After issuing countless statements to the contrary in the past decades, the US government has at last admitted that workers who helped make nuclear weapons in the early years of the nuclear age were exposed to radiation and chemicals that produced cancer and early death.

The admission comes in the wake of the US government's most comprehensive review of studies of worker health and raw health data. It reveals that employees in 14 nuclear weapons plants recorded an unnatural rate of cancer affliction caused by radiation exposure. The review also states that 22 categories of cancer