Braxton Taylor
The Air Force said Tuesday it has detected trace amounts of organic gaseous chemicals known to cause health problems at all three of America’s intercontinental nuclear missile bases, as cancer fears among current and former airmen who worked at those installations grow.
Air Force Global Strike Command released an environmental survey that found “a small number of samples detected volatile organic compounds” at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.
Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, can have short- and long-term health effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. They were detected in launch control centers, the underground bunkers where missileers monitor the nuclear missiles.
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Lt. Col. John Severns, a spokesman for Air Force Global Strike Command, told Military.com in an emailed statement that those levels detected are “5% or less of the Threshold Limit Value established by [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration],” adding that “these levels are not assessed to present any health hazard.”
The threshold values are the levels of airborne chemicals that workers can be exposed to day after day without the risk of adverse health effects, according to the federal agency.
Trace amounts of benzene, chloroform, ethylbenzene, trans-1,2-dichloroethylene, toluene and forms of xylene were detected in certain launch control centers at F.E. Warren and Malmstrom, according to environmental sampling findings provided to Military.com. Only trace amounts of toluene were detected at Minot.
“Across all three rounds of sampling, we’ve learned a great deal about our facilities and what compounds are present in them, and most importantly how we can clean up or mitigate those compounds to ensure our ‘Strikers’ have a safe work environment,” Air Force Global Strike Commander Gen. Thomas Bussiere said in a statement Tuesday.
The latest findings come amid a myriad of severe health diagnoses and cancer fears among current and former Air Force missileers and maintainers — the officers and enlisted airmen who are tasked with monitoring, fixing and, if called upon, firing America’s land-based nuclear missile arsenal.
Military.com has reported on those fears in two wide-ranging investigations, one highlighting the past warning signs and cancer cluster concerns among missileers who live and work in launch control centers, and another disclosing the safety concerns and toxic exposure worries among enlisted maintainers in the launch facilities.
The Air Force has undergone numerous reforms in the wake of these concerns being raised in 2023, including more thorough workplace inspections and health tracking.
The service has also begun a long-ranging health study to examine the extent of cancer diagnoses among those airmen, ranging from breast cancer and prostate cancer to lung cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Initial results, utilizing only Department of Defense records, indicated elevated rates of breast and prostate cancers among missileers and maintainers and other career fields supporting America’s nuclear missile bases.
Additional health findings with data from Department of Veterans Affairs medical records as well as the Department of Defense and VA cancer registries going back as far as 1976 are set to be disclosed during a town hall meeting Oct. 31, Air Force Global Strike Command said in a news release.
A draft report of those findings was finished in September. But officials said more data, including looking at national and state-level cancer registries, will paint a more complete picture. The service is still working to gather that information.
“We won’t be able to make definitive statements about cancer incidence among the missile
community until after we complete the epidemiological study,” Col. Richard Speakman, commander of the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, said in a statement. “But we know from previous studies that military members do have higher rates of certain cancers. Hopefully, this study will increase our awareness of any higher risk and enable airmen, Guardians and their families to make informed decisions.”
The Torchlight Initiative, a grassroots organization of service members tied to the nuclear missile community, has tracked 656 self-registered cancer cases as of July in its own registry — the majority of them missileers, with the highest percentages of cancer diagnoses being prostate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
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