--ratitor

There has been an almost complete absence of serious debate in American scientific and medical journals about the effect of ingested or inhaled fission products on the hormonal and immune systems. A distinction should be made between the nuclear scientists who permitted national security to take precedence over unwanted truths, and the majority of scientists and physicians who have been unaware of the evidence that free radical-induced biological damage may be thousands of times more efficient at low doses of radiation than at high ones. . . .

These scientists would have been hard pressed to envision the perverse nature of the food chain that causes certain ingested fission products to accumulate in much higher concentrations than naturally occurring isotopes. For example, when cows graze over large exposed areas, the radioactive iodine will concentrate in them. When people ingest contaminated milk, water, root vegetables, or fruits, the adverse effects continue to multiply as the radioactive substances concentrate in organs such as the fetal thyroid or the bone marrow of young women prior to pregnancy. Finally, who could have expected the perverse supra-linear nature of the dose response, with lower levels of radiation potentially being hundreds to thousands of times more efficient in producing the free radicals that penetrate and destroy the blood cells of immune systems?

If this knowledge is deemed subversive and is thus excluded from established scientific journals, physicians will never consider the potential effect on the immune systems of their patients. . . .

The cost to dispose of all nuclear facilities in the next century will at least be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of constructing them. A rough estimate of four decades of defense expenditures earmarked for nuclear weapons and three decades of federal subsidies to the civilian nuclear industry yields a figure in the range of two trillion dollars. And right now, when one considers the associated drain on scientific manpower and other human resources, it becomes clear why our deficit-ridden economy can no longer compete with the demilitarized economies of Japan and West Germany. A recent New York Times editorial traced American economic ills to diminishing productivity growth since 1965, at a cost, ironically, of two trillion dollars.[191] . . .

It may be more than a mere coincidence that U.S. productivity gains have sagged just as the damage to immune systems of the baby-boom generation appeared to emerge among young adults. Consider the implications for U.S. productivity of Ernest Sternglass's discovery, later supported by two U.S. Navy psychologists, of the adverse impact of bomb-test fallout on Standardized Achievement Test (SAT) scores. In Secret Fallout, Sternglass described his reaction in 1975 when reading a New York Times article on the puzzling but steady decline in SAT scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than two or three points per year until 1975, when they dropped by ten points in a single year:

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

By 1979, with the help of the educational psychologist Dr. Steven Bell, Sternglass was able to secure state breakdowns of the SAT scores, which indicated that the greatest declines had indeed occurred in states closest to the Nevada Test Site. The greatest decline was registered in the neighboring state of Utah, where the large Mormon population had the lowest rates of cigarette, drug and alcohol consumption in the nation, and traditionally had very high SAT scores.

These findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in September 1979. There it was predicted that SAT scores would begin to improve again in 1981, 18 years after atmospheric bomb tests stopped in 1963. . . . SAT scores have risen since 1981, confirming Sternglass's prediction.[195]

The federal government has recently admitted that radioactive contamination caused a significant loss of life on at least two occasions, and in both cases denied victims the right to sue for damages. After acknowledging that uranium escaped from its Fernald nuclear fabrication facility near Cincinnati, Ohio, the Department of Energy absolved its contractor, National Lead, from any financial liability. The Supreme Court reversed a multi-million dollar award to residents of St. George, Utah, who proved that cancer deaths there were associated with fallout from mishandled bomb tests. In effect, the government has asserted a sovereign right to endanger the lives of its citizens, as if we have been in a state of war all these years.

It is easy to understand how national security was invoked to withhold information about radiation releases from the Savannah River Plant in order to protect tritium supplies critical for producing thermonuclear weapons. But can national security justify concealing an enormous loss of lives?

It is more difficult to explain the role of the scientific community and the media in sustaining this deadly deception. There has been an almost complete absence of serious debate in American scientific and medical journals about the effect of ingested or inhaled fission products on the hormonal and immune systems. A distinction should be made between the nuclear scientists who permitted national security to take precedence over unwanted truths, and the majority of scientists and physicians who have been unaware of the evidence that free radical-induced biological damage may be thousands of times more efficient at low doses of radiation than at high ones.

Despite the warnings of Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov, there is nothing in the century-long experience with brief exposures to high intensity X-rays and radiation to prepare physicians to understand the distinctly different biochemical mechanisms involved in internal low-level radiation. Once radioactive fission products come down in the rain and enter the food chain, immune systems become vulnerable to free radicals by means quite different from the destruction of DNA by high-level radiation. This was not known by many of the nuclear scientists who developed the atomic bomb, and by biologists concerned with genetic damage.

