NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/talk/environm/5289

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From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: Bk Intro: "Secret Fallout, Low-Level Rad. from Hiroshima to TMI" [2/2]
Summary: part 2 of two parts excerpting segments of Dr. Sternglass's 1982 book
Keywords: human exposure to low-level radiation danger greatly underestimated
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Date: 30 Dec 92 15:16:34 GMT
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          ___________________________________________________________


  Dr. Sternglass recounts how in 1975 he began to wonder about how a decline
  in SAT scores, dropping since the mid-sixties, could drop an entire 10
  points in one year--1975--and how he came to the conclusion that this was
  related to the damage to children still in the womb or of very young age
  after birth:
        Clearly, if the effects were serious enough to lead to a rise in
     infant mortality and congenital defects back in 1957, as I knew had
     taken place, then for every baby that died shortly after birth, there
     must have been many who were minimally brain-damaged or whose
     cognitive growth may not have reached its full potential.
  Following this Sternglass reflects on the potential results of such
  debilitating effects on children's cognitive abilities:
               The children that could not read or cope with mathematics
     and science would drop out of school and become permanently
     unemployable.  And these young people would feel increasingly
     resentful toward those whom they blamed for their failure:  their
     teachers, their parents, and their political leaders.  Even worse,
     they would blame themselves and suffer from low self-esteem.
        Many of the unemployed and discouraged young people would drift
     into crime, vastly raising the level of violence and fear in the
     cities.  Not knowing what caused their problems, they would
     increasingly resort to drugs and alcohol to overcome their sense of
     failure and hopelessness, raising the rate of juvenile suicide and
     crime still further.

from chapter 16, "The Minds of the Children":


     [ . . . ]
        In the spring of 1971 our group gathered the data for radioactivity
     in the air, in the milk, and on the ground both before and after the
     Baneberry test.  This was then correlated with the mortality figures
     for infants born following the explosion, as reported in the U.S.
     Monthly Vital Statistics.  In all of the states where the total
     radioactivity rose highest--Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Nevada,
     Washington, Nebraska, and as far away as Minnesota and Maine--infant
     mortality also rose sharply during the first three months after the
     test.  Across the rest of the U.S., the pattern of general decline
     continued.
        It was shortly after reading another story in the papers about how
     the United States and the Soviet Union had failed to agree once again
     on a treaty to halt all underground nuclear tests that my attention
     was caught by an article in {The New York Times} about an apparently
     unrelated subject.  The report dealt with the fact that in 1975 the
     scores in the nationwide Scholastic Aptitude Tests had dropped by the
     largest amount in two decades.  While there had been a more or less
     steady decline in both the verbal and the mathematical scores since
     the mid-1960s, generally by no more than 2 or 3 points, the average
     verbal scores had suddenly dropped 10 points in a single year.  Since
     our son was taking the S.A.T. tests that year, I read the article with
     more than casual interest.
        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 United States from
     the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever detonated in Nevada.
     Just as in the case of the Baneberry test, the radioactive iodines
     must have gone to the thyroids of the infants in their mother's womb,
     where it would retard their growth and development ever so slightly so
     that it was not readily noticeable, and only when the children were
     tested 17 to 18 years later on a nationwide scale would it show up in
     a sharp drop in intellectual performance.
        Clearly, if the effects were serious enough to lead to a rise in
     infant mortality and congenital defects back in 1957, as I knew had
     taken place, then for every baby that died shortly after birth, there
     must have been many who were minimally brain-damaged or whose
     cognitive growth may not have reached its full potential.
        I remembered from the 1969 Hanford symposium that this was exactly
     what had happened to the young children on the Marshall Islands after
     the radioactive cloud from the "Bravo" hydrogen-bomb test in 1954 had
     accidentally showered the island of Rongelap, 150 miles away, with
     fresh fallout.  As reported by Conard at that meeting, in the
     following fifteen years, all the children developed thyroid disease of
     one form or another and showed severe growth retardation, both in
     their bodies and the size of their brains.
        But the thought was really too disturbing to contemplate in all its
     enormous implications.  Perhaps it was just a coincidence and nothing
     more.  After all, as the {Times} story made clear, there were so many
     other possible factors that could have been involved, including a
     deterioration of the schools, more disadvantaged students taking the
     tests, more urban problems, and the whole upheaval of the Vietnam war.
     Even too much television viewing had been blamed for the drop in
     reading ability, as well as a general decline in motivation among
     young people.  But I was glad that I had urged my wife and all our
     friends to give powdered milk to their children during their years of
     infancy, in which the short-lived iodine 131 had had a chance to decay
     away.

      . . . as soon as I opened the letter with the data I knew that the
     hypothesis was once again supported by the evidence:  By far the
     greatest drop between 1974 and 1976 had indeed occurred in the state
     with the highest levels of radio-iodine in the milk, namely Utah, and
     the smallest drop was recorded for the midwestern state of Ohio,
     largely to the south of the drifting clouds of fallout that had passed
     over Minnesota, Michigan, New York, southern Ontario Province in
     Canada and northern New England.  The magnitude of the effect was
     difficult to believe, but here in the letter from the College Board
     were the hard numbers:  Utah had dropped 26 points and Ohio only 2.
        There was just no way that such an enormous difference in the
     sudden drop could be explained solely by socio-economic factors,
     differences in the quality of teachers, school curricula, television
     viewing, amount of cigarette smoking, drug use, alcohol consumption,
     or other gradually changing physical factors in the environment such
     as air pollution or pesticides.
        In fact, if smoking, alcohol, and drug taking during pregnancy had
     been a factor, Utah, with its large Mormon population, should have
     declined less and not more than Ohio and New York.  But it was the
     other way around:  The population with lower cigarette consumption,
     alcohol, and drug problems during pregnancy had the greater decline in
     Scholastic Aptitude scores by many times the normal statistical
     fluctuation of 2 to 3 points.
        Nor could differences in the genetic factors of the two populations
     be blamed:  They were both predominantly white, and in fact the
     Mormons had originally come from the East and Midwest.  Besides,
     genetic or inherited factors would lead to long-term differences, not
     the sudden changes that had taken place.  Tragically, it now appears
     that we had unwittingly carried out an experiment with ourselves as
     guinea pigs on a worldwide scale.  This discovery made me more
     determined than ever to do everything in my power to make sure that
     the terribly costly lesson would be learned before mankind would make
     further and perhaps more irreversible mistakes with fallout from
     nuclear war or nuclear reactor accidents, in which the radioactivity
     equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs might suddenly be released
     over vast areas the size of entire states or nations. . . .

