The court's holding and decision will be displayed here.

This section contains the nature of the case and procedural background.

This is a consolidation of the individual claims of the 1,192 named plaintiffs in this lawsuit. This is not a class action. The trial encompassed 24 of the claims in their entirety, selected as 'bellwether' cases. During the course of the trial, this court received into evidence the testimony of 98 witnesses as well as more than 1,692 documentary exhibits. All the actions related to the radiation and fallout from open nuclear bomb testing done by D in the Nevada deserts. Ps are all local residents who have contracted cancer and leukemia, which they claim was caused by the radiation and fallout from D’s tests. For those who are exposed directly to the explosion of a fission or thermonuclear device, the heat, the blast, the gamma, and neutron radiation pose serious and often lethal risks of injury. Ps do not allege direct exposure to atomic blast effects. Instead, they are concerned with exposure to the residual radiation present in the smoky ashes of the fireball. Fallout from a bomb such as 8-day iodine-131, or 30-year cesium-137, have come to be recognized as posing serious risks of injury to the downwind environment. Products such as strontium-90 (T 1/2 = 28.5 years) or plutonium-239 (T1/2 = 24,400 years) settle as dust on foodstuffs and, upon ingestion, are absorbed into bone tissue, where they bombard sensitive marrow tissue with ionizing particles. The hazard presented by each component isotope of the fallout cloud is thus a product of both nuclear and chemical factors. Studies have been made of the possibility of hazard to humans as a result of eating meat from such animals. These studies indicate that the bone-seeking radioisotopes are of the greatest potential concern, and that the chief among these is radiostrontium. A large portion of the radiation emitted by fallout materials will thus be spent in the first hours and days following the detonation. While some fallout components, such as plutonium, cesium-137, strontium-90, and iodine-129, will persist in the environment for many years following a test, most of the 200 or more radionuclides decay and disappear far more quickly. Contact with fallout in the first minutes or hours following detonation can easily result in serious radiation exposures. Radiation exposure from fallout can be materially reduced simply through physical processes, i.e., removal of fallout particles from skin, clothing, hair, and immediate surroundings by thorough washing, use of face masks around contaminated dust to avoid inhalation, and careful handling of food and water to avoid or minimize contamination by radioactive materials. Ionizing radiation in all of its forms could effectively disrupt, impair, or alter the genetic code. As we now know, the tracking of ionizing particles through the DNA strands will ionize them as well, breaking the fragile genetic text into disjoint fragments, or altering their chemical patterning and, in doing so, changing or destroying the information imprinted therein. If luck prevails, a fragment of genetic material sliced away from the body of the chromosome may join back as before, with important information unaltered. An ionized fragment of a DNA chain may rejoin at a new site, as when two strands are severed, and the fragments translocate, or when a 'ring' chromosome is formed. A broken chromosome may not rejoin at all, resulting in a deletion of information from the genes, which likely cannot be restored. At the end of the trial, D moved to dismiss this matter on the grounds that the actions of the United States, of which Ps complain, are insulated from complaint by the discretionary function exception found in the Tort Claims Act.

The legal issues presented in this case will be displayed here.

The applicable rule of law for this case will be displayed here.

Legal analysis from Dean's Law Dictionary will be displayed here.