SECRETFALLOUT
LOW-LEVEL RADIATIONFROM HIROSHIMATO THREE-MILE ISLANDERNEST STERNGLASSIntroduction by George Wald

-2-

"Professor Sternglass’s courageous voice has helped keep alive the debate on thehealth effects of low-level radiation, a debate that the military, the nuclear
industry, and even some biologists and physicians have tried to bury. His newbook, Secret Fallout: Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island,is an important new contribution to that debate and should be required reading for
all who are concerned with their own health, the health of their children, and of
their children’s children."Victor W. Sidel, M.D.
Professor and Chairperson
Department of Social Medicine
Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Dr. Ernest Sternglass is Professor of Radiology, specializing in radiologicalphysics, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, as well as Adjunct
Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana
University, Bloomington. He is past president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of theFederation of American Scientists, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, amember of the Radiological Society of North America and the American
Association of Physicists in Medicine. He has testified on low-level radiation
before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and many other groups both here
and abroad.

Dr. George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, is Professor of
Biology at Harvard.

-3-

Ernest J. Sternglass

SECRET
FALLOUT_______
LOW-LEVEL RADIATIONFROM HIROSHIMA TO
THREE MILE ISLAND

McGraw-Hill Book Company

New York St. Louis San Francisco
Auckland Bogota Guatemala Hamburg
Johannesburg Lisbon London Madrid Mexico
Montreal New Delhi Panama
Paris San Juan Sao Paulo Singapore Sydney Tokyo Toronto

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Copyright (c) 1972, 1981 by Ernest J. Sternglass
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
This book is an expanded version of Low-Level Radiation, first publishedin 1972 by Ballantine Books.
First McGraw-Hill Paperback edition, 1981
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 FGFG 8 6 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sternglass, Ernest J
Secret fallout.
Ed. of 1972 published under title: Low-level radiation.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Radioactive pollution—Toxicology. 2. Radiation—Toxicology
I. Title. II. Title: Low-level radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile
Island.
RA569.S69 1981
616.9’897
80-22390
ISBN O-07-061242-0
Book design by Roberta Rezk
The author acknowledges the following sources for permission:
The Washington Post for Bill Curry’s "A-Test Officials Feared Outcry
after Health Study."
The New York Times for James Reston’s "The Present Danger." (c) 1978
by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Harrowsmith Magazine for Tom Pawlick’s "The Silent Toll."
Beaver County Times for Joel Griffiths’ "State Panel Questions,Radiation, Safety."-5-The duty to endure
gives us the right to know.
—JEAN ROSTAND

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For Marilyn,
and our children
Daniel and Susan

-7-Contents

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction89
10

Thunderstorm in Troy
The Unheeded Warning
A Small Error in the Assumptions
A Ray of HopeThe Evidence Begins to Emerge
The Hidden Tragedy of Hiroshima
Death before Birth
The Crucial Test
Both Young and Old
The Clouds of Trinity
The Battle for Publication
Counterattack at Hanford
The Public’s Right to Know
The Price of Secrecy
Fallout at Shippingport
The Minds of the Children
Incident at Three Mile Island
Too Little Information Too Late
The Present Danger

