We all know nuclear radiation can kill you.

We kinda remember that sometime around WWII US bomb-builders rained and leaked radiation on innocent citizens--the "Downwinders"--who happened to live near the places nuclear bombs were built and tested.

The Downwinders deserve public recognition.

The US government is building a $21 million dollar National Park to commemorate the bomb-building sites. It’s called the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, and will have three locations: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Richland, Washington.

To date: no government-sponsored atomic-era museum has told the painful stories of the hundreds of thousands of people it poisoned. Not the National Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada; not the Los Alamos Historical Museum in New Mexico; not the REACH Museum in Washington; not anywhere.

During the Manhattan Project decades, thousands of US citizens, including children, unknowingly drank milk from poisoned cows, swam in rivers into which radioactive waste was dumped, and watched atomic test blasts from their front porches, trusting in their government to keep them and their families safe.

It didn’t.

I’m one of the kids. I’m a Downwinder from Richland, Washington, the town closest to Hanford. I watched my parents die of aggressive radiation-related cancers.I had my damaged thyroid gland removed at the first sign of cancer; I suffer from radiation-related parathyroid problems, tetany, chronic fatigue, and other serious illness.

Thousands of Downwinders like me deserve formal recognition. And all Americans deserve a government that protects its own citizens, and is forthright and accountable when it fails to do so.

Please sign my petition to ensure that the Downwinders’ story will be prominently included in the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

Thank you.