NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9827

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From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.censorship,alt.activism
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [9/15]
Summary: part 9 of 15:  chapter 16
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
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Date: 7 Jan 93 17:45:41 GMT
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                                      16


                          The Minds of the Children




    DRAINED by the long battle to warn the people of Beaver County and
    Pittsburgh of the dangers arising from the "normal" operations of
    nuclear plants, I decided to devote myself again to my much-neglected
    research in physics and radiological instrumentation.  Many people had
    by now taken up the fight to warn the public about other previously
    unrecognized dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle, all the way from the
    mining and milling of uranium ore to the ultimate disposal of the
    long-lived radioactive wastes and the possible theft of plutonium by
    terrorist groups to make home-made bombs.  Thus, when Henry Kendall of
    the Union of Concerned Scientists joined forces with Ralph Nader in
    exposing the previously hidden risks of a major accident in early
    1974, I felt that the battle was in good hands while I caught up with
    my other responsibilities.
       Now and then I would of course be asked to speak or testify at
    licensing hearings or court cases, but with the revelations of secret
    abuses of power in the Nixon administration and the formation of
    Nader's "Critical Mass" organization of anti-nuclear groups in the
    fall of 1974, I had the feeling that the public's blind trust in its
    government leaders had at last been shaken, and that the tide had
    begun to turn.  It seemed to me that the nuclear juggernaut would
    eventually be halted as a new generation of young scientists,
    engineers, and political leaders born after Hiroshima could take an
    unbiased look at the enormous problems that had been kept from the
    public and that were now increasingly coming to light.
       What did continue to concern me very much were the repeated
    episodes of heavy fallout of radioactive iodine from Chinese nuclear
    tests that continued to damage the thyroids of the unborn and the
    infants, but that continued to be downplayed by state and federal
    health agencies.  There was also the failure of any real progress
    toward an end to the multiplication of nuclear bombs, despite the
    signing of the SALT treaty that at least for the moment had halted an
    all-out anti-ballistic missile race.
       In addition, there were also the continuing underground bomb tests
    by the U.S., the Russians, the French, and the British.  No one paid
    much attention to these anymore, but on numerous occasions in the past
    such tests had spewed forth radioactive gases that kept raising the
    risk of cancer and threatening the life and health of the newborn
    thousands of miles away.
       I remembered only too well the tragic story of one of the worst of
    such accidents.  On December 18, 1970, more than seventeen years after
    Professor Clark and his students accidentally discovered the rainout
    in Troy, New York, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission conducted an
    underground nuclear-weapons test at the Nevada Test Site.  Code-named
    "Baneberry," this Hiroshima-sized bomb was exploded some 800 feet
    underground.  The explosion opened up a fissure in the rock, and large
    quantities of radioactivity escaped upward into the atmosphere.  In
    the vicinity of the test site, the slowly drifting cloud of
    radioactive dust produced readings of 25 rads per hour on the ground.
    Hundreds of employees were seriously overexposed and had to be quickly
    evacuated.
       Shortly after the accident, the AEC's Division of Biology and
    Medicine and the Utah State Division of Health notified a team of
    fallout specialists working at the University of Utah under contract
    to the AEC.  The team, headed by Drs. Robert C. Pendleton and Charles
    W. Mays, scientists who had long warned of the dangers to the infant
    thyroid from radioactive iodine, immediately set about determining the
    direction and intensity of the radioactive clouds.  From the Salt Lake
    Weather Bureau they learned the speed of the winds at the time of
    detonation, while the Nevada Operations Office informed them that the
    radioactive leakage had occurred during a period of very strong wind
    shear, with winds at different altitudes blowing in different
    directions.  The team was able to estimate that during the next
    twenty-four hours the lowest part of the cloud would probably go to
    the east of Winnemucca, Nevada,while the layer above would be blown
    across Utah to the southeast.  The next-highest layer was apparently
    headed for New Mexico, while the topmost parts were expected to be
    carried into Utah between Highways 56 and 21.
