Nuclear blasts’ toll lingers for one man

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On the Fourth of July weekend of 1957, Darrell Robertson was on a train from Fort Lewis, Wash., to southern Nevada. He was one of hundreds of young men with orders in hand to take part in a training exercise that they were told was crucial to the fight against communism.

The native of Lamar was headed deep into the burnt landscape of the Mojave Desert, to a place called Camp Desert Rock. There, between 1945 and 1958, the U.S. military conducted 106 atmospheric nuclear tests.

At the time, Robertson said, military brass believed a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets was likely. They were intent on developing a group of troops hardened by repeated exposure to radiation. They thought exposure to radiation was like sunning on the beach: First you burn, then you tan.

“Today, you think, ‘How would you ever harden troops to that?’ ” Robertson said in an interview this week at the Tribune. “It’s not something that you can become accustomed to or environmentally be exposed to and continue to go on. That’s just not a fact. But see, they didn’t know that then.”

On one of his first days in the tent city, Robertson was roused at 4 a.m. — the time of least wind and highest humidity in the desert — and driven to a lookout spot known as Newsman’s Knob to observe his first-ever “shot.”

Putting on a heavy jacket, helmet, goggles and leather gloves, Robertson and more than 100 others were instructed to crouch, cover their eyes and turn away from the cloud. What followed was a relatively minor detonation — only a few kilotons — but many of the newbies in his group weren’t prepared for the “blowback” that came moments later. They “just rolled around on the ground like footballs,” he said.

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2009/jun/11/nuclear-blasts-toll-lingers-for-one-man/

And the military didn't want to acknowledge any link to medical problems.