        It was only too evident that if the radioactivity in the
     environment led to early infant mortality, childhood cancer, thyroid
     damage, and underweight births, then also the learning ability of the
     surviving children might never develop its full potential.
        And it would be the steady decline in the ability to read and
     reason and not so much the rising cancer rates in old age that would
     be the real seed for the self-destruction of a modern technological
     society.  The children that could not read or cope with mathematics
     and science would drop out of school and become permanently
     unemployable.  And these young people would feel increasingly
     resentful toward those whom they blamed for their failure:  their
     teachers, their parents, and their political leaders.  Even worse,
     they would blame themselves and suffer from low self-esteem.
        Many of the unemployed and discouraged young people would drift
     into crime, vastly raising the level of violence and fear in the
     cities.  Not knowing what caused their problems, they would
     increasingly resort to drugs and alcohol to overcome their sense of
     failure and hopelessness, raising the rate of juvenile suicide and
     crime still further.
        Not being aware of the subtle thyroid damage with its resultant
     lethargy, parents would blame the teachers, and teachers would blame
     the parents for the increasing loss of interest, discipline, reading
     ability, and general motivation of the students.  Vast sums of money
     would be spent in efforts to help the slow learners and the many
     handicapped students suddenly flooding the schools, draining the
     resources of society at the very time when there would not be enough
     highly skilled, resourceful, and inventive young people produced to
     improve the teaching and raise the productivity of factories,
     businesses, and farms.  At the same time, the cost of health care
     would spiral as more and more developed early chronic disabilities, a
     situation that would lead to increasing absenteeism from offices,
     schools, and factories, and thus further reduce the output of goods
     and services while expectations continued to rise.
        As productivity dropped while the need for costly special education
     and disability payments rose, the vast amount of borrowing that
     government would have to do to provide for the rapidly growing number
     of unemployed, handicapped, and sick would drive up the rate of
     inflation more and more.  To keep ahead of the inflation, as well as
     to dampen its flames, the banks would have to raise their interest
     rates so as not to lose money by lending.  Industrial machinery could
     not be modernized because borrowing the money would become too costly.
     The factories and farms would fall still further behind in their
     ability to meet the growing demand for manufactured goods and food,
     further adding to the pressures of inflation.
        At the same time, the smaller supply of capable and creative young
     people needed to fill the jobs as engineers, scientists, doctors,
     nurses, computer specialists, teachers, managers, and officers for the
     increasingly sophisticated factories, offices, schools, hospitals, and
     military services would drive up salaries, adding still more fuel to
     the inflationary fires.  More and more plants would be forced to shut
     down because they could not compete with more modern factories in
     other countries whose young workers were more productive because these
     countries were not in the direct path of the fresh fallout from Nevada
     and therefore less heavily exposed to short-lived iodine.  Also a
     greater fraction of the reduced supply of talented and inventive young
     people would be absorbed in the unproductive tasks of developing ever
     more complex and costly nuclear-weapons systems and reactors, thus
     further weakening the economic situation of the nation as it was
     forced to import ever larger amounts of civilian goods and machinery
     from other countries.
        As I thought about this scenario, I wondered how much of this had
     already begun to happen, as juvenile crime and suicide suddenly
     doubled and tripled in the mid-1970s among the children born in the
     late 1950s all over the U.S. and in northern industrial countries,
     where the fresh fallout had come down most heavily.  The end of
     weapons testing in Nevada had led to a halt in the decline of
     intellectual ability among those tested eighteen years later,
     especially those born well after 1963, when bomb testing ended.  There
     were now fewer children born blind and deaf showing up in the
     statistics, and there were fewer leukemia cases, brain tumors, and
     suicides among children and adolescents.  Fewer crimes were being
     committed by young people under 18 years old than during the mid-
     1970s, when the intellectual achievement scores had dropped most
     rapidly, although the latest crime statistics showed a second large
     jump in 1979, corresponding to the second series of heavy atmospheric
     bomb tests 17 to 18 years earlier in 1961-1962.






