From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [4/15]
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Summary: part 4 of 15: chapter 6 through chapter 8
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 15:33:21 GMT



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                                      6


                       The Hidden Tragedy of Hiroshima




    LADE'S DATA on leukemia among the children of the Troy area, published
    in the expectation that it would disprove the existence of any effects
    from the 1953 fallout, now seemed to prove the very opposite.  But
    there remained one major difficulty in accepting the evidence for an
    increase in leukemia, and that was the fact that the studies of the
    children conceived after the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and
    Nagasaki in 1945 had shown no such increase in leukemia, or in any
    other radiation effects, for that matter.
       There had, of course, been very serious effects on the infants who
    were in the womb at the time of the explosions.  A large fraction of
    these infants were lost through premature death, while among the few
    that survived more than a year, many suffered from congenital
    malformations and mental retardation.  Of those unborn children who
    had been about one mile from the explosions and received estimated
    doses of 10 to 20 rads, nearly a third were found to have reduced
    brain size and mental retardation.
       But among the many children *conceived* after the explosions, there
    appeared to be no effects, as opposed to the situation in Troy.
       Late in 1966, I was given a copy of the preliminary results of a
    Yale University study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki carried out by Dr. S.
    Finch and a group of colleagues and sponsored by the Atomic Bomb
    Casualty Commission.  The study involved an examination of the
    incidence of leukemia among some 17,000 children whose parents had
    been within 2000 meters of the explosions.  Radiation doses ranged
    from about 3 to 30 rads, with a few as large as a hundred.  These were
    certainly much larger than the doses from typical pelvic X-rays
    received by the mothers in the study by Dr. Saxon Graham, doses which
    increased the risk of childhood leukemia among the children conceived
    many years later by as much as 100 percent.
       The control group used for comparison purposes in the Yale study
    consisted of the population in the suburbs farther than 2500 or 3500
    meters from the explosion, where the radiation from the bomb was
    calculated to have been less than that from natural background.  With
    such a tremendous difference in doses, there could be no question that
    there should be a substantial difference in effects.  Furthermore,
    since there had been virtually no fallout in the two cities, the doses
    had been calculated from the instantaneous flash of the bombs alone.
    Such a flash was similar to the way in which the dose from diagnostic
    X-rays is delivered, so, if anything, the results of Dr. Graham's
    study should have been even more applicable to this situation than to
    Troy, where the fallout dose was delivered over a period of months or
    years.
       Still another study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had also found a
    similar lack of effect.  This study had been conducted over a period
    of nearly two decades by Drs. J. V. Neel and W. J. Schull of the
    Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan.  The
    puzzling nature of the results was emphasized by Dr. Neel himself
    during the course of a lecture series in 1963:  "In view of the vast
    body of data regarding the mutagenic effects of radiation, it can
    scarcely be doubted that the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    sustained genetic damage."  To this he added:  "The question is not
    `Is there damage?' but rather `Can the damage be detected?' "
       It was clear that, unless this problem could be resolved, any
    evidence on the Troy incident would always be subject to this serious
    criticism.  Accordingly, one day I decided to look up the original
    data on the radiation dose measurements for the two Japanese cities,
    collected by E. T. Arakawa of the AEC's Oak Ridge National
    Laboratories.  And as I examined Arakawa's figures, I noticed that
    while there had indeed been little fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    proper, the fallout had drifted down on the suburbs a few miles away.
       But if there had been fallout in the suburbs and beyond, and this
    fallout was far more damaging to the ova, the embryo, and the infant
    than anyone had realized when the studies were set up, then the so-
    called nonexposed control populations beyond about 3000 meters, the
    groups used for comparison purposes, had in fact *also* been affected
    by the radiation.  And just as in the case of Lade's comparison of the
    leukemia rate in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area with that in nearby
    areas of upstate New York, a search for a difference would fail to
    indicate any effect.
       The fallout doses were by no means small.  Arakawa reported that in
    the western suburbs of Hiroshima, namely Furue, Takasu, and Koi, about
    5000 meters from the blast, the external radiation dose from the
    fallout in the environment alone probably amounted to several rads--at
    least twenty times what Dr. Clark and his students were to estimate
    for the Troy population eight years later.  In the case of Nagasaki,
    the fallout had been even heavier, giving external doses as high as
    100 rads in the suburb of Nishiyama.  This was a thousand times
    greater than in Troy.  Such doses would greatly increase the leukemia
    rate for the children born all over the nearby regions that had been
    supposedly free of radiation, completely masking the effect if one
    looked only for a comparative difference, and not for an increase over
    the rate for preceding years.  It seemed incredible that the possible
    effects of such large doses could have been overlooked in the two
    major studies of the effects of atomic warfare, yet they had been.
       A few months later, in the spring of 1967, after I had taken up my
    new position as professor of radiation physics at the University of
    Pittsburgh School of Medicine, I came across the evidence that
    confirmed this conclusion.  It was contained in a paper published in
    the {New England Journal of Medicine}, bringing up to date all the
    findings on leukemia among the survivors of the two Japanese cities.
    One glance at the first figure told the story.  As compared to the
    rate for the preceding years, not only had there been a rise in
    leukemia incidence among those who were less than 1500 meters from the
    explosions, but there was a similar though somewhat smaller rise for
    the population beyond 10,000 meters who could not possibly have
    received any of the direct radiation from the flash of the bomb.  Both
    rises followed the characteristic pattern of radiation-caused
    leukemia.  Furthermore, there was another sharp rise in leukemia for
    both of these groups in 1958, four to six years after the first large
    series of hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific and Siberia in 1952-54,
    tests that resulted in heavy fallout in Japan and in contamination of
    the fish used widely as a staple item in the Japanese diet.  Again the
    delay in onset coincided exactly with the established pattern of
    radiation-caused leukemia.
       In fact, for all of Japan, leukemia rates rose sharply by 50
    percent between 1946 and the early 1950s, just as Dr. Stewart's
    statistician, David Hewitt, had originally observed for England and
    the United States.  This was followed by another sharp rise as of
    1959.  And just as the rates had turned down again in Hiroshima and
    Troy, they declined again throughout Japan to half their peak
    intensities four to six years after the temporary moratorium of 1958-
    61, proving that these rises had not been due to such factors as
    improved diagnostic methods or increased use of medical X-rays, as
    some had suggested.
       The last major argument against the connection between the 1953
    rainouts and the rise in leukemia in Albany-Troy had disappeared.  By
    now, some three years had elapsed since my last attempt to get
    additional data on the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area from the New York
    Health Department.  I sent another letter to Dr. Lade in a final
    effort to obtain more detailed and up-to-date information.  Within a
    few weeks, the following reply arrived:

