“When I was seven years old, I stood in our front yard with my family in Las Vegas and watched the sky to the north light up in a brilliant flash, then a mushroom cloud rise up. Even though the test site base camp was only 70 miles away, we were not fearful or concerned; we were proud to be on the front lines of democracy, deterring Soviet nuclear aggression. Also, the government kept assuring us that the radiation from those tests posed no health risks. Even when the cancer rate in Vegas and nearby communities (notably St. George, Utah) rose to as much as 20 times the national average, the government refused to take responsibility, claiming that there was no way to prove direct causation between radiation exposure and an individual’s illness. So the autoimmune disease that plagued me throughout my childhood, and my father dying of bladder cancer, depriving him of years of retirement and time with his family — these were just unfortunate coincidences.

Finally, with the passage of the original RECA statue, the government began to compensate victims' families. However, for some bizarre reason, nearly all of Clark County, which included most of the population of Southern Nevada, was excluded from coverage — as though the radiation came to the county line and obligingly went around it. Hardest hit were the black residents of the West Side, who did not have access to adequate health care and undoubtedly suffered an even higher death rate from cancer.

If the latest RECA amendment passes the House and is signed into law, there were finally be a measure of justice for the people of New Mexico who witnessed the fiery ball from the Trinity Test, the Southern Nevadans who saw the flash and the mushroom cloud from their yards, all the downwinders who were the unwitting victims of radiation exposure.”