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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 people from her five-block childhood neighborhood who had suffered from cancer, autoimmune diseases, birth defects or miscarriages.

It’s unclear what caused their cancer, since it is difficult to ascribe direct responsibility, but it is generally accepted in the medical community that radiation exposure increases heightens the risk of cancer, depending on the level of exposure.

“Radiation exposure increases the chance of getting cancer, and the risk increases as the dose increases: the higher the dose, the greater the risk,” says the US Environmental Protection Agency, citing studies that follow groups of people exposed to radiation.

Collectively, those who lived and were exposed in the states surrounding the Nevada testing site, including Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington State and Idaho, became known as “downwinders.”

Mary Dickson pictured speaking during the ICAN Nuclear Ban Forum in Vienna, Austria. ICAN/Alexander Papis

“It’s devastating,” said Dickson, a playwright and advocate for survivors of nuclear weapons testing in the US. “I can’t tell you how many friends I’ve had, and their cancers have come back… The psychological damage does not go away.