St. George • Nuclear weapons testing in southern Utah is not something relegated to the history books or occasional Hollywood film. It lingers on in the haunted memories of those who lived through it and are still living with the consequences.
All told, 100 above-ground and 828 underground nuclear tests were carried out at what was then called the Nevada Test Site before the U.S. enacted a moratorium on further testing in 1992. Later research showed millions of Americans were exposed to radioactive fallout linked to various types of cancer.
Today, 32 years after the moratorium, St. George-area residents who have lost family members and friends from radiation-related cancers are still reeling from the impact. But rather than letting bygones be bygones, they are speaking out to stop its revival from becoming a foregone conclusion.
During this election year, they have reason to worry.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, drafted to serve as a playbook for a potential second Trump administration, proposes “restoring readiness to test nuclear weapons” at what is now known as the Nevada National Security Site. Moreover, Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, argues the U.S. needs to resume nuclear testing in Nevada, and further proposes to nearly double the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Steven Snow, now an emeritus Latter-day Saint general authority, at a 2018 news conference. Snow says resuming nuclear testing in Nevada is unthinkable.
For Steven E. Snow, an emeritus Latter-day Saint general authority and former historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, bringing back nuclear testing to Nevada is unthinkable. The St. George resident lost his grandmother to cancer and his mother to non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Snow’s wife, Phyllis, who also grew up in St. George, was diagnosed with breast and kidney cancer. She beat both but died seven months ago from post-Covid-related issues.
“Some argue it is possible those kinds of things can happen anywhere,” said Snow, one of many opponents of more nuclear testing. “But there is now too much evidence that people who lived here were impacted a lot more than those in other parts of the country.”
Dirty Harry dusts St. George
New Mexico State University sociology professor James Rice, a St. George native and author of “Downwind of the Atomic State: Atmospheric Testing and the Rise of the Risk State,” concurs.
“St. George accounts for one-fifth of the cumulative external gamma radiation exposure imposed nationwide upon the public,” Rice told The Salt Lake Tribune. “It’s pretty clear that St George was probably the hardest-hit community in the United States between 1951 and 1962.”
Rice said other southwest Utah towns also bore a disproportionate burden, including Hurricane, Washington City, La Verkin, and Santa Clara. While the Washington County area was exposed to radioactive fallout several times, the professor added, it took its biggest hit from “shot Harry,” a 32-kiloton nuclear bomb — more than double that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II — detonated in Nevada on May 19, 1953.
In an article Rice penned for the Western Historical Quarterly, the author details Harry’s impact on the St. George area after its detonation from a 300-foot steel tower during the predawn hours. When the fallout arrived and lingered over St. George for several hours, roughly 130 miles east of the test site, Rice wrote, “children were running to recess and shoppers were making their rounds.”
“As Harry swept through St. George and outlying areas, some residents noted a strange metallic taste in the air, the remnants, ostensibly, of the tower and metal shed which had housed the device,” Rice continued. “There were scattered reports of nausea, headache, and burns on exposed skin, indicative of radiation sickness.”
When the federal Atomic Energy Commission learned what was happening, it was too late for the commission or local officials to do much about it.
Harry was the dirtiest of the bombs detonated in Nevada, but other tests also dusted St. George and surrounding areas with radiation, although the resulting cancer and other ailments didn’t surface until later. A draft U.S. Public Health Services report in 1965, Rice wrote, found a threefold increase in leukemia in Iron and Washington counties in youth under 19 and an increased leukemia risk for residents of all ages.
Watching clouds, losing loved ones
Snow remembers watching radioactive pink clouds from nuclear tests drift by overhead as a boy and being told he had to stay indoors and not go outside to play. He also recalls the president of then-Dixie College taking a group to the west side of Utah Hill, where they could look out over Nevada and see the flashes from nuclear explosions.
Bill Graff, a primary care physician in St. George for 34 years until his retirement a decade ago, was a third-grader when he and his father would climb on the roof of their Santa Clara home to watch the spectacle.
“We would get up early in the morning when we knew they were going to set one off so we could see the flash,” recalled Graff, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer years later. “Sometimes you would see weird-looking pinkish clouds drift over the area.”
The losses, possibly linked to radiation exposure, mounted for LaRene Cox, who grew up in nearby Veyo. She was too young at the time to remember much about the tests but said her husband, Dean, recalled he and others driving their cars to places where they could watch the explosions.
“Everybody thought it was cool,” she recalled Dean telling her. “Then, all of sudden, [officials] would say, ‘You better keep the kids in the classroom while the tests go on.’ But it just rained dust.”
Cox has since lost her grandfather to leukemia and her father to adrenal cancer. Dean, a former Washington County commissioner, died from multiple myeloma in 2021.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Downtown St. George on Wednesday, May 3, 2023.
St. George Mayor Michele Randall’s maternal grandfather and father-in-law were diagnosed with cancer and qualified for compensation from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, a program that compensated some downwinders — the term applied to victims exposed to harmful radiation from nuclear weapons tests — before it expired in June.
Her mother, another downwinder, has been diagnosed with three autoimmune diseases, and Randall was diagnosed with breast cancer several years ago that she attributes to being exposed to fallout from atomic testing during her youth.
“So many people have been impacted,” Randall said. “Back then there was no warning, and you didn’t have the 24-hour news cycle we have today telling people to stay in their homes. There were clouds full of nuclear, toxic chemicals drifting your way. And since people didn’t know about the danger, they stood outside and watched the clouds and the ash fall.”
Nuclear testing also hits close to home for Washington City Mayor Kress Staheli, who was 11 when his father, Stanley, died of bladder cancer at age 49. He also lost a grandmother to colon cancer in the wake of nuclear testing in Nevada.
Before his birth, the mayor said, many in the Staheli family were farmers in the St. George area who would wash their produce and themselves in the canal when the nuclear blasts were occurring.
“They remember brushing away the debris or [atomic] dust from the fallout that was on the water so they could wash the produce and drink the water …,” Staheli said. “It’s been recounted by numerous families affected locally that before [detonating a bomb], officials at the site would wait until the winds were blowing toward southern Utah because it was a less-populated area.”
Downwinders also say Atomic Energy Commission officials assured them the blasts were safe, or downplayed their effects, something former Ivins Mayor Jack Reber once complained about.
“No advanced warnings were given until sometime later when representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission came to town and informed the residents to go indoors and to shower and wash their clothes when a test occurred,” Reber is quoted saying in a historical section of Ivins’ general plan. “We had no way of knowing the dangerous situation we were in at the time.”
Never again
(Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune) Housing developments in Ivins on Wednesday, May 3, 2023.
Today, it’s difficult to find anyone in the St. George area who wants to see nuclear testing resumed.
“I certainly don’t favor it,” Ivins Mayor Chris Hart said. “Because what are they going to do now to protect people in my community that they didn’t bother to do then? … There’s no way I would say ‘Yeah, I’m all for it.’”
For their part, downwinders say it’s important to keep the history of nuclear testing in Nevada alive so people will not forget what happened and will fight to keep it from happening again.
“I think everyone born and raised here would be against testing taking place again,” Randall said. “The people who want to restart testing need to come to St. George and visit with the families that have suffered so much from the fallout.”
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