       Doctor Sternglass, Sir:

          I would be most willing to provide you with the data you
       request in respect to the occurrence of leukemia in children in
       the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area if there were any reason to
       suppose that they had sustained a significant exposure to
       fallout radiation.  In my letter to the editor of {Science},
       141, 1109 (13 September 1963), I pointed out that children on a
       milk diet in this area at the time of 1953 could not have had a
       significant exposure.  I fail to see, therefore, how further
       data could be "valuable for our understanding of low dose rate
       effects."
                                                              JHL

       Reluctantly, I began the preparation of a final paper for
    {Science}, based on the incomplete data from Lade's brief letter of
    1964.
       It appeared unlikely that {Science} would publish the Albany-Troy
    paper in the near future, so I decided to present my findings at the
    forthcoming annual meeting of the Health Physics Society, to be held
    in Denver, Colorado, in June of 1968.  This professional society had
    been founded in 1955 by Dr. Karl Z. Morgan and a few other physicists
    who, since the early years of atomic energy, had been concerned with
    the health aspects of this technology.  The society was officially
    dedicated to "the protection of man and his environment from
    unwarranted radiation exposure."  Over the years it had acquired many
    members who were professionally engaged in safety planning for nuclear
    weapons tests and nuclear industry activities.
       Dr. Morgan, one of the most widely respected individuals in the
    health physics field, had himself become a controversial figure in
    recent years, due to his outspokenness regarding the widespread use of
    inadequate medical X-ray equipment and procedures.  Long convinced
    that there existed no evidence for a completely safe "threshold" of
    radiation exposure, Dr. Morgan had incurred heavy criticism from
    radiologists' associations and others for his estimates that thousands
    of additional deaths of unborn children were being caused each year by
    unnecessary overexposure to medical X-rays.  Prior to the June
    meeting, I sent Dr. Morgan a copy of the paper I had just submitted to
    {Science} and received a letter from him expressing deep concern about
    the seriousness of the evidence, as well as indignation about the
    refusal of the New York State Health Department to provide the
    additional data.
       At the annual meeting in Denver, the press was well represented,
    word having gotten around about the nature of my findings.  I
    presented the evidence and concluded by urging that much more detailed
    studies be made of other areas known to have received heavy fallout.
    During the discussion period that followed, many of the questions
    dealt with the inadequacies of Lade's data--for example, the lack of
    such facts as the birthplace of each case and the particular type of
    leukemia involved.  I could only point out that this information was
    not available to me.
       Reports of the Troy findings were carried widely by the press both
    in the U.S. and around the world.  Among the many phone calls that
    came during the aftermath was one from an Associated Press reporter in
    Detroit, who informed me that the New York State Health Department had
    just issued a news release stating that "there is no evidence to
    support a Pittsburgh professor's report that radioactive fallout over
    the Albany-Troy, N.Y., area in 1953 has increased the incidence of
    childhood leukemia."  The subsequent AP dispatch based on this release
    added that "Sternglass had consulted the department earlier and had
    been told the department's opinion."  This "consultation," of course,
    had consisted only of requests for information that were repeatedly
    denied, while "the department's opinion" consisted of the arguments
    advanced by Lade in his correspondence to minimize the significance of
    the data.  But it appeared likely that newspaper readers would gain
    quite a different impression.
       It later developed that segments of the Health Physics Society were
    also displeased by the publicity.  In a letter to the society's board
    members a month after the annual meeting, R. E. Alexander, chairman of
    the society's public relations committee, stated that some board
    members had complained that "the publicity about the paper of E. J.
    Sternglass . . . was damaging to the nuclear industry."  After
    defining the "basic publicity objective" of the society, namely, "to
    let the public know that due to a frankly acknowledged need, we have a
    new technology, health physics, which will permit them to enjoy the
    benefits of nuclear energy safely," Alexander went on to say that
    "while we try to avoid publicizing papers that do not contribute to
    our basic objective, *there is no way to prevent such publicity
    absolutely*." (Emphasis added.)