These scientists would have been hard pressed to envision the perverse nature of the food chain that causes certain ingested fission products to accumulate in much higher concentrations than naturally occurring isotopes. For example, when cows graze over large exposed areas, the radioactive iodine will concentrate in them. When people ingest contaminated milk, water, root vegetables, or fruits, the adverse effects continue to multiply as the radioactive substances concentrate in organs such as the fetal thyroid or the bone marrow of young women prior to pregnancy. Finally, who could have expected the perverse supra-linear nature of the dose response, with lower levels of radiation potentially being hundreds to thousands of times more efficient in producing the free radicals that penetrate and destroy the blood cells of immune systems?

If this knowledge is deemed subversive and is thus excluded from established scientific journals, physicians will never consider the potential effect on the immune systems of their patients. The discoveries of Drs. Sternglass and Petkau, for example, were published in technical European professional journals, and have rarely been considered by physicians. After our Chernobyl findings prompted a Toronto Globe reporter to question Dr. Petkau about his work, he was warned against offering further interviews by his employer, Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd.

Unlike the government and the nuclear industry, physicians have no vested interest in perpetuating nuclear myths on political or economic grounds, and may--indeed must--become increasingly concerned about the effects of free radicals on the human immune system. The most detailed coverage of the Chernobyl findings was carried in the American Medical Association's Medical News and its Canadian counterpart in February 1988. Even the weekly medical news section of The New York Times has identified free radicals as a "major cause of disease," especially with respect to immune deficiencies.[184] But the Times failed to mention Dr. Petkau's crucial discovery that this type of damage is thousands of times greater for protracted exposures to internally deposited fallout than for short exposures to medical X-rays or gamma rays.

It has long been known that the body's immune defenses detect and destroy cells that are out of control, having become malignant. In Secret Fallout, Dr. Sternglass offered the following analogy for human society:

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

This analogy illuminates the crisis now facing both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The Chernobyl disaster truly shook the world and may be a final warning that the prospects for continued life on earth are put at risk by nuclear technology. This helps explain Gorbachev's surprising speech before the United Nations in December 1988, in which he cited the environmental threat to the planet as overriding the rationale for the nuclear arms race.

If two American researchers using published monthly data could identify 40,000 lives that appeared to be cut short by the Chernobyl fallout, thousands of miles away from the accident, consider what Soviet and Polish officials must have found in their unpublished mortality records. They could certainly assess the health impact of vast agricultural areas contaminated by fallout.[186]

In June of 1987, Adrian de Wind, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), delivered our Three Mile Island findings, which had just been presented to the staff of the Senate Public Health Committee, to Evgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. At the time, the NRDC was leading an effort to install equipment in the Soviet Union to monitor nuclear bomb tests. On his return from Moscow that summer, de Wind reported that Velikhov found the paper surprising, since "TMI was nothing compared to Chernobyl." He encouraged us to send Velikhov the just-completed paper on the impact of Chernobyl fallout on U.S. mortality. We sent Velikhov the Chernobyl findings, with some degree of trepidation that they would not inform him of anything he did not already know. Velikhov did not respond.

It will take a lot more glasnost--in America as well as the Soviet Union--for the true dimensions of the Chernobyl tragedy to be acknowledged. Almost two years after the accident, buried in a small item on gold futures in Investors Daily, the report was that:

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

Reports of the evacuation was not made available to readers of most major newspapers.

The American press also avoided coverage of our embarrassing Chernobyl findings for months until they succumbed to competitive pressures from Japan, Italy, West Germany, Canada, and England, where the story was considered worthy of front page coverage.

The New Scientist related how the prestigious British journal Nature accepted hundreds of papers from scientists around the world on Chernobyl's effects, but then failed to print them. The would-be authors complained in an open letter, that:

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

Does the West need its own Chernobyl for its leaders to practice glasnost with respect to its own nuclear technologies? At the time of this writing key American nuclear fabrication facilities have been shut down. Not only are workers reluctant to enter the contaminated facilities, but their supervisors also share these fears. Even the corporate contractors who have operated the facilities for decades appear to be having second thoughts, as the facilities exceed their lifetime limits.

