Children from that time and place, including Martin, have never forgotten their awe at those Cold War atomic tests just over the border in Nevada. Nor have they recovered from the shock of betrayal years later, when they learned the government knew the tests were dangerous but told people they were safe.

Today these so-called downwinders - named for the winds that carried atomic debris from the Nevada Test Site to other areas in the 1950s and 1960s - are still searching for a full accounting of how many people were subjected to fallout and what happened to their health.

It isn't just a matter of setting the historical record straight. To this day, people exposed to fallout during atomic tests are developing cancer and other illnesses they believe were caused by radioactive elements.

Martin, 53 and a mother of five, is among them. Doctors recently found a tumor on her thyroid, and she's having a biopsy in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's plans to spend millions of dollars upgrading the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas is provoking deja vu and anxiety among downwinders. The administration has also budgeted millions of dollars to design ''bunker buster'' nuclear bombs and light-yield new nuclear weapons. The 2004 federal budget appropriated $25 million for improving readiness at the site, but officials say there are no plans to test new weapons.

''Before this country spends another red bloody dime on nuclear weapons, it needs to take care of all the citizens who became unknowing victims'' during the Cold War, Martin said this past week, days after former President Clinton warned of the dangers of new nuclear weapons in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

''The public needs to know what happened to us so they can ask themselves, 'Do we want to go down this road again?' ” said Preston Truman, 53, whose first memory is of sitting on his father's lap in Enterprise, Utah, and listening to horses panic as a reddish cloud from a bomb blast filled the sky. Truman heads a national group of downwinders opposed to new nuclear testing.

However distant, the prospect of renewed nuclear testing evokes such passion here that it has become an issue in Utah's 2nd Congressional District race. The Republican Party has identified the contest as its best chance nationwide at grabbing a House seat from the Democrats.

The race pits Rep. Jim Matheson, the only Democratic member of Utah's delegation, against Republican John Swallow, a lawyer and former state legislator. Matheson is the son of former Utah Gov. Scott Matheson, a downwinder who died in 1990 at age 61 of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. Matheson and his family believe his father's exposure to radiation from atomic tests was the cause.

In Congress earlier this year, Matheson introduced the Safety for Americans from Nuclear Weapons Testing Act, which would require congressional approval and extensive safety and environmental studies before nuclear weapons could be tested. The bill has not been heard in committee.

In Utah recently, Matheson called on the federal government to recognize that far more people were affected by nuclear tests than previously recognized and to expand its compensation program.

''This country doesn't understand how much of the nation was subjected to fallout,'' he said, addressing a hearing in Salt Lake City sponsored by the National Academies of Science. Combined with the testing issue, this is ''my No. 1 legislative priority and I'm going to keep working on it.''

Swallow, whose Web site says he is committed to ''conservative ideals'' and national defense, couldn't be reached for comment.

For its part, the National Academies of Science is looking at whether the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed in 1990 largely at the insistence of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and other Western congressmen, goes far enough in recognizing the geographic spread and health consequences of radioactive fallout from atomic tests. The academies plans to issue a report on the subject next summer.

The United States conducted about 100 above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950s and the 1960s. Underground tests continued over the next decades, stopping in 1992.

To date, the compensation program has paid $775 million in claims filed by downwinders, uranium miners, uranium millers, ore haulers and workers who participated in above-ground atomic tests. Funding sometimes has been problematic, and the program expects a $72 million shortfall next year, according to government estimates.