From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: "KILLING OUR OWN" by Wasserman & Solomon Message-ID: <1993Mar3.203225.25992@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Summary: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, 1945-1982 Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 20:32:25 GMT Lines: 1292 [This contains all 18 parts, concatenated.] Chronicling the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, 1945-1982 The following (part 1 of 18 parts) is a complete on-line reproduction of the text of the 1982 book, "Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation," (minus a 2-page map, "Radiation In America" preceding the Introduction, indicating the locations, as of 1982, of U.S. nuclear sites--mining, milling, fuel/plutonium processing, reactors, military deployment/critical assembly facilities, bomb testing and waste), and is reprinted here with permission of the authors, Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon who own the rights to this book. Permission to distribute this book is freely given so long as no modification of the text is made. It is my hope that others will spend some of their time in a similar manner, creating on-line copy of out-of-print books, as relevant today as at the time they were originally published, to provide more and more people with access to the vital information contained in such works about the details of the secret, classified-at-the-time-of-its-occurence, history of these here "United States of America." As Thomas Jefferson once said, "An informed democracy will behave in a responsible manner." --ratitor A PostScript version of this book for hardcopy is available from me: dave@sgi.com. All text bracketed in braces, "{ ... }" denotes italics. ______________________________________________________________________________ KILLING OUR OWN The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation _____________________________________________________ Harvey Wasserman & Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez & Eleanor Walters A Delta Book 1982 ______________________________________________________________________________ A Delta Book Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza New York, N.Y. 10017 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following material: Excerpts from "Three Mile Island: No Health Impact Found" by Jane E. Brody from {The New York Times,} April 15, 1980; "Nuclear Fabulists" from {The New York Times,} April 18, 1980; editorial from {The New York Times,} November 23, 1980. (c) 1980 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from "The Down Wind People" by Anne Fadiman in {Life.} (c) 1980 Time, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Excerpts from "No Place to Hide" by David Bradley. Copyright 1948 by David Bradley. By permission of Little, Brown and Company in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press. Excerpts from NAAV Atomic Veterans' Newsletters. Reprinted by permission of the National Association of Atomic Veterans, 1109 Franklin Street, Burlington, Ia. 52601. Excerpts from the editorial "The Bomb's Other Victims" in the {St. Louis Post-Dispatch,} December 1, 1979. Excerpts from the editorial "Old or Dead Before Their Time" in the {Seattle Post-Intelligencer,} June 17, 1979. Copyright 1979 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Excerpt of letter from Penny Bernstein to authors, used with permission of Penny Bernstein. Excerpt of letter from Pat Broudy to authors, used with permission of Pat Broudy. Excerpt of letter from William Drechin to authors, used with permission of William Drechin. Excerpt of letter from Bob Drogin to authors, used with permission of Bob Drogin. Excerpt of letter from Frank Karasti to authors, used with permission of Frank Karasti. Excerpt of letter from Alvin Lasky to authors, used with permission of Alvin Lasky. Excerpt of letter from George Mace to Joseph Wershba, used with permission of George Mace. Excerpt of letter from William Shufflebarger to authors, used with permission of William Shufflebarger. Excerpt of letter from Gregory Troyer to authors, used with permission of Gregory Troyer. Excerpt of letter from Joseph Wershba to authors, used with permission of Joseph Wershba. Excerpt of letter from Warren Zink to authors, used with permission of Warren Zink. No copyright is claimed on material from United States Government works. Copyright (c) 1982 by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon. Introduction copyright (c) 1982 by Benjamin Spock. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. Delta (R) TM 755118, Dell Publishing Co, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Delta printing {Designed by Judith Neuman} Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wasserman, Harvey. Killing our own. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Radioactive substances--Toxicology--United States. 2. Ionizing radiation--Toxicology--United States. 1. Solomon, Norman. II. Title. RA1231.R2W36 363.1'79 81-17438 ISBN 0-440-54566-6 AACR2 A hardcover edition of this work is available through Delacorte Press, 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, New York. * * * * * * * Notes In researching this book, we have conducted more than two hundred interviews, many of which do not appear in the footnotes. In a number of cases we have interviewed the same person several times, but have denoted our talks with them with a single date. In denoting our printed sources, we have used a number of abbreviations, primarily for U.S. Government agencies. They are: ABCC: Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission AEC: Atomic Energy Commission CDC: Center for Disease Control DOD: Department of Defense DOE: Department of Energy DHEW: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare EPA: Environmental Protection Agency FRC: Federal Radiation Council FDA: Food and Drug Administration GAO: General Accounting Office ICRP: International Commission on Radiological Protection JCAE: Joint Committee on Atomic Energy NAS: National Academy of Sciences NIOSH: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health NRC: Nuclear Regulatory Commission OTA: Office of Technology Assessment PHS: Public Health Service USMC: U.S. Marine Corps VA: Veterans Administration * * * * * * * In 1947 Albert Einstein wrote: "Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since the prehistoric discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense, there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. "We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope--we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death." It is to that faith in an informed citizenry that we dedicate this book. Harvey Wasserman Norman Solomon Robert Alvarez Eleanor Walters * * * * * * * CONTENTS Notes Acknowledgments {Introduction by Dr. Benjamin Spock} PART I The Bombs 1 The First Atomic Veterans 2 300,000 GIs Under the Mushroom Clouds 3 Bringing the Bombs Home 4 Test Fallout, Political Fallout 5 Continued Testing: Tragic Repetitions PART II X Rays and the Radioactive Workplace 6 The Use and Misuse of Medical X Rays 7 Nuclear Workers: Radiation on the Job PART III The Industry's Underside 8 Bomb Production at Rocky Flats: Death Downwind 9 Uranium Milling and the Church Rock Disaster 10 Tritium in Tucson, Wastes Worldwide PART IV The "Peaceful Atom" 11 The Battle of Shippingport 12 How Much Radiation? 13 Animals Died at Three Mile Island 14 People Died at Three Mile Island 15 Conclusion: Surviving the New Fire Appendix A The Basics of Radiation and Health Appendix B Summary of Atomic Bomb Tests Appendix C Commercial Nuclear Power Reactors in the U.S. Appendix D Organizations Index * * * * * * * Acknowledgments First and foremost we would like to thank Chris Kuppig and Gary Luke of Dell Publishing, without whose extraordinary efforts this book could not have been brought to completion. We would also like to acknowledge the Environmental Policy Center for its role in establishing the scientific veracity of this book, and in providing resources for its production. Ron Bernstein, Sr., Rosalie Bertell, Jay and Laura Kramer, Mary Brophy, Priscilla Laws, Ada Sanchez, Samuel H. Day, Jr., Monte Bright, Tony Hodges, and Karen Wilson also provided us with important resources. There are far too many doctors, scientists, farmers, and other concerned citizens on whom we have relied for aid and information to list here. Most appear in the text or footnotes that follow. It should be clear that this book is very much a product of the willingness of private citizens to inquire independently into their own health and that of the community. Therein, almost certainly, lies the hope of the future health of the planet. For personal love and support in a demanding venture, we would like to thank the Walters, Alvarez, Solomon, and Wasserman families; as well as Kitty Tucker, Shawn Tucker, Amber Alvarez, Ada Sanchez, Anne Betzel, Joiwind and Journey Williams, Carolyn Stuart, George and Ken Gloss, Amy Wainer, Alex Coote, John and Nancy Ramsay B. Lynn; the Chilewich, Shapiro, Stellman, Simon, and Styron families; and the Montague and Allen farmers. * * * * * * * Introduction by Dr. Benjamin Spock This is the frightening story of the damage that has already been done to our own people--to children even more than to adults--by the unlocking of the power of the atom. It investigates the testing of our nuclear weapons, the sloppy practices within the nuclear industry, and the problems with our atomic power plants. It is also about the future damage to be expected from mutation in our genes from radiation. More than three and a half decades have now passed since the first atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico--July 16, 1945--and the subsequent detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then our own military has exploded more than 700 nuclear bombs on our own continental soil and in the Pacific. Many of the health effects are just now being felt. It seems no accident that we are currently suffering from a national cancer epidemic, in which one of every five Americans dies of that dread disease. It would be plausible and prudent to assume that the radioactive fallout we've introduced into the global atmosphere, literally tens of tons of debris from bomb tests alone, is a significant factor in addition to industrial pollution and cigarette smoking. As early as the 1950s the American Linus Pauling and the Russian Andrei Sakharov--both Nobel prize winners--warned that literally millions of people would die worldwide because of these bomb tests. There have been American "guinea pigs" who have amply confirmed these predictions. As this book documents for the first time, shortly after the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American soldiers were sent in to help clean up the rubble. They were not warned that there was a danger in drinking the contaminated water and breathing the radioactive dust. Many of these men felt the lethal effects of the bombs' radiation almost immediately. Despite glib assurances from our government, they have suffered an extraordinary rate of rare cancers that could only have been caused by that radiation. Similar tragedies have struck American soldiers present at scores of bomb tests that followed. From 1945 through the early 1960s, some 300,000 men and women in U.S. uniform were exposed to radiation from atmospheric, underwater, and underground bomb tests. The military wanted to know how armies would react to atomic weaponry in war and they used American soldiers to find out. Though the Pentagon has insisted all along that there was little or no danger from these tests, the authors here present irrefutable evidence, which has only gradually come to light, that many of our GIs have suffered and died from leukemia, cancer, chronic respiratory distress, progressive muscular weakness, and mental disturbance. Most tragically of all, some of their children have been born with physical and mental handicaps. Yet in spite of overwhelming evidence, the Veterans Administration has adamantly refused to admit there is any proof that these illnesses are service-related, the vets and their widows and children have been consistently denied compensation. Of course, no individual case of leukemia or cancer or birth defect carries a label saying exactly what caused it. But the statistics, gathered by the veterans themselves, show that the tests were responsible. With shocking callousness, our government has even refused to divulge the list of those hundreds of thousands who were deliberately exposed, a list that would greatly aid in the early detection of further cancers and save hundreds of lives. Civilians unfortunate enough to live downwind from the tests, in towns like St. George, Utah, and Fredonia, Arizona, have also suffered disease and death. They were assured by the Atomic Energy Commission that the radiation would not harm them. But in ensuing years they have been afflicted with an outbreak of cancers and leukemia that could only have come from the test fallout. Yet, like the veterans, they have met a stone wall of governmental denial. Frightening stories are also coming to light among people and animals living near nuclear weapons facilities, mining and waste storage sites, uranium processing plants, and nuclear power reactors. Farmers in central Pennsylvania, for example, began to observe abnormalities in their animals when Three Mile Island Unit One opened in 1974. They reported much worse problems in the wake of the accident at Unit Two in 1979. Many animals became infertile. Others developed bizarre behavior. Young were born with marked deformities. These farmers had seen such abnormalities only rarely in the past. Now they were occurring repeatedly and on many farms. But government investigators turned in reports that baldly denied a majority of the abnormalities, which had already been witnessed by neutral observers. In fact, the investigators never even visited some of the farms they reported on. They blamed what few disturbances they admitted to finding on mismanagement and ignorance on the part of the farmers. Farmers living near the Rocky Flats plutonium factory in Colorado, near the West Valley atomic fuel reprocessing center in upstate New York, near a uranium mining waste pile in Colorado, and near four separate reactor sites--including Three Mile Island--have complained of similar defects and illnesses among their animals. They have documented the same kind of problems that first appeared back in the 1950s in sheep caught downwind from nuclear test blasts. Parallel evidence is now in hand, from private citizens and independent researchers, that the rates of infant mortality and cancer and leukemia have risen among humans living near nuclear reactors. The government response has again been a condescending and blanket denial. The government's own record of health studies has been stained with serious scandal and obvious cover-up. In the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission engaged a topflight expert named Thomas Mancuso to look into the health of workers at nuclear facilities such as the Hanford weapons plant in Washington state. But when he discovered, after more than a decade of research, that there was an elevated cancer rate at Hanford, the government fired him and tried to confiscate his data. Other top scientists, including Drs. John Gofman, Alice Stewart, Karl Z. Morgan, Rosalie Bertell, and Irwin Bross, have been censored, harassed, fired, or deprived of their grants for standing by their studies, which showed that humans and animals were being harmed. Our government set up a massive study of the Japanese victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the data was kept secret, and it was later used in a way that brought charges of manipulation and deliberate suppression of the dangers of radiation. Now, nearly four decades later, it has become clear that radiation released was ten times more dangerous than anyone believed possible, not just to those killed at the time, but to the "survivors" as well. There are great potential perils in the nuclear power industry that our government and the utilities consistently minimize. The most dramatic is the danger of a meltdown, which could kill many thousands of people immediately, and even more from the aftereffects. The accident at Three Mile Island revealed that the government and utilities are not in full control of this technology. They didn't know for several days what had gone wrong or what to do about it. There had been carelessness in maintenance. There were not adequate plans for meeting such a disaster. Part of the equipment was basically defective in design. The responses of government and the utility at the time, and later, to charges that radiation had already harmed infants and animals, showed again that their predominant impulse was to reassure the public that nothing serious was wrong and that there was no real danger--even when there was no technical or moral basis for such statements. There are also problems related to the low-level radiation that leaks from all these reactors. {Killing Our Own} documents two cases--Three Mile Island and Arkansas Nuclear One--where strong evidence has been collected indicating an increased infant mortality rate from these emissions. Some scientists have charged that infant mortality rates have risen around other reactors as well. Yet neither the government nor the industry has ever conducted a definitive nationwide survey of cancer and infant mortality rates near atomic reactors, though one would be easy enough to perform. Danger also arises from the production of nuclear fuel and its transport, and the transport and permanent storage of nuclear wastes, the latter being a problem for which even the government admits it has no solution. As this book documents, health problems have already arisen from even the short-term storage of these deadly radioactive poisons. Yet government and industry leaders continue to try to reassure us. All of this has long since convinced me that we cannot trust these people and, more important still, that nuclear power is too dangerous to have around. But it is clear that our government is so deeply committed to nuclear weapons and nuclear power that it will ignore damning evidence, deny the truth, mislead our people, jeopardize health and even life itself, and try to blacken the reputation of scientists who disagree with its policies. Atomic testing in the atmosphere was ended by the test ban of 1963. However, the testing has continued underground, on the assumption that radiation can be confined. The current administration has called for even more tests. But many of these explosions have vented dangerous amounts of radiation. The infamous Baneberry test in Nevada leaked thousands of times more radiation than the accident at Three Mile Island. Is this dangerous testing really necessary? A couple of years ago, Norris Bradbury, a former director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first atom bomb was designed, and Hans Bethe, a recipient of the Nobel prize for his accomplishment in nuclear physics, wrote a petition (endorsed by the Federation of American Scientists) to President Carter asking to end the testing. They pointed out that the mechanical reliability of our nuclear weaponry had been proved "almost exclusively by nonnuclear testing"; it has been "rare to the point of nonexistence" for a nuclear test to be required to resolve any problem in our nuclear weapons arsenal. So why go on? I earnestly believe that as soon as there is a definite suspicion of harm from any source as malignant as radiation, it is time to make every effort to eliminate it. I feel particularly strongly about radiation because children are much more vulnerable than adults--not only in regard to the likelihood of developing leukemia and cancer, but also of being born with physical or mental defects. And once mutations have been produced in genes, they will be passed down forever. What right do we have to threaten with deformity or death those who are too young to protest or those still unborn? What right do we as adult citizens have to allow our government to take this power for evil into its hands? Such harm would be bad enough if there were no alternatives. But I believe that the perilous and senseless accumulation of nuclear weapons and their dispersal to more and more nations could be ended if our citizens would demand that our government stop stalling and get on with the negotiation of a true disarmament with the Soviet Union. The damage being done by the mere building of these bombs at places like Rocky Flats would then also be eliminated. We could solve the problem of our energy needs without the multiple risks of nuclear power if our government would provide leadership for energy conservation and the development of nonpolluting, renewable sources such as the sun, the wind, the tides, the burning of wood. Only you, as aroused citizens, can stop the terrifying plague of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. But first you should read the estimates of past and future damage assembled here, in order to make up your mind independently. Then, if you are convinced, you will be well-motivated to exert your full influence. ______________________________________________________________________________ P A R T I ___________ The Bombs * * * * * * * 1 The First Atomic Veterans Like many millions of other Americans, Marine Corporal Lyman Eugene Quigley reacted to news about Hiroshima and Nagasaki with relief. A tall, large-framed, handsome man with straight black hair, bushy eyebrows, and a friendly countenance, Quigley had enlisted in the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor, at the age of twenty. Leaving his job assembling electric motors in his native Illinois, Quigley went through boot camp and advanced training in California; by spring 1943 he was on a troop carrier in the South Pacific, headed to Australia and New Zealand. As part of the 2nd Marine Division, during more than two years in the Pacific, he saw combat at Tarawa, Okinawa, then Tinian and Saipan. Quigley remained in the Mariana Islands, working in a Marines bulldozer crew, clearing away an air base for B-29s loaded with explosive bombs and--twice--with atomic weapons. "All we knew was the war was over, and some kind of special bomb had been dropped," Lyman Quigley recollected a third of a century later. "All I was thinking was, the war was over, I'm coming back. We were so happy, we were going home. But it didn't turn out that way. Unfortunately."[1] After the long-awaited formal surrender took place on September 2, Quigley's orders sent him not home, but toward Nagasaki. Peace notwithstanding, U.S. wartime censors kept both Hiroshima and Nagasaki off limits to journalists until mid-September. "The war was ended, as we had reported, but the censorship was not," wrote George Weller, a Pulitzer prizewinning war correspondent. "What the command wanted covered was the [POW] prison camps of northern Japan. . . . away from where the war had been decided a month earlier."[2] Violating the U.S. Government's edict that declared all southern Japan forbidden to the press, Weller headed to the Japanese island of Kyushu; on September 6, 1945, he became the first known civilian Westerner to enter Nagasaki since its atomic bombardment, arriving four weeks after the nuclear assault. "When I walked out of Nagasaki's roofless railroad station, I saw a city frizzled like a baked apple, crusted black at the open core . . ."[3] Weller climbed a nearby hill, gaining an overview. "The long inlet of the main harbor looked eerily deserted, with the floating lamp of a single freighter smoking off the blistered, sagging piers and twisted derricks. We could see the main Mitsubishi plant, a long fallen Zeppelin of naked, twisted steel, bent like a child's structural toy crushed by a passing foot. Its form was still almost intact, though it was almost directly under the bomb. The sturdiness of the ceilings had taken the blast and blocked the ray. The workers were more fortunate than their families in the one-story bungalows around the plant. They did most of the dying."[4] A U.S. military inspection team was dispatched for the nuclear- ravaged cities, reaching Hiroshima on September 8 and going on to Nagasaki a few days later. "In all the areas examined, ground contamination with radioactive materials was found to be below the hazardous limits," the U.S. Army's official history states.[5] Within two weeks after its inspection team began surveying the two Japanese cities, the War Department announced that scientists had ascertained that the residual radiation in Nagasaki did not merit concern. The situation was unprecedented, however, and understanding of nuclear- fission particles' effects was in its infancy. On September 23, U.S. occupying troops disembarked at Nagasaki harbor--forty-five days after the bombing. "They came along in Jeeps," Kayano Nagai recounted a few years later. She was four years old as she watched the occupiers enter her home city. "Daddy told me they were Marines and lots of them were college students. They were all very nice and they had very good manners, and whenever we said 'Haro' they gave us chocolate and chewing gum."[6] Much of Nagasaki was in ruins. Kayano's mother and an estimated eighty thousand other Nagasaki residents were dead from the atomic bombing; thousands of others were in agony. "We walked into Nagasaki unprepared, and we were shocked as hell at what was there," Lyman Quigley remembered many years later. "Really, we were ignorant about what the hell the bomb was. We had no idea what we were going to see. We weren't given any instructions whatsoever. We were amazed, shocked--and yet stupefied." It was a grisly scene. Corpses were still being burned in the open air. "Women's hair was falling out, the men all had their heads shaved, and all of them had running sores on their heads, ears, all over."[7] At the time, gruesome as the panorama of suffering was, it seemed to involve only other people's problems. Quigley and fellow members of Company C, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, made their way up a steep hill from the docks; about 150 strong, the Marines of Company C billeted at a partially destroyed concrete schoolhouse up the hill from the spot over which the atomic bomb had exploded. Orders from above did not include any unusual precautionary guidelines or provisions. Quigley and his buddies drank city reservoir water, and worked in the midst of the most heavily damaged area without any protective clothing or special gear. They were not provided with radiation-dose badges or any other equipment to measure their exposure to radioactivity. Quigley was in charge of a Marine bulldozer crew razing what was left of wrecked structures, cleaning up rubble, clearing out roads, and leveling the ground. For Company C Marines the long days settled into a busy routine amidst the dusty debris--bulldozing, hauling, standing guard duty in the blast center area by day, sleeping in the makeshift camp at the schoolhouse by night. Quigley bought some silk kimonos for his sister and some young women friends back home. But there was little time or incentive for sight-seeing. Toward the end of autumn many of the Marines were sent out of Nagasaki. On November 4, after forty-three days of working in the radioactive rubble of Nagasaki, Corporal Quigley received a Good Conduct medal ("We used to call it a Ruptured Duck," he quipped with a chuckle) and later that month shipped back to the States. "When I got back, I had burning, itching, running sores on the top of my head and the top of my ears," Quigley recalled. The sores looked to him like those on Nagasaki's residents. He called the running sores to the attention of a doctor during a routine discharge examination in December 1945. "They listed that in my medical records as a fungus, which is wrong--I know that now." Also: "I had a warm feeling in my lips. I remember that distinctly."[8] On December 21, 1945, Lyman Eugene Quigley received an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps. On the surface his military service had the trappings of a traditional all-American tale. The troubling radioactive underside, with its ironic and disturbing twists, would not become apparent to him for decades. ------ 1. Lyman Quigley, and Bernice and Ron Quigley, interviews, November 1978; in addition, authors obtained hundreds of pages of medical and military service records in Quigley's claim file at the regional Veterans Administration office in Portland, Oregon. 2. David Brown and W. Richard Bruner, eds., {How I Got That Story} (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967), p. 209. 3. Ibid., p. 211. 4. Ibid., p. 217. 5. William S. Augerson, M.D., Director, Health Care Operations, Department of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, to Harry Shaich, University of Oregon Health Services Center, February 25, 1975, quoting from {Radiology in World War II} (Medical Department, U.S. Army, 1965). 6. Takashi Nagai, {We of Nagasaki} (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1951), pp. 19-20. 7. Quigley interviews. 8. Ibid. ------ A Hollow Triumph Five months previous to Lyman Quigley's return home, the President of the United States was contemplating the new vistas of atomic energy. "We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world," President Harry S. Truman wrote in his diary two weeks before the United States exploded nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I have told the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children." The atomic bomb, President Truman noted, "seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."[9] Truman was weighing options left in the wake of an experimental detonation of the first atom bomb on July 16, 1945. A nuclear blast named Trinity, set off in the New Mexico desert, had been a spectacular triumph for participants in the supersecret Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb. But some Manhattan Project researchers were uneasy about the new weapon. Warnings, like the confidential Franck Report, which scientists presented to War Secretary Stimson, urged demonstration of an A-bomb at a sparsely populated spot. However, as a chief drafter of the Franck Report, Dr. Eugene Rabinowitch, remarked later, ". . . the American war machine was in full swing and no appeals to reason could stop it."[10] At the U.S. War Department, senior officers believed "it was very important to prove the bomb a successful weapon, justifying its great cost," observed David H. Frisch, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Frisch remembered that America's military strategists were eager "to use the bomb first where its effects would be not only politically effective but technically measurable."[11] Manhattan Project director General Leslie R. Groves recalled that it was "desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb." For the same reason criteria for targeted cities included absence of previous bombardments.[12] Thirty-five years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. Government was listing them as "Announced United States Nuclear Tests."[13] "Nobody really knows how many people were killed in Hiroshima: anywhere from around 60,000 to 300,000," comments Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, whose study of A-bomb survivors won the National Book Award. "The city of Hiroshima estimates 200,000. It depends upon how you count, which groups you count, whether you count deaths over time. And it depends on emotional influences on the counters. It is of some significance that American estimates have tended to be lower than Japanese."[14] Japan's dazed hierarchy in Tokyo had little time to assess the unprecedented, catastrophic chaos of Hiroshima. Three days later another searing flash--this one fueled with plutonium instead of uranium and detonated with a more sophisticated implosion apparatus-- devastated Nagasaki. In both cities, despite Truman's diary vow, women and children were among the primary sufferers. Included were several thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry, stranded in Japan when the war began.[15] And at least eleven American POWs being held in Hiroshima died from the bombing.[16] "All concerned should feel a deep satisfaction at the success of the operations," Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell reported about the Nagasaki bombing in a memorandum to General Groves.[17] But when the war ended a few days later at the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory in New Mexico, according to journalist Lansing Lamont, "more than one scientist walked cold sober into the dark of that August night and retched."[18] United States policymakers certainly were anxious to convey the image of a return to normality as soon as possible in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When U.S. occupation troops reached Nagasaki in late September 1945, they were there to help calm a jittery world. Entering Nagasaki six weeks after the nuclear bombing, about one thousand Marines and a smaller detachment of Navy Seabees were billeted in the demolished core area around the blast center. Assigned cleanup duties, they arrived as U.S. military-command press releases announced that scientists had found no lingering radiation worth worrying about in Nagasaki. Two weeks later, in less extensive operations, U.S. Army troops moved into the Hiroshima area.[19] What they endured in ensuing decades closely resembles the ordeals of a wide range of American radiation victims, consistently ignored and denied at every turn by the very institutions responsible for causing their problems. Accorded no place in official histories, many of these U.S. veterans suffered privately, with debilitating and often rare health afflictions as they reached middle age. Some developed terminal illnesses affecting bone marrow and blood production--the kind of biological problems long associated with radiation exposure. Others found that at unusually early ages they were plagued by heart attacks, severe lung difficulties, pain in their bones and joints, chronic fatigue, and odd skin disorders. The ultimate question of the controversy about these veterans is whether they later suffered significantly higher rates of diseases compared with average occurrences among other American males of their age. Were serious illnesses among those veterans merely random--or were they part of a pattern of extraordinarily high ratios of particular diseases linked to their stints in postbomb radioactive rubble? Normally among American men in their late fifties one would find multiple myeloma bone-marrow cancer at an average rate of about one- half case per one thousand, according to standard medical incidence tables.[20] So ordinarily perhaps one case of multiple myeloma might be expected to develop later among the one thousand U.S. Marines routinely present within about a mile of the atomic blast center point of Nagasaki during the last week of September 1945. We have found five cases of multiple myeloma among those particular Marines--an extremely high incidence of the terminal bone-marrow disease. Additional blood-related afflictions--such as Hodgkin's disease, myelofibrosis, and leukemia--have been documented by the veterans, and their widows. And other painfully insidious illnesses became common. ------ 9. Robert H. Ferrell, ed., {Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman} (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); diary entry July 25, 1945, published in {The Oregonian} (Portland), October 12, 1980. 10. Richard S. Lewis and Jane Wilson, eds., {Alamogordo Plus Twenty-Five Years} (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), p. 4. 11. Ibid., p. 254. 12. Ibid. 13. U.S. DOE, {Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979} (Las Vegas: DOE Office of Public Affairs, 1980), p. 5 (hereafter cited as {Announced U.S. Nuclear Tests}). 14. Robert Jay Lifton, "The Prevention of Nuclear War," {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, October 1980, p. 38. 15. Approximately six hundred survived and returned home, mostly to California and Hawaii. Although U.S. citizens, none were able to gain medical assistance from their government for persistent health effects of being subjected to nuclear attack. See {San Francisco Chronicle}, May 12, 1979, p. 30; also, {American Atomic Bomb Survivors. A Plea for Medical Assistance} (San Francisco: National Committee for Atomic Bomb Survivors in the United States, 1979), available from Japanese American Citizens League, 1765 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA 94115. 16. "Government documents and the testimony of former servicemen indicate that the United States has been concealing information about the deaths of these men for 34 years," historian Barton J. Bernstein concluded in 1979. The American government maintained its long silence about the POW deaths, the Stanford University professor contended, "so as not to weaken, impair or damage the reputation of U.S. leaders and to block any moral doubts at home about combat use of the atomic bomb." (United Press International, dateline San Francisco, reporting on July 23, 1979, press conference by Barton Bernstein.) See also {New York Times}, August 21, 1979. 17. Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald, eds., {The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb} (New York: Dial Press, 1977), p. 534. 18. Lansing Lamont, {Day of Trinity} (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 268. 19. Interviews with several dozen American veterans of Nagasaki cleanup. Also, U.S. DOD, {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces} (Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1980); U.S. DOD, {Radiation Dose Reconstruction U.S. Occupation Forces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan 1945-1946} (Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1981). In some respects the U.S. servicemen's atomic cleanup experiences in Japan resembled events more than thirty years later in the South Pacific. In the late 1970s, about three thousand American GIs--some wearing surgical protective masks--obeyed orders to clean up Eniwetok atoll radioactivity left by scores of nuclear tests at those islands. The three-year, $100 million cleanup project was backed by Defense Nuclear Agency officials eager to show that islands in the radiation- covered atoll could be made habitable. (See Steve Rees, "84th Eng Bn Exposed to Cancer Causing Elements on Clean-up Mission: But Why?" {Enlisted Times}, August 1979, pp. 5, 19.) 20. White House Domestic Policy Staff Assistant Director Ellen L. Goldstein to Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, December 18, 1979; available from Committee, P.O. Box 14424, Portland, OR 97214. ------ A Legacy Comes Home In the fall of 1946--a year after the atomic bombings of Japan--Lyman Quigley settled down in Portland, Oregon, where he went to work for the city transit company operating streetcars and buses. Very soon he began suffering acute abdominal attacks. "I'd wake up and be doubled up in pain at night. It kept getting more and more severe. I got haggard-looking. I can't describe it to you. You'd have to go through it to know what it is. Excruciating."[21] In December 1951 doctors removed Quigley's appendix. The severe stomach pains, however, persisted. He later developed stomach tumors. One day, in March 1953, Quigley's lungs hemorrhaged suddenly, bleeding for over a week. A scar formed on a lung. He was thirty-one by then--married, and a father. "The doctors told me they couldn't figure out what was going on. This is when I first got a suspicion." More than twenty-five years later his memory was vivid about the day in the summer of 1953 when he spoke to his doctor about the bulldozer work in Nagasaki's radioactive rubble. "The doctor starts to diagram on the blackboard about the atom and the half-life and all this stuff. And all of a sudden he turns to me and says, `I wish you wouldn't come see me anymore.'"[22] In the late 1950s a painful lump grew out of Quigley's head. Surgery removed the tumor, diagnosed as a lipoma (tumor of fatty tissue). Later doctors took out "a tumor about the size of a hen egg"[23] from the back of his knee. Pain and weakness in his legs persisted. By this time Quigley was having trouble breathing; he was diagnosed as having "chronic obstructive lung disease." At the age of forty-three, he suffered a heart attack--the first of five. Missed work and medical bills outstripped insurance coverage by many thousands of dollars. "We borrowed on the house, borrowed money on the car, borrowed money on the insurance policies we had," Quigley recounted.[24] In the early 1970s worsening health problems forced him into retirement. Monthly Social Security disability payments of about $300 and a Teamsters union pension of $140 did little to ease the financial strain. His wife of a quarter century, Bernice, started working in hospitals to counter the awesome financial toll. In the autumn of 1978 Lyman Quigley received visitors at his house in northeast Portland. Pain-racked but determined, he sat next to a kitchen table piled high with correspondence from the Defense Department, Veterans Administration, and nongovernmental scientists. Thirty-three years after going ashore in Nagasaki, for Quigley, atomic and personal histories had become inextricably meshed. He was a quintessential American man, raised in the Depression era, proud of his military service. His political views were mainstream; his favorite magazine, {Reader's Digest}. What set him apart was his belief that an unreported part of history had been telescoped into his own body, his organs and cells--and, he feared, perhaps into the genetic heritage passed on to his children, Ron and Linda, now in their twenties. "When my father first started putting facts together and came to the realization that his illnesses might stem from exposure to radiation, we found that this was more frightening than the unknown," Ron remembered. "It was not only frightening but also it was financially and emotionally draining for me and my family. . . . I can remember times my father would isolate himself in another part of the house for two or three days at a time, he had such pains in his heart, his legs, his chest, and shortness of breath, so much so that he was unable to participate in family activities or even simple things such as getting the mail or sitting outside for a short time."[25] For a score of years, with increasing intensity, Lyman Quigley had read everything he could get his hands on about atomic fallout and radiation effects. In {Radiation,} an authoritative book by Ralph E. Lapp and Jack Schubert, he found documentation that the Nagasaki reservoir water he and fellow Marines had drunk so freely was probably radioactive. About a mile from Nagasaki's nuclear blast center, "there was a fall-out at the Nishiyama reservoir area, where a total dosage of as much as 100 roentgens may have been delivered"[26]--a serious dose of radiation if absorbed into the human body. Quigley had attempted to file a claim for service-connected benefits with the Veterans Administration in the fall of 1973, contending that his severe health deterioration resulted from radiation exposure while a Marine in Nagasaki. The VA official he spoke with dissuaded Quigley from filing a claim, saying there was no chance of approval. Two years later Quigley went back and insisted on filing a claim. In January 1976 the VA issued a denial. After a hearing in Portland the following year the VA sent him a ruling dated March 10, 1978, reaffirming the rejection. "Service- connection for residuals of radiation exposure involving the heart, lung, stomach, head and knee is not warranted," the VA decision declared. "His present disabilities have been determined to be of nonservice-connected origin."[27] In Nagasaki "radioactivity decayed very fast and was all gone within five weeks of the blast," said a scrawled VA memo in Quigley's claim file.[28] In a 1976 letter, Dr. John D. Chase, then chief medical director of the VA, wrote: "Navy records indicate that ships did not approach Nagasaki until so long after the atomic blast that any residual radiation which might have existed would have been negligible."[29] But by now Quigley understood that the Nagasaki bomb exploded with plutonium, known to lodge in human lungs and other internal soft tissue; plutonium diminishes so slowly that it will take twenty-four thousand years for half of its deadly alpha radiation to decay. Other radioactive isotopes left by an atomic bomb include strontium 90, a "bone-seeking" form of radioactivity remaining highly toxic for many decades, and cesium 137--which is assimilated by muscles. Lyman Quigley pursued a hunch. He suspected that his was not an unusual case among veterans, now scattered throughout the United States, who had traveled up that Nagasaki hill with him as part of Company C, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, 2nd Marine Division. After three decades it was not easy to track down Marine buddies from the Nagasaki cleanup days. Adding to the logistical obstacles for Lyman Quigley, life had long since become almost steady pain. Utilizing old address books, yellowed letters, and telephone directory assistance, by the end of 1978 he had located five men of the Company C Marines. In the small town of Sparta in the eastern Tennessee mountains, Junior Hodge--who was with Quigley on the bulldozers in Nagasaki--had been living with chronic anemia for the past twenty years. "Seems like all my strength is going out of me," Hodge told us. One of his testes had become enlarged, while the other, with a small growth on it, had almost disappeared. "I ain't got much money, and I can't afford to go to doctors," he drawled mournfully. Hodge's chronology of stomach and lung afflictions was virtually identical to Lyman Quigley's.[30] In Pittsburgh, Quigley tracked down John Zotter; in Toledo, Ohio, Willard Good; in Berwyn, Illinois, Philip Leschina; across town in Portland, William Gender. In addition Quigley located the mother of Floyd Crews, who had been part of the Company C bulldozing detail; he had died in 1972. Quigley took extensive notes and accumulated medical records and affidavits. A pattern was emerging, with some strikingly similar ailments among the seven of them. Hodge, Good, Gender, Crews, and Quigley suffered severe lung difficulties, at times requiring surgery and in all cases causing chronic breathing problems for decades. Consistent intestinal attacks, often within a few months after leaving Nagasaki, became long-term realities of life for Hodge, Zotter, Gender, Crews, and Quigley; each of those men also experienced persisting painful conditions in their legs. And a pronounced chronic infestation of unusual weeping skin sores or ulcerations had been suffered by Hodge, Zotter, Good, Gender, and Quigley.[31] Willard Good had begun treatments in the mid-1960s for polycythemia vera, an excess of red blood cells found in one out of every 250,000 Americans per year.[32] In 1976, at age fifty-three, Good went on early retirement from his job as a shipping clerk in Toledo. Most of the men spoke of feeling run down by the time they reached middle age--as though they were much older than their chronological years. Time after time medical specialists had been puzzled about their afflictions. By mid-1979 Quigley had reached a total of fifteen men--or their next of kin--who had been stationed with him at that roofless Nagasaki schoolhouse. Dispersed all over the United States and unaware of each other's postwar medical woes, most of the men experienced agonizing health problems at an unusually early age. Six suffered heart attacks, four of them fatal, before the age of fifty. Serious lung ailments, ongoing acute stomach pains, bizarre skin afflictions, aching weakness in leg bones--each of these physical difficulties, occurring at young ages, was reported for about half of the fifteen Company C veterans tracked down.[33] Little more than an hour's drive from Quigley's Portland home, in the southern Willamette Valley town of Lebanon, lived Company C veteran William Hoover. "Bill had been lucky, or so he thought," Juanita Hoover reflected a year after Quigley had located her husband. But rapid-fire events ended the Hoovers' feelings of good fortune. In quick succession, Bill Hoover's wife recalled, "he had a tumor removed from his hip and a skin cancer from his ear--also a testicle operation. Then on October 15, 1979, he discovered he had lung cancer. He had surgery immediately. It had grown so rapidly it had attached itself to the sac around the heart. They removed two thirds of his right lung." Hoover nearly died on the operating table.[34] The fifteen former Marines' health histories that Quigley documented represented about a tenth of the total number of Company C servicemen who had been with him in Nagasaki. The fifteen had been a fairly random sampling, and had turned up a conspicuous pattern of early onset of particular diseases. What's more, Quigley pointed out, he had begun to do what the U.S. Government had always been in a far better position to accomplish, with its resources and access to records; but the government had never tried, refusing even to lend a hand to Quigley's efforts. For Lyman Eugene Quigley--a veteran of Tarawa, Okinawa, and other bloody battles in the Pacific during World War II--the most tenacious foes turned out to be severe health impairment teaming up with a recalcitrant U.S. Government. The new evidence he had uncovered didn't seem to make any difference to the Veterans Administration, which turned down his claim again. "I got a willpower to live," Quigley said as he leafed through stacks of negative replies under official United States Government letterheads. "I ain't giving up yet. I'm not ready."[35] He continued his research work, until a fifth heart attack killed him in spring 1980 at the age of fifty- eight. A few hours after the funeral Bernice Quigley drove across Portland to meet a group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors who were visiting the city as part of a speaking tour. As she talked to them, she learned that a number of her late husband's ailments, including odd purple spots that would come and go and reappear on his legs, were quite familiar to the Japanese visitors who had lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atom bombs fell.[36] For Bernice Quigley, newly widowed, an insidious irony had completed a painful full circle. Fifty miles east of Portland along the Columbia River, former U.S. Marine Ralph Sheridan Clapp settled down to raise a family after the Second World War. But ever since the autumn of 1945 his life had never been the same. "Before I was in Nagasaki, I had a friend who said I was more like a gazelle than a human being."[37] By the end of his few weeks of Nagasaki cleanup duties, according to Clapp and affidavits from ex-Marines who had been in that city with him, severe breathing problems began. As the years passed, Clapp spent more time in hospitals for oxygen and diagnostic tests. In early spring 1979 we visited Sheridan Clapp at the Barnes VA Hospital in Vancouver, Washington. Clapp sat up in bed, his voice wheezing but resolute. "It's kind of ironic to go through a war like that with no scratches, hell in a half-acre, and then wind up like this," he said. Clapp had seen combat in Okinawa, but it was another legacy that preoccupied him at age fifty-seven. "I think, really and truly, the American public needs to be told. We went in there green as grass. We were just kind of cleaning up in Nagasaki, one thing or another. You're drinking water and all that, why hell it's all contaminated; it'd have to be."[38] Turned down for Veterans Administration service-connected benefits, Clapp had developed a thick VA claim file containing the same official assurances--often word for word--as those received by Lyman Quigley.[39] "Why?" Clapp asked during an interview; looking around the noisy hospital wing, he responded to his own question: "It must be all the big money behind nuclear."[40] Chronic respiratory illness was not the only reason for Sheridan Clapp's hospitalization in the first months of 1979. Doctors had discovered a perplexing blood condition, requiring extensive tests as one after another of the most common blood diseases were ruled out. During the spring a medical verdict finally came in: Clapp was afflicted with a life-threatening lack of blood coagulant "factor VIII"--a condition so rare that no more than one hundred cases had been reported worldwide in the previous three decades, according to the hematologist treating Clapp, Dr. Scott H. Goodnight, Jr., of the Oregon Health Sciences Center.[41] For Clapp the agony was intense--all the more because he was weary of hospitals, and what he perceived as political motives for VA rejections of claims by American veterans exposed to radiation while in military service. "This country had better get itself in gear if we're going to survive, that's all I've got to say," he told us during a hospital visit in March 1979. "All the doggone money in developing those nuclear plants. I can't understand what they're thinking about. I'm against any further development of it at all. Absolutely none."[42] On April 20, 1979, Sheridan Clapp picked up a blunt pencil and wrote a letter mentioning plutonium and ending with the words: "Stop these people. Sincerely, Sheridan Clapp."[43] He died five weeks later. Sheridan Clapp left behind a widow whose grief combined with outspoken anger. Two years after her husband's death there was a little less audible pain in Delores Clapp's voice, but the outrage had grown stronger. "Sheridan lost his life for his country just as sure as if he had died on a battlefield," she said, sitting in the living room of the house their family had shared in Hood River, Oregon. "If he hadn't been in Nagasaki, he'd be here today to enjoy his grandson. I feel so strongly about this. If it were just a matter of money, the government's refusal to admit the truth wouldn't be so important. But it's the principle of the thing."[44] ------ 21. Quigley interviews. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ron Quigley, {Newsletter}, Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, summer 1979, p. 5. 26. Jack Schubert and Ralph E. Lapp, {Radiation: What It Is and How It Affects You} (New York: The Viking Press, 1957), p. 219. 27. VA claim determination letter to Lyman Quigley, March 10, 1978. 28. VA "Report of Contact," October 26, 1978, Quigley file, No. C-20-303-320. 29. VA Chief Medical Director John D. Chase, M.D., to Congressman Robert B. Duncan, December 27, 1976. 30. Junior Hodge, interviews, December 1978. 31. Quigley, John Zotter, Willard Good, Philip Leschina, and William Gender, interviews, November 1978 to June 1979. 32. Stephen Chandler, M.D., Portland hematologist, interviews, April 1979. 33. Quigley and other fifteen Company C Marines he located, interviews, November 1978 to June 1979; plus correspondence and medical records. 34. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter} (National Association of Atomic Veterans, 1109 Franklin St., Burlington, IA 52601), fall 1980, p. 6. 35. Quigley interviews. 36. Bernice Quigley, interviews, July 1980. 37. Ralph Sheridan Clapp, interview, March 1979. 38. Ibid. 39. Authors obtained both Quigley's and Clapp's complete claim files of record at the VA regional office in Portland. 40. Clapp interview. 41. Scott Goodnight, interview, April 1979. Dr. Goodnight said Clapp's "factor VIII" inhibitor condition had been diagnosed as being a noninherited type, which greatly accentuated its rarity. 42. Clapp interview. 43. Clapp to authors, April 20, 1979. 44. Delores Clapp, interviews, May 1981. ------ [part 2 of 18] Government Response Beginning in the late 1970s, the federal government publicly solicited toll-free phone calls from former GIs who were directly involved in A-bomb tests between 1946 and 1962. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki veterans were intentionally excluded from the scope of the telephone data-gathering program. At the Defense Department two of the project's top officials each admitted personally responding to about half a dozen such calls or letters.[45] "We were able to reassure them that they didn't get any significant exposure,"[46] said Lieutenant Colonel Bill McGee at the Defense Nuclear Agency (ironically acronymed DNA), a branch of the Pentagon devoted to governmental assessments of atomic weapons impacts. McGee and other DNA officers would not tell us how many contacts regarding Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup their agency received. At the Veterans Administration headquarters a few blocks from the White House, in January 1979 we inquired about claims for service- connected benefits based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki residual radiation exposure. VA Board of Veterans Appeals chief member Irving Kleinfeld said that "we probably know of a couple of cases" of VA claims in that category. Kleinfeld added he seriously doubted any other VA official would know anything more about it.[47] In the VA's central public-relations office the story was about the same. When asked whether any claims based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki residual radiation exposure had ever been filed with the VA, public- information official Stratton Appleman replied: "We've had none for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb."[48] The VA's public-relations machinery was apparently telling other curious journalists much the same thing. In North Carolina, on January 21, 1979, {The Charlotte Observer} published an article about area resident Clifford Helms, fifty-four, a Navy Seabee veteran with paralysis and kidney trouble who had recently filed for VA benefits linked to his cleanup assignment at Nagasaki. The {Observer} article, written by staff reporter Bob Drogin, stated that "Helms is the first veteran to claim disability based on exposure to radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, according to Al Rayford, a Veterans Administration spokesman in Washington."[49] Rayford later denied ever contending that Helms's claim was the only one due to Hiroshima or Nagasaki radiation.[50] Informed of the denial, Drogin responded with a written statement: "Al Rayford unequivocally told me Clifford Helms was the first and only vet to claim disability based on exposure at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My notes are clear on this. Moreover, I specifically asked him this question several times because it seemed so unlikely to me."[51] We also called second-level VA officials, some of whose names had appeared in Lyman Quigley's bulky claim file. The trail led to Robert C. Macomber, chief of the Veterans Administration rating-policy staff, a career VA employee who said he had never been asked such a question before by a reporter. As a matter of fact, Macomber said, he happened to have more than two dozen Hiroshima-Nagasaki claims right next to him in his office.[52] For several hours over the phone Macomber patiently went through the files, omitting only claimant names, identification numbers, and addresses to protect confidentiality. Macomber estimated that approximately fifty such Hiroshima and Nagasaki residual radiation claims had been filed with the VA nationwide, with about twenty of those still at regional VA offices and not yet forwarded to headquarters for appeal. All those claims, he said, had been turned down.