The Hidden Costs of Empire

Key to our global empire is our vast arsenal of nuclear weapons. Once poised to strike the Soviet Union, they are now aimed at a number of various targets around the world. The environmental destruction caused by our nuclear program is horrendous. But perhaps the worst thing was the human testing:

Atomic Bomb Testing on U.S. Soldiers

From 1951-1963 thousands of U.S. soldiers were purposefully exposed to radiation during atomic bomb and H-bomb testing in Nevada and the Pacific. Atomic veterans have an exremely high cancer rate but it took the U.S. Government over 40 years to even acknowledge the experiments took place.
In addition, a countless number of people, down wind of the Nevada test sites, were exposed to radioactive fallout in Nevada and Utah. From 1964-1970, 3000 school children in Washington County, Utah were used in thyroid studies by the Atomic Energy Commission without parental consent.

Sources:
The Atomic Veteran's Research Institute, Robert Campbell
The History Channel, "History Undercover: Declassified: Human Experimentation"
"Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans", Jonathan Moreno, Routledge, W. H. Freeman & Co., 2000
http://www.downwinders.org
http://www.naav.com
http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets

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