my father Dwyane E. Blanch

scroll down lots of info and links

The Atomic Victims and their wife’s got no money no respect no metals and NO American popular opinion knowledge of Honor, but they all had one think that metals, and money can never give, True soles with Dignity, and Honor THE REAL KIND. To the soles of the men and popular opinion that allowed the testing of AMERICAN young men to be used like lab mice, MAY YOUR SOLES ROT IN HELL for all eternity. kevin Dwayne blanch 2/19/11

atomic victim nuked 1952 nevada test site Marine

semper fi , nearly killed at the blast 1000 yards from the blast many where killed at the blast the rest all died from leukemia ( A.B.L.) a 100% death sentence.

Watch for my book about atomic vets coming soon available on this site coming next month

blanchblanch2@gmail.com I have been working on it for 11 years 2/18/11

I have been working on a book about my father and the Nevada atomic veterans I call them atomic victims, I have researched and written and talked with senators, congressmen, and the U.S. justice department for well over a decade now. I have gathered a tremendous amount of knowledge in regard to this said subject matter. My uncle my father’s three year younger brother the fighter pilot, was stationed at the pentagon, and was the number two shirt at Colorado Springs. Has also helped me with my gathering of knowledge, When my father died he had a safe, in that safe was every article of investigation ever written on the radiation of the marines @ the site, He was with the group that somewhere killed at the blast he was in critical condition from the blast. I have been lied to, by my senators and congressman; ( Utah) I watched western congressman, and senators grandstand this issue for votes, and do nothing the bush justice department Even stole my photos, of him at the time and shortly their after the blast. He received NO METALS, NO MONEY NO RESPECT, and MY widowed MOTHER NO MONEY NO METALS NO RESPECT NO BENEFITS NO NOTHING semper fi. Kevin Dwayne Blanch 2/18/11

state of Washington radiation monitioring page below

http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/rp/environmental/default.htm

http://healutah.org/nuclearutah/weapons/downwinders

No other step in the nuclear fuel cycle has affected Utah more than nuclear weapons testing in Nevada. Between 1951 and 1992, 925 nuclear weapons tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) including 100 above-ground tests. Utahans were never told the fallout was dangerous to their health, or to seek shelter as the radioactive clouds rained fallout over their homes, gardens and pastures. We drank milk, not knowing it was laced with strontium-90, which mimics calcium, concentrates in bones, and causes cancer.

Before NTS was opened, the United States conducted tests on distant islands in the Pacific Ocean. This proved to be too expensive and time-consuming for the growing nuclear weapons programs of the late 1940s, so the federal government decided to search for a continental nuclear test site. Initially, a site in North Carolina was considered because it would allow the radioactive fallout from tests to fall over the Atlantic Ocean and not over populated areas. However, North Carolina was eventually deemed too costly and politically difficult for nuclear testing. When Nevada was ultimately chosen, it was with full knowledge that many millions of Americans would be exposed to radioactive fallout.

The recklessness did not stop there. During above ground tests, the Atomic Energy Commission would wait until the wind was blowing away from more populated areas such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas and toward Utah. Declassified documents show that the federal government referred to Utah at the time as a "low-use segment of the population." Clearly, the government's desire to test nuclear weapons outweighed the health of Utahans and the millions of Americans impacted by the weapons testing program.

HEAL Utah is working to ensure that nuclear weapons testing never occurs again in Nevada or anywhere else. It is vitally important that we remember the stories of our atomic past in order to better work for a cleaner, healthier future.

One step toward justice

For decades the federal government denied any responsibility for the deaths and illnesses that ravaged Utah’s communities. It wasn’t until 1990 that Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Pushed by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and the late Congressman Wayne Ownes (D-UT), RECA promises to give $50,000 to each person who developed specific types of cancer attributed to fallout and who lived in one of a handful of counties in Utah, Nevada, or Arizona. Ironically many counties in Utah received more fallout than those included in the RECA program, but because they were not listed in the Act, those Utahans are not eligible for compensation.

In 1983 Congress directed the National Cancer Institute to conduct a study on the health impacts of nuclear testing, particularly with regard to radioactive Iodine-131 (I-131), which is closely linked to thyroid cancer. Fourteen years later, the study was released and provided shocking results: every county in the lower 48 states received some amount of fallout from nuclear tests. Millions of people born between the mid-1940s and the 1960s received significant doses of radiation.

Hotspots were detected throughout the Intermountain West, including Utah, Idaho, and Montana, in the breadbasket states of Iowa and Missouri, and as Far East as upstate New York and Vermont.