[53] James (Jack) McDaniel volunteered for the Marine Corps when World War II broke out--then a tall athletic young man barely in his twenties. A few years later he was among about two hundred Marines quartered in a bombed-out waterfront hotel near the Nagasaki blast center. (As far as they could tell when they met thirty-three and a half years later, for a few days Sheridan Clapp had been in the same semidemolished hotel on the waterfront.) Like the rest of the U.S. troops assigned to cleanup there, he did not receive any precautionary instructions, radiation monitors, or protective gear.[54] When discharge came in southern California, just about the only thing on McDaniel's mind was getting back to his wife a thousand miles north. He found employment as a diesel mechanic in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, remaining on the Weyerhaeuser Corporation job for more than twenty years in southwestern Washington. He enjoyed much about his life, working in lush forests and appreciating wonders of nature in the countryside around his home near the small town of Toutle. But as time passed, McDaniel's health deteriorated drastically. In 1975 doctors diagnosed Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, an extremely rare cancer of bone marrow involving overproduction of blood protein.[55] "I don't know if I'll be able to work the next four years to retirement. I'm going downhill fast," McDaniel said in early 1979. He spoke wistfully of the past--"I had the consistency of a horse, I was strong"--and of the government he had trusted for so long: "They don't want to admit they were wrong to send us in there without any warning, without any preparation, without any protection."[56] McDaniel had recently applied, unsuccessfully, for Veterans Administration benefits based on his stint in Nagasaki;[57] the main concerns he expressed had to do with the future financial security of his wife. In the opinion of McDaniel's hematologist, Dr. Richard B. Dobrow of Vancouver, "the question of [VA] compensation will probably be answered politically, not medically."[58] Despite intense pain accompanying his chemotherapy, McDaniel traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak at a press conference in June 1979. At the Commodore Hotel, near the Capitol, in the morning he met other press conference participants. Among them were two people who understood, as few Americans could, what he was going through: Virginia Ralph, whose ex-Marine husband, Harold Joseph Ralph, had died in 1978 from multiple myeloma, a brutal form of bone-marrow cancer;[59] and Harry A. Coppola, a former Marine also suffering from multiple myeloma. Coppola, McDaniel, and Mrs. Ralph's husband had all been in the core bombed area of Nagasaki in late September 1945. Seated in the hotel lobby, McDaniel reached into a manila envelope and pulled out photos he had kept of Nagasaki's devastation, taken where he was billeted; Virginia Ralph pulled out her husband's photos of the Nagasaki rubble where he had been stationed. They were virtually identical pictures, taken from what looked like the same spot.[60] Virginia Ralph, who had lost her husband in a protracted and terribly devastating death, sat next to Harry Coppola, who had the same disease's terminal agonies to look forward to in the near future. Alongside them, Jack McDaniel was losing ground to a deadly cancer of the same family of blood cells in his marrow. Atomic legacies were emerging in people's very bones. Mrs. Ralph was accompanied by her twenty-one-year-old son Mike. Sorrows of losing a husband and father, in such a terribly painful way, were still fresh after nearly a year since Harold Joseph Ralph's death. For Virginia Ralph, a farm wife forced into the workaday world of secretarial chores in Streator, Illinois, to provide for her children, the runaround from federal agencies was infuriating. Along with the government's blanket policy of turning down all claims for U.S. veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleanup, she found it particularly galling that their own government never bothered to do any systematic study on the health of those veterans--and would not even admit that such a study was appropriate. "Actually, no one cared," Mrs. Ralph charged. "And now, the U.S. Government is stonewalling." She reflected on her husband's inexorable, anguishing drift toward death at age fifty-four: "The last two years are better forgotten. The last ten days of his life were a nightmare for all of us. I would do anything in my power to spare another family what we have experienced."[61] She and her son, Mrs. Ralph later recalled, "were saddened by the news that two more veterans had been found who are also suffering from bone-marrow cancer, but we were so happy to meet these two grand fellows, Jack McDaniel and Harry Coppola. Knowing very well how this illness affected my husband's strength and how this illness plays tricks on human beings, I was amazed at their bravery. I was so thankful to have them with us."[62] Slowly the group walked across the mall area on the west side of the Capitol dome, to the Rayburn House Office Building. Cosponsored by {The Progressive} magazine and Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D), the press conference took place in the ornate grandeur of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee room. "Far be it from me to bad-mouth my country, or the military. I still love it like I did when I joined the Marines," said McDaniel. "I can't understand in my hillbilly mind why I get a flat no. I want to know why we receive no assistance from our Government. Why no help?"[63] Virginia Ralph found that her journey to Washington for the press conference in early June 1979 rekindled a flame of optimism. "For two-and-a-half years previous to the Washington trip," she remarked later that summer, "replies from our U.S. Government and the VA to all of my correspondence left me with the feeling of someone who has had his hands tied behind his back with his face pushed up against a brick wall. The trip to Washington offered hope! My hands are unleashed and the wall is beginning to crumble. In view of all we know, the U.S. Government cannot shun its responsibilities much longer."[64] But the reconciliation Virginia Ralph hoped for was not to be. Until the summer of 1979 federal agencies had never faced any widespread publicity raised about the U.S. veterans who went into the postbomb wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Washington press conference gave unprecedented visibility to the issue, and some federal officials began to devote more time and resources toward responding. In late July 1979 at the Pentagon the Associated Press interviewed Defense Nuclear Agency Lieutenant Colonel Bax Mowery, and reported that the agency "has been trying to identify the estimated 250,000 servicemen exposed to radiation in the A-bomb tests and the two bomb blasts in Japan."[65] It was the first published report that the U.S. Government was expressing any interest in learning more about the American soldiers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleanup. But such statements were not to be confused with a substantial change in practices and attitudes. "These guys are getting old enough so that they're just getting sick from being on the good old earth," a November 1979 issue of {Newsweek} quoted a Defense Nuclear Agency officer as saying about U.S. veterans of Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup. "Somebody has convinced them to blame it on radiation."[66] At the Veterans Administration and White House, officials responded to questions from journalists with the refrain that there was no reason to be concerned. The intensifying media coverage included editorials in a number of newspapers criticizing government handling of the issue. The San Jose {Mercury} editors lamented the lack of forthright federal action;[67] the {St Louis Post-Dispatch} went further--running a series of editorials lambasting the government's conduct with increasing venom: "Either the Veterans Administration has difficulty understanding statistics or it is engaging in some callous stonewalling on the deaths and disabilities suffered by servicemen who were sent into Nagasaki and Hiroshima for cleanup operations. . . . Rather than admit it was wrong, and possibly heighten public doubts about its nuclear policies, the Government has chosen to dodge responsibility and ignore the suffering."[68] Under the headline "Old or Dead Before Their Time," the {Seattle Post-Intelligencer} editorialized that "grim new evidence comes to us no thanks to the U.S. Government, which, for a third of a century, has swept aside, ignored and apparently suppressed information on the long-lasting effects of radiation exposure. . . . One would have thought that the Government would have kept records on the health of these veterans. Such has not been the case. For the past 33 years, the Government has asserted that radiation levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe during the cleanup. This seems a shabby artifice." Concluded the {Post-Intelligencer} editorial: "We believe the Government now must take responsibility for the risks of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima cleanup. The disability assistance that these veterans could gain in the few years remaining to them is a small enough amount to pay for three decades of misery and denial."[69] On Capitol Hill, few members of Congress were willing to step forward. When Junior Hodge, for instance, sought help from his representative, Al Gore, Jr., the ex-Marine veteran of Nagasaki bulldozer assignments got no help as he lay ailing in eastern Tennessee. An aide to Congressman Gore noted that the Tennessee Valley Authority's nuclear power plants carry enormous political clout back home. "I know nuclear weapons fallout isn't exactly the same thing," the aide told us, "but it's close enough to nuclear power that we'd rather stay away from it publicly."[70] A few members of the U.S. House of Representatives did speak out. Among them the earliest was Patricia Schroeder. In addition to appearing alongside Nagasaki cleanup veterans at press conferences, Representative Schroeder fired off a strong letter to Veterans Administration director Max Cleland on August 9, 1979. Terming the VA's treatment of veterans who had cleaned up after the wartime atomic bombings "unconscionable," Schroeder's message to the VA top administrator was blunt: "I am shocked and appalled by your lack of responsiveness to these servicemen who, without adequate precautions or protections, unknowingly subjected themselves to high levels of radiation and are now paying the fatal price." Schroeder went on to suggest that the VA "initiate a comprehensive study" probing the health of U.S. veterans of Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup, along with "testing and medical examination of all surviving servicemen, who officially or unofficially, were present at the blast sites within one year after the bombing."[71] "Now that the latency period for these bone and blood cancers and diseases has expired, we can no longer excuse the Government's gross miscalculation which has resulted in these disorders," she added. "We cannot rectify the damage that has been done. We can, however, admit our mistakes and try to make these terrible afflictions which Marines have come to bear slightly less painful."[72] VA director Max Cleland responded to Representative Schroeder two and a half months later, in a letter dated October 29, 1979. "At the outset," Cleland replied, "I should like to assure you that there is no effort whatsoever on the part of the Veterans Administration or, so far as I am aware, on the part of any other government agency to obfuscate or withhold the truth about any untoward biological effects of exposure to nuclear radiation."[73] In Nagasaki, he contended, "one hour after the bomb burst, the radiation present from the fallout was about 10 rads . . . By way of comparison, an x-ray examination of one's gastrointestinal tract can deliver 5 to 30 rads, depending upon the circumstances of the examination. The 10 rads appearing one hour after the burst very rapidly decreased to a fractional amount . . . Radiation levels at Hiroshima declined at a similar rate."[74] The facile comparison to external penetrating X rays did not take into account an atom bomb's fission products, some of which inevitably give off alpha and beta radiation for years or centuries after a nuclear explosion. Even a tiny particle--lodging in lungs, bones, muscles, or other vulnerable human tissue after being inhaled or swallowed--would continue to irradiate from inside the body, with potentially deadly consequences. Cleland continued: "The Department of Defense advises that a combined United States and Japanese team made a complete survey of the fallout radiation levels at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki from October 3 to 7, 1945, about two months after the bombings. Radiation levels were measuring up to 0.015 milliroentgen per hour from Hiroshima and 1 milliroentgen per hour for Nagasaki."[75] It all boiled down to no reason for alarm, Cleland insisted. "I again stress that we at the VA have no desire to 'cover-up' or otherwise prejudice the good-faith claims of our veterans. We are dealing, however, with a matter of ongoing scientific inquiry, and the medical knowledge presently available simply does not support a conclusion that malignancies or other diseases which have afflicted or are afflicting veterans are causally related to their proximity to Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the nuclear explosions. Your interest in veterans' benefits is appreciated, and I hope I have allayed your concern that we at the VA are in any way reluctant to address this complex and controversial issue."[76] A few months after expressing optimism that the government would change its tune at last, Virginia Ralph sounded sadder but wiser. "It's a great cover-up," she said. "They're afraid to admit anything, because then people who are living near nuclear reactors would worry that 30 years from now the same thing will happen."[77] ------ 45. Lieutenant Colonel Bill McGee and Colonel D. W. McIndoe, U.S. DNA, interviews, January 1979. 46. McGee interview. 47. Irving Kleinfeld, interview, January 1979. 48. Stratton Appleman, interview, January 1979. 49. {Charlotte Observer}, January 21, 1979. 50. Al Rayford, interview, February 1979. 51. Bob Drogin to authors, March 1979. 52. Robert Macomber, interviews, January 1979. 53. Ibid. 54. James McDaniel, interviews, March 1979. 55. Richard B. Dobrow, M D., to VA regional office in Seattle, February 22, 1979. 56. McDaniel interviews. 57. McDaniel's claim file, 75-1022, obtained from VA Seattle office. 58. Dr. Dobrow, interview, April 1979. 59. Death certificate of Harold Joseph Ralph, state of Illinois, August 18, 1978. 60. Authors were present at June 8, 1979, meeting at Commodore Hotel. 61. Virginia Ralph, interviews, March-July 1979. 62. Virginia Ralph, {Newsletter}, Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, summer 1979, p. 3 63. {Denver Post}, United Press International, June 9, 1979. 64. Ralph, {Newsletter}, Committee, p. 3. 65. {Los Angeles Times}, Associated Press, August 1, 1979. 66. {Newsweek}, November 26, 1979. 67. {Mercury} (San Jose), September 26, 1979 and May 6, 1980. 68. {St. Louis Post-Dispatch}, December 1, 1979. 69. {Seattle Post-Intelligencer}, June 17, 1979. 70. Aide to Congressman Al Gore, Jr., interview, September 1979. 71. Patricia Schroeder to Max Cleland, August 9, 1979. 72. Ibid. 73. Cleland to Schroeder, October 29, 1979. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. {Newsweek}, November 26, 1979. ------ The Ordeal of Harry Coppola While certain government agencies were digging in for a protracted struggle, so were some of the victims. A group called the Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki formed to take up the fight. Its membership included several hundred veterans and relatives who believed their families' lives had been forever harmed by cleanup participation in the two Japanese cities. One of the first activities of the new organization came in August 1979, when Virginia Ralph and Harry Coppola traveled to Japan on its behalf. For Coppola--in the throes of an increasingly painful terminal disease--the journey to Nagasaki was his first visit to that city in nearly thirty-four years. Until recently there seemed to be no particular reason to return. A Bostonian of Italian descent, a patriotic Marine with official discharge papers listing combat in battles at Iwo Jima and Bougainville, a bakery worker and then a union house painter who saved a little money and moved to Florida--for three decades Harry Coppola almost forgot having been sent into Nagasaki's atomic blast center area in September 1945. But in 1978 Coppola learned that he was dying of a cancer in his marrow--multiple myeloma--the cause of unexplained pain and frailty of his bones that had plagued him since 1974.[78] He did not have long to live, according to Dr. James N. Harris, a West Palm Beach specialist. Broward County medical examiner Dr. Abdullah Fatteh, based in Fort Lauderdale, reviewed Coppola's records and concluded it was "probable that Mr. Coppola's condition of multiple myeloma is causally related to the atomic bomb radiation exposure in 1945."[79] Coppola filed a Veterans Administration claim for service-connected benefits for himself, his three sons, and his widow-to-be, based on a connection between the Nagasaki duties and his terminal illness. As in all such cases the VA's answer was an unequivocal {no}. Later, after his predicament received national publicity, Defense Nuclear Agency officers tried to undercut congressional concern by telling people at Michigan Congressman Robert W. Davis's (R) office that Harry Coppola had not been in Nagasaki in 1945.[80] But Coppola's Marine Corps discharge papers list his military service as including "Occupation of Japan--September 22, 1945, to October 6, 1945."[81] And an affidavit by Masuko Takaki, who was a young girl living in Nagasaki in the fall of 1945, recollects Coppola's presence as a patrol in the central A-bombed zone of the city at that time. "I remember specifically," the affidavit declares, "because my father invited him to our home several times for dinner, and I remember he gave my father American cigarettes. I also recognized his pictures in Japan's newspapers during his visit August 6, 1979, and made an effort to have a reunion with him."[82] Coppola was part of a squad of a dozen crack machine-gunner Marine MPs arriving in Nagasaki shortly before the larger detachment of Marines and Seabees. He would never forget becoming "nauseous as hell" two weeks after getting to Nagasaki; he and another Marine with the same symptoms in the MP squad were quickly removed from the city and put on a Navy ship bound for the States. After a voyage during which he lost large amounts of hair, Coppola was discharged two days after arriving at Oceanside, California.[83] "They rushed us right through," Coppola remembered. "Other guys there were waiting for weeks to get discharged--they asked me, 'Who do you know, a congressman?'" Coppola's impression was that "they wanted to get rid of me fast."[84] It was to prove far more arduous to return to Japan in 1979 than it had been to arrive the first time. "I'm going to Japan because the truth must be told," Coppola said in a written statement. "I've already gone to Washington, D.C., and the Veterans Administration doesn't want to help me. I'm feeling very bitter that my own government, that i fought for proudly, refuses to admit that the Nagasaki bomb is killing me. After what I've learned, what I've been going through, I'm against all this nuclear crap."[85] A few days later, with Coppola beginning to tour Japan, the Associated Press reported his intention to "seek financial aid in Japan to pay his medical costs." AP quoted Coppola as saying: "I know it's a lousy thing to do--to ask the country where we dropped the bomb, but the United States has turned a deaf ear." Owing to expenses of his bone-marrow cancer, Coppola said, "I've blown my life savings, about $29,000, and I'm still in debt."[86] Ostensibly a beneficiary of the nuclear bombings, at the age of fifty-nine Coppola had become living--and dying--symbolic evidence refuting the illusion that the effects of an atomic weapon can be confined to its intended victims. "I really didn't know how they were going to accept me. I knew we were going to go on a speaking tour and all that, but the rest of it I couldn't anticipate. I didn't know what the hell to expect."[87] Emotion ran high, as the Japanese hosts and American visitors saw in each other common anguish. Coppola was besieged by scores of journalists; at times he was accompanied by Masuko Takaki, now a middle-aged woman who succeeded in her efforts to "have a reunion" with the former Marine she remembered from those dinner-table visits. When Coppola reached Nagasaki for ceremonies on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the atomic bombing of that city, a huge amphitheater holding eighteen thousand people awaited his address. "When I got through with the speech, they gave me an applause until I left the arena. And every five or six feet I would give them a bow. And they all stood up. It was something; it was deafening, the roar that they gave me. Because I told them, in that speech, that Truman was livin' in hell, I told them that he shouldn't've dropped the bomb there. He didn't drop it on military targets, he dropped it right in the middle of two cities, with women and children."[88] Sitting in the living room of his modest home outside of West Palm Beach, expecting his death would not be much longer in coming, memories of his second trip to Japan were bittersweet for Coppola. "They were very good to me. They offered me free medical service, they offered me everything there, live there free. But I figured what the hell, I don't want to die in Japan, I'd have to leave my family, go there, I'm not getting {cured} on it." His wife, Anna, leaned over the armchair and patted his shoulder. "Multiple myeloma means {many}, I'm loaded with it, they're not going to {cure} me. And I was told they could never really arrest it; they were trying to control it, but it'll never be arrested. But if I'm going to {die}, I says, I want to die {home}--I'm not going to die over there. That's the only reason why I didn't take 'em up on it. But they can't understand why the United States Government won't help me on this."[89] Travel became still more difficult for Coppola, subject to frequent, torturous attacks. "Sometimes I feel like I'm in hell," he said, describing the pain searing his bones that all too often left him feeling "like someone cut your leg off." People told him they found it hard to believe, from looking at him, that he was so close to death. "An apple can look shiny, beautiful on the outside. But inside, it's rotten."[90] Despite the increasing agony Coppola was eager to participate in activities planned for Washington, D.C., in late September. Over the summer several dozen American veterans had signed a petition, addressed to President Jimmy Carter and Max Cleland, requesting fundamental changes in VA policies. "Some of the U.S. servicemen who were with us in Nagasaki cannot sign this petition, because they are dead--from premature heart attacks, blood disorders, bone marrow cancer or other ailments," the document said. "As time passed, it has become clear that our illnesses, and those of our buddies, were connected to the time we spent in the atomic blast center of Nagasaki in the fall of 1945, as we functioned under orders there."[91] On Sunday, September 23, 1979--exactly thirty-four years after the Marine occupation troops entered Nagasaki's harbor--Harry Coppola, Virginia Ralph, and several other veterans and widows of Nagasaki cleanup walked through Lafayette Park to the northwest gate of the White House. Coppola, dressed in a suit and tie, and wearing a Veterans of Foreign Wars hat in the bright sunshine, handed a pile of signed petitions to William Lawson, executive director of the White House Federal Veterans Coordinating Committee. The next morning, thirty-four years to the day after U.S. Marines and Seabees first awoke to begin their cleanup assignments in Japan, VA administrators and a White House aide sat down to discuss the aftermath of those duties with Nagasaki veterans and relatives from New York, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, and California. There was appreciable tension in the national VA headquarters office suite. What followed were three hours of dialogue and often heated debate. "We have very little choice but to accept the evidence given to us by the Defense Department as authoritative," John Wishniewski, deputy director of the VA Compensation and Pension Service, informed the delegation. "We have been assured by the Defense Department that the levels of exposure at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were very minimal."[92] "I have got multiple myeloma, and you say to send new evidence in," Harry Coppola retorted. "Well, I have sent new evidence, medical evidence, by some of the biggest doctors in the country . . ."[93] Coppola added that while the VA's director "is living high off the hog, big salary, I am looking for--I am ready to eat dog food! I am living on Social Security! And now I submitted that evidence, now you say `Go back to your military records.' Well I have asked for my military records, and half the stuff isn't in there. I went to a Japanese [language] school in Guadalcanal to learn how to speak Japanese, it is not in my record. I got wounded with shrapnel in the back on Bougainville, it is not in my record. I got wounded in the leg at Iwo Jima--it is not in my record. I am not even on the record that I was patrolling in Nagasaki! What records are you talking about? I applied for disability on this, got a form letter that says `It is not in your military records.' But I have cancer . . . "[94] For Margaret E. Powers, widow of a Nagasaki cleanup veteran, the trip to Washington from her home in Castleton-on-Hudson, New York, was propelled by the same kind of long-standing frustrations. Her husband, ex-Marine William S. Powers, had died at the age of forty- eight, from gastrointestinal bleeding due to cancer, in 1965. Soft- spoken, her pent-up bitterness spilled out after a VA administrator offered assurances that the agency was interested in learning all it could about such veterans. "Do they know the names of these Marines?" Mrs. Powers asked, turning to other visitors in the VA suite. "They never kept track of who was in there or for how long, the VA, did they? I mean, how do they know where to locate these men? Maybe they don't even know that this is going on . . . I only found this out myself, and I have been a widow for fourteen years, and my husband was in there on the day that they went, September 23, and he was there [in Nagasaki] for three months before they sent him to Sasebo, and they were cleaning up the area with bulldozers and whatnot, and still discovering bodies under the rubble, and getting sick just from the smell of the place. Now they weren't too concerned about it then, about sending these boys in there."[95] Virginia Ralph added that the VA was refusing to accept responsibility for disabilities that cropped up decades after military service ended. "If a man is shot in the leg, or shot in the head, or loses an arm in service, immediately he is taken care of, because there is visual evidence. But when a man is exposed to radiation which is a silent invader, there is no way to detect that he has radiation illness. He may be lethargic; my husband had dizzy spells, the doctor said, `It is something you must learn to live with.' "But when his rib cage deteriorated, when the bones fell apart, when he was in his final stages, that is when the doctors at the VA hospital, every doctor that came in to take his history, the first question was, `Have you ever worked in radiation?'" Ralph, a farmer, never had--except in Nagasaki. "It sounded to me as though the VA thought that my husband's illness struck overnight. This is false. I don't think it is handled individually, because I have seen several denial letters, and they have the same paragraph: `Your husband received insignificant radiation.' `Your husband received slight radiation.' In the case of plutonium, what is insignificant radiation? . . . What is slight radiation?"[96] Back home in Florida, Coppola spoke with a steady stream of interviewers. "I can accept dying, we're not here for good," he told a {Tampa Tribune} reporter. "But I cannot accept the Government giving me a screwing."[97] As 1979 drew to a close, the bone-marrow cancer grew still more excruciating. In anguish over her husband's worsening condition, Anna Coppola confided: "I don't know how a person can stand so much pain."[98] Shortly before Christmas {The Miami Herald} quoted Coppola in a front-page article: "Does the Government want me dead? They hope I die tomorrow. Then my case is closed, and they've gotten rid of one royal pain."[99] The same month, Howard Rosenberg, a staff associate of columnist Jack Anderson, called the Defense Department for reaction to the national publicity often spearheaded by Coppola's flamboyant accusations and unswerving persistence. Chatting with an officer at the Defense Nuclear Agency, Rosenberg asked whether the publicized charges were angering the nuclear military brass. Replied the Pentagon official: "We don't get mad, we get even."[100] In the spring of 1980 Coppola's appeal to the Veterans Administration was denied. The VA justified its decision by declaring that "service medical records do not reveal treatment for any condition which could be considered a result of radiation exposure and do not show any evidence of any early manifestation of multiple myeloma. The condition is not shown to have become manifest to a degree of at least 10 percent within one year of the veteran's release from active military service."[101] As the {Palm Beach Post} noted in an editorial, "Coppola was outraged by this rationale, and rightly so."[102] The lag time between radiation exposure and multiple myeloma is known to run a quarter of a century or longer. Coppola responded, "I'm a very bitter man against the government. When my country needed me in Guadalcanal I was there. On Bougainville I was there. On Guam I was there. I was there in Iwo Jima; I gave machine-gun coverage while they put the flag up on Mount Suribachi."[103] Out of his original Marine battalion of one thousand men, he recalled, only a dozen or so had survived the war. He had felt blessed to be among them. But American-made radioactivity seemed about to succeed where Japanese troops had failed--and the Veterans Administration's refusals felt like salt in the festering radiation wounds. Meanwhile, protests came from other quarters. Delegates to the 1979 national convention of the International Woodworkers of America approved a resolution observing that "the U.S. Government has failed to take responsibility for aiding veterans and their families-- suffering from severe illnesses and financial hardships as a result of exposure to residual radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." The labor union's resolution proclaimed that "we support the rights of these veterans and their widows to receive compensation from the Veterans Administration for service-connected disability."[104] A few months later the White House received a petition signed by dozens of prominent Japanese scientists and civic leaders, urging aid for Coppola and other U.S. veterans who had been sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki in autumn 1945.[105] During the spring of 1980 Harry Coppola was in hospitals much of the time. "In the last week I almost died two times, and I know time is running short," he said, speaking into a tape recorder, his voice still strong though audibly short of breath. "No human should suffer the pains of hell like we're suffering."[106] By the time Harry Coppola died from multiple myeloma bone-marrow cancer on June 16, 1980--three months short of his sixtieth birthday- -he was one of five ex-Marines whose multiple myeloma had been publicly linked to their presence in the core atomic blast area of Nagasaki in late September 1945. ------ 78. Diagnosis summary by James N. Harris, M.D., August 16, 1978. 79. Abdullah Fatteh, M.D., Ph.D., Office of District Medical Examiner, Fort Lauderdale, to John F. Romano, Esq., West Palm Beach, June 17, 1979. 80. Aides to Congressman Robert Davis, interviews, June 1980. 81. Discharge statement for Harry A. Coppola, signed by commanding officer E. W. Autry, Captain, U.S.M.C.R. 82. Affidavit by Masuko Takaki (1512-5 Waifu, Kikuchi City, Kumanoto-ken, Japan), September 1, 1979; available from Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 83. The U.S.M.C. honorable discharge certificate for Coppola is dated November 9, 1945. 84. Harry A. Coppola, interviews, March 1979 to April 1980. 85. Press release by Coppola and Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, July 26, 1979. Working to get his passport in time to participate in ceremonies marking the thirty-fourth anniversaries of the atomic bombings, Coppola called his congressional representative, Daniel Mica. Coppola told us that Mica advised him to be careful not to say anything against the U.S. Government while abroad; to do so, Coppola recounted Mica's telling him, might be considered a violation of federal statutes. 86. {Los Angeles Times}, Associated Press, August 1, 1979. 87. Coppola, interview, March 1980. 88. Ibid 89. Ibid. 90. Coppola, interview, September 1979. 91. Petition presented to White House on September 23, 1979, and to VA national headquarters September 24, 1979; available from Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 92. Transcription of tape-recorded meeting, September 24, 1979. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. {Tampa Tribune}, November 28, 1979. 98. Anna Coppola, interview, December 1979. 99. {Miami Herald}, December 7, 1979. 100. Howard Rosenberg, interview, February 1980. 101. "Statement of the Case--In the Appeal of Harry A. Coppola," VA regional office, St. Petersburg, March 28, 1980. 102. {Palm Beach} (Fla.) {Post}, April 21, 1980. 103. Coppola, interview, April 1980. 104. International Woodworkers of America, 1979 Resolution No. 6; available from IWA national headquarters, Portland, Oregon. 105. Petition to White House by Japanese scientists; available from Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 106. Coppola to authors, tape-recorded message, April 1980. ------ A Toll in Blood Alvin N. Lasky, a St. Louis business executive, was "doing mostly cleanup and guard duty" in Weapons Company, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division--"billeted on the industrial site of the harbor" immediately next to the core blast site in Nagasaki.[107] Lasky was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1974, and was unusually successful in continuing to live with the usually terminal illness.[108] Richard W. Bonebrake, a member of B Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, was ordered to patrol in the center of Nagasaki's nuclear-blasted area. In October 1977, living in Williamsport, Indiana, where he worked as a bank clerk, Bonebrake learned he had multiple myeloma, and began the long struggle with chemotherapy.[109] George Proctor, also a 2nd Division Marine sent into Nagasaki's central area for cleanup, was forced to quit his job as a construction worker, suffering through several years of multiple myeloma before dying from the disease in October 1979. His widow, Agnes Proctor, living in Elwell, Michigan, recalled her husband's accounts of experiencing severe nausea and aching joints even while still in Japan during the occupation.[110] His claims to the VA for compensation were rejected. Multiple myeloma was not confined to the five former Marines we located. Anthony Thomas Sirani, an Army radio operator attached to the 2nd Marine Division, arrived at Nagasaki's central zone on September 23.[111] At age fifty-five, in December 1979, Sirani died from multiple myeloma at Nassau Hospital in New York.[112] The disease also emerged among U.S. naval personnel accompanying the Marines assigned to begin occupation cleanup duties in Nagasaki, and among Army veterans engaged in similar cleanup tasks in Hiroshima starting the second week of October 1945. "How much longer can the Government ignore such statistics as 10 times the national average for such a rare disease?" demanded Congressman Robert Davis. A constituent of Davis's--Napoleon Micheau of Escanaba, Michigan--contracted multiple myeloma three decades after Army cleanup chores in Hiroshima.[113] His plight prompted Davis to issue a statement, in spring 1980, decrying "the tragedy of the Defense Department's refusal to cooperate in locating the military personnel involved in the cleanup operations in Hiroshima and Nagasak."[114] The Department of Defense, however, was doing no more than stonewalling. In a letter sent to Illinois Representative Thomas Corcoran (R) on March 18, 1980, Defense Nuclear Agency director Vice Admiral R. R. Monroe contended that "medical science has, to date, identified only a `borderline' relationship between exposure to radiation and the onset of multiple myeloma."[115] Later, in a report dated August 6, 1980, DNA officials replayed the same theme: "Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure."[116] Amid recent research scrupulously ignored by the Pentagon was a survey by the Government Accounting Office. Coordinated by Boston blood specialist Dr. Thomas Najarian and made public May 31, 1979, it indicated that veterans who were exposed to atomic bomb testing may have become far more susceptible to multiple myeloma as a result.[117] In releasing the survey results, Dr. Najarian noted that the disease has an incubation period of twenty-five to thirty years[118]--a time span precisely corresponding to the experiences of Nagasaki cleanup Marines Coppola, Ralph, Lasky, Bonebrake, and Proctor. Meanwhile the Hiroshima-based Radiation Effects Research Foundation was reporting that Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings faced a risk of multiple myeloma 4.7 times higher than normal. It had taken at least twenty years for the excessive multiple myelomas to emerge.[119] And, in 1981, the {New England Journal of Medicine} published a study linking radiation to increased risk of multiple myeloma. University of Oxford researcher Jack Cuzick pinpointed "a clear excess of myeloma among persons exposed to radiation." The British scientist had compiled information available from two decades of research around the world.[120] In addition to multiple myeloma many other rare bone-marrow diseases plagued the Nagasaki veterans. When doctors found that former Marine Lyle Wohlfeil's bone marrow was being destroyed by myelofibrosis, "they kept asking him if he was ever connected with radiation," recalled his widow, Marilyn Morris, who settled in LaGrange, Illinois, after remarrying. Wohlfeil had been in the autumn 1945 Nagasaki cleanup, and went on to become a realtor. He succumbed to myelofibrosis, a severe scarring of the bone marrow, in 1968; he was fifty-four. Having heard VA officials discount the possibility that Nagasaki's residual radiation could have been harmful, neither Wohlfeil nor his widow filed with the VA for service-connected benefits.[121] VA national headquarters records show that a claim was filed in March 1968 on behalf of another veteran who died from myelofibrosis-- and who had arrived at the Nagasaki atomic blast center on September 23, 1945, serving there five weeks. Nagasaki-based VA claims also document deaths from such radiation-connected illnesses as Hodgkin's disease, granulocytic leukemia, and oat-cell carcinoma of the lung.[122] In late 1979 Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder acquired photocopied summaries of sixty-four Veterans Administration claims filed by veterans and widows contending residual radiation had caused severe illnesses among the veterans of Nagasaki and Hiroshima cleanup. We obtained copies of the documents, which made staggering reading. There were a dozen cases of leukemia, plus various forms of organ cancers and several instances each of blood-related diseases like myelofibrosis, Hodgkin's disease, and bone-marrow cancer. A number of claimants mentioned chronic bizarre skin afflictions. All the claims had been submitted before any national publicity on U.S. veterans of Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup. Quietly the VA had been systematically rejecting all of them.[123] There were good reasons to believe that the sixty-four claims acknowledged by VA headquarters represented a tip of the iceberg of claims filed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleanup veterans. The two dozen that VA rating-policy staff chief Robert C. Macomber described to us in January 1979 included a number that never turned up in the stack of claims that VA administrator Max Cleland later provided to Representative Schroeder. And some of the claims submitted in the late 1970s were not included in that stack of documents sent along to the congressional office. {Chicago Sun-Times} journalist Claudia Ricci reported in December 1979 that "of 13 veterans of Nagasaki and Hiroshima whose cases have surfaced here, 10 have died, nine of them from cancer."[124] A Chicago widow, Margaret Ryan, recounted a discussion with physicians who discovered her husband, James--a Navy veteran who had been in Nagasaki after the atomic bombing--was suffering from myeloblastic leukemia: "At the time, the doctors asked if he was ever in Japan. We were in shock. `Yeah, I was there,' he said. `Well, you have the same kind of leukemia the Japanese had.'"[125] Ryan's application for VA benefits was rejected in the spring of 1977, a year before his death. William Shufflebarger was twenty-two years old while a Marine stationed in Nagasaki at the end of September 1945--"just a few blocks from the devastated area of the city," as he described the location. Living in Oak Lawn, Illinois, thirty-five years later he was battling Hodgkin's disease, and cancer of the lymph nodes.[126] Severe breathing problems have been frequently cited by America's veterans of assignments to clean up after atomic warfare. Sam Scione, of Warwick, Rhode Island, a Marine veteran of Nagasaki cleanup, was the subject of an article published in the Disabled American Veterans' magazine in March 1980. As a result of the article Scione heard from 180 veterans involved in the occupation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki; nearly half--eighty-three--reported severe respiratory maladies.[127] ------ 107. Alvin Lasky to authors, August 20, 1979. 108. Diagnosis summary by Virgil Loeb, Jr., M.D., St. Louis, January 8, 1979. 109. Richard Bonebrake, interview, May 1980; also, {Chicago Sunday Sun-Times}, May 25, 1980. 110. Agnes Proctor, interview, May 1980; also, {Chicago Sunday Sun-Times}, May 25, 1980. 111. Marie Sirani (widow of A. T. Sirani) to Virginia Ralph, February 6, 1981. 112. Death certificate of Anthony Thomas Sirani, New York State Department of Health, December 22, 1979. 113. Diagnosis summary by Robert E. Ryde, M.D., Escanaba, Michigan, July 24, 1979. Ilene and Napoleon Micheau to authors, June 28, 1979. 114. Press release, Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, May 18, 1980. 115. R. R. Monroe to Congressman Thomas Corcoran, March 18, 1980. 116. {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}. 117. {The Oregonian}, Associated Press, June 1, 1979. See also, letter by Thomas Najarian, M.D., and Benjamin Castleman, M D., {New England Journal of Medicine}, May 31, 1979, p. 1278. 118. Ibid. 119. M. Ichimaru, et al., {Multiple Myeloma Among Atomic Bomb Survivors, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1950-1976}, Technical Report No 9-79 (Hiroshima: Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 1979). 120. Jack Cuzick, Ph.D., "Radiation-Induced Myelomatosis," {New England Journal of Medicine}, January 22, 1981, pp. 204-210. 121. Marilyn Morris, interview, March 1979. 122. Robert Macomber, interviews, January and February 1979. Regarding radiation and lung cancer tissue, see Archer et al., "Frequency of Different Histological Types of Bronchogenic Carcinoma as Related to Radiation," {Cancer}, Vol. 34, no. 6, 1974, pp. 2056-2060. 123. VA claim files obtained from Schroeder's office, November 1979. 124. {Chicago Sunday Sun-Times}, December 23, 1979. 125. Ibid. 126. William Shufflebarger to authors, April 30, 1979. 127. Log of informational phone calls and correspondence compiled by Dora and Sam Scione. ------ A Continuing Dispute For the most part federal officials responded to the emerging controversy as they always had--by denying the danger of the radiation exposure. A December 1979 White House letter to veterans and widows maintained that maximum doses "received by any U.S. serviceman in either city, in an absolute {worst case}, is less than one rem. The estimate assumes the man arrived with the first unit in September 1945, remained until the last unit left in July 1946, and worked eight hours a day, seven days a week, for nine and a half months, in the highest-intensity portion of the very small fallout field (a few hundred meters in diameter). Since, in the actual situation, no one approximated this worst-case pattern, DNA believes the maximum dose any individual received was markedly less than one rem." The letter added that this dose was far below that allowed for radiation workers, and lower than common medical X rays.[128] By the middle of 1980 the Department of the Navy was sending out a new batch of letters designed to soothe veterans of Hiroshima or Nagasaki who had contacted a wide range of federal agencies with their concerns. "The Department of Defense and the U.S. Government continue to be deeply interested in the welfare of veterans and determined to insure that issues such as these are fully investigated, with wide dissemination of the results," Navy Captain J. R. Buckley wrote. Furthermore, Captain Buckley informed veterans receiving his letter, "It is reassuring to note that the likelihood of exposure to any radiation was quite low, that there was no possibility of any occupation force member having received a significant dose, and there is no cause whatsoever for concern over an increased risk of adverse health effects."[129] The Defense Nuclear Agency prepared a lengthy "fact sheet" titled {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}, releasing it to the media on August 11, 1980. The thirty-page Pentagon report did not stray from any previous positions. "The maximum radiation dose any member of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan could have received-- considering his external dose, his inhaled dose, and his ingested dose--was less than one rem. . . . the health risk from a dose such as this is negligible--so small statistically that it cannot be expressed in meaningful terms."[130] The hot-off-the-press Defense Department document clearly impressed the Associated Press reporter on the Pentagon beat, Fred S. Hoffman, who promptly turned the DNA "Public Affairs Office" handout into article form[131] without seeking any contrary points of view.[132] While conceding that "unquestionably there would have been occasions during the Nagasaki occupation on which patrols or other groups entered the areas of residual contamination to carry out specific missions,"[133] the Pentagon report stated that the troops closest to ground zero generally remained out of the blast center area.[134] Many Nagasaki cleanup veterans and widows found the depiction infuriating. Virginia Ralph responded by pointing out that "no mention is made of the school building where Lyman Quigley was quartered, nor the bombed-out waterfront hotel where Jack McDaniel stayed nor the bombed-out warehouse where Joe [Ralph] was billeted."[135] The Defense Department's description of the Marines as aloof from cleanup activities in the ground zero area did not jibe with remembrances of the ex-Marines themselves. Nor was it consistent with the results of a painstaking search of U.S. military archives, in 1979 and 1980, by a Hollywood-based independent documentary filmmaker, Trell W. Yocum. Sifting through scene-by-scene descriptive logs accompanying thirty-two reels of footage lodged in the U.S. Marine Corps Histories Division, Yocum cross-referenced the information with interviews of ex-Marines who participated in the Nagasaki occupation. Yocum confirmed that a few companies of U.S. Marines totaling several hundred of the men who arrived in Nagasaki on September 23, 1945, were billeted in the immediate area of the atomic blast hypocenter--in direct contradiction to the claims made by the Defense Nuclear Agency thirty-five years afterward.[136] The Pentagon's retrospective report, complete with tidy hand-drawn maps, portrayed the 2nd Marine Division occupation troops closest to the hypocenter as members of the 2nd and 6th Regiments billeting at Kamigo Barracks seventy-five hundred yards south of the hypocenter, and at Oura Barracks five thousand yards southwest of the hypocenter.[137] But by matching up official maps, Marine Corps archival footage records, and independently conducted interviews, Yocum confirmed that at least three Marine companies from those regiments were actually billeted within a mile of the hypocenter. The partially destroyed schoolhouse occupied by Lyman Quigley and other Marines in the 2nd Pioneer Battalion's Company C "engineers" unit was approximately one thousand yards from the atomic blast's ground zero, according to Yocum's research for his film {The Other Victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.}[138] (In a scientific consultant's report distributed in 1981, DNA quietly acknowledged the 2nd Pioneer Battalion's constant involvement in hypocenter-zone cleanup, and noted the battalion was used "to rehabilitate two athletic fields in the `bombed' area of the city.")[139] Throughout, the well-publicized 1980 "fact sheet" from the Pentagon strove to assert that scientific research had found insignificant levels of residual radiation at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.[140] Thus, the official story went, troops were ordered into an area where no threat to health existed. But four months before the DNA released its report, {The Washington Post} had unearthed a declassified survey[141] from the National Archives on residual radiation levels in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had been completed in 1946. In an article published April 13, 1980, the {Post} stated, "The once-secret reports are bound to increase the controversy that has developed over whether U.S. troops sent to Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 absorbed enough radiation to cause cancers that appeared after 20 years or more." The {Post} noted that two teams of U.S. Government researchers, surveying the outskirts of Nagasaki two months after the atomic bombing, found radiation "that was twice the level now considered safe for nuclear workers and over 10 times the radiation safety standard for the general population."[142] Left unacknowledged were the lethal qualities of minute alpha particles capable of lodging in human bone marrow, lungs, and other organs. The Defense Nuclear Agency preferred to focus attention on gamma--external--radiation doses left in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, while parenthetically claiming that plutonium and other forms of alpha-particle radiation were virtually nonexistent. It was not a bad assumption--if those veterans hadn't been breathing. "The U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency estimate of the radiation dose received by these Marines is not accurate," concluded Dr. Ikuro Anzai, a Tokyo University professor and secretary general of the ten- thousand-member Japanese Scientists Association, who conducted a detailed study of the issue. Anzai was concerned with alpha- radioactivity intake: "Though, by my calculations, the external exposure would have been relatively small, the internal radiation dose received by the bone marrow of these men could have been exceedingly high. This was due to plutonium deposited in the water and soil of Nagasaki."[143] Dramatic substantiation of that view came on October 10, 1980, at a medical symposium held in Tokyo. Not only was plutonium released at the time of the bombing; it is still there. "Thirty-five years after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, large amounts of deadly plutonium still lie buried under the city, a professor of medicine says," United Press International reported. "Professor Shunzo Okajima, a specialist in the effects of the atomic bombings in Japan, told a radiotherapeutics conference . . . that unusually large amounts of the radioactive substance were detected 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) east of the blast's center in the city's Nishiyama district."[144] "Radioactivity levels in the Nishiyama district were far higher than I had expected," said Professor Okajima, who had just completed a study of radioactivity in Nagasaki's soil. "I don't expect immediate effects on human beings," he added.[145] But, UPI recounted, Okajima "cautioned that extreme care must be taken with plutonium, which is believed to cause lung cancer. . . . The professor said he was alarmed because 76 percent of the plutonium was concentrated within 10 centimeters (4 inches) of the surface."[146] All but two paragraphs of the nine-thousand-word Defense Nuclear Agency report issued August 6, 1980, skirted the specific health problems among United States veterans of Japan atomic bomb cleanup. As had been government policy before, the DNA report--dated precisely thirty-five years after the day in history when the atomic age was introduced to the world--still espoused the U.S. Government's theoretical conclusion that no appreciable health risks were involved. The report's few sentences commenting on actual subsequent health ills among Nagasaki cleanup Marines illustrate how far down the road of misinformation the Pentagon had gone. "One specific health risk deserves mention because it has received some recent publicity. This concerns a type of bone marrow cancer known as `multiple myeloma.'" Conceding that "four veterans of the Nagasaki occupation have been diagnosed as having multiple myeloma," the report claimed, "This does not appear to represent an abnormal incidence of this disease. The following statistics from the National Cancer Institute are pertinent. If you start with 10,000 males age 25, in 1945 (which approximates the Nagasaki Marines); then today, in 1980, about {7.7} deaths from multiple myeloma should have already occurred, based on normal statistics." The report concluded, then, that "the four multiple myeloma cases that are known are less than the number that would have been expected for a normal, non-radiation- exposed group of this age and size."[147] In those few sentences the Pentagon had thoroughly distorted the situation. Use of the ten thousand Marines figure was misleading in the extreme, grossly inflating the statistical "data base" against which the multiple myeloma cases would be compared. By the Defense Department's own account the vast majority of those ten thousand Marine occupation troops remained several miles from ground zero in Nagasaki. But the five--not four--cases of multiple myeloma were all among the approximately one thousand Marines billeted in the immediate central area, within a mile of the hypocenter in late September 1945. In effect the Pentagon's DNA report was multiplying the epidemiological data base ten-fold by including the Marines stationed at the 6th Regiment's Oura Barracks three miles to the southwest and the 2nd Regiment's Kamigo Barracks more than four miles to the south of the hypocenter. With the correct data base of one thousand, according to medical incidence tables cited by all sources in the dispute, the occurrence of multiple myeloma among the five Marine veterans was between 6.5 and 10 times higher than normal. And for all we know, Harry Coppola, Harold Joseph Ralph, Alvin Lasky, Richard Bonebrake, and George Proctor were not the only ones among the Marines at the blast core area that first occupation week who later developed multiple myeloma. The five of them represented the minimum, not the maximum of actual incidences of the rare bone-marrow disease. Federal officials have refused to make detailed records available for systematic research on the cleanup veterans. Thanks to government intransigence, the full dimensions of the health toll probably will never be known. U.S. servicemen sent into Nagasaki and Hiroshima amid residual radiation were the first Americans to confront the specter of invisible radiation from atomic weaponry. They were by no means the last. After 1945 nuclear bomb explosions proliferated--and so did their victims, in uniform and out. ------ 128. Ellen Goldstein to Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, December 18, 1979. 129. Captain J. R. Buckley, USN, to Maurice E. Wilson, Portland, Oregon, October 22, 1980. 130. {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}, pp. 25, 29-30. 131. {San Francisco Chronicle}, Associated Press, August 12, 1980. 132. Fred Hoffman, interview, August 1980. 133. {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}, p. 22. 134. Ibid., p. 21. 135. Virginia Ralph, interview, August 1980. 136. Trell Yocum interviews and correspondence (7471 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, CA 90028), December 1979 to February 1981. 137. {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}, pp. 16, 21. 138. Documents were obtained by Yocum from Motion Picture Film Video Tape Depository, Quantico, Virginia, aided by Support Branch, History and Museums Division. 139. {Radiation Dose Reconstruction}, p. 23. 140. {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}, pp. 25, 29-30. 141. Naval Medical Research Institute, {Measurement of the Residual Radiation Intensity at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Sites}, NMRI-160A (Bethesda: National Naval Medical Center, 1946). 142. {Washington Post}, April 13, 1980. 143. Trell Yocum interviewed Dr. Ikuro Anzai in March 1980. 144. United Press International, dateline Tokyo, October 10, 1980. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid. 147. {Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces}, p 28. ------ [part 3 of 18] 2 300,000 GIs Under the Mushroom Clouds Dr. David Bradley sat among colleagues aboard a U.S. Navy ship docked just off the main island of the Bikini atolls in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, about two thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. Bradley, a young Army doctor, was one of a score of assembled physicians in training to be radiation monitors for the first peacetime atomic detonations.[1] He listened attentively as Colonel Stafford Warren, head of the Radiological Safety Section, explained the scenario set for seventeen days later, on July 1, 1946. An atomic bomb--the same size as the weapon that exploded over Nagasaki--was scheduled to detonate at Bikini. In more ways than one the U.S. military high command and its civilian counterparts were testing the waters with this "Operation Crossroads"--the name given to the 1946 Bikini test series. There was very little question that the two plutonium bombs ready for detonation that July would work; the purpose of Operation Crossroads was to evaluate impacts of existing nuclear weapons rather than to experiment with any new designs.