NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/environm/5231

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Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!sgigate!odin!ratmandu.esd.sgi.com!dave
From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: Nuclear Witnesses--Dr. John Gofman, Medical Physicist
Summary: scientists testify to the lie: nuclear energy isn't safe, clean, cheap
Keywords: nuclear technology: radiation cannot be contained==disaster ahead
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Date: 23 Dec 92 21:12:54 GMT
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     "Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random
     premeditated murder.  First of all, when you license a plant, you know
     what you're doing--so it's premeditated.  You can't say, "I didn't
     know."  Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond
     doubt.  I've worked fifteen years on it [as of 1982], and so have many
     others.  It is not a question any more:  radiation produces cancer,
     and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses."


contents:  line 1 [this line] -- ratitor's note
           line 41   -- begin excerpts
           line 260  -- Author's Note
           line 353  -- begin Chapter 4
           line 1838 -- Bibliography


  The following is chapter 4 from the 1982 book "Nuclear Witnesses, Insiders
  Speak Out" and is an interview with Dr. John Gofman detailing his personal
  experiences and knowledge regarding the nuclear establishment.  Dr. Gofman
  is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. in
  nuclear-physical chemistry and an M.D.) who was the first Director of the
  Biomedical Research Division of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from 1963-
  65 and one of nine Associate Directors at the Lab from 1963-1969.  He was
  involved in the Manhattan Project and is a co-discoverer of Uranium-232,
  Plutonium-232, Uranium-233, and Plutonium-233, and of slow and fast neutron
  fissionability of Uranium-233.  He also was a co-inventor of the urnayl
  acetate and columbium oxide processes for plutonium separation.  He has
  taught in the radioisotope and radiobiology fields from the 1950s at least
  up into the 1980s, and has done research in radiochemistry, macromoloecules,
  lipoprotiens, coronary heart disease, arterioscleroisis, trace element
  determination, x-ray spectroscopy, chromosomes and cancer and radioation
  hazards.  Starting in 1969 he began to challenge the AEC claim that there
  was a "safe threshold" of radiation below which no health effects could be
  detected.

  "My particular combination of scientific credentials is very handy in the
  nuclear controversies, but advanced degrees confer no special expertise in
  either common sense or morality.  That's why many laymen are better
  qualitfied to judge nuclear power that are the so-called experts."  Gofman
  has achieved the singular distinction of being branded "beyond the pale of
  reasonable communication" by the nuclear power industry.
         -- from "IRREVY, An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear Power,"
                 1979, by Dr. John Gofman.

                                   -- ratitor
  [text in italics enclosed within "{   }" braces denotes the author's--
   Leslie Freeman's--voice.]


        {Gofman sits back.  It is the attempt to deceive the public that
     makes him so angry.  His reaction was the same when he learned how the
     Atomic Energy Commission was deceiving the public about the effects of
     low-level radiation.  When the AEC tried to censor his findings about
     radiation-induced cancers, Gofman reached his turning point.  To him,
     censorship is "the descent of darkness.". . .}
        Then I started hearing that there were a lot of people from the
     electric utility industry who were insulting us and our work.  They
     were saying our cancer calculations from radiation were ridiculous,
     that they were poorly based scientifically, that there was plenty of
     evidence that we were wrong.  Things like that.  So I wondered what
     was going on there.  At that point--January 1970--I hadn't said
     anything about nuclear power itself.  In fact, I hadn't even thought
     about it.  It was stupid not to have thought about it.  I just
     wondered, Why is the electric utility industry attacking us?
        I began to look at all the ads that I had just cursorily seen in
     "Newsweek" and "Time" and "Life," two-page spreads from the utilities,
     talking about their wonderful nuclear power program.  And it was all
     going to be done "safely," because they were never going to give
     radiation above the safe threshold.
        And I realized that the entire nuclear power program was based on a
     fraud--namely, that there was a "safe" amount of radiation, a
     permissible dose that wouldn't hurt anybody. . . .
        "Someone from the AEC came to my house last weekend," he said.  "He
     lives near me.  And he said, `We need you to help destroy Gofman and
     Tamplin.'  And I told him you'd sent me a copy of your paper, and I
     didn't necessarily agree with every number you'd put in, but I didn't
     have any major difficulties with it either.  It looked like sound
     science.  And--you won't believe this--but do you know what he said to
     me?  He said, `I don't care whether Gofman and Tamplin are *right* or
     not, scientifically.  It's necessary to destroy them.  The reason is,'
     he said, `by the time those people get the cancer and the leukemia,
     you'll be retired and I'll be retired, so what the hell difference
     does it make *right now*?  We need our nuclear power program, and
     unless we destroy Gofman and Tamplin, the nuclear power program is in
     real hazard from what they say.'. . .
      . . . in 1972 the National Academy of Sciences published a report
     called the BEIR Report--Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation--a
     long, thick report, in which they walked around the problem as best
     they could, and finally concluded that we were too high between four
     and ten times.  But if you read the fine print, they were admitting
     that we might just be right.[22]
        When that came out, everybody realized that the AEC was not worth a
     damn.  By then the AEC had gotten themselves into another flap.  Henry
     Kendall and Dan Ford of the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that
     the AEC didn't know whether the Emergency Core Cooling System would
     ever work or wouldn't.[23]  The Emergency Core Cooling System was the
     last barrier of safety in a major nuclear accident.  This further
     damaged the credibility of the AEC.
        Those two events--the conflict with Ford and Kendall and the
     conflict with us--finally led them to realize they could no longer use
     the words "Atomic Energy Commission," and so the government abolished
     the AEC.
        "We are now solving the problem," they said.  "We'll create two new
     agencies--ERDA (Energy Research and Development Agency) and NRC
     (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)."
        ERDA was supposed to promote the development of atomic energy, and
     NRC was supposed to concern itself with public safety.  The idea was
     that it was the promotion of nuclear energy that made the AEC's safety
     work so poor.  The new NRC was only supposed to involve itself in
     safety--no promotion.
        Which turned out to be one of the greatest lies in history. . . .
        I had made one mistake.  If the Department of Energy or the AEC
     gives you money on a sensitive subject, they don't mean for you to
     take the job seriously.  They need you--with your scientific
     prestige--so they can point to you.  "We have so and so studying the
     problem."  Studying the problem is marvelous.  But if you want the
     money and the continued support, you should go fishing or play golf.
     My mistake was I discovered something. . . .
        {Gofman decided to take an early retirement at the age of fifty-
     five, so he gave up his position at the University in 1975 and became
     professor emeritus.  Although no longer engaged in active teaching,
     Gofman did not give up research.  In the next years he discovered that
     plutonium was even more hazardous than he had thought.  "Plutonium is
     so hazardous that if you had a fully developed nuclear economy with
     breeder reactors fueled with plutonium, and you managed to contain the
     plutonium 99.99 percent perfectly, it would still cause somewhere
     between 140,000 and 500,000 extra lung-cancer fatalities each year."}. .
        The requirement for controlling plutonium in a nuclear economy
     built on breeder reactors would be to lose no more than one millionth
     or ten millionth of all the plutonium that is handled into the
     environment where it could get to people.  Which brings up a
     fundamental thing in nuclear energy--there are some engineers,
     scientists, who are not merely fraudulent sycophants of the system.
     They're really out of touch with reality.
        I was once on an airplane with a strong pronuclear engineer.  I
     said, "I've done some new work on plutonium.  I think it's a lot more
     toxic than had been thought before.  At what toxicity would you give
     up nuclear power?"
        He said, "What are you talking about?"
        "If I told you that you had to control your plutonium losses at all
     steps along the way--burps, spills, puffs, accidents, leaks,
     everything--that you can't afford to lose even a millionth of it,
     would that cause you to give up nuclear power?"
        "Oh, I understand your point now, John," he said.  "Now, you tell
     me--we look to biologists like you to tell us how well we need to do.
     If you say I've got to control it to one part in ten million, we'll do
     it.  If you say it's got to be one in a billion or ten billion we'll
     do it.  You tell us what we have to engineer for, and we'll do it."
        I said, "My friend, you've lost touch with reality completely.
     I've worked in chemistry laboratories all my life, and to think you
     can control plutonium to one in a million is absolutely absurd.  If
     you were a patient of mine who came in to see me, I'd refer you to a
     psychiatrist."
        "Well, John, engineering is my field.  And we believe we can do
     anything that's needed."
        Engineers do believe that.  That's the arrogance of engineers--they
     think they can do anything.  Now their mistakes catch up with them, as
     you see from the DC-10s and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that fell down,
     and the Teton Dam and the most recent episode, Three Mile Island--
     where the unthinkable, the impossible, did happen.
                       Nuclear Power:  A Simple Question
        Many people think nuclear power is so complicated it requires
     discussion at a high level of technicality.  That's pure nonsense.
     Because the issue is simple and straightforward.
        There are only two things about nuclear power that you need to
     know.  One, why do you want nuclear power?  So you can boil water.
     That's all it does.  It boils water.  And any way of boiling water
     will give you steam to turn turbines.  That's the useful part.
        The other thing to know is, it creates a mountain of radioactivity,
     and I mean a *mountain:*  astronomical quantities of strontium-90 and
     cesium-137 and plutonium--toxic substances that will last--strontium-
     90 and cesium for 300 to 600 years, plutonium for 250,000 to 500,000
     years--and still be deadly toxic.  And the whole thing about nuclear
     power is this simple:  can you or can't you keep it all contained?  If
     you can't, then you're creating a human disaster.
        You not only need to control it from the public, you also need to
     control it from the workers.  Because the dose that federal
     regulations allow workers to get is sufficient to create a genetic
     hazard to the whole human species.  You see, those workers are allowed
     to procreate, and if you damage their genes by radiation, and they
     intermarry with the rest of the population, for genetic purposes it's
     just the same as if you irradiate the population directly.[27]
        So I find nuclear power this simple:  do you believe they're going
     to do the miracle of containment that they predict?  The answer is
     they're not going to accomplish it.  It's outside the realm of human
     prospects.
        You don't need to discuss each valve and each transportation cask
     and each burial site.  The point is, if you lose a little bit of it--a
     terribly little bit of it--you're going to contaminate the earth, and
     people are going to suffer for thousands of generations.  You have two
     choices:  either you believe that engineers are going to achieve a
     perfection that's never been achieved, and you go ahead;  or you
     believe with common sense that such a containment is never going to be
     achieved, and you give it up.
        If people really understood how simple a problem it is--that
     they've got to accomplish a miracle--no puffs like Three Mile Island-
     -can't afford those puffs of radioactivity, or the squirts and the
     spills that they always tell you won't harm the public--if people
     understood that, they'd say, "This is ridiculous.  You don't create
     this astronomical quantity of garbage and pray that somehow a miracle
     will happen to contain it.  You just don't do such stupid things!"
        Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random
     premeditated murder.  First of all, when you license a plant, you know
     what you're doing--so it's premeditated.  You can't say, "I didn't
     know."  Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond
     doubt.  I've worked fifteen years on it, and so have many others.  It
     is not a question any more:  radiation produces cancer, and the
     evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses.
        The only way you could license nuclear power plants and not have
     murder is if you could guarantee perfect containment.  But they admit
     that they're not going to contain it perfectly.  They allow workers to
     get irradiated, and they have an allowable dose for the
     population.[28]  So in essence I can figure out from their allowable
     amounts how many they are willing to kill per year.
        I view this as a disgrace, as a public health disgrace.  The idea
     of anyone saying that it's all right to murder so many in exchange for
     profits from electricity--or what they call "benefits" from
     electricity--the idea that it's all right to do that is a new advance
     in depravity, particularly since it will affect future generations.
        You must decide what your views are on this:  is it all right to
     murder people knowingly?  If so, why do you worry about homicide?  But
     if you say, "The number won't be too large.  We might only kill fifty
     thousand--and that's like automobiles"--is that all right? . . .
        People like myself and a lot of the atomic energy scientists in the
     late fifties deserve Nuremberg trials.  At Nuremberg we said those who
     participate in human experimentation are committing a crime.
     Scientists like myself who said in 1957, "Maybe Linus Pauling is right
     about radiation causing cancer, but we don't really know, and
     therefore we shouldn't stop progress," were saying in essence that
     it's all right to experiment.  Since we don't know, let's go ahead.
     So we were experimenting on humans, weren't we?  But once you know
     that your nuclear power plants are going to release radioactivity and
     kill a certain number of people, you are no longer committing the
     crime of experimentation--you are committing a higher crime.
     Scientists who support these nuclear plants--*knowing* the effects of
     radiation--don't deserve trials for experimentation;  they deserve
     trials for murder. . . .
      . . . The only solution is, you must stop *all* efforts to develop
     first-strike force solutions everywhere--whether they be nuclear or
     other--and move toward a more just society.
        Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but
     you left established power structure in the U.S. and the USSR, they'd
     go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing.
     My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a
     disease.  I call it the "power disease."  They want to rule and
     control other people.  They are a more important plague than cancer,
     pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put
     together.  They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use
     each other.  They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast
     aside when they don't need them any more.  There are fifty million
     people a year being consumed in a nutritional holocaust around the
     world;  nobody gives a damn about starvation.  If fifty million white
     Westerners were dying, affluent Western society would worry, but as
     long as it's fifty million Third World people dying every year, it
     doesn't matter.
        In my opinion, what we need is to move toward being nauseated by
     people who want to be at the top, in power.  Can you think of anything
     more ridiculous than that the Chinese, Russian, and American people
     let their governments play with superlethal toys and subject all of us
     to these hazards?  The solution is not to replace one leader with
     another or to have more government.  Society has to reorganize itself.
     The structure we have now is, the sicker you are socially, the more
     likely it is that you'll come out at the top of the heap.