When the Bush Administration started talk of developing—and perhaps testing—new, bunker-busting weapons in 2003, advocates and downwinders in the Intermountain West joined together to oppose this plan, and to call for compensation for the victims of past nuclear tests.

In 2004 the Utah legislature passed a resolution calling for RECA to be expanded to include all of Utah.

On August first of 2007, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo (R) joined with fellow Senators Craig (ID-R), Baucus (MT-D), and Tester (MT-D) to introduce S. 1917, to include Montana and Idaho in the compensation program.

Thus far, Utah’s Senators Hatch and Bennett are notably absent from neither the bill’s co-sponsor list, nor have either of the two asked the bill’s sponsor to include Utah in

http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/nucleartestingandthedownwinders.html

Janet Burton Seegmiller

The History of Iron County

War in Asia caused the United States to reconsider testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific Ocean and to look for a continental test site. Conflict in Korea justified a less-expensive continental testing site in order to maintain U.S. nuclear weapons superiority. A Nevada site north of Las Vegas was chosen because of its safety features, which included low population density, favorable meteorological conditions (a prevailing easterly wind blowing away from the populous west coast), and good geographical features--that is, hundreds of miles of flat, government-controlled land. On 27 January 1951, a one-kiloton bomb dropped from an airplane and detonated over Frenchman Flat marked the beginning of atmospheric nuclear testing in Nevada.

Relatively few Iron County residents were aware of or concerned about nuclear testing when the first mushroom-shaped cloud rose into the western skies and drifted to the northeast in 1951, but the cloud figuratively remains over southern Utah and Nevada to this day. Residents live with every day what the cloud left behind that the eye could not see. There are no southwestern Utah neighborhoods or communities that have not been touched by the tragedy of cancer or birth defects or lingering bitterness over human and financial losses.

Atomic Energy Commission press releases promised that atomic tests would be conducted "with adequate assurances of safety." Residents of southern Nevada and southern Utah who lived downwind of the tests initially believed what they were told; as one historian wrote, "Their faith and trust in their government would not allow them to even consider the possibility that the government would ever endanger their health." However, their experiences during and since the 1950s have convinced them of just the opposite--there was no safety for either people or livestock from atmospheric nuclear testing and the AEC knew it. Declassified transcripts released from 1978 to 1980 show that scientists knew as early as 1947 that fission products released by atomic bomb tests could be deadly to humans and animals exposed during and after the tests. The AEC chose to ignore warnings from its own scientists and outside medical researchers and continued with a "nothing-must-stop-the-tests" rationale.

Atomic testing during its first two years actually received very little attention in Iron County, if the pages of the Iron County Record are an accurate measure. Residents could read about detonations in statewide daily newspapers, but the local paper was more likely to describe civil defense preparedness. Residents were more concerned about the threat of nuclear attack from Russia. As elsewhere, children practiced bomb drills at school and residents began building bomb shelters and storing food so it would not become contaminated.

Scott M. Matheson, governor of Utah from 1977 to 1984 and a former Parowan and Cedar City resident, recalled life in Iron County during the early 1950s: "People in southern Utah were mainly concerned with making a living, and I don't recall anyone being too upset about the brilliant flashes and thunder-like blasts that were part of the 1953 atomic testing. The Upshot-Knothole series, conducted from March to June 1953, included the "Dirty Harry' exposure that carried an enormous amount of debris downwind, over southern Utah. People were concerned about the sheep deaths that occurred in May 1953, but when the AEC said there was nothing to worry about, we all just shrugged our shoulders. No one really accepted the malnutrition rationale, but we were used to accepting whatever the government said, especially during that very nationalistic period."

As part of a test site public-relations program in March 1953, some 600 observers were invited to view a test shot and its effect on manikins, typical homes, and automobiles in an effort to get Americans more interested in civil defense. Klien Rollo represented the Iron County Record at the media event. Observers watched the detonation seven miles from ground zero and later were taken into the test area, after debris and dust had settled. Rollo at first thought it was "his good fortune" to be invited to the test site, but not many weeks later the newspaper began questioning the safety of nuclear fall-out. It printed a long article by University of Utah student Ralph J. Hafen of St. George in which he wrote that he felt "morally obligated to warn people of the irreparable damage that may have occurred or may in the future occur" from exposure to radiation. He also called upon the AEC to explain why cars entering St. George were washed after the shot. Predicting later problems, he cautioned that "damage done to an individual by radiation often does not make itself known for five to ten years or a generation or more."