[2] The psychological aspects of atomic detonations--among direct participants as well as the general public--were being carefully considered. It was no accident that journalists from around the world, photographers, and newsreel crews were solicitously encouraged to observe Operation Crossroads in all its breathtaking, awe-inspiring atomic glory. But the atomic test supervisors were able to meticulously control the stories those journalists turned in. All information about the blasts--including the quantity and significance of radioactive fallout affecting plants, animals, and humans--was most definitely the sole province of official sources. To be stressed to the world in the summer of 1946 was the theme of fantastic power of nuclear weaponry, held only by the United States--a nation capable of controlling nuclear explosions to protect its own citizens and allies while inflicting enormous and selective damage on adversaries. The leadoff test, appropriately enough, was code-named Able. The first lectures that Dr. Bradley and other scientists aboard the U.S.S. {Haven} heard were about keeping quiet. Sitting on the balmy navigation deck of the sleek white ship equipped with elaborate laboratory instrumentation, Bradley had listened to the initial briefing three days after the {Haven} left San Francisco. "The naval equivalent of a Trial Judge Advocate read us the riot act on security, backing it up with selections from the Federal Espionage Act. Before he got through it began to look as though Bikini would be but a brief stop on the way to Leavenworth," Bradley later recorded in his personal log.[3] The tests were mounted with assiduous attention to detail. Along with forty-two thousand U.S. armed forces personnel, and an armada of about two hundred ships and 150 planes dispatched to both withstand the atomic damage and help in assessing it,[4] there were hundreds of military and civilian specialists. The government had assigned an entire ship, carrying animals and physicians, to study effects of radioactivity on the fish, plant life, and coral atolls, and its spread by air and sea.[5] Over four thousand nonhuman test animals[6] were to be involved in the Able atomic blast--including goats, pigs, rats, and specially bred mice--in addition to fruit flies. As he concentrated on the final briefing from Colonel Stafford Warren, one of the American military's top radiation authorities, Bradley found himself both fascinated and concerned. To him, medicine was always destined to be practiced "somewhere in that intermediate zone which combines both science and humanism."[7] The scientist in Bradley was fascinated; the humanist in him was concerned. Colonel Warren explained that a B-29 would fly over Bikini to drop an A-bomb. A mobile "live" fleet would be about twenty miles away, on the sea and in the air. The bomb would explode with a power of about twenty thousand tons of TNT, sending off blinding heat equal to the sun's.[8] As the initial flash dissipated, two of the Navy's Marin PBM-S flying boats (Bradley was assigned to be in one of them) would cruise closer and closer to the blast until detecting radiation levels deemed "dangerous." While planes and destroyers would be sent off to follow the mushroom cloud's travel path, the "live" fleet would gradually head toward the blast center--where ships berthed under the nuclear explosion would be examined to find out what an atom bomb of twenty kilotons or so could do to aircraft carriers, battleships, and other military equipment.[9] U.S. commanders had designated seventy-three ships to serve as the atomic explosion's target fleet.[10] Having heard the last briefing and received their assignments, Bradley and most of his scientific colleagues went ashore on Bikini's main island--four miles long and about two hundred yards wide--a sandy sliver in the Pacific immensity. "The sun was rich with its tropical intensity, and the sky full of the clustering thunderheads," Bradley wrote in his notebook. "The beauty of this Bikini setting seems to belong to another world entirely, having no relation to the strange mission which brings us here."[11] Indeed, Bikini's beauty masked radioactive poisons that would prove fatal to natives and GIs alike. ------ 1. David Bradley, {No Place to Hide} (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), pp. 18-20. 2. Herbert York, {The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb} (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), p. 19. 3. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, p. 5. 4. Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs} (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1980), p. 34 5. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, p. 15. 6. Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 34. 7. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, p. 15. 8. Ibid., pp. 18, 19. 9. Ibid., p. 20. 10. {Time}, July 8, 1946, p. 20. 11. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, p. 21. ------ Tested, and Ignored It is not entirely accurate to describe the veterans of America's nuclear weapons tests as "guinea pigs." Until the late 1970s the U.S. Government had made no epidemiological inquiries into the health of these servicemen, established no studies about long-term effects of their radiation exposure. As "guinea pigs," at least 250,000 U.S. troops[12]--directly exposed to atomic radiation during seventeen years of nuclear bomb testing--were neglected by their overseers. Between 1946 and 1962 orders routinely sent American soldiers close to hundreds of atomic blasts. The logistics of their roles changed, as did the kinds of terrain. But what did not vary were the presence of radioactive fallout and official assurances that it was harmless. In the 1970s as some media attention focused on charges that participation in nuclear tests had caused serious diseases, the U.S. Government denied any responsibility. Continuing to reject service- connected radiation claims from veterans and their widows, the Veterans Administration asserted that servicemen had been exposed to harmless "low-level" radiation. In 1977, more than thirty years after Able exploded, pressure from publicized battles between the VA and atomic vets moved a federal agency--the Center for Disease Control--to conduct the first health study of America's nuclear veterans.[13] The survey was confined to the 3,224 men who were in the Nevada desert military maneuvers at a 1957 atomic test code-named Smoky. An initial eighteen-month assessment, released in 1979, discovered more than twice the normal leukemia rate among those servicemen. In more detailed statistics that followed, the federal researchers found nine cases of leukemia among those same soldiers--a ratio nearly three times the average. "This represents a significant increase over the expected incidence of 3 1/2 cases," reported a research team headed by Center for Disease Control official Dr. Glyn C. Caldwell, in a study summary published in the {Journal of the American Medical Association} in autumn 1980.[14] The Smoky test soldiers, however, represent only about 1 percent of U.S. servicemen exposed to nuclear testing. Extrapolation of the completed federal study conclusions would strongly indicate that several hundred veterans died from leukemia alone as a result of their involvement in the tests. The estimate does not include deaths from numerous forms of cancer, blood disorders, and other ailments. The implications of the federal government's own study seemed to make no impact on the VA. Consistent with policies toward the veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the agency continued its practice of turning down the claims. The VA granted an occasional publicized atomic vet's request for benefits--being careful not to concede that the terminal illness was tied to bomb test radiation exposure. But for the overwhelming majority of irradiated veterans, the Smoky study results notwithstanding, encounters with the VA continued to mean dealing with an administrative stone wall. Sensitive to mounting public accusations of unfair treatment toward nuclear test veterans, VA general counsel Guy H. McMichael III told Congress in 1979 that no individual autopsy or diagnosis could establish connection between an illness and prior radiation exposure. "There are serious difficulties inherent in the adjudication of claims involving more lengthy post-exposure development of cancer," he maintained, "when there is no pathological evidence to indicate that the disease process began in service."[15] The VA cited as a complicating aspect of radiation compensation policies "the fact that radiation-induced cancers have no unique pathological characteristics to distinguish them from cancer due to `natural' factors. This makes it impossible to determine with {certainty} whether such a disease would have occurred regardless of the radiation exposure."[16] Meanwhile, as of 1981, the VA has turned down more than 98 percent of radiation-based claims for atomic veterans' service-connected benefits.[17] In the summer of 1980 the Pentagon issued a widely circulated press release claiming that "most exposures to DoD [Department of Defense] personnel during the tests were quite low-- averaging about half a rem. . . . Of course, many received no exposure at all, and some received more. Our research indicates that only a very small percentage exceeded 5 rem per year, the current Federal guideline for allowable annual dose to radiation workers."[18] The Defense Department statement, released thirty-four years after America's first peacetime nuclear test, concluded on a soothing note: "In summary, based upon research to date, the average exposure of atmospheric nuclear test participants is about {one-tenth} of the level that is generally agreed as an acceptable annual exposure for radiation workers."[19] Despite the Center for Disease Control's findings a year earlier, the Pentagon stated that "approximately one fatal cancer per 20,000 individuals" would result.[20] But many of America's veterans of nuclear testing were in no mood to be placated by Pentagon press releases. Their voices, scattered around the nation, had grown louder and more cohesive as the 1970s progressed. In 1979 the National Association of Atomic Veterans was founded by former Army sergeant Orville Kelly, and his wife, Wanda. Kelly had witnessed twenty-two nuclear weapons test explosions while serving as commander of Japtan, a small land mass in the Marshall Islands, two decades earlier.[21] Kelly's experiences were fairly typical. As described in an NAAV newsletter he "wore a film badge, which measured gamma radiation, from April 1, 1958 to August 31, 1958. During that time, the badge recorded an exposure of 3.445 rems. At no time was he measured for beta radiation or for possible internal deposition of radionuclides. The equipment used on the island for environmental monitoring also only measured gamma radiation."[22] Formation of NAAV in August 1979 brought a strong response from atomic veterans and widows all over the country. Within a year three thousand had become members of the association, operating out of headquarters in Burlington, Iowa, the hometown of Orville and Wanda Kelly. Together with nuclear veterans and supporters in every state, they set about challenging the Veterans Administration's treatment of former servicemen exposed to radiation while in the military. Diagnosed as suffering from lymphocytic lymphoma in June 1973, Orville Kelly's claims for service-connected benefits were repeatedly rejected by the VA.[23] Hobbled by the pain of his cancer and powerful chemotherapy drugs, Kelly traveled as much as he could, meeting with atomic veterans and speaking out on their behalfs. In the process Kelly's own often-rebuffed claim became a cause celebre, and a severe embarrassment to the VA and Defense Department. In November 1979, after five years of denials, the VA's Board of Veterans Appeals granted Kelly's claim. The decision conceded the {plausibility} of a link between in-service radiation exposure and later cancer, but stopped short of acknowledging a definite connection. The VA made clear that the Kelly decision would not serve as a precedent for other such claims, which would still be processed case-by-case.[24] Kelly was well aware that only a handful of atomic vets had been successful in gaining compensation. In April 1980, two months before he died, Orville Kelly said from his sickbed: "Although our claims are difficult to prove because we cannot feel, taste, hear or smell radiation, it is more deadly than bullets or shrapnel."[25] Articulating the sentiments of thousands who had joined the National Association of Atomic Veterans, Kelly added: "I believe I should have been warned about the possible dangers of radiation exposure and that medical examinations should have been conducted on a regular basis after my exposure. The truth is that I was never warned nor were examinations ever performed. During all the years after I left the Army, I was never once told to get a physical because I participated in nuclear weapons testing. Even though I won my case, I have still lost the overall battle because doctors have told me I have but a short time to live."[26] After Kelly's death it became clearer than ever that the NAAV would not disappear. In fact the organization showed signs of continued growth, issuing bimonthly newsletters to its thousands of members and establishing field organizers in every region of the nation. The federal department perhaps most hostile to the NAAV's aims was the Defense Nuclear Agency at the Pentagon. "We're not in the health effects business--we're in the defense business," DNA spokesman Colonel Bill McGee told an interviewer in 198O.[27] However, responding to adverse publicity, DNA had set up a toll-free telephone number in the late 1970s to gather information from veterans of nuclear testing--and by early 1981 had accumulated more than forty thousand names and current addresses of atomic veterans or next of kin.[28] DNA refused requests by the National Association of Atomic Veterans for those names and addresses.[29] The Veterans Administration, meanwhile, after more than a year's delay, in January 1981 agreed to provide NAAV with its record of atomic vets' names and addresses.[30] But the VA had only 2 percent of the number of names accumulated by the Defense Nuclear Agency.[31] DNA's refusal to share its large cache of data was consistent with the agency's combative posture toward the nation's nuclear veterans. A DNA refrain has been the contention that servicemen received very low levels of radiation. But support for the NAAV cause came in the form of a rebuttal from Dr. Edward Martell, a former fallout analyst for the Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission. Testifying at a citizens' hearing in Washington on April 12, 1980, he said: "The best way of deceiving all of you about the effects of radiation is to talk about the effects of one kind of radiation when you're measuring the other."[32] A scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research based in Colorado, Martell stated that internally absorbed alpha and beta particles are intentionally ignored by government authorities.[33] Martell alleged that Pentagon officials "take film badge records, which are a measure of penetrating radiation, and they discuss the small degree of effect expected in the way of cancers and leukemias. But most cancer and leukemias are due instead to internal emitters"[34]--nuclear-fission by-products such as strontium, cesium, and plutonium, which were not measured by dosimetry badges.[35] Even journalists priding themselves on hard-hitting investigative research are inclined to defer to seemingly superior knowledge of Defense Department experts. Such was the case on September 28, 1980, when the CBS television program {60 Minutes} broadcast a segment on nuclear vets. {60 Minutes} showed brief interviews with atomic veterans Orville Kelly and Harry Coppola, filmed only a few weeks before their deaths. But the program focused on DNA director Vice Admiral Robert R. Monroe.[36] Admiral Monroe informed CBS correspondent Morley Safer--and tens of millions of TV viewers--that at the nuclear tests "meticulous precautions were taken to ensure that the exposures were within limits thought to be safe. We have almost no indication today that there is a statistically higher proportion of cancer deaths." And, the admiral added, "This weapon testing exposure is a very, very, very, very tiny amount of very low-level radiation." Admiral Monroe explained that about 16 percent of American men die of cancer, so of course the disease would occur among some nuclear veterans.[37] The Pentagon representative's on-camera assertions went unchallenged as CBS presented no contrary scientific view. The {60 Minutes} segment did not mention the government's own Center for Disease Control study--public for well over a year by that time--showing a leukemia rate more than twice expected among veterans who participated in the Smoky test.[38] Numerous veterans wrote angry letters to {60 Minutes}, which quoted from a couple of critical ones on the air. But the CBS editors seemed to have retained unshaken faith in the Pentagon's integrity. The program quoted a viewer's letter charging that "the government's treatment of these men is a national disgrace and perhaps the biggest whitewash since Tom Sawyer painted his Aunt Polly's fence." But {60 Minutes} immediately sought to dispel the aspersion on the Defense Department's sincerity, as anchorman Mike Wallace declared flatly: "However, the government is interested in getting the facts, and wrote to us to please tell atomic vets to call, toll-free 800-336-3068."[39] Among the outraged atomic veterans was a Hagerstown, Maryland, resident--George E. Mace. In a letter to {60 Minutes} producer Joseph Wershba, Mace pointed out that "you graciously provided interested atomic veterans with the Defense Nuclear Agency toll free telephone number, so they could seek information and help from a Government which just the week before had said they were insignificant and financially not worth the bother."[40] Three weeks after the atomic veterans segment was aired, in a one- sentence footnote to its mailbag excerpts, {60 Minutes} finally mentioned the high leukemia rate among atomic vets found by the Center for Disease Control. For George Mace, a participant in twenty-two atomic tests in 1958, the issues went far deeper than a sophisticated journalist was likely to convey.[41] "Cancer is not the only disease or health problems encountered by the atomic veteran," he wrote. "There are blood and bone marrow diseases, respiratory diseases, general deterioration of health, sterility, mental stress or breakdown, and genetic damage."[42] In late 1980 the National Association of Atomic Veterans published a brief article advising members not to donate blood or sign up for organ donor programs. The newsletter notice expressed a deep sadness common to radiation victims: "All veterans who were exposed to radiation during atomic tests and are now participating in such programs are urged to notify the state or national organization that they are atomic veterans and request a decision on acceptability of future participation. It is a scientific fact that radioisotopes concentrate in specific organs of the body, one of which is bone marrow which produces mature blood cells. Let us not perpetrate this curse on another human being!"[43] ------ 12. The U.S. Department of Defense has estimated there were approximately 210,000 atomic test servicemen. Most other sources say the number was higher. The National Association of Atomic Veterans has calculated the figure at between 250,000 and 400,000. These estimates do not include the many thousands of civilians who participated in the testing at close range. 13. G. C. Caldwell, et al., "Leukemia Among Participants in Military Maneuvers at a Nuclear Bomb Test: A Preliminary Report," {Journal of the American Medical Association}, October 3, 1980, pp. 1575-1578. 14. Ibid., p. 1575. 15. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, "Statement by Guy H. McMichael III," June 20, 1979, p. 6. 16. Ibid. 17. Lewis Golinker, attorney, National Veterans Law Center in Washington, D.C., interviews, February-May 1981. Atomic veterans appealing to the courts for help, after VA rejections, have been blocked by the government's use of a 1950 Supreme Court decision in the case of {Feres v. United States}. The "Feres doctrine" has made it nearly impossible for veterans or family members to sue the government for injuries inflicted while in the U.S. military. (For an analysis of political and legal issues involved, see Lewis M. Milford, "Justice Is Not a GI Benefit," {Progressive}, August 1981, pp. 32-35.) 18. U.S. DOD, {Nuclear Test Personnel Review} (Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1980), pp. 5-6. 19. Ibid., p. 11. 20. Ibid. 21. Account of Orville Kelly's life and founding of NAAV is drawn from {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, September-October 1979, pp. 6-7. 22. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, September-October 1979, p. 6. 23. Ibid., p. 7. 24. {New York Times}, November 27, 1979, p. 18. 25. "Statement of Orville Kelly," {Citizens' Hearings for Radiation Victims} (hereafter cited as {Citizens' Hearings}), Washington, D C., April 11, 1980 (National Committee for Radiation Victims, 317 Pennsylvania Ave., SE, Washington, D.C. 20003.) 26. Ibid. 27. {People}, November 10, 1980, p. 44. 28. Years after they called DNA's toll-free phone number and submitted information, all the scores of atomic veterans we interviewed said they had received at most a form letter, and no substantial follow-up, from the government. For its part the Pentagon continued to gather informational responses from atomic veterans. In 1981 the overwhelming majority of backlogged responses from veterans were not being put to any apparent use by Pentagon agencies. Meanwhile the Defense Department was paying the National Academy of Sciences--an institution with long-standing and harmonious ties to governmental nuclear interests--to study the health of veterans who participated in a few bomb test series. With no results expected before 1982 at the earliest, that study addressed the health of about 15 percent of the veterans who took part in atomic tests. 29. Golinker, interview, February 1981; Golinker to authors, January 13, 1981. 30. VA Administrator Max Cleland to Golinker, January 2, 1981. 31. Golinker interview. 32. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 26-28. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. The Defense Nuclear Agency, in support of its claim that the exposure received by atomic soldiers was too small to cause cancer, uses an average obtained from film-badge readings. This approach is fraught with distortions. First, not everybody wore a film badge. Often a badge was issued to only one person in the platoon. Second, and perhaps most important, the largest source of exposure to the troops was probably the inhalation of radioactive dust, or the ingestion of contaminated water--neither of which was measured by badges. The several hundred isotopes produced immediately after an atomic detonation were swirled around by high-speed winds. Although only a small percentage of this fresh fallout is made up of long-lived isotopes like plutonium, there would still be a significant amount produced. Because the distribution of the fallout would not be uniform, there were no doubt several "hot spots" in the areas where troops were posted. 36. {60 Minutes}, CBS television network program segment titled "Time Bomb," September 28, 1980, transcript provided by CBS News. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., letters segment broadcast. 40. George Mace to Joseph Wershba, October 20, 1980. 41. We asked Joseph Wershba for his response to the criticisms leveled by nuclear veterans regarding the {60 Minutes} story he produced. Wershba replied with a note, dated January 22, 1981, saying: "As for personal comment, we're responsible for what goes out over the air so the script and follow-up will have to stand for itself." 42. Mace to Wershba, October 20, 1980. 43. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, winter 1980, p. 13. ------ Selling the Bomb The root of the curse that plagued the atomic veterans had in fact been resisted as early as the 1946 Bikini detonations. Though their voices were overwhelmed by the emotions of the nascent Cold War, numerous top-level American scientists had argued strenuously against nuclear bomb testing. Some pleaded, with tragic foresight, that the testing would be biologically dangerous. Others warned that it was unnecessary and would make more difficult the job of controlling atomic energy worldwide.[44] The Federation of Atomic Scientists also expressed fear that in the midst of a vast ocean, the nuclear explosions would seem relatively puny, creating an unrealistic image of their power--which would be used to devastate cities rather than isolated battleships or remote atolls. Before sending mushroom clouds up over the Bikini atolls, Operation Crossroads was the subject of several months of intensiVe media buildup.[45] U.S. military and civilian commanders carefully and successfully set the tone for press coverage of nuclear displays--thus defining the formative notions of atomic weapons for most citizens. Motivations for U.S. atomic tests were increasingly depicted as benign, circumscribed, and well-meaning. {Newsweek} first headlined its advance coverage of Operation Crossroads scenarios "ATOMIC BOMB: GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH."[46] By the time the week of Crossroads' first test blast arrived, {Newsweek} headed its preview coverage "SIGNIFICANCE: THE GOOD THAT MAY COME FROM THE TESTS AT BIKINI."[47] Washington bureau chief Ernest K. Lindley urged {Newsweek}'s readers to keep in mind that the atomic explosions were for scientific and military research, not for planetary saber-rattling: "None of these tests is planned as a spectacle; none is intended to show the world what a powerful weapon the atom bomb is. None is intended for diplomatic or political effect."[48] With mass media uncritically relaying the military's line, the public image of Operation Crossroads became one of self-defense and even humanitarianism. "The Bikini tests are set up to measure the effects of atomic explosions, not only on ships but on a wide variety of equipment and military ground weapons and on life itself," {Newsweek} declared on the eve of the first Crossroads blast. "The tests on animals, at varying distances from the explosion should be especially valuable, through their contribution to medical knowledge."[49] {United States News} informed readers that "only the coming tests can give the final answer to the main question of how today's modern warship can stand up in combat in an age of atomic warfare."[50] The humanistic theme was reiterated. "One of the answers being sought in the tests will be to see whether more sensitive or more exact devices may be needed to indicate quickly enough the need for special medical treatment of atom bomb victims," reported {Science News Letter}, adding: "Whether the radiation injury from atom bombs will cause sterility in the victims or cause defects in such children as they might have will also be studied. While it will take many years before such genetic effects could be determined from following atom bomb survivors in Japan, laboratory animals and insects, such as drosophila, can provide the answers much faster."[51] And, a later issue of the periodical went on--with unknowing irony- -"Cancer research may get some help from the atomic bomb explosions at Bikini."[52] Missing from the press billing of Operation Crossroads were any serious suggestions that subjects of the atomic test experiments included human beings.[53] {United States News} dubbed the blast target ships the "guinea-pig fleet," but devoted scant attention to the forty-two thousand human beings in uniform nearby.[54] ------ 44. Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 37. 45. Originally announced for early May 1946, Operation Crossroads was delayed for a few weeks. The postponement enabled President Truman's emissary Bernard Baruch to proclaim U.S. support for worldwide nuclear controls, in his speech to the fledgling United Nations, {before} the U.S. proceeded with atomic bomb tests; "it was felt," noted historian Robert Jungk, "that they would be a discordant accompaniment to the forthcoming presentation of the American plan for international control to the United Nations Organization" (Robert Jungk, {Brighter Than a Thousand Suns} [New York: Harcourt Brace 1958], p. 240.) Other motives were involved, however. "The real reason for the delay was closer to home" than global tensions, {Newsweek} reported. "Operation Crossroads would have drawn 120 senators and representatives, a record-breaking number for Congressional junkets, away from Washington for six weeks and thus endangered the Administration's legislative program." At stake were proposals for extension of the peacetime draft, military appropriations, and measures to boost development of atomic energy. ({Newsweek}, April 1, 1946, pp. 21-22.) 46. {Newsweek}, February 4, 1946, p. 30. 47. {Newsweek}, July 1, 1946, p. 21. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. {United States News}, February 1, 1946, p. 27. 51. {Science News Letter}, May 11, 1946, p. 294. 52. {Science News Letter}, July 6, 1946, p. 4. 53. Some apprehensions about the Bikini atomic blasts were publicized. Fears of cracked ocean floors, vaporized seas, and gigantic oceanwide tidal waves--plausibly destined to be disproved--received more general press attention than the issue of long-term radiation effects. See, for example, {Newsweek}, July 1, 1946, p. 20. 54. {United States News}, February 1, 1946, p. 26. ------ Experimenting at Bikini In a twin-engine plane twenty miles from the falling atomic bomb Dr. David Bradley waited anxiously, looking out through black goggles toward the Bikini lagoon. "Then, suddenly we saw it--a huge column of clouds, dense, white, boiling up through the strato-cumulus, looking much like any other thunderhead but climbing as no storm cloud ever could." The atomic conflagration was rising from its midair detonation point at a speed of two miles per minute. "The evil mushrooming head soon began to blossom out. It climbed rapidly to 30,000 to 40,000 feet, growing a tawny-pink from oxides of nitrogen, and seemed to be reaching out in an expanding umbrella overhead."[55] In the hours immediately after the explosion, with Geiger counters clicking rapidly, radiological monitoring planes swept through the air around the mushroom cloud. No one seemed to know whether the gas masks worn by the crews would filter out harmful radioactive particles.[56] As Bradley's plane drew closer to the cloud, passengers could see many of the target ships afire below; a few were sinking. "Expecting much more dire and dramatic events our crew was disappointed," he recalled. "There was much pooh-poohing of the Bomb over the interphone."[57] The Able test countdown and explosion seemed to bring the atomic bomb within human scale. "Awful as it was, it was less than the expectations of many onlookers," remarked {Time} magazine. "There was no earthquake, no `tidal' (seismic) wave or other catastrophe to justify the fears of crackpots that the bomb would bring the end of the world."[58] And {Newsweek} expressed some optimism in its coverage: "Man, pygmy that he is in the endless stretch of time, set off his fourth atom bomb this week. Trembling, he waited once again to see if he had wrought his own destruction. . . . Yet, as the macabre cloud of his fourth explosion rose majestically from Bikini's environs . . . he could sigh with relief. Alive he was; given time and the sanity of nations, he might yet harness for peace the greatest force that living creatures had ever released on this earth."[59] The limitation of visible physical impact was in the spotlight; little attention was devoted to invisible radioactive fallout.[60] A week after the Able explosion Dr. Bradley boarded a patrol gunboat at Bikini and headed westward, reaching a small atoll after an hour's journey. "Even below the high water mark, on the south shore, whose rocky ledges are constantly being sluiced by the foaming breakers, even here we found radioactive material, invisibly and almost permanently adsorbed to the surface of the rocks. It isn't enough to be serious, but illustrates the difficulty of trying to clean any rough surface of fission products. Even the great Pacific itself cannot wash out a roentgen of it."[61] The radiation could not be cleansed away. The situation became severely aggravated when the U.S. went ahead with its second postwar nuclear shot, code-named Baker, set off three and a half weeks later. Baker exploded underwater at a shallow location beneath the lagoon surface, displacing two million tons of water.[62] Instruments in Bradley's monitor plane detected radiation from the targeted ships and the ocean water. Needles on all Geiger counters quickly went off scale.[63] Radioed orders to abandon the survey task were a great relief to the crews--"with radiation so intense at such an altitude, that at water level would certainly be lethal. And this wasn't just a point source, it was spread out over an area miles square."[64] For many weeks afterward monitors found radiation permeating the ecosystem of the Bikini atolls.[65] Meantime many thousands of sailors were aboard ships anchored in Bikini's lagoon. Four days after the Baker detonation Dr. Bradley and his coworkers became aware that "the live fleet is lying at anchor in dangerous water. . . . By noon the intensity was such as to endanger our water intakes and evaporators."[66] The entire fleet pulled up anchors and moved in an attempt to escape the radioactivity.[67] But U.S. servicemen were being sent aboard the target fleet--about one hundred ships--under orders to scrub off the persistent radiation. More than a week after the Baker blast Dr. Bradley observed "most of the ships are still in quarantine because of radioactivity." The decks were "still so hot as to permit only short shifts of twenty minutes to an hour. The rain which fell contained the equivalent of tons of radium."[68] For Navy hands accustomed to swabbing the decks, it was an exercise in frustration. Scrubbing the vessels, with help from fire-fighting equipment, provided "no relief from the `damned Geigers.'"[69] Two years later those ships remained highly radioactive.[70] For all the official public talk about Operation Crossroads being a crucial experiment, from the standpoint of scientific inquiry it had a number of peculiarly flawed aspects. For example the Navy killed Bikini atoll insects before the first atomic explosion there--preventing any accurate assessment of the bomb radiation impacts on the land food chain. Unlike mass circulation periodicals, the small journal {Science News Letter} noticed the action, reporting after the first blast: "The atom bomb's effect on Bikini's ecology will have a blurred record because DDT was sprayed over the atoll islands before Seabee forces went to work there weeks ago. This was done to abate the plague of flies that wrecked comfort and threatened health. Biologists making the `before-B day' survey objected but Navy authorities decided in favor of the Seabees."[71] Whether the test supervisors were merely concerned about servicemen's comfort--or whether they also wished to preclude the possibility of news accounts revealing that an atomic explosion had wiped out insect life--remained unclear. But, as {Science News Letter} correspondent Dr. Frank Thone pointed out, DDT indiscriminately kills almost all aboveground insects--including those transferring pollen to sustain plant life. So use of the DDT predictably clouded reasons for insect and plant deaths on Bikini.[72] The government's DDT dousing prevented systematic evaluation of radiation effects on other atoll life as well. "Some birds and almost all lizards depend mainly on insects for food," Thone reminded readers. "Recent experiments indicate that DDT-poisoned insects do not kill birds and fishes that eat them but if the insects are killed off, where will the birds find food? . . . This one monkey-wrench, thrown into this atoll's ecology, sprinkles question marks all over the biological record."[73] Those life forms that escaped the DDT were not missed by the radiation. After the Baker test ordinarily bright-hued coral heads were white, and dead; their normally nurturing surroundings remained highly radioactive. Dr. Bradley's "first netful of sand dumped upon the fantail of our boat proved to be so radioactive that in a panic I had the whole catch thrown overboard."[74] The implications were disturbing. Intensive radiation on the lagoon bottom threatened to contaminate the ocean food chain. After two more weeks passed, Bradley found that nearly all seagoing fish caught around the atoll were radioactive.[75] Government authorities and the mass media neglected such biological issues. More conspicuous, however, was the failure to decontaminate the target ships; the military had little choice but to concede a lingering problem.[76] In the words of Bradley's log, there remained "a real hazard from elements present which cannot be detected by the ordinary field methods. . . . recent studies with the alpha counter have established the presence of alpha emitters, notably plutonium."[77] A month after the Baker explosion it became clear that ship surfaces would shed radioactivity only through sandblasting or administering huge quantities of strong acid.[78] Seven weeks after the blast, laboratory studies were consistently detecting "a small but definite amount of plutonium spread atom-thin over most of the contaminated areas."[79] The public version of Operation Crossroads was that no long-term harm had been inflicted by the tests. Bradley's conclusions were far different: "We don't know to what distances from Bikini the radiation disease may be carried. We can't predict to what degree the balance of nature will be thrown off by atomic bombs."[80] ------ 55. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, p. 55. 56. Ibid., pp. 22-23. 57. Ibid., pp. 57-58. 58. {Time}, July 8, 1946, pp. 20-21. 59. {Newsweek}, July 8, 1946, p. 19. 60. American media eagerly lacquered events even indirectly linked to the atomic test with thick coats of patriotic heroism. An Associated Press article--headlined "SCIENTISTS RISK LIVES TO SAVE ATOMIC SECRETS" in the {Los Angeles Times}--disclosed that "a group of famous scientists flying to the United States from Bikini, deliberately gambled their lives today in a thunderstorm over Nebraska by refusing to bail out to save top secret photographic and instrument records of the atomic blast." ({Los Angeles Times}, July 5, 1946.) 61. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, p. 73. 62. Bruce A. Bolt, {Nuclear Explosions and Earthquakes} (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), p. iv. 63. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}. p. 95. 64. Ibid., pp. 96-97. 65. Ibid., pp. 98, 107-108, 126. 66. Ibid., pp. 100-101. 67. Ibid., p. 101. 68. Ibid., p. 102. 69. Ibid., p. 103. 70. Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 44. 71. {Science News Letter}, July 6, 1946, p. 3. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, pp. 107-108. 75. Ibid., p. 126. 76. Ibid., pp. 115-116. 77. Ibid., pp. 116-117. 78. Ibid., pp. 131-132. 79. Ibid., p. 147. 80. Ibid., p. 149. ------ Crossroads Veterans Like their later counterparts, servicemen at the 1946 atomic testing were almost nonpersons--little more than props in a grandiose show. Early onset of health problems among American troops sent onto the radioactive ships was not publicized. Operation Crossroads veterans were to recall, sometimes bitterly, that they were provided no special cleanup garb as they scrubbed the contaminated decks. Most emphasize they were provided no radiation-detection badges or other monitoring gear. Three decades later, under short-lived congressional pressure, U.S. Department of Energy acting assistant secretary Dr. Donald Kerr admitted that the government could document radiation-exposure badges for only about one quarter of the servicemen at Operation Crossroads. The ratio dropped to about one tenth for the next atomic test series.[81] For participants at Operation Crossroads the pair of twenty-three- kiloton nuclear detonations were only the start of their hazardous ordeals. Sent onto the targeted vessels within days--sometimes merely a few hours--after the atom bomb explosions, they scoured the irradiated surfaces for weeks on end, at times living on the same ships. They routinely drank water distilled--through frequently contaminated evaporators--from the lagoon that Dr. Bradley and his colleagues were finding to be so intensely radioactive.[82] Former Navy servicemen tell of entire crews falling violently sick soon after boarding ships hot with radioactivity. Chronic, painful illnesses inexorably followed. Vice Admiral W. H. P. Blandy, commander of the Operation Crossroads joint Army-Navy task force, had been quick to proclaim the atomic experiment "highly successful." {Newsweek} reported at the time: "There had been no human casualties, though Admiral Blandy cautiously warned some might yet be overexposed to radiation [a rare public admission that received no substantive media follow-up]. For, he said, the personnel were eager to board the ships for the military and scientific findings that would affect the future of mankind."[83] Judging from dozens of interviews with Operation Crossroads veterans contacted for this book, Admiral Blandy may have greatly overstated just how eager "the personnel" were to climb aboard the radioactive vessels. Jack Leavitt, for instance, had enlisted in the Navy in 1941, before his eighteenth birthday. Stationed in California, he was twenty-two years old when he learned he was headed for Operation Crossroads in early 1946. "Someone told me it was volunteer only, but I was not asked if I wanted to participate, only to report for duty. I had volunteered to join the Navy, and I guess that was good enough."[84] After the Able atomic blast Leavitt was ordered to board the U.S.S. {Pensacola}, a heavy cruiser among the hardest-hit large ships in the Bikini target zone. He was assigned to a team "to scrub down the decks to wash off any radioactive fallout." Leavitt was aware that "at no time did I or anyone working with me--that is, naval personnel--have a Geiger counter, nor any other testing device to measure danger of radiation." Leavitt and the others in his crew ate K-rations and sandwiches, and drank water filtered from the lagoon.[85] Leavitt's stint aboard the {Pensacola} was cut short by news of the death of his mother, and he left for the United States after nine days on the radioactive cruiser. Ever since boarding the {Pensacola} his health had deteriorated. "I had diarrhea for some time after the test, but was told it was emotional and would go away. I had accompanying pain in the lower abdomen, and in the right side. And have had since. I have had stomach trouble since 1946."[86] His later ailments included colitis, bleeding of the bladder, and obstructive lung disease, all malfunctions of organs vulnerable to internally absorbed radioactive particles. The Veterans Administration refused to provide medical treatment.[87] In 1981, at age fifty-seven, Jack Leavitt spoke to us from his home in Mesa, Arizona. "They asked me to participate in a test I knew nothing about, and gave no guarantee as to what could result from these tests. Upon completion of tests I felt I was forgotten and rejected for further testing of any ailments." For Leavitt, who served in World War II and the Korean War, the continuing injustice of Operation Crossroads remained hard to accept. The government, he noted, "still doesn't want to admit any possible guilt for cause of alteration of the lives of those `volunteers' who {gave} at that time--but when they ask now for help they are rebuffed and told to simply forget it ever happened."[88] Like so many other atomic veterans Jack Leavitt refused to forget. "I am bitter because I have lost my ability to work, to take care of myself. I collect five hundred thirty-four dollars and ten cents Social Security. I am totally disabled." With a sad anger in his voice he said that the government declined to pay for his needed prescription drugs. His situation, Leavitt stressed, only represented a small part of a much larger problem. "There must be thousands still suffering, and loved ones left behind prematurely by early death to veterans who have passed on with claims pending, and some could still be alive today if proper treatment was given, and the responsibilities accepted by those responsible in the first place."[89] Kenneth H. Tripke, of Brooklyn, Wisconsin, was aboard the U.S.S. {Quartz} supply ship at Operation Crossroads. "I personally was so sick," he recalled, "with diarrhea and vomiting for days. I went from 128 to 70-some pounds. I turned a funny color, lost all my hair on my body." Taken onto a hospital ship, Tripke was fed intravenously. Ever since, severe weight loss plagued him, along with calcium deposits in his eyes impairing his sight, and sharp hip pains. "My back, shoulders, nerves, etc., are in poor shape."[90] A day after the Baker underwater blast Frank F. Karasti and three other seamen were sent aboard the destroyer {Hughes} to keep it from sinking. Karasti who later settled in Winton, Minnesota, was twenty- six years old at the time. "Out of the four hours we spent on her, two were spent vomiting and retching as we all became violently ill." Like many Crossroads veterans, Karasti never forgot that drinking water came from conversion of the Bikini lagoon water. Lesions appeared on his lungs about a month after the second Crossroads explosion; serious breathing problems evolved. Since 1948 he suffered from "uncontrollable hypertension." As with many Crossroads veterans Karasti's skin developed frequent severe disturbances. "My skin is deteriorating on my whole body and it is possible to wash off parts of it while bathing. . . . I have been aging ahead of my time and should I use any physical effort, I get ill for three days after."[91] Frank Karasti's afflictions--serious damage to breathing, nervous system, and skin, along with overall feelings of premature aging--are frequently reported by people exposed to atomic radiation. The day after the first Crossroads blast, Karasti was assigned to putting out fires on several of the target vessels, including the bull's-eye ship, the U.S.S. {Nevada}, which had been painted orange.[92] About two weeks later a Navy crew of about sixty men boarded the {Nevada}, where they worked, ate, and slept. Among the crew was seaman Michael W. Stanco, who had in years past been wounded in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and again in the Philippines. On board the U.S.S. {Nevada}, "We became deathly ill after eating. I remember being so ill along with the others."[93] Reflecting on the events, from his home in New Port Richey, Florida, Stanco recalled reading that the {Nevada} was later among ships intentionally sunk because of long-lived intensity of residual radioactivity. "If this ship was sunk for reasons of contamination, what effects do you think it had upon the 60 men who ate and slept aboard it?" he asked. "And what about the divers who sank to their armpits in ooze--and the other 42,000 men that also participated?"[94] George McNish of Tampa, Florida, was on the U.S.S. {Coucal} as part of a radiation survey group at Bikini. "We scuba dived, ate coconuts from the island and swam, unaware of the danger involved. We had scientists dressed like for `outer space,' with instruments like I had never seen. But when it came to diving or bringing up samples, all we had were `skin and tanks.'" Seven years later he began treatment for tuberculosis; he later suffered from severe spine deterioration.[95] A few days after the Baker test Navy seaman Richard Stempel "anchored among the ships in the target area, swimming nearly every day and using the water freely. We were never told not to do either. At one point in operations during rough seas, three other crewmen and I tied our landing craft to a mooring buoy anchored in the blast area and climbed aboard. About two hours later, a high ranking officer came by and checked the radiation level of the moss on the buoy. The Geiger counter pegged and he ordered us off. He didn't advise us of any decontamination procedure."[96] Within a few weeks Stempel "was being treated by ship's doctor for a skin disorder the doctor was unable to diagnose." The following year Stempel filed for service-connected VA benefits because of the severe skin affliction physicians had dubbed "atopic eczema"; the VA rejected his claim.[97] Initially the VA's rejection had contended that "the evidence shows that you had had this affliction since early childhood and there was no evidence to show that it was aggravated by your military service."[98] Refiling the claim in 1980, Stempel, living in Grants Pass, Oregon, submitted "three notarized letters from my father and two brothers stating I had no skin problems before enlisting in the U.S. Navy. Again it was refused." Uncompensated, Stempel's skin "has now deteriorated to where the total skin surface is either red raw, white scales, or open bleeding sores that itch constantly."[99] By the early 1980s numerous other Crossroads veterans had begun to speak out. As Navy veteran Jack Sommerfeld recalled: "We remained berthed in the lagoon and had to use sea water from the lagoon to make water with which to wash, bathe and brush teeth and for other purposes. . . . We were not issued radiation badges."[100] An in- service photo of Sommerfeld shows a cherubic, smiling youngster in sailor garb. But in 1980 he was blind, confined to a wheelchair, suffering from deteriorating skin, and diagnosed with mouth and throat cancer. His continued efforts to obtain VA compensatory aid went unrewarded.[101] Warren E. Zink, an eighteen-year-old fireman first class at Operation Crossroads, was assigned to go aboard the heavy cruiser U.S.S. {Salt Lake City} two days after the Able explosion.[102] He was "accompanied by a scientist who was equipped with a Geiger counter," Zink explained. "We had no way of telling the severity of the level of radiation other than noticing the indicator went as far as it could on the counter."[103] After the Baker test Zink and his crew returned to the {Salt Lake City} for cleanup and repair work. The ship was eventually torpedoed because of its extreme contamination.[104] "Within two years of my discharge from the U.S. Navy in 1948, I began having severe headaches, nausea and vomiting," recounted Zink, a resident of Woodridge, Illinois. After months of hospital tests the diagnosis was "migraine." In 1973 doctors found that Zink's lungs had deteriorated severely. "At that time, and I quote my doctor, `my lungs are 15 years older than the rest of my body.' Today I am classified as an emphysema patient, I am also bothered by constant muscle spasms in my legs which never seem to let up."[105] Pervasive among former military participants in Operation Crossroads--as well as for others exposed to radiation--are deep concerns about genetic damage to their children and future generations. For William A. Drechin, of Old Forge, Pennsylvania, worries began on deck of the U.S.S. {Ottawa}, as he faced toward Bikini. He was nineteen years old. Dizziness and painful headaches soon became part of his life, and a softball-size lipoma tumor was surgically removed from his back three years later. But the most painful was yet to come. In 1954 he and his wife had a son, born nonambulatory. A year afterward another son was born with the same condition, later diagnosed as cerebral palsy. The first child died at age twenty-one; the second at age nine. "There is absolutely no history of defective births on either side of families," according to Drechin, who blames his participation in Operation Crossroads for the birth defects of his two sons. "The seeds of their physical woes were implanted when the destructive forces of the A-bomb were released on Bikini."[106] Charlie Andrews, of Riverview, Florida, also was left to agonize over the genetic legacies of Operation Crossroads. For the last six months of 1946 he worked on radioactive ships that had been at Bikini. "We lived on board, drank the water filtered by contaminated evaporators, and some of the food had been aboard the vessels at the time of the blast, making it also contaminated." In 1980 the aftermath of Crossroads was still very much with Andrews: "I find it very difficult to explain to my 15-year-old son who was born with deformed legs and no heels, which have been corrected over the years no thanks to Uncle Sam, the possibility of his children . . . being deformed also."[107] Living in Lower Lake, California, Howard C. Taylor harkened back to his early pride in the Navy. At Bikini in 1946 he was a ship's officer on the target-zoned U.S.S. {Dawson}, sent onto the vessel after both test explosions. In the late 1950s, health problems appeared: lesions on his lungs, calcium deposits in his shoulder, and black, brittle teeth. They were only the start of his ills. Suddenly he lost nearly all his vision. He was forced into retirement in 1963. "I had five children and we were soon quite destitute. My children all have eye problems. I have a son in a mental institution and another son who is abnormal and in a foster home. My wife had several miscarriages."[108] As occurred for so many atomic veterans, Taylor's strong patriotism and pride in the U.S. armed forces soured. "I am now disenchanted and disgusted with the Navy and our government. I and many more veterans have been deprived of the ability to enjoy and provide for our families and are now being treated like a bunch of `social bums.'"[109] There were civilians involved in Crossroads test operations as well; they and their families gained no more consideration than their military counterparts. Thomas W. Scott received top-secret clearance as a civilian aerial- ground photographer to film the Able test for the government. After the explosion his plane followed the dissipating radioactive cloud for several hours. Scott's wife, Helena, of Camarillo, California, saw that "for 26 years following `Able Day' his ailments slowly, but steadily, kept increasing: the choking cough, nausea, vomiting, nose bleeds, severe back pains, depression and so on, became a daily routine." Scott died of bone cancer in 1972.[110] Nor did Americans' radiation exposure from Operation Crossroads end when the U.S. ships involved left the Bikini area. Scores of the vessels remained highly radioactive, and some were taken to Hawaii for disposal. Gregory Bond Troyer, eighteen, was in the Navy at the time, working in the Base Craft, Pearl Harbor shipyard. His duties included securing vessels, still hot from Bikini, to a tug, towing them out to sea about ten to fifteen miles from Pearl Harbor, and sinking the ships. He worked without protective clothing; often his chest and feet were bare. His crew had no exposure badges or radiation monitoring gear.[111] A few years later, after honorable discharge from the Navy, Troyer got married. Attempts to start a family were unsuccessful, intensive physical exams by doctors determined that Troyer was sterile. In the mid-1970s physicians discovered Troyer was suffering from hyperthyroidism. A lesion appeared on his scrotum, attributed to eczema. Arthritis of neck and shoulders, cysts around his eyes and forehead, prostate problems, and hearing loss set in also. In 1980, living in St. Paul, Minnesota, Troyer at age fifty-three remained under medication for his long-standing thyroid damage.[112] ------ 81. Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 43. 82. Bradley, {No Place to Hide}, pp. 103-104, 152. 83. {Newsweek}, July 8, 1946, p. 20. 84. Jack Leavitt, taped statement to authors, December 1980. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, winter 1980, p. 4. 91. Frank Karasti to authors, December 8, 1980. 92. Ibid. 93. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, fall 1980, p. 11. 94. Ibid. 95. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, summer 1980, p. 13. 96. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, winter 1980, p. 9. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, spring 1980, p 11. 101. Ibid. 102. Warren Zink to authors, December 15, 1980. 103. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, fall 1980, p. 5. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. William Drechin to authors, December 10, 1980; {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, summer 1980, p. 9. 107. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, fall 1980, p. 8. 108. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, winter 1980, p. 8. 109. Ibid. 110. Helena Scott, "Written Statement," {Citizens' Hearings} April 12, 1980. 111. Gregory Troyer to authors, December 1980; Troyer's complete VA file, C-13470812. 112. Ibid. ------ Living with Nuclear Weapons Considering the government's deliberate control of information before and after Crossroads, it is perhaps no surprise that the test blasts actually allayed domestic fears of atomic war. "On returning from Bikini," wrote William L. Laurence, a {New York Times} science reporter, "one is amazed to find the profound change in the public attitude toward the problem of the atomic bomb. Before Bikini the world stood in awe of this new cosmic force. Since Bikini this feeling of awe has largely evaporated and has been supplanted by a sense of relief unrelated to the grim reality of the situation. Having lived with the nightmare for nearly a year [since Hiroshima and Nagasaki], the average citizen is now only too glad to grasp at the flimsiest means that would enable him to regain his peace of mind".[113] Many years later the public-relations role played by the Bikini tests of 1946 seemed apparent. "Their spiritual effect was great," wrote historian Robert Jungk. "For they soothed the fears of the American public almost as much as the bombs dropped on Japan had aroused them."[114] There had been some opposition to the atomic explosions at Bikini. After the Federation of Atomic Scientists unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the tests protesters gathered in New York's Times Square.[115] But America's nuclear machinery--forged through extremely close cooperation between government and private industry during the wartime Manhattan Project--was picking up speed and consolidating alliances along the way.[116] America had entered the cold war, and atomic bombs were requisite materiel. Rhetorical abhorrence of nuclear bombs accompanied the beefed-up nuclear weaponry appropriations and further atomic bomb test explosions.[117] President Truman inaugurated "an American political tradition," as authors Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign described it: "Denounce the proliferation of nuclear weapons, urge disarmament, and advocate peaceful uses of atomic energy, while continuing to produce and test nuclear weapons under the guise of national security."[118] The issue of how the government should supervise atomic energy came to the fore in 1946, with a struggle over whether regulation should be entrusted to the U.S. military or civilian administrators. A petition campaign, spearheaded by the Federation of Atomic Scientists, deluged Congress with messages favoring civilian control of the atom. When the law establishing the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took effect in August 1946, its provisions seemed to reflect a victory for the forces backing civilian authority over nuclear development.