Atomic soldiers: American victims of nuclear experiments

“A timely and unsparing account of how U.S. nuclear test policies were guided and executed in the early years of the atomic age. At its most compelling Atomic Soldiers tells what became of a man who was made a pawn in a long-ago dress rehearsal for nuclear war.”-Alan Cranston U.S. Senator During the summer of 1957 Army Corporal Russell Jack Dann was marched to a desert hilltop in Nevada and ordered to watch while an atomic device four times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was detonated just 4 500 yards away. The story of what that mission did to Dann and to nearly 300 000 other American soldiers who were exposed to low-level radiation during the 1950s nuclear test blasts is the focus of this astonishing report. Without hair or teeth deaf in one ear a sterile quadriplegic with leukopenia Dann is waging a losing battle for compensation from the Veterans Administration which refuses to acknowledge the connection between nuclear radiation and his disabilities. One of the centurys most appalling horror stories Atomic Soldiers raises questions about both atomic weapons and nuclear power that are crucial to the future of our society. “Anyone who starts this book will not put it down before reading it from cover to cover. The reader meets in flesh and blood the young military men who became guinea pigs and finally victims of one of the saddest misuses of government in history.”-John Gofman M.D. Ph.D. Chairman Committee for Nuclear Responsibility