From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [5/15]
Summary: part 5 of 15: chapter 9 through chapter 12
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
Date: 6 Jan 93 13:19:35 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.



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                                      9


                              Both Young and Old




    MEANWHILE, I continued my search, for the investigation of infant
    mortality had revealed still another possible dimension of the effects
    from fallout.  As Dr. I. M. Moriyama put it in the introduction to his
    1964 report entitled "The Change in Mortality Trend in the United
    States":

       The same kind of change in trend observed for infants appears to
       be taking place in the death rates for other ages.

    Regarding the overall trend, he added:

       The failure to experience a decline in mortality during this
       period is unexpected in view of the intensified attack on
       medical problems in the postwar years . . . there has been a
       growth in the volume and scope of health services in prevention,
       diagnosis, medical and surgical therapy, and rehabilitation, and
       also an improvement in their quality.  The rapid growth of
       health insurance plans has made high quality medical care
       readily accessible to ever-increasing numbers of people.  The
       rising level of living has resulted in improvement of work and
       home environment, quality and variety of food, educational
       attainment, and facilities of recreation.  Developments in
       medicine arising from the exigencies of a global war have become
       readily available for application to civilian health problems.
       At no time in the history of the country have conditions
       appeared so favorable for health progress.
          In this setting, it would seem reasonable to expect further
       reductions in mortality.  On the other hand, the possible
       adverse effects on mortality of radioactive fallout, air
       pollution, and other manmade hazards cannot be completely
       ignored.

       In the School of Public Health library, page after page of data
    showed the same dramatic upward changes for chronic diseases as had
    occurred for childhood leukemia and fetal and infant mortality.
    Deaths from all types of noninfectious respiratory diseases such as
    lung cancer, emphysema, and bronchitis had increased especially
    dramatically among all age groups, as had deaths from certain other
    types of cancer.  The overall life expectancy, particularly for adult
    males, had begun to level off and then actually declined again after
    decades of steady rise in this country and in northern Europe.
       Most significant of all were the death rates due to all types of
    childhood cancers in the U.S.  For young people of both sexes, white
    and nonwhite alike, there were sudden, steplike jumps in the cancer
    rate between 1948 and 1951.  For the white children, the rate doubled
    during these three years.  The rate for the nonwhite children, which
    had held basically steady between 1930 and 1948, tripled during the
    same three-year period.  This was to be expected if fallout was the
    cause, since by far the largest portion of the nation's nonwhite
    population lived in the regions where the fallout from the early tests
    came down.
       When had this overall trend begun?  Dr. Moriyama's report indicated
    that deaths from respiratory diseases and childhood cancers either
    declined steadily or held level throughout the 1930s and most of the
    1940s, the period of rising air pollution and the tripling of
    cigarette consumption.  Between about 1948 and 1950, three to five
    years after the detonation of the first bombs in New Mexico and Japan
    and the onset of atomic testing in the Pacific, the death rates from
    these diseases suddenly began to shoot up.  For example, the annual
    death rate among white males seventy-five to eighty-four years old
    from respiratory diseases (not including influenza and pneumonia) was
    close to 110 per 100,000 per year in 1934.  By 1948 it had declined to
    an all-time low of about 70.  But after this it shot up to 190 by
    1960.
       The sharp upward changes in the rates for these types of chronic
    diseases were reflected in an overall leveling in the decline of death
    rates for the United States as a whole.  But this effect was
    particularly serious in certain states, where the death rates actually
    rose again after decades of steady decline.  As Moriyama pointed out:
    "In twelve states and the District of Columbia there appears to be a
    marked rise in the crude death rate during the past five to ten years
    as represented by the trend for North Carolina."  The list of the
    states showed that they were all either southern states to the east of
    New Mexico and Nevada, or states directly to the northeast of the
    Nevada test site.  The states were Alabama, Arkansas, the District of
    Columbia, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina,
    Tennessee, and West Virginia in the South, and Nevada, Colorado, South
    Dakota, and Wyoming in the West.  None of these states was heavily
    industrialized or noted for its air pollution.  In fact, the opposite
    was true.
       The number of excess deaths in the U.S. resulting from these upward
    changes in the death rates was calculated by Dr. Moriyama as being
    300,000 during 1956-60.  This was the period of heavy Nevada testing.
    The fallout and the excess deaths continued as testing resumed in
    1961.  According to Moriyama, "The estimated excess deaths is about
    85,000 deaths for 1961, and 131,000 deaths for 1962."  The "excess
    deaths" had jumped from an average of 60,000 per year during the
    earlier period of testing to 85,000 in 1961, the year that the
    Russians detonated the largest megaton weapons ever exploded.  In the
    following year, when nearly 70 megatons of fission energy were
    detonated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union--the highest megatonnage
    ever exploded in a single year--the excess deaths in the United States
    alone reached 131,000.
       The same trends were also evident in other parts of the world.  A
    detailed report on changes in mortality trends for England and Wales
    by Hubert Campbell at the Welsh National School of Medicine showed
    that in those countries the mortality rates for the very young and the
    very old followed exactly the same pattern as in the U.S.  Beginning
    about 1953-55 the total death rates for 1- to 4-year-olds suddenly
    refused to decline further.  For the 5- to 9-year age groups, which
    the studies of Stewart and MacMahon had shown to reflect most strongly
    the cancer-causing effect of irradiation during early development, the
    mortality rate actually started to climb again.  Beginning the year
    after the first Nevada tests, there was also the same sudden halt in
    the rapid decline of maternal mortality associated with complications
    of pregnancy and childbirth as in the U.S.  These rates actually
    turned sharply upward in 1960-61 for the youngest group of women (15
    to 24 years of age) for the first time in modern history.  And there
    was the same sharp rise in cancer deaths of all types for the age
    group 5 to 14 years, following some three to five years after the New
    Mexico test and the detonations in Japan in 1945.  Both male and
    female death rates jumped in a steplike fashion:  from about 30 per
    million per year to about 60 for boys, and from 25 to about 50 for
    girls, all between 1948 and 1951, exactly as in the United States.
    That these rises could not be due to changes in statistical or
    classificational methods was emphasized by Campbell:  "There has been
    no important change in the classification of these diseases during
    this period. . . ."
       For all age groups in England and Wales, Campbell's report showed
    tremendous rises in leukemia for both men and women, beginning
    suddenly between 1947 and 1951, with the sharpest changes for the very
    young and the very old.  Thus, whereas the leukemia death rate had
    remained fairly steady for men 75 to 84 years old during the fifteen
    years between 1931 and 1946, ranging from 50 to 80 deaths per million
    individuals each year, by 1954 the rate had increased to about 200.
    It reached 350 by 1959, an increase of about 500 percent.  During the
    same period, the leukemia rate remained unchanged for the middle-aged
    group 45 to 54 years old, but it increased some 50 percent for boys 5
    to 14 years of age.  This was the rise that had prompted Dr. Stewart's
    study.
       The data for Japan, prepared by a group of public health physicians
    and statisticians from the Japanese Institute of Public Health, was
    particularly significant, since Japan was not only exposed to the
    fallout from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, but also received the
    radioactive debris from the U.S. Pacific and Soviet Siberian tests.
       The report showed that three to five years after the fallout from
    Hiroshima and Nagasaki descended in 1945 the cancer rate for the 10-
    to 14-year-old children all over Japan tripled from 10 to 30 cases per
    million population, gradually climbing further to 40 cases by 1955 and
    to 50 by 1963, a fivefold increase during the period of heavy testing.
    For the youngest children zero to 4 years old, the increase was less,
    once again confirming the hypothesis that radiation was the causative
    factor as in the case of Troy.  Again, the rates for the middle-aged
    group remained level, while the rate for those over 80 went up as
    elsewhere, in the case of Japan from about 3000 to 8000 per year per
    million individuals.
       Here then was the confirmation of why the studies of the Hiroshima
    and Nagasaki survivors had not revealed any effects on their children.
    Everywhere in Japan, mortality rates had gone up due to the fallout,
    so that there was little or no difference between those survivors
    exposed to the direct flash and those who received the fallout in
    their diet over the years that followed.
       And after the large hydrogen bomb tests, deaths due to
    noninfectious lung diseases such as emphysema and bronchitis suddenly
    stopped declining in Japan after 1955.  This was the year after the
    Pacific and Siberian tests filled the air all over the world with
    radioactivity.  In the next two years, deaths due to bronchitis, which
    had been dropping rapidly from 150 per million population in 1950 to a
    low of 40 by 1955, actually began to rise again.  Thus, in the period
    from 1945 to 1955, when industrial growth and the accompanying smog
    and chemical pollution had been very great, these respiratory diseases
    had been declining.  As in the United States, they rose only after the
    enormous increase of atmospheric radioactivity.
       If the major factor was fallout and not the pollution produced by
    industry and the automobile, then Chile provided an excellent chance
    to test this hypothesis in a country of low industrialization, as it
    was the only South American country for which detailed mortality-trend
    data was available.  Since Chile was located on the west coast of
    South America, facing the prevailing winds from the South Pacific that
    release their moisture on the steeply rising slopes of the Andes,
    there should be upward changes in mortality following the first two
    series of Pacific A-bomb tests in 1946 and 1948.  And these increases
    should be even more noticeable for the heavy series of tests beginning
    in 1952, involving the "dirty," uranium-clad hydrogen bombs that had
    produced such massive amounts of fission products.
       The Chile mortality graphs instantly confirmed this prediction,
    especially the plot of mortality for the infants dying between the
    ages of one month and one year, which showed an initial rise between
    1947 and 1949 after the first Bikini and Eniwetok tests.  Far more
    serious was the sudden and complete reversal of the overall infant
    mortality trend, from a steady decline to a continuous rise beginning
    in 1954 and persisting until 1960, the last year for which data were
    available.
       And the same change had taken place in the total mortality rate for
    all ages combined.  There had been a steady decline after 1933, except
    for small rises during the second half of the 1940s, but then between
    1953 and 1955 there was a sudden and complete end to the decline for
    both men and women, continuing for as long as the data had been
    plotted.
       In the words of the report's authors, a group of Chilean public
    health specialists:

       The significance of this trend is evident if the mortality for
       1960 is estimated on the basis of regression for 1933-53.  The
       expected rate was 8.6 and the observed rate was 12.3, which
       means that 28,024 of the total 93,265 deaths registered in 1960
       would not have taken place if the previously described trend had
       continued.

       This did not mean that cigarettes or air pollution were not
    significant factors in chronic lung disease, or that heavy metals,
    pesticides, food additives, and other pollutants were not adversely
    affecting worldwide health.  The phenomenon of synergism, in which
    combinations of two or more biological agents have a much greater
    effect than one alone, is well known to modern science.  For instance,
    it has long been known that uranium miners have ten times the normal
    rate of lung cancers because of their breathing of radioactive gas in
    the mines.  But those who smoked died of lung cancer at one hundred
    times the normal rate.
       However, statistics from all over the world kept indicating that
    radiation was the dominant factor in these worldwide changes of
    mortality trends.  It made no difference what the social or economic
    system was, nor how much medical care was available, as in the very
    different cases of the Netherlands versus Chile.  It made no
    difference whether infant mortality was high or low to begin with, as
    in Mississippi versus Sweden.  It did not matter whether there was any
    air pollution, or what the genetic, cultural, or dietary differences
    were.  There was only one way to explain these worldwide, synchronous,
    and totally unexpected changes that did not stop at any national
    boundaries nor at the edges of the seas.  Only the introduction of
    some new and enormously powerful biological agent on a worldwide scale
    could produce such sudden rises in death rates that could almost be
    termed epidemics.  And this new agent clearly seemed to be the fallout
    that had been released into the atmosphere in quantities equivalent to
    tens of millions of pounds of radium, the most powerful biological
    poisons yet created by man, circling the world in a matter of a few
    weeks and attacking mainly the weakest in every living species--the
    developing young and the very old.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      10