[119] The U.S. Government's executive and legislative branches, with appointments by the president and confirmation powers plus oversight duties by Congress, would keep watch over the AEC. Yet, underneath the proclaimed civilian umbrella, America's top military officers retained basic roles in the government's atomic policy decisions. The 1946 law that established the AEC also set up the Military Liaison Committee, located in the Pentagon and charged with supervising America's nuclear program from a "national defense" standpoint. While usually a civilian, that panel's head represented the Defense Department; the committee's members were military officers.[120] Supporters of civilian nuclear control soon began to realize they had won a hollow victory. The AEC was effectively interwoven with U.S. military authority--which was, after all, the prime user of the atom.[121] Those eager for nuclear proliferation American-style found that in many respects they could enjoy the best of both worlds: the appearance of civilian control, with the military still calling the shots.[122] In the face of Pentagon expertise and clout, the legislative branch quickly accepted a junior role in nuclear matters. When the 1950s began, members of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy still were not privy to the number of bombs in the U.S. nuclear stockpile.[123] The American military, meanwhile, rapidly became the primary source of funds for scientists in numerous fields. And those who paid the pipers composed the tunes. By autumn 1946 the trend was becoming painfully obvious to many atomic scientists, including Philip Morrison. Speaking at an annual public-affairs forum sponsored by the {New York Herald Tribune}, Morrison commented on this evolving relationship: "At the last Berkeley meeting of the American Physical Society just half the delivered papers . . . were `supported in whole or in part' by one of the [Armed] Services . . . some schools derive 90 percent of their research support from Navy funds . . . the Navy contracts are catholic. . . . The now amicable contracts will tighten up and the fine print will start to contain talk about results and specific weapon problems. And science itself will have been bought by war on the installment plan. "The physicist knows the situation is a wrong and dangerous one. He is impelled to go along because he really needs the money."[124] The nation's major universities grew steadily entangled in the atomic funding net. In spring 1947 prime academic institutional involvement came from the University of California--operating Los Alamos in New Mexico and the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley--and from the University of Chicago, main operator of the Argonne National Laboratory along with dozens of other colleges acting as copartners. By the end of the decade scores more large universities were under large atomic contracts from the government. Less than seven months after the AEC came into existence, President Truman issued a "loyalty order" authorizing police investigations into the moral fiber and political fidelity of federal employees.[125] Atomic researchers with government grants were also subject to such inquiries. Robert Jungk characterized the results as an "unhealthy climate of suspicion, accusations and time-wasting defense against false charges."[126] "From 1947 on," he added, "the atmosphere in which the Western scientists lived became more and more oppressive every year." Throughout the U.S., England, and France scientists faced "loyalty committees," firings, interference with international travel, and general harassment--so that "in the laboratories of the Western world people started whispering to one another, anxiously on the watch for the State's long ears, as had hitherto been the case only in totalitarian countries."[127] The fear ran from the lowest lab intern to the most esteemed scientific pioneer. Attending the University of California, physics student Theodore Taylor and a few other pupils devised a proposal for a general strike by American physicists. They approached J. Robert Oppenheimer, then at the height of his considerable national power in nuclear policy circles. Taylor always remembered Oppenheimer's words. After he read over the written proposal, Oppenheimer said, "Take this paper. Burn it. Never recall it. Anyone who knew of this would label you a Communist and you would have no end of trouble the rest of your life."[128] ------ 113. Jungk, {Brighter Than a Thousand Suns}, p. 240. 114. Ibid. 115. Bolt, {Nuclear Explosions and Earthquakes}, p. xiv. 116. Most members of a blue-ribbon consultant board, entrusted by the State Department to come up with an initial plan for international control of atomic capabilities, were top executives in large American business institutions--General Electric Company, Monsanto Chemical Company, and New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. The pattern of policy formulations dominated by representatives of corporations, standing to reap huge profits from further nuclear expansion, was well established. 117. For details on proposals and negotiations regarding international control of atomic energy in the late 1940s, see D. F. Fleming, {The Cold War and Its Origins}, Vol. I (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, 1961 ), Chapters 13 and 14; see also, Jungk, {Brighter Than a Thousand Suns}, Chapters 14 and 15; also, {The H Bomb} (New York: Didier, 1950), pp. 170-171, for comments by Professor Hans J. Morganthau. 118. Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 32. 119. Fleming, {The Cold War and Its Origins}, pp. 382-383. 120. York, {The Advisors}, p. 61 121. See Jungk, {Brighter Than a Thousand Suns}, p. 244. 122. It soon became clear that entrenched enthusiasts for civilian jurisdiction over atomic matters generally saw it as the most effective way to bring the nuclear age to rapid maturity. In a speech aimed at rallying support for the civilian-control concept, one of its most influential boosters, Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon, left no doubt that he was seeking the most productive way to develop a wide array of atomic technologies: "Of course the military should be consulted on the military aspects of atomic energy and this is as far as any civilian commission should be required to go. The military is noted for its reactionary position in the field of scientific research and development. The most successful weapons of war throughout history have been conceived and developed by civilians and the atomic bomb was no exception. It is because I am concerned about the nation's security, as well as the development for peaceful use of atomic energy, that I want civilians to control this force unhindered by the military." (Fleming, {The Cold War}, p. 382.) 123. {The H Bomb}, p. 158. 124. Jungk, {Brighter Than a Thousand Suns}, p. 248. For an account of the military's atomic research contracting activities on campuses the spring after Morrison's speech, see {Business Week}, March 22, 1947, pp. 32-38. 125. Jungk, {Brighter Than a Thousand Suns}, p. 249. 126. Ibid., p. 251. 127. Ibid. 128. John McPhee, {The Curve of Binding Energy} (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), Ballantine paperback edition, p. 41. ------ Eniwetok When American students opened {Scholastic} magazine's first issue of 1948, they read that their country was planning more nuclear bomb tests. Under the headline "ADVANCING SCIENCE" was the periodical's account of upcoming Operation Sandstone: Eniwetok is a lonely spot. It is a sort of coral necklace of 40 tiny island "beads," far out in the vast Pacific. It lies about halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines. The nearest land is more than 100 miles away. The 147 natives of the atoll are being moved to another island. But don't get the idea that you can spend a nice, quiet vacation there. You couldn't even get near the place. Even the United Nations is barred. For Eniwetok will become a "forbidden fortress of the atom." The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission plans to test atomic weapons there.[129] Just two years after Operation Crossroads the United States was back exploding nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands. About twenty thousand American servicemen were there,[130] during three atomic detonations from towers on Eniwetok in April and May 1948. Men like David Lloyd and John E. Knights and Claude E. Cooper participated, like the good soldiers they were, in the Pentagon's scenarios. Ten years after Operation Sandstone, Air Force veteran Lloyd got married. His son Scotty was born in 1960; at the age of ten, Scotty was diagnosed with bone cancer. A year later Scotty was dead. His father was left with skin cancer, which doctors termed recurring basal cell carcinoma, on his nose. Twenty years after the death of his son, Lloyd, living in Topeka, Kansas, could not forget. "At the present time," he said, "I feel nothing but bitterness towards my Government for using me and thousands like me as human guinea pigs."[131] Lieutenant Colonel John Knights, of Tampa, Florida, had a long military career spanning service in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He was an Army major in 1948, exposed to high amounts of radiation a few days after the first nuclear shot at Eniwetok, when he helped extricate a tank from a blast crater. Knights testified about the experience in front of a citizens' commission in Washington, D.C., thirty-two years later: "Back on board the radiological safety ship, the needle on the radiation meter bounced off scale and I was sent to the showers for a scrub-down with stiff brushes. I was still very hot and in a state of shock after the shower and I was sent back to my state room to recuperate. An hour later I suffered severe nausea and vomited." Twenty years later he had bladder cancer, combined with chronically itching skin and sharp pain in his groin that persisted for decades.[132] U.S. Navy Lieutenant Claude Cooper died in 1979, after suffering from prostatic cancer with metastases to his vital organs and all his bones. "I feel in my heart that my husband's death was attributable to the radiation he received while participating in Operation Sandstone at Eniwetok," said his widow, living in Long Beach, California.[133] The response to Lloyd and Knights and Mrs. Cooper from the U.S. Government was the standard one: Denial of responsibility. At Eniwetok in 1948 atomic weaponry took a substantial leap. Under joint auspices of the Defense Department and AEC, the Operation Sandstone tests "evidently did result in substantial improvements in the efficiency of use of fissile material," according to physicist Herbert York, a key researcher in U.S. nuclear weapons design.[134] One forty-nine-kiloton blast, code-named Yoke, expended more than twice the force of any atomic bomb detonation in previous years.[135] Operation Sandstone gave a lift to the politicians, industrialists, generals, and scientists pushing for bigger nuclear weapons outlays. "Success" of the Sandstone tests "boosted morale at Los Alamos and helped garner further support for the laboratory in Washington," observed York. "As a result, the construction of a new laboratory, located nearby on South Mesa, was authorized as a replacement for the wartime facilities that were still being used."[136] More than ever the fix was in for nuclear testing to be perpetual scenery on the American political, economic, scientific, and media landscapes; its tangible benefits had become obvious to its prime constituents. One of the Los Alamos laboratory's leading physicists, Edward Teller, recognized that nuclear bomb test explosions would be pivotal for continually gearing up the nuclear weapons assembly line: from research and development to production of warheads in bulk. Offered the directorship of the Los Alamos theoretical division, Teller said he would accept the post only if the U.S. would conduct a dozen nuclear tests per year--a rate that seemed unrealistic to Los Alamos chief Norris Bradbury in the late 1940s.[137] Unable to force such a commitment, Teller declined the position.[138] But his vision soon prevailed. In the first five years after the end of World War II the U.S. tested a total of five atomic bombs; from 1951 to 1955, the American government tested sixty-one nuclear bombs. ------ 129. {Scholastic}, January 5, 1948, p. 6. 130. Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 43. 131. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, fall 1980, pp. 9-10. 132. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 17-19. 133. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, summer 1980, p. 9 134. York, {The Advisors}, pp 19-20. 135. {Announced U.S. Nuclear Tests}, p. 5. Unless otherwise noted, nuclear bomb blast dates and magnitude figures were derived from this source. 136. York, {The Advisors}, pp. 19-20. 137. Ibid., p 18. 138. Ibid. ------ The H-Bomb The Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb on August 29, 1949, in Siberia.[139] U.S. planes detected the fallout. On September 23, 1949, President Truman announced: "We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R." The President added, "Ever since atomic energy was first realized to man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us."[140] Edward Teller called fellow atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer and asked what to do in response to the news. According to Teller, Oppenheimer replied: "Keep your shirt on."[141] But for Teller and others demanding more federal monies to develop weapons, the revelation that the Soviets had the atom bomb provided a strong additional argument. The nuclear arms race was on! A few days later {Time} commented on "a change in mood and tempo. Military planners were suddenly faced with a whole new timetable of strategic planning. . . ." Under the subheading "Red Alert," {Time} declared that "with atom bombs and bombers in the hands of an enemy, the Army and Navy, as well as the Air Force, took on new and immediate importance. If the U.S. wanted security, it would have to buy the full, costly package."[142] While virtually everyone recognized that a nuclear war would cause unprecedented casualties and suffering, few people realized that more insidious peacetime effects were already under way. Routine operation of the atomic weapons assembly line--exposing an increasing number of Americans to radiation under normal conditions--was taking its toll. Ironically, Americans became primary victims of their own country's nuclear weapons program. Like other major nuclear decisions before and since, the hydrogen bomb go-ahead came first. Public comment was welcome later. When it came to atomic development, the general public was in a position of reacting to one fait accompli after another. And proliferation of radiation victims followed as a consequence. As the new decade began, the White House, Defense Department, and Atomic Energy Commission were coordinating hush-hush meetings about the H-bomb--a weapon involving fusion of hydrogen into helium. The required high temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees would be possible only from an atomic bomb detonation--so A-bomb capability was a prerequisite for triggering an H-bomb's "thermonuclear" explosion. Scientists estimated that if an H-bomb were possible, it could bring about one thousand times the explosive force of an A-bomb. Albert Einstein was among those in 1950 who viewed current events with trepidation. Within the U.S. he warned of "concentration of tremendous financial power in the hands of the military, militarization of the youth, close supervision of the loyalty of the citizens, in particular, of the civil servants by a police force growing more conspicuous every day. Intimidation of people of independent political thinking. Indoctrination of the public by radio, press, school. Growing restriction of the range of public information under the pressure of military secrecy."[143] It was in this atmosphere that deliberations over whether to proceed with H-bomb research reached their climax. That secretive process is important to understand "because it is one of the relatively few cases where those who explicitly tried to moderate the nuclear arms race came within shouting distance of doing so," according to Herbert York, the first director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory where much of the hydrogen bomb R and D subsequently took place. Behind the scenes there was, in York's words, "a brief, intense, highly secret debate."[144] Under federal law a key source of recommendations for the Atomic Energy Commission was its General Advisory Committee. Called upon by the AEC to take up the question of prospective H-bomb development, the Advisory Committee--chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer and including such luminaries of nuclear physics as Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi--met in late October 1949. While urging continued efforts to magnify the power of atomic weaponry, the Advisory Committee urged that the United States {not} plunge ahead with developing the H-bomb, also known as the "super bomb."[145] The panel presented arguments in terms of military strategies, technical aspects, and optimum use of present nuclear resources, concluding that the H-bomb was not needed for U.S. national security. The report also depicted the H-bomb choice as a profound moral issue: "It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations."[146] An addendum to the Advisory Committee report, written by James B. Conant--later president of Harvard University--and signed by five other committee members including Oppenheimer, underscored the moral moment of the H-bomb decision: "Let it be clearly realized that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb. . . . Its use would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians. We are alarmed as to the possible global effects of the radioactivity generated by the explosion of a few super bombs of conceivable magnitude. If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit on the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore, a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide."[147] These and other anti-H-bomb scientists were in effect muzzled from openly expressing their viewpoints at critical junctures, held back by security-clearance status. Thus in the crucial months before Truman proclaimed his decision on H-bomb development, the public was allowed little information about a decision that could potentially result in millions of deaths and change the course of human history. In top-secret circles the debate was fierce. Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, confided in Edward Teller that the anti-H-bomb Advisory Committee report "just makes me sick."[148] For their part McMahon and a constellation of atomic scientists, including Teller and University of California Radiation Laboratory director Ernest Lawrence, were determined to bring about development of the H-bomb as soon as possible, believing it to be the best possible response to Soviet possession of the atom bomb.[149] Teller went out of his way to tell {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists} readers at the time: "The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist's job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is {not} the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives."[150] But in the real world--as Teller well knew-- secrecy restrictions prevented the American people from participating in the deliberative process until the basic decisions had already been made at governmental top levels, by men very much like himself. The Pentagon provided important support for the hydrogen bomb. Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, Military Liaison Committee chairman Robert LeBaron, and, less strongly, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged proceeding with the H-bomb. Most of the five-member Atomic Energy Commission opposed development of the H-bomb, at least for the present. But commissioner Lewis Strauss vehemently argued that the AEC's Advisory Committee had inappropriately raised issues of morality. In a letter to President Truman in late November 1949 Strauss urged approval of a crash program to come up with the H-bomb. Strauss--who later became chairman of the AEC--warned that the Soviet Union could be expected to develop the H-bomb. "A government of atheists," Strauss added, "is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on `moral' grounds."[151] Neither would a government of Christians and Jews. On January 31, 1950, President Truman announced he was ordering full-speed-ahead research and development for the H-bomb. ------ 139. Prior to the first Soviet atomic test, in 1948 and 1949, public speeches by a number of high-ranking American generals had contended that a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union's major cities and industrial centers might be a good idea. (See Fleming, {The Cold War}, p. 391.) 140. York, {The Advisors}, p. 34. 141. Ibid., p 63. 142. {Time}, October 3, 1949, p. 7. 143. {The H Bomb}, pp. 13-14. 144. York, {The Advisors}, pp. ix, 2. 145. Ibid., pp. 150-159. 146. Ibid., p. 155. 147. Ibid., pp. 156-157. 148. Ibid., p. 60. 149. Ibid., p. 45. 150. Ibid., p. 71. 151. Ibid., p. 58. ------ Atomic Escalation Without so much as hinting that tests of the H-bomb could vastly increase harmful radiation fallout, America's mass media applauded the President's latest nuclear-related action. "No presidential announcement since Mr. Truman entered the White House seemed, in the opinion of many observers, to strike such an instant or general chord of nonpartisan congressional support," {The New York Times} reported.[152] "Under the circumstances," {Newsweek} added, "it was the only answer he could give."[153] Reporting of the AEC Advisory Committee's moral objections to the H-bomb was lacking. As for the more general matter of scientists' compunctions about assisting research for a weapon of such mass annihilation, {Newsweek} did affirm that "many, if not most, of the nation's atomic scientists had developed `a Hiroshima complex'; they were appalled by the death and destruction which the A-bomb had wrought; and they detested the idea of developing an even more murderous weapon." But, said the magazine, "as patriotic Americans, they were ready to squelch any moral reservations they might have if the AEC gave the go-ahead signal."[154] Dissenting voices, published in some small periodicals, were all but ignored. "One difficulty created by the cold war is that it makes everything America does right and unquestionable for Americans and everything Russia does wrong and indefensible," observed a lengthy analysis in {The Nation.}[155] Much was being demanded in the name of {patriotism}, including the setting aside of moral reservations. {The Nation} perceived that a perverse logic had taken hold of nuclear policy-making: "The decision to proceed with the construction of the hydrogen bomb carries the folly of present thinking about defense close to suicide. If fear is to be man's defense, the fear must be magnified to the greatest possible extent. That is to say that the greater the fear the greater the safety, another way of saying that the greater the danger the greater the safety."[156] As a corollary in the prevailing atomic syllogisms, horrors of the past justified more lethal atomic weaponry for the future. Allied firebombing sieges of Dresden and Tokyo had been recalled as justifications for the later atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; these nuclear bombings, and the very existence of an atom bomb arsenal, in turn, provided rationales for preparing the hydrogen bomb.[157] In nuclear escalation today's awesomely repugnant spectacle became tomorrow's diminutive old hat. The 180 American atmospheric nuclear bomb detonations between 1950 and 1960 carried with them great political power. Senators Millard Tydings and Glen Taylor were object lessons. Tydings, an aristocratically mannered parliamentarian from Maryland, was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Taylor had been elected to the Senate from Idaho after a barnstorming career as a Western vaudevillian earned him the sobriquet "the handsome cowboy singer." Both men had become vocal foes of unbridled nuclear weapons development and indiscriminate disloyalty charges against dissenters from the cold war.[158] And, in 1950, both Tydings and Taylor were up for reelection. At the same time Senator Joseph McCarthy was in the midst of launching to new depths his crusade to depict a wide array of citizens and organizations as un-American and pro-Communist--a drive that was to put the word {McCarthyism} into the political lexicon as a synonym for unsubstantiated, scurrilous smear tactics. Only ten days after Truman's directive favoring the H-bomb, McCarthy delivered a famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming that there were many Communists in the U.S. State Department. McCarthy's witch-hunting star was on the rise, with nuclear weapons enthusiasm and anti- Communist hysteria dovetailing nicely for him and his backers.[159] But, in 1950, Senator Millard Tydings unrepentantly advocated comprehensive disarmament talks to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. He was one of McCarthy's prime targets. That autumn, running for reelection, Tydings went down to defeat in a campaign filled with charges that he had amiable relations with Communists and was not in favor of vigorously combating reds.[160] Glen Taylor, elected to the Senate in 1944, was given to committing serious breaches of contemporary political etiquette. In 1948 Taylor ran as the vice-presidential candidate on the Progressive Party's national ticket headed by Henry Wallace. Taylor's decision to run for vice-president came after a meeting with Truman, who expressed views favoring military confrontation with the Soviet Union--an approach that Taylor found appalling in the atomic age. The Progressive Party involvement clearly jeopardized Taylor's Senate career, and even his future ability to support his children and send them through school. "Well hell, honey, if there's an atomic war, it won't matter none if the kids are educated or not," Taylor told his wife.[161] During his unsuccessful campaign for reelection to the Senate in 1950 Taylor was called to account for his staunch opposition to nuclear boosterism; he was branded disloyal and worse. The sort of conduct that had made him a target was epitomized in a Senate debate two days after Truman's announcement that the U.S. was going ahead with the H-bomb. "I feel that we have handicaps to overcome," Taylor told the Senate. "The fact that the evil influence of Dillon, Read & Co. was largely responsible for shaping our foreign policy and creating mistrust in many areas of the world, has placed us at a disadvantage."[162] Taylor had committed a severe indiscretion.[163] He had raised the issue of corporate control over U.S. nuclear policies. The leading Wall Street banking firm of Dillon, Read & Co. was, in fact, well represented in the top echelons of the federal administration that brought the nuclear industry over the billion- dollar-a-year mark in 1950. Truman's secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, was formerly president of Dillon, Read & Co.; William H. Draper, a high-ranking executive of the same firm, became undersecretary of defense.[164] Truman's appointee as the AEC's research director, Dr. James B. Fisk, was a former executive of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The AEC commissioners included Sumner Pike, who had been a Republican member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Lewis Strauss--a rear admiral and New York banker.[165] To astute financiers the late 1940s signaled prospects for huge profits to be made from nuclear investments.[166] Fairchild, General Electric, and Monsanto Chemical were taking the lead in postwar corporate nuclear involvements.[167] By the start of 1949 the list of postwar corporate investors had lengthened to include such major companies as Du Pont, Westinghouse, Standard Oil Development Co., Union Carbide, Kellex Corp., Blaw-Knox, and Dow Chemical.[168] A cornucopia of government contracts was anticipated. "ATOM BECOMES BIG BUSINESS AT BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR," blared a 1950 headline in {US. News & World Report}. "All across the country, research installations and industrial projects are to be built or expanded as part of the rapid growth of the atom into a big business. Hydrogen-bomb development will be fitted into this pattern."[169] There was talk, too, of developing nuclear power for electricity--a prospect that would evolve into the "Atoms for Peace" program a few years later. More certain to investors as the 1950s began, however, was the lure of nuclear weaponry.[170] ------ 152. {New York Times}, February 1, 1950. 153. {Newsweek}, February 13, 1950, p. 20. 154. Ibid., p. 19. 155. Raymond Swing, "Prescription for Survival," {Nation}, February 18, 1950, p. 152. For another contemporary critique of Truman's H-bomb decision, see {Christian Century}, February 15, 1950, p. 198. 156. Swing, "Prescription for Survival," p. 151. 157. For an example of the public arguments used to justify the H-bomb on grounds of earlier forms of brutality, see the 1950 essay by Robert F. Bacher, head of the California Institute of Technology physics department who had been a charter AEC commissioner, in {The H Bomb}, p. 142. 158. See Peter Collier, "Remembering Glen Taylor," {Mother Jones}, April 1977, pp. 43-53. For Senator Tydings' position on disarmament and ending U.S.-Soviet tensions, see Fleming, {The Cold War}, p. 527. 159. For news coverage of McCarthy and Tydings during this period, see {Newsweek}, July 31, 1950, pp. 25-29; also, {Newsweek}, March 5, 1951, p. 25. 160. Fleming, {The Cold War}, p 534. 161. Collier, "Remembering Glen Taylor," p. 48. 162. {The H Bomb}, p. 94. 163. Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, leapt up to chastise the errant Senator Taylor. "I cannot let go unchallenged the Senator's assertion that the foreign policy of the United States has been written by any banking firm be it Dillon, Read & Co. or any other firm," McMahon declared on the Senate floor. McMahon added: "We cannot tolerate without speaking up the attack which I feel has been made by the Senator from Idaho on the sincerity of our position, and which does not help the cause of peace." ({The H Bomb}, pp 94-95.) Idaho Senator Taylor had indeed touched a sensitive nerve. 164. Fleming, {The Cold War}, p. 437. 165. {Business Week}, March 15, 1947, pp. 38, 41. 166. In 1948 the Atomic Energy Commission sought suggestions on how to best draw in the private sector, setting up the "Industrial Advisory Group" headed by the president of Detroit Edison and including executives in such corporations as Standard Oil of Indiana, Gulf, and Babcock & Wilcox. See {Newsweek}, January 10, 1949, p. 63. 167. {Business Week}, March 29, 1947, p. 22. 168. {Business Week}, January 1, 1949. 169. {U.S. News & World Report}, February 10, 1950, p. 11. 170. The issue of corporate interests in perpetuating atomic development and the nuclear arms race is commonly viewed as a rather indiscreet subject--perhaps all the more so because of its critical importance. Within the nuclear weapons and arms control establishment even those individuals who have served as voices of moderation prefer not to talk about it publicly. Herbert F. York, director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from 1952 to 1958, later served in prominent positions related to nuclear arms control under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. York became a fervent and articulate supporter of disarmament. Yet, in a book he wrote in the mid-1970s, York blamed the momentum of technology while disregarding corporate influence: "The possibilities that welled up out of the technological program and the ideas and proposals put forth by the technologists eventually created a set of options that was so narrow in the scope of its alternatives and so strong in its thrust that the political decision makers had no real independent choice in the matter." ({The Advisors}, p. 11.) While stating that in his view responsibility for the cold war and arms race "is widely shared among the major powers of the world," York wrote "I do believe that the United States has pursued policies which caused the technological arms race to advance at a substantially faster pace than was really necessary for America's own national security." In diagnosing why this has happened, however, York sanitized the issue so that no one on Wall Street, in nuclear laboratories, or at government agencies need squirm: "The reasons for this are not that American leaders have been less sensitive to the dangers of the arms race than the leaders of other countries, nor that they are less wise or more aggressive. Rather, the reason is that the United States is richer and more powerful, and its science and technology are more dynamic and generate more ideas and inventions of all kinds, including ever more powerful and exotic means of mass destruction. In short the root of the problem has not been maliciousness, but rather a sort of technological exuberance that has overwhelmed the other factors that go into the making of overall national policy." ({The Advisors}, p. ix. ) ------ [part 4 of 18] "To What Extent Can We Trust Ourselves?" With the twentieth century at its midpoint the United States geared up for a quantum leap in the magnitude and frequency of atomic bomb tests. Wrapped in the flag, the testing package grew bigger, costlier, and deadlier. Even before the first of hundreds of U.S. nuclear test explosions took place in the 1950s, some nuclear scholars warned about the biological implications of large-scale atomic blasts. One of the first was Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate credited with discovering energy mechanisms present within the sun--knowledge that proved integral to H-bomb development. Bethe had served as director of theoretical physics at the Los Alamos laboratory during World War II. A professor at Cornell University, he and eleven other prominent physicists expressed deep concern about the H-bomb in a public statement issued at a Columbia University meeting of the American Physical Society, a few days after Truman's directive approving the new weapon.[171] In late February 1950 Bethe appeared on an NBC radio round-table discussion that provoked national controversy. When the moderator raised the question of radiation dangers from thermonuclear weapons, Bethe responded: "You are certainly right when you emphasize the radioactivity. In the H-bomb, neutrons are produced in large numbers. These neutrons will go into the air; and in the air they will make radioactive Carbon-14, which is well known to science. This isotope of carbon has a life of 5,000 years. So if H-bombs are exploded in some number, then the air will be poisoned by this Carbon-14 for 5,000 years. It may well be that the number of H-bombs will be so large that this will make life impossible."[172] Another panelist on the NBC program was Leo Szilard, a University of Chicago professor of biophysics who had been influential in getting the U.S. to embark on atomic development for military purposes at the start of World War II. A physics pioneer whose work on uranium's neutron emissions had made it possible to sustain chain reactions, Szilard posed a profound overview for the national radio audience to ponder. Said Szilard: In 1939 when we tried to persuade the Government to take up the development of atomic energy, American public opinion was undivided on the issue that it is morally wrong and reprehensible to bomb cities and to kill women and children. During the war, almost imperceptibly, we started to use giant gasoline bombs against Japan, killing millions of women and children; finally we used the A-bomb. I believe there is a general uneasiness among the scientists. It is easy for them to agree that we cannot trust Russia, but they also ask themselves: To what extent can we trust ourselves?[173] Such talk from impeccably credentialed individuals, if widely disseminated, could have been a roadblock to the nuclear weapons testing program. David E. Lilienthal, who had just retired from his post as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, promptly denounced the scientists who had appeared on the NBC round-table radio show as "oracles of annihilation." Lilienthal, speaking at a Town Hall forum in New York City, warned that the "new cult of doom" was liable to bring about "hopelessness and helplessness. . . . And hopelessness and helplessness are the very opposite of what we need. These are emotions that play right into the hands of destructive Communist forces."[174] If physicists of Bethe's and Szilard's stature could be taken to task for warning the public about perils of radiation, less secure critics had better watch their step. Those running the nuclear machinery were anxious to make clear that they would employ derision and innuendo to fight anyone opposing atomic proliferation. Such pressure would be felt for decades to follow as scientists attempted to investigate the full implications of radiation effects on human health. Dr. Szilard's unpleasant question, however, would prove prophetic for many thousands of Americans whose lives were forever altered by the mushroom clouds that followed his broadcast words: {To what extent can we trust ourselves?} ------ 171. {Science}, February 17, 1950, p. 190. 172. {The H Bomb}, p. 112. 173. Ibid., pp. 118-19 174. {New York Herald Tribune}, March 2,1950; reprinted in {The H Bomb}, pp. 121-122. ------ * * * * * * * 3 Bringing the Bombs Home In 1951 few people openly objected to the U.S. Government's announcement that it would begin exploding atomic bombs over Nevada along with continuing atmospheric tests in the Pacific. The reasons were couched in national-security terminology. The Korean War was well under way. Nuclear tests in Nevada would mean a far shorter supply line from weapons laboratories and materiel depots.[1] And continental testing meant diversified atomic war game scenarios for U.S. troops. These logistical and economic advantages all supported the government's decision to expand the nuclear test program by bringing it closer to home. A test site on the mainland, stated the AEC's director of military application, would serve as "a location where its basic security and general accessibility cannot be jeopardized by enemy action."[2] Rejecting alternative spots in New Mexico Utah, and North Carolina, the AEC's commissioners agreed upon the desert area northwest of Las Vegas.[3] The location in southern Nevada seemed almost ideal for the purpose at hand. The Nevada Test Site would be buffered from access by being placed within the Tonopah Bombing and Gunnery Range, which had already claimed over five thousand square miles. On the southern edge of the site the Air Force had already erected temporary buildings at Camp Mercury that could be handy in administering the nuclear tests. Government nuclear planners held a series of meetings to pinpoint "radiological hazards" involved with exploding atom bombs in Nevada. A secret conference of more than a score of officials--including Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller--at Los Alamos on August 1, 1950, discussed anticipated off-site safety aspects. Concern was raised for keeping the most densely populated areas out of the heaviest fallout zones. Official minutes of the meeting acknowledged "the probability that people will receive perhaps a little more radiation than medical authorities say is absolutely safe."[4] America plunged ahead with an intensive atomic bomb test program. During the 1950s and early 1960s more than two hundred nuclear weapons sent huge mushroom clouds of radioactivity into the atmosphere from the Pacific and Nevada. Total explosive force of those bombs, according to official figures, surpassed ninety thousand kilotons-- ninety megatons--equivalent to more than seven thousand atomic bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.[5] Some people were in the way, living in the wrong places at the wrong time. ------ 1. For description of Los Alamos Laboratory discussion that led up to establishment of a continental test site, see McPhee, {Curve of Binding Energy}, pp. 59 60. 2. "Location of Proving Ground for Atomic Weapons," AEC Memo 141/7, December 13, 1950, p. 2. 3. Meeting on December 12, 1950, the AEC approved recommendations for proceeding with plans to use the Nevada site, although some staff memoranda conceded that assumptions of safety for downwind residents were speculative. "These questions may be answered satisfactorily as test knowledge increases . . . but they're not satisfactorily answered at present," said one memo. (Uhl and Ensign, {GI Guinea Pigs}, p. 55.) For details of test-site selection, see Howard L. Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers} (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), pp. 26-31. 4. "Meeting: Discussion of Radiological Hazards Associated with a Continental Test Site for Atomic Bombs," AEC, Los Alamos, New Mexico, August 1, 1950, pp. 13, 23, 24. Conferees concluded that "a tower- burst bomb having a yield of 25 kilotons could be detonated without exceeding the allowed emergency tolerance dose of 6-12 r [roentgens] outside a 180-degree test area sector 100 miles in radius." 5. {Announced US Nuclear Tests}; "Joint Force Seven, Report WT-933: Cloud Photography," U.S. Government, January 27, 1958--cited in York, {The Advisors}, p. 86. ------ Downwind Residents Routinely, large atomic clouds blew from the Nevada Test Site to rural communities like Enterprise--a small town, more than one hundred miles away in southwestern Utah, surrounded by productive farms and arid grazing country dotted with sagebrush and juniper trees. The same year nuclear testing began, a boy named Preston Truman was born near Enterprise. His parents, ranchers and farmers, taught Preston to ride a horse at the same time he learned to walk. "I can remember," he would recall, "several times getting up with the rest of the family and driving out to my father's farm in the moments before dawn and watching the western sky light up with the flash from the bombs in Nevada approximately 112 miles away. I remember on occasion hearing the sound waves come over. I remember later in the mornings watching on a couple of occasions clouds come over. To a little child that didn't mean much. The atomic tests were very much a part of our lives."[6] When he was in high school, Preston Truman was diagnosed with a form of cancer called lymphoma. Chemotherapy and other medical treatment over the next thirteen years cost about $100,000. As was true for all other downwind residents, the government did not provide a penny. But Truman was relatively lucky. In 1980 he was in remission from the usually fatal lymphoma. Out of nine children who were his friends in the immediate area of Enterprise when he was a child, Truman was the only one who reached the age of twenty-eight. The rest died of leukemia or cancer.[7] The lethal potential of the nuclear tests was not immediately apparent to Truman and others. Especially in the first years of the A-tests there was confidence in the government's trustworthiness. "It was kind of almost a carnival atmosphere in the beginning with the radio telling us where the clouds were going, following the tests, and always assuring us there was no danger," Truman recalled. "But that wasn't the way it continued."[8] The incubation periods, from initial radiation exposure to the development of consequent diseases, began to expire. Always to remain vivid in Preston Truman's memory was a day when, five years old, he heard that all was not well for the young children of Enterprise. "I remember one morning going to the store with a friend of mine to cash in pop bottles, and listening to some people from the town talk about a boy our age who was dying of leukemia and listening to the details of the nose bleeds and the suffering he was going through. And this was a shock. I remember talking with my friend and wanting to know; we didn't know that little children could die, we had never seen that."[9] Forty miles east of Enterprise, in Cedar City, Blaine and Loa Johnson buried their twelve-year-old daughter in 1965. She died of leukemia. A total of seven leukemia cases occurred for people within a two-hundred-yard radius of their home, in the space of a dozen years.[10] In the next sizable town, twenty miles farther northeast along Interstate 15, residents in the devout Mormon community around Parowan were similarly hard hit. In 1978 Frankie Lou Bentley, whose mother and stepfather both died of cancer a year apart, listed more than 150 cancer victims in the Parowan-Paragonah-Summit area, which contained about fourteen hundred people during the nuclear tests in neighboring Nevada. The cancer was particularly startling because so few people smoked in the community. "It's amazing that there should be so many cancer cases in an area as small as this," she told a county newspaper. "It's to the point now where there's not a person in town who hasn't lost at least one relative or knows of several people who have died of cancer."[11] A coworker with Frankie Lou Bentley at the Bank of Iron County office in Parowan, Wilma Lamoreaux, watched her fifteen-year-old son Kenneth die of leukemia in 1960.[12] During a two-year period, leukemia struck four youngsters in Parowan and Paragonah,[13] an extremely high rate for towns with a combined population of about one thousand. Normally, not even one leukemia would have been expected by medical statisticians.[14] Eighteen years after her son's death from leukemia, Wilma Lamoreaux declared, "There's been wrong done. There's no relief in knowing your son died of negligence." She added: "I don't want to be a rabble- rouser or anything but I don't want another generation to go through this. Cancer is such a long, painful, drawn-out death.[15] In the nearby Escalante Valley cancer caused forty-eight of sixty- three "natural" deaths in official records since the atomic testing began--an extraordinarily high ratio.[16] And there were other worries. One fifth of the male high school graduates of the 1950s and early 1960s in Cedar City discovered they were sterile,[17] a particularly grievous condition in a Mormon culture which places great stress on holy edicts to raise large families. For those who became parents, there were fears of genetic damage. Elizabeth Catalan, who was a teenager while growing up in southwest Utah during the 1950s, lost her father to leukemia when he was forty- three, and a sister to complications from an enlarged thyroid. A surviving sister's daughter remained on her mind: "I watched my beautiful little niece, Kay's child, cope with the birth defect that left her with a ganglia that doubled the size of her tongue and wound around, like a weed, inside her neck and down into her shoulder."[18] Elizabeth Catalan thought too about girls she grew up with, now women, coping with aftermaths of miscarriages and physical abnormalities in their children. When Beth Catalan became pregnant, the fetus dissolved {in utero}. "One of the things I always wanted to be was a mother," she told a citizens' commission inquiry in Washington in 1980, adding that "you run a Geiger counter over my body and it'll click."[19] She decided not to take the risk of trying again to give birth to a baby. Nestled in a picturesque valley, Beth Catalan's hometown of St. George long enjoyed bounties of the land. Since the days that Brigham Young, elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, wintered in St. George, the town seemed to epitomize reasons for Mormon references to the Utah region as "Zion." Benefiting from a warm winter climate, proudly sustaining a college, in the middle of the twentieth century St. George was a tranquil and in many ways idyllic place to live. On a sunny day about three decades after nuclear weapons testing began upwind, a seventy-three-year-old woman named Irma Thomas opened the front door of a trim house on East Tabernacle Street in St. George. She had grown accustomed to welcoming out-of-state researchers carrying notepads and tape recorders and cameras. Irma Thomas offered the visitors chairs in her living room, next to the shelves of ceramics she had made with her hands until disquiet with the gathering tragedies in the neighborhood had compelled her to put aside the potter's wheel. Few questions were necessary to prompt her to speak about painful realities: a town, and an entire region, devastated. "We're not numbers, we're not statistics, we're human beings," she said, motioning to her living-room wall covered with family photos, an acute blend of pain and fury and vulnerability seeming to lace her words as she spoke. She did not mention the skin cancer across her back. Sometimes she laughed, an irrepressible zest for life surfacing through outrage and anguish. She talked about the suffering of her cancer-ridden husband, of her daughter, whose nervous system was in the process of falling apart, of her children's blood damage, stillbirths, hysterectomies, and miscarriages, of her brother, destined to die of bone cancer less than a year after the interview.[20] And she pointed through the living-room walls toward the homes of neighbors in the residential area. She had compiled a list of thirty-one cancer victims who lived in the houses within a block radius;[21] smoking was rare in the heavily Mormon community. "They couldn't pay anyone for the loss of a child. I hope they realize that," she said, hands folded in her lap. "And the people of my generation are just dropping by the wayside."[22] Punctuated by her special kind of laughter, and silences, eyes often brimming with tears, Irma Thomas shared her perceptions about living in a town A-bombed by its own government: We accepted all this. It was our government and we accepted it. . . . We didn't connect it to people's cancer at first. It takes a while. . . . I've been at work on this for two years. I was concerned about it many years before that. The people of St. George, after the 1953 blast, some of the people got a little nervous . . . People had to have cars washed down . . . The AEC guys came by to soothe all the ruffled feathers. . . . And yet so many people died from that. You'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to see it. And it's pretty horrendous.... I work to raise my children. And later I find out this has happened, it just infuriates me so I can hardly stand it. I get so upset and frustrated, I can hardly stand it . . . The victims are outraged. . . . Our earth is getting so filled with radioactive waste. And it doesn't go away. . . . One of my favorite sayings, "Oh too much talk, hit 'em on the head with a rock." . . . I'm going to keep pounding, here and there and everywhere, till somebody hears me. . . . All I can do is right here, in this house. All I can do is do what I can, the way I can. . . . Look how long we suffered, for thirty years. Nobody makes a peep. When the congressional hearings were happening last year, I told them it looks like a big show for the politicians. . . . At the hearings it came out, about the government trying to confuse us with "fission" and "fusion" [a secret directive from President Dwight Eisenhower]. That big old Army president we had. I'd like to dig him up and hit him in the head.[23] By 1980 recent national publicity had often left the impression that St. George and nearby towns were the main recipients of radioactive clouds from Nevada bomb blasts. But test fallout was not limited to the southern part of Utah. More than two hundred miles northeast of St. George, between the cities of Provo and Salt Lake City, is the town of Pleasant Grove, populated by several thousand people. Affidavits filed in federal court in 1980 cited ten leukemia deaths among people living in Pleasant Grove during the 1960s; seven of those leukemia fatalities were children.[24] Still farther away from the Nevada Test Site, in the Uinta Mountains of northeast Utah some four hundred miles from where the atom bombs exploded aboveground, severe impacts have been reported as well. The Uinta mountain range tended to have a "sweeping effect," bringing down fallout on grasslands in the dairy country below the Uinta peaks. In the summer of 1980 a U.S. District Court suit charged that the government should be held liable for radioactive contamination of milk in the area and resulting cancer.[25] One of the plaintiffs, David L. Timothy, grew up on a dairy farm in the mountainous region of northeastern Utah. When he was nineteen cancer was discovered in his thyroid--where radioactive iodine 131 from fallout is known to lodge. In 1981, after undergoing thyroid surgery eight times, Timothy angrily demanded to know "why the hottest spot in the state has been ignored by not only the officials but the news media too."[26] Rose Mackelprang also wondered about lack of attention to the town of Fredonia in northern Arizona, about two hundred miles from the nuclear test site. National journalists visiting St. George across the Utah border had not bothered to report what happened to Fredonia's residents in the wake of atomic fallout that regularly passed over their town. Soft-spoken, demure, devoted to the Mormon Church, Rose Mackelprang was willing to talk about what she could never forget. "My husband and I moved to Fredonia in 1948. It's just a little town, and we have a very happy atmosphere down there. We did rather, anyway. They raise their own gardens and most of 'em have their own cows, a lot of them do, and they have gardens and bottle their own food, put it up, store it, that's just the life of a small community."[27] Rose Mackelprang's husband, Gayneld, became a teacher in the public schools of Fredonia, where the lumber industry was assuming economic importance alongside farming and livestock. "At that time, when they started the testing in Nevada, it'd be at dawn when the tests would go off and we could see this big light and then the ground would shake, it'd billow up you could see the big mushroom cloud go way up and it was really quite exciting, it was different, we didn't really know that much about it. As far as we knew, why, it was really going to help us out, it was really something that our government was doing and it would be for our own good. We trusted the government, we figured that it was necessary because, after all, the government does look after us, and they're over the people and they will take care of anything that needs to be taken care of to see that it's healthy, or otherwise . . . So we didn't worry about it."[28] In 1960 the population of Fredonia was 643. By 1965 four had passed away from leukemia--a truck driver, who died at age forty-eight; a fourteen-year-old girl; a lumber crane operator, thirty-six; and Gayneld Mackelprang, by that time forty-three years old and superintendent of the Fredonia Public Schools. A secret memorandum by the U.S. Public Health Service's leukemia unit director, Dr. Clark W. Heath, Jr., noted, "This number of cases is approximately 20 times greater than expected."[29] In the entire previous decade 1950 to 1960 no cases of leukemia had been reported among Fredonia residents. The memo, dated August 4, 1966, and sent to the head of the federal agency's Communicable Disease Center, was marked "FOR ADMINISTRATIVE USE ONLY, NOT FOR PUBLICATION."[30] Soon after learning it was leukemia, Gayneld Mackelprang was dead. His widow recalled, "The doctors said it was a lot farther advanced than they ever guessed. It was a shock, I can tell you. We hardly knew what to do, no plans, no nothing. I had six children home, and I was expecting my seventh in six weeks."[31] Cancer became commonplace in Fredonia. Rose Mackelprang ticked off the names of the next towns north along Highway 89--Kanab, Orderville, Glendale--where cancer and leukemia had appeared. "Some of them have died with leukemia, we have a lot of cancer, and it's not the end of it. It's still going on." Federal agencies continued to deny responsibility. "One thing that really upsets me," she added, "is that instead of telling us it was dangerous, they have denied it all the time, they've said they're not at fault."[32] ------ 6. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 8-9. 7. Preston Truman, interviews, February 1980, December 1980, June 1981. 8. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 8-9. 9. Ibid. 10. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), Associated Press, November 21, 1978; Loa Johnson, interview, June 1981. 11. {Color Country Spectrum} (Utah), December 22, 1978. 12. Ibid. 13. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), Associated Press, November 21, 1978. 14. Clark W. Heath, Jr., M.D., Chief, "Subject: Leukemia in Fredonia, Arizona," U.S. Public Health Service Memo, Leukemia Unit, Epidemiology Branch, August 4, 1966. 15. {Color Country Spectrum}, December 22, 1978. 16. Samuel H. Day, Jr., "Rebellion in the Rockies," {Progressive}, February 1981, p. 9. 17. Ibid. 18. {Los Angeles Times}, April 11, 1980. 19. {Citizens' Hearings}, p. 6. 20. Irma Thomas, interview, February 1980. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), May 17, 1980. 25. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), August 13, 1980. 26. David Timothy, interview, January 1981. 27. Rose Mackelprang, speech to National Conference for a Comprehensive Test Ban, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, December 12, 1980. 28. Ibid. 29. Heath, "Subject: Leukemia," August 4, 1966. 30. Ibid. 31. Rose Mackelprang speech. 32. Ibid. ------ AEC Denials In the 1950s few Americans knew of the health risks associated with bomb fallout. The test program had been cast in a patriotic light by the official releases that the press circulated. For those who feared ill effects from radiation, government assurances were profuse. Year after year media conveyed U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announcements to downwind residents: "There is no danger."[33] But sheep, thousands of them, abruptly sickened and died. Country dwellers noticed that wildlife, from deer to birds, thinned from expansive rangelands regularly dusted with fallout from the Nevada Test Site upwind. And in one small community after another, people died from diseases rarely seen there before: leukemia, lymphoma, acute thyroid damage, many forms of cancer. "My father and I were both morticians, and when these cancer cases started coming in I had to go into my books to study how to do the embalming, cancers were so rare," remembered Elmer Pickett, a lifelong resident of St. George, Utah. "In '56 and '57 all of a sudden they were coming in all the time. By 1960 it was a regular flood."[34] As latency periods came due, towns like St. George began to reap a grim harvest sown by the atomic whirlwinds. They were mostly populated by Mormons, devoutly obeying their Church's instructions not to smoke tobacco or drink alcohol. Cancer had never been a noticeable problem before. But, as the 1950s wore on, and for decades afterward, the ravaging effects came like a pestilence in serial form: the leukemias, usually quickest to result from radiation exposure, came first; numerous types of cancer, emerging in body organs or in bones, tended to arrive later. Despite its claims that neither the detonations nor fallout were harmful, the Atomic Energy Commission routinely waited until the winds were blowing in the "right" direction.