                       *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

                                 Author's Note

        Two things happened that led me to write this book.  First, a
     doctor tried to convince me to take radioactive iodine for an
     overactive thyroid.  I refused.  Several months later John Gofman told
     me I was very fortunate.  The radioactive iodine, he explained, would
     have increased the chance of my getting cancer by more than 100
     percent.
        The other thing that led me to write this book was the accident at
     Three Mile Island.  Coincidentally, my thyroid condition had been
     diagnosed the same week that Three Mile Island vented radioactive
     gases into the atmosphere.  I read everything I could lay my hands on,
     groping for the truth behind the evasive reports published by the
     Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  I finally read verbatim transcripts of
     the Commissioners' meeting held the day after the accident.  The words
     these men said to each other stunned me.  They had no idea what was
     happening and no idea how to stop it.  And meanwhile they were issuing
     reassuring reports to the public.
        I wanted the truth.  For the first time I felt my survival was at
     stake--nuclear power was not an abstract issue:  it was a matter of
     life and death.  I started to talk to people--scientists, doctors,
     nuclear workers.
        I interviewed twenty-four people who have worked with or around
     nuclear materials.  In nineteen cases I traveled to the person's home
     or place of work.  Most interviews took between two and four hours and
     were followed up by phone interviews.  I taped the in-person and
     telephone interviews and listened to them several times, taking notes.
     I then selected and transcribed those which I felt contained the
     clearest and most important information and were also the most
     fascinating as narratives.  These were the transcripts from which I
     worked for the chapters of this book.
        A word about the editing I did.  In every case I tried to maintain
     the exact words, the exact flavor of the speech, and the exact meaning
     intended by the speaker.  I have cut out sections that were redundant,
     irrelevant, unnecessary, or confusing.  The repetitive "you know" or
     "like I said" was eliminated when it seemed too distracting--
     appropriate perhaps in conversation but not on the page.
        Each chapter was returned to the narrator in draft form for
     comments, accuracy, and approval.  In some cases a name was changed to
     protect an informant, an expression was changed, a statistic was
     corrected.
        The final version of each chapter was then written--including an
     introductory section, footnotes, and a bibliography of sources
     relevant to the chapter.  Each narrator was also asked for a
     photograph to include with his or her chapter.
        The question that I asked initially in each interview was about
     personal background.  This was followed by a series of questions about
     what experiences the person had which made him or her change or
     develop a point of view on nuclear power.  I did not merely listen.
     When I did not understand, I asked questions.  When I did not believe
     something, I said so.  I asked for proof, for reasons, for the
     thoughts and feelings which made people act the way they did.  I asked
     them to describe experiences in such a way that I could see what they
     saw and hear what people said and did.  They described specific
     hearings and meetings.  Again and again I asked to be told what went
     through their minds as they experienced the things they told me about.
     It was these personal moments that most brought me into their lives
     and that I have attempted to bring to the reader.

        It is the premise of this book that if the American people knew the
     truth about radiation there would be no nuclear issue.  The
     information speaks for itself.  In this book people who have had
     direct personal experience with the nuclear establishment speak about
     what they learned.  They did not necessarily start out as proponents
     or opponents of nuclear power;  they are people who have in common a
     genuine respect for hard work.  In almost every case they found their
     integrity as workers threatened by involvement with the nuclear
     establishment.  When they mentioned that something was done sloppily,
     that some regulation was being violated, that something was dangerous,
     their concerns were ignored, trivialized, rationalized, or twisted.
     Some, unable to work under such conditions and feeling their sense of
     decency outraged and their survival in jeopardy, began to speak
     publicly.  Then they found out what they were up against:  it wasn't
     just their boss, it wasn't just their boss's boss:  it was the union,
     the utility company, the military-industrial complex that were
     insisting on the myth that nuclear power was "safe."  No one was
     permitted to challenge this myth and retain credibility.  Nuclear
     energy existed for the "benefit" of the people and nuclear weapons
     were necessary for "national security."
        The stories in this book are evidence that even in the face of
     intimidation, people still believe their own experience matters and
     that other people matter.  They are concerned about the lives of their
     children and the continuation of the species.  These people know that
     when people hear the truth, they listen.





       The following is taken from the book "Nuclear Witnesses, Insiders
      Speak Out," by Leslie J. Freeman, (c) 1981 by W W Norton & Company,
       and is reprinted here with written permission from the publisher.
     _______________________________________________________________________
                                   CHAPTER 4
                       John W. Gofman, Medical Physicist



        {A cool, crisp morning, late in August 1979. From inside a
     meticulously furnished living room in the quaint house, built high on
     a hill overlooking the city of San Francisco, you can see the city
     orange and white, glittering in the distance.
        John Gofman sits across from me on a wooden bench-sofa built into
     the corner of the living room.  He lights a pipe and crosses his legs.
     On the verge of sixty, he is surprisingly youthful.  His oval-shaped
     face is framed with a thick snow-white beard.  His skin is ruddy and
     smooth, his eyes quick, piercingly alive.
        As usual, I begin the interview by explaining what led me to write
     this book.  I tell him about discovering I had an overactive thyroid
     and the thyroid specialist who recommended radioactive iodine as a
     cure.  Gofman's eyes narrow.  He leans forward.  "Did you take the
     radio-iodine?"  I shake my head no and explain, "I was afraid of it."
        "Let me tell you what that would have done to you," he says.  His
     voice rises in anger as he explains that the dose the specialist said
     he wanted to give me would have increased my chances of developing
     cancer by "50 to 100 percent--which is a massive increase!"  Gofman
     sits back and relights his pipe.  Then he continues, warming to the
     subject:  "The logical question is:  if what I say is true, then how
     come the medical profession doesn't know it?  Well, there are many
     reasons, some of which don't even surface.  For example, hundreds of
     thousands, perhaps a few million people have been given radio-iodine
     treatments already.  Think of how hard it is for the physician to
     think that his profession can have endangered the lives of five
     hundred thousand to a million people.  So psychologically he has a
     wall that says, `No, this cannot be harmful.  I personally have not
     seen a single cancer from it.'  Which of course is a ridiculous way to
     look at it.
        "The Public Health Service sponsored a follow-up study of some
     30,000 people who had received radio-iodine.  Came to the conclusion
     that it didn't appear that cancer was seriously increased.  Absolutely
     rotten, miserable, stupid, unscientific study.  Published in a quality
     medical journal--but that didn't in any way prevent it from being all
     those things--unscientific, miserable, and stupid.  What was wrong
     with that study?  First of all, we know that very few cancers surface
     before ten years after the radiation.  Then they get more and more
     frequent.  In the study the average person was followed up only nine
     years.  In other words, they were studying the people in the period
     when you *don't* expect cancers to occur!
        "Also, the number of radiation-induced cancers goes up in
     proportion to how frequent that particular cancer type is anyway.
     Breast cancer is 20 percent of all cancer in women.  So after you have
     treated women of twenty-five or so with radio-iodine, you should look
     in the fifty-year age bracket, when breast cancer becomes a common
     disease.  So the whole damn study, averaging nine years of follow-up,
     is at the wrong time and is giving a false impression of security
     that's going to kill more and more people.
        "The epidemic of doctor-induced cancer from radio-iodine is ahead
     of us yet!
        "You would think that medicine would have become wiser from the
     experience with asbestos, with vinyl chloride, with radiation.  But
     they don't seem to learn from such experience.  They seem to think
     that radio-iodine is something special.  The next thing will be
     radio-strontium is something special.  Then plutonium is special.
        "I'll sit here and confidently say into your recorder--and if you
     hold the tape for another ten years, I will still be confirmed.  I
     don't say many things positively.  A lot of things I'll tell you I
     don't know--we're uncertain, more work needs to be done.  But on this
     one I don't put any of those qualifiers in.  It is going to occur.
     The dose to the body from radio-iodine at therapeutic levels is such
     that it's going to produce many, many cancers.  Then it's going to be:
     `Oh, we must not use radio-iodine any more.  At the time we did it, it
     was the best medical practice.'
        "See, that's the out.  If the whole profession was idiotic in a
     given time and agreed to the idiot position, that's regarded as the
     `best medical practice of the time.'  That's the story."
        Gofman sits back.  It is the attempt to deceive the public that
     makes him so angry.  His reaction was the same when he learned how the
     Atomic Energy Commission was deceiving the public about the effects of
     low-level radiation.  When the AEC tried to censor his findings about
     radiation-induced cancers, Gofman reached his turning point.  To him,
     censorship is "the descent of darkness."
        "I'm not interested in being a crusader," Gofman says, "but
     somebody had to say something about this issue, so why not me?"}


                         The Beginning:  Uranium-233

        {Born in Ohio, John Gofman grew up in Cleveland and attended Oberlin
     College, with a major in chemistry.  He thought he might like to do
     medical research, so in his junior and senior years he took courses to
     qualify him for medical school.  After graduating from Oberlin 1939
     with an A.B. in chemistry, Gofman entered Western Reserve University
     Medical School.  Although he enjoyed learning medicine and did quite
     well his first year there, he realized he was not getting the sound
     scientific background in physical sciences that he would need for
     medical research.  In 1940 Gofman took a leave of absence from medical
     school and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley as a
     Ph.D. candidate in chemistry.  "The first thing you did when you came
     to Berkeley as a Ph.D. candidate was to choose a research field.  I
     looked around and there was a young professor there by the name of
     Glenn Seaborg, who was working in artificial radioactivity."[1]  Glenn
     Seaborg was the scientist who discovered plutonium,[2] the man-made
     radioactive element that would be used five years later in the atomic
     bomb dropped on Nagasaki (9 August 1945).}