          ___________________________________________________________


  The chapter on Three Mile Island provides a revealing view into the closed
  world of suppressed and censored information the U.S. government had kept
  a tight lid on since the late fifties about the true health costs from
  exposure to radioactive fallout.  Sternglass laments the fact that if the
  information had been made available to the public and the scientific
  community, "the enormous financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth
  of nuclear plants" might never have been made.  As it was, the public was
  not informed of such fundamental risks because it might have "endangered
  the ambitious program of rapidly building a whole new generation of
  gigantic nuclear reactors all over the nation, each ten times as large as
  Shippingport, which were about to be considered for licensing.  Among these
  were to be the plants of Beaver Valley, Millstone, and Three Mile Island."
  The tragic irony--that Three Mile Island itself was in part able to be
  built because the public was not aware of or informed about the potential
  dangers it and reactors like it presented--is that individuals in the U.S.
  government knew the serious nature of radioactive fallout from government
  studies, and yet they felt the "national interest" superceded the health
  of the people.  Truely, censorship *is* the descent of darkness.
        Nearly 40,000 pages of files dealing with radiation revealed a
     disturbing story of deception perpetrated in the national interest.
     Not surprisingly, the full consequences of this deception for the
     nation's health were never adequately examined.
        Reading the list of what Curry discovered made me realize something
     that I had only begun to suspect in recent years, namely that some
     individuals in the government knew long before I had stumbled upon it
     accidentally how serious the fallout from weapons testing really was.
     As early as 1959, a study found higher levels of radioactive strontium
     90 in the bones of younger children in the fallout zone.  And, as
     Curry added, "coincidentally a Utah state epidemiologist found this
     year that children living in the zone during the weapons testing had
     2.5 times as much leukemia as children before and after the testing
     program.". . .
        As Curry's story made clear, this was to be the end of the report
     that might have given the public and the scientific community a timely
     warning of the unexpected seriousness of the planned normal and
     accidental releases of low-level radiation before the enormous
     financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth of nuclear plants
     had been made by the nation's utilities. . . .
        As Curry's story made clear, the AEC was determined to prevent the
     publication of the Weiss study, which would of course have fully
     substantiated the concerns of scientists such as Linus Pauling, Barry
     Commoner, Eric Reiss, E. B. Lewis, Jack Schubert, Ralph Lapp, myself,
     and many others who had warned of the possible rise in congenital
     defects, thyroid cancer, and especially childhood leukemia only a few
     years earlier.  But our concerns had largely ended with the signing of
     the test-ban treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the fall of 1963,
     just before Kennedy was assassinated.  The release of the Weiss study
     would clearly have evoked renewed opposition from the scientific
     community and the public to the vast military and civilian programs
     that were being planned by the Pentagon, the AEC, and the nuclear
     industry for the use of bombs to dig canals and for vastly increasing
     the radioactivity in the environment from the production of weapons
     and the routine releases from giant commercial nuclear power plants.
        The next part of the story in the {Washington Post} was therefore
     the inevitable next step in a Greek tragedy that would eventually lead
     to Three Mile Island and the crisis that a stunned nation would face
     when the promised source of cheap, clean, and economical nuclear power
     to replace the imported oil would suddenly turn into a national
     nightmare on their television screens

from chapter 17, "Incident at Three Mile Island":



     [ . . . ]
        The telephone rang again, and this time it was someone from the
     Mobilization for Survival in Philadelphia, asking me whether I would
     be willing to go to a press conference in Harrisburg the next day
     together with Dr. George Wald of Harvard University.  The purpose of
     this conference would be to present an alternative source of
     information for the people in the area on the potential health hazards
     from the accident.  (So far, the people in the area had received
     nothing more than the bland reassurances being offered by the utility
     and the spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the
     government organization formed from the old AEC when it was
     reorganized a few years ago).
        The thought passed through my mind that by tomorrow, Harrisburg
     might not be a very healthy place to bring a lot of reporters together
     for a news conference, but I tentatively agreed to go, provided there
     were no further serious or unforeseen developments.  In the meantime,
     I would have to try to gather as much information as possible about
     just what was going on in the reactor.  I needed to have a clearer
     feeling for the nature of the danger that the people in Harrisburg
     were facing. . . .
        The news conference was already in progress when I arrived.  There
     were a surprisingly large number of reporters with microphones, tape
     recorders, and television cameras crowded into the relatively small
     meeting room, with Dr. George Wald of Harvard sitting at a table
     toward one end.
        I apologized for being late, and then took out my survey meter to
     measure the radiation rate in the room.  The reading was still three
     to four times normal, or essentially the same as outside.  Clearly,
     the walls of the building did not provide any significant protection.
     Most likely, it was the gamma radiation from the radioactive gas that
     was by now at the same level as outside the building.  Even closing
     the windows would have been futile at this point.
        The intensity of the questions from the reporters reflected the
     great concern that existed, and I felt acutely the great difficulty of
     having to explain, without causing a panic, the seriousness of the
     situation that already existed for the pregnant women and infants.  I
     explained that at the moment, the radiation levels were not serious
     enough for the normal, healthy adult as long as they would not
     increase because of further releases.  Asked what I would recommend in
     the light of my knowledge of the situation, I said that at the very
     least, pregnant women and young children should be urged to leave the
     area within a few miles of the reactor because of the likelihood of
     continuing releases of radioactive iodine that would concentrate in
     the fetal thyroid as well as in that of the infants and young
     children.
        By limiting my recommendation in this manner, I hoped that there
     would not be any sudden rush toward a mass evacuation of the whole
     population, which might cause serious traffic jams and accidents.  I
     was primarily concerned with preventing panic, especially since
     according to my latest information, there was apparently no immediate
     threat of a complete melt-down.  And since the greatest danger existed
     for the unborn and very young, at least they would not be exposed any
     further, although at that point I did not know whether most of the
     dose had already been received, or whether there would in fact be any
     further large releases.
        I also urged that pregnant women and young children should not
     drink fresh milk or local water for the next few weeks, until detailed
     measurements could be carried out to determine the precise levels of
     radioactivity.  The most immediate hazard was clearly from the
     inhalation of the fresh radioactive gases by expectant mothers, which
     would lead in a matter of hours to significant amounts of radioactive
     iodine transmitted through the blood stream to the placenta and from
     there to the developing infant's small thyroid gland.
        When someone asked Dr. Wald whether the public should believe me or
     the spokesmen for the utility who had just reassured them that there
     was no danger, he answered that under such circumstances, one should
     always ask oneself who has the greater financial interest, the
     industry or the concerned scientist trying to warn the public.  Under
     the present circumstances, he personally would tend not to accept the
     reassurances of the industry spokesmen and would tend to believe that
     there was indeed reason for deep concern, as I had indicated.  There
     was no safe level of radiation, and the unborn and the young are
     clearly more vulnerable than adults. . . .

        Here then was the long bitter story emerging at last, just as it
     was being repeated--not in the case of fallout from nuclear-weapons
     tests carried out in the national interest at distant test sites in
     the Pacific and the Nevada desert, but in the case of invisible
     releases from peaceful nuclear reactors near the nation's cities, in
     the private interest of an industry spawned by the secret military
     atom.
        Nearly 40,000 pages of files dealing with radiation revealed a
     disturbing story of deception perpetrated in the national interest.
     Not surprisingly, the full consequences of this deception for the
     nation's health were never adequately examined.
        Reading the list of what Curry discovered made me realize something
     that I had only begun to suspect in recent years, namely that some
     individuals in the government knew long before I had stumbled upon it
     accidentally how serious the fallout from weapons testing really was.
     As early as 1959, a study found higher levels of radioactive strontium
     90 in the bones of younger children in the fallout zone.  And, as
     Curry added, "coincidentally a Utah state epidemiologist found this
     year that children living in the zone during the weapons testing had
     2.5 times as much leukemia as children before and after the testing
     program."  This was the study by Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, published in the
     {New England Journal of Medicine} just a few weeks before Three Mile
     Island.
        But what shocked me even more was Curry's account of a much earlier
     government study suggesting a link between fallout and leukemia that
     was begun even before I had submitted my first article to {Science}
     dealing with this possibility, back in 1963.  Apparently, a 1959-60
     spurt in leukemia in the southwestern Utah counties of Washington and
     Iron had been noticed by Edward S. Weiss of the Public Health Service,
     and he had immediately suspected fallout.  The study, which showed
     that the two counties experienced 9 more leukemia cases than the 19
     statistically expected, was essentially completed by July 1965, when
     Weiss submitted it for publication in a Health Service journal. . . .

        Not only would the study have jeopardized the commission's program
     at the Nevada Test Site for using strings of hydrogen bombs to build a
     new Panama Canal and to test designs for anti-ballistic-missile
     warheads in the atmosphere, but as I learned later, it might also have
     endangered the ambitious program of rapidly building a whole new
     generation of gigantic nuclear reactors all over the nation, each ten
     times as large as Shippingport, which were about to be considered for
     licensing.  Among these were to be the plants of Beaver Valley,
     Millstone, and Three Mile Island.
        As Curry's story made clear, this was to be the end of the report
     that might have given the public and the scientific community a timely
     warning of the unexpected seriousness of the planned normal and
     accidental releases of low-level radiation before the enormous
     financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth of nuclear plants
     had been made by the nation's utilities.
        In fact, it was clearly no coincidence that at exactly this time,
     namely the years 1964 and 1965, the Johnson White House had ordered a
     twentyfold increase in the permissible levels of iodine 131 and
     strontium 90 in the milk before it needed to be withdrawn from the
     market.  (This fact came to light in the course of hearings by the
     Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Radiation Standards held in 1965.)
     And it was also the time when the Johnson administration had made a
     secret commitment to a major involvement of American armed forces in
     Vietnam, where tactical nuclear weapons might have to be threatened or
     used if the Chinese should enter the conflict, as they had in Korea.
     That was clearly not the time to alarm the American people about the
     possible risk of leukemia, thyroid disease, and congenital defects
     among newborn children from the clouds of radioactive fallout that
     were certain to drift back over the United States if these weapons
     were ever used.
        As Curry's story made clear, the AEC was determined to prevent the
     publication of the Weiss study, which would of course have fully
     substantiated the concerns of scientists such as Linus Pauling, Barry
     Commoner, Eric Reiss, E. B. Lewis, Jack Schubert, Ralph Lapp, myself,
     and many others who had warned of the possible rise in congenital
     defects, thyroid cancer, and especially childhood leukemia only a few
     years earlier.  But our concerns had largely ended with the signing of
     the test-ban treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the fall of 1963,
     just before Kennedy was assassinated.  The release of the Weiss study
     would clearly have evoked renewed opposition from the scientific
     community and the public to the vast military and civilian programs
     that were being planned by the Pentagon, the AEC, and the nuclear
     industry for the use of bombs to dig canals and for vastly increasing
     the radioactivity in the environment from the production of weapons
     and the routine releases from giant commercial nuclear power plants.
        The next part of the story in the {Washington Post} was therefore
     the inevitable next step in a Greek tragedy that would eventually lead
     to Three Mile Island and the crisis that a stunned nation would face
     when the promised source of cheap, clean, and economical nuclear power
     to replace the imported oil would suddenly turn into a national
     nightmare on their television screens:

           The next day, Sept. 10, Ink sent to the surgeon general a
        critique containing criticisms of the study's scientific basis
        which were made public in January with the Weiss report.  The
        letter did not, however, make any reference to the AEC's
        concerns about damage suits, adverse publicity or its effect on
        the testing program.
           Meanwhile, the Public Health Service was gearing up to
        announce the thyroid study and to disclose the leukemia study.
        Weiss' study was formally prepared and dated Sept. 14.  Two days
        later, the thyroid study was announced, but there was no mention
        of the leukemia findings.
           One Health Service document suggests that the service itself
        may have even suppressed the study temporarily to avoid
        excessive press coverage of the thyroid study.  "All of this
        interest," an official wrote of the congressional and press
        concern for fallout studies, "will be intensified if publication
        of the leukemia portion of the study occurs before the [thyroid]
        project begins."
           Earlier, the Health Service had decided to minimize any
        publicity of the thyroid study.
           The result was that the Weiss study was not released and in
        1966 was still under review and revision.  It was never
        released.

        It was now clear what Surgeon General Jesse L. Steinfeld had
     referred to when he answered an inquiry from Representative William S.
     Moorehead back in 1969.  Moorehead wanted to know what had happened to
     the promised large-scale epidemiological studies on thyroid cancer,
     leukemia, and congenital defects in relation to fallout radiation
     requested by Congressmen Holifield and Price after the August 1963
     hearings on low-level radiation.  Steinfeld had written that the
     feasibility studies for such a program led to a decision that "a
     national program was not indicated" and that "the feasibility studies
     were not published."  Those were the studies of Edward S. Weiss, a
     Public Health Service Officer who had tried to protect the lives and
     health of the people of the United States in accordance with his
     professional oath.
        And as inexorable as that fateful decision was to suppress the
     truth about the biological effects of the worldwide fallout from
     nuclear-weapons testing in the interest of national security, it would
     now be necessary for the government to keep from the people of this
     country and the rest of the world the truth about what I knew would
     surely happen in the wake of the drifting fallout clouds from Three
     Mile Island.






          ___________________________________________________________


  In the aftermath of Three Mile Island, more concrete examples of government
  deception and silence about the danger to human health from the radioactive
  clouds escaping from TMI.  But instead of protecting the health of the
  people, the government was attempting to protect the continued myth of the
  viability of the nuclear industry.
        Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to
     keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at
     large.  The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies
     knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced
     by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across
     the northern United States as far as New York and New England during
     the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the
     largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New
     London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two.
        If, indeed, there should once again be sudden rises in infant
     mortality in areas where the radioactive clouds had drifted and the
     public should learn of them when the televised nightmare of Three Mile
     Island was still fresh on everyone's mind, this public knowledge would
     threaten the government's and the nuclear industry's vast program to
     build a thousand of these giant reactors by the end of the century
     near all the major cities, and would result in costly damage suits,
     exactly as in the case of the Nevada tests. . . .

from chapter 18, "Too Little Information Too Late":



     THE TRUTH WAS more difficult to suppress this time than it had been in
     the atmosphere of fear engendered in the cold war of the McCarthy
     years, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam war.  Nonetheless, an
     attempt to keep the facts from the people was clearly being made. . . .

        Here it was:  the NRC knew that the true doses were not just a few
     millirems to the people in the area, as had been claimed at the
     Kennedy hearings, with maximum values of the order of 75 to 100
     millirems nearest to the plant.
        They knew just as I did that the greatest dose arose not from the
     external gamma radiation measured by a survey meter or a film badge,
     but from the internal beta radiation from the inhaled fission gases
     and particles in the lung, the thyroid, and the other critical organs
     that concentrate the different substances according to their various
     chemical properties.  So when the external gamma-dose rate on the
     ground was of the order of 1 to 2 millirems per hour, the true dose
     rate to the lung and other critical organs could be as much as 50 to
     100 times greater, or of the same general magnitude as the 120
     millirems per hour Hendrie himself had just mentioned.
        But they also knew, as I did, that if they ever were to order the
     full evacuation that should have been ordered long before, it would
     not only have caused a panic among the completely confused and
     unprepared population, it would also have been the end of the nuclear
     industry, whether or not the core would ever go to a complete melt-
     down.
        And so more precious time in which to save lives was being lost by
     recommending only that people should stay indoors, as was clear from
     the taped conversation with Governor Thornburgh.  At that very moment
     Governor Thornburgh was under enormous pressures from those wanting to
     protect this important Pennsylvania industry on the one hand, and his
     Secretary of Health, Gordon MacLeod, on the other hand, who was at
     that very time urging that at least the pregnant women and young
     children should be evacuated. . . .

        No wonder the NRC staff did not want to let the public know that
     they knew exactly in which direction the most radioactive clouds had
     moved, since this information could then be used to tie any later
     localized rises in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and cancer to the
     radioactive gas clouds from Three Mile Island. . . .
        Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to
     keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at
     large.  The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies
     knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced
     by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across
     the northern United States as far as New York and New England during
     the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the
     largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New
     London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two.
        If, indeed, there should once again be sudden rises in infant
     mortality in areas where the radioactive clouds had drifted and the
     public should learn of them when the televised nightmare of Three Mile
     Island was still fresh on everyone's mind, this public knowledge would
     threaten the government's and the nuclear industry's vast program to
     build a thousand of these giant reactors by the end of the century
     near all the major cities, and would result in costly damage suits,
     exactly as in the case of the Nevada tests. . . .
        In mid-August, the latest monthly report from the U.S. Center for
     Health Statistics for the month of May arrived in the library.
     Calculating the rates of infant deaths per 1000 live births, I found
     what I had expected.  Instead of declining from the winter high,
     infant mortality in Pennsylvania had gone up following the accident at
     the end of March.  Compared to 147 deaths in February and 141 in
     March, there had been 166 in April and 198 in May, an unprecedented
     rise of 40 percent.  Yet, the number of births had actually declined
     from 13,589 in March to 13,201 in May.  Thus the rate of infant deaths
     per 1000 live births had increased even more, namely by 44 percent,
     from 10.4 in March to 15.0 in May.
        Yet, at the same time, the rate for the United States as a whole
     between March and May had declined 11 percent as it normally did,
     dropping from 14.1 to 12.6 per 1000 live births. . . .






          ___________________________________________________________


  In the final chapter Sternglass describes the continuing efforts by U.S.
  government officials to suppress the true health costs and effects of
  low-level radioactive fallout from Three Mile Island as well as large
  emissions from nuclear power plants.  In the case of TMI's aftermath, the
  overriding concern was to put an absolute clamp on any information coming
  out of the Harrisburg area or areas downwind which would undermine the
  government's claim that no one had died or was injured as a result of the
  meltdown.
        It was as if an iron curtain had descended around the Harrisburg
     area, sealing off the people of the rest of the United States and the
     world from the news that would have warned them of a totally
     unexpected severe effect of low-level fallout.  But neither the
     nuclear industry, the military, nor the state and federal governments
     committed to nuclear power wanted them to know.  What so many people
     had feared would happen in a society committed to nuclear power had in
     fact taken place.  The most important of all our civil rights, the
     freedom to learn of matters affecting our lives and those of our
     children through a free press, was being secretly subverted by an
     enormously powerful nuclear industry and a military establishment that
     had spawned and nurtured it, all in the interest of national security. . .
        Thus, still another set of official data confirmed my original
     findings as well as the data MacLeod had forced into the open, and I
     knew that Tokuhata's attempt to mislead the public in the pages of the
     {Times} would eventually backfire, still further increasing the tragic
     mistrust of the public for its institutions. . . .
  Secrecy and censorship are the cancers killing this society and its ability
  to respond to dangers and threats to health promulgated by technologies the
  true risks and costs of which are hidden and kept secret from the public by
  their own government.
        In our rapidly changing science-based 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.
        The rapid growth of a powerful military and commercial nuclear
     technology was largely unchecked by the normal protective processes of
     free communication and public discussion.  As a result, the unique
     economic and political forces of the industrial, military, and
     scientific organizations to which the atom gave birth are like a
     malignant cancer in our society, unrecognized and unchecked while it
     developed under the cover of secrecy to its present enormous size.  If
     we continue to allow our government, which brought this technology
     into being for purposes of national security, to continue in its
     efforts to aid and abet the suppression of the freedom of publication
     in this vital area, then the crucial early warning system that our
     society needs to survive will have been destroyed. . . .

from chapter 19, "The Present Danger":



     [ . . . ]
        The nation could survive if there were a few more infants that died
     shortly before or after birth.  It could even survive if there were
     many more adults who would die of cancer or heart disease at age
     seventy rather than at eighty.  But no nation could survive in the
     long run if it continuously damaged the mental ability of its newborn
     children, especially in an age where verbal and mathematical skills
     were increasingly essential to the functioning of a high-technology
     society.  And since fewer children were being born, and the advances
     of modern medicine had increased greatly their chances of survival to
     adulthood even if they were physically and mentally handicapped, it
     would not take much more than a few generations for a nation with
     nuclear plants near its cities or sources of milk and water to destroy
     its health, its productivity, and thus its ability to compete with
     others who used less biologically damaging ways to meet their needs
     for energy. . . .

        Thus it was no surprise that the EPA as well as the NRC issued
     statements after my reports had been sent to State Representative
     Anderson and Congressman Christopher Dodd, in whose district the
     Millstone Plant was located, which claimed that the high strontium 90
     and cesium 137 levels in the milk near this plant were due to fallout
     and could not be attributed to releases from the plant.  The EPA and
     NRC never even attempted to explain why the levels of these
     radioactive substances should increase as one approached the stack
     from every direction.
        Instead, these government agencies, on whom the public depended for
     the protection of its health and safety, tried to mislead the public.
     They claimed that there was little strontium 89 present along with the
     strontium 90, as is always the case when fresh fission products escape
     into the environment, and that therefore the strontium 90 could not be
     due to plant releases.
        But what the nonspecialist could not have known is that strontium
     89 has a very short half-life of only 50 days compared with 30 years
     for strontium 90.  While the long-lived strontium 90 continues to
     build up in the soil around the plant, the strontium 89 rapidly decays
     away.  Thus, when the cows return to pasture in the spring and summer,
     the milk shows predominantly the accumulated strontium 90, and very
     little of the short-lived strontium 89.
        In fact, it is just as in the case of a coal-burning plant, where
     both steam and dust are emitted from the stack.  Clearly, one would
     not expect to see the surrounding area covered with water, which
     evaporates rapidly just as short-lived isotopes disappear.  Instead,
     one would expect to find a high level of ashes accumulating,
     decreasing with the distance away in every direction, just like the
     long-lived strontium 90 particles in the soil and milk around a
     nuclear plant.
        But the nuclear scientists and engineers in these agencies, taking
     advantage of the widespread lack of scientific knowledge among the
     general public, its representatives, and even the heads of their own
     bureaucratic organizations, acted to protect the national interest as
     they saw it.  Thus, they used their expertise to mislead the public,
     firmly believing that the need for energy independence or the
     willingness to use nuclear weapons far outweighed any conceivable
     small impact on human health. . . .

        I had been approached by ABC to appear on the show {Good Morning
     America} to present my findings, which were apparently in sharp
     contrast to the conclusion of the Kemeny report, a draft of which was
     read to me by the producer.  According to this draft, which had a
     discussion of potential health effects that was confined to only a
     couple of pages, the only effects were psychological, with no
     detectable increases expected on infant mortality or cancer rates.  In
     effect, the Kemeny Commission had accepted the optimistic report by
     the NRC, the EPA, and HEW a few days after the accident [at TMI].
        Apparently no efforts had been made to look at the actual
     statistics on infant mortality and miscarriages that had shown
     significant rises as early as May and June, four to five months before
     the final draft was being prepared in September and October.  Yet, if
     the commissioners had wanted to, they could easily have obtained the
     same data I had been able to find in the records of local hospitals
     and the reports of the U.S. Center for Health Statistics for every
     state in the United States.  If there really had been no increase in
     stillbirths and infant deaths, this would surely have been the best
     way to reassure the people of Harrisburg and the rest of the world
     living near nuclear reactors, once and for all ending the concern
     about nuclear power, silencing the critics, and freeing the industry
     from the uncertainty that was leading to its rapid decline in the wake
     of Three Mile Island.
        But this was clearly not the course chosen.  The actual data would
     have shown an increase in mortality rates near the plant during the
     summer months, while they declined in nearby areas not reached by the
     plume so carefully recorded in the utility's own internal reports
     available to the Kemeny Commission.  Such a pattern would have been as
     difficult to explain away as the peaks of strontium 90 infant
     mortality and cancer increases around Shippingport and Millstone in
     the past, hardly reassuring for a public that had by now learned to
     distrust deeply the public statement of utility officials and
     government scientists whenever it came to the health effects of low-
     level radiation from bomb fallout or nuclear facilities.
        Not being able to allow the truth to emerge, the government and the
     industry resorted once again to the familiar tactics of suppression
     and attempts to discredit the critics, as I would learn in the days
     following the official release of the Kemeny Report in early November.
        I was supposed to appear on {Good Morning America} the day after
     the Kemeny Commission report was published.  All arrangements had been
     made when I received a phone call from the producer saying that the
     format of the show would have to be changed, that they would need to
     find someone who would represent the industry and government point of
     view to debate me, and that this would mean a day's delay in my
     appearance.  The following morning, I received another call from the
     producer, who said that they had found someone who would represent the
     other side, and that the program was now scheduled for 8:15 A.M. the
     next day.  My tickets had been paid for, the hotel room in New York
     reserved, and a limousine ordered to pick me up and take me to the
     studio.
        But the opportunity to present the other side of the story to a
     nationwide audience in answer to the bland assurance of the Kemeny
     Commission broadcast the day before never came.  Just a few hours
     before I was scheduled to leave for New York, a call came from ABC
     saying that there was a last-minute change in the schedule, and that
     they had to cancel my appearance.  I remembered the enormous pressures
     that had been exerted by the Atomic Energy Commission on the producers
     of the NBC {Today} show back in 1969 when I was scheduled to appear to
     talk about the effects of bomb fallout on infant mortality.  But this
     time, it seemed likely to me that the pressure came from a commercial
     nuclear industry fighting for its life, and apparently these forces
     were too powerful even for a large television network such as ABC. . . .

