NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/environm/5272

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From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: "Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Rad., High-Level Coverup," It's Not Too Late
Summary: true costs: cancers, immune disease, birth disorders, genetic mutation
Keywords: examining low-level radiation effects of nuclear bomb tests/reactors
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Date: 29 Dec 92 15:20:36 GMT
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   This 1991 book, "Deadly Deceit" provides a wealth of information about the
   the reality of low-level radiation created in the fallout from nuclear
   bomb detonations and from nuclear reactors, and how exposure to such
   material via the food chain may have done far more damage to humans and
   other living things than previously thought.  The possibility of continued
   operation of civilian and military nuclear reactors will do irreversible
   harm to future generations as well.  The chief findings in this book
   revolve around statistical estimates of excess deaths that have never
   before been part of the public debate on the dangers of low-level
   radiation.  The information is "out there."  The question is, are we
   willing to study it and act upon its implications?  Or are we "too busy"?
   Excerpts follow from Chapter 11, (included in its entirety below)
   examining some of the consequences of "an almost complete absence of
   serious debate in American scientific and medical journals about the
   effect of ingested or inhaled fission products on the hormonal and
   immune systems."                                           -- ratitor


    There has been an almost complete absence of serious debate in American
    scientific and medical journals about the effect of ingested or inhaled
    fission products on the hormonal and immune systems.  A distinction
    should be made between the nuclear scientists who permitted national
    security to take precedence over unwanted truths, and the majority of
    scientists and physicians who have been unaware of the evidence that
    free radical-induced biological damage may be thousands of times more
    efficient at low doses of radiation than at high ones. . . .
       These scientists would have been hard pressed to envision the
    perverse nature of the food chain that causes certain ingested fission
    products to accumulate in much higher concentrations than naturally
    occurring isotopes.  For example, when cows graze over large exposed
    areas, the radioactive iodine will concentrate in them.  When people
    ingest contaminated milk, water, root vegetables, or fruits, the
    adverse effects continue to multiply as the radioactive substances
    concentrate in organs such as the fetal thyroid or the bone marrow of
    young women prior to pregnancy.  Finally, who could have expected the
    perverse supra-linear nature of the dose response, with lower levels
    of radiation potentially being hundreds to thousands of times more
    efficient in producing the free radicals that penetrate and destroy
    the blood cells of immune systems?
       If this knowledge is deemed subversive and is thus excluded from
    established scientific journals, physicians will never consider the
    potential effect on the immune systems of their patients. . . .
       The cost to dispose of all nuclear facilities in the next century
    will at least be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of
    constructing them.  A rough estimate of four decades of defense
    expenditures earmarked for nuclear weapons and three decades of
    federal subsidies to the civilian nuclear industry yields a figure in
    the range of two trillion dollars.  And right now, when one considers
    the associated drain on scientific manpower and other human resources,
    it becomes clear why our deficit-ridden economy can no longer compete
    with the demilitarized economies of Japan and West Germany.  A recent
    {New York Times} editorial traced American economic ills to
    diminishing productivity growth since 1965, at a cost, ironically, of
    two trillion dollars.[191] . . .
       It may be more than a mere coincidence that U.S. productivity gains
    have sagged just as the damage to immune systems of the baby-boom
    generation appeared to emerge among young adults.  Consider the
    implications for U.S. productivity of Ernest Sternglass's discovery,
    later supported by two U.S. Navy psychologists, of the adverse impact
    of bomb-test fallout on Standardized Achievement Test (SAT) scores.
    In {Secret Fallout}, Sternglass described his reaction in 1975 when
    reading a {New York Times} article on the puzzling but steady decline
    in SAT scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than two or
    three points per year until 1975, when they dropped by ten points in a
    single year:

       {Suddenly, the question flashed through my mind:  When were
       these young people born or in their mother's womb?  Most of them
       were 18 years old when they graduated from high school.  What
       was 18 taken from 1975?  It was 1957, the year when the largest
       amount of radioactive fallout ever measured descended on the
       U.S. from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever
       detonated in Nevada.[193]}