        I thought, probably all kinds of biochemical problems in medicine
     are going to be solved by the application of radioactive tracers.[3]
     How better could I prepare myself for a future medical career than to
     work on a problem involving artificial radioactivity?
        So I elected to work with Glenn Seaborg.  He assigned me a
     problem--there was a possibility from thorium you might be able to
     make a substance called uranium-233, provided it existed, and we
     didn't know whether it would exist or not.
        He said, "Why don't you see if you can find out whether it exists
     or not?"
        It was just an interesting problem in nuclear physical chemistry--
     an unknown part of a whole systematics of the heavy elements.  So I
     started to look, and the work went quite well, and in about a year and
     a half I had discovered uranium-233.
        We used the Berkeley cyclotron--an accelerator machine--to develop
     very high energy particles, and from this to develop neutrons with
     which we could bombard natural thorium.  By a complex series of
     chemical steps I was able to isolate and prove the existence of
     uranium-233 at a time when I had four one-millionths of a gram.  This
     was not an amount I ever saw--you traced it around by its alpha
     particle radioactivity.  So all the chemistry I was doing, I could
     never see the material I was working with;  I was only tracing it.  I
     had to measure the amount I had by its radioactivity--instead of a
     scale that uses gravity, you're using radioactivity to weigh things.
        By then, things had shaped up to the point that it appeared
     possible America would enter the war and that the discovery of nuclear
     fission might mean that nuclear bombs were possible.  Scientists in
     this country voluntarily stopped talking about their work in public.
     It was an informal agreement.
        It was possible that uranium-233, which I had discovered, might be
     one of the substances used to make a bomb.  It depended on whether it
     fissioned more easily or less easily than plutonium, which had been
     discovered by Seaborg, or than uranium-235, which exists naturally.
     These were the three candidates to make a bomb, and certain physics
     measurements on the fissionability would determine which was the best.
        So I started to work on trying to find out if uranium-233 was
     fissionable, and I proved that it was, using what's called both slow-
     and fast- moving neutrons.  In fact, I proved that it was even better
     in many respects than plutonium for this purpose.[4]  All that was
     connected with my Ph.D. thesis which I finished in 1942.[5]

------
  [1] "artificial radioactivity:"   radioactivity was discovered in uranium
      in 1896 by Becquerel.  All substances that are found naturally and
      are radioactive are "naturally radioactive."  When man bombards an
      element to convert it to a new radioactive element, as Madame Curie's
      daughter did in the mid 1930s, this new radioactive element is
      referred to as "artificially radioactive."

  [2] Glenn Seaborg received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1951 and
      became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1961.  He remained
      in that position for ten years.

  [3] radioactive tracer:  use of a radioactive substance to trace the
      behavior of an element in the body.  Radioactive potassium-40, for
      example, traces the movement of potassium through the body.

  [4] U-233 can be made from natural thorium.  Thorium does not chain
      react by itself.  Another element that makes the thorium chain
      react was necessary--uranium-235 or plutonium.  Then the thorium
      continued to chain react and could produce U-233.  However, at
      the time there was not enough U-235 or plutonium around to use
      for converting the thorium to U-233.

  [5] Ph.D. in Nuclear/Physical Chemistry from the University of California
      at Berkeley, 1943.  Dissertation:  The discovery of Pa-232, U-232,
      Pa-233, and U-233.  The slow and fast neutron fissionability of U-233.
------



                  The Manhattan Project:  Building the A-Bomb

        I was all in favor of making a bomb.  And I want you to know that I
     have no guilt about it.  I would do it again, and for this reason:  as
     I appraised the situation at that time, there was not for a long time
     in history any worse aberration of human conduct and human monstrosity
     than the Nazi regime in Germany.  And the idea of an atomic bomb that
     could win the war against Germany was highly attractive to me.  While
     nothing required me to work more than eight hours a day, I spent at
     least sixteen in the average day on the bomb project.  I was very
     highly motivated simply because I thought it was important to win the
     war against Germany.
        By this time the Manhattan Project had started, and the government
     was backing it.  They hadn't backed any of our work before.  We were
     working for peanuts in terms of money.  Seaborg's group became one of
     the integral parts of the bomb project, and then Seaborg left to go to
     Chicago to the headquarters where the Fermi reactor--the first one--
     had run.  They were definitely going to go ahead and attempt to make a
     bomb out of plutonium.
        I stayed behind in Berkeley and became the leader of the residual
     Berkeley group that Seaborg had had before.  Seaborg and a fellow by
     the name of Arthur Wahl were the first two people in the world to work
     with plutonium, and I became the third.
        In order to make a bomb out of plutonium, we had to learn a hell of
     a lot of chemistry of plutonium, at a time when practically no
     plutonium was available.  We had never even seen it.  We were tracing
     its radioactivity around by its alpha radioactivity.
        But we learned quite a bit about the chemistry of plutonium in the
     year that followed.  About that time, J. Robert Oppenheimer[6] took a
     large group down to form the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico,
     which was to be a secret isolated lab, to go on with the bomb work.
     The other labs--in Berkeley, Chicago, and Columbia--were feeders to
     that project.
        Very shortly thereafter, Oppenheimer came up to see me and said,
     "We have a very desperate problem.  We need to have half a milligram
     of plutonium."
        That was something like ten times what had ever been available
     before.
        "You're going to have grams of it in a year," I said, "when the Oak
     Ridge reactor runs.  Why do you need half a milligram now when you're
     going to have two thousand times that in a year?"
        "We need that measurement," Oppenheimer said.  "We need it badly
     because it will alter the whole way the Project goes."
        "Well, what do you want?"
        "Well," he said, "I talked to Ernest Lawrence"--who was head of the
     Lawrence Laboratories--"and he has agreed to give up the cyclotron for
     as long as it will take to have you make some plutonium.  We figured
     out," he said, "that you could make half a milligram if we bombarded a
     ton of uranium for maybe a month or two."
        So after a few hours of thinking about it I finally agreed to do
     it, to place a ton of uranium nitrate--that's two thousand pounds--and
     then go through an intricate and complicated series of steps to purify
     the plutonium from all that uranium.  We were going to make half a
     milligram, less than a needle in a haystack.
        It was a big, dirty job, and dangerous, because uranium gets hot as
     a firecracker with radioactivity from all the fission products that
     accumulate--all the strontium-90 and all the cesium-137 and the
     radio-iodine, and everything else.  I didn't know enough to have good
     sense, but I knew that it was dangerous.
        To make a long story short, we bombarded the uranium night and day
     for six or seven weeks.  I set up a small factory and built it on the
     Berkeley campus.  In three weeks we isolated what turned out to be not
     half a milligram, but 1.2 milligrams of plutonium.  Pure.  In about a
     quarter of a teaspoon of liquid, out of this ton.  I gave it to the
     Los Alamos Lab.
        So I was the first chemist in the world to isolate milligram
     quantities of plutonium, and the third chemist in the world to work
     with it.  We knew nothing of its biological problems.
        I got a good radiation dose in doing that work.  I feel that since
     that time, with each year that's passed, I consider myself among the
     lucky, because some of the people who worked closely with me in the
     Lawrence Radiation Lab died quite prematurely of leukemia and cancer.
     I'm still at a very high risk, compared to other people because of the
     dose I got.  I probably got a hundred, hundred and fifty rems in all
     my work.  That's a lot of radiation.  And damn stupid, but nobody was
     thinking about biology and medicine at that point.  We were thinking
     of the war.  So we did it.

        {For the next few years Gofman continued working to develop
     processes for separating plutonium.  "It was already clear that we
     were going to have big reactors running at Hanford, Washington, to try
     to make enough pounds of plutonium to make a bomb, and they'd need to
     be able to separate it."  The process Gofman had worked out in
     Berkeley to separate one milligram of plutonium was a candidate
     process.  After working intensively on the project, Gofman decided in
     1944 that he was no longer needed.  "I felt that from here on out it
     was strictly engineering work.  We didn't know if the war would last
     one year or ten.  I didn't want to do engineering work--not that I was
     against the bomb or anything--I just felt the project didn't need my
     kind of talent any more.
        Gofman applied to the second-year class at the University of
     California Medical School and was accepted in their accelerated
     program.  He was still a medical student when the bombs were dropped
     on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  "When I heard the announcement of the
     explosion of an atomic bomb, I knew they'd completed the project.
     That was my only reaction."  He finished medical school in 1946 and
     did his internship in internal medicine at the University of
     California Hospital in San Francisco.  Then in 1947 he was offered an
     assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley,
     which he accepted.
        Gofman remained in that position, teaching and doing research from
     1948 to about 1961.  He made a number of major discoveries working
     with cholesterol and lipoproteins.[7]  By 1954 he had moved up to a
     full professorship and had become internationally known as a result of
     numerous publications on coronary heart disease.  Then something
     happened which altered the course of things for him.
        Early in the 1950s a controversial decision had been made to set up
     a second weapons laboratory in the United States.[8]  The first
     weapons laboratory was at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic
     bomb had first been designed and tested.  The second, the Lawrence
     Livermore National Lab, was set up at Livermore, fifty miles east of
     the University of California at Berkeley under the aegis of the
     University's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, of which Gofman was a
     member.  Much of Gofman's funding at the Lawrence Radiation Lab came
     from the Atomic Energy Commission, although at the time Gofman was not
     doing any radiation work himself.  With the decision to set up a new
     weapons laboratory, there were two parts to the Lawrence Lab--one at
     Berkeley and one at Livermore.}

