The Uranium Fever

In 1952, a broke geologist found uranium in the Utah desert and became a millionaire overnight. Within a decade, the men who followed him into the same red rock canyons were dying of lung cancer in their forties.Between 1948 and 1958, the United States government convinced ordinary Americans, farmers, war veterans, mechanics, and entire families, to abandon their old lives and search the deserts of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico for radioactive ore. Geiger counters became as common as gold pans once were. Towns like Moab grew from a few hundred people to thousands almost overnight. Fortunes were made in weeks.What the government did not tell its own citizens was that it already knew, from research dating back to the 1940s, exactly how dangerous this work would prove to be.THE URANIUM FEVER follows the rise and collapse of America's uranium boom from the first prospecting licences to the cancer epidemic that followed decades later, drawing on declassified government files, court records, and the documented experiences of the miners and families who lived through it. It traces how Navajo workers became some of the most heavily exposed labourers in the entire nuclear weapons programme, how a federal court ruled the government could not be held liable for its silence, and how it still took Congress until 1990 to admit any responsibility at all.This is the story of patriotism turned into tragedy, of a government that chose production over honesty, and of a debt to ordinary citizens that has never been fully repaid.For readers of Cold War history, nuclear policy, and the hidden costs of American industry, this book tells a story that has stayed largely out of the history books, until now.

In 1952, a broke geologist found uranium in the Utah desert and became a millionaire overnight. Within a decade, the men who followed him into the same red rock canyons were dying of lung cancer in their forties.Between 1948 and 1958, the United States government convinced ordinary Americans, farmers, war veterans, mechanics, and entire families, to abandon their old lives and search the deserts of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico for radioactive ore. Geiger counters became as common as gold pans once were. Towns like Moab grew from a few hundred people to thousands almost overnight. Fortunes were made in weeks.What the government did not tell its own citizens was that it already knew, from research dating back to the 1940s, exactly how dangerous this work would prove to be.THE URANIUM FEVER follows the rise and collapse of America's uranium boom from the first prospecting licences to the cancer epidemic that followed decades later, drawing on declassified government files, court records, and the documented experiences of the miners and families who lived through it. It traces how Navajo workers became some of the most heavily exposed labourers in the entire nuclear weapons programme, how a federal court ruled the government could not be held liable for its silence, and how it still took Congress until 1990 to admit any responsibility at all.This is the story of patriotism turned into tragedy, of a government that chose production over honesty, and of a debt to ordinary citizens that has never been fully repaid.For readers of Cold War history, nuclear policy, and the hidden costs of American industry, this book tells a story that has stayed largely out of the history books, until now.