The toxins were recorded in a bunch of pages of documents dating back to the 1980s that were received through The Associated Press through Freedom of Information Act requests. They tell a very different story than the one Air Force leaders told the nuclear missile network decades ago, when the first reports of cancer among the military began to emerge.
THE U. S. AIR FORCE U. S. INVESTIGATES HIGH RATES OF CANCER AMONG NUCLEAR MISSILE WORKERS
“The workplace is free of health hazards,” a Dec. 30, 2001, Air Force investigation found.
Doreen Jenness, the widow of Air Force Capt. Jason Jenness, is seen at her home in Missoula, Montana, on Aug. 26, 2023. Captain Jenness, a missilist from Malmstrom who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2001, at the age of 31. (AP Photo/Tommy Martino)
“Sometimes illnesses tend to occur just by chance,” a 2005 Air Force follow-up study found.
The pills are back on the radar.
The AP reported in January that at least nine current or former nuclear missile officers, or missileers, had been diagnosed with the blood cancer non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Then hundreds more came forward self-reporting cancer diagnoses. In response the Air Force launched its most sweeping review to date and tested thousands of air, water, soil and surface samples in all of the facilities where the service members worked. Four current samples have come back with unsafe levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a known carcinogen used in electrical wiring.
AIR FORCE DETECTS UNSAFE CARCINOGEN LEVELS AT MT NUCLEAR MISSILE BASE AS HUNDREDS OF REPORTS OF CANCER SURFACE
By early 2024, more knowledge is expected and the Air Force is conducting an official count of the number of current or former Community Missile Service members with cancer.
Some existing missile launchers have told the AP they are involved in the new reports, but the Air Force is being transparent in its ongoing search for toxins. Many of them take some of the same precautions that missile launchers have taken for generations, such as wearing clothes in “capsule clothing,” the civilian clothes they put on once inside the capsule to work 24 hours a day. Clothes go straight to the laundromat after a shift because they end up smelling like metal.
“Every time you hear ‘cancer,’ it’s kind of concerning,” said Lt. Joy Hawkins, 23, a missile launcher at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. For Hawkins and fellow missile launcher Lt. Samantha McGlinchey, who spoke to an AP reporter while on an underground shift at the Charlie release capsule, the news meant they would have to be diligent with medical checks. “There’s more testing, things to come, cleanup efforts,” said McGlinchey, 28, “For us, at the beginning of your career, it’s worse to be stuck this early. “
Others say the risks will be minimized once they return.
When the set of lacheck control effects was released, the Air Force did not first disclose that samples that appeared contaminated had PCB levels particularly higher than those allowed by EPA criteria, and dozens of other spaces reviewed were just below the EPA’s threshold, Mayne said. a former senior supervisor of the enlisted nuclear missile facility at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, who now runs an organization on Facebook committed to posting internal Air Force news or memos.
“At this point, the EPA, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and the senators from North Dakota and Montana want to look into this,” Mayne said.
In December 2022, former missile launchers Malmstrom Jackie Perdue and Monte Watts, who have non-Hodgkin lymphoma, asked the Defense Department’s inspector general to investigate.
“I believe health and safety standards have been violated, or not considered, and should be investigated,” said Perdue, who served as a nuclear missile combat crew commander at Malmstrom from 1999 to 2006, in an inspector general complaint obtained by the AP.
PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS
Lately there are three nuclear missile bases in the United States: F. E. Warren, Wyoming, Minot, and Malmstrom. Each base has 15 underground release pods, each of which serves as centers for 10 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silo fields. The pills work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The missiles spend 24 hours or more per shift operating underground in those pods to monitor intercontinental ballistic missiles, so they can release them if the president asks them to.
The Air Force acknowledges that the existing review can’t provide complete answers about what the old missiles were exposed to, but the knowledge will build a proficiency profile that will allow them to apply for veterans’ benefits.
However, the documents received through AP imply many precautionary symptoms that go beyond poisonous risks.
“Type and content of asbestos, please call as soon as possible,” reads a handwritten note dated Nov. 9, 1992. All documents received through the Palestinian Authority were redacted so that names would be withheld, but the urgency was obvious. “PRIORITY” reads the handwritten note, in capital letters.
MILITARY PILOTS AND GROUND CREWS SHOWING HIGH RATES OF CANCER, PENTAGON STUDY REVEALS
An environmental team from the Malmstrom Hotel and Juliet Pills received disturbing asbestos readings under a generator in the pill apparatus rooms. The apparatus room is also underground, contained within the same sealed workspace. The EPA’s asbestos exposure threshold is 1% for an eight-hour workday. But the missiles were locked up there for at least 24 hours straight. If the weather is bad and replacement equipment can’t make it to the site, a team can be stuck underground for 72 hours. Hotel and Juliet recorded counterfeit samples of chrysotile asbestos (a white asbestos that can be inhaled) between 15% and 30%.
However, in the official report seven days later, the dangers were downplayed.
“Asbestos poses a health threat only when crushed (it can be crushed or pulverized by hand pressure). Everything suspicious (asbestos) is found to be in good condition,” says the hotel’s annual review.
At missile silo Quebec-12 in 1989 it found levels of up to 50% amosite asbestos, a brown asbestos found in cement and insulation. And a team looking at Malmstrom’s Bravo capsule that same year had warned that even if it was left undisturbed, it could be dangerous. “Diesel room — when running leaks asbestos,” it warned.