        Ernest Lawrence called me in one day.  We were good personal
     friends.  "I'm worried about the guys out at Livermore," he said.  "I
     think they may do some things to harm themselves.  You're the only
     person who knows the chemistry and the medicine and the lab structure.
     Could you do me a favor and go out there a day or two a week and just
     roam around and see what the hell they're doing, and see that they do
     it safely?  If you don't like anything they're doing, you can tell
     them that your word is my word, that either they change, or they can
     leave the lab."
        So I decided to do it.
        While I was out there--to have something to do between times of
     roaming around--I organized a Medical Department at the Livermore Lab.
     It was then a lab of about fifteen hundred people.  It's now about
     seven thousand.  I organized the Medical Department and served as the
     medical director.  But I was there only a day or two a week.  The rest
     of the time I was in Berkeley teaching.
        In the course of my wandering around I got to know all the
     weaponeers who were working there.  I worked with them, helped them
     with some of their calculations on health effects and problems of
     nuclear war, and so forth.  They were making bombs, new bombs,
     hydrogen bombs, designing all the bombs within the nuclear subs, for
     missiles and so forth.
        I stayed out there until, one day, in 1957, I thought, I've done
     this long enough.  Besides, one of my former students, Dr. Max Biggs,
     had come back as assistant director of the Medical Department.  It was
     time for me to go back to Berkeley, to teach and also return to my
     research.  By about 1960 I decided that, although there was still a
     lot left to do in heart disease, the excitement of my early
     discoveries, the night and day work, wasn't there any more.  I'm not
     very good at dotting I's and crossing T's.  If it's not something
     really new and unknown, it's not something I want to do.
        By then, two of my students were on the faculty and were doing very
     nice work.  So I said, "I'm going to get out of the heart disease work
     totally.  You take over."  They did, and they're still there, doing
     fine work.  I shifted my major emphasis to the study of trace elements
     in biology and worked hard on that from about 1959 to 1962.
        In 1962 I got a call from John Foster, who was by then the director
     of the Lawrence Livermore Lab.
        He said, "I'd like to have you come out."  I'd met with him and
     worked with him during the years that I'd been at Livermore.  He said,
     "We had a very interesting approach from the Atomic Energy Commission.
     They're on the hot seat because of this 1960s series of tests which
     clobbered the Utah milkshed[9] with radio-iodine.  And they've been
     getting a lot of flak.  They think that maybe if we had a biology
     group working with the weaponeers at Livermore, such things could be
     averted in some way--like you'd advise us not to do this or to do this
     differently."
        And I said, "So?"
        He said, "They're willing to set up something very nice--like a
     biology and medicine lab at Livermore, with a very adequate budget,
     starting at three to three and a half million dollars a year.  You
     know, we've got the best computer facilities in the country.  We've
     got engineering talent coming out of our ears, and electronic and
     mechanical engineering.  So you'd have support.  What do you think of
     coming out here and setting that up?"
        "That's crazy," I said.  "I'm perfectly happy in Berkeley.  I've
     got my research.  I'm up to my neck in my trace element research.
     I've gone down from having to supervise fifty people in my heart
     disease project to where I now have three people working with me.  And
     it's just the way I like to work.  I can be in the lab, and I don't
     have to think about administrative details.  And now you're telling me
     to come out and head a division and be back in the administrative
     field.  I'll be out of the lab--"
        "Oh, no, no, you won't be out of the lab.  Just organize it.  And
     after a year or two you can get back in the lab full time, but under
     circumstances that are much better than you'd ever have."
        "Well, I can tell you one thing," I said.  "I wouldn't consider
     giving up my professorship to take this thing, because I don't trust
     the Atomic Energy Commission."
        He didn't seem surprised at that.
        I said, "I don't think they really want to know the hazards of
     radiation.  I think it's important to know, but I don't think *they*
     want to know."[10]
        I kicked around the idea of going back to Livermore for a while.
     Sometimes you have a lapse of cerebration, and in one of those weaker
     moments I finally agreed that I would go to Livermore and do that job,
     because Johnny Foster said, "Listen, the AEC can't fight the
     University of California, the Regents, and this lab.  And I can tell
     you one thing, if they try to prevent you from telling the truth about
     what you find about radiation, we'll back you and the Regents will
     back you, and they'll just have to eat it."
        Well, those were nice words.  I didn't completely believe them.
     But the Regents wrote me.  The president of the university wrote me a
     letter of terms, stating that if for whatever reason I was unhappy
     about the Livermore set-up, or the AEC's behavior, I could return full
     time to my teaching with no further explanation.
        So I cut my teaching down to 10 percent, and took two posts at
     Livermore--one as head of a new bio-medical division, the exact
     mission of which was to calculate and do the experimentation needed to
     evaluate the health effects of radiation and radionuclide release from
     weapons testing, nuclear war, radioactivity in medicine, nuclear
     power, etc.--all of the atomic energy programs.  And I was given a
     three million dollar budget to start.  I pulled in ultimately about
     thirty-five scientists--some who'd worked with me before at the
     university, some from outside--and finally built up a division which
     was one hundred and fifty people total, with engineers, technicians,
     and so forth, including the thirty-five senior scientists.  I also
     became an associate director of the entire laboratory.  There were
     nine associate directors and a director.  Anything in biology or
     medicine was my general area.  As an associate director, once a week I
     was at directors' meetings that concerned all lab matters.  So I was
     involved in the bomb testing and everything else.

------
  [6] J. Robert Oppenheimer:  a nuclear physicist involved in the Manhattan
      Project, and selected to head the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to
      lead the race for the atomic bomb.  A respected scientist, he was
      later accused, in 1954, of being a Soviet agent.

  [7] "lipoproteins:"  all the fatty materials in the body that are not
      soluable in water, such as fat and cholesterol, are not transported
      by themselves in the blood, but combine with certain proteins.
      These proteins are called lipoproteins.

  [8] J. Robert Oppenheimer opposed this second weapons laboratory.  Edward
      Teller, a nuclear physicist involved in the Manhattan Project and
      credited with being "the father of the H-bomb," strongly supported
      the new lab.  Teller won.

  [9] "milkshed:"  an area where dairy cattle graze and provide milk.  The
      1961-1962 series of atomic tests resulted in radioactive fallout
      being carried to Utah.  Between 1958 and 1961 Eisenhower and
      Khrushchev had informally stopped testing.  Testing resumed in 1961
      and was finally banned in the atmosphere in 1963.

 [10] The Atomic Energy Commission "had tried to ridicule Linus Pauling's
      calculations about strontium-90 and carbon-14 in the late fifties--for
      which Pauling got the Nobel Peace Prize.  They said his calculations
      were wrong.  I even got caught up in that mythology--thinking that
      Pauling might be wrong about the low-radiation doses causing all these
      diseases.  I took the wrong position in 1957 on Pauling's work,
      saying, `Since we don't know the answer for sure, we should not impede
      progress'"--John Gofman.
------



        A Visit to the Washington Office of the Atomic Energy Commission

        A couple of disturbing things happened.  Within a few weeks after
     I'd gone out to Livermore, I had a call from an Atomic Energy
     Commission official, who said, "You've got to come into Washington
     next week."
        "What for?"
        "I can't tell you over the telephone."
        "Sure, I'll come."
        I got there.  There were five other guys from AEC-supported labs
     around the country assembled in a room, and this AEC official.
        "The reason I called you together," he said, "is we have a problem.
     We've got a man in the bio-medical division in the Washington AEC
     office by the name of Dr. Harold Knapp who has made some calculations
     of the true dose that the people of Utah got from the radio-iodine
     from the bomb tests in 1962.  And he says that the doses were
     something like one hundred times higher than we've publicly
     announced."
        So this group of six people, of which I was one, said, "What do you
     want us to do?"
        "We must stop that publication," he said.  "If we don't stop that
     publication, the credibility of the AEC will just disappear, because
     it will be stated that we've been lying."[11]
        I said, "Well, what can we do?  What do you want us to do?  If
     Knapp has that evidence, then he ought to publish it."
        "We can't afford to have him publish that evidence," he said.
        "But if it's right, we can't stop him.  It's not our job to stop
     him."
        He said, "Well, will you do this?  Talk to him.  Look at the data,
     and see if you can convince him that it would be better not to publish
     it."
        So he brought Knapp in the room and he left.  Knapp was surly, and
     properly so.  Because here was a guy that did a straightforward
     scientific job, and he had this evidence, and he wanted to write it
     up.
        And he said to the group, "What's wrong with what I've done?"
        We hadn't even seen his data yet.
        He gave us his data and said, "Do you think I'm too high?  Or do
     you think I'm right?  Or too low?"
        We looked at the data, and as a matter of fact, there were a few
     minor technical questions the people had to ask him, and then we
     concluded that the guy had a very good scientific story and it ought
     to be published.  So we told Knapp he could leave, and the AEC person
     came back in.
        "Did you get anywhere?" he asked.
        "Yeah," we said, "we think Knapp ought to publish his data and you
     face the music."
        He was very disappointed.  But since the committee wasn't going to
     do anything--this is a matter of record now--do anything to help the
     AEC try to suppress scientific truth, Knapp did publish.  And the sky
     didn't fall.  Unfortunately, in this society it takes a hell of a lot
     more than revealing some awful things for the sky to fall.
        But it taught me something that was very, very different from what
     Glenn Seaborg had told me.  (By now my former professor was chairman
     of the Atomic Energy Commission.)  When we had signed the contract for
     the Livermore work, I told him, "You know, Glenn, you ought to think
     twice about my being the head of this thing.  Because I don't really
     give a damn about the AEC programs, and if our research shows that
     certain things are hazardous, we're going to say so.  And so why don't
     you think twice about me taking this job?"
        "Oh, Jack," he said, "all we want is the truth."
        And here within a matter of a few weeks one of his chief men at the
     AEC is asking us to help suppress the truth.  So I came back to the
     lab and I told Johnny Foster, "Well, the first encounter with
     Washington was to help with a coverup."
        And he said, "Well, how did you handle it?"
        "We told them to go to hell."
        He said, "That's fine.  That's fine."
        So there was no further flap from that.  But it taught me something
     about the Washington office--that they would lie, coverup, minimize
     hazards.  My worst suspicions were confirmed.

------
 [11] "When I told them in '62 how high the dosage levels were, the deputy
      director of the Division of Operational Safety had this pitch:  `Well,
      look, we've told these people all along that it's safe and we can't
      change our story now, we'll be in trouble.'  And I told him, `Well, I
      know you guys have been telling them that, but I haven't, and I'm
      supposed to be studying fallout.  So don't tell me what answers I
      have to get"--Dr. Harold Knapp, former member of AEC fallout studies
      branch.  In Anne Fadiman, "The Downwind People:  A Thousand Americans
      Sue for Damage Brought on by Atomic Fallout," "Life," June 1980, p. 39.
------



                      Plowshare:  A Minor Disagreement[12]

        There was a project called "Plowshare"--peaceful uses of nuclear
     bombs.  Big project.  They wanted to dig a new Panama Canal with 315
     megatons of hydrogen bombs.  The current Panama Canal is not too good
     for large ships, and they were thinking of digging a deeper canal.
     They were going to implant hydrogen bombs and blow a big hole in the
     ground.  Two places were being considered--Panama and Colombia--and
     negotiations were under way with those countries.  They would place
     more bombs and blow them up, and finally dig this whole trench with
     bombs.  But all the radioactivity would spew into the atmosphere and
     over the countryside.
        One of my first assignments was to figure the biological hazard of
     that, and I concluded by 1965 that the project was biological
     insanity.  Just an awful thing for the biosphere.  Kill a lot of
     people from radiation, from cancer eventually.  Project Plowshare.
     Turning our swords into plowshares.
        Even with the fragmentary knowledge we had then, I opposed the
     project--which did not earn me a lot of favor with the Atomic Energy
     Commission.  They thought I was being obstructionist.  But my
     objections didn't stop it at all.
        What stopped it were U.S. efforts to negotiate a test-ban treaty.
     And the ability to have a test-ban treaty with ongoing shots for so-
     called peaceful nuclear explosives could always be shots that were
     really for military purposes.  So they elected to stop that project
     temporarily.  It was really nothing to do with the biological hazard
     that made them quit.  It was because of these political negotiations
     to keep other countries who didn't yet have bombs from developing
     them.  As though the ones that do have them can be trusted for
     anything.
        In any case, in 1965 the bio-medical division got known in the lab
     as "the enemy within" because we opposed things like Plowshare.  But
     it was really fairly good-natured.  In no way did it interfere with my
     status in the lab.  I did give up the headship of the department after
     two and a half years.  I appointed one of my junior associates as
     chairman of the division so I could go back into the lab.  I had a new
     project by then, on cancer and chromosomes and radiation.  It was an
     area I was very interested in, and a new one for me.
        Things went quietly until 1969.

