Radioactive Clouds of Death Over Utah
by Dr. Daniel W. Miles
Trafford Publishing

book review by Barbara Bamberger Scott

More than a hundred nuclear bombs were detonated above ground by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1958. In the fly zone of the mushroom clouds created by nuclear testing was the small town of St. George, in Washington County, Utah, which became better known as "Fallout City, USA." Reports of a cancer epidemic plaguing the community followed in the succeeding years. In his new book, Dr. Miles, a resident of St. George who lived through the decade of nuclear testing and has studied its aftermath for decades, attempts to separate fact from conjecture and uncover the true consequence nuclear testing has had on "downwinders."

As the result of a 1979 class-action suit, the residents of St. George were led to believe their cancer rate was three to four times that of the nation. The author has set forth to prove otherwise. With the caveat that "the fallout controversy is about the magnitude of the fallout effect, not about whether or not fallout exposure may have been harmful," Dr. Miles presents the case that survivors of the fallout era face only a minimally increased likelihood of cancer. Drawing upon a lifetime of research and a career teaching upper division physics, the author provides a wealth of factual evidence to make the case that Washington County residents have suffered "about one extra cancer from fallout for every 200 cancers due to other causes."

While Dr. Miles makes a compelling argument on factual grounds, the writing itself is less compelling, as the author's work reads more as a thesis than a book. His dense data collection is linear and encyclopedic, a bit dry for the average reader. Hopefully, however, the information provided by this credible researcher may well ease the minds of St. George residents who lived through the fallout era.

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