Listen to an interview with Preston Truman

The town of Enterprise, Utah had a population of around 700 during the time of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site. One of those residents was Preston Truman. Preston was born the same year nuclear testing began in Nevada. He recalled "getting up with the rest of the family and driving out to my father's farm in the moments before dawn and watching the western sky light up with the flash from the bombs in Nevada approximately 112 miles away. "I remember on occasion hearing the sound waves come over. I remember later in the mornings watching on a couple of occasions clouds come over. To a little child that didn't mean much. The atomic tests were very much a part of our lives." Truman remembers the fallout of that time period being so thick that some days he could write his name in the white ash that fell on the family automobile.

When Truman was only four years old his friend, Michael Stalie, died of leukemia at the age of five. Within a few years four other children living nearby died of leukemia. Soon the adults of the area started coming down with the disease. The Mormon communities that were common in the area felt it was God's will, and didn't question the government out of their strong sense of patriotism.

A few years later Preston's class room was visited by a speaker from the Atomic Energy Commission. He handed out uranium ore-encased key chains and a small booklet that thanked the children for accepting the "inconvenience" of the tests. The booklet went on to say that their "cooperation helped achieve an unusual record of safety."

When Truman was in the seventh grade, his class was being lectured on how to properly evacuate if Los Angeles were to be hit by a Soviet nuclear bomb. He raised his hand and asked "Why would we have to evacuate to a cellar for two weeks if Los Angeles was bombed, but it was OK for our own government to bomb us over and over." Not getting what he felt was a proper answer, he continued to question the tests in letters he wrote to television stations, newspapers, congressmen and even to President Lyndon Johnson.

By the time Preston reached high school he was diagnosed with lymphoma, a type of cancer in the immune system. Over the next thirteen years Preston received chemotherapy and medical treatments to a cost of $100,000 dollars. None of this was paid for by the government. It was at this time that Preston became an activist against nuclear weapons. He would speak "to anybody who would listen."

When above-ground tests ended in 1963, Truman began organizing the local youth in protesting the nation's nuclear policies. After a few years at college, Truman dropped out to focus entirely on activism. For one of his early projects he and his supporters went door-to-door throughout the state, asking people to fill in maps showing which neighbors had cancers and thyroid diseases.

Looking back at the federal study of school children that he was a part of, Truman was convinced it was the government's way of "checking the guinea pigs' cages to see how many they had killed." Of Preston's 30 schoolmates, 9 had died. When it came time to hold a ten year reunion, the class held a portion in the town cemetery. By 1978, Preston had organized a group called Downwinders. The group fights to ban nuclear tests and to block radioactive waste dumps.

In 2008, Oregon State University published a study of the southwestern Utah soil. The researchers found there to be residual Cesium 137 contamination from the nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site. According to the study "Cesium still exists throughout all areas of Southwestern Utah...no region was found to be without at least some contamination." The area around Enterprise "received a substantially higher level of contamination than the St George area. They were possibly exposed to as much as two or three times the amount of radioactivity received in other areas." The finding leads the researchers to believe that the public received higher doses from the testing than previously thought.

References

http://motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/hellraiser-atomic-activist-preston-j-truman

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO3.html

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/250010267/N-activists-career-began-with-a-light-in-the-sky.html?pg=1

http://www.webdesignsphere.com/citizensedproject/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=409&Itemid=58