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Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!rutgers!sgigate!odin!ratmandu.esd.sgi.com!dave From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Newsgroups: talk.environment Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [5/15] Summary: part 5 of 15: chapter 9 through chapter 12 Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival Message-ID: <1993Jan6.131935.9161@odin.corp.sgi.com> Date: 6 Jan 93 13:19:35 GMT Sender: news@odin.corp.sgi.com (Net News) Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Lines: 1086 Nntp-Posting-Host: ratmandu.esd.sgi.com * * * * * * * 9 Both Young and Old MEANWHILE, I continued my search, for the investigation of infant mortality had revealed still another possible dimension of the effects from fallout. As Dr. I. M. Moriyama put it in the introduction to his 1964 report entitled "The Change in Mortality Trend in the United States": The same kind of change in trend observed for infants appears to be taking place in the death rates for other ages. Regarding the overall trend, he added: The failure to experience a decline in mortality during this period is unexpected in view of the intensified attack on medical problems in the postwar years . . . there has been a growth in the volume and scope of health services in prevention, diagnosis, medical and surgical therapy, and rehabilitation, and also an improvement in their quality. The rapid growth of health insurance plans has made high quality medical care readily accessible to ever-increasing numbers of people. The rising level of living has resulted in improvement of work and home environment, quality and variety of food, educational attainment, and facilities of recreation. Developments in medicine arising from the exigencies of a global war have become readily available for application to civilian health problems. At no time in the history of the country have conditions appeared so favorable for health progress. In this setting, it would seem reasonable to expect further reductions in mortality. On the other hand, the possible adverse effects on mortality of radioactive fallout, air pollution, and other manmade hazards cannot be completely ignored. In the School of Public Health library, page after page of data showed the same dramatic upward changes for chronic diseases as had occurred for childhood leukemia and fetal and infant mortality. Deaths from all types of noninfectious respiratory diseases such as lung cancer, emphysema, and bronchitis had increased especially dramatically among all age groups, as had deaths from certain other types of cancer. The overall life expectancy, particularly for adult males, had begun to level off and then actually declined again after decades of steady rise in this country and in northern Europe. Most significant of all were the death rates due to all types of childhood cancers in the U.S. For young people of both sexes, white and nonwhite alike, there were sudden, steplike jumps in the cancer rate between 1948 and 1951. For the white children, the rate doubled during these three years. The rate for the nonwhite children, which had held basically steady between 1930 and 1948, tripled during the same three-year period. This was to be expected if fallout was the cause, since by far the largest portion of the nation's nonwhite population lived in the regions where the fallout from the early tests came down. When had this overall trend begun? Dr. Moriyama's report indicated that deaths from respiratory diseases and childhood cancers either declined steadily or held level throughout the 1930s and most of the 1940s, the period of rising air pollution and the tripling of cigarette consumption. Between about 1948 and 1950, three to five years after the detonation of the first bombs in New Mexico and Japan and the onset of atomic testing in the Pacific, the death rates from these diseases suddenly began to shoot up. For example, the annual death rate among white males seventy-five to eighty-four years old from respiratory diseases (not including influenza and pneumonia) was close to 110 per 100,000 per year in 1934. By 1948 it had declined to an all-time low of about 70. But after this it shot up to 190 by 1960. The sharp upward changes in the rates for these types of chronic diseases were reflected in an overall leveling in the decline of death rates for the United States as a whole. But this effect was particularly serious in certain states, where the death rates actually rose again after decades of steady decline. As Moriyama pointed out: "In twelve states and the District of Columbia there appears to be a marked rise in the crude death rate during the past five to ten years as represented by the trend for North Carolina." The list of the states showed that they were all either southern states to the east of New Mexico and Nevada, or states directly to the northeast of the Nevada test site. The states were Alabama, Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia in the South, and Nevada, Colorado, South Dakota, and Wyoming in the West. None of these states was heavily industrialized or noted for its air pollution. In fact, the opposite was true. The number of excess deaths in the U.S. resulting from these upward changes in the death rates was calculated by Dr. Moriyama as being 300,000 during 1956-60. This was the period of heavy Nevada testing. The fallout and the excess deaths continued as testing resumed in 1961. According to Moriyama, "The estimated excess deaths is about 85,000 deaths for 1961, and 131,000 deaths for 1962." The "excess deaths" had jumped from an average of 60,000 per year during the earlier period of testing to 85,000 in 1961, the year that the Russians detonated the largest megaton weapons ever exploded. In the following year, when nearly 70 megatons of fission energy were detonated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union--the highest megatonnage ever exploded in a single year--the excess deaths in the United States alone reached 131,000. The same trends were also evident in other parts of the world. A detailed report on changes in mortality trends for England and Wales by Hubert Campbell at the Welsh National School of Medicine showed that in those countries the mortality rates for the very young and the very old followed exactly the same pattern as in the U.S. Beginning about 1953-55 the total death rates for 1- to 4-year-olds suddenly refused to decline further. For the 5- to 9-year age groups, which the studies of Stewart and MacMahon had shown to reflect most strongly the cancer-causing effect of irradiation during early development, the mortality rate actually started to climb again. Beginning the year after the first Nevada tests, there was also the same sudden halt in the rapid decline of maternal mortality associated with complications of pregnancy and childbirth as in the U.S. These rates actually turned sharply upward in 1960-61 for the youngest group of women (15 to 24 years of age) for the first time in modern history. And there was the same sharp rise in cancer deaths of all types for the age group 5 to 14 years, following some three to five years after the New Mexico test and the detonations in Japan in 1945. Both male and female death rates jumped in a steplike fashion: from about 30 per million per year to about 60 for boys, and from 25 to about 50 for girls, all between 1948 and 1951, exactly as in the United States. That these rises could not be due to changes in statistical or classificational methods was emphasized by Campbell: "There has been no important change in the classification of these diseases during this period. . . ." For all age groups in England and Wales, Campbell's report showed tremendous