From: houle@nmt.edu (Paul Houle)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.activism
Subject: Re: Dr Rosalie Bertell @ World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet,11/91
Keywords: radioactivity, cancer, leukemia, poison, sickness, death, militarism
Date: 19 Aug 92 21:38:00 GMT
Organization: New Mexico Tech

In article <1992Aug19.194346.5143@oracle.us.oracle.com> mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman) writes:
>In article <1992Aug18.143707.8783@odin.corp.sgi.com> dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) writes:
>
>>        You probably have not heard of the effect in the atmosphere of
>>     nuclear weapon testing.  
>
>No, I haven't.  What effects are those?

	Fallout.  I seem to recall that an island in the pacific had to be
evacuated because the Ivy Mike shot (the first fully thermonuclear weapon
tested by the US) went off with twice the estimated yield;  fallout drifted
over the island and over a japanese fishing vessel,  which had casualities
in the crew due to radiation.  Andrei Sakarov,  who was instrumental in the
development of the soviet bomb became alarmed at the possibility of excess
deaths caused by C14 added to the atmosphere that would cause about 10,000
deaths/megaton.  The isotope composition of carbon in the atmosphere has
been considerably changed (C14 levels more than doubled) by atmospheric
testing.  Transport into the ocean is currently reducing the level.

>
>>     Even nine space shots of nuclear bombs set
>>     off in the upper atmosphere and also leaked to space, to outer space,
>>     by the U.S.  
>
>As far as I know, the US has never exploded a nuclear weapon in space.

	The US has.

>>     It is the only country that ever set off the so-called
>>     "rainbow test" which set fire to the Van Allen belts--the outer
>>     magnetic force of the earth--that dumped radioactive material at the
>>     magnetic North Pole, and has polluted very much of the Arctic.
>
>God, this is a laugh.

>
>1.  I've never heard of the rainbow test and doubt it existed.
>
>2.  The Van Allen belts are not flammable.
>
>3.  If it had caught fire I suspect we would have heard about it.
>
>4.  The Van Allen belts are not the outer magnetic force of the earth,
>	in fact they aren't even a magnetic force.

	The only test that I've heard of being called "rainbow" is a rumor
about an ill-fated attempt at making a battleship invisible around 1943.  (The
"Philadelphia experiment").  Several devices were fired at levels that caused
auroral activity around the world...  They spewed out charged particles that
caused auroral streaks visible around the tropics.  Someone observing this
phenomenon could probably describe it as a kind of "setting the Van Allen
belt on fire"...  That's what it looked like.

	So far as the Van Allen belts go,  those are regions where the
Earth's magnetic field traps particles from cosmic rays.  It turns out that
particles from nuclear shots (and even nuclear reactors) can get caught in
the Van Allen belt where they increase the radiation level and can do
damage to satellites.  AT&T's first experimental communications satellite,
called Telstar,  was seriously damaged by the Starfish test which involved,
I believe,  a one megaton device.  The story of how the bell labs people
fixed the satellite is amazing but beyond the scope of this post.  Also,
some people were blinded by the flash of Starfish,  which was brighter
than anticipated.

>>        You probably have not heard of chemical-release modules in the
>>     space program that are set up that dump things like berilium and
>>     radioactive materials into the upper atmosphere *just* to see where
>>     they go.
>
>Well, the idiot who said this may not have, but anyone who pays
>attention to the papers does.  For example, amateur astronomers often
>watch these becasue they produce artificial "auroras".

	The amount of materials that are released in these tests are very
small indeed,  nothing compared to the influx of material from meteorites.
If they did tests like these every five minutes,  that might cause some
problems,  but at the level these are being done,  they don't pose any
credible threat to anything,  whereas space nuclear testing can do damage.


>>     It's
>>     ludicrous and I'm glad we can laugh because if we don't laugh we'll
>>     cry.
>
>Yes.  Rank stupidity is ludicrous but it is also depressing.

	It is indisputable that atmospheric nuclear testing has done harm
to some people and to the environment.  People might disagree about the
magnitude,  but the nuclear testing programs of the US and the USSR both
carry with them a small but uncontested body count.  If Sahkarov's calculations
are correct (which I'm not sure,  because I don't know what he did to factor
in CO2 transport between the atmosphere and ocean),  then millions of people
could die early deaths due to additional cases of cancer caused for the next
10,000 years.  So far as today's upper atmospheric and space exploration
programs,  the knowledge that these bring back about the atmosphere probably
will do more good than harm to the environment.

>>  A clear sign of decline in our culture is the consistent lack of attention,
>>  given in major media, to the issues and long-term costs arising from the 
>>  continued promulgation of "our" plutonium economy.
>
>What plutonium economy?  Even within the nuclear industry we use very
>little plutonium.

	The nuclear weapons facilities of both the US and the USSR are
responsible for some very serious messes and safety problems and maybe even
a few murders.  Nobody can argue with the mess up at Hanford,  the shutdowns
at Savanna River or the actual explosion that occured at a soviet waste
dump in the 1950s.  Other than in the military,  plutonium plays little role
in the economy.

>>        However you have probably not heard of the effect on the
>>     atmosphere of supersonic flight--this is almost all military.
>
>What effect is this?

	Two of them come to mind right away.  One of them is sonic booms,  and
the other one is the contribution of oxides of nitrogen into the stratosphere,
hence the ozone layer,  where they could contribute to destruction of ozone.
While the sonic boom issue is controllable,  the NO2 issue is actually a
major concern towards those who are working towards the next generation of
supersonic commercial aircraft.  One simple solution is to fly at lower
altitudes,  but this increases drag and fuel costs prohibitively for
commerical applications.  So far as I know,  most military supersonic flight
is done in training by interceptor aircraft (unless one counts a handful of
exotics like the SR-71 and Aurora prowling around) which mostly fly at
lower altitudes.  The interceptors do cause more of a sonic boom problem
though...  If we had replaced the B-52 with something like the XB-70,
military supersonic flight might have been a big environmental concern.

	In all,  I think this lady has some points,  but she should probably
learn a bit more about her subject matters.

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