                            The Clouds of Trinity




    THE GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS of the changes in worldwide leukemia and
    infant mortality trends between 1945 and 1955 clearly matched the
    patterns of fallout.  But so unbelievable and far-reaching a
    conclusion required much more evidence before the possibility of any
    other explanation could be ruled out.  Laboratory-animal experiments
    had shown that various pesticides, drugs, food additives, and heavy
    metals could apparently cause cancer and congenital defects, while air
    pollution and mothers' cigarette smoking were believed to be linked to
    fetal and infant mortality.
       There was one test, however, that would effectively rule out these
    agents as the principal factors in the increase.  It would involve the
    first nuclear explosion ever set off by man.  Code-named Trinity, this
    explosion took place at dawn on July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New
    Mexico.  Before this, there was no nuclear fallout in the environment,
    so this explosion would have to have produced a clear effect on
    mortality rates wherever the fallout descended.
       But where had the fallout come down?  There was at that time no
    elaborate countrywide network of fallout-measuring stations.  However,
    many eyewitness accounts of this historic explosion had subsequently
    been published, and, among these, a book called {Day of Trinity} by
    Lansing Lamont reported the event in greatest detail.  Lamont, a
    {Time} magazine reporter, had gone to considerable lengths to trace
    the direction of the drifting radioactive debris, studying weather
    maps and conducting extensive interviews with many of the scientists
    involved.
       According to Lamont, shortly before the final countdown at 5:10
    A.M. on the morning of July 16, Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge announced to
    the scientists at the various observation posts that the winds close
    to the ground were blowing north, toward where Dr. Robert Wilson was
    manning an observation post 10,000 yards from ground zero.  An instant
    after the flash of the detonation at exactly 5:29 A.M., the churning
    fireball detached itself from the ground and shot upward, followed by
    a column of radioactive dust, penetrating the overcast at 15,000 feet.
    The column of dust continued upward to an altitude of 40,000 feet,
    where it spread out in the mushroom shape that was later to become so
    familiar.
       The lower part of the mushroom's stem was blown north toward
    Wilson's position, which had to be quickly evacuated.  Simultaneously,
    Dr. Luis Alvarez and Navy captain William Parsons, flying high above
    the cloud cover just to the west of the test site in an observation
    plane watched the head of the mushroom penetrate the overcast and
    break up into three distinct sections.  These sections drifted off in
    different directions, generally to the northeast and east.  As
    recounted by Lamont, the largest of the three sections, a dense white
    mushroom trailed by a dusty-brown streamer, drifted off in a direction
    just slightly north of east.  Meanwhile, the low-altitude fallout from
    the stem of the mushroom cloud continued north and northeast until it
    covered an area about 30 miles wide and 100 miles long, gradually
    settling to the ground in a white mist of intense radioactivity.
       By three o-clock in the afternoon, the readings on the radiation
    counters monitored by Alvin Graves and his wife, Elizabeth, observers
    assigned to the little town of Carrizozo some 40 miles just slightly
    north of east from the test site, started to climb rapidly.  By 4:20
    P.M., eleven hours after the explosion, the counters shot off scale
    and Alvin Graves called Dr. Stafford Warren, the chief medical officer
    in charge of radiation monitoring.  As Lamont put it, the fate of the
    little town hung in the balance while the scientists and Army officers
    decided whether or not to evacuate it.  Ultimately, they held off, and
    within an hour the fallout readings had dropped.  Lamont reported that
    these were difficult hours for Dr. Warren and the officer in charge of
    the entire project, General Leslie R. Groves.  "The medical dangers
    were most immediate of all," Lamont wrote, "but, in addition, both men
    knew that the Army was not too eager to pursue too diligently the
    possibilities of widespread fallout."
       From the fact that it had taken the fallout particles some nine to
    eleven hours to reach Carrizozo, it was possible to determine which
    portion of the cloud had gone eastward.  According to the AEC
    publication {The Effects of Nuclear Weapons}, typical fallout
    particles descend at a speed of about 5000 feet per hour, while
    smaller particles fall more slowly.  Allowing about half an hour for
    the cloud to travel the 40 miles to Carrizozo at the usual speed of
    the jet-stream air currents, then, it meant that the particles that
    caused the Graveses' radiation counters to start climbing must have
    taken about eight to nine hours to descend at a rate of 5000 feet per
    hour.  Therefore, the cloud that passed over Carrizozo must have been
    at an altitude of between 40,000 and 45,000 feet.
       Thus, it had to have been the uppermost section of the mushroom
    cloud that drifted just slightly north of east.  And since the winds
    became more northerly with decreasing altitude, the lower, smaller
    sections would have gone increasingly northward.  This estimate was
    confirmed by the fact that the more northerly towns were the first to
    receive the fallout, and those to the east were the last.  The low-
    altitude fallout, therefore, had come down mostly in New Mexico to the
    northeast, while the highest portions would have been carried more
    nearly eastward across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the whole
    southeastern U.S., where they would be brought down mainly by the
    rain.
       On the basis of these estimations, then, any upward changes in
    infant mortality should be found to some degree in the sparsely
    populated areas of New Mexico itself, and to a greater extent in the
    more heavily populated states to the east, northeast, and north.
    Among the more distant states generally to the east, those with the
    heaviest rainfall should show the largest upward changes, since the
    high-altitude cloud carried the smallest particles, which would
    largely remain aloft unless brought down by rain.  Furthermore, the
    states near the Atlantic seaboard to the northeast, such as North
    Carolina and Virginia, should be affected less than nearby Arkansas,
    Louisiana, and Mississippi, for the cloud would have gradually fanned
    out and the short-lived radioactivity would have steadily diminished
    in intensity with the passage of time.
       The five-year period 1940-45 was the longest period immediately
    preceding the test during which a steady decline in infant mortality
    had existed in every state in the U.S.  Thus, the amount of upward
    deviation from this rate of decline would provide a measure of any
    changes occurring after the explosion.
       When the infant mortality figures were plotted on a map of the
    U.S., the pattern began to emerge.  The states directly to the west
    and far to the northeast of New Mexico kept declining at the 1940-45
    rate.  In fact, in some cases the decline was actually somewhat
    faster, due to the introduction of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, since
    the greatest cause of infant deaths was the infectious diseases that
    these new drugs succeeded in cutting back.  But each year after 1945
    and beginning strongly in 1947, there was a growing excess infant
    mortality in the states of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts to the east
    and northeast of the test site, amounting to as much as 30 to 40
    percent.  This pattern extended over the entire southeastern part of
    the country, from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi all the
    way across Alabama and Georgia to South Carolina, North Carolina, and
    Virginia, and existed both for the poorer nonwhite as well as for the
    socio-economically better-off white infants.
       Two of my colleagues, Donald Sashin and Ronald Rocchio, became
    quite concerned about these findings and offered to work out a
    computer program to calculate and plot the infant mortality rates for
    every state, thus removing any possible subjective bias.  The pattern
    that emerged from the computer was essentially the same except for one
    striking difference.  For some reason the computer maps showed
    excesses in infant mortality for the north-central region of the U.S.,
    in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and especially North Dakota.  In 1946,
    even before the increased infant mortality manifested itself to the
    east of New Mexico, North Dakota was showing a 19 percent increase,
    reaching 32 percent in 1949.  But the low-altitude fallout that went
    northward from the Trinity test could not possibly have been
    significant in these distant states so directly to the north.
       The mystery was solved when a colleague happened to show me a copy
    of an AEC publication entitled {Meteorology and Atomic Energy}.  In
    the opening chapter, dealing with the history of the atomic energy
    industry, the report explained that in 1944 the first of a series of
    giant nuclear reactors had gone into operation in Hanford, Washington,
    to produce the plutonium for the Trinity bomb.  The reactor was
    located in the dry eastern edge of the state of Washington, directly
    upwind from Montana, Idaho, and North Dakota.  Because the operating
    engineers did not have sufficient experience with these enormous new
    reactors being built under wartime pressures, large releases of
    radioactive gases occurred.  As the AEC report described it:

       As soon as a charge of fuel came out of the plutonium production
       reactors, a large source of gaseous effluent was encountered.
       For the plutonium produced to be removed from the uranium and
       other fission products, it was necessary to dissolve the fuel by
       various chemical reactions.  During the early stages of this
       process, all the noble-gas fission products, notably radioactive
       isotopes of xenon and krypton, were released.  It was not
       feasible to remove them by a filter system;  they were released
       to the atmosphere in rather large quantities.

