BETRAYED BY THE VA Thomas Alan Bowman Sr. asked his country for help. He got silence. Sign the demand →
Dear Doug Collins

Victor B. Skaar: The Airman Who Measured the Plutonium — and Spent Sixty Years Fighting the Government's Math

Some betrayals are a single act. This one is a method. When the plutonium settled over the fields of Palomares in January 1966, roughly sixteen hundred American servicemembers were sent in to clean it up with no protective gear, and the Air Force set about measuring what they had breathed. The measurements taken on site were discarded as impossibly high. The measurements that replaced them produced doses so low that, for half a century, almost no Palomares veteran could qualify for the benefits Congress had provided for radiation-exposed veterans. Victor B. Skaar was one of the men who gathered the original samples. He has spent the years since — claim, denial, class action, Supreme Court petition, and, at eighty-nine, still more litigation — trying to make the government answer for its own arithmetic.

The service and the promise

Victor B. Skaar of Nixa, Missouri, served nearly twenty-seven years on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and retired in 1981 at the rank of E-9 — a Chief Master Sergeant, as the record of his case long styled him. His service took him, in January 1966, to a farming village on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, less than a day after the worst accident of the airborne-alert era.

The promise made to men sent into radiation was written into the VA’s own regulations. Under 38 C.F.R. § 3.311, a veteran who develops a “radiogenic” disease after service is entitled to benefits if — using a dose estimate prepared by the service department — it is at least as likely as not that the disease resulted from in-service exposure. The regulation even resolves uncertainty in the veteran’s favor: where a dose estimate is reported as a range, exposure at the highest level of the range is presumed. Everything in this case turns on the estimates the Air Force supplied — what was measured, what was thrown away, and what was invented to take its place.

What happened

On January 17, 1966, a B-52G bomber on an Operation Chrome Dome airborne-alert mission collided with its KC-135 tanker during mid-air refueling at about 31,000 feet over Palomares, Spain. The tanker was destroyed with all four of its crew; the bomber broke apart, killing three of its seven. Seven of the eleven airmen died. The bomber carried four thermonuclear bombs. None detonated as a nuclear weapon. Three fell on land; the conventional explosives in two of them burst on impact and scattered plutonium — about seven pounds of plutonium-239 across roughly two square kilometres of farmland. The fourth bomb fell into the Mediterranean and was recovered intact on April 7, 1966, after an eighty-day Navy search.

Then came the cleanup: from January 17 to April 11, 1966 — eighty-five days — some 1,600 U.S. servicemembers, mostly Air Force with Army, Navy, and other contingents among them (later court orders put the number nearer 1,400), surveyed for radiation, recovered debris, scraped contaminated topsoil, plowed fields, hosed down buildings, and filled 4,810 barrels of contaminated soil and crops for shipment to burial at Savannah River, South Carolina, by the accounting of the Labat-Anderson review. They did this, on the record, without the protection the manuals required. Wright Langham, the Los Alamos expert who advised on protection, later said the manual prescribed coveralls, booties, hair covering, respirator, and gloves — “but none of that was done,” because of concern about alarming the local population.

Skaar’s job put him at the center of the measurement itself. He served on the medical team collecting urine samples from the cleanup crews to gauge plutonium absorption — and, by his own account to other veterans’ advocates and reporters, washing radiation dust off villagers’ adobe homes and monitoring the area with Spanish counterparts. The protocol called for collecting urine over twelve hours. As he told the New York Times in 2016: they had neither the time nor the equipment; from many men he could get only a single sample, and others were never tested at all. It was worse than improvised. Of more than 1,500 samples gathered on site, about 1,000 — roughly two-thirds, including all the samples from the first days, when exposure was probably highest — were disqualified as “unreasonably high” and discarded. The Air Force’s chief of radiation testing, Dr. Lawrence T. Odland, concluded the extreme readings must reflect plutonium dust contaminating hands and clothes rather than true inhalation. Interviewed at ninety-four, he questioned his own call: “We had no way of knowing what was from contamination and what was from inhalation… I just had to make a call.”

