Utah & America’s “Downwinders” History with Mary Dickson (S4 E12)

**Brad Westwood** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, and the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. We hope if you have one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, we hope this is the place. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the story of the Atomic West and the environmental history of nuclear testing during and after America's Cold War. If you subscribe to this podcast or if you are the first-time listener, we hope you'll go back and listen to the dozens of other prior episodes. If you have an idea for Speak Your Piece, would you please contact us at askahistorianatutah.gov.
PBS Utah, KUER-TV, former creative director, now retired and current online host of Utah's Contact with Mary Dickson, will be speaking with me today. Besides her long-time career in public television, Mary is also award-winning writer, playwright, and is a Downwinder, which I will ask her to define in just a few minutes, and a thyroid cancer survivor who is an internationally recognized advocate for survivors of nuclear weapon testing. Mary has a deep personal perspective on the deadly aftermath of the testing. Her story she will be sharing represents also a local and a personal history approach, but also with a great deal, decades actually, of deep unceasing journalistic investigation.
She has written and spoken widely about the human toll of the weapons testing at numerous conferences, symposia and forums in the US as well as in Japan. Welcome, Mary, to Speak Your Piece.

**Mary Dickson** (1:59)
Thank you so much, Brad, for having me. Thank you.

**Brad Westwood** (2:03)
We will be talking to Mary about the historical intersections between Utah, the broader Intermountain West and the US government's nuclear weapon testing, which was done both above ground, what was known as atmospheric testing, and below ground. Most of this was done at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north as the crow flies from Las Vegas, 140 miles from St. George and 340 miles from Salt Lake City. The Nevada Test Site was the most significant weapons testing site in the United States.
Mary Dixon's play entitled Exposed, which was first performed by Utah's Plan B Theater Company, is a combining of her personal experiences along with some powerful documentation and some incredible deep research. The play received critical acclaim when it premiered in Salt Lake City. It was subsequently toured through universities and venues nationwide as a stage reading. She was honored by the Alliance of Nuclear Accountability for her lifetime work on behalf of those harmed by the nuclear testing that we did here in the United States. Mary is currently working with a group of frontline community members in the West and with national groups of NGOs on advocating for the passage of the US. Congress bill that will expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was passed in 1990 Now those bills are S2798 and HR. 5338 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Amendment Act.
Welcome again, Mary.

**Mary Dickson** (3:51)
Thank you so much, Brad. Something I love talking about.

**Brad Westwood** (3:55)
Well, and there's such a personal story you have, but you've also used so much journalistic effort here. First, tell us a little bit about the bills and what they mean.

**Mary Dickson** (4:05)
Sure, sure. Well, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was a bipartisan bill passed in 1990, and our own Senator Orrin Hatch, Representative Wayne Owens, kind of spearheaded those in the House and Senate. It passed to make right by the people who had been harmed by nuclear testing.
It was when George HW. Bush signed that into law, he called it compassionate payments to those who had been harmed. And because it's almost impossible to prove definitively that one specific cancer was caused by radiation from a test, it was a presumptive bill. In other words, if you lived in certain counties during certain years and got certain kinds of cancers, it was presumed that was caused by radiation from fallout from the test in Nevada.

**Brad Westwood** (4:57)
And what does the follow-up bill offer?

**Mary Dickson** (5:00)
The follow-up bill, they have tried for years to amend this because it was never broad enough.
It was a very specific area. It was some counties in Nevada, some counties in southern Utah, some counties in northern Arizona.
And we know now, especially since studies that have been done since then, how widespread that fallout was. It went thousands of miles from the test site, all the way upstate New York, heavily through the Midwest. But the areas that were really heavily hit were western states. So you've got the new bills would expand the geographic range that would include all of Utah because many times northern Utah was hit even more heavily than southern Utah. It would include all of Arizona, all of New Mexico. Interestingly, Trinity, the very first nuclear test in 45, those Downwinders were never included in anything. So all of New Mexico, all of Nevada, Colorado, Montana, and what am I leaving out? Idaho, which were all heavily hit. And we've got justification for all of that. It would also include Guam, where the Inuitoc veterans were testing there. They were all Downwind.