[35] That meant away from big cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Occasionally at the last minute shifting breezes dumped fallout on large metropolitan areas-- Las Vegas was sprinkled with radioactivity in 1955, for example, and three years later fallout clouds dropped on Los Angeles. But for the most part America's continental nuclear tests went according to plan. The most deadly concentrations of fallout came down in rural areas of Nevada, Utah, and northern Arizona. After southern Utah sheepherders lost massive numbers of their livestock, they unsuccessfully brought suit against the federal government in 1955. In court the government response was that "a combination of factors including malnutrition, poor management, and adverse weather conditions" led to the animals' deaths.[36] (Two decades later complaints near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, the Rocky Flats weapons production facility in Colorado, and other atomic installations would meet similar explanations.) Internal memos to the contrary from AEC researchers were suppressed. Sworn statements by sheepherders, who testified such epidemics among their livestock had never happened until the mushroom clouds rose upwind, were discounted. However, the sheep were a kind of early-warning system for what was to follow. Starting in the mid-1950s, {leukemia} became a household word in Utah towns like St. George and Enterprise and Parowan; the same held true for communities like Tonopah in Nevada, Fredonia in Arizona. Children were especially vulnerable. As early as 1959 a study disclosed higher radioactive strontium 90 levels in young children living downwind of the atomic tests.[37] In 1965 another suppressed study--this one by U.S. Public Health Service researcher Dr. Edward Weiss--correlated radioactive fallout with an inordinately high leukemia rate among downwind Utah residents. Weiss's report concluded: "An examination of leukemia death records in southwestern Utah" during the years of heavy fallout "shows an apparently excessive number of deaths."[38] A joint AEC-White House meeting about the Weiss report took place in early September 1965; AEC representatives criticized the study. A week later the AEC's assistant general manager told AEC commissioners that researching such topics as downwind leukemia rates would "pose potential problems to the commission: adverse public relations, lawsuits and jeopardizing the programs of the Nevada Test Site."[39] Although atmospheric testing had been banned by then, underground tests were still releasing radioactivity into the air. And the AEC was gearing up for the civilian nuclear power program, predicated on the contention that low levels of officially permitted radiation were harmless. The White House shelved the Weiss report in 1965, and blocked any follow-up research.[40] In fact there were many nuclear-testing- related documents and AEC meeting minutes that remained secret until 1979, when they were made public by journalists or Senator Edward Kennedy.[41] For the Weiss study that meant staying locked up in federal vaults for a full thirteen years.[42] In 1979, however, University of Utah epidemiology director Dr. Joseph L. Lyon independently confirmed the validity of the Weiss report. In an article published in the {New England Journal of Medicine}, Dr. Lyon and associates documented that children growing up in southern Utah during the aboveground atomic weapons tests suffered a leukemia rate two and a half times higher than for children before the testing began and after it ended.[43] In early 1981 results of the federal executive branch's Interagency Radiation Research Committee inquiry were made public--stating that a profusion of childhood cancer in southern Utah "remains unexplained on grounds other than possible fallout exposure."[44] Health risks of living downwind from the nuclear tests were shared by Indians--particularly Duckwater Shoshones north of the test site, and Southern Paiutes to the east. Poor medical record-keeping has handicapped efforts to assess fallout effects. But in 1981 Paiute Tribe of Utah vice-chair Elvis F. Wall blamed the radiation for adding to health woes among tribe members.[45] Through it all, during three decades that started with the first mushroom clouds over Nevada in 1951, the U.S. Government nuclear weapons testing spokespeople continued to proudly observe that federal authorities had never lost a lawsuit based on radioactive fallout.[46] With about a thousand plaintiffs seeking damages in federal court as the 1970s ended, U.S. Justice Department attorneys were anxious to sustain their "perfect record" of eluding judicial pronouncements of atomic fallout culpability. In 1979 plaintiffs accused the federal government of failing to inform area residents that fallout from the tests could cause cancer. Federal statements filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City denied the charges, stating that citizens were told "there was some risk associated with exposure to radioactive fallout" during the 1950s.[47] Those denials infuriated citizens, who produced numerous written proclamations distributed by the federal government throughout the 1950s, claiming the radioactive fallout posed no danger. One widely posted statement, dated January 1951 and signed by AEC project manager Ralph P. Johnson, read: "Health and safety authorities have determined that no danger from or as a result of AEC activities may be expected . . . All necessary precautions, including radiological surveys and patrolling of the surrounding territory, will be undertaken to insure that safety conditions are maintained."[48] In March 1957 the AEC distributed a booklet titled "Atomic Tests in Nevada" among downwind residents. "You people who live near Nevada Test Site are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation's atomic test program," the federal pamphlet said. "You have been close observers of tests which have contributed greatly to building the defenses of our country and of the free world. . . . Every test detonation in Nevada is carefully evaluated as to your safety before it is included in a schedule. Every phase of the operation is likewise studied from the safety viewpoint." Readers were assured that after six full years of open-air nuclear tests upwind, "all such findings have confirmed that Nevada test fallout has not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site."[49] And, in an effort to keep the local citizenry from looking too closely, the AEC included in its booklet a drawing of an unshorn, bowlegged cowboy raising his eyebrows at a clicking meter in his hand. "Many persons in Nevada, Utah Arizona, and nearby California have Geiger counters these days," the pamphlet counseled. "We can expect many reports that `Geiger counters were going crazy here today.' Reports like this may worry people unnecessarily. Don't let them bother you."[50] Few residents of Utah, or Nevada, or northern Arizona were surprised by the conclusions of a 1980 report issued by the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations: "The Government's program for monitoring the health effects of the tests was inadequate and, more disturbingly, all evidence suggesting that radiation was having harmful effects, be it on the sheep or the people, was not only disregarded but actually suppressed."[51] ------ 33. Jack Willis and Saul Landau, {Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang} (New York: New Time Films, 1979), transcript p. 1. 34. {Life}, June 1980, p. 36. 35. This policy was reflected in numerous AEC deliberations and decisions; for example, commissioners' meetings of March 1 and March 14, 1955. 36. {Life}, June 1980, p. 38. 37. {Washington Post}, April 14, 1979. 38. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, and Senate, Labor and Human Resources Committee, Health and Scientific Research Subcommittee, and the Committee on the Judiciary, {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}, 96th Cong., 1st sess. Serial No. 96-42, April 19, 1979, Vol. 2, p. 2195 (hereafter cited as {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}). 39. {Washington Post}, April 14, 1979. 40. {Deseret News}, February 27, 1979; {Washington Post}, April 14, 1979. 41. See {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}, Vols. 1 and 2. 42. {Washington Post}, April 14, 1979. 43. Joseph L. Lyon, et al., "Childhood Leukemias Associated with Fallout from Nuclear Testing," {New England Journal of Medicine}, February 22, 1979, pp. 397-402. Lyons's study has been criticized by nuclear proponents because in spite of the increase in leukemia rate among children in Utah, the rate was still below the U.S. average. This attitude seems to assume that every area of the U.S. "deserves" to be as polluted as the East Coast, where synergistic effects of multiple carcinogens and wash-out of radioactive chemicals from contaminated clouds compound the health problems. 44. {The Oregonian}, Associated Press, January 1, 1981. 45. Elvis F. Wall, vice-chairperson, Interim Tribal Council, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Cedar City, Utah, printed statement, undated, distributed May 1981. 46. {Deseret News}, February 15, 1979. 47. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), December 17, 1979. 48. "WARNING," sign dated January 1951, obtained from Citizens' Call organization in Utah. 49. AEC, {Atomic Tests in Nevada}, March 1957, pp. 2, 4, 15. 50. Ibid., p. 23. 51. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, {The Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, 96th Cong., 2nd sess., Committee Print 96-1FC 53, August 1980, p. 37. ------ Nevada Veterans In early January 1951 President Truman approved the first series of Nevada atomic tests scheduled to begin later that month. When the nuclear testing started there, little information--let alone consultation--had been accorded residents in the surrounding region. The first series of nuclear tests within North America was labeled "Operation Ranger." Over a period of ten days beginning January 27, 1951, five air-dropped A-bombs exploded over the Nevada Test Site, ranging from one to twenty-two kilotons. Sixty-five miles away, Las Vegas took the tests in stride; the only ostensible negative effects were a couple of broken windows resulting from an eight-kiloton blast code-named Baker-2.[52] As with the Pacific test program, no plans were incorporated to evaluate the impact of radiation on human beings. Rather, the Army chose to evaluate servicemen's psychological reactions to participating in atomic bomb tests. The plan got under way in the summer of 1951, financed by the Department of Defense and administered by George Washington University, under the heading of the "Human Resources Research Office."[53] The Pentagon also entered into a similar arrangement with the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University. When soldiers arrived at Camp Desert Rock to participate in "Operation Buster-Jangle" in autumn 1951, they knew little about what they were in for. Introduction to the bare facilities at the Nevada Test Site came partly from an "Information and Guide" booklet distributed to incoming GIs. "The officers and men of this operation share with you the hope that your visit to Camp Desert Rock will prove an informative and revealing experience which you will always remember," read a greeting signed by U.S. Army Major General W. B. Kean.[54] Every page bore the inscription "RESTRICTED," and the booklet was replete with injunctions against talking too much. "To assist in maintaining the security of Exercise Desert Rock it is desired that you maintain secrecy discipline regarding classified information observed here. Everyone will want to know what you have seen--officials, friends, {and the enemy.}"[55] The Army booklet handed to the first nuclear soldiers at the Nevada Test Site did not discuss atomic bomb radiation hazards. It did discuss possible hazards from indigenous reptiles and poisonous insects.[56] Scenarios for tactical war games, assuming an enemy invasion sweeping inland from the West Coast, postulated that "the decision has been made to employ an atomic weapon to effect maximum destruction of the enemy." The maneuvers, while testing numerous facets of infantrymen's responses to atomic weaponry exploding in their midst, were depicted as realistic dry runs for future combat situations.[57] "Indoctrination in essential physical protective measures under simulated combat conditions, and observation of the psychological effects of an atomic explosion are reasons for this desired participation," said a preparatory memorandum from the Pentagon's Military Liaison Committee to the AEC chairman. Added the Defense Department panel: "The psychological implications of atomic weapons used close to our front lines in support of ground operations are unknown."[58] The AEC ordered strict exclusion of the media during the forthcoming autumn nuclear tests in Nevada.[59] Like Army buddies with him in the engineers A Company and other servicemen who arrived at the Nevada Test Site that October of 1951, twenty-two-year-old private William Bires did not know that military authorities were placing major importance on gauging mental and emotional impacts of close-range atomic blasts on foot soldiers like himself.[60] Sleeping on the desert ground got very cold in October and November. ("We didn't even have decent sleeping bags. We froze our asses off.")[61] Of far more lasting significance was the actual experience of seeing half-a-dozen nuclear bomb detonations, ranging up to a thirty-one-kiloton blast code-named Easy. Bires participated in the series of atomic tests over a period of a few weeks, with the largest nuclear explosions coming from bombs dropped by aircraft. Several thousand men watched from about seven miles away as fierce atomic light slashed across the desert; some were marched to within half a mile of ground zero. After the indescribably vivid bright flash Bires took note of "bizarre effects of the bombs"--weird designs of permanent shadows left in the atomic wake, charred into test range buildings, vehicles, gun emplacements. Animals situated in calibrated proximities to the A-blasts were singed and sometimes pathetic. "I can still see this damn sheep with its rump burnt," Bires commented three decades later.[62] The Pentagon eagerly assessed behavior of GIs as they responded to orders soon after the half-dozen nuclear detonations, which totaled seventy-two kilotons. The more intimate, and more lasting, consequences apparently were not of great concern to the military brass. "I was then, and I still am," William Bires said in 1981, "living with the firsthand knowledge that we do indeed have within our power the ability to destroy ourselves. Most people have heard this, but have not been able to observe firsthand the effects of those terrible weapons."[63] When he filed the first in a series of claim statements with the Veterans Administration in 1978, Bires cited the psychological jolts left by his hitch at the Nevada nuclear tests. Recurrent fits of depression, the tenacious imagery of atomic weapons exploding close by, and an acutely painful spinal affliction came to plague him.[64] Less than five months after the first troop maneuvers in the shadow of a mushroom cloud over Nevada, the U.S. military was pushing for more daring escapades for GIs. The distance of seven miles from nuclear blasts seemed too remote, and tame, to high-ranking occupants of Pentagon offices along the banks of the Potomac River. In the future, declared Air Force Brigadier General A. R. Luedecke, a less cautious policy would be appropriate. In a secret letter to the AEC in early 1952 he attributed "unfavorable psychological effects" among soldiers "to the tactically unrealistic distance of seven miles to which all participating troops were required to withdraw for the detonation."[65] The Pentagon now suggested that soldiers be stationed a little less than four miles from the exploding nuclear weapons in subsequent tests. The AEC's director of biology and medicine, Dr. Shields Warren, didn't like the sound of it. "The explosion is experimental in type, and its yield cannot be predicted with accuracy," he warned. "Deviations from established safety practices would result . . . in larger numbers and more serious casualties the closer the troops were to the point of detonation."[66] Despite such in-house warnings from its own staff experts the AEC capitulated to the Pentagon plan. Commission chairman Gordon Dean promised the Department of Defense that the AEC "would enter no objection to stationing the troops at not less than 7,000 yards from ground zero."[67] All discussions leading to the decision that would affect thousands of soldiers were conducted in secrecy. The Pentagon had exercised its unwritten dominance over the AEC. In Nevada nearly eight thousand Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel were in the early stages of "Operation Tumbler-Snapper"-- involving eight nuclear weapons dropped from airplanes or perched on towers, with total explosive force of over one hundred kilotons. During the largest blast of the series--a thirty-one-kiloton bomb air-dropped on April 22, 1952--selected reporters and television crews were allowed for the first time to record an A-bomb shot in progress.[68] At that test, and again the following month, soldiers were less than four miles from the explosions, often moving into the central blast area within two hours. Back in Washington, according to classified AEC minutes, Commission chairman Gordon Dean "commented that a popular article on fall-out to reduce the possibility of public anxiety resulting from lack of information might be helpful."[69] The kind of publicity the AEC sought did not come from Army veterans like James W. Yeatts, whose description of Operation Tumbler-Snapper would calm no public fears--neither at the time, nor twenty-eight years later, when Yeatts issued the following statement from his home in Keeling, Virginia: At the test site we had no protective clothing or equipment, not even a gas mask. When the bomb was detonated, we had our backs to the blast, kneeling with our hands over our eyes and our eyes closed. The flash was so bright we could see the bones in our hands. Then we turned to see the fire ball form. The shock wave hit us and knocked me backward. The dust was so thick that we could not see anything. After the dust settled we marched toward Ground Zero until the radiation got too hot. We then turned back and had a Geiger counter check for radiation. By the time we arrived back at Camp Desert Rock, most of us had severe headaches and were nauseated. We were told to lie down--that it would go away. Two days later, back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I was told to turn the uniform that I wore in the tests in to the stock room. It was put in a rubber bag. Nothing was said about how much radiation we had received.[70] Two months later Yeatts began having serious health problems-- "rectal abscesses, headaches, nausea and severe back pains," which persisted into the 1960s. Ten years after his participation in the atomic testing Yeatts lost all his teeth. "They became so loose, I could pull them with no pain. About a year later I began having breathing problems." By the late 1970s Yeatts was unable to work. In 1980 his weight had declined to 103 pounds. "I can only walk a few steps. I am now losing control of my bowels and urine."[71] As far as the family was concerned, the aftermath of Operation Tumbler-Snapper did not end with James Yeatts. "My son was born in 1969, with many birth defects--the sutures in his head were grown together, a severe heart problem, an imperforate anus, he had only one kidney and an obstruction in the urinary tract. He had to have a colostomy at one day old. At three months old he had a `Pots procedure' operation on his heart. He had a ureterostomy at six months, which will be permanent. A pull through was done on his rectum at 2 years old. At the age of 5 he had open heart surgery. He cannot attend school and still suffers from these problems. . . ."[72] Ultimately Yeatts asked physicians at the M.C.V. Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, "if radiation exposure I had could cause my son's defects. The doctors asked me why I did not tell them about the radiation exposure when my son was born. They said my son would have to have close check-ups for other problems that could come up."[73] The Veterans Administration denied Yeatts any service-connected benefits. "It is not enough for the Government to use me for a guinea pig," he said, "but to cause something to children years later is more than I can take."[74] ------ 52. Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers}, p. 34. 53. For detailed account of role played by Human Resources Research Office in the U.S. nuclear testing program, see Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers}. 54. U.S. Army, "Exercise Desert Rock Information and Guide," 1951, p. 1. 55. Ibid., p. 8. 56. Ibid., p. 19. 57. Ibid., pp. 9-11. 58. Military Liaison Committee Memorandum MLC 31.4, July 16, 1951, pp. 1, 2. 59. AEC memo by General Manager M. W. Boyer, September 20, 1951. 60. William Bires, interview, March 1981. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. USAF Brigadier General A. R. Luedecke to Director, AEC Division of Military Application, March 7, 1952. 66. Shields Warren, M.D., "Draft Staff Paper on Troop Participation in Operation Tumbler-Snapper," AEC memo, March 25, 1952. 67. Gordon Dean to Brigadier General H. B. Loper, April 2, 1952. 68. Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers}, p. 58. 69. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, May 14, 1952. 70. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, summer 1980, p. 12. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 74. Ibid., p. 14. ------ Operation Upshot-Knothole As the U.S. Government prepared for "Operation Upshot-Knothole," slated for the spring and summer of 1953, civilian restraints over nuclear testing continued to erode. In a meeting between the AEC and the Department of Defense it was established that "in the forthcoming tests the usual limits of physical exposure to weapons effects would probably be exceeded." The AEC commissioners then acquiesced to a suggestion "that responsibility for the physical safety of the troops participating in the exercise be delegated to the DOD [Department of Defense] and that the DOD be informed of the possibility that exceeding the normal limits of exposure to radiation or pressure might endanger the participating personnel."[75] Servicemen at the atomic tests were thus left to the tender mercies of the Department of Defense. Official notes depicted AEC chairman Gordon Dean's view that "since the DOD apparently considered it necessary to conduct the exercises in this manner, the AEC was not in a position to recommend that the normal limits [of radiation exposure and blast pressure] be observed."[76] For good measure, the AEC commissioners endorsed plans for a joint announcement that the Defense Department would be taking responsibility for the safety of troops during the forthcoming series of atom bomb tests in Nevada.[77] As the newly elected President, Dwight Eisenhower, prepared to unveil his "Atoms for Peace" program, promoting use of nuclear energy for electric power, the AEC and Pentagon put finishing touches on Operation Upshot-Knothole. During the spring and early summer of 1953 a total of eleven nuclear test shots sent mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert, concluding with a sixty-one-kiloton explosion code- named Climax. In less than three months the Nevada blasts had unleashed a cumulative force of over 250 kilotons--about twenty times the power of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. About seventeen thousand military personnel participated in Upshot- Knothole. Routinely thousands were in trenches within two miles of ground zero as a nuclear bomb exploded; obeying orders, they moved toward the blast center inside of an hour after detonation in mock attack. The exercises even included, for the first time, direct charges immediately after detonation. The Pentagon had nearly doubled the AEC's prior theoretical limit for radiation exposure of the servicemen, raising it to six roentgens.[78] Meanwhile A-test overseers had been experimenting with nonhuman subjects as well--sheep, rabbits, and pigs confined at varying distances from the blast site. Scores of porkers were clothed with specially fitted "uniforms" made out of standard Army material, to test for protection of their skin. One of the more bizarre expenditures came when one set of pigs had to be refitted with new uniforms after they outgrew their originals while waiting for the weather to break.[79] Former Army sergeant Cecil G. Dunn, an Operation Upshot-Knothole veteran, recounted from his home in Pensacola, Florida, "After the blast, they marched us to ground zero. I will never forget the smell after that shot. I have no idea how much radiation was there. I know of no film badges. I don't remember seeing any of the men wearing any. I know I never had one." Recalling subsequent chronic headaches lasting years, followed by nosebleeds, a nervous breakdown, festering spots on his legs, and dizzy spells, Dunn said: "I feel like I am drunk all the time, but I don't drink. I tire very easily now. . . . All I have ever asked is to live like other people. But I cannot help blaming the Government for subjecting me to nuclear testing without warning me of the potential consequences and I will always wonder why it happened."[80] Outside the borders of the Nevada Test Site fallout clouds intensified as Operation Upshot-Knothole progressed. On April 25, 1953, four and half hours after a forty-three-kiloton[81] blast named Simon, a spot outside the Nevada Test Site boundaries registered 460 milliroentgens per hour along Route 93--nineteen miles north of the Nevada town of Glendale. The potential dose was far in excess of the current standards set by governmental agencies. Caught off guard, the federal government hastily set up roadblocks. A report by the U.S. Public Health Service estimated about fourteen hundred people were living in the immediate fallout area. Starting nine hours after the Simon explosion, for 150 minutes, traffic was stopped on major roads; out of some 250 vehicles stopped and checked for radiation, 40 were judged to require decontamination. A Greyhound bus, bound for Las Vegas with 30 passengers, gave off readings of 250 milliroentgens outside, 160 milliroentgens inside.[82] Three hours after the blast the tiny town of Riverdale registered readings of sixteen milliroentgens an hour.[83] An Armed Forces Special Weapons Project report, which was to remain secret for twenty-five years, commented: "The amount of fallout was expected to be much larger than usual. However, due to the fact that no populated communities were expected to be in its path, the decision was made to fire on schedule."[84] But the Simon fallout cloud also passed over Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it encountered a tumultuous thunderstorm over upstate New York, southern Vermont, and parts of western Massachusetts. It was one of the heaviest flash storms in memory, bringing down torrents of rain.[85] Two days after the Simon explosion a group of students at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York--twenty-three hundred miles from the blast--noticed Geiger counters at their school radiochemistry lab were registering high readings. They went outside to discover that the previous evening's rain had brought down large amounts of fallout. Radiochemistry Professor Herbert Clark called the AEC, where an official first thought Clark was joking.[86] But students systematically measured the area for radiation. Some samples from rain puddles showed 270,000 times more radioactivity than usually found in drinking water. Tests from city reservoir water showed levels 2,630 times higher than normal. Professor Clark and the Rensselaer students also discovered another problem. Radioactive fallout clung to the roof and walls despite hours of scrubbing; the surface radioactivity in Troy/Albany was comparable to measurements taken two hundred to five hundred miles from the point of the Simon detonation in Nevada.[87] In the mid-sixties that contamination would lead to a bitter controversy over health damage in the wake of bomb testing. ------ 75. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, December 23, 1952. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers}, p. 57. 79. Ibid., pp. 61-63. 80. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, spring 1980, p. 3. 81. In contrast to a continued official listing of forty-three kilotons, documents declassified in the late 1970s refer to the Simon test as a 51.5-kiloton blast. ({The Tribune} [Salt Lake], New York Times News Service, August 12, 1979.) 82. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), New York Times News Service, August 12, 1979. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ernest Sternglass, {Secret Fallout} (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 1-5. See also articles by Herbert M. Clark in {Science}, May 7, 1954, pp. 619-622, and by Clark, et al., in {Journal American Water Works Association}, November 1954, pp. 1101-1111. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. ------ "Dirty Harry" Some downwind residents became apprehensive after the Simon blast when they witnessed the official concern over fallout levels on the highways outside of the test site. But the worst was yet to come that spring when the U.S. Government detonated a thirty-two-kiloton atomic bomb from atop a tower at the Nevada Test Site. The code name was Harry; people downwind now remember it with bitterness as "Dirty Harry." As sixty-eight-year-old St. George resident William Sleight recorded the event in his diary: {May 19, 1953:} Beautiful morning. We left St. George at 4 a.m. for Las Vegas, Nevada. We were watching for the A-Bomb explosion on the desert north of Las Vegas. At 5 a.m., just dawn, we saw the flash which lit up the skies, a beautiful red, visible for hundreds of miles away. It was a beautiful sight, a hundred miles or more away from it. I had my car radio on and at 5:01 a.m. the announcer on KFI, Los Angeles, Calif., said at 5 a.m. the bomb had been exploded and that it was visible at that station, and also in Idaho. I drove for ten minutes, then stopped the car on the roadside, got out and soon after we heard the report of the blast. It rumbled as thunder, not quite the same as other blasts we have heard. This is the 9th in a series of ten, another next week. It makes me shudder when I think of what misery we may face when men start dropping these terrific bombs on our cities. Some fanatics are now clamoring for their use in Korea. After we came back on Highway 91, we were stopped and a young man examined our car with an instrument to see if we had picked up any radioactive dust while traveling on the Highway. Found none so we missed a free car wash (which would have been appreciated). . . . Returned to St. George in a high wind which seems to always follow these explosions.[88] Winds easily carried radioactive fallout the 135 miles to William Sleight's home in St. George. Atomic Energy Commission monitors picked up readings of six thousand milliroentgens in the town, where news bulletins broadcast the agency's sudden advice to stay indoors from 9:00 A.M. till noon. Monitoring crews stopped about one hundred cars heading north from St. George; many vehicles were washed down in an attempt at decontamination. The fallout was coming down so hard, AEC scientists later reported at a confidential government conference, that the commission's workers gave up on washing off the cars in St. George until the radioactive particles stopped falling.[89] The AEC, meanwhile, told area media that "radiation had not reached a hazardous level."[90] In St. George the blanket of fallout left a bad taste in many people's mouths--in more ways than one. Lifetime residents of the town reported, for the first time, an oddly metallic sort of taste in the air.[91] (This condition would surface again at Three Mile Island, twenty-six years later.) Forty miles farther east, according to another secret AEC report, at least five residents developed symptoms matching signs of radiation sickness from high doses. The classified AEC report also said that in the town of La Verkin, twenty miles northeast of St. George, goats turned blue after clouds of fallout wafted through their grazing area.[92] The day after Dirty Harry, downwind residents barraged the AEC with complaints. "Reverberations from the atomic tests in Nevada Tuesday echoed in Washington Wednesday as Southern Utah residents protested to Representative Douglas R. Stringfellow (R-Utah) about radiation contamination in the area," narrated {The} (Salt Lake) {Tribune}.[93] Congressman Stringfellow followed up by asking the AEC to stop the Nevada test program because of fallout. The AEC refused. (The next year Stringfellow lost his race for reelection.) Two days after the Harry explosion, while AEC commissioners discussed the heavy fallout dumped on St. George and vicinity, an AEC worker tried to obtain names of milk producers in the area and failed. "It was just as well," he reported in an agency memo. "I was afraid it would create a disturbance."[94] Rulan (Boots) Cox, operator of Cox Dairy in St. George for thirty years beginning in 1949, had radiation monitoring equipment at his dairy the entire time of atmospheric nuclear testing upwind. He sent samples to federal addresses on a regular basis, but was never informed of results.[95] New downwind samples of milk initially showed high levels of radioactivity. By the time the milk was boiled in Las Vegas and Los Alamos laboratories, AEC researchers found little radioactivity; the iodine 131 was being destroyed in the lab heating process.[96] After the Harry test the AEC was faced with a new problem. Commissioner Henry D. Smyth, according to agency minutes, "was concerned about the public relations aspects of the tests, especially in view of the St. George, Utah, incident and the large number of shots already fired." The other AEC commissioner in attendance, Eugene M. Zuckert, also perceived nascent difficulties. "A serious psychological problem has arisen, and the AEC must be prepared to study an alternate to holding future tests at the Nevada Test Site. In the present frame of mind of the public, it would take only a single illogical and unforeseeable incident to preclude holding any future tests in the United States."[97] The Pentagon, however, pushed hard for the AEC to stand firm. At a joint meeting in late May 1953, according to classified minutes, Defense Department representatives conveyed "the opinion that AEC is making a serious mistake in over-emphasizing the effects of fall-out resulting from recent tests." One general criticized official measures such as washing down cars and urging residents to stay indoors for a few hours after the Harry test; he complained that "the precautions taken by AEC were extreme and caused undue public concern."[98] Meanwhile, on the morning of May 27, AEC chairman Gordon Dean met with the Commander-in-Chief. President Eisenhower, Dean recorded in his diary, "expressed some concern, not too serious, but made the suggestion that we leave `thermonuclear' out of press releases and speeches. Also `fusion' and `hydrogen.'" In the wake of hydrogen explosions in the Marshall Islands during the past year, and with more sophisticated nuclear weapons tests scheduled, Eisenhower instructed the AEC's top executive to keep the public "confused as to `fission' and `fusion.'"[99] ------ 88. William Sleight, diary, made available to authors with permission of family through Citizens' Call organization. 89. {Chicago Tribune}, April 1-5, 1979, published as booklet "Radiation," p. 11. 90. {Washington County News} (Utah), May 21, 1953. 91. Preston Truman, interview, February 1981. As state director of Citizens' Call and a lifelong resident of Utah, Truman said he had heard many accounts by St. George residents recalling a metallic taste after the Harry test. 92. {Deseret News}, September 5, 1979. 93. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), May 21, 1953. 94. {Chicago Tribune}, April 1-5, 1979, "Radiation," p. 9. 95. Ibid. 96. {Deseret News}, September 5, 1979. 97. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, May 22, 1953. 98. AEC-MLC Joint Meeting Minutes, May 28, 1953. At the same meeting Military Liaison Committee chairman Robert LeBaron said that the government "must avoid arousing public fears to the point of large-scale public opposition to the continental tests." 99. Gordon Dean, diary, May 27, 1953. ------ Fallout on Livestock Downwind of the Nevada Test Site the epidemics of leukemia and cancer among residents would come later. Animals, however, were immediately affected. The AEC quietly paid a few hundred dollars to owners of some horses that suffered beta radiation burns in 1953.[100] But the concern about livestock burns was soon overshadowed as sheep began dropping dead--in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented rapidity. One hundred fifty miles from the test site, on Wheeler Mountain land owned by George Swallow in Nevada, about seventeen hundred sheep grazed on tender grass. It was lambing time in spring 1953. On the third Tuesday morning in May, George Swallow, his brother Dick, and a ranch hand named Lee Whitlock watched a pink fallout cloud (from the Harry detonation) drift overhead, toward the Utah line, Air Force jets following behind. Within a few weeks five hundred of the females in the flock of seventeen hundred sheep were dead. Sixty-five percent of new lambs were stillborn.[101] The Swallows owned eleven sheep herds of the same size; the herd that sustained the high ratio of deaths and dead births was the one on Wheeler Mountain when the Harry blast fallout passed through.[102] George Swallow expressed his suspicions to the AEC. "We told Mr. Swallow that our experts have assured us that this sort of thing can't happen," AEC acting field manager Joe Sanders informed national headquarters.[103] But the AEC's own files were filled with classified descriptions of similar incidents throughout Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. One Utah sheepherder reported twenty-five hundred stillbirths. Cattle and horses developed lesions and severe sores in large numbers.[104] Dr. Stephen Brower was Iron County agricultural agent in southwestern Utah at the time. The Atomic Energy Commission stressed to Dr. Brower that the federal government had no intention of being held accountable for herd losses. Word first came from the chief of the AEC's Biology Branch of the Division of Biological Medicine, Dr. Paul B. Pearson. Brower recalled that Pearson "told me . . . that the AEC could under no circumstances afford to have a claim established against them and have that precedent set. And he further indicated that the sheepmen could not expect under any circumstances to be reimbursed for that reason."[105] In Cedar City, Utah, a U.S. Public Health Service veterinarian, Dr. Arthur Wolff, studied area sheep in June 1953. "My main concern was whether there was radioactivity involved," he recalled. "We autopsied a couple of animals, and I took some specimens back with me and took some [radiation] measurements. I was able to determine, yes, there was a relatively high level of radiation in the Iodine-131 in the thyroid and some radiation on the wool of these sheep.[106] Cedar City sheepherder Kern Bulloch described what happened with his herd in 1953 this way: We were over at Coyote Pass right next to the bomb site just herding our sheep. One morning we were sitting in the saddle there, and some airplanes come up and one of them dropped a bomb. Jesus, it was bright! I put my hands up like that and you could doggone near see your bones. And then that cloud come right over top of us, it mushroomed right over our camp and our herd. And we were sitting there--'course we didn't know a thing about radiation or bombs or anything else. Pretty soon here comes some jeeps with Army personnel, and they said to us, "My golly, you fellas are in a hot spot." We didn't even know what they were talking about. Then we started driving the sheep back to Cedar [City], and we just started losing them. We got them in the yard there to get their lambs out, and gosh, every time you'd go in there, there'd be 20 or 30 dead sheep. The lambs were born with little legs, kind of potbellied. Some of them didn't have any wool, kind of a skin instead of wool. We figure we lost between 1,200 and 1,500 head close to half our herd. Later, the scientists come, we took them up to a pile of bones and I remember putting a Geiger counter down. Somebody said, "Are they hot?" And one of the scientists said, "Hot? I'll say! This needle just about hit the post."[107] Kern Bulloch remembered, nearly three decades later, "we just started to losing so many lambs that my father--[who] was alive at that time--just about went crazy. He had never seen anything like it before. Neither had I; neither had anybody else."[108] Twenty-seven years passed before some semblance of the full story reached beyond the memories of downwind herders and officials privy to classified government files. In 1980 the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations provided the sort of overview kept from a national spotlight for decades. The committee reported that, at the time of the two heaviest fallout tests in Nevada during the spring of 1953, there were 11,710 sheep grazing in a zone from 40 miles north to 160 miles east of the test site. "Of these sheep, 1,420 lambing ewes (12.1 percent) and 2,970 new lambs (25.4 percent) died during the spring and summer of 1953."[109] This sheep mortality rate was considerably above normal.[110] But the government denied that there was anything amiss--refusing to admit radiation was involved. "It seemed like a policy decision had been made, and federal officials were there to implement it," Dr. Brower told us. "The government just wanted to cover up."[111] Although the AEC profusely insisted in its public statements throughout the 1950s and beyond that fallout had nothing to do with sheep ills, a different assessment later came from Dr. Harold Knapp, a scientist who served with the AEC Fallout Studies Branch in the early 1960s. "The simplest explanation of the primary cause of death in the lambing ewes is irradiation of the ewe's gastrointestinal tract by beta particles from all the fission products that were ingested by the sheep along with open range forage," Dr. Knapp concluded. Radiation doses to the sheep internal tracts "are calculated to be in the range of thousands of rads, even though the external gamma dose to the sheep was within the 3.9 r limit per test series established by the Atomic Energy Commission as acceptable for persons living in areas adjacent to the test site."[112] The 1980 House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee report disclosed that its researchers had uncovered "substantial documentation from the files of the Government veterinarians and scientists assigned the task of investigating the 1953 sheep deaths, which revealed the Government's concerted effort to disregard and to discount all evidence of a causal relationship between exposure of the sheep to radioactive fallout and their deaths."[113] Recently declassified minutes of a secret June 10, 1953, AEC meeting verify that the commissioners were aware that "sheep grazing in an area approximately 50 miles from the site were determined to have beta burns in their nostrils and on their backs and 500-1,000 out of a total of approximately 10,000 were reported to have died while being moved to grazing lands in Utah."[114] But the AEC commissioners proved more concerned with publicity than health problems of either sheep or humans.[115] At a July 7 meeting Commissioner Henry Smyth observed that public concern could be allayed by comparing bomb fallout "to radiation incurred in the normal medical use of X-rays."[116] It was a public-relations angle that proved to be a favorite for the AEC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and utilities operating nuclear power plants across the nation in future decades. But the analogy--comparing X rays with radioactivity from nuclear fission--is highly misleading. An atomic bomb, or a nuclear reactor, produces radioactive alpha and beta particles that can be deadly if inhaled or swallowed even in minute quantities; the alpha and beta "internal emitters" are not present in the penetrating X rays used for medical purposes. The comparison with X rays also falsely assumes that bomb fallout or emissions from nuclear plants are evenly distributed in the population. A number of factors--including weather conditions and radioactive contamination of the ecological food chain[117]--can subject some animals or people to higher amounts of radioactivity. Twenty-six years later the report by congressional investigators quoted from the AEC's conclusive press statement about the sheep, issued on January 6, 1954: On the basis of information now available, it is evident that radioactivity from atomic tests was not responsible for deaths and illness among sheep in areas adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds last Spring, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission reported today. The AEC findings, reached as the result of extensive research studies, was concurred in by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Bureau of Animal Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Prior to issuance by the AEC, the report was reviewed by the Department of Health, State of Utah. Special studies were conducted by veterinary and medical research scientists at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and Hanford Works and the University of Tennessee to determine whether radioactivity contributed to the deaths.[118] But some of the AEC's own experts disagreed. Veterinarian Dr. Richard Thompsett, for example, reported that lesions on downwind sheep typified effects of beta radiation--and that the atomic tests had been a factor in the mass deaths of sheep.[119] Dr. Thompsett's report was never published. Dr. Stephen Brower recounted that Thompsett's "report was picked up--even his own personal copy--and he was told to rewrite it and eliminate any reference to speculation about radiation damage or effects."[120] Follow-up research by scientists at the Los Alamos lab--C. Lushbaugh, J. F. Spaulding, and D. B. Hale--concluded that among sheep downwind from the Nevada Test Site "the skin lesion was remarkably similar, histologically, to severe beta ray burns as demonstrated experimentally." The researchers added, "It would appear from these gross observations that this and similar lesions seen in the field . . . confirm well enough to a presumptive diagnosis of a radiation- produced lesion."[121] Publicly the AEC stuck to its story--a story that would be repeated time and again to farmers and ranchers downwind from nuclear facilities. In his role as county agricultural agent in southwest Utah, Dr. Brower accompanied sheep rancher Doug Clark to talk with federal administrators. "Doug raised some questions with the team of scientists, one of whom was a colonel," Dr. Brower remembered many years later. The colonel "seemed to be the leading spokesman to kind of press this issue that it couldn't have been radiation. Doug asked him some fairly technical questions about the effects of radiation on internal organs that he'd gotten from other veterinarians."[122] In response the colonel called Doug Clark a "dumb sheepman" and told him he was "stupid--he couldn't understand the answer if it was given to him, and for just 10 or 15 minutes, just kind of berated him rather than answer the question."[123] A week after the Atomic Energy Commission's unequivocal public denial that sheep had been harmed by atomic test fallout, AEC officials faced angry livestock owners in a conference room of the Cedar City firehouse. The January 13, 1954, meeting included a dozen or so federal officials and a roughly equal number of area livestock owners. "We know that practically all the sheep that range in that area had these effects," said a local rancher. "We fed these sheep corn and tried to keep them up. I couldn't keep my sheep up where they were able to raise a lamb. I had never seen it before.[124] "We would like to have an answer for you," responded AEC biological medicine chief Dr. Paul Pearson. "We don't have any explanation for it. There have been instances of disease coming in that caused different effects, we don't know what happened."[125] "There is very little protein in corn and they could be low in protein," interjected Leo K. Bustad, a General Electric Company envoy from the AEC-controlled Hanford Nuclear Reservation, prime production center for weapons-grade plutonium. "How was their flesh?"[126] Refusing to be drawn into a discussion about his sheep's flesh with the GE representative, the rancher said that his sheep got all the protein they needed from grazing. "Range is white sage and black sage. . . . Sage is very high in protein."[127] And so it went. "The body dose radiation that these sheep got is around five roentgens," explained GE's Bustad midway through the meeting. "You can get more roentgens from a fluoroscope or an X-ray machine than these sheep got through body radiation." Bustad failed to note that the sheep ingested radioactive particles into their bodies, which does not occur during an X ray. Nor did he mention that five roentgens is a hazardous dose in either case.[128] A year later the Bulloch family filed suit in federal court, suing the U.S. Government for the loss of fifteen hundred sheep because of fallout. When the case came to trial in 1956, the federal government presented testimony that the sheep died of natural causes.[129] During initial investigations the Bullochs had heard researchers attribute the sheep deaths to radiation. "A lot of those scientists that checked the sheep and admitted it, when they got to court they had a different story," commented McRae Bulloch.[130] The Bulloch family lost their court suit. Twenty-five years later no downwind rancher had been able to collect a penny from the federal government for a single dead sheep.[131] ------ 100. {Deseret News}, February 15, 1979. 101. {Chicago Tribune}, April 1-5, 1979, "Radiation," p. 10. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. vii. 106. {Deseret News}, February 20, 1979. 107. {Life}, June 1980, p. 36. 108. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. vii. 109. Ibid., p. 3. 110. Dr. Stephen Brower, interview, March 1981. When we spoke with him, Dr. Brower was a professor at Brigham Young University. 111. Ibid. 112. Dr. Harold Knapp, "Sheep Deaths in Utah and Nevada Following the 1953 Nuclear Tests," quoted in {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 4. 113. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 4. 114. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, June 10, 1953. 115. On October 26, 1953, the AEC convened a secret meeting at Los Alamos to take up the question of sheep deaths. The scientific method was not of paramount concern as the AEC's chief of the Weapons Radiation Effects Branch presided. Dr. George Dunning stressed to the assembled scientists the need for getting together a self-exonerating report for AEC commissioner Eugene Zuckert. As recorded by federal veterinarian Dr. Arthur Wolff, the influential Dr. Dunning informed the meeting's participants that a firm statement--concluding there was no connection between the nuclear tests and the sheep woes--would be necessary "before Commissioner Zuckert [would] open the `purse strings' for future continental weapons tests." Scientists present tacitly agreed to go along with such a declaration, despite the opinions of some that a judgment would be premature, with the understanding it would be tagged "for internal use only" within the AEC. See {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 7. 116. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, July 7, 1953. 117. See {Washington Post}, November 11, 1979, for Dick Brukenfeld's article "A New German Study Challenges the NRC Assurances," on food chain concentrations of radiation. 118. "AEC Report on Sheep Losses Adjacent to the Nevada Proving Grounds," January 6, 1954; quoted in {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 4. 119. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 6.; {Deseret News}, February 15, 1979. 120. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 6. 121. {Deseret News}, February 15, 1979. 122. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. viii. 123. Ibid. It was, as Dr. Brower put it, "a tough kind of experience for Doug. I remember he left there to go out to his ranch to meet with the loan company to account for what sheep he had left, and within a couple of hours, he was dead from a heart attack. I think that . . . part of the stress that he experienced at that time was that abuse that he had received from these officials." 124. Minutes of livestock owners' meeting with AEC officials, Firehouse, Conference Room, Cedar City, Utah, January 13, 1954. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. {Deseret News}, February 20, 1979. 130. {Life}, June 1980, p. 36. 131. Bruce Findley of Salt Lake City (current attorney for downwind sheep ranchers), interview, March 1981; {Deseret News}, February 20, 1979. ------ Unwanted Controversy Anxious to counter its increasing credibility problems, in 1954 the Atomic Energy Commission entered into an off-site radioactivity surveillance agreement with the U.S. Public Health Service.[132] Not until 1979 did the terms of the AEC-PHS arrangement become public knowledge. After award-winning journalist Gordon Eliot White, Washington correspondent for the Salt Lake City daily {The Deseret News}, dislodged more than fifteen thousand A-test documents he reported that "PHS furnished trained personnel who worked under AEC funding and under strict AEC control." Their mission was not to ensure public health, but rather "to protect the test site from controversy."[133] The 1954 pact prohibited the PHS from any public release of its radiation data or "dissemination of information connected with activities under this agreement, except as prescribed by the AEC . . ." At the end of the year AEC tossed in a stipulation that any unauthorized release of information to the public could subject "the Public Health Service, its agents, employees, or subcontractors, to criminal liability" under the Atomic Energy Act.[134] The AEC-PHS off-site monitoring agreement remained in effect not only during the last nine years (1954 to 1962) of atmospheric nuclear blasts at the Nevada Test Site, but also for the first eight years (1963 to 1970) of large underground nuclear bomb tests in Nevada.[135] Those underground detonations also spewed large quantities of radioactivity downwind for hundreds of miles.[136] Despite the intense and pervasive downwind fallout from the Nevada Test Site in 1953 Washington remained enthusiastic for more continental nuclear weapons detonations. The prevailing sentiment at the federal level was aptly expressed in a letter to the acting chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Thomas E. Murray, written by AEC Biology and Medicine Advisory Committee head Dr. Elvin C. Stakman on March 25, 1954: Paraphrasing General Forrest's famous saying, "Victory goes to the nation that gits there fastest with the mostest and bestest weapons." This is no less true in the atomic age. It is therefore essential to continue the Nevada Proving Grounds in order to achieve maximum speed in the development of weapons. Speed is essential to national survival. In emergencies such as this some risks, immediate and long term, must be accepted. These risks should be frankly and publicly acknowledged. However, the policy of minimizing these risks must be continued in both the local and national interest.[137] Perhaps some unlikely victims of the Nevada test program were the Hollywood cast and film crew of Howard Hughes's production {The Conqueror}. In 1954 John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead, and producer-director Dick Powell filmed on the sandy dunes outside of St. George, Utah. They were there for three months. A quarter century later John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Dick Powell had all died of cancer. Wayne, a heavy smoker, succumbed to cancer of his lungs, throat, and stomach in 1979; Hayward died of skin, breast and uterine cancer in 1975; Moorehead passed away from uterine cancer in 1974. Another star of the movie, Pedro Armendariz, developed kidney cancer in 1960 and was later struck with terminal cancer of the lymphatic system. Dick Powell died from lymph cancer when it spread to his lungs in 1963.[138] The coincidence of these cases was placed into a larger pattern when {People} magazine researched the subsequent health of the entire Hollywood entourage that had worked on location in St. George. They found that out of 220 people in the cast and crew, ninety-one had contracted cancer by late 1980, and half of the cancer victims had died of the disease.[139] (This survey did not include the couple of hundred local American Indians who served as extras in the film.) "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic," remarked University of Utah radiological health director Dr. Robert C. Pendleton.[140] For two decades Pendleton had been warning that radioactive "hot spots" remained in numerous Utah locations, even after atmospheric testing had ceased.[141] Added Dr. Ronald S. Oseas of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center: "It is known that radiation contributes to the risk of cancer. With these numbers, it is highly probable that the {Conqueror} group was affected by that additive effect."[142] Ellen Powell, Michael Wayne, and Susan Hayward's son Tim Barker had accompanied their parents to the set in 1954. Tim Barker told of his mother's protracted cancer: "She was in a fetal position, and she had lost her swallowing reflex, she had pneumonia and she had lost her hair." In 1968 he had a benign tumor removed from his mouth. Michael Wayne later suffered from skin cancer. Barker echoed the sentiments of many residents downwind from the test site when he asked, "If the Government knew there was a possibility of exposure, why didn't they just warn us?"[143] Federal nuclear authorities had long been aware of the deep resentment that had taken hold in numerous communities within a radius of several hundred miles of the Nevada Test Site. But the specter of culpability for the cancer deaths of such popular public figures caused concern at usually stolid government bureaus. At the Pentagon one official of the Defense Nuclear Agency responded to the news by murmuring, "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne."[144] ------ 132. {Forgotten Guinea Pigs}, p. 18; see also pp. 19-22. 133. {Deseret News}, April 5, 1979. 134. Ibid. Summarizing the agreement, White's article added that PHS "was not permitted to set up a Nevada office until AEC approved the security arrangements, even though PHS was ordered only to measure readings outside the proving grounds. AEC retained the right of full access, at any time of day or night, to the PHS offices so commission officers could determine `security obligations (to the AEC) are being met.' The ultimate responsibility for the off-site monitoring was retained by AEC . . ." 