RIP, Michelle Thomas
The Cold War took another life not long ago. And this time, it’s personal.
Michelle Thomas, a longtime advocate for those poisoned by the fallout from the nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site, left this good Earth recently, succumbing to the illnesses that plagued her life after repeated exposure to the radiation that drifted across the state line all those years ago.
She was a warrior in the way she battled her illnesses. She was a warrior in the way she championed the rights of those called downwinders who, like her, were civilian casualties of their own government. She was a warrior in the fight against developing more and more lethal nuclear weapons.
And she was my friend.
I met her first back in the late ‘90s while doing a piece on downwinders and the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, a piece of legislation authored by former Sen. Orrin Hatch that has thus far paid $2.25 billion dollars to 34,372 people who lost their lives or suffered from various cancers as a result of exposure to iodine 131, a dangerous isotope released during nuclear detonations. Detonations at the test site continued until 1992, when a series of seven explosions known officially as Operation Julin closed the era. Of those seven detonations, four vented into the atmosphere.
Subsequent to RECA legislation, further studies proved that there were many more people who suffered from the tests. I discussed this with Hatch and asked why the parameters of compensation were not broadened to include additional cases of cancer and disease.
Hatch told me: “The U.S. government could not afford it.”
His statement was supported by recent information unearthed in a study conducted by University of Arizona economist Keith Meyers, who revealed that we may never know exactly how many innocent civilians were killed by nuclear testing.
“This [study] reveals that there are more casualties of the Cold War than previously thought, but the extent to which society still bears the costs of the Cold War remains an open question,” Meyers said.
He added that “the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty might have saved between 11.7 and 24 million American lives.”
Many researchers have published maps showing the track of radiation fallout that spread from the Nevada Test Site to each of the 48 contiguous United States, into Canada and Mexico, and across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.
Perhaps the most devastating result of these studies proved that our children, particularly in the midwest, were exposed in a most insidious and frightening manner through the milk they drank.
The fallout would drift over the continent, dropped into our grasslands by rain. Dairy cows would graze in those fields. Iodine 131 would poison their feed and get passed along in the milk they gave, poisoning our babies and our children.
“Exposure to fallout through milk leads to immediate and sustained increases in the crude death rate,” Meyers explained.
Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Idaho, I learned, were given priority to RECA funds because of their proximity to the tests, however.
“I remember people would pack up their families and drive to Snow Canyon to watch the mushroom clouds pass,” Michelle told me. “I remember how they had scientists all dressed in HAZMAT suits stopping traffic out of Snow Canyon so they could run Geiger counters over the vehicles. People would ask if it was dangerous, and those scientists would lie and say, ‘No … these are just standard tests.’ They knew better, they knew it was poison, but they let people go out there to be exposed so they could measure how much of it fell on them.
“My mother asked questions and was told that she needn’t worry,” Michelle continued. “We all had gardens at that time, but we were told it was perfectly fine to just rinse the fallout dust off our vegetables before eating them.
“Nobody had clothes dryers back then, so laundry hung on the line. We were told not to worry and just to beat on our clothes to get the dust out. More lies.”
Usually, at this point, a string of expletives would spring from Michelle. So would the tears as she recalled the deaths of family, friends, and classmates who had died as a result of radiation exposure.
Michelle was perhaps the most honest person I have ever known. She shared her ordeal without reserve, bluntly, candidly, passionately. She was not embarrassed by what radiation had done to her body, and often at public meetings, to stand against nuclear testing or nuclear waste transport, she would share her medical frailties.
It was raw and excruciatingly painful.
She was also known internationally as an eloquent spokeswoman for downwinders and as a leader in the fight against nuclear weapons, power, and improper waste management.
She was tough, a fighter, and I knew she would hang in there as long as the shell she was living in would allow, her indomitable spirit, courage, and strength pulling her through.
Oh, there were frustrations, tears, moments of doubt, and lots of anger, but considering how her body had been ravaged, it was, in proportion, minimal.
She would counter it all with her savage wit and sarcasm, always laced with the sobering facts of how the United States recklessly took the lives of its own citizens to win the Cold War.
Was it worth it?
No, because, as we learned, we were better able to settle that faceoff through an economic battle that caused the USSR to go belly up financially.
“I was a veteran of the Cold War, only I never enlisted and no one will ever fold a flag over my grave,” Michelle said.
Nonetheless, she was a warrior, a hero, and an example of strength in the most trying of circumstances.
Most of all, she was my friend.
I mark her passing with an odd combination of sorrow and joy.
I grieve her loss, but I celebrate the fact that she is now free from her Earthly chains and am confident she has now found the peace she so richly deserves.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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Thank you Ed for a great article.