    By 1979, with the help of the educational psychologist Dr. Steven
    Bell, Sternglass was able to secure state breakdowns of the SAT
    scores, which indicated that the greatest declines had indeed occurred
    in states closest to the Nevada Test Site.  The greatest decline was
    registered in the neighboring state of Utah, where the large Mormon
    population had the lowest rates of cigarette, drug and alcohol
    consumption in the nation, and traditionally had very high SAT scores.
       These findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American
    Psychological Association in September 1979.  There it was predicted
    that SAT scores would begin to improve again in 1981, 18 years after
    atmospheric bomb tests stopped in 1963. . . .  SAT scores have risen
    since 1981, confirming Sternglass's prediction.[195]



 the following is taken from the revised and updated softcover 1991 edition of
 "Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Coverup" by Dr. Jay Gould and
 Benjamin A. Goldman with Kate Millpointer, published by Four Walls Eight
 Windows, New York, and reprinted here with the permission of Dr. Gould.
  ___________________________________________________________________________


                                  CHAPTER 11

                              IT'S NOT TOO LATE



    This book has tried to indicate the potential toll in human lives that
    low-level radiation from nuclear bomb tests and reactors has exacted
    over the past four decades.  Because of national security concerns
    going back to the early days of the Cold War, the truth about such
    losses has been withheld from the American people.
       The federal government has recently admitted that radioactive
    contamination caused a significant loss of life on at least two
    occasions, and in both cases denied victims the right to sue for
    damages.  After acknowledging that uranium escaped from its Fernald
    nuclear fabrication facility near Cincinnati, Ohio, the Department of
    Energy absolved its contractor, National Lead, from any financial
    liability.  The Supreme Court reversed a multi-million dollar award to
    residents of St. George, Utah, who proved that cancer deaths there
    were associated with fallout from mishandled bomb tests.  In effect,
    the government has asserted a sovereign right to endanger the lives of
    its citizens, as if we have been in a state of war all these years.
       It is easy to understand how national security was invoked to
    withhold information about radiation releases from the Savannah River
    Plant in order to protect tritium supplies critical for producing
    thermonuclear weapons.  But can national security justify concealing
    an enormous loss of lives?
       It is more difficult to explain the role of the scientific
    community and the media in sustaining this deadly deception.  There
    has been an almost complete absence of serious debate in American
    scientific and medical journals about the effect of ingested or
    inhaled fission products on the hormonal and immune systems.  A
    distinction should be made between the nuclear scientists who
    permitted national security to take precedence over unwanted truths,
    and the majority of scientists and physicians who have been unaware of
    the evidence that free radical-induced biological damage may be
    thousands of times more efficient at low doses of radiation than at
    high ones.
       Despite the warnings of Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling and Andrei
    Sakharov, there is nothing in the century-long experience with brief
    exposures to high intensity X-rays and radiation to prepare physicians
    to understand the distinctly different biochemical mechanisms involved
    in internal low-level radiation.  Once radioactive fission products
    come down in the rain and enter the food chain, immune systems become
    vulnerable to free radicals by means quite different from the
    destruction of DNA by high-level radiation.  This was not known by
    many of the nuclear scientists who developed the atomic bomb, and by
    biologists concerned with genetic damage.
       These scientists would have been hard pressed to envision the
    perverse nature of the food chain that causes certain ingested fission
    products to accumulate in much higher concentrations than naturally
    occurring isotopes.  For example, when cows graze over large exposed
    areas, the radioactive iodine will concentrate in them.  When people
    ingest contaminated milk, water, root vegetables, or fruits, the
    adverse effects continue to multiply as the radioactive substances
    concentrate in organs such as the fetal thyroid or the bone marrow of
    young women prior to pregnancy.  Finally, who could have expected the
    perverse supra-linear nature of the dose response, with lower levels
    of radiation potentially being hundreds to thousands of times more
    efficient in producing the free radicals that penetrate and destroy
    the blood cells of immune systems?
       If this knowledge is deemed subversive and is thus excluded from
    established scientific journals, physicians will never consider the
    potential effect on the immune systems of their patients.  The
    discoveries of Drs. Sternglass and Petkau, for example, were published
    in technical European professional journals, and have rarely been
    considered by physicians.  After our Chernobyl findings prompted a
    {Toronto Globe} reporter to question Dr. Petkau about his work, he was
    warned against offering further interviews by his employer, Atomic
    Energy of Canada, Ltd.
       Unlike the government and the nuclear industry, physicians have no
    vested interest in perpetuating nuclear myths on political or economic
    grounds, and may--indeed must--become increasingly concerned about the
    effects of free radicals on the human immune system.  The most
    detailed coverage of the Chernobyl findings was carried in the
    American Medical Association's {Medical News} and its Canadian
    counterpart in February 1988.  Even the weekly medical news section of
    {The New York Times} has identified free radicals as a "major cause of
    disease," especially with respect to immune deficiencies.[184]  But
    the {Times} failed to mention Dr. Petkau's crucial discovery that this
    type of damage is thousands of times greater for protracted exposures
    to internally deposited fallout than for short exposures to medical
    X-rays or gamma rays.
       It has long been known that the body's immune defenses detect and
    destroy cells that are out of control, having become malignant.  In
    {Secret Fallout}, Dr. Sternglass offered the following analogy for
    human society:

