Downwinders United wants the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency to hold more meetings and drop the "dog and pony show" format that will provide information but not allow for public comment on the test.

"In our book that's pure propaganda," Downwinder director Preston Truman of Malad, Idaho said in a news release. "Three town hall meetings with power points and poster board are not acceptable in view of the past legacy of fallout and lies."

Meetings are scheduled for Jan. 9 in Las Vegas, Jan. 10 in Salt Lake City and Jan. 11 in St. George, Utah.

"We want hearings, not tellings," Truman said.

The group is calling for additional hearings in Kingman, Ariz., Idaho, Montana, southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico, including the Navajo Reservation. All are areas where fallout from Cold-War era nuclear tests has been documented.

Known as "Divine Strake," the blast would send a 10,000-foot mushroom-shaped dust cloud over the Nevada desert. Initially scheduled for June 2006, the blast was indefinitely postponed after a lawsuit was filed in federal court and the government said it needed time to sort out questions about whether it would kickup radioactive fallout from weapons tests at the Nevada site 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"Downwinder" is a name commonly given to residents in part of Nevada, Utah and Arizona who lived downwind of weapons tests who later contracted certain cancers and other serious diseases.

The son of a downwinder, Utah's U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Salt Lake City, called the meeting format limited.

"It's more of an open house than a hearing," Matheson told The Associated Press. "I do encourage people to go. This is at least an opportunity that we didn't have before. But I do have similar concerns."

Downwinder United member Mary Dickson of Salt Lake City also said the group doesn't believe government claims that the 700-ton blast presents no public health hazards.

Las Vegas attorney Robert Hager, who represents plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said a newly released environmental assessment of Divine Strake acknowledges just the opposite.

"What the Pentagon is saying for the first time is there is radioactivity in the soil and that will become airborne as a result of this bomb," Hager said.

The report also projects an equal dispersion of the blast's cloud and said the level of radiation released would be below federal safety standards.

Experts who work for Hager disagree.

"Nobody can predict where that cloud will go," Hager said.