While we will never know how many have died as a result of nuclear weapons testing, new studies reveal more information. In 1963 the Partial Test Ban Treaty marked an end to most above ground testing after 1,900 test bombs had already been exploded. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War released a study in 1991 predicting as many as 2.4 million deaths worldwide from the resulting radioactive fallout. In 2001 author Dr. Rosalie Bertell, using official radiation risk estimates from the International Commission on Radiological Protection and radiation exposure data from the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, concluded there could be up to 175 million fatal cases of cancers due to the testing.
Bomb testing by the United States was done primarily at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) on Western Shoshone land and adjacent to Southern Paiute land, and on the Marshall Islands. A 2002 study by the US Department of Health and Human Services admitted that 11,000 US civilian deaths were caused by just the radioactive iodine-131 from the NTS. A new study related to the same nuclear tests conducted by University of Arizona professor Keith Meyer reports an estimated toll many times higher—as many as 695,000 deaths in the United States from 1951-1973. Using county radiation fallout maps, Meyer found a higher number of deaths related to the consumption of radioactive milk from cows grazing in areas of concentrated fallout.
—Keith Meyers, June 2017; The New Scientist, Mar. 2002; The Ecologist, April 2001; International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1991
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