The sheep and their owners were Iron County's first victims of radioactivity. While being trailed across Nevada from winter range to the lambing yards at Cedar City, some 18,000-20,000 sheep were exposed to large quantities of radioactive fallout from tests in March and April 1953. Kern and McRae Bulloch first noticed burns on their animals' faces and lips where they had been eating radioactive grass. Then ewes began miscarrying in large numbers and at the lambing yards wool sloughed off in clumps revealing blisters on adult sheep. New lambs were stillborn with grotesque deformities or born so weak they were unable to nurse. Ranchers lost as much as a third of their herds.

Ranchers and preliminary veterinary investigators suspected radiation poisoning. The AEC had given Iron County agricultural agent Steven Brower a Geiger counter, a small radiation meter, to carry with him. At the sheep pens, he reported the "needle on my meter went clear off scale. We picked up high counts on the thyroid and on the top of the head, and there were lesions and scabs on the mouths and noses of the sheep." In early June the AEC sent teams of radiation experts to Cedar City to examine ailing animals. The dead carcasses had already been destroyed. The AEC reportedly forced its scientists to rewrite their field reports and eliminate any references to speculation about radiation damage or effects. The number of dead sheep represented a loss of a quarter of a million dollars to the ranchers, but Brower was told "that AEC could under no circumstance allow the precedent to be set in court or otherwise that AEC was liable or responsible for payment for radiation damage to either animals or humans."

In 1955-56, five lawsuits were brought by Iron County ranchers against the government alleging that atmospheric testing of nuclear devices in the spring of 1953 had damaged their herds. The ranchers and their young lawyer, Dan Bushnell, firmly believed that truth would win out and fair play would prevail. The first case, Bulloch v. United States, was processed and tried as representative of the others. It came before the court of Judge Sherman Christensen in September 1956. To the plaintiffs' dismay, technical data from government studies and testimony from government veterinarians regarding radiation damage gathered by the AEC was not presented. Instead, government expert witnesses testified that radiation damage could not have been a cause or a contributing cause to the sheep deaths. Attorney Bushnell tried without success to convince the judge that the government was covering up unfavorable material to protect itself and its program; however, although Judge Christensen ruled the government was negligent in monitoring the tests, he ruled for the government on the crucial issue of whether damage occurred as a result of atomic testing.

In 1979, congressional oversight hearings uncovered weighty evidence of AEC deception in 1956 and Judge Christensen reopened the suit. His fifty-six-page decision concluded that new information demonstrated that "a species of fraud" had been committed upon the court by government lawyers and federal employees acting "intentionally false or deceptive." He also noted improper attempts to pressure witnesses not to testify, a vital report intentionally withheld, and "deliberate concealment of significant facts with references to the possible effects of radiation upon the plaintiffs' sheep." He set aside his prior judgment and granted the sheepmen's motion for a new trial.

Dan Bushnell, who had waited more than twenty years hoping that the AEC files would become public record, assumed justice would finally be done. However, the U.S. Tenth Court of Appeals, in what has been called a "grotesque episode of American jurisprudence," rejected Judge Christensen's findings, maintaining that the material from the congressional hearings was not admissible under the rules of federal procedure. In the opinion of the appeals court, "nothing new" had been presented and it could see no reason to overturn the judgment of the court twenty-five years before. In 1986 the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of the circuit court decision. By that time, the older-generation ranchers were dead or dying. Only two of the original families were still sheep ranching; all had suffered financial losses. Hope of ever recovering damages ended with the disappointing Supreme Court decision in 1986.

Within three to five years after atmospheric testing, leukemia and other radiation-caused cancers appeared in residents of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada living in areas where nuclear fallout had occurred. Communities in which childhood leukemia was rare or unknown had clusters of cases in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the 1990s, people in Iron County believed that those who lived there in the 1950s were guinea pigs and victims, like the sheep. They have adopted the appellation "downwinders," signifying they lived "downwind" of atomic tests. Tests were usually conducted when the wind was blowing east or northeast in order to avoid fallout over more densely populated areas to the south and west, including Las Vegas and southern California. Iron County is centered in the fallout arc. Even though it is impossible to prove that any particular person died or was afflicted by cancer caused by radioactive fallout, the perception of people living in Iron County is that atmospheric nuclear testing brought an epidemic of cancer to the area. The link between radioactive exposure and tumors can, however, be drawn statistically. There is also a local perception that infertility, miscarriages, and birth defects are part of the legacy of living downwind of nuclear tests. Long-time residents of southwestern Utah are quite comfortable blaming a multitude of medical problems on nuclear testing and wonder how many future generations will be affected.