       Once the direction of the fallout was estimated, the extensive
    network of sampling stations around the state, constructed in the
    years since the dangers from fallout in the milk were discovered,
    could go into operation, estimating the strength of the radioactivity
    in the air and on the ground.  This was indeed a far more
    sophisticated operation than the one mounted so long before by Dr.
    Clark's students, driving from town to town in their jalopies carrying
    rudimentary Geiger counters.  And in this case, there was no problem
    about estimating the internal radiation dose, something that had not
    even been considered in Troy back in 1953.  Now, a program run jointly
    with the Utah Division of Fish and Game was put into action to procure
    samples of the local wildlife that had been in the path of the
    fallout.  Conservation officers were enlisted to collect deer that had
    recently been killed on the highways, while sheep, deer, and rabbits
    were shot in areas where they were regarded as a nuisance.  These
    animals were to be dissected in the laboratory, where the
    concentrations of isotopes in their body organs would be measured.
       On December 19 and 20, teams departed from Salt Lake City to obtain
    samples of snow and vegetation.  Instead of the burdock leaves favored
    by Dr. Clark and his students, the fallout specialists took samples of
    alfalfa, sagebrush, and juniper.  Some of the alfalfa samples
    consisted of loose hay from exposed bales.
       According to the laboratory results, the most prominent gamma-
    radiation-emitting isotopes in the Baneberry fallout were the short-
    lived, intensely radioactive iodine 131 and iodine 133.  These were
    found in the lungs, thyroids, stomachs, and fetuses of deer and sheep,
    as well as in snow, milk, and vegetation.  The fallout specialists
    were able to determine that if the Baneberry explosion had happened to
    take place in the warmer months, when the cows were out to pasture,
    the total dose to the local children from iodine in the milk would
    have been approximately 120 millirads, with some receiving much higher
    exposures.  This did not include the dose from the other isotopes
    inhaled or eaten.  Furthermore, the scientists observed that low wind
    velocities and an atmospheric inversion had fortunately served to keep
    the fallout that reached Utah fairly stationary for a number of days
    in a position over relatively unpopulated areas.  This allowed
    quantities of the heaviest fallout particles to settle to the ground,
    while the short-lived isotopes lost much of their radioactivity before
    the cloud was blown over the more populated areas.  If these
    fortuitous circumstances had not existed, the doses might have been
    much higher for the people of Utah, perhaps as high as in Troy in
    1953.
       As it turned out, the predictions of where the fallout would drift
    were wrong.  The heaviest clouds went north and northeast toward
    Idaho, Washington, and Montana, where rain and snow brought down much
    more radioactivity than in Utah.  Subsequently, the fallout from
    Baneberry was detected across the northern U.S. by large rises in the
    cesium 137 levels in milk, as could be seen in the state-by-state
    tabulation of cesium levels for December 1970 printed in the April
    1971 issue of {Radiation Health Data and Reports}.  Data for the
    radioactivity on the ground also showed that the fallout had drifted
    into Canada, thus violating the provisions of the 1963 test-ban
    treaty, which does not permit nuclear tests that release radioactivity
    beyond the national borders of the nation conducting them.
       But as far as the general public was concerned, there was only the
    following statement by the AEC, carried by {The New York Times} and
    the rest of the press around the country:

       The Commission said that the radioactivity was of such low
       intensity that it presented no danger.  It was detected at
       altitudes of several thousand feet, and only the most minute
       traces of radioactive contamination would reach the ground, the
       Commission said.  The AEC . . . said that nowhere outside the
       immediate area of the test was the fallout dangerous to human
       life or health.

       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.
       Not being an expert in the field of psychological testing, I
    clearly was out of my depth.  Consequently, I decided to put the idea
    aside for the moment, thinking that perhaps some day there might be an
    opportunity to discuss it with colleagues and friends more
    knowledgeable in this field.  Besides, I saw no obvious way to test
    this idea further at this time.  It was true that the decline had
    begun only in 1963, eighteen years after 1945, when the first bombs
    were detonated and infant mortality began to halt its decline.  But
    only time would tell whether the decline would end when the students
    taking the test were those who were born during the temporary nuclear
    bomb test moratorium between 1959 and 1961.  (This group would be
    taking the S.A.T. in 1977 and 1978.)
       In the face of widespread public alarm, a special panel on the
    decline in Scholastic Aptitude scores was created under the direction
    of former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz.  The Wirtz panel
    commissioned more than two dozen special research studies under the
    joint sponsorship of the College Board and the Educational Testing
    Service;  these studies were published in 1977 together with a summary
    report, a copy of which I sent for when its completion was announced
    in another article in {The New York Times}.
       It was clear from the report that despite this major effort to
    identify the cause or causes of the disturbing decline in test scores,
    no single factor or group of factors seemed to explain the observed
    pattern of decline.  The various studies did conclude, however, that
    certain factors were *not* likely to have played a significant part in
    the sudden decline.  For example, cultural bias, differences in the
    predictive ability of the tests for whites and blacks, changes in the
    difficulty of the test, and tests getting out of line with high school
    practices and standards were eliminated as likely explanations.
       Since even after this major research effort no one had come up with
    any really adequate explanation, I decided to discuss my hypothesis
    with an old friend, Dr. Henry P. David, a psychologist living near
    Washington, whenever the opportunity would present itself next.
       To my surprise, after listening quietly to my explanation for a
    long while, he did not think that it was so impossible after all.
    There had apparently been a growing recognition in the psychological
    community that many physical factors acting on the developing baby
    during pregnancy--including cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and
    anesthetics used during delivery--could result in retarded growth,
    underweight births, and various degrees of learning and behavioral
    problems later in childhood.
       Thus encouraged, I decided to pursue the matter further,
    particularly since one of the predictions of the hypothesis had just
    been confirmed:  As suddenly as the annual drop in verbal S.A.T.
    scores had gone to ten points in 1975, it had just as unexpectedly
    stopped dropping so precipitously in the following two years,
    declining by only three points in 1976 and a mere two points by 1977.
       Many years ago, I had had occasion to look up the total amount of
    fission energy released by small tactical weapons detonated in Nevada
    as measured in kilotons, or thousands of tons, of equivalent weight of
    TNT.  (The Hiroshima bomb was approximately 15 kilotons.)  When I
    found the figures, they were 303 kilotons in 1957, 18 kilotons in
    1958, and none in 1959.  So far, at least, the idea had withstood its
    first test, and the ability of a theory to make a correct prediction
    is universally regarded as a very crucial factor in accepting it.  But
    I needed to find someone in the field of educational testing with whom
    to work on the further examination of these ideas.
       It so happened that shortly after I had started to look for a
    collaborator, I received a letter from Dr. Steven Bell, an educational
    psychologist at a small college in Georgia.  In the letter he told me
    that he had heard about my findings on infant and fetal mortality
    changes that were correlated with fallout, and he asked whether I had
    ever considered the possibility that it might have had an effect on
    learning ability.
       Delighted with this coincidence, I wrote back that indeed I had
    begun to suspect this, and that I would be happy to work with him on
    this question.  I included copies of all my relevant papers and some
    preliminary plots showing a correlation of the declining S.A.T. scores
    with the pattern of accumulated external gamma-radiation doses
    measured at the Brookhaven National Laboratories.  Oddly enough, this
    had been introduced into the record of the licensing hearings for the
    Shoreham nuclear plant some years ago by proponents for its
    construction when I was asked to testify as to the potential danger
    that the planned releases might present for children born in the area.
       As it turned out, Bell had for some years become increasingly
    concerned about the possibility that physical and chemical agents in
    the environment might have much more serious effects on I.Q. and
    achievement test scores than had been suspected.  Such factors acting
    on the baby in the mother's womb would be indistinguishable from
    hereditary problems, so that individuals born in an environment where
    there were such deleterious factors present might show learning
    disabilities that would wrongly be blamed either on "bad genes" or the
    poor social and educational environment alone.
       Since very often the poor were blacks, Indians, or Puerto Ricans,
    the generally lower I.Q. and S.A.T. scores of these groups as a whole
    could mistakenly be blamed on genetic factors when actually there
    could be an unrecognized effect of such physical and chemical agents
    as DDT, cigarette smoking, air pollution, herbicides, poor diet, high
    fallout, and drug use during pregnancy--factors that had been
    generally ignored by psychologists studying intellectual development
    in the past.  And since poor diet and health are more common among the
    poor, minority groups would be disproportionately affected by these
    factors.
       Certainly all the earlier studies on infant and fetal mortality
    rates had consistently shown that nonwhites suffered about twice the
    mortality rates of infants within the white population, and this was
    widely recognized as being connected with poverty and poor diet and
    not with any inherited factors.  When the mortality rates had stopped
    declining after the onset of heavy nuclear testing in the early 1950s,
    the greatest negative effects were in the nonwhite population of the
    rural south and the urban ghettos of the Northeast, where not only the
    fallout but also the poverty was greatest.  And even after the end of
    the heaviest fallout from the atmospheric bomb tests in the mid-1960s
    although both white and nonwhite infant mortality were declining
    rapidly once more, as I had predicted back in 1969, the absolute
    mortality rate for nonwhites was still twice what it was for the white
    populations in such urbanized states as Pennsylvania, New York, and
    Illinois.
       But wherever there were no large groups of very poor populations
    and the environment was relatively free from both ordinary industrial
    and radioactive pollution--as in Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, and New
    Hampshire--infant mortality rates were plunging to unprecedented low
    levels in the late 1970s.  The rates were dropping far below those of
    the urban states with large nuclear reactors, such as New York and
    Pennsylvania, despite the higher number of physicians per person and
    the greater access to hospitals with special units for the care of
    premature babies.  And a similar pattern had begun to show in cancer
    rates.
       All of these considerations supported the hypothesis that
    radioactive fallout might have been one widely distributed factor that
    had been neglected in the search for a cause of the declining learning
    and reading abilities of the young students born in the 1950s.  But
    how could this be tested further?
       Bell and I had sent for one of the studies carried out for the
    Wirtz commission by Dr. Rex Jackson of the Educational Testing
    Service.  The study contained a detailed statistical breakdown of the
    scores by region since 1971.  Since fallout also had differed in
    intensity for different regions of the United States, here was another
    chance to check the hypothesis.
       If it was indeed the poor schools of the large urban areas that
    were mainly responsible for the drop in scores, then clearly the
    greatest declines should have taken place in the Middle Atlantic
    Region, which included New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware,
    Maryland, and the District of Columbia, together with the Midwest
    populations in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio, with their large ghetto
    areas.
       On the other hand the Western Region, which included the states of
    Alaska, Hawaii, California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Montana,
    Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado, with their relatively rural
    populations and relatively fewer urban ghetto problems should clearly
    show the least decline.
       But exactly the opposite was the case.  Comparing the scores for
    the high school graduating classes of 1976 with those for 1974, during
    which the United States as a whole dropped 13 points in the verbal
    test, the West dropped 19 points compared to only 9 points for the
    Midwest and 14 points for the Middle Atlantic states.
       Even the South, with its relatively low average income, poorer
    school systems, and lowest educational expenditures, dropped by much
    less than the West, namely by only 13 points.  No other region
    declined as much as the western United States, with its relatively
    clean air, clean water, and generally higher average socio-economic
    level.
       Nor would the wide difference in the drop fit the hypothesis that
    it was television viewing that was responsible for the great drop in
    reading and mathematics scores.  It was difficult to believe that the
    children in Illinois, Ohio, and New York watched television so much
    less than those living in California, Washington, and Idaho.
       Certainly the ghettos of Chicago, Detroit, and New York had
    suffered a much greater social upheaval than most of the West, except
    for Los Angeles, and they clearly contained the greater number of
    minority groups, broken homes, one-parent families, and run-down
    schools plagued by vandalism, absenteeism, and violence in the
    classrooms.  But the decline in scores did fit the pattern of the
    weapons-test fallout during the years of 1956 to 1958, when these
    children were born.
       By far the largest amount of fallout from the Pacific and Siberian
    tests had rained out over Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and
    California, where the coastal mountain ranges near the population
    centers of Seattle and Portland showed the highest amounts of
    strontium 90, cesium 137, and other radioactive substances in the milk
    and diet.  And in Nevada and Utah, the large 1957 series of tactical-
    nuclear-weapons tests had brought down the highest levels of short-
    lived iodine 131 in the milk ever recorded.  It was, in fact, in the
    clean coastal counties of the Pacific Northwest where lung cancer
    rates had risen most sharply.
       By contrast, the areas of the Midwest such as lower Illinois,
    Indiana,and Ohio had been spared the heaviest fresh fallout, which
    drifted mainly across the northern United States from the Nevada test
    site over Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and
    Michigan, until it reached the Appalachian Mountains of northern New
    York and New England.  There the heavy rain and snowfall as well as
    the greater air pollution would bring it down in large amounts, just
    as the acid rain brought down the sulphur dioxide emitted by the coal
    plants of the Midwest.  Together with the effects of poverty and
    ordinary air pollution of the industrial East, this could explain why
    the Middle Atlantic and New England states showed an intermediate drop
    in scores of only 12 to 14 points, between the West's 19 points and
    the 8 points of the Midwestern plain.
       Bell and I realized that it would be extremely important to obtain
    the scores for some of the individual states, but these were not
    listed in any of the existing publications.  Not until the summer of
    1979, shortly before we were scheduled to present an invited paper at
    the meeting of the American Psychological Association in September,
    did we find a way to obtain the scores for four out of the five states
    for which the U.S. Public Health Service had measured the fallout
    levels back in 1957.  Apparently, some of the states did not want
    their S.A.T. scores to be published, and so the College Board was able
    to release to us only the data for California, Utah, Ohio, and New
    York, but not for Missouri.
       But 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.
       But as we pointed out at the Psychological Association meeting,
    there was also reason for hope in the data for individual states.
    First of all, the test scores in Utah rebounded partially by 9 points
    the following year, when the nuclear test ban apparently showed its
    effect for the children conceived eighteen years earlier.  At least
    some of the damage was not permanent, presumably because it affected
    the fetal thyroid more than the mother's, and the iodine was gone from
    the milk within a matter of a few months after the bomb tests ended,
    although damage from strontium 90 and its daughter product, yttrium
    90, to the pituitary gland would continue for many years, since it had
    accumulated in the bones of young women for decades.
       Also, it was encouraging that the average level of performance on
    the tests had been so much higher in Utah than in any of the three
    other states for which we had the data.  Although California, New
    York, and Ohio all showed scores in 1974 that were above the U.S.
    average of 440, down 38 points from the maximum of 478 in 1963, Utah
    had by far the highest score, namely 532, compared with 459 for Ohio,
    454 for New York, and 450 for California.
       Thus, it appeared that given the kind of quality school system that
    the people of Utah had established, together with the good diet, the
    low amount of smoking, drug use, and alcohol consumption during
    pregnancy, it was possible to attain a much higher degree of
    performance on this type of achievement test.  The potential for
    raising the school performance of our children in the future was
    therefore clearly immense if we could only learn to use our vast
    productive capability to provide better diets, better schools, and
    better prenatal care as the Mormons had been able to do.  Instead we
    were investing more and more of our national income in gigantic
    nuclear reactors for both military and civilian purposes that were
    filling the air and drinking water with invisible radioactive poisons,
    destroying the most important resource of our nation, the physical and
    mental health of our children.
       Furthermore, this high intellectual performance was achieved in
    Utah despite serious local pollution problems from copper smelters,
    large coal-burning plants, and as many automobiles per capita as
    anywhere else in the United States.  (Neither copper smelters, coal
    plants, nor automobiles produce strontium 90 or iodine 131.)  It was
    obviously not necessary to return to a primitive, nonindustrial
    society for people to have capable children or to live a long,
    healthy, and useful life.  For not only did the people of Utah have
    children with test scores that were far above the average of the rest
    of the United States, but they also had among the lowest rates of
    heart disease and cancer in the entire nation.
       Since the Mormon customs discouraged smoking, they did not
    experience the large synergistic multiplying factor for lung cancer
    that smokers experienced when the radioactive fallout arrived.  Just
    as the uranium miners who did not smoke were better off than their
    coworkers who did, the Mormons were able to clear out of their lungs
    the fine radioactive dust particles more rapidly than those whose lung
    clearance was slowed down by the nicotine in cigarette smoke.  Thus,
    their religious customs resulted in much lower amounts of both man-
    made and natural radioactivity staying in their lungs or entering
    their bloodstream, reducing greatly the risk of low-level exposure
    leading to rises in lung cancer, heart ailments, and other chronic
    diseases.
       Both Bell and I were surprised by how well our rather startling
    hypothesis was received by the large number of psychologists who came
    prepared to question our theory.  In the ensuing discussion, questions
    were raised as to whether a change in the mix of the students taking
    the tests might not explain a good portion of the long decline in test
    scores.  That is, could the decline in scores be explained by the
    increase of students from lower-income homes who in the past would not
    have thought of going to college?  This was indeed likely to be the
    case in the early years, according to some of the studies published by
    the Wirtz Commission, but it could not explain either the sudden sharp
    drop followed by a halt in the late 1970s, when the total number of
    students taking the tests was actually declining.  Nor could an
    increase in the number of less well-prepared students explain the
    recent wholesale decline in the number of students who could score
    above 600 or 700 out of the possible maximum of 800 points in these
    tests.
       It was, in fact, the extremely sharp decline in the number of very
    high-scoring students that presented the greatest potential problem
    for a society increasingly dependent on verbal and mathematical skills
    to run the computers, design the automated machines for the factories
    and farms of the future, administer an increasingly high-technology
    society, and operate the sophisticated electronic weapons of a modern
    army.  Instead of 189,300 students who had been able to score above
    600 in the verbal test among those born in 1952-53, there were
    suddenly only 110,300 for the birth years of 1957-58, a drop of 42
    percent.  And an even greater drop occurred for the top students on
    whom our society would depend for much of its new ideas, creativity,
    and leadership skills in the arts, the sciences, and engineering,
    namely those who were able to score over 700.  In this category, the
    numbers were cut by more than half, from a high point of 33,200 born
    before the Nevada tests began in 1949-50 to a low of only 14,800 for
    those born in 1957-58, the years of the heaviest fallout from our
    weapons testing.
       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.
       There were now also fewer who were born immature, underweight, and
    thus dying of chronic and infectious diseases, except near the growing
    number of nuclear reactors that started operating in the early 1970s.
       There was to be yet another development that strongly supported the
    hypothesis that fallout had unanticipated effects on mental
    development of the young.  Just six months after the meeting of the
    American Psychological Association in New York where we had presented
    our findings, another scientific meeting took place in Baltimore
    devoted to the biological effects of ionizing radiation.  At this
    meeting, Dr. Charlotte Silverman of the Bureau of Radiological Health
    in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services presented a paper
    entitled "Mental Function Following Scalp X-Irradiation for Tinea
    Capitatis in Childhood," a condition more commonly known as ringworm
    of the scalp.
