Rejection Of Nuclear-Fallout Suit Ends An Era In Nevada Desert

LAS VEGAS - Alma Mosley sits alone in her cluttered house and thinks about justice.

Fallen behind a chest of drawers, unreachable, is a framed certificate for work well done, illustrated with a mushroom cloud and inscribed with her husband's name: Hugh Mosley. He has been dead since 1978, lost to colon cancer - a victim, she says, of the Nevada Test Site, where he labored for 13 years at the height of the nation's nuclear-weapons-testing program.

But a federal judge here has disagreed, ruling there was not enough evidence to conclude that radiation caused the illnesses of Hugh Mosley and five other men who worked at the site in the harsh Nevada desert long ago. The judge said that for some of the men, lifestyles - diet or cigarettes or alcohol - may have been to blame.

"My husband was a clean man," says the diminutive Mosley, voice charged with pain, spine stiff with indignation. "He neither drank nor smoked. It was a slap in the face. . . . There's no justice in this government. They killed my husband, my children's father, and said they didn't."

The workers case, as Mosley's was called, was the last big Nevada Test Site radiation lawsuit against the government to finish trial.

This stretch of desert - a restricted swath of sand and sagebrush larger than Rhode Island, pocked with craters from nuclear blasts and shrouded with the secrecy of its Cold War past - was the site of more nuclear-warhead detonations than any other place in the world.

More lawsuits have been focused on this location, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, than on any other stop along the so-called Atomic Trail, the nuclear weapon's path from uranium mine through manufacturing plant to proving ground.

But with the workers case possibly at an end - an appeal is uncertain - and U.S. nuclear testing halted for at least the next 13 months, a notorious chapter in the nation's weapons history may be coming to a close. As the United States heads toward next year's 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nevada Test Site is on the precipice of a dramatic change:

-- The U.S. Department of Energy is scrambling to figure out what to do with 1,350 square miles of irradiated Nevada desert. Among the options: turning the site into a Solar Enterprise Zone for solar-energy research.

-- No new lawsuits are in the works to hold the government accountable for alleged radiation exposure to men, women, children and animals between the first blast at the test site in 1951 and the last in 1992.

"The significance of the decision (in the workers case) is that, right or wrong, it ends . . . the legal history of the Cold War nuclear-weapons-testing project at the Nevada Test Site," says Larry Johns, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

Had the decision gone in favor of the six workers, says John Thorndal, an attorney involved in the government's successful defense, "it could have opened up the government to enormous financial exposure and probably clogged the courts for years here in Las Vegas."

Like the seven other major radiation-exposure lawsuits , the workers case was actually a combination of many other lawsuits, in this case for a total of 220 plaintiffs. Because class-action lawsuits against the government are not allowed, six of the individual cases were chosen to go to trial.

Driving south on U.S. 95 toward Las Vegas, there is very little indication that the hot, flat desert and dramatic mesas to the left hosted nuclear detonations, both above ground and below, for 41 years. The offramp for the test site is marked simply "Mercury," the name of a small support town within the restricted region. A "No services" sign is tacked on for good measure.

Once a symbol of pride

In the beginning, the Nevada Test Site was a symbol of pride, the place where the Atomic Age came out of the closet, when nuclear testing moved from the seclusion of Pacific atolls to the glare of the continental United States, by order of President Truman in 1951.

"There was a honeymoon, a love affair that went on here into the mid-'50s," attorney Johns says. "It was exciting. These were superscientists, and they were going to save the world."

Then things began to go wrong. Nearly 5,000 sheep died after a string of strong blasts in 1953 called the Upshot-Knothole series.

"Wool sloughed off in clumps, most of the adult sheep had blisters and sores on their faces, and the new lambs were either stillborn with grotesque deformities or were so weak they were unable to nurse and died soon after birth," says Stewart Udall in his new book "The Myths of August."

Udall, a former secretary of the interior, has brought many of the cases against the government, including the workers case and unsuccessful lawsuits seeking compensation for uranium miners and "downwinders" who lived in the path of the radioactive fallout from the Nevada Test Site.

In 1956, U.S. District Judge Sherman Christensen ruled that the radiation doses received by the sheep were not enough to cause the carnage and that the government was not negligent. After congressional hearings in 1979 revealed that the government had falsified or withheld evidence during the trial, Christensen ordered a new trial.

"The conduct of the government amounted to a species of fraud on the court for which a remedy must be granted," Christensen said in his 1982 opinion. But four years later, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Christensen's findings and canceled the new trial.

Suits not filed because of secrecy

Because of strict government secrecy and general scientific ignorance about the effects of radiation, it took until the 1970s for lawsuits to be filed in large numbers against the government, alleging that radiation exposure from the test site caused injury and death.

Of the six men involved in the workers case, Keith Prescott of tiny Francis, Utah, can claim two major distinctions: Unlike some, his lifestyle was not cited in his cancer diagnosis.

And, after watching his friends and former colleagues die, one after the other, of painful cancers, he is the only living worker plaintiff.

There was Robert Bergen, Prescott's boss when Prescott came home from the test site for the last time at age 43. Bergen died 15 years ago. Then there was Doug Godfrey, dead for perhaps a decade, and Cal Walters, a shift boss.

"Nearly all my best friends that I worked with died of cancer," says Prescott, the former equipment operator who has battled multiple myeloma, or tumors in his bone marrow, for 25 years. "I was a pallbearer for three of them. It's hard on you, I tell you."

Now that the workers case appears to be over, Prescott is left with another reason to mourn: the loss of hope. Deep down, he thought his case was so strong that simply getting to trial - a process that took 15 years - would automatically lead to compensation.

He hasn't worked since he was 43; he is 68 today, a dignified man who has always believed that he should earn his own, financially and emotionally.

"I had to rely on my wife," he says. "There was so much my kids didn't get to do. I just thought if I could get compensation, I could pay them back and earn my way."

Prescott must, like the Department of Energy itself, now learn to move on. As the department searches for new uses for the sprawling test site, Prescott searches for a reason to wake up in the morning.

"I've lost all of my strength, vitality, determination," he says.