       {It is the freedom to investigate and communicate important
       scientific or public health findings quickly and widely--no
       matter how disturbing or controversial--that is the key element
       in the protective system needed to alert a society to
       potentially dangerous developments before they become
       irreversibly destructive.[185]}

    This analogy illuminates the crisis now facing both the U.S. and the
    U.S.S.R.  The Chernobyl disaster truly shook the world and may be a
    final warning that the prospects for continued life on earth are put
    at risk by nuclear technology.  This helps explain Gorbachev's
    surprising speech before the United Nations in December 1988, in which
    he cited the environmental threat to the planet as overriding the
    rationale for the nuclear arms race.
       If two American researchers using published monthly data could
    identify 40,000 lives that appeared to be cut short by the Chernobyl
    fallout, thousands of miles away from the accident, consider what
    Soviet and Polish officials must have found in their unpublished
    mortality records.  They could certainly assess the health impact of
    vast agricultural areas contaminated by fallout.[186]
       In June of 1987, Adrian de Wind, President of the Natural Resources
    Defense Council (NRDC), delivered our Three Mile Island findings,
    which had just been presented to the staff of the Senate Public Health
    Committee, to Evgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of
    Sciences.  At the time, the NRDC was leading an effort to install
    equipment in the Soviet Union to monitor nuclear bomb tests.  On his
    return from Moscow that summer, de Wind reported that Velikhov found
    the paper surprising, since "TMI was nothing compared to Chernobyl."
    He encouraged us to send Velikhov the just-completed paper on the
    impact of Chernobyl fallout on U.S. mortality.  We sent Velikhov the
    Chernobyl findings, with some degree of trepidation that they would
    not inform him of anything he did not already know.  Velikhov did not
    respond.
       It will take a lot more {glasnost}--in America as well as the
    Soviet Union--for the true dimensions of the Chernobyl tragedy to be
    acknowledged.  Almost two years after the accident, buried in a small
    item on gold futures in {Investors Daily}, the report was that:

       {Gold futures firmed Friday, rallying out of two year lows on
       news that Moscow had ordered the evacuation of 20 more villages
       due to lingering radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
       accident.[187]}

    Reports of the evacuation was not made available to readers of most
    major newspapers.
       The American press also avoided coverage of our embarrassing
    Chernobyl findings for months until they succumbed to competitive
    pressures from Japan, Italy, West Germany, Canada, and England, where
    the story was considered worthy of front page coverage.
       The {New Scientist} related how the prestigious British journal
    {Nature} accepted hundreds of papers from scientists around the world
    on Chernobyl's effects, but then failed to print them.  The would-be
    authors complained in an open letter, that:

       {We appreciate the journal} Nature {as one of the leading
       scientific journals in the world.  The present situation
       embarrasses us deeply.  We feel that not only the case of our
       present manuscripts but important questions of principle are
       involved, e.g., the right of the scientist to know what happens
       to his unpublished work.  If his work is rejected, the author
       has a chance to improve it and try again.  We have now
       encountered a new, much worse alternative:  to be accepted and
       not published.[188]}

    Does the West need its own Chernobyl for its leaders to practice
    glasnost with respect to its own nuclear technologies?  At the time of
    this writing key American nuclear fabrication facilities have been
    shut down.  Not only are workers reluctant to enter the contaminated
    facilities, but their supervisors also share these fears.  Even the
    corporate contractors who have operated the facilities for decades
    appear to be having second thoughts, as the facilities exceed their
    lifetime limits.
       Senator John Glenn is among the few U.S. politicians who have
    declared the need to "tear away the veil of secrecy and self-
    regulation."  In a {New York Times} column on revelations from his
    hearings regarding the Fernald (Ohio) facility, he stated:

       {For decades, the Government has violated its own worker health
       and safety standards and has frequently ordered the private
       contractor running the facility to ignore state and federal
       environmental laws.  As a result, vast quantities of radioactive
       and toxic wastes are contaminating offsite drinking water
       supplies.  Residents live with the fear that the plant may have
       harmed their health and that of their children.  Now, adding
       insult to injury, the government proposes to close the
       operation, with statements that the severe environmental
       contamination will be cleaned up--sometime--but just when it
       does not say.
          How could this happen?  Secrecy.  Back in the 1950s, the
       production of nuclear weapons material was paramount, and
       secret.[189]}