Senator John Glenn is among the few U.S. politicians who have declared the need to "tear away the veil of secrecy and self-regulation." In a New York Times column on revelations from his hearings regarding the Fernald (Ohio) facility, he stated:

For decades, the Government has violated its own worker health and safety standards and has frequently ordered the private contractor running the facility to ignore state and federal environmental laws. As a result, vast quantities of radioactive and toxic wastes are contaminating offsite drinking water supplies. Residents live with the fear that the plant may have harmed their health and that of their children. Now, adding insult to injury, the government proposes to close the operation, with statements that the severe environmental contamination will be cleaned up--sometime--but just when it does not say.

How could this happen? Secrecy. Back in the 1950s, the production of nuclear weapons material was paramount, and secret.[189]

Thus, for Americans as well as Soviets, openness must replace secrecy. As Senator Glenn concluded, "it will do us little good to protect ourselves from our adversaries if we poison our own people in the process."

Though considerations of life and death have often been out-ranked by economic considerations in the formation of our nuclear policies, the costs are now too staggering for us to bear. The human losses attending every major release of fission products underscores the truth that thermonuclear weapons cannot be used.

The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that it may cost $175 billion to clean up and replace the military's nuclear production facilities. Add to this the far more daunting problem of what to do with the radioactive wastes now accumulating in pools at every civilian reactor across the nation. The national nuclear cemeteries for civilian and military high-level radioactive wastes, proposed for Nevada and New Mexico, may be myths in political, technological and economic terms. As physicist Marvin Resnikoff has demonstrated, simply by transporting the millions of curies of deadly materials to repositories nobody wants, sixteen accidents per year could occur, any one on the scale of Three Mile Island.[190]

These huge volumes of nuclear waste may end up staying just where they are. Every reactor may end up being entombed, along with its wastes, as the Soviets have had to treat Chernobyl. But who can guarantee that the wastes will not leak? New technologies are needed to guarantee permanent cooling and containment, to keep the wastes from contaminating underground aquifers, on which future generations will rely for drinking water.

The cost to dispose of all nuclear facilities in the next century will at least be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of constructing them. A rough estimate of four decades of defense expenditures earmarked for nuclear weapons and three decades of federal subsidies to the civilian nuclear industry yields a figure in the range of two trillion dollars. And right now, when one considers the associated drain on scientific manpower and other human resources, it becomes clear why our deficit-ridden economy can no longer compete with the demilitarized economies of Japan and West Germany. A recent New York Times editorial traced American economic ills to diminishing productivity growth since 1965, at a cost, ironically, of two trillion dollars.[191]

Former President Reagan was probably right when he said our military capability was second to none. Yet as the economist Benjamin Friedman said of the consequences of Reagan's policies, "for America to earn its international position primarily by military might, as its economic power seeps away, means ultimately that we become a mere policeman, a hired gun . . . Hessians of the twenty-first century."[192]

It may be more than a mere coincidence that U.S. productivity gains have sagged just as the damage to immune systems of the baby-boom generation appeared to emerge among young adults. Consider the implications for U.S. productivity of Ernest Sternglass's discovery, later supported by two U.S. Navy psychologists, of the adverse impact of bomb-test fallout on Standardized Achievement Test (SAT) scores. In Secret Fallout, Sternglass described his reaction in 1975 when reading a New York Times article on the puzzling but steady decline in SAT scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than two or three points per year until 1975, when they dropped by ten points in a single year:

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

By 1979, with the help of the educational psychologist Dr. Steven Bell, Sternglass was able to secure state breakdowns of the SAT scores, which indicated that the greatest declines had indeed occurred in states closest to the Nevada Test Site. The greatest decline was registered in the neighboring state of Utah, where the large Mormon population had the lowest rates of cigarette, drug and alcohol consumption in the nation, and traditionally had very high SAT scores.

These findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in September 1979. There it was predicted that SAT scores would begin to improve again in 1981, 18 years after atmospheric bomb tests stopped in 1963.

Two Navy psychologists investigated whether these findings could throw light on the difficulties new recruits were having in mastering complex weapons technologies. They found that:

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

These "disquieting" findings were largely ignored by the media as was the fact that SAT scores have risen since 1981, confirming Sternglass's prediction.[195]

After the Chernobyl fallout in the summer of 1986, the German edition of Psychology Today reexamined Sternglass's SAT findings, raising concerns about possible mental impairment of German children who would reach their 18th birthday in the year 2004. Yet if a theory's validity lies in its predictive value, then Sternglass's SAT hypothesis would appear to have already passed the test.

