FALLOUT - The Cold-War Casualties

"A little-known casualty of the Cold War?  U.S. nuclear workers" PBS NewsHour 12/11/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  More than 33,000 men and women who worked at nuclear facilities have died from related illnesses, and more than 100,000 Americans were diagnosed with cancer and other diseases after helping build the country's nuclear stockpile.  That toll had never fully been revealed until a year-long investigation by McClatchy News.  Jeffrey Brown speaks to McClatchy's Lindsay Wise.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  McClatchy's team found the federal government had never fully revealed the true toll of what happened to men and women working at nuclear facilities.

Back in 2001, the government set up a compensation fund for some of those workers.  The investigation found that more than 33,000 of them have died from related illnesses.  That’s more than four times the number of Americans killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

And there were more than 100,000 Americans diagnosed with cancer and other diseases after helping to build the country’s nuclear stockpile over the decades.

Lindsay Wise is one of the leading reporters on the McClatchy team.  She joins me now.

And welcome to you.

I want to fill in the picture first.  What kind of work and workers were most impacted, most exposed?

LINDSAY WISE, McClatchy Washington Bureau:  Well, these were workers at plants, more than 300 plants all over the country.

They did everything from pipe fitting and production work, blue-collar work, to nuclear physicists and scientists.  And we even found in our database some CEOs who ran the contracting companies that managed the plant.

JEFFREY BROWN:  You refer to this as a hidden legacy.  It’s a little known casualty of the Cold War, but how much was known?

LINDSAY WISE:  Well, this is what I found so interesting working on this project, which was that I feel like when we talk about the Cold War and the history of the Cold War, we often talk about it as though it was a war without any casualties, without any American casualties.

And what we were able to do at McClatchy is we obtained a database from the Department of Labor for the compensation program, and we were able to crunch the numbers and analyze the data, and find the number of people who had applied and then been compensated for illnesses and died.

And so that told us that there were people who gave their lives as part of the Cold War.