    Thus, for Americans as well as Soviets, openness must replace secrecy.
    As Senator Glenn concluded, "it will do us little good to protect
    ourselves from our adversaries if we poison our own people in the
    process."
       Though considerations of life and death have often been out-ranked
    by economic considerations in the formation of our nuclear policies,
    the costs are now too staggering for us to bear.  The human losses
    attending every major release of fission products underscores the
    truth that thermonuclear weapons cannot be used.
       The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that it may cost $175
    billion to clean up and replace the military's nuclear production
    facilities.  Add to this the far more daunting problem of what to do
    with the radioactive wastes now accumulating in pools at every
    civilian reactor across the nation.  The national nuclear cemeteries
    for civilian and military high-level radioactive wastes, proposed for
    Nevada and New Mexico, may be myths in political, technological and
    economic terms.  As physicist Marvin Resnikoff has demonstrated,
    simply by transporting the millions of curies of deadly materials to
    repositories nobody wants, sixteen accidents per year could occur, any
    one on the scale of Three Mile Island.[190]
       These huge volumes of nuclear waste may end up staying just where
    they are.  Every reactor may end up being entombed, along with its
    wastes, as the Soviets have had to treat Chernobyl.  But who can
    guarantee that the wastes will not leak?  New technologies are needed
    to guarantee permanent cooling and containment, to keep the wastes
    from contaminating underground aquifers, on which future generations
    will rely for drinking water.
       The cost to dispose of all nuclear facilities in the next century
    will at least be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of
    constructing them.  A rough estimate of four decades of defense
    expenditures earmarked for nuclear weapons and three decades of
    federal subsidies to the civilian nuclear industry yields a figure in
    the range of two trillion dollars.  And right now, when one considers
    the associated drain on scientific manpower and other human resources,
    it becomes clear why our deficit-ridden economy can no longer compete
    with the demilitarized economies of Japan and West Germany.  A recent
    {New York Times} editorial traced American economic ills to
    diminishing productivity growth since 1965, at a cost, ironically, of
    two trillion dollars.[191]
       Former President Reagan was probably right when he said our
    military capability was second to none.  Yet as the economist Benjamin
    Friedman said of the consequences of Reagan's policies, "for America
    to earn its international position primarily by military might, as its
    economic power seeps away, means ultimately that we become a mere
    policeman, a hired gun . . . Hessians of the twenty-first
    century."[192]
       It may be more than a mere coincidence that U.S. productivity gains
    have sagged just as the damage to immune systems of the baby-boom
    generation appeared to emerge among young adults.  Consider the
    implications for U.S. productivity of Ernest Sternglass's discovery,
    later supported by two U.S. Navy psychologists, of the adverse impact
    of bomb-test fallout on Standardized Achievement Test (SAT) scores.
    In {Secret Fallout}, Sternglass described his reaction in 1975 when
    reading a {New York Times} article on the puzzling but steady decline
    in SAT scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than two or
    three points per year until 1975, when they dropped by ten points in a
    single year:

       {Suddenly, the question flashed through my mind:  When were
       these young people born or in their mother's womb?  Most of them
       were 18 years old when they graduated from high school.  What
       was 18 taken from 1975?  It was 1957, the year when the largest
       amount of radioactive fallout ever measured descended on the
       U.S. from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever
       detonated in Nevada.[193]}

    By 1979, with the help of the educational psychologist Dr. Steven
    Bell, Sternglass was able to secure state breakdowns of the SAT
    scores, which indicated that the greatest declines had indeed occurred
    in states closest to the Nevada Test Site.  The greatest decline was
    registered in the neighboring state of Utah, where the large Mormon
    population had the lowest rates of cigarette, drug and alcohol
    consumption in the nation, and traditionally had very high SAT scores.
       These findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American
    Psychological Association in September 1979.  There it was predicted
    that SAT scores would begin to improve again in 1981, 18 years after
    atmospheric bomb tests stopped in 1963.
       Two Navy psychologists investigated whether these findings could
    throw light on the difficulties new recruits were having in mastering
    complex weapons technologies.  They found that:

       {the state having the largest drop in [SAT] scores from children
       born during the two year period 1956-1958 was Utah, a fact which
       is consistent with Utah's proximity to the Nevada Test Site and
       the general northeastern motion of the fallout clouds produced
       by the Nevada tests, providing very convincing and disquieting
       evidence closely linking the SAT score decline to the cumulative
       effects of nuclear fallout.[194]}