------
 [12] See Chapter 3, pp. 68-69 [the section from the chapter on Ernest J.
      Sternglass entitled "A Note About the Plowshare Program" --ratitor].
------



                         Sternglass Challenges the AEC

        By 1969 Johnny Foster had gone on to head the Defense Department
     Research and Engineering, under McNamara, secretary of defense, and he
     was no longer head of the lab.
        That year a man by the name of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, who had been
     studying infant mortality, published some papers saying that something
     on the order of four hundred thousand children might have died from
     radioactive fallout from the bomb testing.  And "Esquire" published an
     article called "The Death of all Children" based on Sternglass's
     work.[13]
        The AEC was desperately worried about this because they were just
     then trying to get the antiballistic missile through Congress, and
     they thought if Sternglass's work was accepted, it might kill the ABM
     in the Senate.  So they sent Sternglass's paper to all the labs.  I
     got it, looked at it quickly, and wasn't sure what to make of it.
        But Arthur Tamplin, one of my colleagues, was much more into that
     thing than I was.  And I said to him, "Art, would you look at this?"
        He came back about three weeks later and said, "I think Sternglass
     is wrong.  His interpretation of that curve is not right."[14]
        I'll say today--ten years later--the new evidence coming out
     suggests to me that Sternglass may have been right.  But Tamplin's
     argument seemed good to me at the time.  I felt he should write it up
     as a report.  And he did, as an article to be published in the
     "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists," stating that he thought
     Sternglass was wrong, and since people had raised the question, he
     estimated how many deaths had been caused by fallout.  His estimate
     was four thousand, not four hundred thousand.
        At Livermore, Tamplin became the "hero of the lab."  He had
     countered this man who was saying that something was going to hurt the
     ABM program, which the lab was heavily involved in.  So Tamplin was an
     absolute hero, even to someone like Edward Teller, who all through
     that period was also an associate director of the Livermore Lab.[15]
        Tamplin wrote the paper and submitted it through the lab, to tell
     Washington what he thought of the Sternglass thing.
        I saw one of the top lab officials with whom I got along very well,
     and he said, "Something's wrong.  I don't know what's going on, but
     Washington AEC has called me up.  They're very disturbed about
     Tamplin's paper and don't want him to publish it the way it is."
        "*Disturbed* about Tamplin's paper!"  I said.  "He's the hero of
     the day.  He saved their neck on the ABM program.  What in the world
     can they be disturbed about?"
        "Look, Jack," he said, "I don't know what they're disturbed about.
     It's not my area.  Would you do me a favor and call this fellow at the
     AEC?"
        So I called the AEC and told Arthur Tamplin, "You better be on the
     other line.  Just in case.  It's your work they're concerned about."
        On the phone I said, "What's on your mind about Tamplin's study?"
        "Oh," the AEC official said, "we like Tamplin's study."
        I said, "Gee, I heard you were terribly disturbed about Tamplin."
        "No, no.  We like Tamplin's study.  *Very* well."
        "So what's the problem?" I said.
        "Well, Tamplin has proved that Sternglass is wrong, and that four
     hundred thousand children did not die from the fallout.  But he's
     decided to put in that paper that four thousand did die.  And we think
     that his refutation of Sternglass ought to be in one article--like the
     "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists," which is widely read--and that
     his four thousand estimate ought to be in a much more sophisticated
     journal."
        "Well," I said, "I've talked to Arthur about this, and he says that
     doesn't make sense, because if you publish an article saying
     Sternglass is wrong, the first thing anyone will ask you is what do
     you think the *right* number is?"
        "No, the two things are just separate," he said.
        Arthur Tamplin was on the phone.  I said, "Art, I don't think it
     makes sense."
        "No, it doesn't make sense to me."
        I said, "What in the world is the sense in separating these two
     things?"
        And this AEC fellow said, "Well, one ought to be in a scientific
     journal. "
        I said, "What you're fundamentally asking for is a whitewash.  And
     for my money, you can go to hell."
        That's where we ended the conversation.
        So I saw my friend at the lab, and he said, "Did you call
     Washington?"
        And I said, "Yeah."
        "What was it?"
        "They wanted a whitewash of Tamplin's four thousand number."  I
     explained it to him.
        He said, "What did you tell them?"
        "I told them to go to hell."
        And he said, "Fine."
        That was April 1969.  And I never heard a word more about it.
     Tamplin published that paper.

------
 [13] See Chapter 3, p. 61 [the end of the "Westinghouse:  1952 - 1967"
      section of the chapter on Ernest J. Sternglass --ratitor].

 [14] The curve showed that infant mortality in the United States had been
      steadily declining, and that the decline had leveled off right after
      the atomic bomb testing.  Dr. Sternglass's interpretation of this
      leveling off was that it was a result of more babies dying from
      radioactive fallout from atmospheric bomb testing. (See Sternglass,
      "Low-Level Radiation.")

 [15] "In truth, Edward Teller ran the Livermore Lab, but for public
      purposes he liked it better to be known as only an associate
      director"--John Gofman.
------



                 The Harassment Starts:  Low-Level Radiation

        {During the 1950s and 1960s the, Atomic Energy Commission maintained
     there was a "safe threshold" of radiation below which no health
     effects could be detected.  This so-called safe threshold provided the
     justification for exposing American servicemen to atomic bomb tests,
     for permitting workers in nuclear plants to receive a yearly dose of
     radiation, and for operating nuclear power plants which released
     radioactivity to the environment and exposed the general population
     even during normal operation.  But in the 1960s evidence began to come
     in from around the world--from the atomic bomb survivors,[16] from
     some people in Britain who had received medical radiation[17]--with
     estimates of the numbers of cancers occurring per unit of radiation.
     Gofman and Tamplin assembled these figures and concluded that there
     was no evidence for the AEC's so-called safe threshold of radiation.
     In fact, they estimated that the cancer risk of radiation was roughly
     twenty times as bad as the most pessimistic estimate previously made.
        When Gofman was invited to be a featured speaker at the Institute
     for Electrical, Electronic Engineers meeting (IEEE) in October 1969,
     he and Tamplin decided to present a paper on the true effects of
     radiation "So we gave this paper,[18] and said two things.  One, there
     would be twenty times as many cancers per unit of radiation as anyone
     had predicted before, and two, we could find no evidence of a safe
     amount of radiation--you should assume it's proportional to dose all
     the way up and down the dose scale."  The paper did not attract much
     public attention, only a small article in the "San Francisco
     Chronicle" and nothing in the national press.  Senator Muskie was
     holding hearings on nuclear energy at that time[19] and invited Gofman
     to address the Senate Committee on Public Works.  Muskie did not know
     about the paper given before the IEEE but invited Gofman because of
     his position as associate director of the Lawrence Livermore
     Laboratory.  Gofman gave an amplification of the paper he and Tamplin
     had presented at the IEEE meeting entitled, "Federal Radiation
     Guidelines Protection or Disaster?"  This was picked up by the
     Washington press.}

        Within two weeks I began to hear all kinds of nasty rumblings that
     we were ridiculous, we were incompetent.
        Here I'd been getting a budget of three to three and a half million
     dollars a year for seven years, and suddenly I'm hearing rumors out of
     Washington that my work is incompetent.  That wasn't a criticism of
     me.  That was a criticism of them.  If they give someone three million
     a year for seven years and in two weeks they suddenly decide he's
     incompetent, what's wrong with them for seven years?
        It was obviously related to what we'd said.
        A guy from Newhouse News Service phoned me and said, "I have a
     statement from a high official on the Atomic Energy Commission, and I
     asked him about your cancer calculations, and he said that you don't
     care about cancer at all.  All you're trying to do is undermine the
     national defense."
        I said "Me, undermine the national defense?"
        He said, "What do you have to say about that?"
        "Nothing."
        "You're not going to deny it?"
        I said, "Do you think I would lower myself to deny a statement like
     that?"
        He said, "You wouldn't be considering a lawsuit for libel if I
     publish that statement?"
        "What I consider doing is my business," I said.  "You're a
     journalist.  You've got a story.  If you'd like to publish that story,
     you go ahead and you take your chances, but I'm not going to tell you
     whether I have in mind a libel suit or anything else.  You just do
     what you want with it."
        "You're not going to deny the story?"
        "No.  I'm not even going to comment on something that low."
        He never published the story.
        The next thing we experienced was this.  I'd had an invitation
     about four months before, to come and give a talk in late December
     '69.  It was to be a symposium on nuclear power and all the questions
     about it.  And I'd said to the person inviting me, "You know, the
     kinds of things you want from me are much better handled by Arthur
     Tamplin, because that's been the area he's worked on.  Instead of me,
     could he give the talk?"
        "Oh, that's just fine," they said.  "We wanted to be sure to have
     one of your representatives there."
        So he was scheduled to give the talk on December 28.
        Well, this friend of mine at the lab asked to talk to me right
     after the Muskie hearing.  And he said, "Jack, I have a problem.  The
     AEC has contacted me, and they're very disturbed about your IEEE talk
     and your Muskie testimony."
        "What are they disturbed about?  I've sent them the paper, sent it
     out to a hundred scientists.  If they're disturbed, they can tell me
     what's wrong with it."
        "No, no.  They're not saying that," he said.  "What they're saying
     is that it's just embarrassing to them to have these things given at a
     meeting and then in testimony before they've had a chance to review
     it.  If you would just in the future do me one favor, send them your
     papers--your testimony--before you give it, I think the whole problem
     would be solved.  They just don't want to be caught unawares."
        "Well," I said, "that's very reasonable.  Sometimes we have a
     scientific paper ready, sometimes we don't, to give it to them three
     weeks in advance or so.  But we'll try."
        I talked to Arthur Tamplin.  He said, "Sure, what do I care.  They
     can have it."
        His paper was about a month from delivery before the American
     Association for the Advancement of Science.  So I said, "Would you
     give me a copy of it for the lab to send to the AEC so they can scan
     it?"
        So he did.  Three days later Tamplin came into my office mad as
     hell, and threw this thing down on my desk.
        Apparently someone in the lab had done some editing on it, and the
     editing was such that all that was left was the prepositions and
     conjunctions.  All the meat was gone.  This hadn't even gone to
     Washington.  It was our own laboratory that had censored it!  My own
     colleagues who were going to protect us from censorship.
        I went over to my friend and said, "What the hell is going on?
     When you asked me if we'd give the papers to the AEC in advance, I
     told you I wouldn't tolerate any censorship.  And you said, `Jack, do
     you think I would tolerate any censorship?'"
        He said, "Jack, be realistic."
        "I'm very realistic," I said.  "We're just not going to tolerate
     any form of censorship."
        "You're overwrought."
        "Listen, you know what I'm going to do?  I'm calling up the guy
     from that meeting from the American Association.  I'm going to tell
     him what has been told to Tamplin--that if he gives the paper
     unaltered, he cannot say he's a member of the Livermore Lab, he must
     pay his own travel expenses, and cannot use a lab secretary to type
     the paper."
        That's what the lab had told him!
        I said, "I'm going to call the AAAS[20] and tell them I'll send a
     letter instead of Tamplin going to the meeting.  In the letter I'm
     going to say that the Livermore Laboratory is a scientific whorehouse
     and anything coming out of the Livermore Lab is not to be trusted."
        "Jack, you're just excited," he said.  "Go home.  Think it over.
     Let's talk tomorrow."
        I said, "I'm really very cool, but if you want to talk about it
     tomorrow, that's okay.  You know what I'm going to do."
        The next day he came over to my office.  "Well, did you get some
     sleep and think it over?"
        "Sure, I got some sleep, and I've thought it over.  And I also took
     care of what I told you I would."
        He said, "What do you mean?"
        "I called the guy from AAAS and told him what I was going to do,
     that I was going to submit this letter to be read before the assembled
     public meeting, that the Livermore Lab is a scientific whorehouse and
     practices censorship."
        He turned all colors and just stormed out of my office.
        Well, the upshot was the lab backed off on virtually everything--
     Tamplin could have lab funds and so forth.  A couple of minor
     modifications to the paper, which Tamplin agreed to and they removed
     the censorship.  So my statement was never read and Tamplin did go to
     the meeting.