What are the potential social costs associated with those members of the baby-boom generation who survived birth in the atmospheric bomb test years, but with physical and mental impairments that may hinder them from playing responsible roles in the work force today? Facing a bleak and poverty-stricken future, these young people would be an increasing burden to society as they swell the ranks of the drug-addicted, the homeless and the over-crowded prison population.

Dr. Charlotte Silverman published research in 1980, which found that children who had radiation treatment for ringworm experienced significant mental deterioration years afterwards.[196] Dr. Silverman summarized her results and similar findings for Israeli children at the Sixth International Congress of Radiation Research in Tokyo as follows:

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

The sociologist Dr. R. J. Pellegrini has studied an FBI database of Uniform Crime Reports going back to 1945 and discovered that rates of criminal homicide, forcible rape and aggravated assault doubled in the 1970's as compared with previous decades, just as the baby boomers entered in the age group 15 to 24. Crime rates for those 15 to 34 years of age are now at all time peaks, a fact Dr. Pellegrini attributes to their exposure to radiation from fallout.[198]

Businesses are spending millions of dollars a year on remedial reading and arithmetic instruction, because many young adults entering the labor force are unqualified for work.[199] To what extent might exposure to bomb-test fallout contribute to this deterioration of abilities, which is most commonly blamed on a breakdown in the American school system?

Finally, consider the explosion in medical care costs in recent decades. While examining the health effects of Chernobyl in Europe, Professor Jens Scheer of the University of Bremen discovered that a West German health insurance company experienced the largest annual cost increases for allergic diseases in more than ten years as a result of increased demand in the months after Chernobyl.[200]

Since 1970 total private and public expenditures on health in the U.S. have been rising at more than twelve percent each year. Projecting this increase into the future results in total expenditures of 2.5 trillion dollars by the year 2000, outranking U.S. expenditures for food and shelter!

A most troubling aspect of the current explosion of medical costs, not yet sufficiently appreciated, is the increasing proportion associated with young persons rather than with the aged. Since 1982, and perhaps for the first time in our history, mortality rates for persons aged 15 to 54 are rising. Thus what should be the most productive sector of the labor force must now deal increasingly with the morbidity and mortality problems associated with AIDS, and other immune deficiency diseases.

Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. In the face of the medical and economic crises we face today, it becomes more and more possible for public agitation, expressed through Congress, to decrease our dependence on nuclear technologies. It is not too late. We have only to look at those (admittedly few) areas of the world that have managed to avoid the "benefits" of the atom to realize that we can still enjoy breathing air and eating food that is relatively free of radioactivity.

In our own country, the states of Wyoming and Montana are examples of such areas. Infant mortality rates that were once far worse than the national average have been improving remarkably since 1970. In 1987 and 1988, infant mortality in Wyoming was 42 percent less, and in Montana 30 percent less than in the U.S. as a whole, rivalling countries like Denmark with among the lowest infant mortality rates in the world.[201] Wyoming and Montana have no nuclear reactors and benefited from the pains the government took to avoid testing bombs in Nevada when winds would have blown fallout toward Salt Lake City and Canada.

A change in nuclear policy would free scientific resources to grapple seriously with the energy crisis, an effort long delayed by the nuclear option. A tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars spent in the past four decades on this deadly technology could realize the promise of improving energy efficiencies, and of developing solar and other less destructive energy-producing technologies. A free science will be necessary to find ways to cure the immune system deficiencies that now plague the world and that may have been partly caused by low-level radiation. And ultimately, more open scientific inquiry will serve the goal of preserving the prospects for continued life on earth.

Even if you made an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons, but you left established power structure in the U.S. and the USSR, they'd go on to research mind control or some chemical or biological thing. My view is, there exists a group of people in the world that have a disease. I call it the "power disease." They want to rule and control other people. They are a more important plague than cancer, pneumonia, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and heart disease put together. They can only think how to obliterate, control, and use each other. They use people as nothing more than instruments to cast aside when they don't need them any more. . . .

In my opinion, what we need is to move toward being nauseated by people who want to be at the top, in power. Can you think of anything more ridiculous than that the Chinese, Russian, and American people let their governments play with superlethal toys and subject all of us to these hazards? The solution is not to replace one leader with another or to have more government. Society has to reorganize itself. The structure we have now is, the sicker you are socially, the more likely it is that you'll come out at the top of the heap.

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