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      7


                              Death before Birth




    A FEW MONTHS after the Denver meeting, a letter arrived from {Science}
    flatly rejecting the Albany-Troy paper.  There were two reviews
    enclosed, both negative.  One contained references to nonpublic data
    available only to the New York Health Department, indicating that the
    reviewer was a member of that agency.  Apparently unaware of the
    irony, this reviewer claimed that "the number of cases in the Albany-
    Troy area used in this study are too few to warrant the conclusion."
    This was, of course, the same number of cases that Lade had used in
    his 1964 letter to {Science} to prove there had been *no* effect from
    the fallout, and his conclusion had then been deemed suitable for
    publication by the editor.  And this very same data had also been
    cited frequently to the same end by the AEC and the New York Health
    Department.  Apparently these figures were only adequate to prove
    there was no effect.
       I now became more determined than ever to pursue the effort to have
    the full evidence on the worldwide effects of nuclear fallout on
    childhood leukemia exposed to the scientific community and the public
    at large.  The issue was far greater than the rejection of just
    another scientific paper.  The nature of modern science depends upon
    the free communication of even the most disturbing ideas, since only
    through their widest possible examination can the essential process of
    the gradual correction of errors be accomplished.
       And so I began the task of answering each objection raised by the
    reviewers.  One of the points was that the increase in childhood
    leukemia could probably be explained simply by the increase in the
    number of children born in Albany-Troy-Schenectady during the postwar
    years.  It was really quite evident that this factor could not
    possibly begin to explain the fourfold rise in the annual number of
    cases in an area where the entire population had only increased by
    10.5 percent from 1950 to 1960.  But now this had to be proved in
    detail.
       I began the laborious task of going through the volumes of the U.S.
    Vital Statistics, extracting the figures for annual births in the
    three counties of upstate New York for which Lade had given the
    leukemia rates.  While copying down the numbers, I noticed that there
    was also a listing for fetal deaths--stillbirths, miscarriages, and
    other forms of death before birth.  Remembering that an increase in
    fetal deaths had been looked for by J. V. Neel in his study of genetic
    effects on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I decided to note
    down these figures as well.
       As expected, the gradual increase in annual births during the
    period from World War II to 1953 was far too small to account for the
    subsequent increase in the number of leukemia cases.  The births had
    increased by only some 50 percent, while the leukemia cases had risen
    by over 300 percent.
       But the figures for fetal deaths showed something quite unexpected.
    After steadily declining from 23.8 cases per thousand births in 1941
    to a low of 14.4 in 1952, the number of fetal deaths suddenly refused
    to decline any further.  It had only declined to 14.2 seven years
    later in 1960.  This type of change is termed a "leveling off" in the
    rate of decline.  In the case of fetal mortality, such a leveling off
    was most significant, for the original pattern of steady decline was
    the result of steady improvements in prenatal medical care which
    should have enabled the decline to continue until reaching an
    "irreducible minimum."  This minimum had clearly not yet been reached,
    as was shown by the fact that the decline started again after each
    discontinuation of testing.  More significantly, it reached an all-
    time low of 11.7 in 1965, two years after large-scale atmospheric
    testing had ended.
       Could it be that this effect on fetal mortality had also been
    missed by Dr. Neel because his study had not taken into account the
    effects of fallout on the control population?  Was it some kind of
    statistical illusion, or was it real, and therefore far more serious
    than even the rise in leukemia?
       The library closed for the day, cutting short my investigations.
    But the implications were staggering.  For it was widely known among
    statisticians that the number of fetal deaths listed in the U.S. Vital
    Statistics was perhaps no more than one-tenth of the total that
    actually occurred, since many cases, especially in the early months of
    pregnancy, were never reported to the authorities.  Before the
    fallout, there had been only two or three leukemia cases per year in
    the Troy area, as compared with some 150 to 200 reported fetal deaths.
    The actual number of fetal deaths in the area would probably have
    ranged from 1500 to 2000.  If the relative increase in fetal deaths in
    Albany-Troy-Schenectady after the fallout was comparable to that for
    leukemia, then it would involve the loss of hundreds of times as many
    unborn children as might die from leukemia.
       If it was true that fallout caused an increase in fetal mortality,
    then a similar effect should have occurred not only in the Troy area
    but also in the rest of New York State, parts of which had been
    exposed to various other rainouts throughout the 1950s.  The next day
    I returned to the library and went through the data for New York State
    as a whole.  Exactly the same pattern existed:  There was a steady
    decline in fetal deaths toward a minimum of 22.2 per thousand births
    in 1950, but then the rate actually rose again to 23.3 in 1953 instead
    of continuing its decline to the 20 per 1000 live births that was to
    be expected if the normal downward trend had continued.  After a brief
    drop in the mid-fifties, fetal mortality rose once again following the
    major test series in 1957 and 1958, so that the rate exceeded the
    expected number by almost 50 percent in 1960.  The gap widened
    steadily as all further improvements in living standards, diet, and
    maternal health care suddenly failed to have any further effect.
       But when I reached 1964, I found the most extraordinary figure of
    all.  In a single year the number of reported fetal deaths in New York
    State had jumped by 1500 cases.  After this it declined once more--the
    exact same pattern as in the Troy area.  In the single year 1964,
    then, there must have been some ten times this number of reported
    cases, or, ten to fifteen thousand additional children lost by
    miscarriage or stillbirth in New York State alone.  This tremendous
    steplike increase for the entire state was clearly connected with the
    1961-62 test series, from which large peaks in iodine and other
    short-lived radioactivity resulted when the spring rains came down in
    1963.  Unlike the local rainouts of the 1950s, the fallout from these
    extremely large tests came down much more uniformly over large areas
    of New York State.  Thus there would have been few, if any, unexposed
    sections, and the state as a whole would show the kind of sharp
    increases that earlier had been seen only in localities like Albany-
    Troy.
       But could this extraordinary figure be the result of some
    statistical fluctuation, or a sudden improvement in reporting methods
    that happened to coincide exactly with the period of the highest
    fallout levels ever recorded?  There was one way to check this very
    quickly.  Unlike the number of fetal deaths, more than 95 percent of
    all live births are reported to the public health authorities, since
    nearly all of them take place in hospitals.  So if there had really
    been an increase of some 15,000 fetal deaths in New York State in
    1964, then there would have to have been a corresponding sudden drop
    in the number of children born live the following year.  And this is
    exactly what happened.
       For 1962, the total live births in New York State were listed as
    354,152.  For 1963, the number had increased to 355,760.  For 1964,
    there was a drop to 351,602.  But for 1965, there was a sudden decline
    to 335,628.  This was a drop of 15,974 live births, or almost exactly
    the number of babies lost in 1964 through stillbirth or miscarriage.
    The rise in fetal deaths must therefore have been real.
       It was imperative to make still another test.  New York State in
    the early 1960s was more or less typical of the United States as a
    whole with respect to the levels of fallout in milk, food, and water.
    Therefore, the entire country should have shown the same effect:  some
    ten to fifteen times as many fetal deaths in 1964, and a corresponding
    sharp drop in live births in 1965.
       It took only a few minutes to find the figures for the children
    born live in the United States during these years.  For 1964 the
    number was 4,027,000, and for 1965 it had declined to 3,760,000, a
    sudden drop of 267,000, the sharpest single decline in the entire
    history of the United States.  And for the entire country the year
    before, fetal deaths showed a corresponding jump.
       It seemed that if there had been about twenty times as many bombs
    detonated during the 1961-62 test series, there would probably not
    have been many children born live in 1965.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      8


