The Weiss Study and the Cover-Up of Leukemia Deaths Downwind of the Nevada Test Site

What qualifies as a “cover-up?”

In the summer of 1977 Gordon Eliot White, a reporter for the Salt Lake City Deseret News, discovered an unpublished National Cancer Institute report outlining leukemia rates in Utah between 1950-1969. He combined this with data on fallout from atmospheric atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) between 1951-1962, that he obtained from a source at the Pentagon. Laying one atop the other, something stood out: those counties with the heaviest fallout illustrated higher than expected cases of leukemia.

White then wrote an article highlighting the Utah counties of Garfield, Kane, Iron, San Juan, and Washington had rates of leukemia above the state average. “Deaths High in Utah Fallout Area” caught the attention of Joseph L. Lyon–a cancer researcher at the University of Utah who was skeptical fallout had an impact within the state. Two years later, however, Lyon and colleagues research published in the New England Journal of Medicine was strikingly consistent with White’s reporting.

In their 1979 study, Lyon et al. analyzed leukemia deaths in Utah among those 15 years of age or younger and documented 152 deaths in northern Utah where 119 were expected or a 1.3-fold increase, and in the high fallout counties in southern Utah, where far fewer people lived, they observed 32 deaths where 13 were expected or 2.4 times higher than anticipated.

“Children born in southern Utah between 1951-1958 experienced 2.4 as many deaths from leukemia as children born before and after above-ground bomb testing,” Lyon later explained in the pages of the journal Epidemiology. Selecting the five southern Utah counties closest to the NTS–they reported a level 3.4 times normal.

What Joseph Lyon did not know at the time is that he and his colleagues inadvertently replicated research from 14 years earlier. Indeed, no one knew at the time of earlier research examining leukemia in Utah because it had been shelved under pressure from AEC officials.

In 1960 the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) began studying leukemia and thyroid abnormalities downwind of NTS. Five years later PHS researcher Edward S. Weiss circulated a report illustrating that between 1950-1964 the two southwestern-most Utah counties downwind of the NTS, Iron and Washington, exhibited a statistically significant threefold excess of leukemia among those under 19 years of age and a 1.5-increased risk of leukemia among residents at all ages.

Weiss’s research prompted a meeting in September of 1965 at the White House with Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and PHS officials in tandem with staff from the office of President Johnson’s Scientific Advisor. AEC officials were in charge of conducting atomic weapons experimentation and development and confronting the potential hazards to public health. It was a dual mandate AEC and military officials could never balance. Indeed, at the meeting, and in a memorandum to the Surgeon General, they stressed the methodological weaknesses of Weiss’s study as well as the public relations implications (See Dunning to Ink, below).

From this point forward Weiss’s leukemia study lay dormant.

Irrespective of the strengths and weaknesses of Weiss’s research, a statistically significant excess number of childhood leukemia deaths in high fallout counties was deserving of additional study-which is exactly what did not happen within either the PHS or the AEC. There were things AEC officials did not want to know and, in this instance, PHS officials acquiesced to ensure they did not learn of those things. And neither the public nor the scientific community knew of Weiss’s study until 1979 when The Washington Post obtained a copy through a Freedom of Information Act request.

It would be difficult to find a more glaring example of the institutional production of willful and strategic ignorance than the shelving of Edward Weiss’s leukemia study in 1965.

Willful ignorance is the refusal to foster a better understanding or recognize the validity of new knowledge that may have disadvantageous implications. It involves deliberate rather than inadvertent neglect. Moreover, willful ignorance is distinct from self-deception. Self-deception suggests one truly believes that which is demonstrably false while willful ignorance suggests a degree of choice in remaining unaware of something which may be inconvenient. And willful ignorance, of course, can contribute to biased decision making.

Strategic ignorance involves the methodical, coordinated production of uncertainty where it is not reasonably, and empirically, justified. Strategic ignorance is twofold: 1) stressing the existing unknowns in a situation to assert control and deny liability; and 2) the manufacturing of unreasonable doubt. Linsey McGoey argues the ability to authoritatively define for others the unknowns in a situation are crucial to organizational control: “We need to resist the tendency to assume that knowledge is more powerful than ignorance or that key actors have an overarching interest in expanding knowledge.”

The irony is that the goal of atmospheric atomic testing in Nevada was to further knowledge of weapons design and innovation, but, in tandem, there were also things AEC officials did not want to know. And it is the children living downwind of Nevada who paid the price for the Commission’s failure to balance weapons experimentation and protecting public health.

For more information:

Gordon Eliot White, “Deaths High in Utah Fallout Area,” Deseret News, August 12, 1977.

Joseph L. Lyon, Melville R. Klauber, John W. Gardner, and King S. Udall, “Childhood Leukemias Associated with Fallout from Nuclear Testing,” New England Journal of Medicine 300, no. 8 (1979): 397-402.

Joseph L. Lyon, “Nuclear Weapons Testing and Research Efforts to Evaluate Health Effects on Exposed Populations in the United States,” Epidemiology 10, no. 5 (1999): 557-560
Edward S. Weiss, “Leukemia Mortality in Southwestern Utah: 1950-1964,” U.S. Public Health Service, 14 September 1965; Lyon, “Nuclear Weapons Testing.”

Gordon Dunning to Dwight Ink, “PHS Announcement on Study of Possible Fallout Effects in Utah,” 31 August 1965; Dwight A. Ink to Luther L. Terry, Surgeon General, U.S. Public Health Service, 10 September 1965.

Linsey McGoey, “The Logic of Strategic Ignorance,” The British Journal of Sociology 63, no. 3 (2012): 553-576; Proctor, “Agnotology.”

Steve Rayner, “Uncomfortable Knowledge: The Social Construction of Ignorance in Science and Environmental Policy Discourses,” Economy and Society 41, no. 1 (2012): 107-125.