Even though House subcommittee hearings in 1979 found that the government was negligent, that fallout was a likely cause of both adverse health effects to downwind residents and the 1953 sheep losses, its report Health Effects of Low-level Radiation stated that a cause-and-effect link cannot be forged between low-level radiation exposure and cancer or other health effects. Since these might not appear for years or decades, the Federal Tort Claims Act is impossible to apply and compensation had to come through legislation.

Suits were nonetheless brought against the government by Navajo uranium miners, test-site workers, military servicemen forced to watch the tests, and downwind victims of radiation-caused cancers; all were unsuccessful. Twenty-four plaintiffs in one test case, Irene Allen v. United States, represented 1,200 individuals who were deceased or living victims of leukemia, cancer, or other radiation-caused illnesses. Eleven of the twenty-four lived in Iron County during the period of atmospheric testing. Two were children who died of leukemia; eight others died of various other cancers; only one of the eleven was alive in 1984.

Judge Bruce Jenkins issued a landmark decision that awarded damages to some victims. The government appealed, and, in 1986, the Tenth Circuit Court reversed Jenkins's judgment. In January 1988 the Supreme Court again refused to hear an appeal. In 1990, however, Congress passed and President George Bush signed into law the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which created a $100 million trust fund to compensate citizens who lived downwind from aboveground atomic tests and later were stricken with radiation-related illnesses before warnings of potential danger were issued. The act was later amended to remove the $100-million ceiling and to allow uranium miners and test-site workers to participate in the compensation. The legislation states in part: "The United States should recognize and assume responsibility for the harm done to these individuals. And Congress recognizes that the lives and health of uranium miners and of innocent individuals who lived downwind from the Nevada tests were involuntarily subjected to increased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interests of the United States. The Congress apologizes on behalf of the Nation to the individuals...and their families for the hardship they have endured."

Some residents of Iron County, or their surviving family members, have been compensated by the fund. As of September 1994, 1,003 claims had been approved, 829 claims had been denied, and 125 were pending. Many who believe their cancer is fallout-related are prohibited from applying because of restrictions written into the legislation.

The end result is a more cynical attitude toward government. In recent years, many people in southern Utah have been skeptical of government promises and government studies. This was evident when the government was considering building the huge MX missile track in the Escalante Valley in 1980 and 1981; it carries over to wilderness issues and endangered-species battles of the 1990s.

During his term as Utah governor, Scott Matheson brought to the forefront of public awareness the problems faced by Utahns as a result of the nuclear testing. At the 1979 hearings he presented some 1,100 pages of testimony concerning the AEC cover-up and other research. All this was done before Matheson himself developed terminal cancer. His personal conclusion in 1986 was: "I am still angry about the way this issue was handled by the federal government. It points to a continuing need for governors to be vigilant concerning both short-term and long-term impacts of federal decisions on their residents. If citizens in a state are to be sacrificed for the 'national interest,' then, at the very least, those citizens need to be fully informed and protected as much as possible."

Allen Kent Powell

History Blazer February 1995

Historians date the beginning of the McCarthy era as February 9, 1950, when senator Joseph R. McCarthy gave a speech in wheeling, West Virginia, as part of a Lincoln Day weekend celebration. In that speech the junior senator from Wisconsin claimed to have a list of State Department employees who were members of the Communist party. The announcement catapulted McCarthy to center stage as America's most aggressive foe of communists who, he claimed, had infiltrated the national government for the purpose of destroying the American political system and way of life. His unfounded and hysterical accusations, verbal abuse of witnesses, contempt for proper legal procedures, and attack on the loyalty--rather than the ideas--of those with whose policies he disagreed, led to the coining of a new word, "McCarthyism." The process produced widespread hysteria that opponents and victims compared to the infamous Salem witch hunts of the 1690s.

The day after McCarthy's famous Wheeling speech he flew to Salt Lake City where he participated in a Lincoln Day banquet held at the Newhouse Hotel. In Wheeling he had been somewhat vague about the number of alleged communists in the State Department, but in Salt Lake City McCarthy claimed to have a list with fifty-seven names of card-carrying communists in the State Department. While in the Beehive State, McCarthy learned that a spokesman for the State Department said they knew of no communists in their agency. McCarthy offered to give the list of fifty-seven communists to Secretary of State Dean Acheson if Acheson contacted him. The list was never produced.

