70 years of US atomic weapons: Some 33,500 Americans dead

The study by a team of investigative journalists at McClatchy News indicates at least 33,480 Americans have died since 1945 as a result of nuclear-related diseases.
 
Drawing upon millions of government records and large numbers of interviews, the study concluded that employment in the nation's nuclear weapons plants since 1945 led to 107,394 American workers contracting cancer and other serious diseases.
 
Of these people, some 53,000 judged by government officials to have experienced excessive radiation on the job received $12 billion in compensation under the federal government's Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program. And 33,480 of these workers have died.
 
According to the Huffington Post, workers in nuclear weapons plants constitute only a fraction of Americans whose lives have been ravaged by preparations for nuclear war.
 
A 2002 report by the US Department of Health and Human Services maintained that between 1951 and 1963 alone, the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons - more than half of it done by the United States - killed 11,000 Americans through cancer.
 
As this estimate does not include internal radiation exposure caused by inhaling or swallowing radioactive particles, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research has maintained that the actual number of fatal cancers caused by nuclear testing could be 17,000.
 
A larger number of people contracted cancer from nuclear testing than actually died of it. The government study estimated that those who contracted cancer numbered at least 80,000 Americans.
 
Many of them were "downwinders" - people whose towns and cities were located near US nuclear testing sites and, thus, were contaminated by deadly clouds of nuclear fallout carried along by the wind.
 
Now former NSA contractor Stephen D Kelley says cancers and environmental fallout are only some of the impacts of the US nukes.
 
During the 1950s, the US government conducted close to a hundred atmospheric nuclear explosions at its Nevada test site. Nearly 30 percent of the radioactive debris drifted over the towns to the east, which housed a population of roughly 100,000 people.
 
The residents of St. George, Utah recalled that a "pink cloud" would hang over them while they worked amid the fallout, walked in it, breathed it, washed their clothes in it, and ate it.
 
"Even the little children ate the snow," recalled one resident. "They didn't know it was going to kill them later on."
 
During subsequent decades, leukemia and other cancer rates soared in the counties adjoining the Nevada test site, as they did among the 250,000 US soldiers exposed to US nuclear weapons tests.
 
From the standpoint of US military commanders, it was vital to place American soldiers close to US nuclear explosions to get them ready to fight in a nuclear war.
 
Uranium miners comprise yet another group of Americans who have suffered and died from the US nuclear weapons program.
 
The report says the American nuclear catastrophe is not only a matter of the past, but seems likely to continue well into the future as the US government is now beginning a $1 trillion program to "modernize" its nuclear weapons complex. This involves building new nuclear weapons factories and labs, as well as churning out new nuclear weapons and warheads for firing from the air, land, and sea.