Domestic Protest Against Covert Nuclear Tests by US Government Mounts as report says thousands died of cancer due to nuclear test exposure.

Is there a Shifting of US nuclear test venue to the Third World?

Recent media exposures revealed that radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear testing exposed virtually everyone in the United States, and contributed to about 11,000 cancer deaths, reveals a study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes.

The radioactive exposure also contributed to a minimum of 22,000 U.S. cancer cases overall, according to a progress report the CDC provided Congress last year. The report first came to light in USA Today recently. The study is the first to consider the health effects of nuclear detonations - including those performed by foreign countries -between 1951 and 1962, when above-ground testing was banned. It is also the first to consider forms of radioactive fallout other than iodine-131, the most serious public health threat posed by atmospheric nuclear tests. Recently, the US Government has been under severe public criticism for hiding the negative fall out from nuclear tests.

A 1997 assessment by the National Cancer Institute found that 11,300 to 212,000 thyroid cancers could have been caused by iodine-131 produced in nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site. The new CDC research does not challenge that result, and suggests iodine-131 fallout is responsible for almost all ill health effects from nuclear testing. The CDC report does conclude, however, that nuclear testing has been responsible for about 550 leukemia deaths since 1951, revealed investigations by USA Today journalists.
Fallout from tests by the US, the Soviet Union and Britain between 1951 and 2000 were reportedly responsible for a total of 80,000 cancer cases in the US alone.

US Environmental groups have termed the US government report as the first extensive study of the effect of test fallout on population by a nuclear power. The report estimated radiation doses from sites used until overground nuclear weapons tests were banned in 1963 by an international treaty. According to Dr Arjun Makhijani, The head of the IEER the study showed that people living thousands of miles from nuclear tests had been affected. "Hot spots were scattered across the United States from California and Oregon, Washington in the west to New Hampshire, Vermont and North Carolina in the east," he said in an interview with The USA Today Magazine.

Apparently the US Government does not want to hurt its own people by conducting nuclear tests on its own soil. The best alternative is to transplant these risky experiments to developing countries. .
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Environmental Campaigners in Idaho, where fallout was particularly high, are calling for a full government public information programme and for compensation awarded in the immediate Nevada area to be extended nationwide. It finds that fallout from scores of U.S. trials at the Nevada Test Site spread substantial amounts of radioactivity across broad swaths of the country. When fallout from all tests, domestic and foreign, is taken together, no U.S. resident born after 1951 escaped exposure, the study says.

It concludes that about 22,000 cancers, half of them fatal, probably occurred from external exposure to radioactive fallout. Those could include everything from melanoma to breast cancer. The study attributes thousands of additional cancers to internal radiation exposure, such as inhalation or eating tainted food. Those cancers include at least 550 fatal leukemias and about 2,500 thyroid cancer deaths. Nuclear weapons powers "owe the world a real accounting of what they did to its health," said Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, in an interview with the USA Today.

More than 550 US companies, research sites and other places across the nation where involved secretly to process radioactive and toxic materials for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. About 300 private contractors did weapons work. Unwitting workers at many sites were exposed to extreme radiation and chemical hazards and that many companies dumped hazardous waste into surrounding communities.

There is a list of more than 550 sites where the US Department of Energy either knows work was performed for the nuclear weapons program or where questions have been raised about whether such work was done. At some of these sites, past investigations have concluded that no radioactive material was handled. At other sites, past investigations have concluded that weapons work was not done. Officials also say they are developing a plan to address worker safety and environmental questions at many of the sites.