Downwinders... the Play
- ISBN-10
- 1481014390
- ISBN-13
- 9781481014397
- Pages
- 142
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2012-11-26
- Author
- Ed Kociela
Description
On Dec. 7, 1941, 353 Japanese aircraft stormed the shores of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack left 2,395 Americans dead, the third worst attack ever on American soil. On Sept. 11, 2001, two commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center, one was crashed into The Pentagon, and passengers forced a fourth to crash into a field in rural Pennsylvania, killing 2,996 Americans, the second worst attack ever on American soil. In July 1951, an atomic bomb was detonated on a top secret military base in the Nevada desert. It was the first above-ground detonation of its kind on American soil. Subsequently, 1,048 other atomic tests, both above and below the surface of the Earth, have taken place on American soil. According to a report that was partially released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute, approximately 15,000 Americans have been killed by the worst attack ever on American soil, an attack that lasted from 1951 until 1992. "Any person living in the contiguous United States since 1951 has been exposed to radioactive fallout...and all organs and tissues of the body have received some radiation exposure." The very northern tip of Arizona and the entire southern Utah region were hit the hardest by this lethal spray of radioactive energy that lingers in the soil and plants in many parts of the United States today. When nuclear testing began at the Nevada Test Site in 1951, thousands of innocent people would clamor to the ridges of nearby mountains for a glimpse of the brilliant flash of light that traveled across the border whenever a nuclear device was detonated. They would awaken the next morning to a powdery dust that covered their garden vegetables, settled in their water, landed in their fields where there cattle grazed. The dust contained of the deadly element iodine-131, known to cause thyroid cancer. Other contaminated fallout resulted in various other forms of cancers that struck the region disproportionately. The chemicals landed in heavy concentrations on the southern Utah and northern Arizona residents who lived downwind from the test site. As a result, the victims, friends and families of the United States' nuclear attack on its own people, which lasted 41 years, took on the name "Downwinders." Modern research, as the CDC report states, now tells us that almost all of us are now "Downwinders."