rises in leukemia for both men and women, beginning suddenly between 1947 and 1951, with the sharpest changes for the very young and the very old. Thus, whereas the leukemia death rate had remained fairly steady for men 75 to 84 years old during the fifteen years between 1931 and 1946, ranging from 50 to 80 deaths per million individuals each year, by 1954 the rate had increased to about 200. It reached 350 by 1959, an increase of about 500 percent. During the same period, the leukemia rate remained unchanged for the middle-aged group 45 to 54 years old, but it increased some 50 percent for boys 5 to 14 years of age. This was the rise that had prompted Dr. Stewart's study. The data for Japan, prepared by a group of public health physicians and statisticians from the Japanese Institute of Public Health, was particularly significant, since Japan was not only exposed to the fallout from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, but also received the radioactive debris from the U.S. Pacific and Soviet Siberian tests. The report showed that three to five years after the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki descended in 1945 the cancer rate for the 10- to 14-year-old children all over Japan tripled from 10 to 30 cases per million population, gradually climbing further to 40 cases by 1955 and to 50 by 1963, a fivefold increase during the period of heavy testing. For the youngest children zero to 4 years old, the increase was less, once again confirming the hypothesis that radiation was the causative factor as in the case of Troy. Again, the rates for the middle-aged group remained level, while the rate for those over 80 went up as elsewhere, in the case of Japan from about 3000 to 8000 per year per million individuals. Here then was the confirmation of why the studies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors had not revealed any effects on their children. Everywhere in Japan, mortality rates had gone up due to the fallout, so that there was little or no difference between those survivors exposed to the direct flash and those who received the fallout in their diet over the years that followed. And after the large hydrogen bomb tests, deaths due to noninfectious lung diseases such as emphysema and bronchitis suddenly stopped declining in Japan after 1955. This was the year after the Pacific and Siberian tests filled the air all over the world with radioactivity. In the next two years, deaths due to bronchitis, which had been dropping rapidly from 150 per million population in 1950 to a low of 40 by 1955, actually began to rise again. Thus, in the period from 1945 to 1955, when industrial growth and the accompanying smog and chemical pollution had been very great, these respiratory diseases had been declining. As in the United States, they rose only after the enormous increase of atmospheric radioactivity. If the major factor was fallout and not the pollution produced by industry and the automobile, then Chile provided an excellent chance to test this hypothesis in a country of low industrialization, as it was the only South American country for which detailed mortality-trend data was available. Since Chile was located on the west coast of South America, facing the prevailing winds from the South Pacific that release their moisture on the steeply rising slopes of the Andes, there should be upward changes in mortality following the first two series of Pacific A-bomb tests in 1946 and 1948. And these increases should be even more noticeable for the heavy series of tests beginning in 1952, involving the "dirty," uranium-clad hydrogen bombs that had produced such massive amounts of fission products. The Chile mortality graphs instantly confirmed this prediction, especially the plot of mortality for the infants dying between the ages of one month and one year, which showed an initial rise between 1947 and 1949 after the first Bikini and Eniwetok tests. Far more serious was the sudden and complete reversal of the overall infant mortality trend, from a steady decline to a continuous rise beginning in 1954 and persisting until 1960, the last year for which data were available. And the same change had taken place in the total mortality rate for all ages combined. There had been a steady decline after 1933, except for small rises during the second half of the 1940s, but then between 1953 and 1955 there was a sudden and complete end to the decline for both men and women, continuing for as long as the data had been plotted. In the words of the report's authors, a group of Chilean public health specialists: The significance of this trend is evident if the mortality for 1960 is estimated on the basis of regression for 1933-53. The expected rate was 8.6 and the observed rate was 12.3, which means that 28,024 of the total 93,265 deaths registered in 1960 would not have taken place if the previously described trend had continued. This did not mean that cigarettes or air pollution were not significant factors in chronic lung disease, or that heavy metals, pesticides, food additives, and other pollutants were not adversely affecting worldwide health. The phenomenon of synergism, in which combinations of two or more biological agents have a much greater effect than one alone, is well known to modern science. For instance, it has long been known that uranium miners have ten times the normal rate of lung cancers because of their breathing of radioactive gas in the mines. But those who smoked died of lung cancer at one hundred times the normal rate. However, statistics from all over the world kept indicating that radiation was the dominant factor in these worldwide changes of mortality trends. It made no difference what the social or economic system was, nor how much medical care was available, as in the very different cases of the Netherlands versus Chile. It made no difference whether infant mortality was high or low to begin with, as in Mississippi versus Sweden. It did not matter whether there was any air pollution, or what the genetic, cultural, or dietary differences were. There was only one way to explain these worldwide, synchronous, and totally unexpected changes that did not stop at any national boundaries nor at the edges of the seas. Only the introduction of some new and enormously powerful biological agent on a worldwide scale could produce such sudden rises in death rates that could almost be termed epidemics. And this new agent clearly seemed to be the fallout that had been released into the atmosphere in quantities equivalent to tens of millions of pounds of radium, the most powerful biological poisons yet created by man, circling the world in a matter of a few weeks and attacking mainly the weakest in every living species--the developing young and the very old. * * * * * * * 10 The Clouds of Trinity THE GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS of the changes in worldwide leukemia and infant mortality trends between 1945 and 1955 clearly matched the patterns of fallout. But so unbelievable and far-reaching a conclusion required much more evidence before the possibility of any other explanation could be ruled out. Laboratory-animal experiments had shown that various pesticides, drugs, food additives, and heavy metals could apparently cause cancer and congenital defects, while air pollution and mothers' cigarette smoking were believed to be linked to fetal and infant mortality. There was one test, however, that would effectively rule out these agents as the principal factors in the increase. It would involve the first nuclear explosion ever set off by man. Code-named Trinity, this explosion took place at dawn on July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Before this, there was no nuclear fallout in the environment, so this explosion would have to have produced a clear effect on mortality rates wherever the fallout descended. But where had the fallout come down? There was at that time no elaborate countrywide network of fallout-measuring stations. However, many eyewitness accounts of this historic explosion had subsequently been published, and, among these, a book called {Day of Trinity} by Lansing Lamont reported the event in greatest detail. Lamont, a {Time} magazine reporter, had gone to considerable lengths to trace the direction of the drifting radioactive debris, studying weather maps and conducting extensive interviews with many of the scientists involved. According to Lamont, shortly before the final countdown at 5:10 A.M. on the morning of July 16, Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge announced to the scientists at the various observation posts that the winds close to the ground were blowing north, toward where Dr. Robert Wilson was manning an observation post 10,000 yards from ground zero. An instant after the flash of the detonation at exactly 5:29 A.M., the churning fireball detached itself from the ground and shot upward, followed by a column of radioactive dust, penetrating the overcast at 15,000 feet. The column of dust continued upward to an altitude of 40,000 feet, where it spread out in the mushroom shape that was later to become so familiar. The lower part of the mushroom's stem was blown north toward Wilson's position, which had to be quickly evacuated. Simultaneously, Dr. Luis Alvarez and Navy captain William Parsons, flying high above the cloud cover just to the west of the test site in an observation plane watched the head of the mushroom penetrate the overcast and break up into three distinct sections. These sections drifted off in different directions, generally to the northeast and east. As recounted by Lamont, the largest of the three sections, a dense white mushroom trailed by a dusty-brown streamer, drifted off in a direction just slightly north of east. Meanwhile, the low-altitude fallout from the stem of the mushroom cloud continued north and northeast until it covered an area about 30 miles wide and 100 miles long, gradually settling to the ground in a white mist of intense radioactivity. By three o-clock in the afternoon, the readings on the radiation counters monitored by Alvin Graves and his wife, Elizabeth, observers assigned to the little town of Carrizozo some 40 miles just slightly north of east from the test site, started to climb rapidly. By 4:20 P.M., eleven hours after the explosion, the counters shot off scale and Alvin Graves called Dr. Stafford Warren, the chief medical officer in charge of radiation monitoring. As Lamont put it, the fate of the little town hung in the balance while the scientists and Army officers decided whether or not to evacuate it. Ultimately, they held off, and within an hour the fallout readings had dropped. Lamont reported that these were difficult hours for Dr. Warren and the officer in charge of the entire project, General Leslie R. Groves. "The medical dangers were most immediate of all," Lamont wrote, "but, in addition, both men knew that the Army was not too eager to pursue too diligently the possibilities of widespread fallout." From the fact that it had taken the fallout particles some nine to eleven hours to reach Carrizozo, it was possible to determine which portion of the cloud had gone eastward. According to the AEC publication {The Effects of Nuclear Weapons}, typical fallout particles descend at a speed of about 5000 feet per hour, while smaller particles fall more slowly. Allowing about half an hour for the cloud to travel the 40 miles to Carrizozo at the usual speed of the jet-stream air currents, then, it meant that the particles that caused the Graveses' radiation counters to start climbing must have taken about eight to nine hours to descend at a rate of 5000 feet per hour. Therefore, the cloud that passed over Carrizozo must have been at an altitude of between 40,000 and 45,000 feet. Thus, it had to have been the uppermost section of the mushroom cloud that drifted just slightly north of east. And since the winds became more northerly with decreasing altitude, the lower, smaller sections would have gone increasingly northward. This estimate was confirmed by the fact that the more northerly towns were the first to receive the fallout, and those to the east were the last. The low- altitude fallout, therefore, had come down mostly in New Mexico to the northeast, while the highest portions would have been carried more nearly eastward across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the whole southeastern U.S., where they would be brought down mainly by the rain. On the basis of these estimations, then, any upward changes in infant mortality should be found to some degree in the sparsely populated areas of New Mexico itself, and to a greater extent in the more heavily populated states to the east, northeast, and north. Among the more distant states generally to the east, those with the heaviest rainfall should show the largest upward changes, since the high-altitude cloud carried the smallest particles, which would largely remain aloft unless brought down by rain. Furthermore, the states near the Atlantic seaboard to the northeast, such as North Carolina and Virginia, should be affected less than nearby Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, for the cloud would have gradually fanned out and the short-lived radioactivity would have steadily diminished in intensity with the passage of time. The five-year period 1940-45 was the longest period immediately preceding the test during which a steady decline in infant mortality had existed in every state in the U.S. Thus, the amount of upward deviation from this rate of decline would provide a measure of any changes occurring after the explosion. When the infant mortality figures were plotted on a map of the U.S., the pattern began to emerge. The states directly to the west and far to the northeast of New Mexico kept declining at the 1940-45 rate. In fact, in some cases the decline was actually somewhat faster, due to the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, since the greatest cause of infant deaths was the infectious diseases that these new drugs succeeded in cutting back. But each year after 1945 and beginning strongly in 1947, there was a growing excess infant mortality in the states of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts to the east and northeast of the test site, amounting to as much as 30 to 40 percent. This pattern extended over the entire southeastern part of the country, from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi all the way across Alabama and Georgia to South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, and existed both for the poorer nonwhite as well as for the socio-economically better-off white infants. Two of my colleagues, Donald Sashin and Ronald Rocchio, became quite concerned about these findings and offered to work out a computer program to calculate and plot the infant mortality rates for every state, thus removing any possible subjective bias. The pattern that emerged from the computer was essentially the same except for one striking difference. For some reason the computer maps showed excesses in infant mortality for the north-central region of the U.S., in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and especially North Dakota. In 1946, even before the increased infant mortality manifested itself to the east of New Mexico, North Dakota was showing a 19 percent increase, reaching 32 percent in 1949. But the low-altitude fallout that went northward from the Trinity test could not possibly have