135. In 1970 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assumed operational authority for monitoring outside the Nevada Test Site. What agreements the EPA endorsed in secret covenants--with the AEC and its successor atomic military agency, the U.S. Department of Energy--remained a subject of speculation for anyone except those with high security clearances. Critics noted that EPA's radiation monitoring program remained heavily staffed by former AEC officials as the 1980s began. 136. Underground nuclear test leaks information and references are in Chapter Five. 137. Dr. Elvin C. Stakman to Thomas E. Murray, March 25, 1954. 138. {People}, November 10, 1980, pp. 42-47. 139. Ibid., p. 42. 140. Ibid. 141. {The Conqueror} health statistics were especially startling because no atom bombs were exploded in Nevada the year that the movie was filmed (1954); cast and crew were exposed to residual radioactivity left by Nevada atomic tests in previous years (1951-1953). 142. {People}, November 10, 1980, p. 44. 143. Ibid., p. 46. 144. Ibid. ------ [part 5 of 18] 4 Test Fallout, Political Fallout Out in the Pacific, hydrogen bomb tests seemed far away from American communities. But the nuclear explosions there were producing unprecedented quantities of fallout--dropping on people around the world. A 1951 two-page {Life} magazine photo spread hailing "Operation Greenhouse" at Eniwetok must have sounded rather glorious to most readers: "Finally at sunup one April morning a blinding flash and shattering rumble came from the tiny atoll. The AEC was busily engaged at its mid-ocean proving ground in testing its latest products. . . ."[1] The first blast in May, code-named George and detonated from a tower on Eniwetok, proved to be a crucial building block for achieving the H-bomb. "Without such a test no one of us could have had the confidence to proceed further along speculations, inventions, and the difficult choice of the most promising possibility,"[2] Edward Teller later wrote. In the process thousands more American servicemen were exposed to atomic-fission products from nearby explosions. After the George test, U.S. Navy seaman Artie Duvall was aboard a ship ordered to ferry scientists to the blast site. The scientists wore protective garb; the Navy seamen wore jeans, and many had their shirts off in the tropical sun. Duvall and his crew took sick and began vomiting. "It was like having some terrible flu," he remembered. They were ordered to sick bay. The next day, Duvall recalled, a wardroom briefing occurred, with an officer telling the men that they had "received a lethal dose of radiation." A physician recommended weekly blood tests--which were never conducted.[3] Duvall developed skin cancer, and in 1962--unable to obtain dosimetry records--began a long battle with the government. A decade later he had a heart attack, followed by major heart surgery. He was forced to sell his house. The VA rejected his claim for service- connected benefits, telling him, "There is nothing that indicates that your heart condition is medically attributed by your physician to the history of radiation."[4] Duvall reminisced, "We had no knowledge at all of atomic bombs. I had no fear at all of radiation. I didn't even really know what radiation was."[5] At Eniwetok, when the military did raise the matter of health hazards of radiation, it did so in its customary fashion. Air Force Colonel Louis Benne--a decorated fighter pilot who received the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross Air Medal with twelve oak-leaf clusters, and Purple Heart--recalled his introduction to radiation at Eniwetok as he lay dying from internal bleeding on May 11, 1978, at the age of fifty-six: "When we arrived at Eniwetok . . . or even before we left Hawaii . . . we got a briefing that said that a lot of people were concerned about the roentgens that we would be exposed to on these atomic shots . . . The Army said there was nothing to worry about because there was no doubt in their minds that five roentgens a month is nothing . . . and even 20 is nothing. . . . Well, the funny thing is, blowing of the wind shifted and everyone got about 10 to 15 roentgens, so they had to up the roentgens to 20 on the first shot and, of course, we still had some shots to go. So, anyway, Dorothy, it was a big joke."[6] Of course to Dorothy Benne, who tape-recorded her husband's statement, it seemed a very sad joke. Another Operation Greenhouse veteran, Vernon Lee Hawthorne, was still a teenager when he boarded an Army troopship for Eniwetok. By the time he died at age thirty from pancreatic cancer at a VA hospital in Amarillo, Texas, the years of suffering had taken a severe financial as well as emotional toll on his family. "The last year he was alive, we had a total income of $400," recalled his widow Bettye Hawthorne Fronterhouse. In the face of continued VA denials of claims for benefits, "my children and I came close to starving."[7] One son developed prostate trouble; another had four tumors removed including one from the jugular vein; the youngest son underwent surgeries for a two-pound mass tumor in his groin. Four of five grandchildren required treatment for anemia. A grandson developed a tumor in his scrotum like his father's, a granddaughter developed a tumor on her back. The ills had no precedent elsewhere in the family tree.[8] Bettye Fronterhouse told a citizens' commission in Washington, "My husband should have had a right to know when he went there that he might die 10 years later from cancer at 30 years old and never have a chance to see his children grow and his grandchildren. Because we had plans for our future, but it was wiped out, taken away from us."[9] ------ 1. {Life}, June 25, 1951, pp. 28-29. 2. York, {The Advisors}, p. 77. 3. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, November/December pp. 10-11. For evidence linking radiation to heart disease, see Arthur Elkeles, M.D, "Alpha-ray Activity in Coronary Artery Discase," {Journal of the American Geriatric Society}, May 1968, pp. 576-583. 4. Ibid., p. 11. 5. Ibid., p. 10. 6. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, spring 1980, p. 2. 7. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, November/December 1979, p. 8. 8. Michael Marchino, "A Wrongful Death," {Progressive}, November 1980, pp. 9-10. 9. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 24-26. ------ Perfecting the H-Bomb In the northern section of Eniwetok Atoll, on the island of Elugelab, the U.S. constructed a large laboratory building in 1952.[10] Placed in the lab was a bulky mechanism nicknamed Mike that included fission weaponry and deuterium frozen into liquid form. The cylindrical apparatus was twenty-two feet long, with a diameter of five and a half feet, weighing a total of twenty-one tons. On the first day of November 1952 the laboratory's contents exploded with a force of over ten megatons--nearly one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. With the blast, proof existed that a hydrogen bomb was within reach. U.S. Government records listed Mike as the first detonated "experimental thermonuclear device."[11] The island on which it was situated disappeared. The experience "so unnerved Norris Bradbury, the Los Alamos director," said a later narrative of the Mike explosion, "that for a brief time he wondered if the people at Eniwetok should somehow try to conceal from their colleagues back in New Mexico [at Los Alamos] the magnitude of what had happened."[12] With the gigantic hydrogen explosions in the Pacific Ocean the fledgling Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California was gaining great importance--as was one of its prime movers, Edward Teller. Fellow physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, an opponent of H-bomb development and a rival of Teller's, came under growing attack. America was at an apex of the cold war. The arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the fears of internal subversion fomented by McCarthyism, made the AEC less prone than ever to tolerate dissension within its own ranks. That repressive atmosphere intensified in April 1953, when President Eisenhower signed an executive order launching an unprecedented far-reaching investigation into the "loyalty" of federal employees.[13] Two months later, with great fanfare, the government executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted as spies who had conspired to give American atomic secrets to the Soviets.[14] In 1954 the AEC held hearings on the matter of Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance. Oppenheimer's consultancy with the AEC was soon to expire, but this didn't prevent the AEC chairman, Lewis Strauss, from carrying on what many scientists considered a "witch hunt" against him.[15] On the basis of information supplied by the FBI, Oppenheimer was accused of guilt by association because of his long- known early contacts with Communist Party members in the 1930s. A two-year-old statement to the FBI by Teller, questioning Oppenheimer's loyalty and character, had a major influence on the hearings. Teller, although not openly attacking Oppenheimer's loyalty, cited his opposition to development of the H-bomb--implying that Oppenheimer had a "defect" in his personality.[16] The AEC then filed a report stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance. Chairman Strauss wrote the majority report echoing Teller's charge that Oppenheimer had "fundamental defects" in his character.[17] The same year that Oppenheimer was purged from the AEC, America's nuclear weapons testers returned to the Marshall Islands with hydrogen explosives portable enough to qualify as bona fide bombs. From February to May six varieties of hydrogen bombs were detonated during "Operation Castle."[18] The first and largest, code-named Bravo, was fifteen megatons. The American troops participating in Operation Castle were the first to get a close look at the H-bomb in action. Marv Hyman was aboard the U.S.S. {Curtis} on March 1, 1954, when the Bravo shot inaugurated the hydrogen bomb. The ship's crew was kept below decks for three days as Bravo's fallout fell, Hyman recalled in 1980. "We were so well-indoctrinated, we were told not to say anything," recollected Hyman. But Navy denials did not change what had occurred. "I don't know how far away we were--they never told us. There was no way to get out of the fallout when the wind came right back at us. They set up a sprinkler system on deck."[19] Seawater was used. "For three or four days we weren't allowed outside. They closed all the ports and hatches. Then they said it was `low enough' to go out. They let us go on the islands in the Eniwetok and Bikini atolls and go swimming. I saw dead sea life all over, floating around by the millions." Later, sailing into San Francisco, the U.S.S. {Curtis} remained radioactive, Hyman said. "They wouldn't let us off the ship for three days."[20] Navy seaman Robert Smith was twenty-three years old when he arrived at Bikini Island for Operation Castle. "We did not know nuclear weapons tests had already been conducted in this area. We even went swimming there," Smith recalled in 1979 from his home in Del, Oklahoma. "At the time, most of us did not even know what an H-bomb was."[21] ------ 10. For a revealing planning document for the 1952 hydrogen tests at Eniwetok, see "Thermonuclear Research at the University of California Radiation Laboratory," Director of Military Application, AEC 425/20, Washington, D.C., June 13,1952; quoted in York, {The Advisors}, p. 82. 11. {Announced US Nuclear Tests}, p. 6. 12. McPhee, {Curve of Binding Energy}, p. 77. A key American designer of nuclear warheads, Theodore Taylor, later mused: "The theorist's world is a world of the best people and the worst of possible results." (McPhee, {Curve of Binding Energy}, p. 87.) 13. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, {The Fifties: The Way We Really Were} (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 405. 14. For accounts of the Rosenberg case that challenge the government's charges, see Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir, {Invitation to an Inquest} (New York: Doubleday, 1965); Robert and Michael Meeropol, {We Are Your Sons} (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). 15. Carolyn Kopp, "The Origins of the American Scientific Debate over Fallout Hazards," {Social Studies of Science} (1979): 411 (hereafter cited as "Debate over Fallout Hazards"). 16. P. M. Stern, {The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial} (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). See also D. J. Keveles, {The Physicists} (New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 380-382. 17. {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, September 1954, pp. 275-277. 18. More than a quarter century after Operation Castle there were indications that the U.S. Government was not unreservedly proud of it. When, in cooperation with the nation's nuclear weapons design labs, the Department of Energy published an official list of American nuclear tests through the end of 1979, the listing of Operation Castle omitted "yield range" for four of the test series' six hydrogen blasts. The omissions occurred for hydrogen weapons tests code-named Romeo, Union, Yankee, and Nectar--which exploded at a combined power of over thirty- two megatons, according to a U.S. Government report declassified at the end of 1972. See {Announced US Nuclear Tests}, in comparison to "Joint Force Seven" cited in York, {The Advisors}, p. 86. 19. {Arizona Daily Star}, April 13, 1980. 20. Ibid. 21. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, November/December 1979, p. 7 ------ The Islanders As the U.S. Government readied Operation Castle, it informed the chief of Rongelap Atoll about the nuclear tests scheduled for a farther west part of the Marshall Islands; no precautions were recommended. Eighty-six people were living on Rongelap when the Bravo H-bomb exploded. Winds were heading in their general direction.[22] Like other people living on Rongelap, magistrate John Anjain noticed white flecks that looked like snow falling around them; soon the ground was covered with a layer of fallout over an inch thick.[23] "We saw a flash of lightning in the west like a second sun rising," Anjain said as he talked of memories still vivid in 1980. "We heard a loud explosion and within minutes the ground began to shake. A few hours later the radioactive fallout began to drop on the people, into the drinking water, and on the food. The children played in the colorful ash-like powder. They did not know what it was and many erupted on their arms and faces."[24] On the neighboring Rongerik Atoll, U.S. monitoring equipment capable of measuring one hundred millirads per hour went off scale.[25] The Americans put on extra clothing and ducked inside a tightly closed building; within thirty-four hours, all twenty-eight Americans on Rongerik were evacuated.[26] Back on Rongelap, which was closer to the Bravo blast, the people were not removed until more than two days had passed from the time the fallout first hit.[27] "Our people began to be very sick," John Anjain remembered. "They vomited, burns showed on their skin, and people's hair began to fall out."[28] The AEC's own reports later conceded severe health damage, admitting to eighteen deaths among nineteen children in the Marshall Islands who received one-thousand-rad thyroid doses from U.S. hydrogen bomb tests in the area.[29] (Comparable dosages of radiation were absorbed by young children living in St. George, Utah, in 1953, according to secret estimates by top AEC officials--who calculated that thirty cases of cancer would be expected to develop among St. George residents as a result.)[30] Out of twenty-two Rongelap children exposed to the fallout from the Bravo test, nineteen have had thyroid nodules surgically removed.[31] Nor was the damage confined to thyroids, as Anjain knew from grief- stricken personal experience. His son Lekoj, one year old when the fallout settled on Rongelap in 1954, was nineteen years old when he died of leukemia.[32] In 1957, amid widespread publicity, Rongelapese were allowed to return to their atoll. But Rongelap women still experienced a stillbirth and miscarriage rate twice that of other Marshallese women who had not been exposed to the fallout. And radiation in their bodies increased rapidly. A 1961 Brookhaven study found body radiation levels had risen to sixty times normal for cesium; strontium 90 levels rose sixfold.[33] Other Marshall Islanders were also affected. A day after the Bravo test mistlike fallout reached Utirik Atoll, about 275 miles east of the test site at Bikini. After two more days passed, the U.S. Navy evacuated Utirik's 157 residents.[34] In a press release after the Bravo explosion the AEC declared: "During the course of a routine atomic test in the Marshall Islands, 28 United States personnel and 236 residents were transported from neighboring atolls to Kwajalein Island according to a plan as a precautionary measure. These individuals were unexpectedly exposed to some radioactivity. There were no burns. All were reported well. After completion of the atomic tests, the natives will be returned to their homes."[35] The Marshall Islands were in the category of a protective "trust territory" arrangement engineered by the United States Government. The U.S. had signed a United Nations trusteeship agreement under which the American government had pledged to "promote the social advancement of the inhabitants, and to this end shall protect the rights and fundamental freedoms of all elements of the population without discrimination; protect the health of the inhabitants . . ."[36] Some Rongelapese, like other Marshall Island natives, became bitter. "The American people used the Marshallese people as though they were animals," charged Mitsuwa Anjain, who was twenty-nine years old and mother of five when the Bravo fallout arrived at Rongelap. "While I am still alive, I can never forget what a horrible fate the American people inflicted on the Marshallese people."[37] Almira Matayoshi was eighteen years old when the fallout rained on her home in Rongelap. We interviewed her in Hawaii in 1980, with the help of a translator. A friendly woman in her mid-forties, Matayoshi had lost four babies at birth after the bomb explosion--one of which came into the world with no arms or legs. "The people who are testing don't care about people on Rongelap and did not care then," she said. "I will not forget what happened to the people of Rongelap."[38] And Nelson Anjain, fifty-two, a Rongelap tribal chief, told us: "The U.S. has to think about what it did to the people of Rongelap. Department of Energy came to the islands, knew everything was contaminated, but did not tell us. . . . They come and check people but no report, no nothing."[39] For 166 natives of the Bikini isles, where the United States detonated twenty-three atomic and hydrogen bombs over a period of a dozen years, a never-ending nightmare began with the first nuclear blast in 1946. At that time, reflecting the American government's promises, {United States News} reported: "Experts are sure the radioactive danger is temporary, and eventually the islanders will be permitted to return."[40] Relocated to the barren Rongerik Atoll in 1946, the Bikinians lived through food shortages as they tried to adapt to new surroundings within one-half square mile of dry land. Malnutrition followed for years. In 1948 they were shuttled to Kili Atoll.[41] During the 1970s, after a widely fanfared return of Bikinians to their home islands, high concentrations of radioactivity were still found to be present in the land and food of the atoll. The U.S. Government removed the 140 residents of Bikini in 1978 after determining that dangerous amounts of strontium 90 and cesium 137 were being absorbed into their bodies.[42] In 1981 the New York Times News Service noted, "No one lives on any of the islands in the Bikini atoll." Elected Bikinian legislator Henchi Balos issued a March 1981 statement lamenting that "our land is radioactive." Said Balos: "We never wanted to leave. If we cannot go back to Bikini, the United States must pay for taking and destroying our homeland, for the hardship and suffering we have experienced and for its failure to care for us."[43] ------ 22. Giff Johnson, "Micronesia: America's `Strategic Trust,'" {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, February 1979, p. 11. 23. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 76-77. 24. Ibid. 25. Johnson, "Micronesia," p. 11. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp 76-77. 29. {Chicago Tribune}, April 1-5, 1979, published as booklet "Radiation," p. 11. 30. Michael M. May, Director, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to Glenn T. Seaborg (AEC chairman), November 29, 1965; reprinted in {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}, April 19, 1979, Vol. 2, p. 2120. 31. Giff Johnson, "Paradise Lost," {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, December 1980, p. 28. The article quotes a 1977 federally funded study by Brookhaven National Laboratory, stating: "Recently about 50 percent of the exposed Rongelap people showed hypothyroidism without clinical evidence of thyroid disease, a finding that probably portends trouble ahead." 32. {Citizens' Hearings}, pp. 76-77. 33. Johnson, "Micronesia," p. 12. 34. Ibid., p. 11. 35. {Marshall Islands: A Chronology--1944-1978} (Honolulu: Micronesia Support Committee, 1212 University Ave., Honolulu, HI 96826), p. 4. 36. "United Nations Trusteeship Agreement for the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands," Article 6; reprinted in Greg Dever, M.D., {Ebeye, Marshall Islands A Public Health Hazard} (Honolulu: Micronesia Support Committee), p. 25. 37. {Marshall Islands: A Chronology}, p. 4. 38. Almira Matayoshi, interview, May 1980. 39. Nelson Anjain, interview, May 1980. 40. {United States News}, February 1, 1946, p. 26. 41. Johnson, "Micronesia," p. 10. 42. Ibid., pp. 14-15. See also, Johnson, "Paradise Lost," pp. 25-26; {New York Times}, October 13, 1980. 43. {The Oregonian}, New York Times News Service, March 16, 1981. ------ The {Lucky Dragon} GIs and natives of the Marshall Islands were not the only victims of Operation Castle. Twenty-three fishermen aboard the Japanese fishing boat {Lucky Dragon} were sailing eighty miles east of the Bravo shot when it was fired. Within days they were tormented by symptoms of acute radiation exposure--itching skin, nausea, vomiting. When they arrived back in Japan two weeks after the Bravo test, the entire crew remained sick; a Geiger counter revealed their bodies contained radiation from the hydrogen bomb sixteen days after it had exploded. The boat's rear crew compartment gave off readings of one tenth roentgen per hour.[44] The tuna aboard the {Lucky Dragon} were extremely contaminated with radioactivity. This, as it turned out, was not unusual. In 1954 Japan monitoring programs showed that "a total of 683 tuna boats were found to have contaminated fish in their holds," nuclear physicist Ralph E. Lapp wrote in his book {The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon}. "Some 457 tons of tuna fish were detected above the `worry limit' and were discarded, either by dumping at sea or by burial in deep ditches in land. About one out of every eight boats inspected had contaminated fish on board."[45] As a nation dependent on fish for food and commerce, the high radiation levels in tuna caused outrage throughout Japan. And the conspicuous dousing of the {Lucky Dragon} with fallout had caused great publicity and political sensitivity. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission responded with a public-relations sideshow. Dr. John Morton, director of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, visited the stricken fishermen at the hospital and proclaimed them "in better shape than I had expected."[46] The Japanese considered Morton's remarks an insult. After a second hydrogen bomb test AEC chairman Lewis Strauss returned from the Pacific test site and issued a statement to "correct certain misapprehensions" about the effects of the Bravo test. The exposed islanders and Japanese fishermen were recovering rapidly, Strauss claimed.[47] Seven months after the Bravo test one of the {Lucky Dragon}'s twenty-three crew members died; the rest were still being hospitalized. Intensive care included frequent blood transfusions; low sperm counts indicated sterility. In 1955 the U.S. Government paid two million dollars in restitution for damage to the {Lucky Dragon}, its crew, and its cargo. The widow of {Lucky Dragon} fisherman Aikichi Kuboyama later told Ralph Lapp: "To a third person it might almost seem good to die if your death brings such sums of money. But I can't buy the life of my husband with money."[48] Reflecting on the {Lucky Dragon} crew members three years after their encounter with radioactive fallout, Lapp observed: "The true striking power of the atom was revealed on the decks of the {Lucky Dragon}. When men a hundred miles from an explosion can be killed by the silent touch of the bomb, the world suddenly becomes too small a sphere for men to clutch the atom."[49] But, in the midst of the controversy over the H-bomb test effects in spring 1954, AEC Chairman Strauss assured the American public there would be no significant impacts on the continental U.S. The "small increase" in radiation, he said, was "far below the levels which could be harmful in any way to human beings, animals and crops."[50] The AEC chief's pronouncement provoked disbelief among independent scientists. Particularly disturbed was Dr. A. H. Sturtevant, chairman of the genetics department at the California Institute of Technology. In an address to the Pacific division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sturtevant declared there was "no possible escape from the conclusion that bombs already exploded will ultimately produce numerous defective individuals." He further stated that an estimated "1,800 deleterious mutations" had already resulted from fallout.[51] The AEC was stunned that the nuclear weapons testing program was being openly questioned by a prominent scientist like Sturtevant. By early 1955 the AEC released a written response to Sturtevant's charges. Pointing to a "rather wide range of admissible opinion in this subject," the AEC dismissed the geneticist's assessment.[52] The AEC failed, however, to do any of its own calculations of genetic mutations--thus ignoring the scientific basis of Sturtevant's conclusions, which were derived from the work of the AEC's own Division of Biology and Medicine. Comparing fallout hazards with other sources of radiation like medical X rays and "background radiation," the AEC concluded that fallout "would not seriously affect the genetic constitutions of human beings." With respect to the dangers to individuals from isotopes like radioactive strontium and iodine, the governmental report claimed that the levels of these nuclear products were too "insignificant" to pose any problem.[53] ------ 44. Ralph E. Lapp, {The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon} (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 81-83. 45. Lapp, {Voyage of the Lucky Dragon}, p. 178. 46. Roger Rapoport, {The Great American Bomb Machine} (New York: Ballantine, 1971), p. 59. 47. "Statement by Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman U.S. AEC," AEC release, March 31, 1954. 48. Lapp, {Voyage of the Lucky Dragon}, pp. 192-193. 49. Ibid., pp. 197-198. 50. "Statement by Lewis Strauss," March 31, 1954. 51. A. H. Sturtevant, "Social Implications of the Genetics of Man," {Science}, September 10, 1954, pp. 406-407. 52. "A Report by the United States Atomic Energy Commission on the Effects of High Yield Nuclear Explosions," AEC release, February 15, 1955. 53. Ibid. ------ Continuing Tests in Nevada The furor in Utah that had resulted from fallout two years earlier prompted the AEC to exercise more caution as the continental atomic testing program--which excluded H-bombs during its first decade-- restarted in February 1955 after a break of twenty months. But the AEC immediately received counterpressure. In a letter written three days after the first of fourteen nuclear shots slated for "Operation Teapot" at the Nevada site, Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico complained that he had been kept waiting for a week to witness the test series' premier blast, as one postponement after another was forced by poor weather conditions.[54] Senator Anderson was in the midst of a personal feud with AEC chairman Lewis L. Strauss.[55] As head of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Anderson could cause trouble. "I do not advocate taking any real risk with public health and safety," the senator said. But his message was clear: If the AEC was willing to let weather interrupt testing schedules at the Nevada Test Site, then the tests might be banished to the far-flung Pacific.[56] AEC commissioner Willard F. Libby fumed that confining tests to the Pacific would "set the weapons program back a lot."[57] But disregarding weather conditions in Nevada would bring more fallout to the St. George area--"which they apparently always plaster," in the words of AEC Chairman Strauss.[58] "I have forgotten the number of people at St. George," Strauss said. Informed that forty-five hundred people were living in the town, Strauss ruminated, "So you can't evacuate them."[59] "St. George is hypertensified . It is not a question of health or safety with St. George, but a question of public relations," commented AEC fallout expert Dr. John C. Bugher. "You remember the uproar at St. George last series." After that experience, Dr. Bugher recollected, "We regarded southern Utah as a forbidden zone for future fallout in this series."[60] But the AEC decided that the people of Utah were less important than the atomic testing schedule. Former Rear Admiral Strauss, into his second year as chairman, concurred with a suggestion by commissioner Thomas Murray to "get on with the test."[61] "I don't think we can change them at this stage of the game," said Strauss, referring to Nevada testing criteria.[62] A forty-three-kiloton blast, code-named Turk, proceeded as planned at the Nevada Test Site. So did ten more blasts in the Teapot series, totaling 114 more kilotons. At an AEC meeting midway through Operation Teapot spirits seemed to have improved. "People have got to learn to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout," Commissioner Libby said.[63] "It is certainly all right they say if you don't live next door to it," responded Chairman Strauss.[64] "Or live under it," chimed in K. D. Nichols.[65] Vowed Commissioner Murray: "We must not let anything interfere with this series of tests--nothing."[66] At the site about eight thousand troops--from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps--participated in Operation Teapot, observing from trenches officially described as being one and a half to five miles from the atom bomb explosions. But Major Donald H. Anderson of Northridge, California, a twenty-year veteran of the Air Force, remembered being still closer--one thousand yards from ground zero-- when the nuclear shot Bee was fired on March 22, 1955. Formerly trained as an instructor of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project at the Sandia Base in Albuquerque, Anderson was among "about 200 or 300 of us" closest to the blast, listed at eight kilotons. "Upon detonation, we were in trenches 1,000 yards from ground zero."[67] After detonation, we had to dig our way out of the trenches which had collapsed on us. For about 10 or 15 minutes, I was blinded by the blast. . . . Then we were told we had to advance forward from the trenches to a location where toilet paper was lying on the ground. Not everybody who was in the trenches (about 200 or 300 people) advanced to the toilet paper marker which was about 200 or 300 yards from ground zero. About a dozen other people and I went down to it all the way. Then, an emergency jeep came up and an officer told us to get out of there--we did not belong there. He took our names and told us to report to an officer at camp. We had to go back for decontamination testing at Camp Desert Rock about 9 a.m. We reported to an officer who was threatening us with court martial because we did what we were instructed to do! No action was taken. Our film badges were not returned to us and we were not advised of the amount of radiation we had received. I believe it was the commander or his adjutant at Camp Desert Rock who talked to us and threatened us with court martial. At no time did they tell us there would be any possibility of subsequent illness as a result of complying with their orders to advance down to the toilet paper laid out on the ground. We were close enough to see parts of the tower that had been reduced to molten metal. . . . We were told that something went wrong with the detonation--that it was larger than expected.[68] Major Anderson later developed cancer, which he linked to "the radiation exposure I received while in the military."[69] An official report of the 1955 atomic exercises, issued by Marine headquarters, declared that "the realism engendered by coming face- to-face with an actual nuclear detonation adds a great deal to the benefits derived, and augments the total fund of training and experience of the Marine Corps."[70] As an additional note of envisioned battlefield "realism" some servicemen sat in tanks, moving toward the nuclear blast point after detonation--with radiation readings up to twelve roentgens metered in the tanks.[71] As usual Las Vegas newspapers presented the nuclear tests in optimistic terms: "ATOMIC WARHEAD NEWEST YANK DEFENSE WEAPON"; "`BABY' A-BLAST MAY PROVIDE FACTS ON DEFENSE AGAINST ATOMIC ATTACK." Often the news stories glorified anticipated military benefits, with themes replayed by media across the country. In California the {Oakland Tribune} announced "ATOM BLAST TESTS SMOKE SCREEN TO CURB RADIATION." When the government unveiled a taller detonation tower- -five hundred feet instead of the previous three-hundred-foot height- -the {Las Vegas Review-Journal} reported, "Use of taller towers from which atomic devices are detonated at the Nevada Test Site introduces an added angle of safety to residents living outside the confines of the Atomic Energy Commission's continental testing ground, nuclear scientists believe."[72] Military spokesmen continued their public reassurances. "The time after a detonation of nuclear devices is a period of caution, but a safe period if experienced personnel equipped with proper safeguards are used," Major Earl R. Shappell, a radiological safety officer, told reporters. "Our Army clearing teams can frequently move with impunity into the general firing area within hours following a blast."[73] A few days after Major Shappell's explanation the National Broadcasting Company telecast its first TV coverage of an atomic bomb test.[74] Meanwhile millions of American schoolchildren were being taught to hide under desks in air-raid drills, as though such measures would provide appreciable protection in case of nuclear attack. Imagery of atomic holocaust became part of American life. According to authors Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak in their study of the fifties, "For kids, to whom the whole bomb-culture message was a thing to be inhaled like air, defense security could not help but get garbled up with terror."[75] With few exceptions Americans remained frozen in silence as the nuclear age progressed. It was only in the later years of the 1950s, with Red-baiting on the wane and scientists beginning to speak out about biological dangers of fallout, that implications of the bomb were questioned. Meanwhile, the Nevada testing continued, and atomic blasts became fairly common sights for people living throughout the West. One nuclear test explosion was visible from eleven western states.[76] The thick fallout clouds mostly moved through the targeted downwind corridors in rural areas of Nevada, northern Arizona, and Utah. But sometimes, with shifting winds at various altitudes, large cities were contaminated, as in March 1955 when an atomic shot sent radioactivity directly to Las Vegas. Within six hours of that explosion "the cloud dropped invisible bits of matter that gave a total radiation of 174 milliroentgens in North Las Vegas," reported the Associated Press, which usually did not deviate from the official government perspective on nuclear events. "Normal background radiation is 2 milliroentgens, but the Atomic Energy Commission said the fallout was not harmful. The AEC has set a safety minimum of 3.9 roentgens, or 3,900 milliroentgens, per year for civilians offsite. Test personnel are allowed to absorb that much in a 13-week period."[77] The {Las Vegas Review Journal} stated flatly: "Fallout on Las Vegas and vicinity following this morning's detonation was very low and without any effects on health." A front-page follow-up article relayed the AEC's commendations for the "matter of fact manner" in which Las Vegans responded to the fallout dusting.[78] ------ 54. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, February 23, 1955, pp. 117-118. 55. Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers,} p. 71. 56. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, February 23, 1955, pp. 117-118. 57. Ibid., p. 119. 58. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, March 14, 1955, p. 122. 59. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, March 14, 1955, p. 115. 60. Ibid., pp. 115-116. 61. Ibid., pp. 116-117. 62. Ibid. 63. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, March 14, 1955, p. 121. 64. Ibid 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, spring 1980, p. 14. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. U.S. Marine Corps, "Report of Exercise Desert Rock VI," 1955, p. V11-2. 71. Rosenberg, {Atomic Soldiers}, p. 71. 72. {Las Vegas Review-Journal}, March 29, 1955; {Las Vegas Sun}, March 13, 1955; {Oakland Tribune}, March 13, 1955; {Las Vegas Review-Journal}, March 11, 1955. 73. {Las Vegas Review-Journal}, March 27, 1955. 74. {Las Vegas Review-Journal}, March 29, 1955. 75. Miller and Nowak, {The Fifties}, p. 54. Added Miller and Nowak: "Adults, more accomplished at psychological defense, had an easier time of it. They could dodge the great fears and moral questions with more deftness than their offspring." 76. {Las Vegas Sun}, March 13, 1955. 77. {Los Angeles Times}, Associated Press, March 23, 1955. 78. {Las Vegas Review-Journal}, March 22, and March 24, 1955. ------ The Fallout Debate As the spring 1955 nuclear test series continued, a heated controversy arose. Alarmed by increasing radiation in their home state, two scientists from the University of Colorado Medical Center went public. "For the first time in the history of the Nevada tests, the upsurge in radioactivity measured here within a matter of hours has become appreciable," said Dr. Ray R. Lanier, director of the university's radiology department. University biophysics department head Dr. Theodore Puck joined with Lanier in the public statement issued March 12.[79] Colorado's governor Edwin C. Johnson immediately asserted that the two scientists "should be arrested," adding: "This is a phony report. It will only alarm people. Someone has a screw loose someplace and I intend to find out about it."[80] He termed their statements "part of an organized . . . fright campaign."[81] Meanwhile AEC media aides phoned Denver news outlets with a statement that the "trenchant reading in Colorado had absolutely no significance for public health."[82] While insisting that "it is not our desire to alarm the public needlessly," Dr. Lanier said, "we feel it is our duty" to sound a warning. Drs. Lanier and Puck particularly infuriated the nuclear testing establishment when they publicly stressed that gamma-ray readings (and X-ray comparisons) did not provide the full health- hazard picture. Said Dr. Puck: "The trouble with airborne radioactive dust is that we breathe it into the lungs, where it may lodge in direct contact with living tissue." Thus, he explained, internal exposure from alpha or beta particles was "very different from having it lodge on skin or clothing where it can be brushed or washed off."[83] The two Colorado scientists had dared to puncture the popularized myth that Geiger counter readings told the whole radiation danger story; that myth was based on the unspoken supposition that people would not breathe. Dr. Lanier also pointed out the absence of any "safe minimum below which danger to individuals or their unborn descendants disappears. Or at least we do not know what it is."[84] At the same time, more than a few scientists, particularly those not on government payrolls, were voicing intensified concern about cumulative fallout effects. Dr. M. Stanley Livingston, chairman of the Federation of American Scientists and a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, supported the embattled Colorado scientists in a television interview. Livingston said scientists were growing apprehensive "that we may soon reach a level of radiation in the atmosphere which would be dangerous genetically to the future of the race."[85] But within the AEC the cold war made it very difficult for scientists to question the testing program. Oppenheimer's banishment had set a powerful example. "There developed what I consider to be a strange psychological frame of mind," Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, director of the Oak Ridge Health Physics Lab during that era, reflected in 1980. "It became unpatriotic and perhaps unscientific to suggest that atomic weapons testing might cause deaths throughout the world from fallout." Morgan found many of his AEC colleagues holding "onto untenable and extremely shallow arguments . . . comparisons with medical and natural background exposures as if they were harmless."[86] The press gave only limited coverage to scientists who challenged the wisdom of atomic testing. Those complaining about radioactivity were routinely accused of ignorance, hysteria, or involvement in Communist manipulations. The {Los Angeles Examiner} published a March 1955 column by International News Service writer Jack Lotto, headlining it "ON YOUR GUARD: REDS LAUNCH `SCARE DRIVE' AGAINST U.S. ATOMIC TESTS." "A big Communist fear campaign to force Washington to stop all American atomic hydrogen bomb tests erupted this past week," Lotto reported. He repeated the persistent argument that during the past ten years the radiation dose from the testing "has been about the same as the exposure from one chest x-ray."[87] In a {U.S. News & World Report} article called "The Facts About A- Bomb Fallout," AEC Commissioner Willard Libby cited "evidence" from AEC research which implied that bomb fallout would "not likely be at all dangerous."[88] Although the article did not explicitly claim to represent the AEC view, many scientists believed it had been approved in advance by the AEC. That article caused a flurry of written protests from prominent scientists. Linus Pauling, a 1954 Nobel prize winner in chemistry, complained vigorously to Commissioner Libby.[89] Another Nobel laureate, geneticist Hermann Muller wrote to the AEC, saying that he was "shocked" by the article.[90] Bruce Wallace, of the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, was "dismayed" that the AEC had misinterpreted his work in the magazine piece.[91] Dr. Curt Stern, of the University of California in Berkeley, warned the AEC that the article would only serve to increase distrust of AEC credibility.[92] Major newspapers echoed the AEC's argument in the debate. One source of unequivocal disclaimers was nationally syndicated commentator David Lawrence. "Evidence of a world-wide propaganda is accumulating. Many persons are innocently being duped by it and some well-meaning scientists and other persons are playing the Communist game unwittingly by exaggerating the importance of radioactive substances known as `fallout,'" Lawrence wrote in spring 1955. "The truth is there isn't the slightest proof of any kind that the `fallout' as a result of tests in Nevada has ever affected any human being anywhere outside the testing ground itself."[93] "The Nevada tests are being conducted for a humanitarian purpose--to determine the best ways to help civilian defense--and not to develop stronger weapons of war," Lawrence contended authoritatively in another column. "The big bombs are not tested in this country, but in ocean areas far away from this continent. The Communist drive, however, is to stop all tests, and many persons are being duped by the campaign into thinking all the tests held in Nevada are injurious and will hurt future generations. There isn't a word of truth in that propaganda."[94] But profound issues of long-term atomic fallout effects could not be so easily dismissed. ------ 79. {Los Angeles Examiner}, March 13, 1955; {Los Angeles Times}, March 13, 1955. 80. {Los Angeles Examiner}, March 13, 1955. 81. {Albuquerque Journal}, March 22, 1955. 82. {Los Angeles Examiner}, March 13, 1955. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. {Albuquerque Journal}, March 14, 1955. 86. Karl Z. Morgan, "History of Developments in Nuclear Safety and the Development of International Standards," unpublished article submitted to Energy Department's Office of Consumer Affairs, December 1980, p. 2. 87. {Los Angeles Examiner}, March 24, 1955. 88. {US News & World Report}, March 25, 1955, pp. 21-26. 89. Linus Pauling to Willard Libby, March 30, 1955, Historian's Office, U.S. Department of Energy. 90. Hermann Muller to E. Green, March 29, 1955, A. H. Sturtevant Papers, California Institute of Technology, AHS-CIT, Archives Box 11, Folder 3. 91. Bruce Wallace to Hermann Muller, April 5, 1955, AHS-CIT, Archives Box 11,. Folder 3. 92. Curt Stern to John Bugher, March 28, 1955, GWB/BDR-CIT, Archives Box 96, Folder 1. 93. {Washington Post}, March 1955. 94. {Chicago Daily News}, March 25, 1955. ------ Cancer, Genetics, and Fallout In the autumn of 1955 AEC Chairman Strauss was caught suppressing a scientific paper by Hermann Muller on the genetic effects of radiation. In 1927 Muller had been the first to discover that exposure of plants and animals to X rays causes an increase in genetic mutations. Twenty years later he received the Nobel prize for his work in genetics. Muller's 1955 paper assessed the worldwide fallout exposure to people's gonads and the genetic damage this could cause. He submitted it for presentation at the first United Nations meeting on "peaceful uses of the atom," scheduled for Geneva later that year. In May the AEC accepted Muller's abstract. When he tried to submit his full paper in July, the renowned geneticist was told that it had been taken out of the program by the U.N. because of "space limitations." Two months later {The Washington Post} revealed that the AEC, not the U.N. had excised Muller's paper. Then the AEC admitted to blocking the paper because Muller had mentioned the Hiroshima bombing, a subject "definitely inadmissible" at a conference about the "peaceful" uses of atomic energy. As AEC chairman, Strauss apologized for the "regrettable snafu" and promised to publish Muller's paper in printed proceedings of the event. A few weeks afterward, Strauss stated on the TV show {Face the Nation} that "some irresponsible statements that had been made on the subject were liquidated in the course of the conference."[95] The Muller incident so enraged George Beadle, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that he wrote a lengthy editorial in {Science} magazine titled "Liquidating Unpopular Opinion."[96] Prior to publication of his essay, Beadle sent a draft to Gerard Piel, publisher of {Scientific American}. After reading both the draft and the final version, which had been toned down, Piel wrote back remarking on "what skulking deceit and dishonesty had been involved in Admiral Strauss' handling of the matter."[97] Beadle's {Science} editorial asserted that "Chairman Strauss has consistently maintained that fallout from tests of nuclear weapons have been so low that they could not bring harm to human beings. Muller has repeatedly presented reasons for believing such complacency to be unjustified . . . could it be that Muller's persistence in disagreeing with the chairman of the Commission was a factor in barring his report?"[98] By the late summer of 1956 the issue of fallout was being covered on nation-wide television at the Democratic National Convention. The Democratic Party was campaigning to halt H-bomb tests. Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, relying on the information of AEC critics, cited the genetic and strontium 90 hazards from tests. Nuclear testing advocates Edward Teller and Ernest O. Lawrence responded with a joint statement depicting radioactive fallout as "insignificant."[99] Institutional differences over dangers of fallout became quite clear during the election. On one side was the AEC and its scientists, such as Commissioner Willard Libby, Shields Warren, John Bugher, Teller, and Lawrence. The other side included several prominent scientists from the California Institute of Technology--Linus Pauling, E. B. Lewis, A. H. Sturtevant, and George Beadle. Although Stevenson lost the election, his campaign provided a national forum for the fallout debate. Another event in 1956 also had major impact. British physician Alice Stewart found the first firm evidence that low-level radiation causes cancer in human beings. "At the time," Dr. Stewart told us, "radiologists considered low-level radiation to be in the range of fifty to one hundred rems. We were able to demonstrate that the flicker from one X-ray photograph to a fetus could initiate a cancer. This was a tiny fraction of the amount considered safe."[100] Stewart's findings were received with disbelief by radiologists and the international nuclear industry. If she was correct, then physicians were causing cancer among children--and the nuclear industry was doing the same. In 1958 Stewart and her colleagues at England's Oxford University published their classic paper on effects of fetal X rays, now one of the most often cited studies in the world.[101] Stewart found that X rays during the first three months of pregnancy increased the risk of cancer by ten times. With each X ray taken, there would be an increase in the cancer risk. In June 1957 Linus Pauling estimated in a {Foreign Policy Bulletin} article that ten thousand persons had died or were dying from leukemia because of nuclear tests.[102] A month earlier Pauling's colleague E. B. Lewis had published a more detailed analysis in {Science}.[103] Using four sets of data, Lewis showed that there was no safe level of exposure; leukemia incidence seemed to be directly proportionate to the amount of the radiation dose. These articles documented the absence of any "safe" dose of radiation. And the pair of C.I.T. scientists also broke new ground by estimating the number of deaths from strontium 90 fallout. The AEC countered Lewis in a later article in {Science} by Austin Brues, the commission's director of Biology and Medicine. Brues argued that the evidence wasn't strong enough to support Pauling or Lewis, calling their approach one of "superficial simplicity." Instead, Brues insisted, facts corroborated the existence of a "threshold" dose of radiation, below which no biological damage would occur.[104] The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy hearings in 1957 proved to be a watershed in the fallout debate. Dr. Ralph Lapp cut short a trip to Japan to appear before the committee. His opening presentation pointed to "reckless and non-substantiated statements" made by the AEC.[105] He called attention to claims by the AEC's New York Health and Safety Lab chief Merrill Eisenbud, who had announced that "the total fallout to date from all tests would have to be multiplied by a million to produce visible deleterious effects in areas close to the explosion itself."[106] Eisenbud took the stand in his defense, putting qualifications on his earlier statement. Eisenbud claimed to have been "talking about the immediate gamma radiation from the fallout which occurs in the eastern United States within a matter of a day or so after detonation in Nevada." He then accused Lapp of taking his statement "out of context."[107] Lapp quickly responded from the audience by multiplying the amounts of radiation exposure calculated by Eisenbud to be present in the Troy/Albany area after the Simon bomb test in 1953 by a million times. It amounted to an average exposure of ten thousand roentgens. Stunned by this calculation, Senator Clinton Anderson asked if such a dose "would kill everybody in sight." Eisenbud, red-faced, answered with a meek "Yes."[108] In 1958 the U.S. tested sixty-four weapons aboveground, the Soviet Union twenty-four, and Britain five. This was the highest rate since the first tests began.[109] After two and a half years a U.N. study by eighty-seven scientists confirmed allegations by critics of A- tests.[110] Meanwhile strontium 90 levels in milk were rising dramatically, according to the AEC's own data. The northern Great Plains-- particularly the Red River Valley dividing North Dakota and Minnesota--were fast becoming the most strontium-90-contaminated area in North America. Strontium 90 in the region's milk supply was far in excess of the AEC's own safe limit for human consumption.[111] Reacting to the stepped-up nuclear testing, the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP) recommended doubling the "maximum permissible body burden" of strontium 90.[112] Other test advocates like Edward Teller began to contend publicly that radiation from fallout "might be slightly beneficial or have no effect at all."[113] During this period Dr. Karl Z. Morgan attended an NCRP meeting where Teller gave a speech about fallout. "To my amazement, and certainly to the amazement of others, Ed [Teller] was claiming that since naturally occurring radiation played a part in the evolutionary process, the increase in fallout would simply speed up the evolution."[114] Was Teller speculating that fallout would weed out the weak in the society to enhance the development of a superrace? Linus Pauling was the first to sound the alarm concerning the dangers of carbon 14. This radioactive form of carbon exists in nature and is easily absorbed by plants and people. But the incremental increase of carbon 14 from test fallout concerned Pauling.[115] By 1958 he estimated that carbon 14 from "the bomb tests . . . will ultimately produce about one million seriously defective children and about two million embryonic and neonatal deaths, and will cause many millions of people to suffer from minor heredity defects."[116] Pauling and others realized that it was not enough to exchange scientific papers with the AEC in order to stop the continuing radioactive fallout from testing. The circle of scientists necessary to alert the people of the U.S. and the world had to become much larger. On April 23, 1957, Nobel peace prize winner Albert Schweitzer made a radio speech that inspired Pauling to take a first important step in recruiting scientists of the world. Schweitzer concluded his speech by saying that "the end of further experiments with atom bombs would be like early sunrays of hope longed for by suffering humanity."[117] AEC Commissioner Willard Libby responded with the standard AEC line: "Exposures from fallout are very much smaller than those which would be required to produce observable effects in the population."[118] Three weeks after Schweitzer's speech Pauling addressed an audience at Washington University in St. Louis, the headquarters of the Committee for Nuclear Information--an active antitesting organization recently cofounded by Dr. Barry Commoner. That afternoon Pauling sat down with Commoner and Edward Condon of the committee and told them of his idea for a petition campaign to enlist American scientists in opposition to nuclear testing. With their help Pauling drafted "An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World," urging that "an international agreement to stop testing of nuclear bombs be made now."[119] "Each nuclear test spreads the added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world," read the petition. "Each added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm such as to lead to an increase in the number of seriously defective children that will be born in future generations . . ."[120] Within two weeks the signatures of two thousand American scientists were collected and released in the midst of the 1957 hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. President Eisenhower, in a press conference shortly after Pauling publicized his appeal, implied that the scientists' petition was the work of an "organization" that didn't necessarily have the best interests of the nation in mind. When later asked to clarify his statement, Eisenhower backed off and replied, "I said that there does seem to be an organization behind it. I didn't say a wicked organization."[121] Two days later Pauling told a reporter that "I would like to see signatures of thousands of Russian scientists, of scientists of all countries of the world to this appeal." The response was an immediate outpouring of signatures from scientists all over the globe. By January 1958 Pauling had collected 11,021 signatures from 50 nations- -including 216 from the Soviet Union, 701 from Britain, and 1,161 from Japan.[122] Pauling personally delivered the petition to the United Nations secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, on January 15, 1958. By the end of the year the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to a voluntary moratorium on testing--a move to enhance negotiations for a test ban treaty. Attacks against Pauling and his so-called "organization" intensified. Syndicated columnist Fulton Lewis, Jr., estimated that such a petition drive would have cost $100,000, and he demanded to know who had funded the campaign.[123] The Nobel prize winner was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. According to Pauling, "the cost of gathering the 7,500 signatures of scientists outside the U.S. amounted to about $250.00 . . . for stationery, postage and secretarial help. . . . My wife and I have expended altogether about $600 on the appeal and petition."[124] Pauling's "organization" consisted of his wife and a circle of friends. Congress was unable to prove that Pauling's petition was a Communist conspiracy. But Pauling's detractors in the government assured that he would no longer receive a penny of federal money for his research. More than two decades later Pauling had received no federal government funds for his work. However in 1962 Pauling received a second Nobel prize--this one the peace prize for his efforts to end nuclear testing. Antibomb protests during the late fifties included small-scale sit- ins at missile bases, and refusals to participate in New York City air-raid drills. The most dramatic civil disobedience against nuclear explosions occurred as activists attempted to steer their ships into the Marshall Islands test zones. In 1958 four pacifists in a thirty- foot ketch--christened the {Golden Rule}--tried to set sail from Hawaii for Eniwetok; they were arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard. A similar expedition the same year, by the crew of the {Phoenix,} sailed toward the Bikini testing area; U.S. authorities halted that demonstration as well.[125] Other tactics against the nuclear tests took hold, widening the pressure campaign participation beyond scientific experts and pacifists. Less than a year after its founding in November 1957, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) had enlisted 130 chapters and twenty-five thousand members in opposition to the tests.