SECTION 2 THE WORK OF THE NTPR TEAMS While the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) has been the executive agent, the Nuclear Test Personnel Review (NTPR) military service teams and a separate team at DNA’s Field Command in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been the executors of the tasks assigned the agency beginning in 1978. These five teams have expended considerable time, personnel effort, and funds meeting their responsibilities. This chapter sketches their common challenges and then traces the efforts and accomplishments of each team. 2.1 COMMON CHALLENGES. Each NTPR team is responsible for a different constituency and has a distinctive history. experiences. At the same time, the teams have shared a number of They have all, for example, had certain problems with inadequate documentation from the testing period, although some teams have had more difficulties in this area than have the others. # These problems have posed challenges to the teams in fulfilling their responsibilities, such as responding to File A personnel, meaning those individuals who called in on the toll-free DNA telephone lines or wrote to the agency concerning their participation in the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. 2.1.1 Documentation from the Testing Period. Inadequate documentation has been a significant problem, even though many of the source materials are detailed and useful. The sources, written 20 to 40 years ago, are housed in private, public, and Government repositories scattered across the Nation. In addition, the extant Department of Defense (DOD) records of the atmospheric test program do not emphasize personnel participation and exposure data, as Vice Admiral Robert R. Monroe explained in testimony given on 20 June 1979 before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (1): The reason that DOD records do not meet today’s needs in this specific area derives from the views of medical science in the 1940s and 1950s concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation. Both national and international authorities at that time were more certain than they are 25