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Professor John Robertson OBA

From the Washington Spectator yesterday:

Over 800 Air Force personnel have independently reported cases of cancer and other serious illnesses due to extended exposure to toxic chemicals while serving at three Minuteman ICBM bases since 2023. These missileers’ revelations come at a critical moment as the Air Force continues with restructuring its exorbitant $140.9 billion plan to decommission 450 Minuteman IIIs and replace them with 634 modernized Sentinel ICBMs at a cost of over $162 million each.

In a September 2025 report, the non-partisan Government Accountability Organization (GAO) blasted the Air Force for its failure to develop an essential risk management plan and warned that the service “may need to operate Minuteman III for 25 more years because of Sentinel delays and increasing costs.” This proposed deployment postponement until 2050 would span six US Presidential elections and offer opportunities to curtail a mindless nuclear weapons race with Russia and China.

The imperative for such a delay is underscored by increasingly serious revelations about Air Force stonewalling over missileers’ health issues. Launch officers work 60 feet below the surface in hardened command capsules with control over 10 nearby ICBM silos. They operate on 24-hour shifts (often extended up to 72 hours) and constantly monitor the readiness of their missiles. Missileers claim that a toxic work environment has caused a disproportionate number of cases of cancer, especially non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and other serious illnesses.

These claims have been backed up by an April 2025 statistical analysis undertaken by University of North Carolina specialists, one of whom served as an ICBM launch officer. The results demonstrate a statistically significant increase in NHL diagnoses among missileers, with observed rates surpassing expected benchmarks. The study also finds that the median age of diagnosis is significantly younger for the study population compared to national averages. An earlier version of the report “underscored the exceptionally low likelihood of such events occurring purely by chance,” citing a probability of 2.1 in 1,000 trillion.

https://washingtonspectator.org/cracks-are-showing-in-air-force-stonewall-over-minuteman-icbm-crews-cancer-charges/

The USAF is already investigating.

From the North Dakota Monitor, yesterday:

Within the community of U.S. service members who staff nuclear missile silos scattered across the Northern Rockies and Great Plains, suspicions had long been brewing that their workplaces were unsafe. Just months after Watts was diagnosed in 2022, Lt. Col. Danny Sebeck, a former Air Force missileer who had transferred to the U.S. Space Force, wrote a brief on a potential cancer cluster among people who served at Minuteman III launch control centers on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

Sebeck identified 36 former workers who served primarily from 1993 to 2011 and had been diagnosed with cancer, including himself. Of those, 11 had non-Hodgkin lymphoma; three had died. The Air Force responded swiftly to Sebeck’s findings, launching a massive investigation into cancer cases and the environment at three intercontinental ballistic missile bases and a California launch facility. The goal is to complete the research by the end of 2025.

but:

So far, the Air Force investigation has found no “statistically elevated” deaths from cancer in the missile community compared with the general population, and it found that the death rates for four types of common cancers — non-Hodgkin lymphoma, lung, colon and rectum, and prostate cancer — were significantly lower in missileers than in the general population.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma accounted for roughly 5.8% of all cancer deaths among people who worked in launch control centers from January 1979 to December 2020.

Early results, derived from Defense Department medical records, found elevated rates of breast and prostate cancers in the missile community, but a later analysis incorporating additional data did not support those findings. The studies also did not find increased rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. 

https://northdakotamonitor.com/2025/09/29/nuclear-missile-workers-are-contracting-cancer-they-blame-the-bases/

Researchers are, unfortunately, human, too human. If your life, your career, your family, your mortgage depends on direct funding of your salary by the nuclear industry, by a government department tied to their interests or by a university dependent on grant income from them, the odds are stacked against methods being selected that will implicate them in such awful consequences – cancer, death.

Not sure about that?

Here’s a persuasive example:

Lesson for opponents of nuclear power in Scotland as researchers revisit study of Essex nuclear power station and breast cancer incidence among mature women nearby to find an even greater risk, only a short distance from new Sizewell C, and ‘establishment bias and cover-up’

There have been nuclear missiles on the Clyde for more than 60 years. The subs have been leaking tritium which ‘smashes into your DNA’, into the waters for decades and increasingly so in recent years. Thousands of locals have worked on the sites, have eaten the fish and have swum in those same waters for decades too. MoD research will find nothing so there must be independent research.