ST. GEORGE - A gray snow, the fallout was in Donald Moore's hair and on his winter clothes.

As the other workers scrambled to evacuate, his nose began to bleed. He had inhaled a hot particle, and in the half-hour he spent in the bathroom, clotting what would become a hole in his nasal passage, he missed the last bus out of Area 12.

It was the morning of Dec. 18, 1970, and Moore, then a 40-year-old general electrician at the Nevada Test Site, had just witnessed Baneberry.

"I told my wife that I was probably a walking dead man," he wrote in a letter to The Spectrum & Daily News some 36 years later. "I had this mental strain of wondering how long it would take before this atomic bomb would kill me."

An underground nuclear test, officially 10 kilotons, Baneberry had vented above-ground about 9,000 feet away, Moore said - an accident that spread radiation throughout the region, across the United States and, according to some reports, into Canada.

Safety specialists ran Geiger counters over the men as they left the site, Moore said. Their contamination pegged the meter. They were told to incinerate their clothing - Moore burned his expensive winter boots, jeans and coat - and to take cold showers three times a day for two weeks.

Today the 76-year-old is house-bound. His medical and employment records, dating back to the early 1960s, are laid out across his dining room table in neat stacks. A photograph of Baneberry hangs on his living room wall.

"I'm one of the lucky ones," he says. "I've kept such good records."

Moore, a Navy veteran of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, is seeking compensation for his exposure to radiation during the Cold War on three test ranges - two in Nevada, one on Johnston Island in the Pacific.

"You know when the body is deteriorating," he says. "I can feel it."

Moore has had five lesions removed from his scalp, four of them squamous cell carcinoma, and he teeters on the edge of end-stage kidney failure. He suffers from diseases of the heart, blood and lungs. Sleep apnea makes his nights restless. The hole seared by that hot particle 36 years ago has grown.

"It has to be from all that fallout," he says.

As an on-site participant, Moore stands a better chance of payment than the average downwinder, but the three-year effort to prove his case has taken a toll on him and his wife, Mary.

"I've had to jump through so many hoops on this stuff. It's unbelievable what you have to go through," he says. "They leave it up to us to prove it. They don't give us any of the information."

Moore says he loves his country but is angry at the loss of his retirement years. Mary is angry, too.

"I think about how hard we worked," she says. "We always did our best. We were working people. We always lived just beneath our means so we'd have a good retirement."

Now her world has shrunk, she says, and talk of Divine Strake, a non-nuclear blast slated for the Nevada Test Site this spring, compounds the Moores' sense of powerlessness.

They have become vocal critics, believing the experiment will sweep latent radiation from previous nuclear tests across the Southwest. But the Moores don't expect to change the government's course.

"How do you stop the military industrial complex?" Mary asks. "How do you stop them from doing it?"

To read Moore's story in his own words and an opinion piece on Divine Strake, visit www.thespectrum.com/news/extras/divinestrake.html

* (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance 
     with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *