NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30

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Xref: sparky misc.activism.progressive:9407 alt.censorship:9681 alt.activism:19658 Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.censorship,alt.activism Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: Bk Intro: "Secret Fallout, Low-Level Rad. from Hiroshima to TMI" [2/2] Message-ID: <1992Dec17.162552.19779@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Followup-To: alt.activism.d Summary: part 2 of two parts excerpting segments of Dr. Sternglass's 1982 book Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: human exposure to low-level radiation danger greatly underestimated Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 16:25:52 GMT Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Lines: 1036 ___________________________________________________________ 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