Draft Defense Budget Cuts Federal Aid for People and Places Exposed to Radiation by Nuclear Arsenal

Uranium ore was processed into weapons-grade plutonium on an industrial scale for the first time in a Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. plant north of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, in December 1942 as part of a secret project. That first-generation plutonium, which existed on no manifest, was trucked to nearby warehouses along 19-mile Coldwater Creek, loaded onto coal trains bound for Canon City, Colorado, and eventually on to Alamogordo, New Mexico. There, on a white sand desert in 1945, the Missouri-made processed ore fueled the Manhattan Project’s first atomic weapons test, and the subsequent Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that ended World War II. Nearly 80 years later, senators from Missouri and New Mexico said during Dec. 12 floor proceedings on the draft $886.3 billion defense budget, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), that this shared legacy links the states in ushering in the atomic age, sustaining the nation’s Cold War era nuclear weapons arsenal for decades, and in cancer-stricken families and poisoned lands....