Nuclear testing. The whole world was downwind.

The organization, Women For Peace, protested above ground nuclear testing in the sixties.

Talking with a friend at a party this weekend we winded up in a conversation about the fact that growing up in Los Angeles in the sixties kids like me were victims of nuclear fallout.

Until 1963, the United States conducted above ground nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Testing Site (NTS) just 300 miles north of my home and 60 miles from Las Vegas.

We were downwind.

The Los Angeles Times, 1965.

They were seemingly unrelated front-page news events on Jan. 13, 1965: Government scientists in Nevada had intentionally blown up a nuclear rocket, and the Santa Ana winds had begun pushing warm desert air “from a high pressure front in Nevada” into the Los Angeles Basin.

But they were more than coincidence. Newly released records show that Atomic Energy Commission officials had been waiting for the unusual southwesterly wind pattern in order to gauge the possible environmental effects of a major launch pad disaster involving nuclear rockets then being tested for the space program.

Unbeknown to the Southern California public and most local officials, the radioactive cloud from the blast was tracked 200 miles as it moved across California, over Los Angeles and out over the Pacific Ocean.

Nearly 30 years later, news of the radioactive cloud, which officials insist was harmless, has landed in a far more suspicious and environmentally conscious Los Angeles than existed when hilltop missile bases guarded against foreign nuclear attack and police officers were equipped with Geiger counters.

That happened three years after the Soviets and the U.S. signed the test ban treaty.

But in fact, the entire world was downwind.

Between the atomic bomb testing by the the US., the Soviets and other nuclear powers, everyone in the world was a downwind.

It was known even then that the explosions produced a substance known as Strontium 90 that as fallout got into the food supply.

Strontium 90, with a half life of 28 years, got into the grass that cows ate.

Then it got into the milk that kids drank.

Kids like me.

At the time there was not much reported research about the effects of atomic testing and incidents of cancers.

If there were studies, they were kept secret.

Some still are secret.

There was a study conducted by the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which was partially released in 2002, 40 years after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed in 1963.

The publication was delayed by the US government. Excerpts of the report were obtained by Tom Harkin, Democratic senator for Iowa.

The study estimates that an estimated 80,000 people who lived or who were born in the US in the past 50 years have contracted or will contract cancer as a result of American nuclear tests conducted in Nevada and the Pacific ocean, Soviet tests in Kazakhstan and eastern Russia, French tests in the Pacific and British tests on Christmas Island.

Of that number, 15,000 cases are estimated to be fatal. The study reported that everyone living on the US mainland was exposed to nuclear fallout.

Many scientists remain suspicious about the number and suggest that the number of cancer victims from nuclear testing could be in the millions.

“The message is we are all downwinders,” said Bob Schaeffer, of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. He said the report summary obtained by Mr Harkin was dated August 2001.

It had not been made public because of unwillingness by governments to acknowledge the impact of past nuclear testing programs.

The New York Times wrote about the study in 2002 in a story titled Almost All in U.S. Have Been Exposed to Fallout, Study Finds.

”If the threat of exposure had been related to Americans sooner, early diagnosis and treatment may have saved many of these lives,” said Mr. Harkin, who has seen four siblings die of cancer.

It appears that scientists and government officials showed little concern for the effect of nuclear testing on people. What research was done was kept mostly secret.

On a personal level, my mother died at the age of 62 from a cancer of the lymph glands.

I had a cancerous tumor the size of an orange removed from my kidney at the age of 72.

Were we victims of above ground nuclear testing?

Who knows?

An atomic bomb test lights up Downtown LA in the predawn hours in 1953.

Photos courtesy Los Angeles Public Library