13
16
22
26
33
36
40
43
51
55
59
63
70
74
85
106
117
127
139

Bibliography
Glossary
Index

159
171
172

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Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK could not have come into being without the understanding, concern and support of many
individuals whose help I was privileged to receive during the years in which the events recounted here
took place.
Although it is impossible to list all those to whom I have become deeply indebted, there are a few
individuals whose help went far beyond anything I shall ever be able to acknowledge adequately.
First among these is my wife Marilyn, who not only stood by my side throughout these years, butalso provided the constant counsel, encouragement and understanding needed in the long and arduous
task of writing this book.
And it was the great personal dedication of my editor, Joel Griffiths, that shaped the first edition of
the book, helping immeasurably in the difficult task of explaining for the non-scientist the complex
scientific and technical arguments underlying the events described. Thus, though the responsibility
for the accuracy of the facts and their interpretation must remain mine, whatever success this bookmay have in clarifying the nature of the scientific problem and the dangers arising from the misuse of
nuclear radiation will be to a large extent a reflection of his efforts.
Among the many others who contributed importantly to bringing this book into being, I must
express my indebtedness to Larry Bogart, long-time conservationist and founder of the National
League to Stop Environmental Pollution, who together with Leo Goodman of the United Automobile
Workers was responsible for first drawing my attention to the full hazard of an unchecked nuclear
technology.
In these researches, I was greatly aided by two of my colleagues, Dr. Donald Sashin and Ronald
Rocchio, who worked out the computer programs that made the analysis of the vast amount ofstatistical data possible, as well as by Michael Szulman, Diane Gaye, Mitchel Margolis and Debbie
Conant, without whose dedication in patiently collecting and analyzing the data the task would havebeen insuperable.
In the collection of the basic data, I was also generously helped by a number of young volunteer
student assistants who spent long hours in the library. My gratitude goes to all of them, and inparticular to David and Harold Colker, Randolph Strothman, and Gary Harris, whose important
contributions were particularly appreciated.
Last but not least, I must express my deep appreciation to my secretary, Judy Czachowski, whopatiently suffered through the agonies of gathering the data, preparing papers and repeated retyping of
the original manuscript, and without whose cheerful help and dedication the task would have been
vastly more difficult.
The present, greatly expanded edition owes its existence to my new editor, Joanne Dolinar, who
persuaded me that it was important to tell the story of the developments in the ten years since thebook’s original publication. For her persistence in this I am deeply grateful. I am also grateful to mysecretary, Nancy Siegel, who greatly eased the task of completing the expanded version of the bookwith her unwavering patience in tackling the never-ending pages with their illegible revisions.

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Preface
WHEN I UNDERTOOK to write the first edition of this book, originally published in 1972 under thetitle Low-Level Radiation, my primary concern was with the health effects of worldwide fallout from
nuclear weapons, particularly on the developing infant in the mother’s womb.
At that time I also discussed the first evidence for possible health effects of routine releases ofradioactivity from nuclear reactors in their ordinary day-to-day operation.
In the ten years that have intervened since then, my concerns about the safety of nuclear plants
have unfortunately been reinforced far more than I could have anticipated. Not only in the accident atThree Mile Island, whose likely effects on human health are discussed in the present book, but also in
the normal operations of many other nuclear plants, there is now growing evidence for rising infantmortality and damage to the newborn. In the decade that has passed, cancer rates increased most
sharply in areas closest to the nuclear reactors whose radioactive gas releases were found to rise moststrongly, following the earlier pattern of death rates among the newborn described in the originalbook.
The first fourteen chapters have been left nearly unchanged, while the rest of the present bookbrings the story up to the present time. It deals with the newly disclosed evidence that the possibilityof serious health damage from weapons testing was long known to our government. It also presents
the evidence for widespread damage to the learning abilities of the children born in areas of heavy
fallout during the period of massive nuclear weapons testing.
What emerges is that in order for major governments to be able to continue threatening the use of
their ever-growing stockpiles of weapons to fight and win nuclear wars rather than merely to deter
them, they must keep from their own people the severity of the biological damage already done totheir children by past nuclear testing and the releases from nuclear reactors near their homes.
It is to focus attention on the need to end this hidden threat to the future of human life on this globe
that this new edition has been prepared.
Ernest J. Sternglass
Pittsburgh
July 1980