been significant in these distant states so directly to the north. The mystery was solved when a colleague happened to show me a copy of an AEC publication entitled {Meteorology and Atomic Energy}. In the opening chapter, dealing with the history of the atomic energy industry, the report explained that in 1944 the first of a series of giant nuclear reactors had gone into operation in Hanford, Washington, to produce the plutonium for the Trinity bomb. The reactor was located in the dry eastern edge of the state of Washington, directly upwind from Montana, Idaho, and North Dakota. Because the operating engineers did not have sufficient experience with these enormous new reactors being built under wartime pressures, large releases of radioactive gases occurred. As the AEC report described it: As soon as a charge of fuel came out of the plutonium production reactors, a large source of gaseous effluent was encountered. For the plutonium produced to be removed from the uranium and other fission products, it was necessary to dissolve the fuel by various chemical reactions. During the early stages of this process, all the noble-gas fission products, notably radioactive isotopes of xenon and krypton, were released. It was not feasible to remove them by a filter system; they were released to the atmosphere in rather large quantities. Still more disturbing was the statement that "large quantities of radioactive iodine were involved." Additionally, when the reactor's fuel elements would occasionally catch fire, krypton and biologically more hazardous fission products such as strontium and cesium were driven off. Not only could this account for the sharp rise in infant mortality in the northernmost part of the U.S. before the effects of the first bomb could make themselves felt, it could also explain the "Mandan Milk Mystery"--the inexplicably high strontium 90 content of the milk collected at Mandan, North Dakota, by the AEC's New York Health and Safety Laboratory throughout the 1950s. For the radioactive particles from the Hanford reactor in Washington would have largely passed over dry Idaho and Montana as they were blown by the prevailing westerly winds toward the wet eastern part of North Dakota where Mandan was located. There was also one other peculiarity in the computer-printed maps. Florida, South Carolina, and Oklahoma showed no increase in infant mortality during the five years following the test, even though they had been in the path of the fallout. Soon, however, when I received detailed weather maps from the U.S. Meteorological Records Center, this too fitted the hypothesis: During the week ending July 17, 1945, the heavy rains had missed these states. In fact, the weather map indicated that the rainfall for that week had been restricted mainly to a rather narrow zone, extending from Texas along the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico and then up the Atlantic coast. About 90 percent of the fallout is brought down by the rains, while only about 10 percent settles to the ground in dry air. This is why the zones of heaviest rainfall showed the sharpest increases. The {Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin} summarized the rainfall situation as follows: Rainfall during the week was again limited mostly to sections east of the Rockies. Heavy 24-hour amounts occurred the forepart of the week in Northeastern Texas and coastal areas of Gulf States and the latter part of the period in most Atlantic States and the lower Lake region. And the summary ended: "Rain was light over the Central States and little or none occurred in the far west." The {Weather Bulletin} also made it clear why the effects of a single small bomb had been so serious. Referring to the rainfall, it added: "Haying continued in nearly all states with generally good to excellent yields." Thus, the fallout from Trinity, which was twenty to thirty times greater than the fallout from later similar-sized tests because the fireball touched the ground and created enormous amounts of radioactive soil and vaporized rock, was deposited on the fresh vegetables and hay being harvested that week. And so the intensely radioactive short-lived isotopes, as well as the long-lived strontium 90, quickly found their way into the milk and food and from there into the unborn children in their mothers' wombs. * * * * * * * 11 The Battle for Publication EARLY IN JANUARY of 1969, the article on fetal and infant mortality was returned by the editor of {Science}. This was the paper that had been discredited by Abelson in his phone conversation with the reporter Stuart Brown, before the paper had arrived in the offices of {Science}. Copies of three reviews were enclosed. Two were clearly written by individuals in the field of public health and statistics; these merely contained suggestions for certain changes that might make the case more complete. The third reviewer, however, was totally negative. This individual went into a detailed analysis of fallout and dose levels in the U.S., making eight references to internal AEC reports. The majority of these reports had been prepared by the staff of the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York, directed by John Harley, the man responsible for the classified fallout measurement at Troy. The argument used to discredit the paper in this review (and also in an article published by Harley in the {Quarterly Bulletin} of the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory later that year) was this: According to the detailed measurements made by the AEC's laboratory, the highest levels of strontium 90 had actually been in Utah, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, as well as in very small portions of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. On the other hand, the lowest levels were measured in the southern U.S., from southern California to Florida. This was just the opposite of what I had said in my paper. Harley therefore argued that since infant mortality had risen most in the southern United States to the east of Nevada and New Mexico, and least in the low-rainfall mountain states of the Southwest, it clearly could not be the fallout that was responsible. This was indeed a devastating argument, supported by a vast set of detailed measurements. Yet these measurements cited by Harley were in total disagreement with the measurements reported by the Public Health Service, which I had used in my paper. According to the Public Health Service, year after year the "wet" southern and eastern parts of the U.S. showed levels of strontium in the milk two, three, or even four times as high as in the dry western mountain states. The mystery was resolved a few months later when Dr. E. A. Martel, a former U.S. Air Force fallout specialist, told me the story of the gummed films. The technique that had been used by Harley's lab to measure the fallout involved the use of a sheet of plastic about a foot square, coated on one side with a sticky substance very much like that used on flypaper. These plastic squares were mounted on a stand with the gummed side facing upward so as to catch the fallout particles as they descended. Every few days the films were collected, and shipped to the laboratory, where the radioactivity was measured. In a detailed study later carried out by scientists at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio, it was discovered that in the dry states of the west, the winds constantly picked up the radioactive dust again and again, so that the exposed gummed films, acting just like the flypaper in a room full of flies, ended up collecting much more radioactivity than was typical for the soil of the area. On the other hand, in the high-rainfall areas east of the Mississippi, the rains soaked the fallout deep into the soil and kept the dust levels low. Thus, by the early 1960s, it was widely realized that the so-called "gummed film" measurements of fallout had given levels much too high for the dry mountain states, and too low for the East and South. In fact, in the 1962 United Nations Report on Atomic Radiation, of which John Harley was one of the authors, there was a note from Harley on page 225 indicating that the "gummed film" procedure "may lead to an overestimate of the tropospheric fallout," the troposphere being the lower part of the atmosphere containing the clouds of rain and radioactive dust. Yet seven years later Harley used the "gummed film" measurements in his attempt to discredit my correlation of nuclear testing with the rises in infant mortality, writing that "fallout before 1954 was exactly the opposite of what was stated by Dr. Sternglass." A few days after the paper on infant mortality had been returned by {Science}, the paper on the leukemia rise in the Troy area was also returned with a note of rejection. It was the same story again. Two of the three enclosed reviews were clearly by public-health physicians and statisticians and were quite favorable. One of these reviewers, in fact, stated that "the comparability between past fallout and past irradiated cases is `impressive,'" while the other reviewer began with the statement: "The conclusion of this paper, if correct, is clearly a most important one." The third reviewer, however, was completely negative, and, exactly as in the case of the paper on infant mortality, there could be no doubt to which organization this third reviewer belonged. Almost word for word and point for point, the third review resembled a critique that had been sent to me a few months earlier by John Conway, Chief Counsel for the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy. And this critique had been sent to him by the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. Perhaps the most remarkable point made by the third reviewer, in view of my experience with the Health Department of the State of New York, was the following: After arguing that the data on Albany-Troy were "incomplete," the reviewer asserted that "Sternglass could obtain the missing data." And then, quite unexpectedly, less than a week after the two papers had been returned by {Science}, the following letter arrived: {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists} A Journal of Science and Public Affairs Eugene Rabinowitch, Editor Dear Dr. Sternglass: The drawings which we have for some of the figures in your article on Infant and Fetal Mortality Increase in the U.S. are not dark enough to be printed. Could you send us the original drawings--or very clear, dark copies--for figures 1 and 3. Thank you for your assistance. Sincerely yours, Merry Selk Editorial Assistant I gradually realized that the {Bulletin} must have decided to publish the report I had sent to Dr. Rabinowitch merely for his information. As I later learned from the managing editor, Richard S. Lewis, in the face of strong reviewers' opinions both pro and con, it had been decided that the grave issues raised by my findings should be publicized and discussed as widely as possible, both by the scientific community and the general public. This was indeed good news. For although {Science} had a far wider circulation, the {Bulletin} reached an important group of physical and political scientists in university and government circles around the world. Furthermore, like {Science}, it was carefully read behind the Iron Curtain, hundreds of copies of each issue being sent to the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania. Subsequently, I presented all the new evidence before a meeting of the National Council of the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council voted to set up a special committee to look into the evidence in detail. Dr. John T. Edsall, a noted biologist at Harvard University, agreed to head up the study committee, and after many months of investigations during which he consulted a number of specialists, he indicated in a letter that he would personally be willing to urge the editor of {Science} to reconsider his decision not to publish my findings. Meanwhile, at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance, I sent copies of my data to Dr. Luis Alvarez, then president of the Physical Society, who was now heading a physics research group in Berkeley, California. I included the maps showing increases in infant mortality downwind from the Trinity test site in New Mexico, for it had been Alvarez who watched the mushroom cloud from the first atomic explosion drift off across the United States. Thus, he was one of the few individuals in the world who had firsthand knowledge of the way the cloud had broken up and the directions in which it had drifted. In the first paragraph of the reply I soon received from him, he stated that he had found the evidence "very impressive, particularly the map of the United States with the percent excess in mortality showing an effect only downwind of the Trinity site." He added that "in view of the enormous statistical significance of the results you plot on your map of the United States it is difficult to question your findings." My article appeared in the April 1969 issue of the {Bulletin}. Interestingly, the managing editor, Richard Lewis, later told me that pressure had come both before and after publication in the form of long-distance calls from Washington from individuals who claimed to be long-term government friends of the journal. They said it was a grave mistake for the {Bulletin} to publish my article. When Lewis asked their names, they refused to identify themselves. The April issue also carried an article by Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, entitled "A Case for Missile Defense." It was clear that the basic premise of Dyson's argument in favor of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system would not be valid if my conclusions on the vulnerability of the developing infant to radiation were correct. His basic assumption was that a defensive system, once installed, regardless of how really effective it might be, would force an attacker to concentrate many of his missiles on a few defended cities, thereby reducing the number of cities that could be attacked with a given number of missiles and saving those cities that could not be attacked. But in the process, the "saved" cities would be inundated with intensive fallout. I wrote a short note in rebuttal to Dyson's article, hoping that it would be published in the {Bulletin}. A few weeks later, a letter arrived from the {Bulletin} containing galley proofs of my letter and a reply by Dyson that began as follows: I welcome this chance to call attention to Ernest Sternglass' article "Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests" in the April {Bulletin}. I urge everyone to read it. Compared with the issues Sternglass has raised, my arguments about missile defense are quite insignificant. Sternglass displays evidence that the effect of fallout in killing babies is about a hundred times greater than has been generally supposed. The evidence is not sufficient to prove Sternglass is right. The essential point is that Sternglass may be right. The margin of uncertainty in the effects of worldwide fallout is so large that we have no justification for dismissing Sternglass' numbers as fantastic. If Sternglass' numbers are right, as I believe they well may be, then he has a good argument against missile defense. . . . Thus it appeared that once the evidence on the dangers of worldwide fallout was allowed to reach the scientific community at large, responsible scientists would be willing to reconsider their past judgments. * * * * * * * 12 Counterattack at Hanford IN MAY 1969, for the first time in over fifteen years, as a result of growing concern among radiobiologists, there was to be a symposium dedicated to the effects of radiation on the developing mammal, including the human infant, both prior to and immediately after birth. Not since the detonation of the first hydrogen bombs in 1953 had such a conference been sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission. In the ensuing years, a vast amount of data had been accumulated on the biological effects of radiation given to animals at doses comparable to those that would be expected in a nuclear war. But even by 1969, almost nothing had been published on the more subtle effects of lower radiation doses, comparable to those from fallout, given over long periods of time. And there still had been no publication of any largescale statistical studies of populations exposed to fallout. It was true that the AEC had initiated a large-scale statistical study of some 20,000 persons exposed to long-term, low-level radiation in AEC laboratories. But the study population included only adults in their period of least sensitivity to radiation, receiving the best medical care available, and working under carefully controlled and monitored conditions designed to minimize any chance of absorbing isotopes into their bodies. Since the control population consisted of individuals in the same families, communities, and installations who were not exposed to the radiation in the plant but who consumed the same fallout-contaminated food and inhaled the same fallout particles as the exposed test population, no effects from the fallout in the environment could in principle be detected by this study. More important, the study population did not include the children of the radiation laboratory workers. There was no search for unusual rises in stillbirths, infant deaths, congenital malformations, or cancer deaths among these children. When I inquired as to why this type of information was not sought, I was told that it was left out on the grounds that such questions might unduly alarm AEC employees. There was clearly no need for the AEC to restrict its studies to so limited a population. In 1966 large statistical studies had been published regarding the very small amount of naturally occurring radium in drinking water in the states of Iowa and Illinois. In these studies a definite increase in bone cancer had been observed for the areas with high radium levels, clearly suggesting that the effects of very low levels of longterm radiation on large populations could in fact be detected, and, furthermore, that there was no evidence for a safe threshold even at the doses received from natural background radiation. A letter from the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, to Representative William S. Moorhead of Pittsburgh made it clear that no large-scale epidemiological studies of possible low- level fallout effects were ever carried out or published by either the AEC or the U.S. Public Health Service, despite the fact that such studies had been specifically requested by congressmen Holifield and Price in the course of the 1963 congressional hearings and then promised by the Surgeon General then in office, Luther L. Terry. The exact words used by the present Surgeon General, Steinfeld, were: . . . studies to determine the feasibility of a national program to analyze morbidity and mortality data of thyroid cancer, leukemia, and congenital malformations in relation to radiation exposure led to the decision that a national program was not indicated. The letter added that "the feasibility studies were not published," and ended with the following statement: Some effects on human populations from levels of radiation of the magnitude encountered during nuclear warfare or from direct high-level radiation therapy have been well established. Effects from low-level radiation have not been as clearly delineated and further research into these problems is needed. The Service welcomes the opportunity to work with those who desire to construct and execute scientifically based plans for studies of human effects from low-level radiation exposure. Thus, in all the years since 1963 no large-scale study of the effects of low-level radiation from *fallout* had evidently been undertaken. The Surgeon General's letter did say that studies of fallout- exposed schoolchildren in Utah were being conducted by Dr. G. D. Carlyle Thompson of the Utah State Department of Health and that Dr. Thompson had published some preliminary data on thyroid cancers among these children in the October 1967 {American Journal of Public Health}. "Progress reports to date," wrote Surgeon General Steinfeld, "show no unusual increased incidence of leukemia and no cases of thyroid cancer among children who reside in the selected `exposed' area of Utah-Nevada." Examination of Thompson's article, however, showed that, although Steinfeld's statement as phrased was literally true, it was misleading in its implication. For although Thompson's paper indeed indicated no increase in thyroid cancers in these children relative to their counterparts in New York State when both sexes were combined, there was in fact a significant increase among girls zero to 19 years of age. Among this group there was a total of ten cases for 1958-62, as compared to four cases expected. For young women aged 20 to 29 years old, the number was twenty as compared to nine expected. Still more significant, the rate of thyroid cancers per 100,000 young women under age 30 in Utah had increased almost 400 percent--from 0.6 in 1948-52, before the Nevada tests, to 2.3 in 1958-62. Since no figures on leukemia deaths in Utah were given in Thompson's article, it was necessary to consult the U.S. Vital Statistics, and what they showed was quite unbelievable. For the age group 5 to 14 years, there were large percentage rises in leukemia deaths exactly three to five years after each of the major test series that deposited fallout in the Utah area. Between 1949 and 1967, the annual number had increased four-fold in successive peaks from 1.5 to 6.2 per 100,000 children. But since leukemia rates for children 5 to 14 years in New York State and elsewhere also went up when fallout became widespread, although not as much as in Utah, a statistician could perhaps say that there was "no unusual increase of leukemia" in Utah. This, then, was the situation in May 1969 on the eve of the Hanford conference. According to the preliminary program of the symposium, Dr. Alice Stewart would be present. The conference was to take place at Hanford, Washington, the site where the plutonium for the Trinity bomb had been produced in 1944. A few days before I was scheduled to leave for Hanford, I watched the computer print out map after map of rising infant mortality stretching eastward from the Hanford reactors and from the Trinity site at Alamogordo, New Mexico. At about this time, a completely unexpected letter arrived by special delivery from the New York State Health Department's Bureau of Cancer Control: April 30, 1969 Dear Dr. Sternglass: Doctor James Yamazaki of the University of California School of Medicine has written to me about your approaching presentation at the Ninth Annual Hanford Biology Symposium. In his letter, Doctor Yamazaki requested information about environmental factors in the Albany-Schenectady-Rensselaer country areas in the early 1950s. As you can see from my response, a copy of which is enclosed, this Bureau has reviewed some of the data upon which your June 1968 presentation in Denver was based. The results of this preliminary analysis are noted in the letter to Doctor Yamazaki. It is my opinion these data are too inaccurate for the type of analysis you have done. We are planning to restudy this subject and would be happy to have you take part. I hope this reaches you before the May 5th conference. Sincerely yours, Peter Greenwald, M.D. Director Bureau of Cancer Control The enclosed letter which Greenwald had written to Yamazaki indicated that J. H. Lade of the New York State Health Department had apparently made some errors in his data on leukemia in Albany-Troy, published years before in {Science} in the attempt to prove that there had been no effect from the fallout of April 1953. As Greenwald put it, "While it is unfortunate that this Health Department may have erred in not clearly describing the possible inaccuracies in this table it is clear that they should now be pointed out." Upon examining Greenwald's revised table, I discovered a remarkable coincidence: These newly found inaccuracies concerned only the cases born in 1953, the year the fallout arrived. Greenwald's new figures showed a greatly reduced number of leukemia cases in that year, thus making it now possible to argue that there had been no significant effect from the fallout. At the end of Greenwald's letter was the notation: cc: Dr. Sternglass Dr. Sagan And on the preliminary program of the Hanford meeting, listed below my name, was: 9:40 P.M. INVITED DISCUSSANT L. A. Sagan Palo Alto Medical Clinic This was Dr. Leonard Sagan, who had long been working for the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. He was apparently scheduled to be discussant, or critic, for my paper at Hanford. Why was he listed as being affiliated only with the Palo Alto Medical Clinic? Interestingly, my paper was the only one in that session for which a discussant had been listed in the final program. The co-chairman of the session was Dr. J. N. Yamazaki of the University of California, the same individual who had just requested information on the Troy rainout from the New York State Health Department. Dr. Yamazaki had published a number of papers while working for the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission that argued for the absence of significant leukemia rises among offspring born to the survivors of Hiroshima. Upon arriving at Hanford, I was interested to discover the summary of a paper written by Dr. Y. I. Moskalev and his colleagues at the Institute for Biophysics in Moscow. This group of Russian scientists had studied the effects of low-level radiation--of the type produced by fallout--from strontium 90 and other isotopes when given to various animals before and during pregnancy. Their observations on the offspring of all types of animals, ranging in size from rats, rabbits, and dogs to sheep and cows, appeared to show effects similar to those I had postulated for human infants. There was no spectacular increase in gross malformations at low levels of strontium 90. Instead there was a small reduction in weight at birth, a decline in fertility, and an increase in the number of fetal deaths. And the earlier the radioactivity was fed to the pregnant animals, the more pronounced were the effects, just exactly as the studies of diagnostic X-rays given during pregnancy had indicated in the case of humans. Unexpected difficulties, however, developed, and the Russian scientists were unable to attend. This was a great disappointment, for the studies of Dr. Moskalev and his group were the first published work I was aware of that appeared to offer the kind of crucial laboratory confirmation of the statistical evidence for the damaging effects of fallout on the newborn. Early in the conference, however, other evidence was presented, in session after session, that internal radiation from isotopes of the type that occurred in fallout was particularly hazardous to the ova and the early embryo and fetus. These were levels much lower than those that led to lethal effects in mature animals. First on the program on the evening my paper was scheduled was a paper by Dr. M. L. Griem of the University of Chicago School of Medicine. Dr. Griem indicated that in his careful study of children X-rayed while in the womb there was no evidence for a difference in the number of leukemia cases between the irradiated children and the two control groups who had not received any radiation. But as soon as Dr. Griem had begun his talk, it became apparent that the number of children X-rayed was only 1008, a group in which one would normally not expect more than one case of leukemia in ten years of life. Thus, even a doubling would at most result in one extra leukemia case, clearly too small an effect to be readily observed with any statistical certainty. As Dr. Alice Stewart herself pointed out in the ensuing discussion, "the reality of juvenile leukemia is such that no one could hope to do a followup like this and detect an increase of 50 percent of the normal incidence without being prepared to follow out 900,000 children for ten years, and no one has done that." She herself had to interview the families of over 7000 children who had died of cancer out of a total of nearly nineteen million children born in order to establish a clear causal connection. Interestingly, however, Dr. Griem's study actually lent support to the hypothesis of other effects from low-dose radiation, even in so small a study population as 1008 children. His data showed that, although there was no detectable increase in leukemia, there was a significant increase in benign tumors and certain types of congenital birth defects, especially severely disfiguring birthmarks. Furthermore, Griem's study revealed that stillbirths had nearly doubled--from eight and nine cases in the two control groups to sixteen among those who had received X-rays in the womb. And according to Griem, the X-rays were given mainly in the less sensitive second and third trimesters of pregnancy, with doses of only 1 to 3 rads to the fetuses. But Dr. Stewart had found the sensitivity to be some ten times greater in the first three months of pregnancy. Thus, Griem's study indicated that if the X-rays had instead been given in the earliest developmental phase, a dose only about one-tenth as large, or a mere 100 to 300 millirads, would have produced a doubling of stillbirths and genetic defects. These were, in fact, the general doses that had been received by large numbers of unborn children from fallout. So Griem's study actually provided, for the first time, direct observational evidence in humans for my statistical findings on fetal mortality. Soon it was Dr. Stewart's turn. As her opening paragraph made clear, it was the opposition to her findings that drove her to find more and more convincing evidence: More than ten years ago, a retrospective approach to the problem of cancer etiology led to the conclusion that about one in twenty of the 600 cancer deaths that were taking yearly tolls of the seven million children living in Britain were being caused by obstetric X-ray examinations. So far as the investigators themselves were concerned, the matter would probably have rested there had it not been for the general skepticism that greeted this suggestion. However, so many clinicians and experimentalists refused to accept the necessarily epidemiological evidence that it was finally decided to remove all grounds for doubt by isolating groups of mainly radiogenic cases (i.e. X-rayed cases) and wholly non-radiogenic cases (i.e. non X-rayed cases) and observing the ages of the two groups of children when symptoms developed. She then went on to present new evidence that leukemia cases among children X-rayed while in the womb showed a clearly recognizable, narrow age range of between three and five years after birth, evidence that supported the hypothesis