Other people keep pictures of their children in their wallets. I keep a small map I've had laminated to protect it from wear. I pull that map out during many conversations to show how far and wide fallout from nuclear testing was scattered. People are always shocked when they see it. Utah and Nevada are almost completely blacked out, and the black ink spreads as far north as Canada and as far east as New York, with heavy patches scattered throughout the country. Most Americans, even most Utahns, mistakenly think radioactive fallout affected only Southern Utah. Radiation isn't a respecter of arbitrary lines on a map. There is no magic shield that stopped it mid-point in Utah. The wind carried it across the country. That's how it got to Nebraska, Missouri , Iowa and other states where it put millions of Americans at risk of cancer and other fallout-related illnesses. The map in my wallet speaks volumes.

The map, from Richard Miller's book, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing, shows where fallout went during the 12 years of above ground nuclear weapons testing from 1951 to 1962. Miller calls his map a "connect the dots" of all points in the United States that were crossed by three or more trajectories of fallout. The map doesn't include the fallout from the three decades of underground testing that ended only in 1993. According to Miller, "there is no such thing as a test that is totally underground" since so many of those tests leaked. Baneberry, an infamous 1970 test, for instance, ejected fallout 8,000 feet into the air and went on for hours. Radioactive debris from another underground test showed up in southeastern Georgia.

Miller, who has recently published a five-volume compendium of fallout data, The U.S. Atlas of Nuclear Fallout, has compiled and analyzed more data on the radioactive fallout that blanketed America than any other researcher. He and other internationally renowned experts, including Helen Caldicott, was in Salt Lake City for "The Nuclear West: Legacy and Future," the eighth annual Stegner Center Symposium at the University of Utah College of Law.

The implications of his work are enormous. In his fallout atlas, he correlates fallout levels with cancer levels, county-by-county across the United States. "If someone lives in Peoria or in Washington state, I want them to know the history of their county in terms of fallout," he says. "It's part of their history." Norman Solomon, co-author of Killing our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, writes that the nationwide statistics in Miller's atlas "make us think exactly where we or our loved ones were at the time each diffuse radioactive cloud scattered its hazardous debris."

Miller first became interested in fallout in the 1970s while working with OSHA. In 1974, he found pockets of cancer in Valley, Nebraska and a string of cancers in northern Missouri, a place that was notorious for high cancer rates. "I talked OSHA into getting outside the box and looking at these things because I wondered if there could be an occupational component, but I never did find anything work-related."

When the National Cancer Institute came out with its model of fallout in October of 1997, Miller discovered that there were hot spots all across America, including an amazing hot spot in southern Iowa and northern Missouri, where he had, years before, found the high incidence of cancers.

In the late 1970s, he and others in the OSHA office where he worked began finding high incidences of brain cancer at a site in Texas near chemical plants. As they were looking for causes, one team member, a physician with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, jokingly suggested it could be fallout from nuclear tests. "I got to thinking about it and said that no one knows where those fallout tracks went," he says.

Using data collected by the old Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Nuclear Agency and the U.S. Weather Service, Miller began doing the research. In 1986, Macmillan published his book, Under the Cloud, charting all the fallout tracks.

When the 1997 NCI study came out showing the trajectory of fall-out at 103 points across the Unvited States, Miller was sure it would create a major uproar, but surprisingly, not much came of the report. Nor did people pay attention when the NCI Journal soon after published an article showing a statistically significant link between thyroid cancer and fallout.

"The NCI study was a little complicated," he says, noting that it was so extensive that it had to be published on the Internet instead of by conventional means. "Not many people downloaded it," he says. " I was one of those people bone-headed enough to take the NCI data and do the calculations."

Miller crunched the data over a period of several years and published his findings in 2000 as The U.S. Atlas of Nuclear Fallout. "There were hot spots all across the country, not only for Iodine-131 which is linked to thyroid cancer, but for a variety of other radionuclides and radioisotopes associated with fallout."

