The steep price of America bombing its own people

Vladimir Putin’s barely veiled threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine have once again heightened the devastating impact radioactive exposure can have on wide swaths of a population.

So has the ill-considered decision by Russian soldiers to briefly occupy the old Chernobyl nuclear plant, which was the scene of the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster in 1986. They may have exposed themselves to harmful radiation.

This awareness ought to have special impact in the interior West of the United States, the only part of the nation exposed repeatedly, over many years, to fallout...