The trench is about three feet deep. It's still dark when they march you in. You're crouched in the dirt with hundreds of other guys, a little over two miles from a steel tower, and on top of that tower is an atomic bomb.
A voice on the loudspeaker starts counting down. They told you to turn away and cover your eyes, so you do. Then the flash comes. Your eyes are shut and your hands are over them, and you can still see the bones in your fingers. Like an X-ray.
Then the heat hits the back of your neck. The ground jumps. The blast goes over the top of the trench and everything turns to dust. Somebody yells at you to get up. You climb out, and there's a cloud climbing over the desert, miles high. And now they want you to walk toward it.
Later, before you get back on the bus, a man brushes you off with a broom and another man runs a Geiger counter over you. Before you go home, you sign a paper saying you'll never talk about any of this. A mystical fear
Go back to 1949. The Soviet Union had just tested its first atomic bomb. America didn't have the only one anymore, and the Army had to plan for a war where both sides used them. That raised a question nobody could answer. If a bomb went off near a battlefield, would the soldiers keep fighting, or would they panic and run?
That same year, military and atomic energy experts met and agreed the troops had to be cured of what they called a "mystical" fear of radiation. An Army pamphlet from 1950 warned that "an unreasoning fear of lingering radioactivity" would cost American lives. So the idea was simple: put real soldiers near real bombs, and show them it's fine.
They called it Exercise Desert Rock. The first one was in November 1951, at a dry lake bed called Yucca Flat, northwest of Las Vegas. About five thousand men took part. They waited in trenches seven miles from the bomb, and after it went off they moved forward toward ground zero.
They weren't only there to train. Some of them were being studied. A research group working for the Army, called HumRRO, tested more than six hundred of those men to measure how afraid they were, before and after. Decades later, the man who ran those studies was asked whether the soldiers ever agreed to be part of them. He said it was "pretty unknowable," because soldiers "generally do what they're asked to do."
Closer
Seven miles was too far for the military. A 1952 report called it a "tactically unrealistic distance." So the next year, troops were put four miles away. By 1953, regular soldiers were in trenches about two miles away.
Some officers volunteered to get closer than that. They got to pick their own spot, and the only rule was no closer than 1,500 yards, which is less than a mile. Those officers signed a form saying they knew the risk and accepted it. According to a government review in 1995, they were the only people at the bomb tests who signed anything like that. The regular soldiers in the trenches didn't.
After the tests in 1955, the Army proposed moving volunteers in even closer, "until thresholds of intolerability are ascertained." In plain words: keep moving men in until they hit the point where they couldn't take it. Another military agency pushed back. It said you couldn't find that line "without eventually exceeding it." Two years later, at the last round of tests, officers were volunteering again.
Not dangerous at all
So what were the soldiers told about the danger?
In 1951, men in the study group were told there was "no danger of immediate radiation" 90 seconds after an air burst. They were also given a quiz. One question asked how dangerous it would be for troops to walk into the area right under the explosion within a day. The answer key said: "Not dangerous at all." Another question said some of the ships at the Bikini bomb tests had to be sunk because they were too radioactive to use again. The answer key said that was false. It was true. When the Defense Department went back over that quiz in 1995, it found that nine of the thirty questions needed to be corrected.
Then there was the dust. After some shots, men were sent to walk over the contaminated ground. After one, men crawled across it. When they came back, they got swept off with brooms and checked with Geiger counters.
The government's position, then and for years after, was that the doses were low. In 2003, a review by the National Research Council told the Pentagon to go back and re-check how it was estimating those doses.
Smoky
The biggest tests came at the end, in the summer of 1957. On July 5, a bomb called Hood went off at 74 kilotons. That's around five times the size of Hiroshima, and it's still the biggest atmospheric test ever set off on the U.S. mainland. Marines waited in trenches, then flew in by helicopter to practice an assault.
On August 31 there was a bomb called Smoky: 44 kilotons, on top of a tower. More than three thousand soldiers were there.
Twenty years later, one of them got sick. His name was Paul Cooper. He was a retired Army sergeant, and he had leukemia. In 1977 he filed a claim with the VA saying Smoky gave it to him. The VA turned him down. Then it reversed itself, but not because of the bomb. The appeals board said signs of his disease were already there while he was still in the Army. It never ruled on whether the radiation caused it.
His claim got the attention of the Centers for Disease Control. They tracked down the men who had been at Smoky, and in 1980 they reported nine cases of leukemia among 3,224 men. For a group that size, they'd expect about three and a half. Some scientists criticized how that study was done, but a later study of the same men, in 2016, still found close to twice the expected number of leukemia deaths.
The biggest study is less clear. In 2000, the Institute of Medicine compared about 70,000 veterans from five test series with 65,000 men who weren't there. Overall, the two groups died at about the same rate. Men from the ocean tests in the Pacific did show a higher death rate. Leukemia deaths were 14 percent higher in the test group, but that wasn't statistically significant, and the authors said it would take a group about four times bigger to know whether that number was real.
Across all the U.S. atmospheric tests, from 1945 to 1962, about 220,000 people from the Defense Department were there.
The oath
For most of this time, a lot of these men believed they couldn't talk about it. They'd been sworn to secrecy. Many of them believed they couldn't even tell their own doctors where they'd been without breaking the law. That oath wasn't lifted until 1996. By then, a lot of them were already dead.
Congress did act before that. In 1988 it said that if a veteran who was at the tests got one of certain cancers, the VA would assume it came from his service. There were thirteen cancers on that list at first. In 1990, a new law offered a one-time payment of $75,000 to people who were at the tests. That law ran out in June 2024. In July 2025, Congress brought it back and raised the payment to $100,000.
The VA side is still hard. NBC News looked at one year of VA records, from August 2022 to August 2023. Out of about 4,100 radiation claims, the VA denied more than 3,500. That's 86 percent.
The Pentagon now gives atomic veterans a commemorative medal. One of them told NBC it looks like something you'd win at a carnival. Another said, "They're waiting for us to die."