       Dr. Silverman summarized the results of studies of two groups of
    children treated by means of X-rays, a method no longer used.  One
    group of 2,215 children was followed at New York University Medical
    Center, and another group of 10,842 children at the Chaim Sheba
    Medical Center in Israel was followed over a period of 20 to 25 years,
    together with matched groups of non-irradiated controls.  Aside from
    an increase in the number of brain and thyroid tumors, there was also
    an excess of nervous, mental and behavioral problems in the irradiated
    groups.  As Dr. Silverman reported, "The New York investigators found
    a higher incidence of treated psychiatric disorders among the
    irradiated which persisted during an observation time of about 30
    years."
       For the Israeli group as originally reported by Drs. B. Modan and
    E. Ron at the Sixth International Congress of Radiation Research in
    Tokyo earlier that year, Dr. Silverman summarized the results as
    follows:

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

       The doses to the thyroids of the children were listed as having
    been in the range of 6 to 9 rads, well below the doses of 10 to 60
    rads received by the children of Utah from the fallout of the Nevada
    tests reported by Dr. C. W. Mays at the August 1963 Congressional
    Hearings for the children of Utah in 1962, or the 5 to 40 rads
    estimated by Dr. Eric Reiss for the children of the Troy-Albany area
    where heavy rainouts in distant areas had first been discovered.
       Since the thyroid doses to the more sensitive developing fetus are
    generally 10 to 20 times as great as for the young infant, it was
    therefore not surprising that effects on brain function, mental
    ability and scholastic achievement should be observable for the
    children born in Utah and other areas subjected to bomb fallout during
    the years of nuclear weapons testing.
       Shortly after the Baltimore meeting, the College Board sent me the
    SAT scores for 45 out of the 50 states up to the most recent testing
    period of 1978-79, 17 years after the second nuclear weapons series of
    tests in 1962.  It was clear that this more detailed data would
    provide a crucial test of our prediction that there should be another
    sharp drop in the scores associated with the series of Nevada bomb
    tests, and that the greatest declines should again be observed for the
    western United States downwind from Nevada.
       After going through the table, I saw that the answer was quickly
    apparent.  Among all the states listed, Utah again showed the sharpest
    decline in the entire United States, 11 points in a single year.  The
    declines diminished with distance away from Utah across the northern
    United States until they reached 5 points in New York, 3 points in
    Connecticut and only 1 point in Rhode Island.
       How long would it take before the public would be able to learn of
    these facts?  How long would it take before the damage that the
    governments deeply committed to nuclear technology for weapons and
    energy were continuing to inflict upon their own children would be
    ended?  There were, of course, hopeful signs among those born in rural
    areas far from the nuclear plants in the years since the bomb fallout
    had stopped.  Would any government leaders dominated by fear of
    foreign enemies be able to find the courage to carry out the
    epidemiological studies that had been called for so often in the past
    and admit the tragic errors that had been made?  Or were we all
    helplessly lock-stepped on the road to the self-destruction that blind
    persistence in the course we had taken would surely bring to our
    nation and all those who had followed us in the frantic rush toward
    the false promise of unlimited power presented by the discovery of
    self-sustaining fission?
       All this had enormous implications for the proposed new missile
    systems and the scenarios used to justify their need.  If indeed the
    fallout from the bomb tests in Nevada was the principal new factor
    responsible for the unprecedented sudden drop in mental abilities
    among newborn in those tragic years, then the detonation of just two
    or three half-megaton warheads on the missile silos in Nevada and Utah
    would cause a drop equal to that observed during the seven years of
    small-tactical-weapons testing.  What then would a massive strike of
    many thousands of such warheads, exploded near the surface on our
    missile silos in the West, mean for the future of our nation, even if
    not a single one of our cities were destroyed?  Knowing the enormous
    sensitivity of the fetus in the mother's womb, was it really credible
    that any President of the United States could be blackmailed into not
    firing our missiles after such a hypothetical attack in the hope of
    "saving" the population in the cities of the east?  And what would it
    profit the leaders of another country that had launched such a blow
    against us if within days, a massive cloud of drifting fallout would
    poison the air, the food, and water of their children for generations,
    even if not a single one of our missiles should ever reach their land?






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