------
 [16] See Chapter 2, p. 38 ["Author's Note" section from the chapter on
      Rosalie Bertell] and Chapter 3, p. 62 [first half of "The Decision to
      Leave Westinghouse" from the chapter on Ernest Sternglass --ratitor].

 [17] Dr. Alice Stewart's epidemiological study showed that pregnant women
      receiving diagnostic X-rays had children with a higher risk of
      leukemia and cancer.  See Alice Stewart, Josefine Webb, and David
      Hewitt, "A Survey of Childhood Malignancies," "British Medical Journal"
      (1958):  1495-1508, and Alice Stewart and George Kneale, "Radiation
      Dose Effects in Relation to Obstetric X-rays and Childhood Cancers,"
      "Lancet" (197O):  1185-1188.

 [18] Gofman, "Low Dose Radiation, Chromosomes and Cancer," presented at the
      Institute for Electrical Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Nuclear Science
      Symposium, San Francisco, 29 October 1969, pp. 640-652.

 [19] Gofman, "Federal Radiation Council Guidelines for Radiation Exposure
      of the Population at Large:  Protection or Disaster" presented to
      the Senate Committee on Public Works, 18 November 1969, in
      "Environmental Effects of Producing Electric Power," pp. 695-706.

 [20] AAAS:  American Association for the Advancement of Science.
------



                     The Decision to Fight:  January 1970

        {Gofman had resigned from his position as associate director of the
     laboratory six months prior to this episode with Tamplin, although he
     remained in the Livermore Laboratory as a research associate.  "The
     resignation of my associate directorship had nothing to do with
     politics.   I just thought it was time to go back to teaching."
        Gofman was now teaching part-time at Berkeley and spending half of
     his time at Livermore doing research.  In January 197O he learned that
     Tamplin had been stripped of twelve of his thirteen staff people.}

        I went back to my friend at the lab, and said, "You son of a bitch!
     What you're doing is so obviously just harassment to please the Atomic
     Energy Commission.  I didn't think you could stoop this low."
        "Jack, it's not that," he said.  "Tamplin didn't want those
     people."
        "Don't tell me Tamplin didn't want those people.  I know what
     Tamplin wants.  And he didn't want to lose any of them.  He's got a
     lot of work to do, and so do I on the radiation hazard question.
     You've looked at our calculations.  What the hell are you harassing
     Tamplin for?"
        "It's not harassment," he said.  "It's just that the laboratory
     budget was cut."
        "The laboratory budget was cut 5 percent and Tamplin was cut 95
     percent.  That doesn't make any sense."
        But it stuck.  I wasn't able to undo it.  I wrote a letter of
     complaint to Glenn Seaborg, and he said, "I can't interfere with lab
     management."  Which was bullshit too.
        Then I started hearing that there were a lot of people from the
     electric utility industry who were insulting us and our work.  They
     were saying our cancer calculations from radiation were ridiculous,
     that they were poorly based scientifically, that there was plenty of
     evidence that we were wrong.  Things like that.  So I wondered what
     was going on there.  At that point--January 1970--I hadn't said
     anything about nuclear power itself.  In fact, I hadn't even thought
     about it.  It was stupid not to have thought about it.  I just
     wondered, Why is the electric utility industry attacking us?
        I began to look at all the ads that I had just cursorily seen in
     "Newsweek" and "Time" and "Life," two-page spreads from the utilities,
     talking about their wonderful nuclear power program.  And it was all
     going to be done "safely," because they were never going to give
     radiation above the safe threshold.
        And I realized that the entire nuclear power program was based on a
     fraud--namely, that there was a "safe" amount of radiation, a
     permissible dose that wouldn't hurt anybody.  I talked to Art Tamplin.
     "They have to destroy us, Art.  Because they can't live with our
     argument that there's no safe threshold."
        He said, "Yeah, I gathered that."
        "So," I said, "we have a couple of choices.  We can back off, which
     I'm not interested in doing and you're not interested in doing, or we
     can leave the lab and I go back to my professorship and you get a job
     elsewhere, or we can fight them.  My choice is to fight them."
        He said, "I agree."


                          Congress Hears the Evidence

        The system used to discredit scientists like us is usually to call
     you before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy--it's a Congressional
     committee--and they let you present your evidence, and then they get
     all their lackey scientists, the ones who are heavily supported, to
     come in and say why you're wrong.
        So I got the call just like I expected to from the Joint Committee.
     Would I come in on January 18, 1970 to testify?
        I said, "Art, just as expected, they're ready to slice our throats
     at a Congressional hearing.  We've got a lot more evidence that's sort
     of undigested than we had when you gave your paper and we gave the one
     at the Muskie hearings."
        In about three weeks we wrote fourteen scientific papers.  I'd
     never done anything like that in my life.  And we learned new things.
     Stuff was falling together.  We took on the radium workers.  We took
     some data on breast cancer.  There was a whole study of radium workers
     and their deaths.  A guy at MIT had said they wouldn't get cancer
     below the safe threshold.  We pointed out his papers were wrong.
     There were the uranium miners, who were getting lung cancer.  And we
     analysed that and showed how it also supported the idea that there was
     no safe dose.  We studied the dog data.  Studies were being done at
     the Utah laboratory and sponsored by the AEC--they were irradiating
     dogs and studying how many cancers appeared.  We took a whole bunch of
     new human and animal data and wrote fourteen additional papers that
     buttressed our position, that indicated, as a matter of fact, that
     we'd underestimated the hazard of radiation when we'd given the Muskie
     testimony.
        We were going to take all this as evidence before the Joint
     Committee.  But I wanted to be sure that our material got out to about
     a hundred key scientists in the country in case the AEC tried to
     prevent us access via the journals.
        --That's always something you have to worry about.  The journals
     can easily not publish what you want to say.  It's a simple technique.
     If the journals have editors and staffs supported by an industry or
     government agency, you can be blocked from getting your things
     published.
        So to be sure that people knew what we were saying, we sent our
     material around to about a hundred separate scientists to let them
     know what we were doing.
        I went to the lab and said, "I want 400 copies Xeroxed."  We had
     put together 178 pages.
        The dwarves who occupy such positions of course immediately ran to
     the master and said, "Gofman wants 400 copies of this!  Do we have to
     do it?"
        And so he came to me. "What's this 400 copies of 178 pages?"
        "Well, the chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy has
     requested that we testify.  We need 200 copies to send them, and I
     need 200 copies for other distribution.  If you prefer, I'll call up
     Mr. Holifield, the chairman of the Joint Committee, and tell him the
     laboratory even wants to censor things from Congress."
        "Oh, no, no.  Don't do that!" he said.  "We'll do the papers.  I
     just wanted to know what you needed them for."
        So we shipped off our 200 copies to the Joint Committee.  Their
     purpose was, of course, to distribute the papers to the people that
     they were going to get to come in and attack us.
        January 28 was the day.  I presented the evidence based on these
     fourteen additional papers.
        At the end of the testimony, Mr. Holifield said, "Now I certainly
     appreciate your presenting this material, Dr. Gofman.  You realize
     that with 178 pages of testimony we haven't had all the time it would
     take to digest it in detail, but we'll invite you back sometime."
        They didn't have any answers.  Their people were just caught flat-
     footed, and meanwhile we'd gotten things out to a lot of people--a
     much stronger story.  Their little escapade failed.
        One of the guys we had mailed the papers to called me up.  He was
     in the Public Health Service, in a division separate from AEC.  It was
     on a weekend.
        "I've got something disturbing to tell you," he said, "but if I
     tell you and you ever want to use it legally, I'll deny that I told
     you."
        "That sounds like terribly useful information," I said.  "I can't
     use it, but you think I ought to know it.  Well, go ahead."
        "Someone from the AEC came to my house last weekend," he said.  "He
     lives near me.  And he said, `We need you to help destroy Gofman and
     Tamplin.'  And I told him you'd sent me a copy of your paper, and I
     didn't necessarily agree with every number you'd put in, but I didn't
     have any major difficulties with it either.  It looked like sound
     science.  And--you won't believe this--but do you know what he said to
     me?  He said, `I don't care whether Gofman and Tamplin are *right* or
     not, scientifically.  It's necessary to destroy them.  The reason is,'
     he said, `by the time those people get the cancer and the leukemia,
     you'll be retired and I'll be retired, so what the hell difference
     does it make *right now*?  We need our nuclear power program, and
     unless we destroy Gofman and Tamplin, the nuclear power program is in
     real hazard from what they say.'  And I told him no.  I refused.  I
     just want you to know if you ever mention this, I'll deny it.  I'll
     deny that I ever told you this, and I'll deny that he said it to me."
        "Well," I said, "it's nice to know.  We realized that we were in a
     war to the death, and that there was no honor, no honesty in the whole
     thing, but that's the way it is.  You're not going to stand behind
     what you found out.  That's okay with me too."


                    Abolishing the Atomic Energy Commission

        By now I was convinced that nuclear power was absurd and
     fraudulent, that there was no safe level of radiation.  Tamplin and I
     were writing and giving talks against nuclear power.  In June 1970 I
     gave testimony at the Pennsylvania state legislature, recommending
     that all new construction of nuclear power plants cease--at least for
     five years--till the whole problem was sorted out.  Our stock at the
     Livermore Lab was zero.
        But we couldn't get them to fire us.  They wouldn't do that.  If
     they fired us, it would be an admission that they couldn't tolerate
     the truth.  We put out more and more reports that were scientifically
     damaging to the atomic energy program.  Meanwhile our Muskie
     testimony[21] had gotten very wide notice in the press, and Ralph
     Nader had entered the action and was asking Muskie what he was going
     to do about this testimony if it was so damaging to the nuclear power
     program.  Muskie contacted Robert Finch, secretary of HEW, and said,
     "What are you going to do about this study of Gofman and Tamplin's?"
        So Finch went to the National Academy of Sciences and said, "I call
     for a study of whether Gofman and Tamplin are right," and awarded the
     National Academy three million dollars to do a study.  Some sixty
     scientists were invited to participate.
        At no time did the National Academy of Sciences invite either
     Tamplin or me to be on this committee or contact us--from 1970 to
     today.  But in 1972 the National Academy of Sciences published a
     report called the BEIR Report--Biological Effects of Ionizing
     Radiation--a long, thick report, in which they walked around the
     problem as best they could, and finally concluded that we were too
     high between four and ten times.  But if you read the fine print, they
     were admitting that we might just be right.[22]
        When that came out, everybody realized that the AEC was not worth a
     damn.  By then the AEC had gotten themselves into another flap.  Henry
     Kendall and Dan Ford of the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that
     the AEC didn't know whether the Emergency Core Cooling System would
     ever work or wouldn't.[23]  The Emergency Core Cooling System was the
     last barrier of safety in a major nuclear accident.  This further
     damaged the credibility of the AEC.
        Those two events--the conflict with Ford and Kendall and the
     conflict with us--finally led them to realize they could no longer use
     the words "Atomic Energy Commission," and so the government abolished
     the AEC.
        "We are now solving the problem," they said.  "We'll create two new
     agencies--ERDA (Energy Research and Development Agency) and NRC
     (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)."
        ERDA was supposed to promote the development of atomic energy, and
     NRC was supposed to concern itself with public safety.  The idea was
     that it was the promotion of nuclear energy that made the AEC's safety
     work so poor.  The new NRC was only supposed to involve itself in
     safety--no promotion.
        Which turned out to be one of the greatest lies in history.