In his inspector general complaint, former Malmstrom missileer Watts said there was asbestos in the floor tile as well, and that missileers also “routinely removed, handled and replaced these tiles as part of required survival equipment inventories.”
The documents also reveal PCB spills over the course of decades. A report from 1987 tells of a missile launcher who called his commander to report severe headaches and dizziness. The team discovers a clear, sticky syrup dripping underneath the capsule’s electrical panel. “I advised opening the armored door “for greater ventilation and to avoid contact with the substance,” documents a bioenvironmental engineer. “All the team had to do was open the blast door and stay away from the spill. I didn’t want to close the capsule. “
“It’s frustrating to know they had thought of this back then,” said Doreen Jenness, whose husband, Jason Jenness, was a Malmstrom missileer who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2001 at the age of 31. “It makes me frustrated and angry that they can keep telling these young men and women that they are not finding anything — knowing that back in 2001, 2003 and the early 2000s that there was something going on there.”
CAPSULE SIERRA
Doreen and Jason Jenness met while he was assigned to Malmstrom. They married and lived on the base in the mid-1990s. Their missile-launching friends made fun of them because they had a golden Labrador named Sierra, named after one of the pills operated by Jason’s squad. .
Malmström’s environmental reports when Jason posted there show that Sierra had a long list of hazards. In 1996, a medical team reported that there were more than 25 gallons of fluid overflowing with purulent biological expansion in the back of the Sierra capsule. air intake gates for Sierra located near the parking lot, and the team observed a car idling nearby for 20 minutes. The team documented that a fan needed to suck in empty air at Sierra had been out of service for at least six months. Therefore, the only way for crews to get new air is to leave the capsule’s metal vault door open.
In the other capsules, the team said the air quality was “marginal, but not expected to cause serious health problems. ” Sierra was dangerous. In March 1996, the medical team measured the degrees of carbon dioxide in the air in 1,700 million-equivalent portions. “At these levels, court cases of headaches, drowsiness, fatigue and/or difficulty concentrating can be expected in most occupants. Withdrawal of personnel. “
Nothing has changed. In May of that year, the medical team recorded exposure levels of 1,800 ppm and endorsed the removal of the missiles.
LEAK OF COMPUTER CONSOLES
By the mid-1990s, a new formula for targeting the missiles was needed, and each pod began a remodel to install a wall-sized computer console called REACT, for Rapid Execution and Combat Targeting System. The new formula would allow the U. S. reprogram and reorient its nuclear missiles more temporarily in the event of war. The demolition of the old computer and REACT structure began inside each of the 15 Malmstrom capsules.
The missiles wonder if the REACT revamp has already altered the asbestos and PCBs that were still in the pods. But once installed, the new console also exposed the missiles to a new toxin.
“Crew members reported a malfunction of the demonstration video characterized by a click,” says a report on a May 1995 incident at the Malmström Bravo capsule. “After the click, the demo video was turned off and only a visual white line appeared for the team members. “.
A clear liquid began to flow, followed by a fishy smell reminiscent of ammonia. The team began complaining of headaches and nausea, and the capsule was evacuated two hours later.
Malmstrom’s team learned about liquid dimethylformamide, an electrolyte used in capacitors in REACT’s video demonstration units, because F. E. Warren, the Wyoming base, had recently reported similar leaks.
“The capacitors overheat and escape into the capsule rather than suffer a catastrophic failure,” was discovered in 1996 after a momentary dimethylformamide leak at Bravo. “To date, we have no idea how much of this material is contained in the pods, nor how much of it is a relative danger that missile crews and the maintenance worker corps are in contact with these curtains. “
Medical studies on the link between dimethylformamide and cancer are divided; Some point to a transparent link to liver cancer, others say more studies are needed.
UPCOMING CHANGES
All of the capsules will be closed down in a few years, as the military’s new ICBM, the Sentinel, comes online. As part of the modernization, the old capsules will be demolished. A new, modern underground control center will be built on top of them. Air Force teams working on the new designs are aware of the cancer reports and are applying modern environmental health standards in the new centers — requirements that did not exist when the Minuteman capsules were first built, said Maj. Gen. John Newberry, commander of the Air Force’s nuclear weapons center.
“We’re certainly in the process of learning or figuring out what’s going on with Minuteman III, and if anything, we want to take a look at the Sentinel side,” Newberry said.
The Air Force will read about cancer among the corps of workers who have worked in close proximity with the nation’s army chiefs on the ground.
The old pills will continue to be used until then, making it even more apparent that the Air Force is now wide open with its missiles, Jenness said.
Because they were so young, neither she nor Jason suspected cancer when he started feeling tired in the fall of 2000, or when his hip hurt in December of that year.
When, despite everything, he relented and saw a doctor in February 2001, he was admitted to the hospital the same day. By March, Jason and Doreen knew their lymphoma was incurable. He died in July.
“We can all pretend we don’t know, because knowing is hard,” Doreen Jenness said. “Knowing and doing anything is even harder. Now, 23 years after Jason left, there are a lot of young men and women who are going through the same things we were going through. They have to go through the same thing, live and maybe have the same journey as me, and it’s just sad. Really sad.