    Still more disturbing was the statement that "large quantities of
    radioactive iodine were involved."  Additionally, when the reactor's
    fuel elements would occasionally catch fire, krypton and biologically
    more hazardous fission products such as strontium and cesium were
    driven off.
       Not only could this account for the sharp rise in infant mortality
    in the northernmost part of the U.S. before the effects of the first
    bomb could make themselves felt, it could also explain the "Mandan
    Milk Mystery"--the inexplicably high strontium 90 content of the milk
    collected at Mandan, North Dakota, by the AEC's New York Health and
    Safety Laboratory throughout the 1950s.  For the radioactive particles
    from the Hanford reactor in Washington would have largely passed over
    dry Idaho and Montana as they were blown by the prevailing westerly
    winds toward the wet eastern part of North Dakota where Mandan was
    located.
       There was also one other peculiarity in the computer-printed maps.
    Florida, South Carolina, and Oklahoma showed no increase in infant
    mortality during the five years following the test, even though they
    had been in the path of the fallout.  Soon, however, when I received
    detailed weather maps from the U.S. Meteorological Records Center,
    this too fitted the hypothesis:  During the week ending July 17, 1945,
    the heavy rains had missed these states.  In fact, the weather map
    indicated that the rainfall for that week had been restricted mainly
    to a rather narrow zone, extending from Texas along the northern edge
    of the Gulf of Mexico and then up the Atlantic coast.  About 90
    percent of the fallout is brought down by the rains, while only about
    10 percent settles to the ground in dry air.  This is why the zones of
    heaviest rainfall showed the sharpest increases.  The {Weekly Weather
    and Crop Bulletin} summarized the rainfall situation as follows:

       Rainfall during the week was again limited mostly to sections
       east of the Rockies.  Heavy 24-hour amounts occurred the
       forepart of the week in Northeastern Texas and coastal areas of
       Gulf States and the latter part of the period in most Atlantic
       States and the lower Lake region.

       And the summary ended:  "Rain was light over the Central States and
    little or none occurred in the far west."
       The {Weather Bulletin} also made it clear why the effects of a
    single small bomb had been so serious.  Referring to the rainfall, it
    added:  "Haying continued in nearly all states with generally good to
    excellent yields."
       Thus, the fallout from Trinity, which was twenty to thirty times
    greater than the fallout from later similar-sized tests because the
    fireball touched the ground and created enormous amounts of
    radioactive soil and vaporized rock, was deposited on the fresh
    vegetables and hay being harvested that week.  And so the intensely
    radioactive short-lived isotopes, as well as the long-lived strontium
    90, quickly found their way into the milk and food and from there into
    the unborn children in their mothers' wombs.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      11


                          The Battle for Publication




    EARLY IN JANUARY of 1969, the article on fetal and infant mortality
    was returned by the editor of {Science}.  This was the paper that had
    been discredited by Abelson in his phone conversation with the
    reporter Stuart Brown, before the paper had arrived in the offices of
    {Science}.  Copies of three reviews were enclosed.  Two were clearly
    written by individuals in the field of public health and statistics;
    these merely contained suggestions for certain changes that might make
    the case more complete.  The third reviewer, however, was totally
    negative.  This individual went into a detailed analysis of fallout
    and dose levels in the U.S., making eight references to internal AEC
    reports.  The majority of these reports had been prepared by the staff
    of the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York, directed by
    John Harley, the man responsible for the classified fallout
    measurement at Troy.
       The argument used to discredit the paper in this review (and also
    in an article published by Harley in the {Quarterly Bulletin} of the
    AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory later that year) was this:
    According to the detailed measurements made by the AEC's laboratory,
    the highest levels of strontium 90 had actually been in Utah, Montana,
    Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, as well as in very small portions
    of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  On the other hand, the lowest
    levels were measured in the southern U.S., from southern California to
    Florida.  This was just the opposite of what I had said in my paper.
    Harley therefore argued that since infant mortality had risen most in
    the southern United States to the east of Nevada and New Mexico, and
    least in the low-rainfall mountain states of the Southwest, it clearly
    could not be the fallout that was responsible.
       This was indeed a devastating argument, supported by a vast set of
    detailed measurements.  Yet these measurements cited by Harley were in
    total disagreement with the measurements reported by the Public Health
    Service, which I had used in my paper.  According to the Public Health
    Service, year after year the "wet" southern and eastern parts of the
    U.S. showed levels of strontium in the milk two, three, or even four
    times as high as in the dry western mountain states.  The mystery was
    resolved a few months later when Dr. E. A. Martel, a former U.S. Air
    Force fallout specialist, told me the story of the gummed films.
       The technique that had been used by Harley's lab to measure the
    fallout involved the use of a sheet of plastic about a foot square,
    coated on one side with a sticky substance very much like that used on
    flypaper.  These plastic squares were mounted on a stand with the
    gummed side facing upward so as to catch the fallout particles as they
    descended.  Every few days the films were collected, and shipped to
    the laboratory, where the radioactivity was measured.
       In a detailed study later carried out by scientists at the Battelle
    Memorial Institute in Ohio, it was discovered that in the dry states
    of the west, the winds constantly picked up the radioactive dust again
    and again, so that the exposed gummed films, acting just like the
    flypaper in a room full of flies, ended up collecting much more
    radioactivity than was typical for the soil of the area.  On the other
    hand, in the high-rainfall areas east of the Mississippi, the rains
    soaked the fallout deep into the soil and kept the dust levels low.
    Thus, by the early 1960s, it was widely realized that the so-called
    "gummed film" measurements of fallout had given levels much too high
    for the dry mountain states, and too low for the East and South.  In
    fact, in the 1962 United Nations Report on Atomic Radiation, of which
    John Harley was one of the authors, there was a note from Harley on
    page 225 indicating that the "gummed film" procedure "may lead to an
    overestimate of the tropospheric fallout," the troposphere being the
    lower part of the atmosphere containing the clouds of rain and
    radioactive dust.
       Yet seven years later Harley used the "gummed film" measurements in
    his attempt to discredit my correlation of nuclear testing with the
    rises in infant mortality, writing that "fallout before 1954 was
    exactly the opposite of what was stated by Dr. Sternglass."
       A few days after the paper on infant mortality had been returned by
    {Science}, the paper on the leukemia rise in the Troy area was also
    returned with a note of rejection.  It was the same story again.  Two
    of the three enclosed reviews were clearly by public-health physicians
    and statisticians and were quite favorable.  One of these reviewers,
    in fact, stated that "the comparability between past fallout and past
    irradiated cases is `impressive,'" while the other reviewer began with
    the statement:  "The conclusion of this paper, if correct, is clearly
    a most important one."  The third reviewer, however, was completely
    negative, and, exactly as in the case of the paper on infant
    mortality, there could be no doubt to which organization this third
    reviewer belonged.  Almost word for word and point for point, the
    third review resembled a critique that had been sent to me a few
    months earlier by John Conway, Chief Counsel for the Joint Committee
    of Atomic Energy.  And this critique had been sent to him by the AEC's
    Division of Biology and Medicine.
       Perhaps the most remarkable point made by the third reviewer, in
    view of my experience with the Health Department of the State of New
    York, was the following:  After arguing that the data on Albany-Troy
    were "incomplete," the reviewer asserted that "Sternglass could obtain
    the missing data."
       And then, quite unexpectedly, less than a week after the two papers
    had been returned by {Science}, the following letter arrived:

                   {Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}
                   A Journal of Science and Public Affairs
                   Eugene Rabinowitch, Editor

       Dear Dr. Sternglass:

       The drawings which we have for some of the figures in your
       article on Infant and Fetal Mortality Increase in the U.S. are
       not dark enough to be printed.  Could you send us the original
       drawings--or very clear, dark copies--for figures 1 and 3.

       Thank you for your assistance.
                                             Sincerely yours,

                                             Merry Selk
                                             Editorial Assistant

    I gradually realized that the {Bulletin} must have decided to publish
    the report I had sent to Dr. Rabinowitch merely for his information.
       As I later learned from the managing editor, Richard S. Lewis, in
    the face of strong reviewers' opinions both pro and con, it had been
    decided that the grave issues raised by my findings should be
    publicized and discussed as widely as possible, both by the scientific
    community and the general public.  This was indeed good news.  For
    although {Science} had a far wider circulation, the {Bulletin} reached
    an important group of physical and political scientists in university
    and government circles around the world.  Furthermore, like {Science},
    it was carefully read behind the Iron Curtain, hundreds of copies of
    each issue being sent to the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany,
    Czechoslovakia, and Rumania.
       Subsequently, I presented all the new evidence before a meeting of
    the National Council of the Federation of American Scientists, and the
    Council voted to set up a special committee to look into the evidence
    in detail.  Dr. John T. Edsall, a noted biologist at Harvard
    University, agreed to head up the study committee, and after many
    months of investigations during which he consulted a number of
    specialists, he indicated in a letter that he would personally be
    willing to urge the editor of {Science} to reconsider his decision not
    to publish my findings.
       Meanwhile, at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance, I sent
    copies of my data to Dr. Luis Alvarez, then president of the Physical
    Society, who was now heading a physics research group in Berkeley,
    California.  I included the maps showing increases in infant mortality
    downwind from the Trinity test site in New Mexico, for it had been
    Alvarez who watched the mushroom cloud from the first atomic explosion
    drift off across the United States.  Thus, he was one of the few
    individuals in the world who had firsthand knowledge of the way the
    cloud had broken up and the directions in which it had drifted.
       In the first paragraph of the reply I soon received from him, he
    stated that he had found the evidence "very impressive, particularly
    the map of the United States with the percent excess in mortality
    showing an effect only downwind of the Trinity site."  He added that
    "in view of the enormous statistical significance of the results you
    plot on your map of the United States it is difficult to question your
    findings."
       My article appeared in the April 1969 issue of the {Bulletin}.
    Interestingly, the managing editor, Richard Lewis, later told me that
    pressure had come both before and after publication in the form of
    long-distance calls from Washington from individuals who claimed to be
    long-term government friends of the journal.  They said it was a grave
    mistake for the {Bulletin} to publish my article.  When Lewis asked
    their names, they refused to identify themselves.
       The April issue also carried an article by Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, a
    theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
    Princeton, entitled "A Case for Missile Defense."   It was clear that
    the basic premise of Dyson's argument in favor of an antiballistic
    missile (ABM) system would not be valid if my conclusions on the
    vulnerability of the developing infant to radiation were correct.  His
    basic assumption was that a defensive system, once installed,
    regardless of how really effective it might be, would force an
    attacker to concentrate many of his missiles on a few defended cities,
    thereby reducing the number of cities that could be attacked with a
    given number of missiles and saving those cities that could not be
    attacked.  But in the process, the "saved" cities would be inundated
    with intensive fallout.
       I wrote a short note in rebuttal to Dyson's article, hoping that it
    would be published in the {Bulletin}.  A few weeks later, a letter
    arrived from the {Bulletin} containing galley proofs of my letter and
    a reply by Dyson that began as follows:

       I welcome this chance to call attention to Ernest Sternglass'
       article "Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests" in the April
       {Bulletin}.  I urge everyone to read it.  Compared with the
       issues Sternglass has raised, my arguments about missile defense
       are quite insignificant.
          Sternglass displays evidence that the effect of fallout in
       killing babies is about a hundred times greater than has been
       generally supposed.  The evidence is not sufficient to prove
       Sternglass is right.  The essential point is that Sternglass may
       be right.  The margin of uncertainty in the effects of worldwide
       fallout is so large that we have no justification for dismissing
       Sternglass' numbers as fantastic.
          If Sternglass' numbers are right, as I believe they well may
       be, then he has a good argument against missile defense. . . .

       Thus it appeared that once the evidence on the dangers of worldwide
    fallout was allowed to reach the scientific community at large,
    responsible scientists would be willing to reconsider their past
    judgments.