------
 [21] Hearings on nuclear energy were held in 1969 by Senator Muskie.
      Dr. Gofman delivered a paper entitled, "Federal Radiation
      Guidelines:  Protection or Disaster?" which was an amplification of
      the talk given at the IEEE meeting three weeks before.

 [22] National Academy of Sciences, "The Effects on Populations of Exposure
      to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation," report of the Advisory
      Committee on the Biological Effects of Radiation (BEIR Report),
      November 1972.

 [23] Daniel F. Ford and Henry W. Kendall, "An Assessment of the Emergency
      Core Cooling Systems Rulemaking Hearings" (San Francisco:  Friends
      of the Earth/Union of Concerned Scientists, 1974.)
------



                      Resigning from Lawrence Livermore

        Meanwhile I continued my work on cancer and chromosomes in the
     Livermore Laboratory.  We continued to put out reports on the
     radiation hazard problem.  In 1972 one of the people at the lab came
     to me.
        "We have a problem," he said. "Now you may not believe this, John,
     but last year the AEC came to me and said, `We need to take Gofman's
     money away that he has for his cancer chromosome work' [which was
     $250,000 a year] and we told the AEC that while we disagreed with your
     position on nuclear power, we thought your cancer chromosome work was
     first-class science, and we were not going to remove your funds.  And
     they let it go.  But this time they've come back and said, `If you
     don't remove Gofman's funds, then we will remove $250,000 from the lab
     budget.  You can fire other people if you insist on keeping Gofman's
     program.'  So what do you want us to do?"
        "Under no circumstances can anybody lose their funding because of
     my problem," I said.  "I'll tell you what I'll do.  I'll go back to
     the National Cancer Institute and see if I can get $250,000 to move my
     program to Berkeley with my professorship, and then I'll resign from
     the lab if I can."
        So I went and saw the head of the National Cancer Institute.  We
     talked about three hours.
        I said, "You know all about the conflict with AEC?"
        "I know all about the conflict," he said.  "We like your program.
     We need it.  It might take me three or four weeks to arrange it, but I
     think I can get you the money."
        So I went back and told the lab it looked good.
        Three or four weeks passed, and I didn't hear anything.  Six weeks
     passed, and I didn't hear.  So I dropped the head of the National
     Cancer Institute a note.  I didn't want to press him because those
     things can take longer.
        Then the strangest thing happened.  I got back a letter from one of
     his third-echelon deputies, saying, "Thank you very much for your
     inquiry.  Your work on cancer and chromosomes is not a mainline
     interest of the National Cancer Institute.  We cannot fund it under
     any circumstances.  But don't be discouraged about further
     applications at some later time on some other programs to the National
     Cancer Institute.  Sincerely yours."
        So I realized what must have happened.  The head of NCI had
     probably talked to some other people in the government and gotten the
     word back.  "This guy has just created nothing but havoc for the AEC,
     and now you're going to take him on to do the same thing for the
     National Cancer Institute?  You need to support Gofman like a hole in
     the head!"
        I went to my contact in the lab and said, "I've failed.  I know of
     no other source to accumulate $250,000 a year.  So tomorrow I'll let
     all the people know that the program has ended.  You can reassign them
     to other work."
        As long as they weren't working with me, it was fine with the AEC.
     So the AEC won.  They managed to destroy my cancer research program.
        He said, "What are you going to do personally?"
        "Well, I have a few more things I'd like to write up," I said.
     "But let's figure about six months, and then I'll resign from the
     lab."
        "You know," he said, "you don't have to resign."
        "Yeah, I know.  But that's what I choose to do, and I'll go back to
     Berkeley full time, without the research.  I'd like to keep my
     secretary and one assistant for the six months."
        "Oh," he said, "that's just fine."  It was really funny--he said,
     "Gee, you're driving out here fifty miles a day.  Couldn't we make the
     last six months a little more comfortable for you?  You know, we could
     get you space in the Berkeley division of the Lawrence Lab and you
     wouldn't have to drive out here."
        "Well, that's very nice," I said.  "As a matter of fact, I'll take
     you up on it."
        So they arranged space for me in one of the buildings of the
     Berkeley Lawrence Lab, and I spent the last six months there, except
     for my teaching, which I was already doing half time.
        And on February 1, 1973 I resigned formally and became a full-time
     professor.
        I had made one mistake.  If the Department of Energy or the AEC
     gives you money on a sensitive subject, they don't mean for you to
     take the job seriously.  They need you--with your scientific
     prestige--so they can point to you.  "We have so and so studying the
     problem."  Studying the problem is marvelous.  But if you want the
     money and the continued support, you should go fishing or play golf.
     My mistake was I discovered something.


                    After Resigning from Lawrence Livermore

        {Tamplin stayed on about another year and a half in the lab as, in
     his words, a "non-person."  He had no staff, he worked alone.  Then he
     joined the Natural Resources Defense Council as a senior scientist.}

        When I got back to my own lab in Berkeley, I thought, Well, the
     National Cancer Institute wouldn't give me the $250,000, but surely I
     can get a small grant to continue the kind of calculations we've been
     making on cancer, particularly since in a major symposium at Berkeley,
     Dr. David Levin got up and added further shock to the AEC by stating--
     and it's on record in that publication--We in the National Cancer
     Institute have checked out the Gofman calculations by a totally
     separate method and have come up with the same answers.
        So I applied for a grant from NCI for $30,000 to continue my
     calculations on cancer and radiation.  It was a good application.  I
     figured, Gee, a $30,000 grant they're not going to refuse me.  I got a
     letter back from them saying the grant's refused on the basis that
     this sort of work is better done by a committee than by an individual.
     It was a revelation to me.
        It seemed to me that I must be on a list of "enemies of the state."
     I never saw a list, but you know it was the Nixon administration, and
     Richard Nixon was said to have such a list, so I concluded that very
     likely I couldn't get any money from federal sources at all.


                "The AEC Made a Mistake Not to Get Rid of Me"

        It's a hazardous occupation, you ought to understand, to take the
     position that we ought to cancel the whole nuclear power program.  It
     would probably have been wise for them to get rid of us--physically--
     in the early seventies.
        Today I don't think it matters what they do to us because hundreds
     of thousands of people know about nuclear energy and its deficiencies.
     But at that time it was a very small group of people, and Tamplin and
     I were among the leading individuals giving the AEC trouble.
     Physically eliminating us from the scene would have been a useful
     thing to do.  I don't know why they didn't.  Of course there's always
     a hazard--you don't want to make martyrs.  But you can have people
     have accidents on the highways and things like that.  I sometimes
     wondered when I started my car whether it was going to explode. . . .
        Funny thing--when the fire occurred in 1973, at the height of the
     period when we were really giving nuclear energy the most trouble, my
     friends said, "I heard the AEC burned your house down."
        So I said, "That's crazy.  It couldn't have been the AEC.  Listen,
     the house next *door* caught on fire, and ours caught fire from *it*."
        They said, "Do you think they'd start a fire *in* your house?"[24]

------
 [24] Gofman's sister-in-law was in his house.  She was the only one there
      at the time.  She got out safely.  The house burned to the ground.
      Gofman says, "I have no evidence that the AEC had anything whatsoever
      to do with it."
------




                  Researching Plutonium:  The Cancer Hazard

        {After leaving the Livermore Laboratory and finding that he could
     not get government funding for his research, Gofman was not sure what
     to do with his life.  "Personally I am not cut out for the social
     scene.  You know, I'm most comfortable in a laboratory, working with
     instruments and materials, and not seeing people.  I don't like going
     to public things.  People can change, but if you've been doing
     something you like to do for something like thirty years, to try to
     develop a new format of things you prefer is difficult."
        Gofman decided to take an early retirement at the age of fifty-
     five, so he gave up his position at the University in 1975 and became
     professor emeritus.  Although no longer engaged in active teaching,
     Gofman did not give up research.  In the next years he discovered that
     plutonium was even more hazardous than he had thought.  "Plutonium is
     so hazardous that if you had a fully developed nuclear economy with
     breeder reactors fueled with plutonium, and you managed to contain the
     plutonium 99.99 percent perfectly, it would still cause somewhere
     between 140,000 and 500,000 extra lung-cancer fatalities each year."
        There are no commercial breeder reactors operating at this time
     (1981) in the United States.  However, breeder reactors are planned,
     are even now prefabricated, waiting in storage for a go-ahead on
     construction.  The Clinch River reactor, for example, is a fast
     breeder proposed for a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  All the
     components have been built by Westinghouse and are now stockpiled in
     warehouses.  Every year the U.S. Congress appropriates millions of
     dollars for the Clinch River project and advanced breeder technology
     research.
        Breeder reactors have a plutonium core surrounded by a blanket of
     U-238, a nonfissionable isotope of uranium.  When the plutonium
     fissions, it gives off fast neutrons that hit the U-238 atoms,
     converting the uranium blanket to plutonium.  Thus the breeder reactor
     produces, or "breeds," more plutonium than it starts with.  Plutonium
     is the ingredient essential for producing nuclear weapons.
        As the nuclear industry readies itself for full-scale breeder
     development, reports on the carcinogenic nature of uranium are
     suddenly receiving widespread coverage in the press.  The "San
     Francisco Chronicle," for example, reports that the "breeder reactor
     would likely reduce the number of occupational deaths associated with
     the nuclear industry, since it largely operates on plutonium and thus
     would reduce the need for the uranium that fuels existing atomic power
     plants."[25]  It also quotes a U.S. official as stating that "the
     dominant factor by at least a factor of 100 in real fatalities is in
     uranium mining."  There is a cruel irony in admitting the danger of
     uranium mining only to seduce the American public into accepting an
     even more treacherous plutonium technology.
        Breeder reactors will lead to a nightmare "epidemic of lung cancer
     in this country,"[26] and widespread weapons proliferation.  In
     themselves, breeder reactors are extremely dangerous.  They use liquid
     sodium as coolant, which ignites and violently explodes on contact
     with air.  The plutonium fuel, if ignited, can produce a nuclear
     explosion equivalent to an atomic bomb, which would rupture the
     reactor's containment building and release enough deadly radioactivity
     to kill millions of people.}

        The requirement for controlling plutonium in a nuclear economy
     built on breeder reactors would be to lose no more than one millionth
     or ten millionth of all the plutonium that is handled into the
     environment where it could get to people.  Which brings up a
     fundamental thing in nuclear energy--there are some engineers,
     scientists, who are not merely fraudulent sycophants of the system.
     They're really out of touch with reality.
        I was once on an airplane with a strong pronuclear engineer.  I
     said, "I've done some new work on plutonium.  I think it's a lot more
     toxic than had been thought before.  At what toxicity would you give
     up nuclear power?"
        He said, "What are you talking about?"
        "If I told you that you had to control your plutonium losses at all
     steps along the way--burps, spills, puffs, accidents, leaks,
     everything--that you can't afford to lose even a millionth of it,
     would that cause you to give up nuclear power?"
        "Oh, I understand your point now, John," he said.  "Now, you tell
     me--we look to biologists like you to tell us how well we need to do.
     If you say I've got to control it to one part in ten million, we'll do
     it.  If you say it's got to be one in a billion or ten billion we'll
     do it.  You tell us what we have to engineer for, and we'll do it."
        I said, "My friend, you've lost touch with reality completely.
     I've worked in chemistry laboratories all my life, and to think you
     can control plutonium to one in a million is absolutely absurd.  If
     you were a patient of mine who came in to see me, I'd refer you to a
     psychiatrist."
        "Well, John, engineering is my field.  And we believe we can do
     anything that's needed."
        Engineers do believe that.  That's the arrogance of engineers--they
     think they can do anything.  Now their mistakes catch up with them, as
     you see from the DC-10s and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that fell down,
     and the Teton Dam and the most recent episode, Three Mile Island--
     where the unthinkable, the impossible, did happen.