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Introduction

I SHOULD LIKE TO START with a few words concerning the human condition, and go on with alittle of the special problems of the author in writing this book.
As a scientist I take a long view of history: 20 billion years of this universe; 6 billion years of thesolar system; 4.7 billion years of the planet Earth; 3 billion years of life on Earth; something like 3
million years of something like human life; 10,000 years of civilization; and then—something
happened.
In 1976 we celebrated the bicentennial of American independence. That independence was aninteresting event, but not nearly as important even to Americans as something else that was happening
at the same time. That was the Industrial Revolution. At first it promised humanity endless leisureand abundance. But a half-century ago it turned life-threatening on the grand scale; and now killingand destruction are the biggest business in the world. Military expenditures worldwide in 1979 wereover $460 billion, and rising rapidly. The simple reality is that a trivial two hundred years of theIndustrial Revolution have brought the human species to the brink of self-extinction.
Nuclear war is the most immediate threat. Just the "strategic" nuclear weapons—the big ones, inthe megaton range1—now stockpiled by the U.S. and the Soviet Union add up to the explosive
equivalent of about 16 million tons of TNT. There are just over four billion persons on the Earth, so
about 4 tons of TNT for every man, woman and child in the world. In addition each superpower has
stored tens of thousands of so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons, and the material to make hundreds ofthousands more.
So I had better say what a tactical nuclear weapon is. The bomb that in a moment leveled the cityof Hiroshima and by the end of that year—1945—had killed 140,000 persons rates in the present
arsenals as a pitifully small "tactical" weapon, a mere 12.5 kilotons. For comparison the Titan missile
whose fuel recently blew up in its silo in Arkansas had perhaps 100 times that explosive power.
But the explosive power—the blast and heat and radiation—are just the immediate release of
nuclear weapons. There is also the mushroom cloud of radioactive fallout that enters the atmosphereand stratosphere and eventually covers the entire globe. This goes on showering the Earth withpotentially lethal ionizing radiation, and every rain and snowfall brings down radioactive elements to
be inhaled, and by entering the food chain, ingested. And that goes on and on, from thecomparatively short-lived iodine-131 and strontium-89, dangerous for 6 months to a year, toplutonium-239, perhaps the most toxic substance known, whose half-life—the time it takes for its
radioactivity to half-decay—is 24,400 years. That remains dangerous, in human terms, forever.
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
1. Nuclear weapons are graded in terms of the equivalent explosive power in tons of TNT: kilotons, which are thousands of tons; or megatons, millions
of tons.

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An interesting dialogue taking place in the Atomic Scientists Bulletin raises the question: would
anyone survive? If the present stockpiles of nuclear weapons were used, would any human beings beleft on the Earth? That is at least questionable, and we would take a lot of the rest of life on thisplanet with us.
Directly out of the business of nuclear weapons came the business of nuclear power, heralded inour country with the slogan, Atoms for Peace. Even that innocent-sounding slogan is part of theendless pattern of public deception that surrounds the entire nuclear enterprise. Let me interject apresent example that poses the relationship nicely. In our country the entire hydrogen bomb
enterprise—both R and D and production—is not under the Department of Defense, but the
Department of Energy. It goes, not into the Defense budget, but the Energy budget. It is by far thelargest item in that budget, consuming well over one-third of it. The next largest item in it is nuclear
power.
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are two sides of the same coin. Nuclear power is lifethreatening in three independent ways, each in itself formidable.
First is the threat of accident in nuclear power plants. This book tells in some detail the story of
the accident at Three Mile Island. But one didn’t have to wait for that to know that nuclear power
plants—unlike what the public has been told—are thoroughly accident-prone. Those great realists,
the American insurance companies, refused from the beginning to insure nuclear power plants.
Hence we have the Price-Anderson Act, renewed by Congress every 10 years since 1957, which lays
the bulk of the liability in the event of nuclear accident on "the government"—i.e., on the taxpayers.
The second life-threatening property is that every nuclear reactor now in operation produces theartificial element plutonium-239 as by-product. This is not only, as already said, perhaps the most
toxic substance known. It is also the most convenient material from which to make fission bombs.
The "trigger quantity"—the smallest amount from which one can make a workable atom bomb—is 2
kilograms, 4 2/5 pounds. You could carry that, and safely, in a grocery bag. To make a Hiroshimasize bomb would take 6-7 kilograms, say about 14 pounds. You’d need a shopping bag for that.
Every nation that now possesses a nuclear reactor can, if it chooses, begin to make nuclear weapons.
It is expected that within the coming decade perhaps a dozen more nations than now possess themwill exercise this option. It should be added that plutonium provides the trigger at the core of allhydrogen bombs, and in some also the shell.
The third life-threatening aspect of both nuclear power and weapons involves the disposal of
nuclear wastes. No one knows what to do with them. The periodic meetings of international experts
have so far yielded no credible solution.
In my opinion the entire nuclear enterprise, both power and weapons, represents a wrong turn forhumanity, a development that cannot be tamed, that remains life-threatening not only in all its present
manifestations, but all future developments that have been contemplated.
Meanwhile the public is subjected to a continuous barrage of propaganda and misinformation
designed to reconcile it to an increasingly problematical and expensive support of both nuclear power
and weapons. The weapons, ostensibly for our security, are of course the principle source of ourinsecurity; and the nuclear power, that we are told we need for energy, supplies in 1980 only about
12% of our consumption of electricity, hence only about 2% of our total energy consumption, at a still
unreckonable cost in both health and money.
The author of such a book as this is under constant attack, not only from the expected sources inindustry and government, but from certain quarters in the science establishment. I have heard at times
from fellow scientists, some indeed on the same side as Professor Sternglass in opposing the spread ofionizing radiations, the somewhat querulous comment, "I don’t like his statistics." That would
impress me more if I had ever met anyone who liked anyone else’s statistics. That’s the way with