    These "disquieting" findings were largely ignored by the media as was
    the fact that SAT scores have risen since 1981, confirming
    Sternglass's prediction.[195]
       After the Chernobyl fallout in the summer of 1986, the German
    edition of {Psychology Today} reexamined Sternglass's SAT findings,
    raising concerns about possible mental impairment of German children
    who would reach their 18th birthday in the year 2004.  Yet if a
    theory's validity lies in its predictive value, then Sternglass's SAT
    hypothesis would appear to have already passed the test.
       What are the potential social costs associated with those members
    of the baby-boom generation who survived birth in the atmospheric bomb
    test years, but with physical and mental impairments that may hinder
    them from playing responsible roles in the work force today?  Facing a
    bleak and poverty-stricken future, these young people would be an
    increasing burden to society as they swell the ranks of the drug-
    addicted, the homeless and the over-crowded prison population.
       Dr. Charlotte Silverman published research in 1980, which found
    that children who had radiation treatment for ringworm experienced
    significant mental deterioration years afterwards.[196]  Dr. Silverman
    summarized her results and similar findings for Israeli children at
    the Sixth International Congress of Radiation Research in Tokyo as
    follows:

       {Several measures of brain function, mental ability and
       scholastic achievement demonstrate that the irradiated children
       suffered impairment.  These findings are consistent with and
       extend previous findings of suggestive brain damage from
       radiation.[197]}

    The sociologist Dr. R. J. Pellegrini has studied an FBI database of
    Uniform Crime Reports going back to 1945 and discovered that rates of
    criminal homicide, forcible rape and aggravated assault doubled in the
    1970's as compared with previous decades, just as the baby boomers
    entered in the age group 15 to 24.  Crime rates for those 15 to 34
    years of age are now at all time peaks, a fact Dr. Pellegrini
    attributes to their exposure to radiation from fallout.[198]
       Businesses are spending millions of dollars a year on remedial
    reading and arithmetic instruction, because many young adults entering
    the labor force are unqualified for work.[199]  To what extent might
    exposure to bomb-test fallout contribute to this deterioration of
    abilities, which is most commonly blamed on a breakdown in the
    American school system?
       Finally, consider the explosion in medical care costs in recent
    decades.  While examining the health effects of Chernobyl in Europe,
    Professor Jens Scheer of the University of Bremen discovered that a
    West German health insurance company experienced the largest annual
    cost increases for allergic diseases in more than ten years as a
    result of increased demand in the months after Chernobyl.[200]
       Since 1970 total private and public expenditures on health in the
    U.S. have been rising at more than twelve percent each year.
    Projecting this increase into the future results in total expenditures
    of 2.5 trillion dollars by the year 2000, outranking U.S. expenditures
    for food and shelter!
       A most troubling aspect of the current explosion of medical costs,
    not yet sufficiently appreciated, is the increasing proportion
    associated with young persons rather than with the aged.  Since 1982,
    and perhaps for the first time in our history, mortality rates for
    persons aged 15 to 54 are rising.  Thus what should be the most
    productive sector of the labor force must now deal increasingly with
    the morbidity and mortality problems associated with AIDS, and other
    immune deficiency diseases.
       Yet there are reasons to be hopeful.  In the face of the medical
    and economic crises we face today, it becomes more and more possible
    for public agitation, expressed through Congress, to decrease our
    dependence on nuclear technologies.  It is not too late.  We have only
    to look at those (admittedly few) areas of the world that have managed
    to avoid the "benefits" of the atom to realize that we can still enjoy
    breathing air and eating food that is relatively free of
    radioactivity.
       In our own country, the states of Wyoming and Montana are examples
    of such areas. Infant mortality rates that were once far worse than
    the national average have been improving remarkably since 1970.  In
    1987 and 1988, infant mortality in Wyoming was 42 percent less, and in
    Montana 30 percent less than in the U.S. as a whole, rivalling
    countries like Denmark with among the lowest infant mortality rates in
    the world.[201]  Wyoming and Montana have no nuclear reactors and
    benefited from the pains the government took to avoid testing bombs in
    Nevada when winds would have blown fallout toward Salt Lake City and
    Canada.
       A change in nuclear policy would free scientific resources to
    grapple seriously with the energy crisis, an effort long delayed by
    the nuclear option.  A tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars spent
    in the past four decades on this deadly technology could realize the
    promise of improving energy efficiencies, and of developing solar and
    other less destructive energy-producing technologies.  A free science
    will be necessary to find ways to cure the immune system deficiencies
    that now plague the world and that may have been partly caused by
    low-level radiation.  And ultimately, more open scientific inquiry
    will serve the goal of preserving the prospects for continued life on
    earth.