------
 [25] "Fast-Breeder Reactor Backed--Jolt for U.S.," "San Francisco
      Chronicle," 26 February 1980, p. 5.  The uranium hazard arises from
      the exposure to radon gases in the uranium mines.

 [26] John W. Gofman, "`Irrevy,' An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear
      Power" (San Francisco:  Committee for Nuclear Responsibility.  1979),
      p. 105.
------



                       Nuclear Power:  A Simple Question

        Many people think nuclear power is so complicated it requires
     discussion at a high level of technicality.  That's pure nonsense.
     Because the issue is simple and straightforward.
        There are only two things about nuclear power that you need to
     know.  One, why do you want nuclear power?  So you can boil water.
     That's all it does.  It boils water.  And any way of boiling water
     will give you steam to turn turbines.  That's the useful part.
        The other thing to know is, it creates a mountain of radioactivity,
     and I mean a *mountain:*  astronomical quantities of strontium-90 and
     cesium-137 and plutonium--toxic substances that will last--strontium-
     90 and cesium for 300 to 600 years, plutonium for 250,000 to 500,000
     years--and still be deadly toxic.  And the whole thing about nuclear
     power is this simple:  can you or can't you keep it all contained?  If
     you can't, then you're creating a human disaster.
        You not only need to control it from the public, you also need to
     control it from the workers.  Because the dose that federal
     regulations allow workers to get is sufficient to create a genetic
     hazard to the whole human species.  You see, those workers are allowed
     to procreate, and if you damage their genes by radiation, and they
     intermarry with the rest of the population, for genetic purposes it's
     just the same as if you irradiate the population directly.[27]
        So I find nuclear power this simple:  do you believe they're going
     to do the miracle of containment that they predict?  The answer is
     they're not going to accomplish it.  It's outside the realm of human
     prospects.
        You don't need to discuss each valve and each transportation cask
     and each burial site.  The point is, if you lose a little bit of it--a
     terribly little bit of it--you're going to contaminate the earth, and
     people are going to suffer for thousands of generations.  You have two
     choices:  either you believe that engineers are going to achieve a
     perfection that's never been achieved, and you go ahead;  or you
     believe with common sense that such a containment is never going to be
     achieved, and you give it up.
        If people really understood how simple a problem it is--that
     they've got to accomplish a miracle--no puffs like Three Mile Island-
     -can't afford those puffs of radioactivity, or the squirts and the
     spills that they always tell you won't harm the public--if people
     understood that, they'd say, "This is ridiculous.  You don't create
     this astronomical quantity of garbage and pray that somehow a miracle
     will happen to contain it.  You just don't do such stupid things!"

------
 [27] See Chapter 2, p. 45 [second half of the "After Leaving the New York
      State Department of Health" section of the chapter on Rosalie Bertell
      --ratitor].
------



                               Licensing Murder

        Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random
     premeditated murder.  First of all, when you license a plant, you know
     what you're doing--so it's premeditated.  You can't say, "I didn't
     know."  Second, the evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond
     doubt.  I've worked fifteen years on it, and so have many others.  It
     is not a question any more:  radiation produces cancer, and the
     evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses.
        The only way you could license nuclear power plants and not have
     murder is if you could guarantee perfect containment.  But they admit
     that they're not going to contain it perfectly.  They allow workers to
     get irradiated, and they have an allowable dose for the
     population.[28]  So in essence I can figure out from their allowable
     amounts how many they are willing to kill per year.
        I view this as a disgrace, as a public health disgrace.  The idea
     of anyone saying that it's all right to murder so many in exchange for
     profits from electricity--or what they call "benefits" from
     electricity--the idea that it's all right to do that is a new advance
     in depravity, particularly since it will affect future generations.
        You must decide what your views are on this:  is it all right to
     murder people knowingly?  If so, why do you worry about homicide?  But
     if you say, "The number won't be too large.  We might only kill fifty
     thousand--and that's like automobiles"--is that all right?
        People have told me they agree with my calculations.  One of the
     associate directors at Livermore actually said to me, "Jack, you have
     a right to calculate that thirty-two thousand people would die from
     the standards we have in force.  What I don't understand is why you
     think thirty-two thousand a year is too many."
        "Look," I said, "if I didn't think thirty-two thousand were too
     many I'd give up my medical diploma saying I didn't deserve it."
        He didn't understand that.
        People like myself and a lot of the atomic energy scientists in the
     late fifties deserve Nuremberg trials.  At Nuremberg we said those who
     participate in human experimentation are committing a crime.
     Scientists like myself who said in 1957, "Maybe Linus Pauling is right
     about radiation causing cancer, but we don't really know, and
     therefore we shouldn't stop progress," were saying in essence that
     it's all right to experiment.  Since we don't know, let's go ahead.
     So we were experimenting on humans, weren't we?  But once you know
     that your nuclear power plants are going to release radioactivity and
     kill a certain number of people, you are no longer committing the
     crime of experimentation--you are committing a higher crime.
     Scientists who support these nuclear plants--*knowing* the effects of
     radiation--don't deserve trials for experimentation;  they deserve
     trials for murder.

------
 [28] See Chapter 2, p. 31 ["Radiation Standards for Workers and the Public"
      section --ratitor] on health effects of current allowable radiation
      doses.
------



                 First Strike Capability:  "The Power Disease"

        In the six years that I was on the Board of Directors at the bomb
     laboratory, I became more and more worried about nuclear weapons.  One
     day, after a couple of years at Livermore, I said at a lab meeting,
     "Do you know, every week we get together and talk about the next bomb
     thing.  This whole business of trying to solve any problems with
     nuclear weapons is ridiculous.   We ought to be having our discussions
     about the sociopolitical aspects of missilery and nuclear weapons, not
     just about bomb design."
        I was told, "You're wrong, John."
        "What do you mean, I'm wrong?"
        "Look, we're scientists.  Our job is to design the best bombs we
     can.  It's for statesmen and the politicians to figure out what ought
     to be done about it."
        That bothered me a great deal.  My thoughts were these:  everybody
     thinks nuclear weapons are a way of deterring war.  That's not true.
     Nuclear weapons are going to *lead* to war.  I'll tell you why.  If
     you're a weaponeer in the United States, what do you have to think
     about?  Since you don't know the facts, you must assume that the
     Soviet weaponeers are trying to get in a position where they can
     either hand you an ultimatum or bomb you out of existence if they
     think they have what's called a "first strike capability"--namely, the
     ability to bomb you out of existence without you retaliating.  The
     only reason there hasn't been a nuclear war yet is that both sides
     realize that they haven't been in that technical position of being
     able to get away with it without too severe losses on their side.
        Now some people say, "You don't need to worry.  If one side gets a
     first-strike capability, the other side will get it too."  That's not
     true.  Scientific and technological advances are such that one side
     might get there six months early or a year earlier.  Then they would
     be in a position to say, "Now we have the other side so they can't
     retaliate."
        What would happen under those circumstances?  Suppose the United
     States made the breakthrough.[29]  "We've just figured out a way we
     can destroy the Soviet Union and not get any significant damage in
     return.  We can either not use it, or we can use it."
        Now why should we *not* use it?  You say to yourself, "What if the
     tables were turned and *they* were the ones that reached this point?
     Would they also not use it?"  I think there's a high chance that if
     one side gets that advantage, they'll use it.  The only solution is,
     you must stop *all* efforts to develop first-strike force solutions
     everywhere--whether they be nuclear or other--and move toward a more
     just society.
        Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but
     you left established power structure in the U.S. and the USSR, they'd
     go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing.
     My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a
     disease.  I call it the "power disease."  They want to rule and
     control other people.  They are a more important plague than cancer,
     pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put
     together.  They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use
     each other.  They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast
     aside when they don't need them any more.  There are fifty million
     people a year being consumed in a nutritional holocaust around the
     world;  nobody gives a damn about starvation.  If fifty million white
     Westerners were dying, affluent Western society would worry, but as
     long as it's fifty million Third World people dying every year, it
     doesn't matter.
        In my opinion, what we need is to move toward being nauseated by
     people who want to be at the top, in power.  Can you think of anything
     more ridiculous than that the Chinese, Russian, and American people
     let their governments play with superlethal toys and subject all of us
     to these hazards?  The solution is not to replace one leader with
     another or to have more government.  Society has to reorganize itself.
     The structure we have now is, the sicker you are socially, the more
     likely it is that you'll come out at the top of the heap.

------
 [29] The U.S. has more than thirty thousand nuclear bombs in its weapons
      arsenal at the present time and is capable of destroying the Soviet
      Union dozens of times over.  The deployment of a whole new generation
      of weapons--cruise missiles, the MX missile, and Trident missiles--
      suggests that the policy of "deterrence" is really a cover for the
      development of a "first-strike capability"--that the U.S. is actually
      planning for a nuclear war.  See Robert Thaxton, "Directive
      Fifty-nine:  Carter's New `Deterrence' Doctrine Moves Us Closer to
      the Holocaust," "Progressive,"  October 1980, pp. 36-37.
------






                                  BIBLIOGRAPHY




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     Damage Brought on by Atomic Fallout."  "Life," June 1980, pp. 32-40.

     "Fast-Breeder Reactor Backed--Jolt for U.S."  "San Francisco
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     Ford, Daniel F., and Henry F. Kendall.  "An Assessment of the
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     Gerber, C. R.;  R. Hamburger;  and E. W. S. Hull.  "Plowshare."
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     Gofman, John W.  "The Cancer and Leukemia Consequence of Medical X-
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     ________.  "The Cancer Hazard from Inhaled Plutonium."  CNR Report
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     ________.  "Estimated Production of Human Lung Cancers by Plutonium
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     by J. Neyman.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1971.

     ________.  "Poisoned Power:  The Case Against Nuclear Power Plants."
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--
  The Hopi believe this is the Fourth World.  There were seven worlds created
  at the beginning.  The first three were each destroyed in turn because the
  humans inhabiting them had diverged too far from their original sacred path
  of connectedness with and respect for all life on Mother Earth.  Their
  prophecies (see "Book of the Hopi" by Frank Waters) describe the possibility
  of such a destruction of the Fourth World (in the forms of uranium mining,
  the existence of powerlines, and the atomic bomb):

       If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.

              Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs
                       spun back and forth in the sky.

           A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky,
                which could burn the land and boil the oceans.



                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.