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statistics: they are highly individual. Sternglass has an exuberant way with them. At times in thisbook I had the feeling he was going a little far. But then I never could be sure, once I had read overcarefully what he was saying, that it was too far. The truth is that once one starts down this path, it’s
hard to know where or whether to stop. And on the fundamental issues, Sternglass is dealing with avery strong case. I think that it is by now beyond doubt that ionizing radiations at all levels involve
serious risks to health, causing increased chances of cancers, leukemia and genetic effects. There isno threshold: a little, however little, causes some increased risk, and more causes more risk. There is
no level that fails to be potentially harmful. From that point of view the existence of an official socalled "permissible level" is misleading. A "permissible level" of radiation only has meaning in costbenefit accounting; and that would mean more if the costs and benefits involved the same parties.
Unfortunately they usually do not: one group—workers, general public—commonly bear the costs;
and another, quite different group—ownership, management, government—shares the benefits.
Having to deal with a lot of official talk about "permissible levels" of radiation at the time of Three
Mile Island, I took to saying, "Every dose is an overdose." I believe that to be true as a statement, notnecessarily of overt effect, but of risk.
GEORGE WALD
Paris, October 28, 1980

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1
Thunderstorm in Troy

ON MONDAY MORNING, April 27, 1953, the small group of students in Professor Herbert Clark’sradiochemistry class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute walked into the metal shack that served as
their laboratory, located high on a hill overlooking the city of Troy in upper New York State. The
students set about making preparations for the day’s experiments, but then Professor Clark interrupted
to draw their attention to something unusual. All the Geiger counters were registering radiation at
many times the natural rate.
Since instruments nearest the outer walls were giving the highest readings, several students
immediately went outside with a portable Geiger counter. At once they found that wherever theywalked, the count rate on the ground was far above normal, in some places a thousand times as high.
In particular, beneath the spout of the gutters that carried the rainwater down off the roof of the shack,the needle gave a disconcertingly high reading. Evidently the previous night’s heavy rains hadbrought down large amounts of radioactivity.
Dr. Clark quickly guessed the source. Such high readings could only have come from heavy
deposits of fallout, the drifting clouds of radioactive debris created by the explosion of a nuclear
bomb in the atmosphere. To verify his guess, he phoned John Harley, a friend and former colleague
who now worked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Health and Safety Laboratory in New
York City. As one of Dr. Clark’s students recalled the story many years later, Harley’s first reaction
was that Clark must be kidding, and, expressing amused disbelief, he hung up. But a few minutes
later, New York called back. Dr. Clark summarized the details of the morning’s measurements: how
the count rate from the gamma radiation on the ground was anywhere from ten to five hundred times
normal, how the activity from beta rays had gone up even more, and how "hot spots" beneathrainspouts and in puddles on the pavement showed still higher readings, much higher than he had everobserved after other nuclear tests, when it had been hard to measure any additional radioactivity at all.
Thoroughly alarmed, the director of the New York Laboratory, Dr. Merrill Eisenbud, promised tocheck personally into the situation, to send some of his top people to make their own measurementson the spot, and to take any steps that might be called for to protect the public health.
For, as Dr. Clark had just learned, there had indeed been a recent atomic bomb test, conducted by
the AEC in Nevada two days earlier. The bomb, code-named Simon and equivalent in power to
43,000 tons of TNT, had been detonated in the atmosphere some 300 feet above the desert. The upper
portion of the mushroom cloud had reached an altitude of about 30,000 or 40,000 feet and then drifted
2300 miles across the United States in a northeasterly direction, passing high over Utah, Colorado,
Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it encountered a severe
thunderstorm in progress over most of upstate New York, southern Vermont, and parts of
Massachusetts.
The storm was an extraordinarily violent one, accompanied by extremely high winds, hail, and- 14 -