What remained was a small, late dataset: plutonium-specific measurements for 422 men, taken after they had left Palomares, and, from them, a group of twenty-six — the “High 26” — who registered the highest exposures and gave further samples over almost two years. Skaar was one of the High 26, as the veterans court recorded in 2026. On this foundation the Air Force built the numbers the VA would use for fifty years. Until the end of 2013, it relied on environmental estimates — air measurements taken well after the cleanup — under which exposures were “less than 500 mrem” and “not significant”; the Times reported the assigned dose worked out to 0.31 rem, about a year of natural background radiation. Then, after Congress questioned those estimates, the Air Force changed methods — and built the second wall. The new methodology took the High 26’s urine data and simply assumed that every other cleanup veteran — the remaining 98 percent — had received less than the least-exposed member of the High 26, capping their intakes at that floor (the High 26’s established intakes ran from 34,000 to 570,000 pCi; everyone else was assigned a range topping out at 34,000). No uncertainty analysis was ever provided for the Palomares estimates. Princeton physicist Frank N. von Hippel, who with Jan Beyea wrote the peer-reviewed history of the dosimetry fight in Health Physics in 2019, stated the objection plainly: it was “improper to discard the [Labat-Anderson] inhalation estimates for 98 percent of the veterans. They may or may not be high because of contamination but they should not be disregarded. They constitute the high end of an uncertainty range” — the very end § 3.311 instructs the VA to presume. Beyea and von Hippel concluded that even the government’s own revised maximum doses “appear to be sufficient to justify compensation to all Palomares veterans with lung and bone cancer and early-onset liver cancer and leukemia” — claims the VA was denying on those same numbers.

Skaar’s own claims ran into the wall in the ordinary way. Diagnosed with leukopenia — a blood disorder, a decreased white-cell count — with his doctor opining that ionizing radiation appeared to be the positive agent, he filed in 1998; the VA denied the claim in February 2000. Diagnosed with skin cancer (basal cell carcinoma), he filed again in 2013. The Board of Veterans’ Appeals denied him in 2017. He was represented by the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School, later joined by co-counsel. In December 2019, at the moment his case broke open, he said: “I have been fighting this battle since I was 45 years old.”

What the institution did afterward

On December 6, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, sitting en banc, decided Skaar v. Wilkie, 32 Vet. App. 156, by a 6–3 vote — the first class action ever certified at that court in an individual appeal of a Board decision. (The court’s class authority itself was new: it derives from Monk v. Shulkin, 855 F.3d 1312 (Fed. Cir. 2017), the ruling won by Conley Monk Jr., whose page stands in this section.) Judge Michael P. Allen wrote that the decision “heralds the beginning of an era in which we will entertain, but by no means always certify, class actions in the first instance, making us the only federal appellate court in the nation to do so.” The ruling was split with care: the court rejected Skaar’s bid to challenge, as a class, Palomares’s absence from the presumptive “radiation-risk activity” list — and certified the class on the dose-estimate challenge, in these words: “All U.S. veterans who were present at the 1966 cleanup of plutonium dust at Palomares, Spain, and whose application for service-connected disability compensation based on exposure to ionizing radiation VA has denied or will deny by relying, at least in part, on the findings of dose estimates requested under 38 C.F.R. § 3.311,” with exceptions for claims already final and for claims denied solely on pre-2001 estimates.

A year later the class won the science round — as far as the court could take it. In Skaar v. Wilkie, 33 Vet. App. 127 (December 17, 2020), the court held that the Board had failed 38 C.F.R. § 3.311(c)’s requirement that dose estimates rest on “sound scientific evidence”: the Board’s acceptance of the Air Force estimate as sound “on its face,” the court wrote, “essentially amounts to the Board saying the dose estimate is sound ‘because I say so.’” The Board’s decision was set aside and the case remanded, on a class basis, for a real assessment of whether the estimates are sound science. No court has ever gone further. No court has held the methodology unsound on the merits.

