The Air Force is conducting a study on the correlation between service members who have worked with nuclear missiles in the past and the high rate of cancer.
The study comes after a preliminary review determined that a deeper examination of the connection was needed.
Earlier this year, the Air Force investigated whether or not officers who worked underground to operate the nation’s silo-launched nuclear missiles, were exposed to unsafe contaminants.
The review began after a number of former missile launch officers came forward to report they had been diagnosed with cancer.
“We’ve determined that additional study is warranted,” Lt. Col. Keith Beam, one of several Air Force medical officers said.
Medical teams have gone to each nuclear missile base to conduct thousands of tests of the air, water, soil and surface areas inside and around each.
During a briefing last week, the Air Force said none of the samples of air, water and soil at either the Montana or Wyoming bases came back showing harmful levels of contamination.
However, four locations in the underground where the missileers worked had “unsafe levels of PCBs.”
“We can’t go back and test to fully quantify what was there in the ’90s or 2000s, or even the ’50s and ’60s,” commander of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine Col. Tory Woodward said.
“But we can use this data to help us inform what those risks might have been.”