torrential rains that flooded streets and basements, undermined foundations, and caused heavy damage
to trees and houses. It was one of the heaviest flash storms Dr. Clark could remember. The sudden
cloudburst, he surmised, had probably brought much of the fallout down in concentrated form. Dr.
Clark quickly put his students to work in an effort to determine just how serious and widespread thedanger might be.
Students set out with portable radiation detectors and began measuring the radioactivity on the
pavement, on pieces of cloth, on asphalt roof shingles, on burdock leaves and other vegetation—any
place it would be likely to collect and adhere. Samples were also taken of water from reservoirs andhousehold taps. Within a matter of hours the students were reporting back from such nearby towns
and cities as Watervliet, Mechanicville, Saratoga Springs, Albany, and Schenectady that everywhere
the radiation levels were about the same as on the campus. Typical readings were twenty to ahundred times normal, with hot spots up to ten times higher than that.
Now knowing the radiation levels as well as the source and age of the fallout, Dr. Clark could
calculate that during the next ten weeks the total gamma radiation dose to the population from theradioactivity in the environment would be, on the average, roughly equivalent to that received from atypical diagnostic X-ray exposure. This was reassuring, since such a dose was not very different fromwhat most people in the world receive each year from the naturally occurring cosmic rays thatpenetrate the earth’s atmosphere. And it was well below the maximum permissible dose limits set bygovernment agencies.
However, there was also the high radioactivity in the rainwater, which was certain to contaminate
the reservoirs and thus the tap water. The samples of rainwater collected from a puddle on thecampus had shown a radioactivity level of 270,000 micromicrocuries per liter, thousands of times
higher than the maximum levels then permitted by AEC standards, which were set at 100
micromicrocuries per liter. Normal drinking water usually had an activity of about 1 micromicrocurie
per liter.
There was, accordingly, much apprehension among the students until the samples of actual
drinking water from the taps and reservoirs could be analyzed early the next day. When this wasdone, the first of the tap water samples, taken Monday night, showed an activity of 2630
micromicrocuries per liter—not as great as was feared, yet still well in excess of the limit. But by thatevening, the same tap gave a sample with a greatly decreased activity of 1210 per liter, while samples
from nearby Tomhannock Reservoir ranged from 580 to 960. The radioactive rain was evidently
becoming heavily diluted in the reservoir before reaching the taps in the households of Troy.
Thus, all concerned were greatly relieved that the total radiation doses received by the populace
would probably turn out to be relatively small. It would not be necessary to filter the drinking wateror decontaminate the streets and rooftops by means of elaborate and costly scrubbing procedures, amonumental task in view of the tenacity with which the radioactivity had been found to cling to roughsurfaces such as pavement, asphalt shingles, and burdock leaves, and especially to porous materials
like paper and cloth. Dr. Clark and his students found that even treatment with hot, concentratedhydrochloric acid—an extreme method—was only partially effective in removing the radioactivity
from the objects to which it clung. The class also conducted tests to determine the strength of thisradioactivity. Surprisingly, they found that it was comparable to that reported the previous year by
the AEC’s New York Laboratory for fallout in desert areas only 200 to 500 miles from the point of
detonation at the Nevada test site itself.
But the possible health effects of any internal doses that might result from eating, drinking, or
breathing the radioactivity were considered negligible by the New York State Health Department andthe AEC. And so it was decided that nothing further need be done. An editorial in the local
newspaper expressed some concern, but soon the whole incident was forgotten.

