Growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the 1950s and 60s, Mary Dickson was among the millions of American schoolchildren taught to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear war.

“I just remember thinking, ‘That’s not going to save us from a bomb ,’” she told CNN. At that time, Dickson didn’t know that nuclear weapons were being detonated in the neighboring state of Nevada as the US tested its new stockpile. She lived downwind, in the direction much of the radioactive fallout from atmospheric tests traveled.

She says she has suffered from thyroid cancer; her older sister passed away from lupus in her 40s; her younger sister was recently told that her intestinal cancer has spread to other parts of her body; and her nieces have health issues too.

Dickson says she once counted 54 peo

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