Thread by @lesleymmblume

I had never cried when doing an interview before. After 5 years of researching and writing about nuclear attack and aftermath, I thought that didn’t have nerves left in my body. I was wrong. 🧵 /1/

When I spoke w/ Claudia Peterson of Cedar City, Utah, she told me about growing up in the shadow of atomic tests at the Nevada Testing Site, @ 175 miles away. There were 100 aboveground tests. The blast flashes & mushroom clouds on the horizon were regular occurrences. /2/

Officials started coming to her school. They gave out big, orange potassium iodide pills: anti radiation medication. They ran Geiger meters over the kids. And all the while, the gov’t told them not to worry: they were safe. /3/

And yet fallout was bathing the landscape. It was in their soil, their water. In the milk from their local cows. Lambs at ranches were born with ghoulish deformities. /4/

Then Claudia’s schoolmates started getting sick. One got bone cancer and died. Another died of leukemia. Another died of liver cancer. /5/

Then she told me about how her daughter Bethany got neuroblastoma at age 3. And her sister, Cathy - mother to six children - got melanoma, which “spread through her like wild fire.” (She gave birth to her last child while she was “full of cancer,” Peterson says.) /6/

And here’s where I lost it. It became clear that Bethany and Cathy were both going to die. Claudia lay with her sister on the latter’s hospital death bed, and told Cathy to come find Bethany right away after they both died, so Bethany wouldn’t be alone. /7/

I don’t know that I’ll ever recover from that conversation. Bethany and Cathy indeed died within days of each other, and Claudia says she nearly went mad with grief. But she didn’t. She instead became an advocate for “downwinders” - people exposed to fallout during tests. /8/

Claudia is the headliner of my new @natgeo story on the history and legacy of the US’s 1,054 nuclear tests. Pls take a few minutes to read it. People often tell me that they feel helpless to affect nuclear matters, but we are not helpless. /9/

Voting counts. Even though the US has honored a moratorium on nuclear testing since 1992, resumption is really at the discretion of presidential administrations. In 2020, the Trump admin considered starting tests again. /10/

Downwinders of the testing era say the prospect of testing resumption is traumatic. “No test is void of risk and danger,” says NM downwinder Tina Cordova. “And somebody is going to suffer the consequences.” /11/

Thank you, @NatGeo for giving this story and issue a platform.

nationalgeographic.com/history/articl…