News of Senator McCarthy's visit to Salt Lake City was carried in the same issue of the daily papers that reported atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs had confessed to giving United States atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. A political cartoon in the Salt Lake Tribune tied the McCarthy and Fuchs stories together in a very dramatic way. The cartoon showed Uncle Sam sitting at a desk going over the national defense plans. A broom-riding witch has just swooped over the desk and gathered an armload of documents labeled "atomic secrets." As she flies off she cackles "...and give my thanks to all the ANTI-witch hunters, Uncle..!" It was not, of course, the anti-witch hunters who had allowed Klaus Fuchs to give atomic secrets away.

Despite his repeated claims, McCarthy never did produce the name of any card-carrying communist, leading critics to claim that "Joe couldn't find a Communist in Red Square." The McCarthy witch hunts came to a close in 1954 when Utah's Republican Senator Arthur V. Watkins chaired a U.S. Senate Select Committee that investigated McCarthy and recommended he be censured for his behavior.

____________________________________________________________________________________

He was as semper fi as it gets HE WAS DRAFTED not enlisted HUGE DIFFERENCE, his older brother Harold Blanch stood on Omaha beach on D-day, and fought in the battle of the bulge. Our little community had several young men his age my Uncle the OLNY ONE who went the rest dodged even W.W.II ; my father was the only young man that age drafted from our little town, by a draft board that was made up of W.W. II draft dodgers. My book is very close to completion. I have been given the run around, lied to, and watched my fathers, and all the others be DISGRACED by the Military, the government and the American community. Finally my uncle the only one of the 5 boys in my father’s family who did not pay a huge price, helped erect a monument to our soldiers and gave credit to my father’s name, as a Supreme sacrifice.

My father looked just like Elvis with Mussels, he said when he woke from the blast, he was feed Iodine and other pills, (the other pills where L.S.D. my research) he said the San-Diego Nurses where all over him over the next few months, he also said at the blast they simply told them to put their hands over their eyes, NO gas mask or protective gear 1000 yards from the blast. He said they were combat ready and on ships headed to Korea, and turned around in the middle of the night and trucked and marched to the trenches to become the greatest HUMAN lab rats in American history. Why did they use Marines? That is an easy one: SEMPER FI and he was as Semper fi AS THEY GETs. He refused morphine and did not shed one tear thought the four month death proses, HE fought like a true Honorable man, and he died with a body like a 30 year old, a wit like Mark Twain, a sense of humor like Johnny Carson, and an intellect like Michelangelo. And a huge compassion, with his three nine year old granddaughters in his bed in his home the same piece of real-estate he was born on at the foot of the might Wasatch of Utah, right next to the Nevada test site that took him, the girls with their arms wrapped around his neck.

The Atomic Victims and their wife’s got no money no respect no metals and NO American popular opinion knowledge of Honor, but they all had one think that metals, and money can never give, True soles with Dignity, and Honor THE REAL KIND. To the soles of the men and popular opinion that allowed the testing of AMERICAN young men to be used like lab mice, MAY YOUR SOLES ROOT IN HELL for all eternity.

Stay tuned my book will expose the liars and scum Politian’s of my home Utah, Hatch Bennett and Bishop all lied to me and my widowed mother, and the Justice department of the bush years, the jury is still out on this Justice department. (Not to mention they stole my mother’s photos of the aftermath of my father’s nuking, that he took). I have copies.

Kevin Dwayne Blanch son of Dwayne Edwin Blanch Atomic Victim

2/19/11 Watch for my book about atomic vets coming soon available on this site coming next month

blanchblanch2@gmail.com I have been working on it for 11 years

http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/

California food and agriculture agency

pat tillman doc.

atomic vets treated like animals

_

_________________________________________________

THE FARM

Summertown, Tennessee, USA

Atomic Veterans

Robert H. Gilbreath

From May through August, 1956, Air Force Staff Sergeant Robert H. Gilbreath was subjected to radiation from 17 nuclear tests and their fallout. Stationed in radiologically contaminated areas in '55 and '56 for 27 days short of a full year, he was exposed to fallout from another 17 tests. The shots which he directly witnessed included Cherokee, the first airdrop of a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb), and 5 other devices in the multimegaton range. The fallout included two exceptionally "dirty" experimental thermonuclear shots, Mike (10.4 MT) and Bravo (15 MT). Both caused widespread and long-lasting contamination in the Marshall Islands, especially in close proximity to the ground zero areas of Bikini and Eniwetok. Radioactive residue from both those tests is still measurable today.