that the excess cases in Albany-Troy among the children irradiated in the womb were caused by radiation, since they too showed the same abnormal pattern of age at death. Dr. Stewart also observed that all types of cellular defects produced by radiation "were felt with equal force by all systems and organs" in the fetal stage, a point crucial in explaining how radiation could cause subtle types of damage that would lead to such biochemical defects as the inability to resist infections early in infancy or childhood. And in her conclusion, she pointed out that her evidence clearly showed that the effects that prove fatal before the age of 10 years are mainly initiated before birth, and often in the most sensitive period of early development. Thus Dr. Stewart's paper had greatly strengthened my statistical findings on the effect of fallout radiation. I then presented my evidence, concluding with the estimate that some 400,000 infants of less than one year of age probably had died as the result of nuclear fallout between 1950 and 1965. The chairman then announced that there would be no discussion until Dr. Sagan of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic had commented on the paper. Dr. Sagan took the microphone. He began by showing the slides of the material collected for him by the co-chairman of the session, Dr. Yamazaki, from the New York State Health Department. Sagan made the point that the data were too unreliable for the type of study I had done. He next cited an estimated figure for the expected number of leukemia cases in a population exposed to a radiation dose of 1 rad, namely one case per year among each million persons. Therefore, he concluded, the doses in the Troy area, with its 130,000 children, were some 1000 times too small to produce even a single extra leukemia case. Sagan's estimated figure, however, was the one for the mature adult, who is least sensitive of all to radiation. It was evident from Dr. Stewart's and Dr. MacMahon's work, as well as from the paper just delivered by Griem, that the fetus and especially the early embryo were many hundreds of times as sensitive as the adult. Furthermore, the total dose from internal radiation in Troy was at least five times the external dose measured by the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory-- which Sagan had used in his argument. He next cited Harley's invalidated "gummed film" fallout measurements to discredit any association of fallout with the infant mortality rises in the wet areas of the South and East. He did this despite the fact that the Public Health Service's data for strontium in the milk that I had just presented correlated perfectly with the changes in infant mortality in every state for which the Service had published data. The discussion was then opened to the floor, and a long and often heated debate began. Some AEC scientists had slides that showed that miniature swine fed fairly large doses of strontium did not seem to show detectable reductions in weight and litter size. This was in apparent contradiction to the findings of Moskalev, who was unfortunately not present to defend his work. But then Dr. T. K. Ellis of the University of Utah reported that in beagle dogs given small amounts of strontium 90, surprisingly strong effects on male hormone production had been found, as well as changes in reproductive cells. Dr. Harold Rosenthal, who had made measurements on baby teeth collected from all over the United States, indicated that for Texas, St. Louis, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, and California he had found a close correlation between levels of strontium in the teeth and the levels reported for the milk. This showed that the Public Health Service's milk measurements that I used in my work were indeed a good indication of the amount of exposure received by infants in various areas. The evidence supporting unexpectedly severe effects on the early embryo and fetus from internal radiation sources continued to accumulate until the close of the conference. And afterward, when I was able to examine the original manuscript submitted by Dr. Moskalev, I found that his studies did in fact confirm the most crucial points at issue in the whole fallout controversy. His group had found that when various of the isotopes contained in fallout were fed to female animals during pregnancy, large fractions were transferred through the placenta to the developing fetus. For example, up to 38 percent was transferred in the case of strontium given to rats and up to 66 percent in the case of cesium given to a litter of dogs. Furthermore, the amounts reaching the developing fetus were many times greater for continuous, slow intake (such as occurs with fallout in food) than for a large single dose. More significant, Moskalev had found a direct relationship between the size of the doses of isotopes given just before pregnancy and the percent of the offspring that died--even for doses as small as 4- billionths of a curie per gram of body weight. This dose was well within the range of doses from fallout delivered to the early human fetus by the accumulated strontium in the mothers' bones. Thus, the argument that there might not be any effects at all from long-term, low-level radiation as opposed to doses given all at once, like diagnostic X-rays, had now been disproven by direct experiments. Moskalev's results also showed that, regardless of whether a given amount of isotopes was fed to a mouse weighing 20 grams or to a dog weighing many thousands of grams, approximately the same fraction of the total amount would always concentrate in the rapidly growing embryo. This was one reason why, in all species, the fetus was so much more sensitive to fallout radiation than the adult. A given tiny amount of an isotope in the body of an adult might be quite tolerable if it was evenly distributed throughout the 70,000 grams of an average woman's body weight. But if even only one one-hundredth of this amount in the mother's body goes to the embryo during the first two to four weeks of development, when the embryo weighs less than a hundredth of a gram, then the concentration of radioactivity in the embryonic tissue would be the same as if the entire original amount had been given to a 1-gram embryo. Instead of the relatively minor radiation dose produced by this original amount distributed in the 70,000 grams of body weight typical of the adult, there would be a concentration 70,000 times greater in the early embryo. And added to this was the fact that the embryo was already hundreds of times more likely to develop cancer or other forms of biochemical damage than the much more resistant, fully mature adult, as paper after paper presented at the conference showed. Thus, the low external doses given by fallout to the body of an adult, doses on which the world's radiation protection agencies had based their assumption that fallout was harmless, were actually highly lethal doses for the early embryo. It was not our physics and technology that had been inadequate, but our knowledge of biological systems and their enormous ability to concentrate toxic agents. Just as in the case of DDT, it was not the amount distributed throughout the environment that was so serious. It was the selective concentration in the food chain and then in the newly forming organs of the rapidly developing young embryo. Since all higher animals, including man, must pass through this critically sensitive phase, it was clear that, unless the problem was widely recognized and acted upon, man could extinguish himself and all other animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through the effect on the weakest link in the chain of life--the unborn and the very young. * * * * * * *