        A news conference had been arranged by a local citizens' group in
     Harrisburg for noon, following my scheduled appearance on {Good
     Morning America}, and so instead of flying to New York, I took the
     plane to Harrisburg early the next day.  It was the same flight I had
     taken the morning of the first news conference, when the radioactive
     gases were causing my survey meter to give me the warning of the large
     gas releases that the industry did not want to become known.
        The news conference took place in the same small room of the
     Friends' Meeting House where the first one had been called on the
     second day of the accident. . . .
        Television cameras representing the major networks had been
     present;  some of the network reporters interviewed me separately
     immediately following the news conference.  But neither that evening
     nor the next day was there any mention of these disturbing findings
     either on the local news in Pittsburgh or on any of the national
     television news programs.  There were a few very brief local radio
     news items, but not a word of the news conference appeared in any
     Pittsburgh or Philadelphia papers.
        It was as if an iron curtain had descended around the Harrisburg
     area, sealing off the people of the rest of the United States and the
     world from the news that would have warned them of a totally
     unexpected severe effect of low-level fallout.  But neither the
     nuclear industry, the military, nor the state and federal governments
     committed to nuclear power wanted them to know.  What so many people
     had feared would happen in a society committed to nuclear power had in
     fact taken place.  The most important of all our civil rights, the
     freedom to learn of matters affecting our lives and those of our
     children through a free press, was being secretly subverted by an
     enormously powerful nuclear industry and a military establishment that
     had spawned and nurtured it, all in the interest of national security.
        Since in our society there are so many independent magazines,
     newspapers, radio stations, and news services, unlike in a monolithic
     society such as the Soviet Union, there is no way to insure absolutely
     that a determined "dissident" scientist armed with publicly available
     government data can be prevented from having his message eventually
     reach the people.  Therefore, the best way to prevent wide
     dissemination of undesirable information is to destroy the credibility
     of any individual seeking to reach the public and the scientific
     community at large.  In this way, the message would either not be
     transmitted by wary news media or it would not be believed, especially
     if it was not reported in sufficient detail.  This was, in fact, the
     tactic that was adopted following the news conference in Harrisburg. . .

        Thus, still another set of official data confirmed my original
     findings as well as the data MacLeod had forced into the open, and I
     knew that Tokuhata's attempt to mislead the public in the pages of the
     {Times} would eventually backfire, still further increasing the tragic
     mistrust of the public for its institutions. . . .

        Yet the state's news release signed by Muller, as quoted in the UPI
     story, concluded as follows:

        After careful study of all available information, we continue to
        find *no* evidence to date that radiation from the nuclear power
        plant resulted in increased number of fetal, neonatal or infant
        deaths.