                               The Crucial Test




    WHEN I RETURNED HOME from the library late that night, I was deeply
    troubled about the implications of these findings, and wondered what
    course of action I should follow.  Should I stop my efforts to publish
    the article on leukemia in Albany-Troy and concentrate all my energies
    on this apparently much greater effect of fallout?  How could still
    more convincing evidence best be found?  How could scientists and
    government officials be quickly informed of this discovery so that
    independent studies to check the findings could be carried out by
    others as soon as possible?  
       At that very moment, the French were continuing their atomic tests 
    in the Pacific, while the Chinese were starting to detonate larger-
    than-ever bombs whose fallout was already drifting over the U.S.  If 
    the rise in fetal deaths had truly been caused by fallout, then a 
    simple calculation showed that for each additional megaton of nuclear 
    energy released some 2000 to 4000 infants would be stillborn in the 
    U.S. within a year, and perhaps ten times as many all over the world.  
    And this figure did not even include the many infants who would be 
    born with congenital defects or who would die of cancer and leukemia 
    in the first years of life.
       Yet what if my interpretation of the data was wrong?  Should I
    spend many more months or even years gathering more and more detailed
    data on many additional populations, examining every conceivable
    alternative explanation for these effects, and only then publish the
    findings?  Clearly this was not just another scientific study, to be
    handled with more deliberation than urgency.  Here, every additional
    megaton bomb that the French or Chinese tested might mean the loss of
    thousands of babies, while every additional nuclear weapons system
    built would increase the certainty that human life would end if these
    weapons were ever used.  The AEC was in the midst of plans to set off
    another large cratering explosion in Nevada within the next three
    months in an effort to prove the feasibility of excavating a new
    Panama Canal by means of hydrogen bombs.  Such a test was bound to
    release large amounts of radioactive debris that would drift all over
    the United States and northern Europe.
       On the other hand, many scientists would surely consider it
    irresponsible and alarmist to voice concern to the public before all
    the evidence had been gathered and submitted to the scientific
    community for detailed consideration.  And there would of course be
    strenuous opposition from all the proponents of nuclear energy for
    military and peacetime use.  Yet by now it was amply clear that I
    could not expect quick publication of these findings in the widely
    read scientific journals, such as {Science}.  At best, it might take a
    year to gather the necessary support and definitively overcome the
    objections of reviewers.
       Ultimately I resolved to take the findings to the public if
    discussions with colleagues failed to reveal any alternative
    interpretations of the evidence.  Meanwhile, I continued to work at
    the library, trying to confirm these incredible findings.
       One test would be that in a state comparable to New York in
    economic level and quality of medical care, but where there had been
    less-intense fallout, the change in the infant mortality decline
    should have been correspondingly smaller.  California, upwind from the
    Nevada test site, met these criteria, and so I plotted the data for
    that state.  The fetal mortality rate did in fact continue to decline
    at an undiminished rate during the early 1950s--while New York State
    had already begun to show sharp rises--reaching rates almost half
    those in New York.  Only in 1955 to 1958, after the large hydrogen
    bomb tests in the Pacific, did California also begin to show a
    noticeable leveling off in the rate of decline.  But at no time did
    this leveling show the sharp rises observed in New York State that
    would be expected from the much more intense short-lived radioactivity
    produced by the relatively small "tactical" weapons tests carried out
    in Nevada.
       But the most crucial test involved the deaths of infants.  For some
    of my colleagues in the field of public health had pointed out that
    fetal mortality figures, being incompletely reported, are not nearly
    as reliable as those for infants who are born live but die before the
    age of one.  And when I examined the infant mortality figures for New
    York City and New York State, I found that they did in fact show the
    same peaking in 1964 and 1965 as did the fetal deaths.  Especially
    sharp was the increase in deaths among the infants under 28 days old,
    which are known to reflect most strongly any effects that occurred
    during embryonic life.
       In order to tie these upward changes in fetal and infant mortality
    to fallout, it would be necessary to make a detailed comparison
    between the actual measured levels of radioactivity in the food and
    milk with the mortality rates to see if the rises and falls coincided.
    Fortunately, data on fallout levels had been made publicly available
    beginning in 1957 after a struggle between the Public Health Service
    and the AEC, which wanted to keep them classified.  The first area to
    check would be New York, for which the fetal and infant death rates
    were already collected.  At the outset, I did not know for certain
    which of the isotopes in the fallout were causing the principal
    damage.  But then I saw that each time the levels of the short-lived
    isotopes, such as iodine 131 and strontium 89, shot up to their
    highest peaks, there was a sharp rise in fetal mortality within a
    year.  The first of these sharp general rises occurred after the very
    large Nevada, Pacific, and Siberian tests in 1957-58, and the second
    and highest took place following the tests in 1961-62, the high levels
    of short-lived isotopes in milk peaking in the spring and early summer
    of 1963.
       Thus it appeared that, in the case of infant and fetal mortality,
    the short-lived isotopes produced especially by the smaller fission
    bombs were dominant.  These isotopes gave off their radioactivity
    anywhere from ten to a hundred times faster than the long-lived
    strontium 90 and cesium 137, or than the carbon 14 and tritium
    produced by the hydrogen bombs.  Inside the body, then, they would
    give the fetus the highest dose in the shortest time.  Certainly
    iodine 131 could be a major source of damage.  In a paper just
    published in January 1968, Merrill Eisenbud, who had been head of the
    AEC's New York Health and Safety Laboratory at the time of the Troy
    incident, reported an actual measurement of the iodine in the thyroid
    of a 12-week-old fetus aborted in New York City in 1962, the peak year
    of testing.  The fetus had received a thyroid dose ten times as large
    as that being received by the average newborn infant during the same
    period.  Eisenbud gave this peak average thyroid dose for newborns in
    the city in 1962 as 200 millirads.   So the thyroid of the fetus must
    have been receiving around 2000 millirads, or 2 rads, a truly enormous
    dose for this crucial organ compared to the 75 millirads it would
    normally have received from natural background radiation.  And this
    was just the dose to a single organ from a single isotope.  The total
    effect on the developing fetus from the combined concentration of
    different isotopes in different organs must have been vastly greater.
    In this connection, Eisenbud also gave monthly figures on strontium 90
    in milk for New York City, and these too showed sharp peaks in 1958,
    1962, 1963, and 1964, corresponding to the years of greatest increases
    in fetal deaths.
       But what would be the effects of the long-lived strontium on fetal
    and infant mortality?  The intense radioactivity of the short-lived
    isotopes generally died out within six months to a year, but the
    strontium, with its half-life of 28 years, would persist in the
    environment and in the diet, continuing to build up in the bones and
    genetic material of the exposed people until reaching an equilibrium
    level where natural metabolic processes would remove it at the same
    rate as it was being taken in.  Studies had shown that this peak level
    was generally reached some four to five years after continuous intake
    began.  Therefore, it seemed likely that any effects of strontium on
    infant mortality would parallel this accumulation in the bodies of the
    parents.  If this was so, then after the initial sharp rise caused by
    the short-lived isotopes there would be a dip, followed by a gradual
    rise culminating in a second, broader, lower peak extending generally
    between the third to fifth years.  Thereafter, if no additional
    strontium was added to the diet, there would be a slow decline that
    would probably accelerate rapidly after a few years as the strontium
    in the environment was dissipated and diluted by natural processes.
       When I discussed the findings with Dr. Barry Commoner, now at
    Washington University in St. Louis, he suggested that I compare the
    leveling of the decline in fetal and infant mortality with the
    measured amounts of strontium 90 on the ground and in the milk for
    different areas of the United States.  It took only a few days to
    discover that the pattern followed closely the levels of strontium 90
    that accumulated in the environment after the onset of hydrogen bomb
    testing in the early 1950s.  Furthermore, the graphs consistently
    showed two peaks in tandem--a sharp peak within a year after each test
    series, when the levels of short-lived isotopes as well as strontium
    shot up, followed by a second slower rise culminating between three
    and five years later.  The second peaks were especially high, probably
    because each of the enormous fusion bombs had actually produced
    hundreds of times as much strontium 90 as one of the earlier atomic
    fission bombs, even though the hydrogen bombs had been advertised as
    being much "cleaner."  For, as Ralph Lapp and the British physicist
    Joseph Rotblat had each discovered independently in 1954, 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 at no additional cost, but the
    levels of strontium 90 in the bones of living creatures were vastly
    increased.
       The final task that remained was to make certain that there existed
    no other known explanation for the halt in the decline of infant
    mortality in the United States.  Various of my associates in the
    University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health had said that to the
    best of their knowledge no other cause had been found.  It was
    suggested that I review the results of an international conference on
    the problem, held in Washington, D.C., in May of 1965.
       The summary of the conference revealed that extensive studies had
    been made comparing the U.S. with five European countries where there
    had been much less of a slowing in the infant mortality decline, or
    none at all.  These studies had failed to find any explanation for the
    sudden worsening of the situation in this country.  However, fallout
    had not even been considered as a possible factor.
       According to the report, the U.S. infant mortality problem had
    become so serious since it was first noticed in 1960 that comparative
    studies had been undertaken in Scotland, England, Wales, Norway,
    Denmark, and the Netherlands.  The 1965 conference brought together
    the investigators from each of these countries in an effort to
    determine "the reasons for the position of the infant mortality rate
    in the United States."
       As the introduction to the report put it:

       Two features were noted about the infant mortality rate in the
       United States in the 1950s:  (1) the virtual halt in the rate of
       decline of infant mortality after a long period of rapid
       decline, and (2) the unfavorable position of the United States
       infant mortality compared with that of many other countries.
       These two points were viewed with concern because health
       authorities had for many years pointed with pride to the high
       rate of decrease in infant mortality in the United States.

       In his opening remarks, Dr. I. M. Moriyama, chief of the Office of
    Health Statistics Analysis of the U.S. National Center for Health
    Statistics, posed the problem as follows:

       One of the intriguing questions is why the rate of decline of
       infant mortality rates for countries such as the United States,
       England and Wales, and Norway has been checked, whereas the
       rates for Denmark and the Netherlands have continued to decline
       without apparent interruption.

       But what was more surprising was what Dr. Moriyama added:

       Incidentally, the change in mortality conditions was not
       peculiar to the period of infancy.  The rates at other ages also
       leveled off in the United States, but these changes came several
       years after the beginning of the deceleration in the infant
       mortality rate.

    This delay in effects on the older population was, of course,
    consistent with the characteristic established pattern of delay in
    appearance of radiation-induced cancer and leukemia.  And I had found
    that fetal and infant mortality changed within a year after the
    exposure took place.
       An observation made by Dr. Samuel Shapiro, director of research and
    statistics of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, seemed to
    lend further support to the fallout hypothesis.  Dr. Shapiro remarked
    that the birthweight of U.S. infants had mysteriously declined since
    the early 1950s.  This was significant, since a decline in birthweight
    had been well established as one of the effects of radiation on unborn
    children in the studies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.  And
    extensive laboratory animal studies had long shown that stunting of
    growth and reduced birthweight were produced by irradiation of the
    fetus, while similar effects had been observed among human infants
    accidentally exposed to X-rays prior to birth.  Furthermore, a slight
    reduction in birthweight, such as sometimes appears in infants whose
    mothers had German measles during pregnancy, was known to greatly
    increase the likelihood that the infants would die in the first year
    of life.  As it was put later in the report of the conference:  "Low-
    birthweight infants have a much greater chance of dying, and hence
    contribute significantly to neonatal mortality."
       Dr. Shapiro also noted that "the decrease in the rate of decline
    was more serious in the nonwhite population."  The large series of
    bomb tests that began in Nevada in 1951 would logically have had the
    greatest effects on the large black populations of the Southern
    Atlantic and Gulf states.  These included the states of heaviest
    rainfall, over which the fallout from Nevada was blown by the
    prevailing eastward high-altitude winds, spreading radioactive rain on
    the crops that formed the staple diet of the sharecroppers and farm
    laborers of the South.  And their children, with the poorer diet,
    poorer sanitary conditions, and poorer medical care prevalent among
    the nonwhite populations, would, if they were born slightly weaker and
    less resistant than normal, have a greatly reduced chance of survival
    as compared with white children, who are generally far better off in
    all three respects.
       According to the report, it appeared that infant mortality patterns
    in European countries also fitted the fallout hypothesis.  According
    to Charlotte A. Douglas, a public-health physician from Edinburgh, "In
    Scotland, there had been impressive declines in maternal, fetal, and
    infant mortality from 1935 until the early 1950s, when the decline in
    mortality rates became more gradual.  Since then there has been only
    slight improvement."  Thus there was a close coincidence in the times
    when this leveling trend began in Scotland and the U.S.  Similarly, in
    England and Wales, as reported by Dr. Katherine M. Hirst:  "The total
    infant mortality has declined for years, but it began to level off
    during the 1950s, as did that of the United States."  And again, just
    as in the U.S., there was a large increase in the number of low-
    birthweight babies.  The same story emerged from the account of Dr.
    Julie E. Backer for Norway, where the clouds drifting across the North
    Atlantic would have rained down their fallout most heavily on the
    coastal mountains rising from the sea.
       However, the reports on Denmark and Holland were quite different.
    In these countries there had been little or no leveling off in the
    rate of decline.  A pattern was beginning to emerge.  It was the more
    northerly countries with the heaviest rainfall that were showing the
    greatest effects on infant mortality.  Even within England, there was
    a reduction in infant and fetal death rates going southward.
       The high-altitude fallout clouds from the Nevada test site, carried
    across the Atlantic in a northeasterly direction by the prevailing
    jet-stream wind currents, would have deposited their radioactivity on
    the northern parts of Europe with much greater intensity than on the
    southern parts.  This pattern was confirmed by the lack of any
    significant halt in the steady decline in infant mortality in France
    throughout the early period of Nevada testing.  There, the first
    leveling of the decline did not occur until after the first tests in
    Algeria in 1960 and the large hydrogen bomb test series in the Pacific
    in 1961-62.  These tests resulted in substantial fallout in France.
    And the same situation existed in Canada, which had been largely
    untouched by the fresh fallout from Nevada as it was blown
    northeastward across the U.S. and on to northern Europe.
       An even more striking confirmation of the thesis that these
    geographical differences in mortality rates were related to fallout
    was contained in a study by Dr. Bernard Greenberg, a biostatistician
    at the University of North Carolina, whose work was summarized in the
    report.  Since Sweden had continued to show a much smaller percentage
    of low-birthweight babies than the U.S., Dr. Greenberg undertook to
    find out if there was some cultural or genetic difference among people
    of Scandinavian stock that made their children less susceptible to
    this condition.  Taking the two states of Minnesota and North Dakota,
    Dr. Greenberg compared the number of low-birthweight babies in
    counties containing the highest percentage of Scandinavians with the
    number in counties containing very few Scandinavians.  He did indeed
    find a small difference of about 10 percent, the counties with more
    Scandinavians showing the smaller number of low-birthweight children.
    But this percentage was far too small to explain the much larger
    difference between the U.S. and Sweden.  However, he also found
    something he could not explain at all, namely:  *All* the counties in
    North Dakota, regardless of the percentage of Scandinavians, showed a
    much higher incidence of low-birthweight babies than did the counties
    in Minnesota.
       This was odd.  But then I remembered an article I had read many
    years before about fallout in North Dakota.  It was entitled "The
    Mandan Milk Mystery."  In the back files of {Scientist and Citizen}
    (now called {Environment}), a magazine then published by the St. Louis
    Citizens' Group for Nuclear Information, I located the article,
    written by E. W. Pfeiffer.  It described how the Mandan, North Dakota,
    milk sampling station operated by the AEC had, for some unknown
    reason, consistently shown the highest concentration of strontium 90
    in milk among all the states where such measurements were taken.  In
    fact, in May of 1963, Mandan had shown the highest levels ever
    recorded anywhere in the United States.  The levels were consistently
    much higher than in nearby states, notably Minnesota.
       This, then, was a direct correlation between the amount of
    strontium 90 in milk and the incidence of low-birthweight babies.  It
    should therefore be possible to find large geographical differences in
    infant mortality based on differences in fallout levels.  The various
    regions should show rises beginning at different times.  These rises
    should come first in the states in the path of the fallout from the
    early tests in New Mexico and Nevada--the southeastern states of heavy
    rainfall, along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast from Forida
    to about New Jersey.  These were the regions over which the high-
    altitude clouds generally drift from west to east, carried along by
    the "jet streams," the constant 60- to 120-mile-an-hour winds blowing
    northeastward at altitudes of 25,000 to 40,000 feet.  Only later,
    after the hydrogen bomb testing began in the Pacific in 1953, should
    the high-rainfall states in the northern U.S. begin to show an upward
    trend.  For in these tests, which continued up until the test-ban
    treaty of 1963, the radioactivity was deposited high in the
    stratosphere, beyond the influence of the prevailing winds, and so it
    sifted down much more uniformly around the world.  But since this
    high-altitude debris was also eventually brought down mainly by rain
    and snow, then there should still be clear differences in infant
    mortality between the wet and dry regions of the U.S.
       Searching among the reports published by the U.S. National Center
    for Health Statistics, I located one that had graphs of infant
    mortality for every state from 1935 to 1964.  And indeed, the
    southeastern states along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts showed the
    first sharp leveling during the 1946-50 period following the first
    test in New Mexico, while the states farther to the north did not show
    this trend until later in the 1950s when the tests were moved
    northward to Nevada.  And overall, from 1935 to 1964, the least change
    in the steady decline occurred in the low-rainfall states of the
    Southwest.  In New Mexico, for example, except for a brief halt in the
    downward trend following the first and only atmospheric test carried
    out in this state in 1945, the pattern was essentially the same as for
    France.  The decline resumed and showed only a slight degree of
    slowing until the early 1960s, when the large amount of debris from
    the South Pacific tests began to raise the levels of radioactivity
    everywhere.
       Furthermore, the lower-income groups--mainly the nonwhite
    population--showed the greater change, so that the effect first became
    apparent in this group.  In fact, in some states, the decline among
    this group did not just slow or stop.  In Arkansas, for instance, the
    nonwhite infant mortality rate actually began to climb again from a
    low point of 30 per 1000 live births in 1946 to 39 per 1000 in 1949,
    gradually rising still further to a high of about 42 after the peak of
    testing had resulted in the highest levels of radioactivity ever in
    the diet in 1963.  In the face of generally improving living
    standards, such a trend was very hard to understand any other way.
       In sharp contrast, the nonwhite infant mortality rates for dry
    Arizona and New Mexico kept right on declining.  Yet the medical care
    and general living standards of the Indian populations in these states
    was not significantly better than for the black population of
    Arkansas.  In New Mexico, the rate for nonwhites in 1952 was close to
    100 deaths per 1000 live births.  During the ensuing decade of heavy
    testing, the rate declined continuously to 40 by 1961, just as steady
    a rate of decline as that for the white population with its much
    higher living standard.
       But the most convincing evidence that it had to be fallout rather
    than ordinary chemical pollution or any genetic, cultural, medical, or
    economic factors came from the evidence for Hawaii.  Here was an area
    that originally had roughly the same high infant mortality rate among
    nonwhites as the southwestern states of the continental United States:
    about 80 per 1000 births in the early 1930s.  It showed a sharp
    downward trend in the late 1930s that brought the rate to about 28 in
    1945.  But then this decline suddenly halted, and the rate actually
    rose during 1946-48, shortly after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    detonations and the first tests at Bikini and Eniwetok, all located
    directly upwind from Hawaii.  The rates for both whites and nonwhites
    afterward resumed their decline, reaching about 21 by 1951-52.
    Shortly thereafter, however, they once again not only stopped their
    decline but actually rose to another peak of 25 between 1957 and 1960,
    following the large hydrogen bomb tests conducted during 1953-58 in
    the Pacific.  Not until four years after the end of large-scale
    atmospheric testing in 1962 did Hawaii resume its decline, finally
    going below 20 in 1966, the lowest rate in its history.  The
    hypothesis that it was the fallout coming down with the rain fitted
    perfectly:  The annual rainfall in Hawaii was among the highest in the
    world--some 100 to 200 inches as compared to less than ten for New
    Mexico and Arizona in the U.S. Southwest.
       The worst situation in the continental U.S. existed in Mississippi,
    a state directly in the path of the fallout from many Nevada tests and
    with poor medical care and an annual rainfall of 49 inches.  There,
    the nonwhite infant mortality rate had shown a promising decline even
    throughout the period of the Depression, dropping from 82 per 1000 in
    1930 to a low of 40 by 1946, quite close to that for the white
    population.  But instead of declining further, the nonwhite rate
    leveled off in the early 1950s and then actually started to climb
    sharply.  By 1963 it was back up to 58, an absolute increase of 45
    percent in the face of a generally rising standard of living and
    improved diet and medical care.  And once again, just as in Hawaii,
    the rate renewed its previous decline after the cessation of
    atmospheric testing, reaching 53 by 1966, the last year for which data
    were available.
       Furthermore, examination of the official fallout measurements
    showed that the high rainfall areas of the south and east did indeed
    have two to three times as much strontium 90 in their soil as the dry
    states of the western mountain region.  By plotting the figures for
    twelve typical rural and urban states on a graph, I was able to
    ascertain that the upward deviation infant mortality was directly
    related to the amount of strontium 90 deposited.
       The total excess infant mortality for the United States as a whole
    was truly enormous.  Using the calculating methods employed by Dr. I.
    M. Moriyama, it was possible to estimate what the mortality rates
    would have been if the decline had not been interrupted.  In the
    fifteen years between 1951 and 1966, the total number of infants in
    the United States who died in the first year of life exceeded the norm
    established during the previous fifteen years by 375,000.  The infants
    were not dying to any noticeably greater degree of bone cancer and
    leukemia, the effects well known to be produced by strontium 90.
    Instead, they were dying a little more frequently of respiratory
    diseases, infections, and immaturity, conditions that apparently had
    nothing to do with the kind of gross effects everyone had been led to
    expect from radiation, and that would be more noticeable among those
    who had poorer diets and medical care.
       Even more staggering were the figures indicating that for every
    infant who died in the first year of life there were five to ten who
    died prior to birth, so that the excess numbers of fetal deaths,
    spontaneous abortions, and stillbirths must have reached anywhere from
    two to three million in the United States alone.
       In addition, after 1955 there had also been a sudden slowing down
    in the steady decline of maternal mortality.  Between 1937 and 1955
    the average rate of decline in the number of women dying from
    complications of pregnancy and childbirth had been 12.8 percent per
    year.  This rate of decline slowed down drastically to 2.1 percent per
    year between 1956 and 1962.  Even more disturbing, instead of a
    further decline, there was actually a rise in the number of maternal
    deaths between 1962 and 1963, the year when fallout reached the
    highest levels ever recorded and fetal deaths began their sharp rise.
    Thus in 1963, a total of 1466 women died from complications of
    pregnancy and childbirth in the United States.  The calculations
    indicated that if the previous downward trend had continued instead of
    leveling off, close to a thousand of these mothers would not have died
    in that one year alone.  For the whole world combined, the figure
    would have been ten times as large.
       It did not take long to discover that beginning in 1966, some three
    years after the test-ban treaty was signed, when only the French and
    Chinese continued testing in the atmosphere, the infant and fetal
    mortality rates all over the U.S. and Europe suddenly and quite
    unexpectedly began to decline once more.  According to the latest
    Monthly Report of the U.S. Office of Vital Statistics, the drop in
    infant mortality that began for the U.S. after 1964, when it had
    reached a peak of 24.8 per 1000 births, had indeed continued into
    1968, reaching 21.7, and it showed no sign of halting.  Even Sweden
    had resumed its decline at the same rapid rate that it had shown prior
    to the onset of testing.  And there, the number of deaths per year had
    already been so far below that of the U.S. that any further decline
    seemed extremely unlikely.  Here was clear proof that the "irreducible
    minimum" in infant mortality had not been reached either in Sweden or
    the United States.
       By 1964, the year before the international conference on infant
    mortality had been held, seventeen other nations in the world had
    reached a lower level of infant mortality than the United States,
    according to a report published by Dr. Helen C. Chase of the U.S.
    Office of Health Statistics Analysis in 1967.  These included the
    Netherlands, 14.8;  Norway, 16.4;  Finland, 17.0;  Iceland, 17.7;
    Denmark, 18.7;  Switzerland, 19.0;  New Zealand, 19.1;  Australia,
    19.1;  England and Wales, 19.9;  Japan, 20.4;  Czechoslovakia, 21.2;
    Ukraine, 22.0;  France, 23.3;  Taiwan, 23.9;  Scotland, 24.0;  and
    Canada, 24.7.  And for the United States in that year the figure had
    been 24.8, or 68 percent higher than for the Netherlands, when as
    recently as 1947 the United States actually had a lower infant
    mortality than that country.  Among all these nations, it was the U.S.
    which was exposed to the most intense fallout from the tests in Nevada
    and the South Pacific.
       Most of these countries had been exposed to other environmental
    pollutants to the same or even a greater degree than the U.S.
    Tobacco, food additives, pesticides, and drugs were used throughout
    the world since World War II.  Neither could ordinary air pollution be
    the principal cause, since unpolluted rural states such as Hawaii and
    Arkansas showed far greater upward deviations in infant mortality than
    any of the heavily industrialized urban states in the northeast.
       The conclusion was inescapable.  There seemed to be no other single
    factor that could account for such sudden and dramatic changes on a
    worldwide scale.  Only radioactive fallout acting mainly on the early
    embryo could explain these facts.
       After discussing my findings with colleagues in the Federation of
    American Scientists, it was agreed that they would be made public at a
    meeting of the Pittsburgh F.A.S. chapter on October 23, 1968.  The day
    before the meeting, I submitted two copies of the report to {Science}.
    Because of his interest in the subject, I also sent a copy not
    intended for publication to Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the
    {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, a journal that had long been
    concerned with the possible biological effects of fallout.
       After delivering my paper at the F.A.S. meeting on the morning of
    the twenty-third, I was interviewed by Stuart Brown, a reporter from
    the Pittsburgh television station KDKA.  A few hours after the
    conclusion of the interview, the phone at my office rang.  It was
    Stuart Brown, who said that he had just called Philip Abelson, the
    editor of {Science}.  Brown thought I ought to know what Abelson had
    said.
       According to Brown, Abelson had told him that my paper had been
    rejected by an "independent committee."  This was a most unusual
    statement for the editor of a scientific journal to make to the press.
    According to long-established tenets of professional ethics, such
    journals are supposed to keep all editorial correspondence completely
    confidential.  Furthermore, the paper I had just presented had been
    mailed to {Science} only the night before and thus could not possibly
    have been reviewed by an "independent committee."  Abelson had
    obviously been referring to the revision of the Troy paper on the rise
    in leukemia, which contained none of the new data on fetal and infant
    mortality.
       Next, Brown said, Abelson had gone to the files, pulled out my
    folder, and read statements from the supposedly confidential report of
    one of the reviewers that my paper was "weak in its scientific
    methods" and its findings were "sweeping and sensational."  And at the
    end of the conversation, Abelson advised Brown against using any of my
    findings on the air.






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