The Fallout Chronicles VI - Evidence Emerges
The Fallout Chronicles VI - Evidence Emerges
Throughout the 50’s and early 60’s, nuclear explosions continued to be detonated in the atmosphere, at first by the U.S. and the S.U., and then by the U.K. and France. The effects of fallout were not much discussed at first but evidence about the effects of fallout and other forms of ionizing radiation kept escaping the shroud of secrecy. None of the evidence came from official sources.
There was no question about the potentially lethal effect of high-levels of ionizing radiation. The question was what low-level radiation of the kind delivered in fallout did. One thing it did, it finally became clear, was cause cancers.
In 1956 and '58, while atmospheric testing was still taking place in the U.S. and the S.U., a Oxford professor named Alice Stewart who was in the new department of Social Medicine (one of the early forms of what is now called epidemiology) published articles in Lancet and the British Medical Journal that reported that prenatal x-rays greatly increased the chances of children getting cancer in the first ten years of life.
And the dose was very small, very brief, a single diagnostic x-ray, a tiny fraction of the radiation exposure considered safe, and it wasn’t repeated. It was enough to almost double the risk of an early cancer death.
X-rays are a kind of ionizing radiation.
It wasn’t just cancers that might result. In the 50’s, the Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling began to argue publicly that low-level radiation could also alter “germ plasm.” Which could produce mutations.
At the beginning of 1958, Pauling presented a petition to Dag Hammarskjold, the General Secretary of the United Nations. The petition urged that because of the risks to human health testing in the atmosphere be stopped. The petition had been signed by 11,021 scientists from forty-nine other countries.
Also in 1958, as we’ve seen, the great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov published an article in a Soviet journal. He had calculated that the radioactive Carbon-14 that we knew was being put into the world by nuclear tests in the atmosphere would by itself result in 6700 additional deaths from cancer worldwide over 8000 years.
In 1961, Dr. Louise Reiss, working under the auspices of a group called the St. Louis Citizen's Committee for Nuclear Information, reported the results of a longitudinal study she and others had done to measure radioactive strontium-90 in the baby teeth of children from across North America. The results of "Baby Tooth Survey" showed that the levels of strontium-90 in the children’s teeth had risen substantially since 1950, the year before atmospheric testing started in the U.S. A later more comprehensive study showed that the levels were fifty times higher than before the testing started.
Strontium is chemically similar to calcium. It tended to end up in teeth and bones. Strontium-90 was known to increase the risk of leukemia and bone cancer.
In 1960 a mathematician named Harold Knapp had joined the newly formed Fallout Studies Branch within AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, formed because of criticisms the AEC had begun to receive. In 1963, because Knapp felt his findings were being downplayed, he resigned from the AEC. In 1963 and 1964, he published articles that reported that after just one atmospheric test conducted in 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, children around St. George, Utah, downwind of NTS, got doses of radioactive I-131 from milk that were 150 to 750 times existing annual permissible doses.
Iodine is taken up by the thyroid gland. I-131 was known to increase the risk of thyroid cancer.
In November 1972 , the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published its first first report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. The report emphasized that the cancer effects of the radiation went far beyond causing leukemia or genetic effects. Other BEIR reports would follow, the last one in 2020.
The BEIR reports held, however, that ionizing radiation below a certain “threshold” level was safe. We had also been given to believe by civil defense officials, that radiation from fallout would fall below safe levels fairly quickly, after one week, we were first told, then two weeks, then six. Sometime pretty soon.