As part of his analysis, Miller compared the data against the Center for Disease Control "Wonder Database," which assigns a disease an International Disease Classification code and shows what the rates of that disease are for every county in the U.S. from 1979 on.

Miller took about 25 different types of radiation-induced cancers and correlated them with fallout levels for the entire United States. His findings show an association between fallout levels and cancer rates, but he is careful to note, this does not prove causation. "However," he says, "the statistics suggest that the chance that these are random associations is very, very small - far less than one in a hundred. Given the numbers, it's clear that further research is necessary."

Unfortunately, in February, the National Academies of Science called for an end to any more study of cancer risk associated with fallout, claiming that further research wasn't needed and saying that "neither data nor consequences justify a more detailed study." Says Miller, "They've said it's not worth the time. Of course, I don't agree with that assessment."

Further studies could get far more specific than the 1997 NCI study. "The NCI study could be evaluated using tools and techniques that have been around for 20 years or more," he says. "Since fallout likely ended up in ponds and low areas, you could go to where we know fallout came down, sink a core into a pond, bring up the material and analyze it for radioisotopes."

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Miller says, that in theory, you can actually pinpoint which nuclear test was responsible for fallout in a specific area by looking at the ratios between the radioactive isotopes found there. These ratios have been published and available since the early 1980s, courtesy of University of California researcher Harry G. Hicks. In fact, Miller used Hick's research data - known in the health physics community as the Hicks Table - to estimate total fallout as well as 66 individual fallout isotopes from the NCI's radio-iodine data. These values form the core of the U.S. Fallout Atlas series.

"The point I'm making is that, while the analyses procedures are slow and cumbersome, the derived information is not particularly complex, and the means to evaluate the NCI study is almost low-tech," he says. "From every perspective, it's a feasible study. If the government decides not to follow this up, it would be a huge waste of he NCI's work. While I somewhat enjoy having the only book series with this kind of detail, I think that science and the public would be better served with a formal government evaluation of nuclear fallout."

The implications of Miller's work, contained in his five volume atlas, are huge. If a link exists between some of the radionuclides and certain types of cancers, physicians across the country could use that information as an important diagnostic tool. They could ask patients where they grew up and where they've lived. If a patient lived in an area that got hit with high levels of Cobalt 60, for instance, a physician might want to consider looking at female colon cancer, which seems to be highly correlated with Cobalt 60 deposits.

So far, he's had no luck convincing Congress to continue such studies. "I would think that some senators and representatives would look at their own families and the people they know and love who have cancer and want to study this more, " says Miller. "I would think they owe it to their constituency."

Atomic weapons testing was a very unique period of history, and everyone's backyard was a part of that history. "It's a technohistory that we've ignored," he says.

Not only have we ignored that chapter of our past, but we don't seem to have learned anything from the human toll of nuclear weapons testing. In fact, the Bush administration is making noise about starting up nuclear testing again. "That's probably going to happen," says Miller. "At some point - perhaps during the so-called bunker-buster tests - I would not be surprised to see what in effect will be above ground nuclear testing. Some of these things are supposed to have 300-kiloton warheads. There is no way a device like that can be field tested without producing a huge debris cloud."

Given what he knows, isn't Miller tempted to become an activist? "You know," he says, "I followed my first book on nuclear testing with a novel, The Atomic Express. In it I included everything I knew about the military, about nuclear weapons, the 1950s, and everything else. In that book I projected what some might suggest is a negative view of the Atomic Energy Commission. If someone wants my personal opinion about the bomb, they can read that. But research for the Fallout Atlas was different. For that research I was just trying to learn something new. That was my only stake in the data. I always got a kick out of seeing those statistical results for the first time. There for a while, it was at least one surprise a day. Just being able to parse the data was enough for me. I always say the data should speak for itself. Look at the data."

Miller's data, indeed, makes a powerful case. Just look at the map. It speaks volumes.