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                                      12


                           Counterattack at Hanford




    IN MAY 1969, for the first time in over fifteen years, as a result of
    growing concern among radiobiologists, there was to be a symposium
    dedicated to the effects of radiation on the developing mammal,
    including the human infant, both prior to and immediately after birth.
       Not since the detonation of the first hydrogen bombs in 1953 had
    such a conference been sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission.  In
    the ensuing years, a vast amount of data had been accumulated on the
    biological effects of radiation given to animals at doses comparable
    to those that would be expected in a nuclear war.  But even by 1969,
    almost nothing had been published on the more subtle effects of lower
    radiation doses, comparable to those from fallout, given over long
    periods of time.  And there still had been no publication of any
    largescale statistical studies of populations exposed to fallout.
       It was true that the AEC had initiated a large-scale statistical
    study of some 20,000 persons exposed to long-term, low-level radiation
    in AEC laboratories.  But the study population included only adults in
    their period of least sensitivity to radiation, receiving the best
    medical care available, and working under carefully controlled and
    monitored conditions designed to minimize any chance of absorbing
    isotopes into their bodies.  Since the control population consisted of
    individuals in the same families, communities, and installations who
    were not exposed to the radiation in the plant but who consumed the
    same fallout-contaminated food and inhaled the same fallout particles
    as the exposed test population, no effects from the fallout in the
    environment could in principle be detected by this study.  More
    important, the study population did not include the children of the
    radiation laboratory workers.  There was no search for unusual rises
    in stillbirths, infant deaths, congenital malformations, or cancer
    deaths among these children.  When I inquired as to why this type of
    information was not sought, I was told that it was left out on the
    grounds that such questions might unduly alarm AEC employees.
       There was clearly no need for the AEC to restrict its studies to so
    limited a population.  In 1966 large statistical studies had been
    published regarding the very small amount of naturally occurring
    radium in drinking water in the states of Iowa and Illinois.  In these
    studies a definite increase in bone cancer had been observed for the
    areas with high radium levels, clearly suggesting that the effects of
    very low levels of longterm radiation on large populations could in
    fact be detected, and, furthermore, that there was no evidence for a
    safe threshold even at the doses received from natural background
    radiation.
       A letter from the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Jesse
    L. Steinfeld, to Representative William S. Moorhead of Pittsburgh made
    it clear that no large-scale epidemiological studies of possible low-
    level fallout effects were ever carried out or published by either the
    AEC or the U.S. Public Health Service, despite the fact that such
    studies had been specifically requested by congressmen Holifield and
    Price in the course of the 1963 congressional hearings and then
    promised by the Surgeon General then in office, Luther L. Terry.  The
    exact words used by the present Surgeon General, Steinfeld, were:

       . . . studies to determine the feasibility of a national program to
       analyze morbidity and mortality data of thyroid cancer, leukemia, 
       and congenital malformations in relation to radiation exposure led 
       to the decision that a national program was not indicated.

       The letter added that "the feasibility studies were not published,"
    and ended with the following statement:

       Some effects on human populations from levels of radiation of
       the magnitude encountered during nuclear warfare or from direct
       high-level radiation therapy have been well established.
       Effects from low-level radiation have not been as clearly
       delineated and further research into these problems is needed.
       The Service welcomes the opportunity to work with those who
       desire to construct and execute scientifically based plans for
       studies of human effects from low-level radiation exposure.

       Thus, in all the years since 1963 no large-scale study of the
    effects of low-level radiation from *fallout* had evidently been
    undertaken.
       The Surgeon General's letter did say that studies of fallout-
    exposed schoolchildren in Utah were being conducted by Dr. G. D.
    Carlyle Thompson of the Utah State Department of Health and that Dr.
    Thompson had published some preliminary data on thyroid cancers among
    these children in the October 1967 {American Journal of Public
    Health}.  "Progress reports to date," wrote Surgeon General Steinfeld,
    "show no unusual increased incidence of leukemia and no cases of
    thyroid cancer among children who reside in the selected `exposed'
    area of Utah-Nevada."
       Examination of Thompson's article, however, showed that, although
    Steinfeld's statement as phrased was literally true, it was misleading
    in its implication.  For although Thompson's paper indeed indicated no
    increase in thyroid cancers in these children relative to their
    counterparts in New York State when both sexes were combined, there
    was in fact a significant increase among girls zero to 19 years of
    age.  Among this group there was a total of ten cases for 1958-62, as
    compared to four cases expected.  For young women aged 20 to 29 years
    old, the number was twenty as compared to nine expected.  Still more
    significant, the rate of thyroid cancers per 100,000 young women under
    age 30 in Utah had increased almost 400 percent--from 0.6 in 1948-52,
    before the Nevada tests, to 2.3 in 1958-62.
       Since no figures on leukemia deaths in Utah were given in
    Thompson's article, it was necessary to consult the U.S. Vital
    Statistics, and what they showed was quite unbelievable.  For the age
    group 5 to 14 years, there were large percentage rises in leukemia
    deaths exactly three to five years after each of the major test series
    that deposited fallout in the Utah area.  Between 1949 and 1967, the
    annual number had increased four-fold in successive peaks from 1.5 to
    6.2 per 100,000 children.  But since leukemia rates for children 5 to
    14 years in New York State and elsewhere also went up when fallout
    became widespread, although not as much as in Utah, a statistician
    could perhaps say that there was "no unusual increase of leukemia" in
    Utah.
       This, then, was the situation in May 1969 on the eve of the Hanford
    conference.  According to the preliminary program of the symposium,
    Dr. Alice Stewart would be present.  The conference was to take place
    at Hanford, Washington, the site where the plutonium for the Trinity
    bomb had been produced in 1944.  A few days before I was scheduled to
    leave for Hanford, I watched the computer print out map after map of
    rising infant mortality stretching eastward from the Hanford reactors
    and from the Trinity site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
       At about this time, a completely unexpected letter arrived by
    special delivery from the New York State Health Department's Bureau of
    Cancer Control:

                                             April 30, 1969

       Dear Dr. Sternglass:

       Doctor James Yamazaki of the University of California School of
       Medicine has written to me about your approaching presentation
       at the Ninth Annual Hanford Biology Symposium.  In his letter,
       Doctor Yamazaki requested information about environmental
       factors in the Albany-Schenectady-Rensselaer country areas in
       the early 1950s.  As you can see from my response, a copy of
       which is enclosed, this Bureau has reviewed some of the data
       upon which your June 1968 presentation in Denver was based.  The
       results of this preliminary analysis are noted in the letter to
       Doctor Yamazaki.  It is my opinion these data are too inaccurate
       for the type of analysis you have done.  We are planning to
       restudy this subject and would be happy to have you take part.

       I hope this reaches you before the May 5th conference.

                                  Sincerely yours,
                                  Peter Greenwald, M.D.
                                  Director
                                  Bureau of Cancer Control

       The enclosed letter which Greenwald had written to Yamazaki
    indicated that J. H. Lade of the New York State Health Department had
    apparently made some errors in his data on leukemia in Albany-Troy,
    published years before in {Science} in the attempt to prove that there
    had been no effect from the fallout of April 1953.  As Greenwald put
    it, "While it is unfortunate that this Health Department may have
    erred in not clearly describing the possible inaccuracies in this
    table it is clear that they should now be pointed out."  Upon
    examining Greenwald's revised table, I discovered a remarkable
    coincidence:  These newly found inaccuracies concerned only the cases
    born in 1953, the year the fallout arrived.  Greenwald's new figures
    showed a greatly reduced number of leukemia cases in that year, thus
    making it now possible to argue that there had been no significant
    effect from the fallout.
       At the end of Greenwald's letter was the notation:

       cc:  Dr. Sternglass
            Dr. Sagan

    And on the preliminary program of the Hanford meeting, listed below my
    name, was:

       9:40 P.M. INVITED DISCUSSANT
                 L. A. Sagan
                 Palo Alto Medical Clinic

       This was Dr. Leonard Sagan, who had long been working for the AEC's
    Division of Biology and Medicine.  He was apparently scheduled to be
    discussant, or critic, for my paper at Hanford.  Why was he listed as
    being affiliated only with the Palo Alto Medical Clinic?
    Interestingly, my paper was the only one in that session for which a
    discussant had been listed in the final program.  The co-chairman of
    the session was Dr. J. N. Yamazaki of the University of California,
    the same individual who had just requested information on the Troy
    rainout from the New York State Health Department.  Dr. Yamazaki had
    published a number of papers while working for the Atomic Bomb
    Casualty Commission that argued for the absence of significant
    leukemia rises among offspring born to the survivors of Hiroshima.
       Upon arriving at Hanford, I was interested to discover the summary
    of a paper written by Dr. Y. I. Moskalev and his colleagues at the
    Institute for Biophysics in Moscow.  This group of Russian scientists
    had studied the effects of low-level radiation--of the type produced
    by fallout--from strontium 90 and other isotopes when given to various
    animals before and during pregnancy.  Their observations on the
    offspring of all types of animals, ranging in size from rats, rabbits,
    and dogs to sheep and cows, appeared to show effects similar to those
    I had postulated for human infants.  There was no spectacular increase
    in gross malformations at low levels of strontium 90.  Instead there
    was a small reduction in weight at birth, a decline in fertility, and
    an increase in the number of fetal deaths.  And the earlier the
    radioactivity was fed to the pregnant animals, the more pronounced
    were the effects, just exactly as the studies of diagnostic X-rays
    given during pregnancy had indicated in the case of humans.
       Unexpected difficulties, however, developed, and the Russian
    scientists were unable to attend.  This was a great disappointment,
    for the studies of Dr. Moskalev and his group were the first published
    work I was aware of that appeared to offer the kind of crucial
    laboratory confirmation of the statistical evidence for the damaging
    effects of fallout on the newborn.
       Early in the conference, however, other evidence was presented, in
    session after session, that internal radiation from isotopes of the
    type that occurred in fallout was particularly hazardous to the ova
    and the early embryo and fetus.  These were levels much lower than
    those that led to lethal effects in mature animals.
       First on the program on the evening my paper was scheduled was a
    paper by Dr. M. L. Griem of the University of Chicago School of
    Medicine.  Dr. Griem indicated that in his careful study of children
    X-rayed while in the womb there was no evidence for a difference in
    the number of leukemia cases between the irradiated children and the
    two control groups who had not received any radiation.  But as soon as
    Dr. Griem had begun his talk, it became apparent that the number of
    children X-rayed was only 1008, a group in which one would normally
    not expect more than one case of leukemia in ten years of life.  Thus,
    even a doubling would at most result in one extra leukemia case,
    clearly too small an effect to be readily observed with any
    statistical certainty.  As Dr. Alice Stewart herself pointed out in
    the ensuing discussion, "the reality of juvenile leukemia is such that
    no one could hope to do a followup like this and detect an increase of
    50 percent of the normal incidence without being prepared to follow
    out 900,000 children for ten years, and no one has done that."  She
    herself had to interview the families of over 7000 children who had
    died of cancer out of a total of nearly nineteen million children born
    in order to establish a clear causal connection.
       Interestingly, however, Dr. Griem's study actually lent support to
    the hypothesis of other effects from low-dose radiation, even in so
    small a study population as 1008 children.  His data showed that,
    although there was no detectable increase in leukemia, there was a
    significant increase in benign tumors and certain types of congenital
    birth defects, especially severely disfiguring birthmarks.
    Furthermore, Griem's study revealed that stillbirths had nearly
    doubled--from eight and nine cases in the two control groups to
    sixteen among those who had received X-rays in the womb.  And
    according to Griem, the X-rays were given mainly in the less sensitive
    second and third trimesters of pregnancy, with doses of only 1 to 3
    rads to the fetuses.  But Dr. Stewart had found the sensitivity to be
    some ten times greater in the first three months of pregnancy.  Thus,
    Griem's study indicated that if the X-rays had instead been given in
    the earliest developmental phase, a dose only about one-tenth as
    large, or a mere 100 to 300 millirads, would have produced a doubling
    of stillbirths and genetic defects.  These were, in fact, the general
    doses that had been received by large numbers of unborn children from
    fallout.  So Griem's study actually provided, for the first time,
    direct observational evidence in humans for my statistical findings on
    fetal mortality.
       Soon it was Dr. Stewart's turn.  As her opening paragraph made
    clear, it was the opposition to her findings that drove her to find
    more and more convincing evidence:

       More than ten years ago, a retrospective approach to the problem
       of cancer etiology led to the conclusion that about one in
       twenty of the 600 cancer deaths that were taking yearly tolls of
       the seven million children living in Britain were being caused
       by obstetric X-ray examinations.  So far as the investigators
       themselves were concerned, the matter would probably have rested
       there had it not been for the general skepticism that greeted
       this suggestion.
          However, so many clinicians and experimentalists refused to
       accept the necessarily epidemiological evidence that it was
       finally decided to remove all grounds for doubt by isolating
       groups of mainly radiogenic cases (i.e. X-rayed cases) and
       wholly non-radiogenic cases (i.e. non X-rayed cases) and
       observing the ages of the two groups of children when symptoms
       developed.