        Neither the UPI nor {The New York Times} had fulfilled their normal
     journalistic responsibility to the public to obtain comments from
     those who could have pointed out the misleading nature of the news
     release.  In a matter of such great concern and importance for the
     future health and well-being of the children of Harrisburg and the
     entire world, was this too much to ask for?
        Ironically, the willingness of {The New York Times} and the UPI to
     lend themselves to the attempt to cover up the full dimensions of the
     deaths at Three Mile Island was to be proven futile within a few
     months, as a result of the persistence of two television news
     reporters who became disturbed when they discovered a series of
     inconsistencies and anomalies in the tables of statistics released by
     the Pennsylvania Health Department in May of 1980. . . .
                                          . . .  Apparently it had not
     occurred to either one of us that the data released might actually
     have been doctored in some manner when we first heard of the May 1980
     news release issued by MacLeod's successor.  It seemed incredible that
     someone might want to do something so glaring, yet when we examined
     the figures further, a whole series of gross inconsistencies emerged,
     all tending to reduce the number of deaths during the critical summer
     months when the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics had shown the greatest
     rise of infant deaths both in Pennsylvania and upstate New York
     relative to the United States as a whole. . . .
        The damage done to the developing infants at Three Mile Island will
     not be as easily swept away as a single public-health official, more
     concerned about trying to protect human life and health than a
     powerful technology gone out of human control.
        I knew only too well how often this had happened before without the
     knowledge of the public.  I knew how the budgets of public-health
     agencies, such as those of New York State, had been cut in order to
     stop the publication of the detailed annual health statistics that
     would allow other conscientious officials or independent investigators
     to alert the public to the danger of emissions from newly built
     nuclear reactors or fallout from distant nuclear detonations.  The
     fragmentary summaries of data that replaced the detailed reports
     beginning in 1970 were a very inadequate substitute.  I also knew that
     the budget of the EPA had been cut by the Nixon administration to
     force an end to the publication of {Radiation Health Data and Reports}
     in 1974.  That was the year after the nuclear industry and the
     agencies that promoted it had learned from the Shippingport hearings
     how the detailed monthly data on strontium 90 gathered by the states
     could be used to pinpoint the new sources of radioactivity in the
     milk.  Used intelligently, such detailed data might lead to costly
     damage suits, just as in the case for the fallout from Nevada.
        After those who were primarily concerned about public health had
     been forced out of the NRC and EPA, it was a simple step to end the
     previously required monitoring of strontium 90 by the nuclear plants,
     ostensibly as an economy measure.  Interestingly, however, the end of
     monitoring came in 1979, the same year in which the permissible doses
     to critical organs from the nuclear fuel cycle were reduced by a
     factor of twenty.  Those scientists who knew that strontium 90 gave
     the greatest dose per picocurie of all substances released by nuclear
     bombs or nuclear reactors would no longer be able to protect the
     public precisely because the most crucial data was no longer being
     collected.  And those few who wanted to warn the public risked the
     destruction of their scientific reputation and careers.
        As I explained to Pawlick at the end of our interview, one of the
     greatest unanticipated threats of low-level radiation to the human
     body comes from its action on normal, life-giving oxygen molecules,
     turning them into powerful toxic agents.  Among the most important
     systems they attack are the immune defenses of the body, which detect
     and destroy not only foreign bodies such as viruses and bacteria, but
     also ordinary cells that have somehow gotten out of normal control.
     These are the so-called malignant cancer cells, which multiply rapidly
     until they become so numerous that they inhibit the normal functions
     of vital organs, a condition that eventually leads to the death of the
     organisms as a whole.
        In this sense, there is a close analogy between the human body and
     a complex human society.  They can both be destroyed by outside
     forces, or they can destroy themselves if they lose the ability to
     recognize "super-normal" individuals with an unusual ability to
     propagate their kind in an unchecked manner.
        In our rapidly changing science-based 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.
        The rapid growth of a powerful military and commercial nuclear
     technology was largely unchecked by the normal protective processes of
     free communication and public discussion.  As a result, the unique
     economic and political forces of the industrial, military, and
     scientific organizations to which the atom gave birth are like a
     malignant cancer in our society, unrecognized and unchecked while it
     developed under the cover of secrecy to its present enormous size.  If
     we continue to allow our government, which brought this technology
     into being for purposes of national security, to continue in its
     efforts to aid and abet the suppression of the freedom of publication
     in this vital area, then the crucial early warning system that our
     society needs to survive will have been destroyed.
        In the name of national security, our scientists and engineers have
     created Frankenstein's monster, capable of destroying life in this
     world.  Ironically, in order to realize the dream of ending all wars
     and developing the peaceful atom that would atone for the horror of
     Hiroshima and make up to mankind for the threat of destruction that
     would forever hang over the world in the years to come, they needed to
     ally themselves with the military, political, and economic interests
     that alone could supply the enormous financial resources needed to
     realize their dream.  Indeed, Eisenhower had tried to warn the nation
     of this danger at the end of his presidency.
        The alliance of science and technology with the military and
     political forces is, of course, as old as civilization itself, since
     only through the fear of powerful enemies would the public provide the
     necessary funds to develop costly new technologies, all the way from
     better steel for swords to gigantic missile systems capable of
     pinpoint accuracy in delivering nuclear bombs to their targets.
        But when the testing of nuclear weapons and the leakage from
     commercial reactors were found to have unanticipated serious
     biological effects on the population, it became necessary to secretly
     subvert the very freedom of publication and continued correction of
     errors on which the success of modern science and technology itself
     has been based.
        In their understandable desire to see the blessings of the peaceful
     atom come about in their lifetime, and concerned not to endanger the
     sources of capital for the research and development essential for the
     advancement of science and technology required by modern society,
     those involved with the development, promotion, and regulation of
     nuclear technology and the protection of public health were too often
     willing to participate in the effort to hide the consequences of
     nuclear testing or normal and accidental releases from nuclear
     reactors, especially when the requirements of national security were
     cited to them in periods of international tension.
        Ironically, the need to believe that peaceful applications of the
     atom were possible played into the hands of those in the military who
     wanted to use nuclear weapons in limited wars, since both required the
     assumption that low-level radiation from distant, worldwide fallout or
     from nuclear plants was essentially harmless.  Thus, the most
     concerned and idealistic scientists who had worked on the bomb and who
     later dedicated themselves to the realization of the peaceful benefits
     of the atom, because they were willing to believe the harmlessness of
     very small amounts of radiation and the negligible magnitude of the
     doses from nuclear reactor operations, were in effect contributing to
     the increased likelihood of nuclear war.
        Thus, the deeply felt hope for safe, clean, and economical nuclear
     power kindled by the nuclear scientists tragically aided the plans of
     leaders of the nuclear nations to find ways to use nuclear weapons in
     all types of military confrontations.  Only the continuing denial of
     the seriousness of worldwide fallout would give credibility to these
     threats.
        Only a few months before Three Mile Island, James Reston, writing
     in {The New York Times}, asked what "the present danger" facing our
     nation really was:

           Is it a military threat from the Soviet Union or an economic
        threat from some of our allies who are outworking and
        outproducing us?
           In short, is the threat external or internal?  What worries
        the world about the United States today:  that it is spending
        only 117.3 billion dollars this year on defense--the highest
        peacetime military budget in our history?  Or that the United
        States is spending more of its economic and moral capital than
        ever before and losing confidence in itself and the confidence
        of the free world?

        Reston went on to quote Lincoln from an address given in
     Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1837.  Lincoln's words now take
     on a particularly strong relevance:

           At what point shall we Americans expect the approach of
        danger?  By what means shall we fortify against it?  Shall we
        expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and
        crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia, and
        Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own
        excepted) in their military chest with a Bonaparte for a
        commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make
        track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

        And then came this most strangely prophetic passage:

           At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?
        I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us:  it
        cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must
        ourselves be its author and finisher.   As a nation of free men
        we must live through all time or die by suicide.

        As Reston concluded, "it could be, of course, that Mr. Lincoln is
     out of date in this nuclear world, but at least his point is worth
     debating.  The `present danger' may be the failure to debate what it
     really is."
        But when vital information is secretly kept from free people, they
     are no longer free, and there can be no meaningful debate of the most
     crucial problem facing our nation and the rest of the people of this
     world, namely whether we shall learn how to live through all time by
     finding a way to end the nuclear cancer threatening our nation, or die
     by nuclear suicide.
        If we have any moral or ethical obligations at all as human beings,
     they surely include the obligation to insure the survival of our
     species and thus the opportunity for our children and their
     descendants to develop to the fullest the miraculous potential of the
     human mind.  As the French philosopher-scientist Jean Rostand has
     phrased it so eloquently on behalf of humanity as a whole, "The duty
     to survive gives us the right to know."






--

                It is not enough for a handful of experts
                to attempt the solution of a problem,
                to solve it and then to apply it.
                The restriction of knowledge to an elite group
                destroys the spirit of society
                and leads to its intellectual impoverishment."

                                             --  Albert Einstein