Gilbreath was diagnosed with acute monocytic leukemia in August, 1981. The period between exposure and diagnosis was 25 years, matching the experience of leukemia among Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. High rates of leukemia have also been observed in Utah schoolchildren at distances of up to several hundred miles from the Nevada Test Site. Leukemia is a white blood cell imbalance, possibly caused by genetic damage in the blood-forming bone marrow. A correlation of deformities in the blood forming tissue of laboratory animals has been demonstrated at doses as low as 15 millirem (0.015 rem), which is three orders of magnitude less than is presently allowed for occupational radiation workers annually. A study of British nuclear workers found that radiation-induced leukemia afflicts one out of every 300 nuclear workers and their children, even though they normally receive only a small fraction of the allowed dose.

Gilbreath was exposed to gamma, beta, and alpha radiation from 34 nuclear tests. His dose was significantly greater than that of an occupational worker.

Federal law forbids servicemen, veterans, and their surviving dependents from suing the United States for wrongful injury and death in the line of duty. The only recourse is to the Veterans Administration ("V.A.") for disability compensation. V.A. law requires an assessment of "the size and nature of the radiation dose or doses" for any applicant alleging nuclear exposure. Despite repeated requests for an individual dose reconstruction by the Defense Nuclear Agency, no such work-up was performed for Robert Gilbreath. Instead, the Air Force provided a "generic" unit estimate of 4.417 rem whole body external gamma and 0.150 rem bone dose. This estimate was based entirely on other veterans' film badge records. The film badges of the period did not measure beta or alpha radiation and measured gamma only very poorly.

After a series of hearings and appeals, the Board of Veterans Appeals determined that "in the instant case, the veteran's slight radiation exposure, coupled with the date of the onset of his leukemia, renders it unlikely that his leukemia was, in reality, related to the radiation exposure in service." For the ensuing 5 years, the Natural Rights Center appealed through the V.A. system, but also pursued legislative relief from Congress.

On May 20, 1988, the Atomic Veterans Compensation Act provided presumptive service connection for veterans who had participated in a nuclear test and had developed one of thirteen diseases. Gilbreath's widow was not helped by this law.

On October 15, 1990, the House and Senate passed and sent to President Bush the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. As originally passed, the Act provided one-time compensation to people who lived for 2 or more years in areas of fallout in Nevada and for uranium miners, providing they met certain requirements for disease and lifestyle (non-smokers, non-coffee-drinkers, etc.). Atomic veterans were not affected.

The following week, the House and Senate separately attempted to amend the new legislation, only each version was different. On October 23, a conference committee reconciled a set of amendments which, among other things, added atomic veterans to the program. Under the 1990 law veterans could abandon their appeals at the V.A. and apply to the Justice Department for a one-time, lump sum award of $75,000.

It took us 4 years and perhaps the first test of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, before we won our appeal. Regrettably, Marie received less than a third of the amount which was allowed under law, because subsequent amendments have reduced the available award by offsetting any amounts paid by the government for retirement pensions, social security, veterans' benefits or other reasons. Robert's wife by a prior marriage had received over $50,000 in Social Security, and this was deducted from Marie's award.

With Gilbreath's family finally receiving compensation, this case was closed. From the time Marie asked for our assistance in 1985 until the check arrived in 1994, the case was a string of unremitting hearings, meetings, briefs and appeals. Complex cases like these fall beside the way every day, victims of an expensive, inaccessible legal system. This case was different, and the difference was the presence of the Natural Rights Center, which is to say, you.

Contact:

Natural Rights Center

Attn: Albert Bates, Director

PO Box 90

Summertown, TN 38483-0090

Fax: 1-615-964-2200

Atomic Testing Museum

755 East Flamingo Road, Las Vegas, NV 89119-7363 (702) 794-5161 ‎ atomictestingmuseum.org

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/atmosphr/index.html

In an effort to calm public fears about weapons testing, Annie was an "open shot" - civilian reporters were permitted to view it from News Nob, 11 kilometers south of the shot-tower. Annie was a weapon development test, it was an experimental device (code named XR3) that provided additional information to normalize the yield-vs-initiation time curve. It was a Mk-5 HE assembly using a Type D pit, and used a betatron for external initiation (the third such test). Total device weight was 2700 lb, predicted yield was 15-20 kt.

The Atmospheric Test Series

Trinity - The First Nuclear Test

The Post War Test Series