[126] With public mistrust of the AEC deepening, near the end of his presidency Dwight Eisenhower created the Federal Radiation Council to "advise the president with respect to radiation matters." Although appearing to represent public-health interests, the FRC was dominated by advocates of nuclear testing. Two out of six members were from the AEC and Department of Defense. The council's director, Paul Tompkins, came directly from the nuclear weapons program. One of the first acts of the council was to increase the amount of sanctioned strontium 90 exposures from testing by six times.[127] On September 1, 1961, during the height of tensions over Berlin, the voluntary moratorium on testing was broken by the Soviet Union. The U.S. followed suit by resuming atomic tests later that month. During the next year the two countries conducted the most intense series of aboveground tests in history.[128] In 1962 more than one hundred nuclear weapons exploded and sent radiation into the atmosphere. By the summer of 1962, iodine 131 in milk across the United States was reaching dangerous levels. As fallout quantities approached "safe" governmental limits, the AEC looked to the Federal Radiation Council for help. By September 1962 the council announced that the U.S. Government's radiation guidelines didn't apply to fallout[129]--in essence, giving the AEC a blank check to contaminate the earth as it deemed necessary. "I-131 doses from weapons testing conducted through 1962 have not caused undue risk to health," the council contended.[130] Two years later the panel secretly raised its guidelines for radioactive iodine by a factor of twenty, to accommodate "underground" nuclear tests.[131] The Federal Radiation Council's director, Paul Tompkins, justified the increase by claiming "we had to take our choice between that much iodine or a predictable level of malnutrition from pricing the milk off the market. We made the choice . . ."[132] In St. Louis, where fallout readings were very high during the 1962 tests, the Committee for Nuclear Information vocally denounced the persisting nuclear blasts. In an effort to blunt the criticisms the AEC transported a group of children from St. Louis to New York and measured them for radioactive iodine. The AEC's Merrill Eisenbud reported that "tests completed at the New York University Medical Center indicate that the amount of radioactive iodine entering the thyroid glands of children has not approached the danger level."[133] Eisenbud did not mention that iodine 131 has an eight-day half-life. By the time the children reached New York and were analyzed, almost all of the radioactivity had decayed--with the damage already done in the meantime. In 1960, fifteen years after the first nuclear testing, the AEC had finally established a Fallout Studies Branch. Harold Knapp was working in the AEC general manager's office at the time. Asked to join the Fallout Studies Branch in 1962, Knapp's first task was to review the AEC's rebuttal to a series of criticisms by Ralph Lapp. Knapp found that the rejoinder, written by the prestigious General Advisory Committee of the AEC, "didn't answer anything" and was a "wholly inadequate response."[134] Particularly, Knapp found that the issue of radioactive "hot spots" raised by Lapp deserved further exploration. AEC officials were continuing to assume uniform distribution of fallout--a woefully inaccurate assumption, ignoring variations in fallout patterns, owing to weather conditions and other factors. "For three months I held them off on a daily basis," while working to come up with a better response, Knapp recollected in a 1981 interview.[135] He found evidence that agreed with Lapp's claims about hot spots. The paper, sent to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, elicited praise for its candor. Knapp decided to make a systematic and detailed analysis of the problem of fallout by first looking at radioactive iodine. To his surprise "no systematic approach to the study of fallout had been done before." The monitoring data were "spotty," and evidently there was no real consistent approach to the collection of radiation samples. "They had inadequate measuring techniques. It takes four days for the radioiodine to build up to a maximum in milk. Within two weeks everything is gone. Either they would analyze the sample too soon or wait too long."[136] In examining milk data for the 1953 tests, Knapp discovered, "by pot luck someone was measuring the right thing at the right time" for St. George, Utah. Knapp estimated that during the 1950s the dose to the thyroid from iodine 131 in cow's milk was ten times the Federal Radiation Council standards.[137] Knapp's report was sent upstairs to Charles Dunham, director of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. It was immediately classified.[138] Dunham sent the paper to Gordon Dunning, AEC deputy director for operational safety, who suggested that a special AEC committee, composed of "qualified scientists with specialized backgrounds,"[139] be established to comment on the report. Four of five reviewers favorably commented on Knapp's paper and urged its release. The only unfavorable review came from the Nevada Test Site's off-site radiological safety officer, Oliver R. Placak.[140] Over Dunning's objections, the AEC assistant general manager for research, Spoford English, reluctantly okayed release of the Knapp report. The basic point of Knapp's research was that after more than ten years of atomic weapons testing at the Nevada site, the AEC had never actually bothered to methodically assess the impact of fallout on people living nearby. The Knapp report, issued in early 1963, warned that "At the Nevada Test Site, over 1,000 kilotons equivalent of Iodine-131 were released before we obtained any reliable data on Iodine-131 in milk in off-site communities following deposition from specific shots." The amount was more than five thousand times as much as had been released at a 1957 accident at the British reactor at Windscale, which caused a national emergency to be declared because of milk contamination.[141] The broad outlines of the fallout disaster came into focus even while atmospheric nuclear testing persisted. Two decades later Robert Minogue, research director for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told us: "High AEC officials knew very well the biological effects of low-level radiation in the 1950s. They can't use ignorance as an excuse."[142] But, as grim evidence mounted, the nuclear policymakers tried to keep the truth from the public. ------ 95. Kopp, "Debate over Fallout Hazards," p. 412. 96. George W. Beadle, "Liquidating Unpopular Opinion," {Science}, October 28, 1955, p. 813. 97. Kopp, "Debate over Fallout Hazards," p. 412. 98. Beadle, "Liquidating Unpopular Opinion," p. 813. 99. {New York Times}, June 21, 1956. 100. Alice Stewart, interview, November 1980. 101. Alice M. Stewart, et al., "A Survey of Childhood Malignancies," {British Medical Journal} (1958): 1495-1508. 102. Linus Pauling, "How Dangerous Is Radioactive Fallout?" {Foreign Policy Bulletin}, June 15, 1957, p. 149. 103. E. B. Lewis, "Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation," {Science}, May 17, 1957, pp. 965-972. 104. Austin Brues, "Critique of the Linear Theory of Carcinogenesis," {Science}, September 26, 1958, pp. 693-699. 105. H. Peter Metzger, {The Atomic Establishment} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 97-98. 106. New York {Daily News}, March 20, 1955. 107. Metzger, {Atomic Establishment}, pp. 97-98. 108. Ibid. 109. J. A. Young and R. W. Perkins, "Fallout from Nuclear Testing--A Position Paper with Recommendations to the EPA," Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, Washington, September 19, 1979, Table 1. 110. United Nations, "United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 1958 Report," New York. See also {New York Times}, August 11, 1958. 111. AEC, "Strontium Program Quarterly Report," New York Operations Office, February 24, 1959. 112. Metzger, {Atomic Establishment}, p. 99. 113. Edward Teller, "The Compelling Need for Tests," {Life}, February 10, 1958, pp. 64-66. 114. Karl Z. Morgan, interview, November 1980. 115. Vast amounts of carbon 14 are produced by hydrogen bombs and large nuclear reactors. A beta-emitter with a half-life of about five thousand years, carbon 14, can be incorporated into the DNA of cells, creating significant biological damage. Another of the worrisome fallout isotopes is strontium 90, which is chemically similar to the nutrient calcium and therefore is taken up in soil, plants, and animals, as calcium is. The principal "pathway" for radioactive strontium is the ingestion of contaminated food, particularly milk, leafy vegetables, fruit, and root vegetables. Once it enters the body, strontium eventually lodges in the bone, particularly the growing bone tissue of children, where half of it remains for twenty-eight years. Once inside the bone tissue it emits beta particles, which can eventually lead to such diseases as leukemia or bone-marrow cancer. 116. Linus Pauling, {No More War} (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), pp. 74-75. 117. Albert Schweitzer, "A Declaration of Conscience," {Saturday Review}, May 18, 1957, pp. 17-20. 118. Pauling, {No More War}, p. 169. 119. Ibid., p. 160. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., p. 172. 122. Ibid., pp. 173, 174-178. 123. Ibid., p. 171. (The Fulton Lewis, Jr., broadcast was on February 12, 1958.) 124. Ibid., p. 175. 125. Miller and Nowak, {The Fifties}, pp. 63, 80, 413. 126. Ibid., p. 413. 127. {Background Material for the Development of Radiation Standards}, Federal Radiation Council Report No. 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961). (Paul Tompkins was formerly deputy director of the AEC's Office of Radiation Standards.) 128. Young and Perkins, "Fallout from Nuclear Testing," September 19, 1979. 129. {Estimates and Evaluation of Fallout in the United States from Nuclear Weapons Testing Conducted Through 1962}, Federal Radiation Council Report No. 4 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963). 130. {New York Times}, September 18, 1962. 131. Federal Radiation Council Report No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964). 132. U.S. Congress, House and Senate Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, {Environmental Effects of Producing Electric Power}, (91st Cong., 1st sess.), October-November 1969, Part 1, p. 409. 133. Metzger, {Atomic Establishment}, p. 107. 134. Harold Knapp, interview, February 1981. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Charles L. Dunham, "Draft Document Average and Above Average Doses to the Thyroid of Children in the United States from Radioiodine from Nuclear Weapons Tests," AEC Memo, October 24, 1962, files of House of Representatives Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and investigations, Washington, D.C. 139. Gordon Dunning to N. H. Woodruff, AEC Memo Re: Knapp Paper, files of House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. 140. U.S. Congress, House and Senate Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, {Fallout, Radiation Standards and Countermeasures}, (88th Cong., 1st sess.), August 1963, Part 2, pp. 914-1082. 141. Harold Knapp, "Observed Relations Between Deposition Level of Fresh Fission Products from Nevada Tests and Resulting Levels of I-131 in Fresh Milk," AEC Report, March 1, 1963, files of House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. 142. Robert Minogue, interview, February 1981. ------ [part 6 of 18] 5 Continued Testing: Tragic Repetitions While the fallout debate raged during the mid-1950s, the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program continued to escalate. American servicemen and civilians were, more than ever, in the radioactive line of fire. The government gave scant priority to the health and safety of its own citizens. The practice of exploding atomic weapons underwater was a case in point. The first time the United States set off an atom bomb beneath the ocean surface, at the 1946 Baker test in the shallow Bikini lagoon, the military vessels had been shellacked with unexpectedly tenacious, and long-lived, radioactivity. The U.S. Government scuttled plans for a follow-up deep-water explosion to climax the first series of atomic tests at Bikini. There was no official acknowledgment that dangers of sub-ocean- surface nuclear explosions had prompted the indefinite postponement.[1] However, an analysis published in {Science Digest} in summer 1947 said such detonations involve "some highly unpredictable phenomena." In fact, remarked author John W. Campbell, "no one has the slightest idea of what might happen if an atomic bomb were set off at a depth of half a mile in sea water."[2] The Atomic Energy Commission, in a report to the National Security Resources Board, later conceded that "if a bomb is exploded in water, such as the [1946] Test Baker at Bikini, there will be considerable amounts of residual radioactivity, depending upon wind, currents, tides, and the size of the body of water."[3] American military officers, briefed by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project during the late 1940s, were warned that underwater nuclear tests entailed special risks. The secret handbook used in the course cautioned that radioactive mist from an underwater nuclear blast could be expected to spray "serious contamination over a large area."[4] On pages marked "RESTRICTED" the government's own experts elaborated on the dangers. Dr. Herbert Scoville, Jr., who later became deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote: "In an underwater detonation the nuclear radiation effects are quite different from those resulting from an air burst and are of considerably greater magnitude." Scoville recalled that the only underwater nuclear test up until that time, in the lagoon at Bikini, had left enormous quantities of radioactivity--"estimated to be equivalent to thousands of tons of radium shortly after the detonation. This is a billion times the radioactivity from a gram of radium. Such is the truly fantastic radioactivity associated with an atomic bomb detonation."[5] And, Scoville pointed out, in Bikini's lagoon "intensities above tolerance were measured for almost a week." Even "nontarget vessels" were severely contaminated.[6] But nine years later the United States exploded a thirty-kiloton nuclear bomb two thousand feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean--just five hundred miles southwest of San Diego.[7] ------ 1. Rather, the official explanation as {United States News} reported it was that the deep-water explosion set for Bikini was axed "chiefly because of the danger to military security in tying up the needed technical man power and equipment at this time." ({United States News}, September 20, 1946, p. 19.) 2. John W. Campbell, "Why Atom Test 3 Was Canceled," {Science Digest}, July 1947, p 7. 3. {The H Bomb}, p. 35. 4. Dr. Herbert Scoville, Jr., "Nuclear Radiation Effects of Atomic Bomb Detonations," "Medical Indoctrination Course," Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., undated, late 1940s, p. 4. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. U.S. DOD, {Prototype Report, DOD Personnel Participation, Operation Wigwam} (Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1980), p. 12. Wigwam blast location was 28 degrees 44 minutes north latitude and 126 degrees 16 minutes west longitude. ------ Wigwam For those who heard about the 1955 deep-water test ahead of time, it didn't sound like much to worry about. Government public-relations specialists saw to that. In the five months between President Eisenhower's approval of the detonation and the day it actually occurred, Pentagon image-makers busily prepared for the unusual nuclear blast, tagged "Operation Wigwam." About sixty-five hundred people, almost all of them servicemen, were scheduled to be there, so secrecy was out of the question. But the AEC barred news correspondents from observing Operation Wigwam. And, although the bomb was thirty kilotons--more than twice the size of the Hiroshima atomic weapon--the government succeeded in depicting it as rather small. The {San Diego Evening Tribune} informed its readers that the Wigwam bomb was "thought to have had an energy equivalent of 1 to 5 kilotons, certainly smaller than 20 kt."[8] Internal government documents about Operation Wigwam remained classified for more than twenty years. In 1980 the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting was able to study official records and films of the underwater test. The team of journalists concluded that "the planners' major concerns were for the scientific and military results of the test; concern for the possible hazards facing the thousands of men stationed at the blast site appears to have been secondary."[9] When the A-bomb exploded on May 14, 1955, it sent huge shock waves and gigantic walls of seawater at thirty ships with more than six thousand servicemen aboard--many of whom had no idea they were participating in an atomic test. A confidential document declared that the men were subjected to "extremely hazardous respiratory conditions."[10] And the Center for Investigative Reporting found that nearly 40 percent of interviewed Operation Wigwam veterans recalled having no radiation-detection badges during the nuclear test.[11] Out of thirty-five Wigwam veterans located, seventeen had illnesses they attributed to radiation exposure during the blast.[12] Twenty-four years after the Wigwam test Elroy L. Runnels faced television cameras in Honolulu and remembered: "We weren't told anything of the . . . gravity of the situation."[13] Two days after Runnels's filmed statement he was dead--a leukemia victim. He had been seventeen years old while aboard the U.S.S. {Moctobi} in the Operation Wigwam armada. One of Runnels's last efforts, from his deathbed in late summer of 1979, was to file a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Government, charging it intentionally endangered him and the other servicemen involved in Operation Wigwam. And because the government continued to stay mum about possible risks, Runnels maintained, his leukemia "festered undetected until it had advanced to an acute, severely debilitating state."[14] Elroy Runnels's charges exposed basic inconsistencies in the government's accounts of the nuclear test. Despite the Navy's contention that no servicemen were closer than five miles to the blast, the logs of Runnels's ship showed it as being well under a mile from the bomb detonation.[15] He was not informed that he had participated in a nuclear test until several weeks after Operation Wigwam was over.[16] Nor was Operation Wigwam the last American underwater nuclear explosion. In the summer of 1958 two nuclear blasts went off beneath the sea at Eniwetok. And on May 11, 1962, a test code-named Swordfish exploded with a force of twenty kilotons, under the Pacific Ocean at a spot 360 miles southwest of San Diego. About five thousand Navy servicemen were at the Swordfish test, which subjected them to what the Defense Nuclear Agency has termed "extremely low-yield" radiation.[17] For the most part America's nuclear testers were content to detonate new warheads above sea level in the Pacific Ocean. In 1958--a dozen years after the first atomic test in the Marshall Islands--the United States was exploding massive thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs amidst those scenic isles. One Eniwetok blast, dubbed Oak, went off with a force of 8.9 megatons on June 28, 1958. Two months later the last nuclear weapons test occurred in the Marshall Islands. The Pentagon moved on to other parts of the Pacific Ocean--Christmas Island and Johnson Island areas--where in 1962 thousands more American servicemen were exposed to nuclear test radiation.[18] Over a span of more than sixteen years, beginning with Operation Crossroads in 1946, the United States exploded 106 nuclear weapons in various parts of the Pacific. ------ 8. Dan Noyes, Maureen O'Neill, David Weir, "Operation Wigwam," {New West}, December 1, 1980, p. 28. 9. Ibid., p. 27. 10. Ibid., p. 29. 11. ABC-TV, {20/20} program broadcast, March 5, 1981, transcript p. 7. 12. Ibid., p. 6. 13. Ibid., p. 3. 14. {Honolulu Star-Bulletin}, September 4, 1979. 15. {San Francisco Chronicle}, United Press International, September 7, 1979. 16. {Honolulu Advertiser}, September 7, 1979. 17. {The Oregonian}, Associated Press, December 13, 1979. 18. Among the megaton-range explosions at Johnson Island was the 1.4-megaton Starfish Prime blast set off via rocket at an altitude of 248 miles on July 8, 1962. "For some time thereafter," {Science} magazine reported nineteen years later, "physicists puzzled over a resulting series of odd occurrences. Some 800 miles away in Hawaii, streetlights had failed, burglar alarms had rung, and circuit breakers had popped open in power lines. Today, the mysterious agent is known as electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Physicists say a single nuclear detonation in near space would cover vast stretches of the earth with an EMP of 50,000 volts per meter." A few such nuclear detonations could shut down electrical power grids and communications systems for thousands of miles around. (William J. Broad, "Nuclear Pulse (1): Awakening to the Chaos Factor," {Science}, May 29, 1981, pp. 1009-1012.) ------ The "Clean" Bomb At the Nevada Test Site atmospheric nuclear bomb tests continued until mid-1962.[19] Leukemia and cancer deaths rose noticeably as mushroom clouds continued to darken the horizon. For residents downwind, radioactive fallout--as AEC Commissioner Willard Libby had predicted in closed session--had indeed become a fact of life. Living in rural range lands of Nevada's Railroad Valley north of the test site, Martin Bardoli was just beginning elementary school in 1956 when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died before the end of the year.[20] Believing the fallout clouds were responsible, Martin's parents circulated a petition and sent it to their senators and the Atomic Energy Commission. In a responding letter Senator George Malone warned against alarmism about fallout. And, the senator added, "it is not impossible to suppose that some of the `scare' stories are Communist inspired."[21] AEC chairman Lewis Strauss replied by quoting former President Truman: "`Let us keep our sense of proportion in the matter of radioactive fallout. Of course, we want to keep the fallout in our tests to the absolute minimum, and we are learning to do just that. But the dangers that might occur from the fallout involve a small sacrifice when compared to the infinitely greater evil of the use of nuclear bombs in war.'"[22] Such reasoning did not convince the bereaved parents. Health matters remained low priority for the nation's nuclear weapons testers. When the AEC's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine convened in January 1957, panelists discussed how best to counter public statements being made by independent scientists failing to toe the government line on fallout dangers.[23] Two months later the AEC distributed its assurances-filled {Atomic Tests in Nevada} booklet to thousands of downwind residents.[24] With two dozen or so atomic explosions during Operation Plumbbob slated to begin soon at the Nevada site, new methods of cultivating trust among residents went into effect. Federal administrators discovered that "good public relations in the off-site area were more difficult to maintain" than during the test series two years earlier, an in-house government report lamented. But the U.S. Government's evaluators had some encouraging news. Innovations for gaining the confidence of residents seemed to pay off. "The single fact that off-site monitors (many with families) lived in communities went a long way in establishing good public relations."[25] Amid customary heavy and laudatory publicity American troops maneuvered beneath mushroom clouds of the 1957 tests. Stationed in southern Nevada, Marine Major Charles Broudy placed a long-distance call to his wife on July 4, 1957. Excitement and urgency in her husband's voice were apparent to Pat Broudy as she listened from their home in Santa Ana, California, about three hundred miles away. "You've got to get the kids up and face the east tomorrow morning around four Nevada time," she would always remember his telling her. "You'll see a miracle."[26] After the "miracle"--a massive atomic explosion named Hood that official logs peg at seventy-four kilotons--Charles Broudy returned home. An often-decorated pilot whose awards included a Distinguished Flying Cross, Broudy was a career Marine with a top-secret clearance. He said little about the nuclear tests. Nineteen years later he was diagnosed with lymphoma, a radiation- linked cancer. "He suffered terribly," recounted his widow, "but was convinced that his government would take care of him in his final days and would take care of his family after his death."[27] However, after the drawn-out death occurred, the Veterans Administration denied service-connected benefits to his widow and children. Pat Broudy undertook detailed research. Aided by Princeton University physicist Frank von Hippel, she found that the Hood shot had exposed her late husband to about seventy thousand millirads of radiation--more than five thousand times above the thirteen-millirad dose the government said his film badge read at the test blast.[28] But the Veterans Administration continued to turn down the Broudy family's appeals. "I buried my husband and swore to avenge his death if it takes the rest of my life, and well it may," Pat Broudy said in 1981.[29] In response to a growing public awareness of the threat of nuclear fallout, President Eisenhower introduced the notion of the "clean" bomb. At a press conference on June 5, 1957, he declared that "we have reduced fallout from bombs by nine-tenths." Nevada test detonations were continuing in order "to see how clean we can make them."[30] A few weeks later, three top American atomic scientists, including Dr. Edward Teller, met with President Eisenhower to support the "clean bomb"' rationale for further nuclear testing. Teller told reporters the meeting occurred to inform Eisenhower "what we are accomplishing in the current weeks and what we hope to and plan to accomplish in the coming years, if we can continue to work."[31] Teller made the comment a few hours after a thirty-seven-kiloton nuclear bomb named Priscilla had exploded in Nevada. "Clean bomb" verbiage sought to put a relatively pretty face on the testing program. "This was done to counter the increasing public protests in the late 1950s against radioactive contamination resulting from atmospheric nuclear test explosions," a later article in the {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists} remarked. "In addition, the possible development of an `absolutely clean' bomb was used as an argument against a nuclear test ban, then under negotiation with the Soviet Union."[32] After his June 1957 meeting with Teller and other physicists, President Eisenhower shared his enthusiasm with the nation. "What they are working on is . . . the production of clean bombs," Eisenhower proclaimed. "They tell me that already they are producing bombs that have 96 percent less fallout than was the case in our original ones, or what we call dirty bombs, but they go beyond this. They say: `Give us four or five more years to test each step of our development and we will produce an absolutely clean bomb.'" {The New York Times} headline, for the article conveying the President's statements, revealed one of the significant motives behind the announcement: "EISENHOWER WARY OF ATOMIC TEST BAN."[33] But promises about cleanliness of nuclear bombs did not decontaminate the radiation still rising from Pacific Ocean and Nevada test sites in 1958--during which the U.S. exploded seventy-seven nuclear weapons. Even America's major metropolitan areas were not exempt from intensely radioactive fallout clouds. Rapid-fire atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada, plus Russian atomic detonations, sent radiation readings to the highest ever recorded in Los Angeles by the end of October 1958. Government officials announced that the fallout on Los Angeles was "harmless." Yet privately the National Advisory Committee on Radiation termed the L.A. radioactivity "an emergency."[34] Panel members met in secret session on November 10, 1958, to discuss the problem. "If you ever let these numbers get out to the public, you have had it," said Lauriston S. Taylor, head of the Atomic Radiation Physics Division of the National Bureau of Standards.[35] The average radiation dose in Los Angeles hovered at the maximum levels deemed "permissible" according to federal guidelines--and some citizens received more than that amount. Taylor admitted that references to permissible levels "carry the implication that we know what we are talking about when we set them. But in actual fact, they really represent the best judgment we would exercise now in the total absence of any real knowledge as to whether they are correct or not."[36] U.S. surgeon general Dr. LeRoy Burney commented, "If I were in Los Angeles, I would consider I was insulted for somebody in the Federal Government . . . to say, `This is nothing to be alarmed about.'"[37] The huddled government scientists observed that radiation dosages at least as high as those besetting Los Angeles had been found the previous year in Salt Lake City. But twenty years would pass before residents of either city learned about what was said at that closed governmental meeting.[38] By the time the provisional nuclear test moratorium began in November 1958, the United States had set off 196 nuclear bombs, while the Soviet Union had detonated 55. For nearly three years the world got relief from atmospheric nuclear tests--except for a few fired by France in 1960 and 1961. Amid growing world tensions--the Berlin and Cuban crises in particular--the Soviets resumed testing with a huge nuclear explosion in September 1961, and the U.S. soon followed that example.[39] But the movement for a formal test treaty continued. ------ 19. Even when the bombs weren't exploding, the radiation burden was being increased because of test-site activities. From 1955 to 1958, and again in 1962, the government conducted dozens of "safety experiments" --sometimes labeled "plutonium dispersal" in official logs--sprinkling deadly plutonium particles to the winds in the southern Nevada desert. At the time, the general public was unaware those tests were going on. The Environmental Protection Agency discovered in 1974 that soil in the two states contained the nation's highest plutonium concentrations. The thickest blankets of plutonium in Utah were found in northern parts of the state--including Salt Lake City. (U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, {Final Environmental Impact Statement, Nevada Test Site, Nye County, Nevada} (Washington, D.C.: ERDA, September 1977), pp. 2-88 to 2-91; {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}, April 19, 1979, Vol. 1, pp. 65-66. 20. {Deseret News}, April 24, 1979; {Life}, June 1980, pp. 38-39. 21. {Life}, June 1980, p. 38. 22. Ibid., p. 39. 23. AEC Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine Meeting Minutes, January 16-19, 1957, pp. 4-6. 24. AEC, {Atomic Tests in Nevada}. 25. AEC, "Plumbbob Off-Site Rad-Safety Report," 1958, p. 19. 26. Pat Broudy to authors, January 2, 1981. 27. Ibid. 28. {Atomic Veterans' Newsletter}, p. 19. 29. Broudy to authors, January 2, 1981. 30. {New York Times}, June 25, 1957. 31. Ibid. 32. Wim A. Smit and Peter Boskma, "Laser Fusion," {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, December 1980, p. 34. 33. {New York Times}, June 27, 1957, cited in Smit and Boskma, "Laser Fusion," p. 34. 34. {Deseret News}, April 24, 1979. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. For a list of nuclear tests by all nations, see Melvin W. Carter and A. Alan Moghissi, "Three Decades of Nuclear Testing," {Health Physics}, July 1977, pp. 55-71. ------ Fallout in New York State By 1963 an atmospheric nuclear test ban was in final stages of negotiation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. Carrying through promises of the 1960 campaign, President John Kennedy had made it respectable for people to question fallout from testing. In a July 1963 speech televised to the nation Kennedy urged Senate ratification of the test ban treaty: "The number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural hazards, but this is not a natural health hazard--and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or malformation of one baby--who may be born long after we are gone--should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics towards which we can be indifferent."[40] On August 20, 1963, Edward Teller testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in opposition to the test ban treaty. "From the present levels of worldwide fallout, there is no danger," he said. "The real danger is that you will frighten mothers from giving milk to their babies. By that, probably more damage has been done than by anything else concerning this matter."[41] Across the Capitol, at a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy hearing, University of Utah scientists Robert Pendleton and Charles Mays presented evidence that because of the 1962 tests approximately a quarter-million young children in Utah may have been exposed to average thyroid doses of 4.4 rads. Their analysis had compelled the state of Utah to dump several thousand gallons of milk--which contained radioactive iodine levels eight times above the official Federal Radiation Council guidelines. Dr. Mays estimated that as a result of the Harry test in 1953, seven hundred infants in St. George received radiation doses to their thyroids 136 to 500 times higher than existing permissible levels.[42] Those doses could cause death, genetic mutation, brain damage, and hypothyroidism among other diseases. Underscoring this point, witness Eric Reiss, cofounder of the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information, added that "in the period 1951-62, a number of local populations, especially Nevada, Idaho, and Utah . . . have been exposed to fallout so intense as to represent a medically unacceptable hazard to children who may drink fresh locally produced milk."[43] On the next day a University of Pittsburgh Medical School professor of radiology, Dr. Ernest Sternglass, presented testimony. His work evoked the greatest amount of concern from the Joint Committee. In a 1963 paper in {Science} magazine,[44] Sternglass had calculated that the latest two years of nuclear testing fallout exposed everybody living in the Northern Hemisphere to a radiation dose of two hundred to four hundred millirads, roughly equivalent to a pelvic X ray. Citing Dr. Alice Stewart's findings of a 50 percent increase in childhood cancer risks from fetal X rays,[45] Sternglass estimated that there would be an additional eight hundred childhood cancer deaths in the U.S. from the 1961-1962 tests alone. Sternglass had applied those estimates to the Troy/Albany area in upstate New York--where average radiation doses went as high as a few thousand millirads as a result of fallout from the 1953 Simon test in Nevada. Sternglass calculated a doubling in child cancer risks for the residents of Troy/Albany.[46] Sternglass submitted his findings on fallout effects to {Science} magazine for publication. In its early days, {Science} had strongly questioned the atomic establishment. In 1955 the magazine vigorously attacked Lewis Strauss for scientific suppression and had published E. B. Lewis's papers opposing the "threshold" concept of radiation safety. But now the editorship of {Science} had passed to Philip Abelson, a physicist deeply involved in the government's nuclear program from the Manhattan Project on. Abelson also served on the AEC's General Advisory Committee and on its Project Plowshare Committee, which was promoting "peaceful" uses of nuclear explosives. Not surprisingly, Abelson rejected Sternglass's article on fallout contending that "there is really no evidence of the functional relationship between the number of X-rays taken and cancer mortality."[47] Sternglass soon resubmitted his paper with comments from Dr. Russell Morgan, one of America's foremost experts on X rays and the effects of low-level radiation. Morgan praised Sternglass's paper and voiced support for Alice Stewart's findings of definite links between X rays and cancer--findings which by then had been confirmed by Dr. Brian MacMahon of Harvard. Within a month after resubmission, {Science} was forced to accept Sternglass's paper. But in March of 1964 the magazine printed a letter from James H. Lade of the New York State Health Department attacking Sternglass's findings. Lade wrote that "the cancer report files of this department reveal no increase in the incidence of cancer or leukemia over the past 10 years in children of the Albany, Troy and Schenectady areas-- who were 15 years or younger in 1963--as compared with children of this age elsewhere in upstate New York."[48] A key phrase in Lade's argument came when he said the Albany area's leukemia rate appeared normal "{as compared with children of this age elsewhere in upstate New York."} The entire upstate New York region had received heavy fallout on April 26, 1953, but measurements there had been classified as secret by the AEC. "Under these circumstances," Sternglass reasoned, "there would of course be little or no difference in leukemia rates between Troy, Albany, Schenectady and elsewhere in upstate New York." Lade's new information actually "showed that beginning in the fourth to fifth years after the 1953 rainout, the yearly number of reported leukemia cases quadrupled," according to Sternglass.[49] Unable to pry loose any further data from New York State's uncooperative health department, Ernest Sternglass presented an update of his Troy/Albany paper to the Health Physics Society's annual meeting, held in Denver in June 1968. Reports of Sternglass's findings received wide publicity in the U.S. and abroad. A month after the annual meeting R. E. Alexander, chairman of the Health Physics Society public-relations committee, sent a letter to the society's board members, complaining that the "publicity about the paper of E. J. Sternglass . . . was damaging to the nuclear industry."[50] Continuing his research, Sternglass began poring through U.S. vital statistics for the three upstate counties in New York. While copying the numbers he noticed that births had increased by only about 50 percent while leukemia cases went up by more than 300 percent. What was even more striking, fetal deaths stopped declining while intense fallout was taking place; seven years after testing, fetal deaths resumed a downward trend. He then began a detailed comparison of actual measured fallout levels made public by the AEC, with fetal and infant death rates in New York State. "Each time the levels of the short lived isotopes, such as I-131 and Strontium-90, shot up to their highest peaks, there was a sharp rise in fetal mortality within a year."[51] The first large jumps in fetal deaths were "followed by a second slower rise culminating between three and five years later," Sternglass discovered. The second peaks were especially high "probably because each of the enormous fusion bombs . . . produced hundreds of times as much Strontium-90 . . . in order to get a `bigger bang for a buck,' as U.S. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson put it. Edward Teller and his weapons engineers had surrounded the hydrogen bombs with cheap, abundant Uranium-238. As a result, the total explosive force could be doubled . . . but the levels of Strontium-90 in the bones of living creatures vastly increased."[52] By fall 1968 Sternglass had estimated that atmospheric nuclear testing caused the deaths of 375,000 babies--in the United States alone--before their first birthdays between 1951 and 1966.[53] Sternglass discussed his research with colleagues in the Federation of American Scientists. They agreed to hold a public meeting in Pittsburgh on October 23, 1968. Meanwhile, Sternglass submitted copies to {Science} and the {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}. Pittsburgh television reporter Stuart Brown contacted {Science} editor Philip Abelson for his comments on the Sternglass paper. Contrary to the standard procedure of keeping editorial correspondence confidential, Abelson read statements from scientific reviews of Sternglass's paper responding to Lade on the Troy/Albany situation. Abelson then advised Brown against using Sternglass's findings on the air.[54] A few weeks later {Science} returned the Troy/Albany and infant-mortality papers with a rejection notice. The {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, after a review of Sternglass's infant-mortality paper, agreed to publish it in their April 1969 issue. Sternglass later learned from the magazine's managing editor, Richard S. Lewis, that the {Bulletin} withstood pressure "both before and after publication in the form of long distance phone calls from Washington from individuals who claimed to be long-term Government friends of the journal." The callers informed Lewis that publication of the Sternglass article was a "grave mistake."[55] ------ 40. Ernest Sternglass, {Secret Fallout}, pp. 27-28. 41. U.S. Congress, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, (88th Cong., 1st sess.), August 12-27, 1963. 42. {Fallout, Radiation Standards and Countermeasures}, June 1963, Part 1. 43. Ibid., August 1963, Part 2. 44. Ernest J. Sternglass, "Cancer: Relation of Prenatal Radiation to Development of Disease in Childhood," {Science}, June 7, 1963, pp. 1102-1104. 45. Stewart, et al., "Survey of Childhood Malignancies," pp. 1495-1508. 46. Sternglass, {Secret Fallout}, p. 21. 47. Ibid., p. 23. 48. J. H. Lade, "More on the 1953 Fallout in Troy," {Science}, March 6, 1964, pp. 994-995. 49. Sternglass, {Secret Fallout}, p. 43. 50. Ibid., p. 52. 51. Ibid., pp. 56, 57, 63. 52. Ibid., p. 65. 53. Ibid., p. 73. 54. Ibid., p. 75. 55. Ibid., p. 97. ------ Nuclear Experiments In retrospect there is chilling irony in the atomic bomb's--and the nuclear industry's--origins. Stopping Nazi barbarism provided the initial rationale for the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. At the Nuremberg trials some Nazi scientists and other functionaries were charged with grotesque experiments on humans; the Nuremberg judges rejected excuses and rationalizations. But since then, in the United States, "we have already accepted the policy of experimentation on involuntary human subjects,"[56] concluded Dr. John W. Gofman, a pioneer in radiation research who codiscovered the fissionability of uranium 233 and helped isolate the world's first milligram of plutonium. "In the mid-'50s--when the toxi[ci]ty of low-dose radiation was still uncertain--we were testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere and launching the Atoms for Peace Program," Gofman recalled in a 1979 statement. "It should have been clear to me, even then, that both atmospheric bomb-testing and nuclear power constituted experimentation on involuntary human subjects, indeed on all forms of life."[57] With extraordinarily blunt self-criticism Gofman--a physicist and medical doctor--went on: "I am on record in 1957 as {not} being worried yet about fallout and still being optimistic about the benefits of nuclear power. There is no way I can justify my failure to help sound an alarm over these activities many years sooner than I did. I feel that at least several hundred scientists trained in the biomedical aspect of atomic energy--myself definitely included--are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity through our gross negligence and irresponsibility." And, Gofman added, "Now that we {know} the hazard of low-dose radiation, the crime is not experimentation--it's {murder}."[58] People viewing such an assessment as unfair or excessively strident might find it less so after visiting small towns like St. George, Utah, or Fredonia, Arizona, or Tonopah, Nevada. The pain, for many, has just begun. Before dawn on January 27, 1981--exactly thirty years after the first mushroom cloud ascended from the Nevada Test Site--lifelong Utah residents gathered at the steps of the state capitol and lit candles in memory of dead relatives and friends. Around the state other memorial candles flickered in the darkness. At the operations center for the Nevada Test Site daylight brought simply the beginning of another working day. An Associated Press reporter phoned for comment on the candlelight observances downwind. He took notes, and wrote in an article sent across the nation a few hours later: "The Department of Energy maintains there is `no positive evidence' of a link between fallout and the cancer cases, said Dee Jenkins, test site spokeswoman."[59] We called Dee Jenkins and asked for clarification. Had she been accurately quoted? Yes, she replied. "There is no positive link between low-level radiation and cancer cases."[60] We asked whether the downwind residents had received "low-level radiation" exposure during the atmospheric testing years. "I'm not qualified to answer that question," she responded after a pause.[61] Our request for a clarifying official statement was never answered. Three decades after the first fallout clouds from Nevada, in some respects not much had really changed at federal agencies making pronouncements about nuclear testing. And, with some exceptions, American mass media have continued to be influenced by substantial pressures to treat nuclear weapons testers with deference. In 1957 {The Reporter} magazine published an exceptional in-depth article, "Clouds from Nevada," by investigative reporter Paul Jacobs.[62] Raising basic questions about the safety of nuclear tests, the article was a classic instance of prophetic journalism that--if heeded at the time of publication--would have prevented a great deal of fallout-induced harm yet to come. Twenty years later Jacobs set about working on a documentary film to update the story. Jacobs died from cancer in 1978, before completion of the project.[63] Associates at New Time Films, based in New York, finished the movie, titling it {Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang}.[64] The result was a devastating chronicle of life and death downwind from the test site. To the nuclear industry, that was the problem. The movie was clearly dangerous. And so when the Public Broadcasting Service scheduled {Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang} for national telecast, the Atomic Industrial Forum--an advocacy organization for nuclear energy corporations--swung into action. It mounted an intensive nationwide drive against the film, denouncing it as biased and unfit for broadcast. In addition stations in some localities received letters from regional reactor-committed electric utilities, urging that the film not be broadcast.[65] "After the Atomic Industrial Forum wrote to PBS to protest, the censorship then took place on a local level," the film's associate producer, Penny Bernstein, told us.[66] When the evening scheduled for telecast came, public TV stations in nine of the nation's twenty- four largest television areas refused to air {Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang}. Some, like the five public stations in New Jersey, said they could not find broadcasting time for the film--ever. Other stations postponed it to less popular time slots.[67] In St. Louis, where public television station KETC scheduled the movie and then yanked it at virtually the last minute, a {Post- Dispatch} editorial expressed doubt that the program would have been treated the same way if it had down-played radiation risks. Most likely, the newspaper concluded, the TV station sought to avoid controversy "only because the show questioned the safety of radiation and because government and industry . . . have invested millions in promoting nuclear power (with its accompanying radiation) as safe."[68] {Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang} won the only Emmy award that the Public Broadcasting Service received for 1979. But as of late 1981 PBS--heavily reliant on government and corporate funding--had not provided any money to the documentary movie's producers for a follow- up film they had proposed.[69] ------ 56. John W. Gofman, {An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear Power} (San Francisco: Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, Main P.O. Box 11207, San Francisco, CA 92401; 1979), p. 227. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., pp. 227-228. 59. {The Oregonian}, Associated Press, January 28, 1981. 60. Dee Jenkins, interview, February 1981. 61. Ibid. 62. Paul Jacobs, "Clouds from Nevada," {The Reporter}, May 16, 1957, reprinted in {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}, Vol. 1, pp. 45-64. Jacobs was one of the few people to write about the Nevada testing's destructive impact on downwind residents as early as 1957 for a national readership. Another was Ralph Friedman, a free-lance journalist who had written for the U.S. Army weekly {Yank} during World War II. {The Nation} published Friedman's reportage--headlining it "NEXT DOOR TO GROUND ZERO"--in autumn 1957. The federal government, Friedman concluded in his article, "has done a top-flight Madison Avenue public-relations job in playing down all issues relating to radiation." But, he noted, "AEC publicists have the painful task of double-dealing. They tell the isolated stockmen and miners that they have nothing to worry about . . . They then tell the people of the cities that the tests are `safe' because the fallout comes to rest in `virtually uninhabited desert terrain.'" (Ralph Friedman, "Next Door to Ground Zero," {Nation}, October 19, 1957, pp. 256-259.) When we asked Friedman what the response was to {The Nation} article, he replied: "None--as far as I could see." (Friedman, interview, March 1981.) 63. For a eulogy to Paul Jacobs see Saul Landau and Jack Willis, {In These Times}, April 11-17, 1979. 64. Jack Willis and Saul Landau, {Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang}. 65. "PBS Stations Yield to Industry Pressure, Decline to Air Program on Effects of Nuclear Radiation," {ACCESS}, March 26, 1979; Penny Bernstein to authors, January 27, 1981. 66. Bernstein to authors, January 27, 1981. 67. "PBS Stations Yield to Industry Pressure." 68. {St. Louis Post-Dispatch}, March 3, 1979. 69. Bernstein to authors, January 27, 1981. ------ Underground Nuclear Tests One of the most pervasive--and erroneous--beliefs about the U.S. nuclear testing program is that its radioactive fallout ended when the Limited Test Ban treaty took effect in 1963. When the nuclear tests went underground, people assumed the weapons-testing radiation threat disappeared. This comforting notion, carefully nurtured by the government, is false. In 1979 the U.S. Government admitted that more than 35 of approximately 330 "underground" nuclear blasts sent radioactivity outside the boundaries of the Nevada Test Site, during the 1960s and early 1970s.[70] And the DOE's test site manager, General Mahlon Gates, said that the government still was not sure it had made public all the atomic tests that occurred in Nevada.[71] Prior to that announcement governmental spokespeople were admitting to only half as many underground test mishaps venting radioactivity off-site. "During 18 weapons tests which accidentally released radioactivity during the period, 1962-1971, very, very, small releases occurred," DOE media liaison David Miller said in December 1978.[72] While understating the number of underground tests spewing radioactivity beyond site boundaries, officials were even more determined to belittle the severity of those ventings. "We didn't believe it was a health hazard then and don't believe it is today," Miller insisted.[73] But that kind of assurance sounded more than a little familiar. In St. George, Irma Thomas--who had lived through the atmospheric testing days as a middle-aged woman--told us the underground nuclear testing continued to infuriate her. "I don't trust all that stuff about how safe it is," she said. "We've heard that before."[74] Across the Arizona border, in the town of Fredonia where the leukemia epidemic killed four people including her husband, Rose Mackelprang reacted to the underground testing with gentle anger: "I don't think that we really should have to have any more radiation, I think we have plenty without adding to it all the time. We have about all that we need."[75] In 1980 we visited the Nevada Test Site, touring the windswept expanse of desert, accompanied by federal officials. Signs at heavily guarded checkpoints now say "U.S. Department of Energy." As always it is a military operation. Amid the ugly pockmarks of the test site, where craters give off the appearance of a moonscape from the air, the austere yet ecologically intricate desert seemed transmuted, and profoundly violated. For the record, Nevada Test Site representatives were resolute-- speaking of preparedness, national defense, a strong "military posture." But an old hand at nuclear testing said, after asking us to turn off our tape recorder, "No head of state, in the world, has ever seen a nuclear bomb explosion. To me, that's scary." He added: "I don't think anyone who has ever seen a nuclear explosion has ever not asked the question--{My God, what have we done?}"[76] When the 1980s began, nuclear detonations under the Nevada desert-- ranging up to 150 kilotons each--were occurring at an average rate of once every three weeks.[77] After the Reagan administration gained power in 1981, it pledged to increase that pace. A cone-shaped crater, measuring several hundred feet deep and a quarter-mile across, was left by the hydrogen "device" code-named Sedan. Eighteen years after it was created by the 104-kiloton thermonuclear blast, the crater--graced with an overlook platform and an explanatory sign--had become a monument to the destructive force of nuclear weaponry. But when it was detonated, as an experiment in possible excavation uses of nuclear energy, Sedan sent intense radiation all the way to the Eastern Seaboard. Probably little would have been learned about this planned disaster had not some University of Utah graduate students and their outspoken professor been visiting a canyon about twenty miles southeast of Salt Lake City. On July 7, 1962, radiologist Dr. Robert C. Pendleton was with students on a field trip in Big Cottonwood Canyon. "We were measuring levels of radioactivity in different environmental situations," Dr. Pendleton remembered. "A cloud of radioactive material came over and all the measurements began to go nuts. I recognized that we were getting fallout and took the students off the hill and back down in the valley."[78] The fallout had multiplied normal radiation readings a hundredfold.[79] There had been no warning from the government--only "the usual announcements that atomic shots were taking place," according to {Deseret News} environmental reporter Joseph Bauman.[80] Although the federal government was content to let the matter rest, Dr. Pendleton was not: "We found radioactive iodine in all of the children, milk and vegetation that we measured in the whole northern section of the state."[81] Pendleton's determination to analyze impacts of the Sedan fallout caused the Utah Department of Health to divert thousands of gallons of milk--laced with radioactive iodine 131, a voracious destroyer of human thyroids--that would have been otherwise consumed by Utah residents.[82] The action partially deflected health damage to Utahns from the Sedan test fallout. But it angered the White House--which "responded by ordering the Public Health Service to clear its radiation reports through the White House press office," {The Deseret News} reported seventeen years later on the basis of newly declassified federal documents.[83] As long-secret records came to light, the Salt Lake City newspaper published an interview with Dr. Pendleton about aftermaths of ostensibly nonatmospheric nuclear testing in July 1962. Radioactive iodine, cesium, and strontium increased "very markedly" after the Sedan blast, Pendleton recalled. "We told Governor George D. Clyde there was a risk, but the [U.S.] Public Health Service was telling the State Division of Public Health a different story." The federal policy of dismissing radiation alarms prevented use of precautions that could have helped guard people from exposure. As Pendleton observed, "Public relations statements that there was no harm in the fallout clouds were reprehensible."[84] During the 1960s, as Pendleton continued warning of radiation damage from underground nuclear tests, official hostility toward him grew. The conflict escalated in 1963 with the publication of a {Science} magazine article on Utah's summer 1962 iodine 131 levels.[85] Pendleton and two colleagues pointed out that the thyroids of many thousands of Utah people were seriously threatened by nuclear detonations in Nevada the previous summer--with children in their first two years of life put at the greatest risk of all. In 1964 a follow-up article in {Science} made clear that the country as a whole remained in jeopardy from ventings of underground nuclear tests.[86] Dr. Edward A. Martell, formerly employed by the U.S. Government to monitor fallout, documented findings that underground nuclear blasts were responsible for significant levels of iodine 131 in milk from the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest to the southeastern United States. "Even underground tests which are largely contained below ground with only a limited release of radioactive gases and vapors cannot be overlooked as sources of Iodine-131," Martell wrote. He added: "Control of Iodine-131 fallout will be more effective if we control its sources rather than the distribution and consumption of fresh dairy products. . . . The high frequency of venting of radioactive products from previous underground tests suggests that either there was no serious attempt to contain them, or that containment is difficult and uncertain."[87] To a casual observer the scientific debate over iodine 131 from underground testing might have seemed somewhat academic. But in a community like Pleasant Grove--located near Provo, Utah, in the fallout path of Sedan and other tests several years earlier--the issue appeared much less abstract. During the late 1960s seven children in that town of about five thousand people died from leukemia[88]--a rate more than ten times higher than the national average.[89] Pendleton found himself faced with cuts in federal research funds because he was coming up with Utah radiation readings deemed "too high."[90] Some of the most ominous nuclear tests were being executed under the category of Plowshare explosions to develop nuclear technology for functions like excavation. "Surely each person to be showered with radioactive dust from engineering tests should be fully informed of this possible hazard, and should be given a chance to decide whether the risk is justified," Pendleton told a {Science Digest} interviewer in 1967. He went on, "While we are making such strong efforts all over the nation to clear up the air and remove pollution, we have an agency proposing to release massive quantities of radioactive air pollution to drift down over the inhabitants of the country without even asking a by-your-leave as to whether they may do so."