  [184] Jane E. Brody, "Natural chemicals now called major cause of
    disease," "The New York Times," April 26, 1988.

  [185] "Secret Fallout," p. 272.

  [186] The Soviet Union ceased publication of its infant mortality rates
        for the years 1972 to 1975.  However, the rate for 1976 was 31.1
    infant deaths per 1000 live births, representing 38,700 more infant
    deaths than would have been expected with the 1971 rate of 22.9
    deaths per 1000 live births.  No official explanation for this
    ominous increase was offered.  Yet during this period, Soviet
    reactors started up without the containment structures used in the
    U.S. to minimize radiation releases.  The published Soviet data can
    be found in C. Davis and M. Fessbach, "Rising infant mortality in
        the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s," Series P-95, No. 74, Washington, DC:
    U.S. Census Bureau.

  [187] "Investors Daily," February 6, 1989.

  [188] "New Scientist," November 26, 1988.

  [189] "The New York Times," January 4, 1989.

  [190] Marvin Resnikoff, "The Next Nuclear Gamble:  Transportation and
        Storage of Nuclear Waste," New York, NY:  Council On Economic
    Priorities, 1983.

  [191] "The New York Times," January 8, 1989.

  [192] Benjamin Friedman, "Day of Reckoning," New York, NY:  Random House,
    1988, p. 85.

  [193] "Secret Fallout," p. 181.

  [194] Bernard Rimland and Gerald Larsen, "Manpower quality decline:  an
        ecological perspective," "Armed Forces and Society," Fall 1981.

  [195] Data on recent SAT scores, received from the College Board in New
        York City too late for the extended discussion in the text that
    they deserve, indicate that, as predicted by Sternglass, the
    average U.S. verbal score rose from an all-time low of 424 in 1980
    to a peak of 431 in 1985 and 1986.  This was matched by a
    corresponding increase from 466 to 475 in the average U.S. math
    score.  But most alarming is a subsequent 4 point decline in the
    verbal SAT score to 427 in 1989, raising the question:  what
        happened 18 years ago?  The answer may lie in the fact that from
    October 1969 to October 1971, five underground tests in Nevada
    (Pod, Snubber, Mint Leaf, Baneberry and Diagonal Line) are known
    to have leaked at least some 7 million curies of radiation into
    the atmosphere.  The following states close to the Nevada Test Site
    displayed the following sharp declines in verbal SAT scores from
    1985 to 1989:  South Dakota -36;  Wyoming -33;  Montana -23;
    Arizona -21;  and Oklahoma -21.  The corresponding decline in SAT
    scores in far-off urban states was far more moderate:  New York -8;
    New Jersey -2;  Pennsylvania -6;  District of Columbia -6.  These
    wide variations in regional trends may help illuminate current
    concerns with the failure of higher education in America.

  [196] C. Silverman, "Mental function following scalp X-irradiation for
        tinea capitatis in childhood," Washington, DC:  Bureau of Radiation
    and Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
    1980.

  [197] "Secret Fallout," p. 195.

  [198] R. J. Pellegrini, "Nuclear fallout and criminal violence:
    preliminary inquiry into a new biogenic predisposition hypothesis,"
    International Journal of Biosocial Research, Vol. 9(21),
    pp. 125-143, 1987.

  [199] "U.S. businesses brace for a disaster:  a work force unqualified to
        work," "New York Times," September 24, 25, 1989.

  [200] Correspondence with Prof. Scheer in 1989 on his research underlying
        the publication in "The Lancet" of his findings on the effects of
    Chernobyl radiation on infant mortality in West Germany, as
    detailed in Guther Luning, Jens Scheer, Michael Schmidt, Heiko
    Ziggel, "Early infant mortality in West Germany before and after
    Chernobyl," "The Lancet," November 4, 1989, pp. 1081-1083.

  [201] The average infant mortality rate for 1987 and 1988 was 5.8 deaths
        per 1,000 live births in Wyoming, 7.0 for Montana, and 10.0 for the
    U.S.  See "NCHS Bulletin," 37, 12, March 28, 1989.



--
   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. . . .
   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.
        --Dr. John W. Gofman, from "Nuclear Witnesses, Insiders Speak Out" 1982