The system then answered on procedure, and procedure won. On September 8, 2022, in Skaar v. McDonough, 48 F.4th 1323, the Federal Circuit held that the Veterans Court had exceeded its jurisdiction under 38 U.S.C. § 7252(a): the certified class included veterans who had never received a Board decision and veterans who had not yet filed claims, and jurisdiction over Skaar’s own appeal could not create jurisdiction over them — unlike the district courts, the Veterans Court has no supplemental-jurisdiction statute. The court vacated the class certification and confined the 2020 merits ruling to Skaar’s claim alone. It did not hold the dose science sound. It did not deny any veteran’s benefits on the merits. It held that the vehicle was too big for the court’s charter. Rehearing en banc was denied on January 17, 2023, by 7–5, over a dissent warning that the rule — only veterans inside the 120-day post-Board appeal window count toward a class — would effectively eliminate veterans’ class actions. The Supreme Court denied review on June 20, 2023 (Skaar v. McDonough, No. 22-815), without comment.

Congress, meanwhile, had finally written Palomares into the statute — and the statute’s fine print left the named plaintiff outside it. Section 402 of the PACT Act (Public Law 117-168, signed August 10, 2022) added Palomares to the “radiation-risk activity” list at 38 U.S.C. § 1112(c)(3)(B)(vi): “Onsite participation in the response effort following the collision of a United States Air Force B-52 bomber and refueling plane that caused the release of four thermonuclear weapons in the vicinity of Palomares, Spain, during the period beginning January 17, 1966, and ending March 31, 1967.” Skaar’s service falls squarely inside that window; he was one of the twenty-six most-exposed men there. But presumptive service connection under § 1112(c) attaches only to the diseases Congress listed at § 1112(c)(2) — leukemia, specified cancers, and the rest of the radiogenic roll. Leukopenia is not on the list. Skin cancer is not on the list. Skaar had acknowledged the first point in his own litigation, and in its Supreme Court filing the Justice Department — as the Associated Press reported — “acknowledged that Skaar is not covered by the legislation.” The man whose name is on the case that carried Palomares into the statute book is not covered by the statute. The coverage question was never his dates. It was his diseases.

Where it stands now

What remains has narrowed to one man’s claims and one structural fight — and Skaar, in his late eighties, is still carrying both. On remand, in December 2023, the Board granted him service connection for leukopenia — individually, on the record of his own case, a quarter-century after he filed. His skin-cancer claim is still open: denied at the regional office in June 2024, remanded by the Board that November, and in September 2025 the VA granted his request for higher-level review and ordered a medical examination. As of the court’s most recent word, that claim “is pending.”

The class fight he continues under narrower rules. In July 2024 he asked the Board itself to aggregate a class of all Palomares cleanup veterans; the Board’s Deputy Vice Chairman refused, holding the Board has no authority to aggregate claims. The Veterans Court dismissed his appeal of that refusal on April 29, 2025 (Skaar v. Collins, 38 Vet. App. 225 — the ruling was a procedural order, not a final decision), and on January 22, 2026 the court denied his petition for extraordinary relief, preserving the question for appeal after a final Board decision. It was his thirteenth opinion from that court since 2018. Judge Jaquith, concurring, wrote the sentence this page exists because of: “Mr. Skaar is now 89 years old. It has been 60 years since he was sent to assist in cleaning up…” the record continues. In Congress, no Palomares-specific bill to close the disease-list gap was pending in the record this page rests on; the live legislative thread is structural — testimony urging repair of the jurisdictional rule Skaar created, so that veterans whose claims are still pending can count toward future classes. Yale’s clinic, in the meantime, has done the arithmetic workaround: a packet of evidence and argument for individual Palomares veterans to file in their own claims against the dose methodology — one veteran at a time, the way the system, having defeated the class, insists it be done.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Three films: the incident itself in a full-length documentary history; the narrative account of the accident and its aftermath; and — the rarest item on this page — the veterans court itself, hearing Skaar’s case argued in November 2025, in the litigation he is still carrying at eighty-nine.

The accident. HISTORY's full-length documentary on America's Broken Arrow accidents; its Palomares segment covers the collision, the plutonium scatter, the cleanup, and the eighty-day search for the fourth bomb, in primary-source interviews. (HISTORY.)

The story, told whole. Simon Whistler's narrative account of the Palomares incident — the collision, the bombs, the Spanish fields — closing with the cleanup crews and their decades-long aftermath. (Today I Found Out.)

The case, still being argued. The veterans court's own recording of oral argument in Skaar v. Collins, No. 25-4066, argued November 13, 2025 — Skaar's aggregation fight, sixty years on, in the court's own voice. (United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.