[91] In 1981 we asked Robert Pendleton to comment on his two-decade altercation with nuclear weapons testing authorities. Continuing his research as director of the Radiological Health Department at the University of Utah, Dr. Pendleton seemed weary of the struggle. He declined to discuss past cover-ups and coercion directed against him.[92] ------ 70. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Testimony of General Mahlon Gates, U.S. DOE manager of the Nevada Test Site, and Richard E. Stanley, acting director of the U.S. Environmental Monitoring and Support Laboratory," Las Vegas, Nevada, April 23, 1979, unpublished transcript. 71. Ibid. 72. {Washington County News} (Utah), December 14, 1978. 73. Ibid. 74. Irma Thomas, interview, February 1980. 75. Rose Mackelprang, speech to National Conference for a Comprehensive Test Ban, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, December 12, 1980. 76. DOE official, who requested anonymity, during tour of Nevada Test Site, interview, February 1980. 77. David Jackson, DOE spokesman, interview, September 1980. 78. {Deseret News}, May 23, 1979. 79. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), May 17, 1980. 80. {Deseret News}, May 23, 1979. 81. Ibid. 82. {The Tribune}, (Salt Lake), May 17, 1980. 83. {Deseret News}, April 24, 1979. 84. {Deseret News}, January 27, 1979. 85. Robert C. Pendleton, et al., "Iodine-131 in Utah During July and August 1962," {Science}, August 16, 1963, pp. 640-642. 86. E. A. Martell, "Iodine-131 Fallout from Underground Tests," {Science}, January 10, 1964, pp. 126-129. 87. Ibid., p. 129. 88. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), May 17, 1980. 89. Heath, "Subject: Leukemia." 90. {Deseret News}, January 27, 1979. 91. Nelson Wadsworth, "Underground A-Tests May Be Making Us Radioactive," {Science Digest}, September 1967, pp. 15, 17. 92. Robert Pendleton to authors, January 19, 1981. ------ More Radiation Clouds In the late 1960s and beyond, the kind of additional fallout that underground testing critics had labored to prevent did indeed occur-- with several subsurface nuclear tests shooting radioactivity across the U.S. and into Canada. From 1966 to 1975 the federal officer responsible for monitoring of off-site fallout from underground detonations was Colonel Raymond E. Brim, chief of operations for the Air Force Technical Applications Center. On December 8, 1968, a thirty-kiloton Plowshare blast named Schooner sent up a storm of radioactivity over the Nevada Test Site. As usual Brim's agency began to monitor the fallout. "This effluent cloud was tracked continuously by Air Force planes until it reached the border of Canada where standing orders prevented tracking outside the United States," Brim revealed more than a decade afterward. "I remember a few days later an article appeared in the {New York Times} which reported an increase in radiation detected in Canada. When we read the article, we knew that it was the cloud we had tracked to the border."[93] But, at the time, Brim and his colleagues kept silent. And, with neither the U.S. nor Canadian governments willing to state definitely that the American test was the cause of increased radiation levels in Canada, the matter dropped, unresolved, from public sight.[94] The Schooner test clouds also dropped radiation across the continent. "It didn't register anywhere east of the Mississippi because the AEC had no monitoring stations east of the river," according to Brim--who termed the government's strategy "a clever adaption of the switch-the-monitors-off ploy."[95] While working for the Air Force, Brim went along with the Pentagon program and held his peace. During the first several years after retirement, however, Colonel Brim mulled the implications of underground testing radiation leaks. On August 1, 1979, he testified at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. "There is indisputable evidence on record that shows that the people, not just of Utah and Nevada but of a much wider and more encompassing area of the United States, were unknowingly subjected to fallout of radioactive debris that resulted from ventings of underground and cratering tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site," Brim told the congressional panel. "Because of weather and wind patterns, this debris was frequently carried much farther than has been reported to the public."[96] Although Brim's testimony came at an open hearing on Capitol Hill, {The New York Times}, {The Washington Post}, and the nation's other most influential newspapers did not print a word about it. More than a year later, in January 1981, Brim declared flatly that "Americans were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation from `safe' underground tests all through the 1960s and 1970s, and remain in danger today." In an article published by {The Washington Monthly} magazine, Colonel Brim charged: "Just as the risk of fallout continues, so does the conscious government effort to cover up the situation. Department of Energy officials fully understand that underground testing can't fully contain radiation, yet downplay the information or even withhold it from the public. Exactly as they did in the 1950s, officials refuse to reveal information necessary for those who live near radiation accidents to protect themselves."[97] It was a strong statement from someone who--for nearly ten years-- served as the Pentagon's top officer in charge of monitoring leaks from underground nuclear tests. "Today it seems incredible that straight-faced government spokesmen could proclaim that standing downwind of an open-air nuclear explosion was perfectly safe," Brim went on. "It seems equally incredible that people believed the claims. Yet that twin mentality continues to operate, with Washington making what will, in years to come, be considered preposterous claims about the safety of underground tests, and most people nodding their heads in agreement."[98] The Nevada Test Site's current manager, Mahlon Gates, made a public appearance before a 1979 congressional hearing, ostensibly making a clean breast of past underground test radiation ventings. Colonel Brim observed, however, that Gates's "estimate of the {total} amount of radiation downwind of a test site in the period from 1951 to 1969 . . . worked out to less than a quarter of the radiation the Public Health Service recorded after a {single blast} on the same site."[99] Indicative of the kind of present-day hazards--and governmental deceit--Brim alluded to was the underground nuclear test Baneberry. When it vented on the morning of December 18, 1970, Baneberry sent a mushroom cloud of radioactivity eight thousand feet into the air. Ten years later the U.S. Government's official log of nuclear tests was still claiming that only "minor levels of radioactivity" were detected off-site from the Baneberry explosion.[100] But Colonel Brim, who was responsible for off-site monitoring during the Baneberry test, has pointed to evidence "that a dangerously high concentration of Iodine-131, a radiation byproduct, was found in the milk of Utah and Nevada cows which had eaten vegetation exposed to Baneberry's fallout. Deer and sheep as far as 400 miles from the test range had abnormal concentrations of iodine in their thyroid glands, and the thyroid of a fetus from one sheep contained five times more iodine than the thyroid of its mother."[101] Favorable weather conditions mitigated the Baneberry fallout impact. Dr. Robert Pendleton calculated that if the accident had happened in summertime the result for Utah residents could have been "a very significant radiation dose to the thyroid."[102] Baneberry radioactivity rode the winds to the Northwest, Midwest, and New England, also reaching Canada. The following spring Dr. Ernest Sternglass and associates accumulated data on where the fallout had descended. They compared the findings to U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics reports on mortality of infants born after the vented test blast. "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," Sternglass discovered. "Across the rest of the U.S., the pattern of general decline continued."[103] The fetal deaths for Bannock County in southeastern Idaho, directly in the path of the December 1970 Baneberry fallout,[104] rose to their highest level in 1971, compared with any of the five previous or five following years.[105] That year there were twenty-one officially recorded fetal deaths in Bannock County--62 percent higher than the average annual total for the years 1966 to 1976.[106] Was the Baneberry underground test venting a fluke unlikely to be repeated? The United States Government says yes. But a 1974 confidential U.S. military memo, written by nuclear testing program officer Captain William Gay, says otherwise. Made public through efforts by Senator Edward Kennedy in 1979, Captain Gay's memorandum stated that "on the basis of past experience at NTS [Nevada Test Site], a rather high incidence prevails for a release of radioactivity like Baneberry." The Gay memo added that "the risk is not like one in a million or so low as to be comfortable. Ventings have happened and will probably happen again."[107] Captain Gay, director for tests in the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Military Application, also wrote in the memo: "Considering past experience, massive venting can be expected in about one [ratio blanked out by censors] events."[108] Even after the decision was made to declassify the document in 1979, the American people apparently could not be trusted to hear a candid official estimate of the chances for future disastrous ventings of underground nuclear bomb tests. ------ 93. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, "Testimony of Raymond Brim, Retired Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C., August 1, 1979, unpublished transcript. 94. Ibid. 95. Raymond E. Brim and Patricia Condon, "Another A-Bomb Cover-up," {Washington Monthly}, January 1981, p. 48. 96. "Testimony of Raymond Brim." 97. Brim and Condon, "Another A-Bomb Cover-up," p. 45. 98. Ibid., p. 46. 99. Ibid., p. 48. 100. {Announced US Nuclear Tests}, p. 30. 101. Brim and Condon, "Another A-Bomb Cover-up," p. 47. 102. {Deseret News}, January 27, 1978. 103. Sternglass, {Secret Fallout}, p. 181. 104. The Baneberry fallout split into three general trajectories after venting. The westernmost segment went over the Idaho Falls area of southeastern Idaho, passing directly over Bannock County. ({Deseret News}, January 27, 1978. See also, EPA, "Final Report of Off-Site Surveillance for the Baneberry Event, December 18, 1970," Western Environmental Research Laboratory, SWRHL-107r, February 1972, especially pp. 31, 51.) 105. Bannock County and overall Idaho fetal death statistics are contained in anthropology master's thesis by Edward B. Beldin, Idaho State University, "A Bioanthropological Approach to the Effects of Air Quality on Human Health, with Emphasis on the Incidence of Stillbirths in Two Southeast Idaho Cities," 1978. 106. Ibid. When put in ratio to live births, the Bannock County fetal deaths in 1971 were even more anomalous in comparison with preceding and subsequent years. 107. {Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation}, Vol. 1, p. 125. 108. Ibid. ------ Irradiated Test Workers Bennie F. Levy was thirty-two years old when he began working at the Nevada Test Site in 1951, the first year of nuclear explosions there. Born and raised on an Arizona cattle ranch, he had left college to volunteer for the Air Corps soon after Pearl Harbor, helping to service B-24s and other Allied bombers at Pacific Ocean bases. After the war, he became an ironworker, on jobs at dam construction along the Colorado River, then electrical transmission lines in the Southwest. A member of the Structural Ironworkers Union, he was laboring on a dam project in the Pacific Northwest when he first heard about a big new source of employment. "I was in Walla Walla, Washington, when I got a letter from a friend in September 1950 to come to Las Vegas, Nevada, that there was a big job breakin' here," Levy recalled in an interview.[109] In autumn 1951 Levy's career as a Nevada Test Site ironworker got under way. "We were workin' a lot around radiation," he told us. "We asked, `Is it safe to go in?' They say, `Oh, yeah, it's safe, nothing wrong with it, it's safe.'"[110] Levy and other ironworkers built towers the atom bombs would be perched on for detonation. In early 1952 he helped set up a test for the first time. "We got everything ready and then we came home." From the town of Henderson, nearly a hundred miles away, he watched the orange light glow of the atomic blast. "It was pretty. It was a pretty shot. They were all pretty."[111] The work settled into a routine. After a nuclear detonation a few ironworkers would be directly involved in retrieving instrumentation from ground zero. On a rotating basis Levy and fellow ironworkers "were recovering the data for the scientists. And we'd go in anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour after the event, after the shot. And the fallout--we went right through it." Levy paused. "Of course we were `rad-safed' with cotton coveralls and a little cap." How about protection for mouth and nose? "Never wore a respirator," he replied.[112] During the early and middle 1950s Levy personally went on the reentry mission dozens of times--"at least thirty, forty, maybe more than that." And, as a matter of course, along with coworkers he ate lunch in "forward areas" hot with radioactive particles, including plutonium. "On occasion," he remembered, "monitors would come by with Geiger counters and get readings on my lunch pail or tools. This common occurrence leaves no doubt in my mind that I was breathing and swallowing radioactive debris all the time. We had no facilities to wash our hands or face, and we could not leave the contaminated areas for lunch as that would take an extra thirty minutes."[113] Bennie Levy had been employed at the test site for about a year when--unbeknownst to him or his fellow workers, or the general public--Atomic Energy Commission policymakers met to discuss their working conditions. In the words of then-secret AEC minutes, "the commissioners expressed concern that workers might be exposed to radiation hazards for too long a time."[114] At a follow-up meeting two weeks later, AEC records show, the commissioners heard that "the means used to determine the intensity and duration of exposure are not always as reliable as might be desired and in general it cannot be said that exposure problems at the test site have been completely solved."[115] But test site employees like Bennie Levy heard nothing of the sort from official quarters. They continued at their high-paying jobs, believing their work shored up national security. Yet Levy noticed a few odd things. "Although we were assured that there was no danger, I thought it was a bit curious that supervisors and AEC personnel did not remain in the area. I questioned them on various occasions and was told that they did not have to remain."[116] When the nuclear testing program shifted underground in the early 1960s, Bennie Levy took part in drilling tasks. In the process, "I was involved in operations which caused me to be exposed on many occasions." Often the underground shots leaked badly, scattering radiation, "but we continued to work in these same areas as if there was no danger at all."[117] And caverns left by the nuclear blasts seeped radiation for days-- even years--afterward.[118] Mounting cancer and leukemia deaths among test-site workers became conspicuous to those who had labored side by side. But the government conducted no health study of test-site employees. "In fact," according to Levy, "any suggestion that radiation had caused cancer was fought bitterly. In my own craft, the ironworkers, I do not need to be told that cancer has been caused by radiation. I have seen my fellow workers die before my very eyes."[119] In the late 1970s, after more than twenty-five years of employment at the test site, Levy left the job and began to research the health of people with whom he had worked. Levy documented that, out of only 350 fellow ironworkers at the test site, two had died of leukemia.[120] Among 350 men, even a single instance of leukemia would have been unusual under ordinary circumstances. By 1981 he had accumulated a list of 132 men who died of cancer or blood diseases, out of 3,100 construction-trades employees working in highly contaminated forward areas at the Nevada Test Site. Three men on the list--Clarence Crockett, Robert Sendlein, and Warren Snyder-- died of multiple myeloma bone-marrow cancer during 1977 and 1978.[121] And in just three months of spring 1981 three who worked in the test- site drilling division died of brain cancer.[122] Eighteen of the men on Bennie Levy's list died of leukemia, a rate of approximately five times the normal.[123] Two others--caught in thick radiation clouds after the Baneberry underground test venting-- died of acute myeloid leukemia.[124] In 1981 the U.S. Government was still denying that the Baneberry blast's radiation caused the leukemia that killed those two workers, test-site guard Harley Roberts and welder William Nunamaker. They had been among eighty-six workers taken to the site's center for treatment after being covered by radioactive clouds that erupted out of the shaft.[125] The two leukemia deaths, out of eighty-six individuals, vastly surpass normal rates of incidence. "We just would like it to be on record that we know our husbands died of leukemia by radiation," widow Louise Nunamaker told a congressional subcommittee in 1979 as she sat next to Dorothy Roberts. "I saw a very well, healthy man die, a beautiful person that loved his country, served his country in the war and also was in the field from 1957. . . . I don't think anyone will know the hell we have been through with the testimony and [the government's] saying that the records of my husband have been destroyed and so forth and so forth. Things we know are untruths. It was very, very difficult for both of us."[126] Bill Nunamaker, his widow recalled, "never said anything until his deathbed. He said, `Mother, you know what I died from. Go get them.'"[127] Louise Nunamaker and Dorothy Roberts tried. When the DOE turned a deaf ear to their entreaties, they went to federal court with a lawsuit. But the two widows had meager financial resources to use against a courtroom adversary with virtually unlimited funds. When a reporter for the {Los Angeles Herald Examiner} asked the U.S. Justice Department's head attorney on the case, William Z. Elliott, how much the government was spending to defeat the Nunamaker/Roberts suit, he replied, "As much as it takes to win."[128] ------ 109. Bennie Levy, interview, December 1980. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, September 23, 1952, p. 504. 115. AEC Commissioners Meeting Minutes, October 7, 1952, p. 536. 116. Levy, interview, December 1980. 117. Ibid. 118. {Final Environmental Impact Statement}, Nevada Test Site, pp. 2-99, 2-106. In addition to leakage from "drillback" operations, the EPA has conceded that craters left by Sedan and other subsurface blasts have continued to seep radiation. (EPA, "Off-Site Environmental Monitoring Report for the Nevada Test Site and Other Areas Used for Underground Test Detonations," Las Vegas, 1977, 1978.) 119. Levy, interview, December 1980. 120. Joe Naves and Raymond Browers. 121. "Deceased Nevada Test Site Workers," list provided by Levy, 1981. 122. Levy, interview, June 1981. 123. The usual rate of leukemia among a comparable number of American males as determined for the Smoky bomb test participants study cited in Chapter 2, would be less than four cases--in contrast to the eighteen instances of leukemia found by Levy among test-site building-trades workers. 124. {Los Angeles Herald Examiner}, March 11, 1979. 125. Ibid. 126. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, "Testimony of Louise Nunamaker and Dorothy Roberts," Las Vegas, April 23, 1979, unpublished transcript. 127. Ibid. 128. {Los Angeles Herald Examiner}, March 11, 1979. In 1980 and early 1981 a total of 263 suits were filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of former Nevada Test Site workers, seeking compensation payments for cancer and other radiation-linked illnesses. ({San Diego Evening Tribune}, Associated Press, November 14, 1980; {Las Vegas Sun}, February 26 1981.) In 1980 the Nevada Test Site Radiation Victim Association came into existence with Bennie Levy serving as president. (NTSRVA, P.O. Box 18414-192, Las Vegas, NV 89114.) ------ No End in Sight In autumn 1980 yet another underground test in Nevada sent radiation off-site.[129] For residents it was a bad case of deja vu. Utah governor Scott M. Matheson was disgusted. "This lack of communication is too much like what occurred between the state of Utah and the Atomic Energy Commission . . . 30 years ago," the governor asserted in a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy. "I object to the disregard for the rights of Utahns to know when there is even the possibility of risk for increased radioactivity in our state as a result of nuclear testing in Nevada."[130] Indeed, events had followed a classic pattern. The Energy Department waited twelve hours after detection of the September 25 radioactive leakage before alerting the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal department responsible for off-site monitoring of radiation.[131] Despite public assurances by DOE that radiation "is not expected to leave the Nevada Test Site," the EPA later reported finding radioactive xenon gas near the California border.[132] Like Utah state officials, California authorities learned of the nuclear accident from the news media--about four hours after EPA was informed of the problem, and a full sixteen hours after on-site DOE personnel reportedly discovered the leak.[133] Meanwhile less than eighteen hours after the mishap the radioactive gas traveled forty miles in a southwesterly direction and reached Lathrop Wells, a small Nevada town about ten miles from the California line.[134] EPA spokesman Chuck Costa acknowledged, when we interviewed him, that his agency did not have monitoring equipment available in California capable of detecting radioactive gases such as xenon. The only such EPA monitors were stationed in Nevada, he said. As for the delay in revealing the leak, Costa--EPA's deputy director for nuclear radiation assessment--said that "there was an obvious screw-up in communication over at DOE. They should have called us much earlier than they did."[135] When we asked DOE for comment, the response was tight-lipped. "We feel that they were notified in what we considered to be a timely manner," test-site spokesman David Jackson said. "That was the way it was, and I have no further comment.[136] The U.S. Government has remained especially anxious to retain its nuclear testing prerogative in Nevada. Federal officials would be hard pressed to find another state hospitable to such activities. After nuclear tests in 1969 and 1973 Colorado voters passed a referendum requiring ballot approval of any further atomic blasts within the state.[137] In southern Mississippi two underground atomic explosions during the mid-1960s occurred near the town of Hattiesburg. A decade and a half later, an Associated Press dispatch noted, Governor Cliff Finch urged families nearby to evacuate "after the University of Mississippi reported that scientists had found radioactive and deformed toads, frogs, and a lizard above the Tatum Salt Dome, a shelf of salt used in the 1960s for nuclear explosions." Tests of one frog detected radioactivity one thousand times normal.[138] At Carlsbad, New Mexico, a 1961 underground nuclear test, named Gnome, sent radiation airborne. Two years later, in congressional testimony, Dr. Eric Reiss said that the Gnome test "delivered sufficient fallout to the vicinity of Carlsbad, New Mexico, to cause thyroid dose levels of from 7 to 55 rads to children."[139] There are strong indications the radioactivity caused second- generation genetic defects. Dr. Catherine Armstrong, a pediatrician in Carlsbad since 1950, told us that during thirty-one years of practice she noticed a startling upswing of serious congenital damage apparent at birth. That trend did not get under way until well after the underground atomic blast vented radiation in 1961.[140] "Young people coming along are having a noticeable increase of congenital abnormalities, much more than we used to have in this area," Dr. Armstrong said in a 1981 interview. "Congenital heart diseases" have been far more prevalent, along with increased bone defects, severely immature livers, and jaundice among newborns in the Carlsbad community. Dr. Armstrong noticed that those problems became conspicuous during the mid-1970s--years when many area residents who were small children at the time of the Gnome nuclear test began raising families. "It's got to be more than coincidental," she declared.[141] As with every presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, the administration of Ronald Reagan eagerly embraced nuclear testing as part of national defense. The desert of southern Nevada has become the place where America culminates work on the nuclear weapons development assembly line. Even without detonation in combat, those atomic warheads have been endangering the lives of many Americans and of future generations around the world. "Our nuclear program was built in the name of national security-- protecting the lives of Americans," Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder commented in 1980. "One can't help but wonder, who was protected and at whose expense?."[142] ------ 129. {The Oregonian}, Associated Press, September 28, 1980. 130. {The Tribune} (Salt Lake), October 9, 1980. 131. DOE spokesman David Jackson and EPA official Chuck Costa, interviews, September 1980. 132. {The Oregonian}, September 28, 1980; Costa, interview, September 1980. 133. James Mahoney, California Department of Health Services, and Alvin Rickers, state of Utah, interviews, September 1980. 134. {The Oregonian}, September 28, 1980; Costa, interview, September 1980. 135. Costa, interview, September 1980. 136. Jackson, interview, September 1980. But nuclear health physics pioneer Karl Z. Morgan was far from complacent about the delay. "It's very important that appropriate monitoring be done. If you wait till the cloud has passed over, you miss entirely what was in it," Dr. Morgan said. (Morgan, interview, September 1980.) 137. Anna Gyorgy and Friends, {NO NUKES: Everyone's Guide to Nuclear Power} (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 443. 138. {Boston Globe}, Associated Press, May 26, 1979. 139. {Fallout, Radiation Standards and Countermeasures}, August 1963, Part 2. 140. Dr. Catherine Armstrong, interview, May 1981. 141. Ibid. 142. Patricia Schroeder, press release statement, April 12, 1980. ------ ______________________________________________________________________________ P A R T II ____________ X Rays and the Radioactive Workplace * * * * * * * [part 7 of 18] 6 The Use and Misuse of Medical X Rays During 1979 congressional hearings on medical and dental X rays, Congressman Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) recalled taking his young daughter to a hospital emergency room after she had inhaled some pillow stuffing. She was having trouble breathing. Recalled Gore: "The first thing the doctor said is, `Let's have an X ray.'" Gore asked the doctor if the pillow stuffing would show up on the X ray. The doctor said it would not. Gore then asked why an X ray was necessary. The doctor said it would be good to have as a base against which to compare future X rays in case some pneumonia developed. Gore decided not to allow the X ray to be taken.[1] Gore's action was a rare one. In 1979--the year of the accident at Three Mile Island--the American population received over 270 million individual X rays.[2] They constituted the largest single source of human-made external radiation doses to the American public. In 1980 some $6.7 billion was spent on radiology equipment, insurance, and personnel;[3] approximately 300,000 people are currently employed operating medical and dental X-ray equipment.[4] Yet the doses administered by this industry were hardly insignificant. In some cases they may have harmed rather than helped their patients. There is no question that X rays can perform enormously important medical services, and that their use has made an inestimable contribution to human health. Surgical therapy; treatment of bone fractures; location of various cancers, internal diseases, and malformations--all have become possible with the use of X rays, and all have resulted in the alleviation of pain and the saving of lives on a mass scale. As a result, X-ray diagnosis has rightfully taken its place as a vital and necessary part of medical therapy throughout the world. The problems arise when the technology is overused and its dangers are not fully appreciated by the medical profession or the public. Every indicator now points to new warnings that caution is advised, and that there are those--particularly pregnant women and their unborn children--who have already suffered from the misuse of this medical miracle. ------ 1. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, {Unnecessary Exposure to Radiation from Medical and Dental X-rays}, 96th Cong., 1st sess., July 24 and 31, 1979, pp. 86-87 (hereafter cited as {1979 X-ray Hearings}). 2. {1979 X-ray Hearings}, p. 79. 3. Joseph D. Calhoun, "President's Address," {American Journal of Roentgenology} 135 (September 1980): 636-646. 4. {1979 X-ray Hearings}, p. 71. ------ The Dawn of the X Ray X rays were discovered accidentally on November 23, 1895, by the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen. Roentgen was working in a darkened room, trying to determine whether recently discovered cathode rays could travel through a glass vacuum tube. "Suddenly, about a yard from the tube," recounted Dr. Otto Glasser, Roentgen's biographer, "there was a weak light that shimmered on a little bench he knew was located nearby. It was as though a ray of light or a faint spark from the induction coil had been reflected by a mirror." Not believing this possible, Roentgen repeated the process, and another faint light appeared, this time looking "like a faint green cloud." Excited, Roentgen soon found the fluorescence was caused by the rays striking a chemically treated screen. After extensive experiments he determined that the rays had a very short wavelength that gave them special penetrating power, enabling them to pass through various substances--including human flesh. Human bones, he found, cast a denser shadow than surrounding soft tissues--a property that would form the basis for the global medical X-ray industry.[5] Roentgen published his first article on the phenomenon in late December 1895. By February of 1896 American physicists were using X rays in clinical medicine. One patient--a young boy named Eddie McCarthy--had a broken forearm X-rayed. A young New Yorker named Tolson Cunningham had a bullet removed from his leg after it was located with a forty-five-minute X-ray exposure. Soon University of Pennsylvania professor Henry W. Cattell wrote in {Science} that "the manifold uses to which Roentgen's discovery may be applied in medicine are so obvious that it is even now questionable whether a surgeon would be morally justified in performing a certain class of operations without first having seen pictured by these rays the field of his work--a map, as it were, of the unknown country he is to explore." Within months X rays were used to find a bullet in the brain of a twelve-year-old child, a severed drainage tube in a lung, and to photograph a broken hip joint. By the end of 1896 a Chicago electrical engineer named Wolfram C. Fuchs had performed more than fourteen hundred X-ray examinations, and doctors were regularly referring their patients to "specialists" with the simple, primitive machines they had bought or built themselves.[6] Not surprisingly the early X-ray pioneers had little understanding of the potential dangers of radiation. They rarely bothered to protect their patients or themselves from overexposure. Machine operators often tested their equipment by placing their hands--time and again--in the beam. With fluctuating power ratios and errant beams, doctors, patients, machine operators, and bystanders alike were exposed. The X rays could even penetrate walls and irradiate people in other rooms.[7] And the side effects were not long in surfacing. In 1896 Dr. D. W. Gage of McCook, Nebraska, writing in New York's {Medical Record}, noted cases of hair loss, reddened skin, skin sloughing off, and lesions. "I wish to suggest that more be understood regarding the action of the x rays before the general practitioner adopts them in his daily work," Gage warned.[8] As the technology was refined and the equipment became more powerful, increasingly serious damage began to surface. A part-time machine demonstrator named H. D. Hawks was forced to quit his job after only four days because his hands began to redden and swell. The skin on his knuckles disintegrated from overexposure, fingernail growth halted, and the hair on exposed skin fell out.[9] Hawks's problems were minor compared with those of Clarence Madison Dally, a glassblower at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory and the first American X-ray worker known to have been killed by X-ray exposure. Dally frequently tested the output of radiation tubes by placing his hands directly in the beam. Though he was severely burned in 1896, Dally continued X-ray work for two more years. In 1902 his right arm was amputated at the shoulder to arrest the spread of skin cancer; two years later his left arm was amputated for the same reason. Dally died that October, prompting Edison to discontinue radiation research in his laboratory. By the 1930s so many people had fallen victim to the misuse of X rays that an entire book (entitled {American Martyrs to Science Through the Roentgen Rays}) was published by Dr. Percy Brown, a Boston radiologist who himself died of cancer in 1950.[10] As the demand for X rays expanded, so did the number of people operating the machines. Radiology grew from a specialty of only a few hundred practitioners in 1913 to a burgeoning profession with more than fifteen thousand people in 1981--roughly 6 percent of the nation's physicians. To become certified radiologists, doctors generally complete a three-year residency following their medical- school training and internship. A one-year fellowship in a specialty may also be taken. They must then pass a national examination before practicing.[11] As an elite group of medical doctors with radiation training, they raised the use of diagnostic X rays to the status of a high-powered medical specialty. Unfortunately the health of radiologists declined dramatically with the expansion of their trade. In 1946 a statistical study of obituaries in the {New England Journal of Medicine} by Dr. Helmuth Ulrich found the leukemia rate among radiologists to be eight times that of other doctors.[12] In 1956 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) supported those findings in a report that concluded that radiologists lived 5.2 years less than other doctors.[13] In 1963 a study by Dr. E. B. Lewis found a significant excess of deaths from leukemia, multiple myeloma, and aplastic anemia among radiologists, and two years later two Johns Hopkins researchers discovered a 70 percent excess of cardiovascular disease and certain cancers among radiologists as opposed to the general population, and a 730 percent rise in leukemia deaths.[14] In 1981 Dr. Genevieve Matanowski, who is directing the continuation of the Johns Hopkins study, wrote that there is additional evidence that radiologists also suffer an increased risk of contracting multiple myeloma, and an increased chance of death from strokes and heart disease.[15] And though they have become the human guinea pigs of the X-ray industry, radiologists unfortunately are not the only people administering X rays. In fact many medical practitioners obtain their M.D. certificates and go on to use X-ray machines extensively in their practices without even rudimentary training in radiology. Dr. Herbert Abrams, professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School, has warned that the problem "can be traced to medical schools, where all too often one finds too few radiologists on the faculty, too little support of the department, too little time in the curriculum and too few radiology clerkships." The result, he warns, "may be a graduating class with limited knowledge of what radiology can do."[16] Indeed, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, founder of the profession of radiation health physics, has stated: "If you ask many of these doctors what is a roentgen or a rad, they are not even able to give you the definition."[17] Surveys have shown, in fact, that nonradiologists who provided their own X-ray services ordered twice as many X rays as those doctors who referred patients to trained radiologists expert in the field, with a more complete understanding of the technology and its dangers.[18] And if doctors are largely ignorant of the potential health effects of the X-ray machines in their offices, often the roughly 150,000 people who actually operate them understand the dangers even less. As of 1981 less than a third of the states in the U.S. required licensing of X-ray machine operators, and even those programs are by no means uniform. Most of the licensing only pertains to full-time X-ray equipment operators and does not cover people who operate the machines part time. Only California, of all the fifty states, requires that all X-ray machine operators be specially trained.[19] Meanwhile the vast majority of the people administering X rays may not really know what they are doing. Congressman Bob Eckhardt, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, found it "particularly disturbing, if not outright frightening . . . that in many states any person can walk off the streets and operate machines which are capable of inflicting great harm upon those exposed to them."[20] Daniel Donohue, president of the American Society of Radiologic Technologists, has echoed the sentiment. After assisting in a training program he found that many prospective X-ray machine operators "were told never to adjust the controls of the equipment, but to increase the time of exposure when they X-rayed a larger patient. Many were told to experiment on their patient and to try different techniques . . . to learn how to use the equipment." Some, Donohue added, had been instructed "not to limit the beam of radiation in the area of interest." The technique of limiting tissue exposed is now seen as a basic safety practice in medical radiology. Donohue found the experience deeply disturbing. "Most of these operators--which included nurses, medical assistants, secretaries, receptionists--who were employed and expected to perform radiological examinations as part of their job requirements were not provided radiation monitoring devices to determine their accumulated dosage, and were unaware that a potential hazard existed for either themselves or their patients."[21] Herbert Abrams has added his opinion that improper focusing and shielding may be widespread among untrained X-ray operators.[22] And a nationwide evaluation by the Bureau of Radiological Health (BRH) has borne out that fear. In 1975 the BRH found that 63 percent of the noncredentialed operators tested failed to properly restrict the X-ray beam to the size of the film for a given examination and thus unnecessarily overexposed the patient. Forty percent of the credentialed technologists taking that same test failed. In some cases exposure levels varied from patient to patient by a factor of two thousand.[23] In August 1981, under intense pressure from portions of the radiation health community, Congress passed a law requiring the states to establish federally approved programs for the training and licensing of radiological technologists. The programs are to be in place by 1985. ------ 5. Otto Glasser, {Dr. W. C. Roentgen}, 2nd ed. (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1958), p. 36. 6. Ruth Brecher and Edward Brecher, {The Rays: A History of Radiology in the United States and Canada} (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1969), pp. 9, 16, 63, 64. 7. Joel Griffiths and Richard Ballantine, {Silent Slaughter}, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1972), p. 39; Charles Panati and Michael Hudson, {The Silent Intruder: Surviving the Nuclear Age} (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 3-43. X rays are produced by bombarding a tungsten target with high-speed electrons in a vacuum tube. They are invisible to the human eye, but they may be captured as a visible image on film. The making of film records of internal body parts by X-ray exposure is called radiography; the film image, a radiograph. Advances in equipment design capability and procedures led to radiation's rapid growth in the medical field after 1920. Refinements --limiting source size, providing radiation shields and high voltage protection, and disposing of excess heat--allowed the number and types of radiologic examinations to increase. Present-day X-ray films and intensifying screens provide physicians with high-quality images of bones and internal organs, while delivering much less radiation to the patient. Today, films are coated with chemical emulsions to enhance their sensitivity to X rays. The more sensitive a film, the smaller the dose of radiation needed to produce an image. Some of the newer sophisticated films are in the experimental stages or not yet widely used. Intensifying screens are thin sheets of plastic or cardboard coated with a substance that emits blue light when struck by X rays. This acts with the X rays to produce an image of a bone or internal organ with less radiation exposure. Rare-earth metals are used in the most sensitive intensifying screens. 8. Brecher and Brecher, {The Rays}, p. 88. 9. {Electrical Review}, 1896, p. 250. 10. Percy Brown, {American Martyrs to Science Through the Roentgen Rays} (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1936), p. 37. 11. Brecher and Brecher, {The Rays}, p. 211. 12. Helmuth Ulrich, "Incidence of Leukemia in Radiologists," {New England Journal of Medicine}, January 10, 1946, Vol. 234, pp. 45-46. 13. NAS, {Pathologic Effects of Atomic Radiation}, Publication No. 452 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1956). 14. E. B. Lewis, "Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation," {Science}, 125(7255): 965, May 17, 1957. (The absence of chronic lymphatic leukemia deaths lead Lewis to suggest that the excess deaths were due to radiation exposure or some other factor acting in a similar manner.) Raymond Seltser and Phillip Sartwell, "The Influence of Occupational Exposure to Radiation on the Mortality of American Radiologists and Other Medical Specialties," {American Journal of Epidemiology} (January 1965): 2-22. 15. "Job Hazards of Radiologists Studied," {Washington Star}, February 23, 1981; "Radiologists Take X-ray to Heart, Disputed Study Suggests," {Medical World News} 22, No. 6 (March 16, 1981): 36. 16. Herbert L. Abrams, "The `Overutilization' of X rays," {New England Journal of Medicine} 300 (May 24, 1979): 1213-1216. 17. {Citizens' Hearings}, p. 93. 18. {1979 X-ray Hearings}, p. 75. 19. Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico have operating programs for licensing X-ray technologists. Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota have enabling legislation to begin licensing programs. 20. {1979 X-ray Hearings}, p. 69. 21. {1979 X-ray Hearings}, p. 8. 22. Abrams, "`Overutilization' of X rays," p. 1213. 23. DHEW, {Bulletin of the Bureau of Radiological Health, Supplement no. 1} (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, July 1976); U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, {Radiation Health and Safety}, June 16, 17, 27, 28, 29, 1977, p. 49. The Bureau of Radiological Health is following up on facilities with readings above or below the average doses for certain examinations and has reported significant drops in patient doses. Use of gonad shielding is part of the educational programs for both medical and general audiences. ------ X Rays {in Utero} Though the X-ray industry and its medical proponents emphasize that the doses from diagnostic radiation are small, considerable evidence has surfaced indicating that the health effects can be devastating, particularly to the unborn fetus.[24] In fact, one of the world's first and biggest radiation surveys was conducted in the mid-1950s on the effects of X rays on unborn children, and it has had an important effect on all debate over safe radiation exposures since. The study began in 1955, when David Hewitt, a statistician at England's Oxford University, noticed that in the preceding few years there had been more than a 50 percent increase in the number of British children dying of leukemia. His preliminary statistics convinced Dr. Alice Stewart of Oxford's Department of Preventative Medicine to search for a reason. Trained as a pediatrician and epidemiologist, Stewart began crisscrossing Britain, persuading local health officials to interview the mothers of each of the 1,694 children who died of cancer the previous two years. An equal number of healthy mothers and children were used as controls. As the interviews began to accumulate, a cause for the excess cancers emerged. Stewart and Hewitt sifted through the data and found that twice as many cancer deaths occurred before the age of ten among children whose mothers had received a series of pelvic X rays while pregnant.[25] "It was quite by accident that we bumped into the radiation story," Stewart told us.[26] The "accident" was not well received by either the medical community or the nuclear industry. An X-ray picture of a fetus {in utero} had been secured as early as February of 1896--two months after Roentgen's discovery--and it had become common practice to use X rays to detect multiple births or abnormal conditions in the uterus, and to clarify the outlines of the mother's pelvis to aid in delivery.[27] Hewitt's and Stewart's findings jeopardized those practices and threw into doubt the entire foundation of the safety standards for radiation. Such doses from X rays were believed to be safe. At the time their study was issued, it was generally believed that the "threshold" below which radiation exposure was safe was roughly ten rads. The new findings indicated that a single rad of X-ray dosage to an infant {in utero} could lead to a higher chance of childhood leukemia.[28] Dr. Stewart soon found herself under a barrage of criticism. She lost her staff and her funding for the Oxford survey. But she continued nonetheless. In 1958, with an expanded data base, she concluded that a fetus exposed in the first three months of development was ten times more likely to develop cancer than an unexposed fetus. The risk increased with the number of exposures, even a single X ray was found to contribute. Stewart also found that X rays to a woman who was not pregnant could also lead to damage in future offspring. Women carry their eggs from birth, and Stewart found the X rays would be particularly harmful if they affected the mothers' ovaries.[29] In 1962 Stewart's embattled study received powerful confirmation from Dr. Brian MacMahon of the Harvard School of Public Health. A study of 700,000 children born between 1947 and 1964 was conducted in thirty-seven major maternity hospitals in the Northeast. MacMahon compared the children of seventy thousand mothers who had received pelvic X rays during pregnancy with the children of mothers who had not been X-rayed. He found that cancer mortality was 40 percent higher among the children with X-rayed mothers.[30] It was a stunning confirmation of Stewart's findings, a crucial turning point in the radiation controversy, and made essentially inescapable the conclusion that the human fetus was far more vulnerable to miscarriage, malformations, and cancer from X rays than anyone had previously believed possible. In 1963 MacMahon told a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy hearing on bomb fallout in southern Utah that "we must consider very seriously the possibility of cancer production by low doses of radiation such as encountered in x ray diagnosis and even fallout."[31] Yet two decades after Stewart first published her findings, and fourteen years after MacMahon confirmed them, little had been done to warn the public. A 1976 telephone survey by the New York Public Interest Research Group indicated that women of childbearing age who underwent X-ray examinations were often not asked beforehand if they were pregnant.[32] At 1980 hearings for radiation victims, held in Washington, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan remembered how he and others had "fought for years to pass a recommendation . . . that women in the childbearing age should not be given x rays in the pelvic and abdominal region except during emergency situations and except during the ten-day interval following the beginning of menstruation." The failure of the X-ray industry to comply was, he said, "one of the biggest problems in reducing the harmful effects of radiation."[33] In 1970, the last year in which the federal government analyzed X- ray records on a national scale, it found that 23 percent of the 3.5 million pregnant women in the United States were exposed to medical X rays--some eight hundred thousand women. In 9 percent of these cases--involving more than seventy thousand individuals--the fetus was exposed to the X-ray beam. Five years later a study of sixty-eight thousand single deliveries in sixteen hospitals during 1969 and 1970 estimated that pelvic X rays were given in 6.9 percent of the cases. Current estimates indicate that pelvic X rays are still given in about 6 percent of all live births in the United States, though some facilities administer them at a far higher rate.[34] Unfortunately the practice of X-raying pregnant women already has had tangible effects. In January of 1957 Emma Rita Mihal, an Ohio housewife, visited an obstetrician and told him she was pregnant. "But," she remembers, "he insisted that I was not pregnant" and then ordered month-long radiation treatments for endometritis, an inflammation of the lining of the womb. A few weeks after completion of the treatment Mrs. Mihal returned to the obstetrician. The doctor, she said, "took the stethoscope and he listened, and then . . . he turned to me and said, `Mrs. Mihal, you are pregnant.' . . . It was the last thing that man ever told me." Worried about what the radiation treatment might have done to her unborn child, Mihal visited her radiologist. "He took me by the shoulder and he said, `I want you to go home, your baby will be fine.'" But when Kathleen Mihal was born on September 19, 1957, she came into the world with the undersized head of a microcephalic. Radiation burns scarred her back. Mihal recalled that her doctors "never told me I shouldn't have another child. I did become pregnant again, and here again my other child is greatly damaged, because she has genetic damages. She was very sickly from the day she was born."[35] Though the Mihals' story was an extreme one, it and other cases ultimately could not be ignored. Additional studies have now linked X-ray doses to women {even before pregnancy} with significant rises among offspring in Down's syndrome and fatal cancer before the age of fifteen.[36] Finally, in April of 1980, the Bureau of Radiological Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists launched a massive public education program warning of the damaging effects of radiation (as well as certain drugs) on pregnancies.[37] The consumer education program is part of BRH's nonpersonnel budget, which was cut in fiscal year 1981 from $6.3 million to $6.1 million. Projections for FY 1982 at the time of this writing put that budget at $5.9 million.[38] ------ 24. DHEW, {X-Ray Examinations A Guide to Good Practice} (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1970), p. 6. The unborn face greater risk of radiation damage than adults receiving the same amount of exposure. The stage of pregnancy determines, in large measure, the type of fetal damage. During the first trimester risks of accidental miscarriage, congenital malformation, and brain damage predominate. From the ninth day through the sixth week of pregnancy, organogenesis--the period of organ and limb development--occurs. The greatest radiation-induced deformities can be produced because of the specialized rapid development and division of cells and tissues. Ear, nose, eye, and structural brain deformities can result. 25. Griffiths and Ballantine, {Silent Slaughter}, p. 41. 26. Alice Stewart, interview, November 1980. 27. Brecher and Brecher, {The Rays}, p. 60. 28. Stewart, et al., "Survey of Childhood Malignancies," {British Medical Journal} (1958), p 1495. 29. Alice Stewart and George W. Kneale, "Radiation Dose Effects in Relation to Obstetrics, X Ray and Childhood Cancer," {Lancet} 1 (1970): 1185-1187. 30. Brian MacMahon, "Prenatal X-ray Exposure and Childhood Cancer," {Journal of the National Cancer Institute} 28 (1962): 1173. 31. {Fallout, Radiation Standards and Countermeasures}, U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Subcommittee on Research, Development, and Radiation, August 20-22, 27, 1963, p. 595. 32. Deborah Van Brunt, {Consumer Perspectives on X Rays} (New York: New York Public Interest Research Group, November 15, 1976). 33. {Citizens' Hearings}, p. 88. 34. "Considerations of Possible Pregnancy in the Use of Diagnostic X Rays," FDA Publication 75-8029, Health Physics in the Healing Arts, 7th Mid-year Topic Symposium, Health Physics Society (Washington, D.C.: DHEW, December 1972), p. 599; J. A. Campbell, "X-ray Pelvimetry: Useful Procedure or Medical Nonsense," {Journal of National Medical Association} 68 (November 1976): 514-520; K. M. Kelly, et al., "The Utilization and Efficacy of Pelvimetry," {American Journal of Roentgenology} 125, No. 1 (September 1975): 66-74. 35. {Citizens' Hearings}, p. 35; Robert W. Gibson, et al., "Leukemia in Children Exposed to Multiple Risk Factors" {New England Journal of Medicine} 279, No. 17 (October 24, 1960): 906-909. 36. Griffiths and Ballantine, {Silent Slaughter}, p. 46; A. T. Sigler, et al., "Radiation Exposure in Parents of Children with Mongolism (Down's Syndrome)," {Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin} 117 (December 1965): 374-399. 37. The FDA panel on X-ray pelvimetry approved the following statement on January 26, 1979: "Pelvimetry is not usually necessary or helpful in making the decision to perform a cesarean section. Therefore, pelvimetry should be performed only when the physician caring for the patient feels that pelvimetry will contribute to the decisions concerning diagnosis or treatment. In those few instances, the reason for requesting the pelvimetry should be written on the patient's chart. This statement does not apply to x-ray examinations for purposes other than measurement of the pelvis." This statement was subsequently approved and adopted by the American College of Radiology in July 1980. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has approved the following statement in June 1980, which is comparable to the panel statement: "X-ray pelvimetry provides limited additional information to physicians involved in the management of labor and delivery. It should not be a prerequisite to clinical decisions concerning obstetrical management. Reasons for requesting x-ray pelvimetry should be individually established." FDA's public education campaign "X-Rays: Get the Picture on Protection" includes American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and FDA-approved materials on X rays and pregnancy. The information is available free from: X Rays, FDA, Rockville, MD 20857. 38. A revised FDA operating budget of $336 million for fiscal 1982 has been submitted to Congress by President Reagan. This is $16.9 million below the request submitted in January by the previous administration. The new proposed figures are: {Fiscal Year Budget Paid Staff Years} 1981 $327 million 7,627 1982 $336 million 7,379 Source: FDA {Talk Paper}, March 10, 1981. ------ Mammography and Other Problems Unfortunately, children {in utero} have not been the only ones to suffer from the misuse of X-ray technology. One major program of X- ray diagnosis--mammography, aimed at tracking down breast cancer in women--has also resulted in disaster. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death among American women between the ages of forty-four and fifty-five. Apparently X rays have contributed to the problem rather than helping to solve it.[39] An X ray of the breast can reveal tumors in their early stages, and thus can have beneficial results. But because the breast is highly radiation-sensitive, the mammogram itself can cause cancer. The danger can be heightened by the subject's genetic makeup, preexisting benign breast disease, artificial menopause, obesity, and hormonal imbalances. Ironically, because the breast tissue of younger women is denser than that of older women, detection of their cancer through mammography is more difficult, if not impossible, in many cases. The idea of using X rays to detect breast cancer gained credence in the 1930s. By the 1960s mammography was in common use, and a study begun in 1963 by the Health Insurance Plan of New York (HIP) concluded that mammography could reduce mortality rates among women.[40] In 1973 the American Cancer Society and National Cancer Institute cosponsored the establishment of the Breast Cancer Detection Demonstration Projects (BCDDP). Twenty-seven projects were established with the goal of examining a quarter million women. The project program included instruction in breast self-examinations, an initial clinical history, and a physical examination which included a thermogram (which uses an infrared camera to study body temperatures) and a mammogram X ray. The entire program was repeated each year for five years, with a five-year observation period after screening. By 1976 about eighteen hundred cases of breast cancer had been detected.[41] But the program took on the aura of a fad. In 1974, after Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller suffered mastectomies, the interest in methods of preventing breast cancer soared. Rose Kushner, executive director of the Maryland-based Breast Cancer Advisory Center, found that "women all over the country were inundated with information about this life-saving machine, and waiting lists for mammograms were often months long. Omitted from this flood of media coverage, however, was the behind-the-scenes conflict among scientists about the potential danger of exposing healthy breasts to a known carcinogen: x ray."[42] In January of 1975 Dr. John C. Bailar III published an article in the {Annals of Internal Medicine} warning that the Health Insurance Plan study, which had prompted so much faith in mammography, had not in fact demonstrated any increase in survival rates among the women under fifty who had been given the X rays.[43] Drs. Irwin Bross and Leslie Blumenson of Buffalo's Roswell Park Memorial Laboratory soon estimated that based on dosage levels, twice as many deaths as cures could result from mammographic screenings.[44] By early 1977 Bross had become an outspoken critic of the program, calling it a "disastrous mistake" that would "produce the worst . . . epidemic of cancer in medical history." At a meeting sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, Bross accused the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiolo