despite attempts in the 1970s and 1980s. Thousands of Marshallese live now in Springdale, Arkansas, where they preserve their people’s culture, and also in smaller communities in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri.
Five islands were partially or completely destroyed, and parts of the Marshall Islands are “still contaminated” almost 70 years on, said Ivana Nikolić Hughes, who is part of a research team from Columbia University which has been investigating radiation levels there.
Some radioactive isotopes become concentrated in food sources, Hughes explained to CNN, citing the process of “bioaccumulation.”
“We found very high values of an isotope called Caesium-137 in the food, and that isotope is chemically similar to potassium,” she said. “Because the plants keep taking nutrients from the soil, they’re going to bioaccumulate.”
The coconut crabs who live on the islands “eat a lot of coconuts so the team was literally able to point a radiation detector at a coconut crab, and it would be giving high (readings),” she said.
“The soil has some amount, the coconuts concentrate it even more, and then the coconut crab concentrates it even more. That would happen if humans were there on that island, eating locally grown food on a regular basis.”
The US did clean up some parts of the Marshall Islands, and where they did Hughes said the researchers “didn’t find evidence of contamination there today.” But in building the infrastructure required for nuclear testing, and in the subsequent clean-up efforts, the US bulldozed vegetation, changing local ecosystems.
Much of the waste was dumped on the atoll of Enewetak in an unlined crater covered with a concrete cap, now known as the Runit Dome; the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission and the United Nations have raised concerns about its safety.
The US Department of Energy said in an August 2024 report that ongoing monitoring programs show it “has no potential for increased health risks to residents in the Enewatak Atoll from current or future conditions considering the impacts of climate change, including a hypothetical failure of the Runit Dome.” The Department of Energy has not yet responded to CNN’s request for comment.
An ongoing reckoning
As the long-term effects of nuclear testing have become increasingly recognized, some “downwinders” have been recognized with compensation, the level of which varies from place to place.
The Marshall Islands has received compensation payments from the US but says these are dwarfed by the true scale of the damages.
Kazakh authorities included 1.2 million people in their compensation scheme, per the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, entitling them to certain health and financial benefits.
In the US, more than 27,000 downwinders have received more than $1.3 billion in payments from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), established in 1990 and extended last month, though advocate Mary Dickson said that gathering the 50-year-old records necessary to file a claim is difficult.
Since the US expanded its compensation program for downwinders in July, she and her younger sister would be eligible for compensation from the government.
France and the UK, meanwhile, have long minimized the impact of their nuclear testing programs. Only in 2010 did France acknowledge a connection between its tests and the ill-health of Algerians and French Polynesians exposed to radiation, and it wasn’t until 2021 that about half of these claimants received compensation.
In 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron stopped short of an apology to French Polynesians for the impact of the nuclear testing, while admitting that the tests were “not clean” and saying that France owes a “debt” to the island territory.
While the UK directs nuclear test veterans to apply for compensation under a general war pensions scheme, veterans’ charities are still calling for former servicemembers, and their children and grandchildren, to receive specific compensation. They say they have suffered ill-health as a result of their participation in UK nuclear testing operations.
A Ministry of Defence spokesperson told CNN that the department is “committed to working with nuclear test veterans and listening to their concerns,” and that work “looking into unresolved questions regarding medical records” was underway.
Eighty years on from the devastating use of nuclear weapons in Japan, and decades on from the most intensive period of above-ground testing, the world’s nuclear reckoning is far from over.