The Fallout Chronicles XI: What is Freedom For?
Note on the previous posting: A doctor friend reminded me that radon should be mentioned as a significant feature of natural background radiation. Radon is a radioactive gas—colorless, odorless, tasteless—produced constantly by the decay of radioactive elements in the earth. It accumulates in uranium mines of course but can also accumulate in basements—some not all and more likely in some geographical areas than others. The dangers radon poses were recognized only in the middle of the last century. It is now thought to be a significant cause of lung cancer, second only to smoking. The Environmental Protection Agency has recommended testing all buildings for radon. Do you suppose that’s being done?
Now to the last posting in the Fallout Chronicles.
The Fallout Chronicles XI: What is freedom for?
Professional Case Management calls itself “the nation’s premier home care provider for nuclear weapons and uranium workers.” In 2008, PCM formed a nonprofit group called the Cold War Patriots (Motto: “We did our part to keep American free.”)
In 2009, CWP got the U.S. Senate to pass a resolution calling for a “National Day of Remembrance for Cold War Patriots,” with “Cold War patriots” defined as those hundreds of thousands of people who had worked in our nuclear weapons and uranium industries.
The nuclear arms race was, whatever else it was, a massive government-sponsored jobs program.
A key part of the CWP’s mission was to see that the workers got the compensation they were now entitled to. For this service, PCM could presumably expect to be paid a reasonable fee.
Every year since 2009, PCM and the CWP nonprofit have sponsored A National Day of Remembrance for Cold War Patriots. Since in 2021 a significant number of Cold War Patriots survive, another Day of Remembrance is scheduled for October 30, 2021.
The Cold War Patriots and in some cases their families are without doubt entitled to compensation, ethically and under the law. We can hope Professional Case Management does help them get the compensation they are entitled to and to spend it wisely.
The people who might have a harder time getting themselves recognized as “patriots” or having a day of remembrance dedicated to them are the scientists and other citizens who during the Cold War came to question the official story. They probably felt that the best service they could do for the rest of us and the country would be to ask significant questions and do good research to get answers to the questions. And publish those answers so that they could, if necessary, be revised.
These chronicles have recognized a number of such people—Dr. David Bradley, Professor Linus Pauling, Professor Alice Stewart, Dr. Robert Lyon, Professor David Mancuso, Dr. Louise Reiss, Harold Knapp, Dr. Samuel Milham, Dr. John Gofman, all of whom produced findings that challenged the official story, all of whom paid a price for it.
Others like them along the way: Dr. Carl Johnson, county health director for Jefferson County who in the 70’s found extremely high levels of plutonium in the soil around the Rocky Flats plant; Dr. Arthur Tamplin, an AEC scientist who went public with John Gofman about their findings of no-safe-dose and, like Gofman, had to resign from the AEC committee; Karl Morgan, one of the founders of health physics during the Manhattan Project and an early promoter of the linear no-safe-dose hypothesis; Joseph Rotblat, the Manhattan Project physicist who showed that the fallout from the Bravo test was far greater than acknowledged in official accounts and who later founded the Pugwash conferences; Drs. Rosalie Bertell and Irwin Bross, who conducted the Tri-state Leukemia Survey; Henry Kendall who in 1969 founded the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Someone else to be recognized here, I would argue, is J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the director of the Scientific Division of the Manhattan Project where the first atomic bombs were designed. After the war, he had been widely and rightly celebrated for this achievement. He had remained influential in official circles as a member of the General Advisory Committee of the AEC.
In the first year of the new Eisenhower’s administration, Oppenheimer had urged upon Eisenhower’s National Security Council an operation called Candor. He argued that the government should begin an affirmative program of disclosure of the realities of the nuclear arms race. He urged this in the name of producing a more informed public and of equipping us to engage in deliberations about the very difficult problems that had to be faced now that our world had nuclear weapons in it. At first, Eisenhower and his NSC had seemed to support such an initiative.
At the end of that first year, however, Eisenhower’s new appointee as Chairman of the AEC, Lewis Strauss, got the AEC to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Oppenheimer’s push for candor and Strauss’s personal enmity are, I am convinced, what got him drummed out of the community of nuclear insiders. Eisenhower no longer supported candor. He had decided to place his faith instead in a huge build-up of nuclear weapons. When he came into office, the U.S. had about a thousand nuclear weapons. When he left, the number was eighteen thousand.
The “heroes” I have named here did run risks, not like the ones their Soviet counterparts did of being imprisoned or exiled, but risks that their funding would be revoked and their reputations damaged. They were in fact penalized and harassed for doing the work they did.
How do we distinguish these patriots, if we want to call them that, from the doubters of the official story and the conspiracy theorists that abound today, abounding in the numbers as they do in large part, I would argue, because of the narrow vision and duplicity of our leaders during the Cold War? The answer is simple. The courageous men and women we are considering here were not seeking confirmation of views they already held. They were paying careful attention and looking for real answers, answers supported by evidence, even if those answers contradicted the views they began with or the views of what John Gofman called the radiation community.
The motto of the Cold War Patriots is “We did our part to keep America free.”
Who did more to keep America free during the nuclear arms race? The workers in the nuclear weapons complex or the scientists whose findings questioned the official story?
I expect some would favor those who built the weapons. I’d call this one a dead heat.
But if we ask who, in this case, did more to embody what freedom is for—those who put their heads down and did the jobs they were asked to do (and let’s stipulate that they did them well) or those who tried to get real answers to important questions regardless of whether those findings confirmed their own beliefs or the official story, we get, I think, a clearer answer.
Gofman reminds us of the all-too-human tendency to be careful not to learn what we don’t want to know. To which should be added the common observation that it is hard to get people to know something when their income depends on their not knowing it.
In the debates about the effects of low-level radiation and more recently the prospect, now the near certainty, of climate catastrophe, we have seen both principles in operation.