       She then went on to present new evidence that leukemia cases among
    children X-rayed while in the womb showed a clearly recognizable,
    narrow age range of between three and five years after birth, evidence
    that supported the hypothesis that the excess cases in Albany-Troy
    among the children irradiated in the womb were caused by radiation,
    since they too showed the same abnormal pattern of age at death.
       Dr. Stewart also observed that all types of cellular defects
    produced by radiation "were felt with equal force by all systems and
    organs" in the fetal stage, a point crucial in explaining how
    radiation could cause subtle types of damage that would lead to such
    biochemical defects as the inability to resist infections early in
    infancy or childhood.  And in her conclusion, she pointed out that her
    evidence clearly showed that the effects that prove fatal before the
    age of 10 years are mainly initiated before birth, and often in the
    most sensitive period of early development.  Thus Dr. Stewart's paper
    had greatly strengthened my statistical findings on the effect of
    fallout radiation.
       I then presented my evidence, concluding with the estimate that
    some 400,000 infants of less than one year of age probably had died as
    the result of nuclear fallout between 1950 and 1965.  The chairman
    then announced that there would be no discussion until Dr. Sagan of
    the Palo Alto Medical Clinic had commented on the paper.  Dr. Sagan
    took the microphone.
       He began by showing the slides of the material collected for him by
    the co-chairman of the session, Dr. Yamazaki, from the New York State
    Health Department.  Sagan made the point that the data were too
    unreliable for the type of study I had done.  He next cited an
    estimated figure for the expected number of leukemia cases in a
    population exposed to a radiation dose of 1 rad, namely one case per
    year among each million persons.  Therefore, he concluded, the doses
    in the Troy area, with its 130,000 children, were some 1000 times too
    small to produce even a single extra leukemia case.  Sagan's estimated
    figure, however, was the one for the mature adult, who is least
    sensitive of all to radiation.  It was evident from Dr. Stewart's and
    Dr. MacMahon's work, as well as from the paper just delivered by
    Griem, that the fetus and especially the early embryo were many
    hundreds of times as sensitive as the adult.  Furthermore, the total
    dose from internal radiation in Troy was at least five times the
    external dose measured by the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory--
    which Sagan had used in his argument.
       He next cited Harley's invalidated "gummed film" fallout
    measurements to discredit any association of fallout with the infant
    mortality rises in the wet areas of the South and East.  He did this
    despite the fact that the Public Health Service's data for strontium
    in the milk that I had just presented correlated perfectly with the
    changes in infant mortality in every state for which the Service had
    published data.
       The discussion was then opened to the floor, and a long and often
    heated debate began.  Some AEC scientists had slides that showed that
    miniature swine fed fairly large doses of strontium did not seem to
    show detectable reductions in weight and litter size.  This was in
    apparent contradiction to the findings of Moskalev, who was
    unfortunately not present to defend his work.  But then Dr. T. K.
    Ellis of the University of Utah reported that in beagle dogs given
    small amounts of strontium 90, surprisingly strong effects on male
    hormone production had been found, as well as changes in reproductive
    cells.  Dr. Harold Rosenthal, who had made measurements on baby teeth
    collected from all over the United States, indicated that for Texas,
    St. Louis, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, and California he had found a
    close correlation between levels of strontium in the teeth and the
    levels reported for the milk.  This showed that the Public Health
    Service's milk measurements that I used in my work were indeed a good
    indication of the amount of exposure received by infants in various
    areas.
       The evidence supporting unexpectedly severe effects on the early
    embryo and fetus from internal radiation sources continued to
    accumulate until the close of the conference.  And afterward, when I
    was able to examine the original manuscript submitted by Dr. Moskalev,
    I found that his studies did in fact confirm the most crucial points
    at issue in the whole fallout controversy.  His group had found that
    when various of the isotopes contained in fallout were fed to female
    animals during pregnancy, large fractions were transferred through the
    placenta to the developing fetus.  For example, up to 38 percent was
    transferred in the case of strontium given to rats and up to 66
    percent in the case of cesium given to a litter of dogs.  Furthermore,
    the amounts reaching the developing fetus were many times greater for
    continuous, slow intake (such as occurs with fallout in food) than for
    a large single dose.
       More significant, Moskalev had found a direct relationship between
    the size of the doses of isotopes given just before pregnancy and the
    percent of the offspring that died--even for doses as small as 4-
    billionths of a curie per gram of body weight.  This dose was well
    within the range of doses from fallout delivered to the early human
    fetus by the accumulated strontium in the mothers' bones.  Thus, the
    argument that there might not be any effects at all from long-term,
    low-level radiation as opposed to doses given all at once, like
    diagnostic X-rays, had now been disproven by direct experiments.
       Moskalev's results also showed that, regardless of whether a given
    amount of isotopes was fed to a mouse weighing 20 grams or to a dog
    weighing many thousands of grams, approximately the same fraction of
    the total amount would always concentrate in the rapidly growing
    embryo.  This was one reason why, in all species, the fetus was so
    much more sensitive to fallout radiation than the adult.  A given tiny
    amount of an isotope in the body of an adult might be quite tolerable
    if it was evenly distributed throughout the 70,000 grams of an average
    woman's body weight.  But if even only one one-hundredth of this
    amount in the mother's body goes to the embryo during the first two to
    four weeks of development, when the embryo weighs less than a
    hundredth of a gram, then the concentration of radioactivity in the
    embryonic tissue would be the same as if the entire original amount
    had been given to a 1-gram embryo.  Instead of the relatively minor
    radiation dose produced by this original amount distributed in the
    70,000 grams of body weight typical of the adult, there would be a
    concentration 70,000 times greater in the early embryo.  And added to
    this was the fact that the embryo was already hundreds of times more
    likely to develop cancer or other forms of biochemical damage than the
    much more resistant, fully mature adult, as paper after paper
    presented at the conference showed.  Thus, the low external doses
    given by fallout to the body of an adult, doses on which the world's
    radiation protection agencies had based their assumption that fallout
    was harmless, were actually highly lethal doses for the early embryo.
       It was not our physics and technology that had been inadequate, but
    our knowledge of biological systems and their enormous ability to
    concentrate toxic agents.  Just as in the case of DDT, it was not the
    amount distributed throughout the environment that was so serious.  It
    was the selective concentration in the food chain and then in the
    newly forming organs of the rapidly developing young embryo.  Since
    all higher animals, including man, must pass through this critically
    sensitive phase, it was clear that, unless the problem was widely
    recognized and acted upon, man could extinguish himself and all other
    animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through
    the effect on the weakest link in the chain of life--the unborn and
    the very young.






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