Under the Radar

News: Veterans and their families in Europe and the U.S. are seeking compensation for cancer suffered by radar technicians who worked with Nike and Hawk missile batteries during the Cold War.

By Jonas von Freiesleben and Michael Rosen

September 20, 2004

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A FEW DOZEN graying former radar technicians gathered last October for their annual reunion at the Nike Missile Museum in Sausalito, California. At the same time, in El Paso, Texas, a federal judge was about to rule that some of their comrades in military service could pursue a class action lawsuit charging that they had been unnecessarily and knowingly exposed to cancer-causing X-rays while doing maintenance on the tracking radars that were part of the missile system. But on that autumn day, the litigation didn’t appear to trouble those enjoying the barbecue, among them Ed Thelen, a missile enthusiast who created a website to honor the Nike program’s history. The sun glinted off the old missiles as kids played on the grass, and Thelen, who maintained the anti-aircraft systems from 1956 through 1958, crawled under a radar to relive old times. “Bad things happen to people who get old," said Thelen, voicing the doubts shared by many veterans. "It’s just lawyers out to get rich," he added in a later interview.

Yet across the globe in Germany, another veteran radar technician, Dietmar Glaner, now 56 years old, doesn’t share Thelen’s skepticism. In 1990, his left arm was amputated below the elbow due to bone cancer. He's convinced the disease was caused by exposure to X-ray radiation during the time, in the late 60s and early 70s, when he handled radioactive tubes in the radars. For a decade in the German military, he serviced U.S.-made Starfighter jet radar systems that were similar to those found in the Nike missile system and another air defense program, the Hawk missile system. "I always did adjustments with my left hand," he said in a telephone interview. "We never wore lead gloves."

Glaner is part of a growing movement of veterans and their families in Europe and the United States seeking compensation for illnesses and deaths that former radar technicians have suffered. For nearly four decades during the Cold War, NATO countries and America’s allies erected Nike and Hawk missile batteries in Germany, South Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, Greece, and Denmark among other places. In the United States alone, the military constructed several hundred Nike and Hawk batteries to deliver conventional or nuclear missiles as the last line of defense against Soviet bombers. More than 3,000 Starfighter jets were used by the U.S. and its allies. So far no one has produced a figure of how many people worked on the tubes over this 40-year period, but the number easily reaches into the thousands. Although the U.S. has phased out these different weapons systems, they still are in use in a number of countries, although the radars now have improved safety systems.

Last year in Germany, Glaner and other veterans filed a lawsuit and held protest rallies in front of the Ministry of Defense in Berlin, prompting the government to acknowledge the danger posed to veterans by the potentially harmful doses of X-rays. Since then, the German government has awarded compensation of as much as $71,000 to at least 360 veterans, according to a government spokesman. (While about 900 applications have been denied, another 600 or so, including Glaner’s, are still under consideration.) And while U.S. veterans have not taken their fight to the Pentagon, they are pursuing their claims, along with some of their European comrades, in what may be a more fruitful venue: the U.S. District Court in El Paso, Texas, which is next door to Fort Bliss, where radar technicians from around the world came to be trained.

Thirty-two American and European technicians and survivors and the German Union of Radiation Victims, the Bund zur Unterstützung Radargeschädigter, filed a class action lawsuit in 2002 against the radar manufacturers for the two missile systems, including Raytheon, Lucent Technologies, General Electric, ITT Industries, Inc. and Honeywell International Inc. The plaintiffs claim that company officials were aware that technicians were being exposed to dangerous doses of X-rays, that they failed to warn the technicians to take precautionary measures, and that they did not start to install a protective shielding around the tubes that emitted the potentially fatal radiation until the 1970s.

There are many kinds of switching tubes in radar systems, and though there are differences among them, they are all used to control the flow of electrons through the circuit. It was common knowledge that such tubes could release radiation, even back in the 50s, according to Gary Zeman, Radiation Control Manager at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. "It’s well known that the electron tubes like those in television sets and radar units were capable of producing X-rays," he says, but adds, "We know that X-ray intensity falls off rapidly with distance, so if people were exposed even a foot or more distant, then the exposure levels would be much lower."

Many German operators, including Glaner, recall making adjustments to the devices and touching the tubes with their bare hands.

One plaintiff, Jack Cooper, an El Paso resident now in his mid-60s, who worked with the Hawk system from 1954 to 1975, claims to have contracted kidney cancer as a result of this negligence, according to court documents. Another, Daniel Duncan, a former technician now in his mid-60s and living in Georgia, attributes an abnormal cell growth in his parathyroid gland following his work on the Hawk system in the mid-1960s.

And Lianne Fridriksson, whose mother is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, blames the death of her 78-year-old father, Thor, from acute Leukemia in 2001, on the tubes that he had worked with from 1955 to 1969 as a U.S. Army soldier. In a note posted on a website, his wife, Joan, of Granbury, Texas, wrote that although his job required that he replace tubes marked "radioactive," the federal government denied paying her disability insurance compensation because "there is no objective evidence to show the veteran worked with or was exposed to radioactive materials." Lianne, who is a journalism professor at Baylor University, said that her father suffered for months before the disease was diagnosed. "Over the last couple of years I’ve done some research and a lot of web searches and found other cases that were similar, other people who had worked on the tubes and gone through the same thing," she said. "Even the doctors who examined him, the head physicians, thought his illness was connected to his handling radioactive tubes."

Representatives of some of the companies that manufactured radar components, declined to comment on the lawsuit, but Raytheon, Lucent, and Honeywell said they believe it to be without merit and promised to fight it vigorously. The U.S. Department of Defense, which is not a party to the suit, declined to comment on the allegations.

But the plaintiffs’ lawyer, John Auerbach of the Philadelphia-based law firm Berger & Montague, said the case would show that the companies had evidence that the devices gave off X-rays. "We've received documents that they knew there were problems with the Hawk system, that they should have added additional shielding to block ionizing radiation," he said.

Auerbach added that the same problems plagued the Nike systems as well. "This is simple physics that we know going back to the '30s. If you go to the dentist's office, they'll usually put a lead apron on you to protect you when they give you an X-ray. It's common sense. [T]hey should have taken steps to reduce exposure or they should have warned these people about the risks. But no measurements were taken, and there was no training to tell people to maintain their distance" from the tubes.

In addition to seeking damages, the suit is also demanding that the firms pay for medical monitoring of those veterans who have yet to show any symptoms. "These people served their country with valor and protected us," said Auerbach.

In their opening volley, the companies tried unsuccessfully to have the case dismissed on grounds that many of the plaintiffs are Europeans and their grievances should be heard in Europe, not in the U.S. That request was denied in April by U.S. District Court Judge Philip R. Martinez, who ruled in April that the case could remain in this country because the radar technicians were trained here. The trial is set for July 29, 2005.

BEFORE YOU SEE the Air Defense Artillery museum at Fort Bliss, Texas, the missiles loom. Hawks and Nike, bright white with sleek black fins, stand in the parking lot. The museum doesn’t get many visitors; most are tourists from nearby El Paso or veterans showing their grandchildren the military hardware of bygone days. But in recent months, people from as far away as England and Denmark have been coming to this desolate desert region for a different reason. They are researchers, attorneys and investigators preparing litigation or scientific reports about the radar that guides the missiles.

"I had a German group come in that wanted to go through our entire archive," said David Ross, the museum curator. "They were here going through them in shifts, three people in the morning, three in the afternoon."

Ross, who tends shelves upon shelves of old military training manuals, says that if the radar injured anyone, human error was at fault. "To blame the radar systems when they’re used properly is ludicrous," he said. "These weapons are designed to hurt the other guy. They are dangerous. So if they’re not used properly, they can hurt you."

The question, however, is whether the systems were, in fact, used properly.

The radar veterans union in Germany said technicians were not warned about possible dangers associated with the radar tubes. And more than two dozen former U.S. and European radar technicians contacted for this article said they also did not recall warnings. "Sure we had protection," retired Army Colonel Don Baker, a onetime Hawk radar operator from Mount Vernon, Va., said in a telephone interview. "We used earplugs against high-pitch frequencies." Jim Wright, a former Army technician who worked on Nike Hercules tracking radar for about two years in the early 1960s, said in an email that he could not remember any radar radiation warnings. "I remember some idle talk about losing your reproductive abilities if you spent a lot of time in the beam; that's all," he said. Neither Baker nor Wright had been aware of the lawsuit before receiving a call for this story.

These and other recollections of radar technicians are bolstered by the findings of the commission established in 2002 by the German government in response to the German veterans’ protests. In a report issued last year, the commission concluded that there was "no adequate protection against radiation" in place before 1975. Some of the following years, it said, were marked by little or no protection. It cites research from the University of Witten-Herdecke that compiled the biographies of 99 radar technicians from the 1970s and found that 69 had cancer, including 24 who had fatal cases; the average age of death was 40 years. Although the commission’s report did not find a causal scientific connection, it identified enough of a link to prompt the German government to initiate the compensation program for veterans. Those with certain types of cancer, including leukemia and bone cancer, are eligible for compensation beginning at about $71,000.

STILL, AT LAST YEAR’S reunion of the American radar veterans, few of the technicians wanted to talk about the issue. In fact, many of the American technicians were unaware of the German findings. Even today, Thelen and many other U.S. veterans are skeptical of any perils from X-rays. Perhaps they fear that a public controversy will cast a cloud over the defense systems that they remain proud to have worked on. Thelen said the cancers could be coming from other sources and compared it to the controversy over silicone breast implants and asbestos. "As a kid, I used to play in piles of asbestos, and I’ve never had any health problems," he said. On his website he recently wrote that he would refuse to help any of the efforts to win compensation and contended that the effort to sue the contractors was motivated by a desire to go after defendants with deep pockets. "As best I can tell, there is no evidence that anyone was exposed to ionizing radiation from Nike equipment," he said in one posting.

But Glaner, the German technician whose left forearm was amputated, expressed dismay over the U.S. veterans’ predicament. The risk of cancer ought to be as big a concern for American technicians as for Germans, he said. "All the different [NATO] forces used the same systems," he remarked. "Many American technicians who have become sick might not draw the connection between their sickness and the radar because it takes so long."

"It’s not like a fire—You can see a fire, you know to be careful," Glaner added. "But you can’t see X-rays. You can’t touch them, or feel them, or smell them. You don’t know you’ve been exposed until years later."

Michael Welt and Jennifer Barrios contributed to this article.

This story was produced for a course at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

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