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Meanwhile, however, Dr. Clark, under contract to the AEC, continued to monitor the levels ofradioactivity in the reservoirs, while AEC physicists, using an extremely sensitive gamma-ray
detector mounted in an airplane, conducted extensive surveys of the entire region. Detailed reports on
the findings were written by the staff of the New York Lab, but, since they were classified "secret,"the public never learned of their contents. All that appeared was the following brief statement in the
14th Semi-Annual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission for the first half of 1953:
After one detonation, unusually heavy fallout was noted as far from Nevada as the TroyAlbany area in New York. Following a heavy rain in that area on the second day after thedetonation, the concentration of radioactivity was from 100 to 200 curies per square mile. It isestimated that this level of radioactivity would result in about 0.1 roentgen exposure for the
first 13 weeks following the fallout. The exposure has no significance in relation to health.
One fact the AEC did not announce, and the general public did not learn, since it was later
published by Dr. Clark in the obscure, highly specialized Journal of the American Water Works
Association, was that, as the AEC continued its nuclear testing in Nevada during the spring of 1953,
further rainouts repeatedly raised the radioactivity in the reservoirs serving Troy to levels comparable
to those measured by Dr. Clark and his students the morning after the "Simon" rainout in April.

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2
The Unheeded Warning

THE TROY INCIDENT was easily forgotten because, at the time, little was known about the effectsof low-level radiation—either from fallout or from other sources. The subject had hardly even beenthought about. Scientists generally assumed that such levels were harmless, since they produced no
immediately observable effects. During the next few years, however, tremendously improved
radiation measurement techniques coupled with detailed laboratory studies revealed many previously
unsuspected hazards from fallout. And with these discoveries, the forgotten incident in upstate New
York re-emerged and took on great significance.
By 1953, it was already known that many of the radioactive elements (called isotopes) created by
an atomic explosion, once they entered the atmosphere in the form of tiny fallout particles, would
contaminate food, water, and air and thus find their way into the human body. What was not widely
known, however, was the extent to which these isotopes became concentrated in various body organs.
Inside the body, they behaved just like their nonradioactive natural counterparts. The isotope
strontium, for instance, which is similar to calcium, settled in bones and teeth. Radioactive iodine
behaved like regular iodine, seeking out and concentrating in the thyroid gland, an organ which isvital in regulating the growth and functioning of the human body.
It was in the case of iodine that some of the most alarming discoveries were made. In the early
1950s researchers found that iodine became concentrated in the milk of cows that grazed on pasture
contaminated with fallout. When people drank the milk, the iodine began building up rapidly in their
thyroid glands. Since the thyroid gland is small in size, the concentration was very heavy.
Measurements revealed that in any given situation the radiation dose to the adult thyroid would be as
much as a hundred times the external dose from the fallout in the outside environment. But far more
important were the results of extensive studies conducted at the University of Michigan and publishedin 1960. These showed that the radiation dose to the thyroids of unborn children and infants was ten
to one hundred times higher than that to the adult because of the greater concentration in the smaller
thyroids. This discovery held serious implications for the health of the children of Troy. It meant thatthe doses to their thyroids might have been as much as a hundred to a thousand times higher thanthose estimated by Dr. Clark and the AEC scientists, who had only considered the overall dose fromthe fallout in the external environment.
However, by the time these discoveries became widely known, a voluntary halt in atmospherictesting had been agreed upon by the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain, and there wasconsiderable hope that incidents of heavy fallout would never occur again. Thus it seemed less urgent
to pursue investigations into the problem. But in 1961, during the Berlin crisis, Russia’s detonation of
a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb high over Siberia marked the resumption of large-scale atmospherictesting by the nuclear powers, and the levels of radioactivity in air and water once again rose sharply
throughout the world. In the weeks that followed, an enormous peak of radioactive iodine was

- 17 -

detected in milk throughout the northern hemisphere. As the testing continued, many scientists began
to feel it was imperative to find a conclusive answer to the question: Just exactly how harmful was
low-level radiation from fallout?
It was in this context that the well-known nuclear physicist Ralph Lapp wrote an article for Sciencemagazine in 1962 which first focused attention on the significance of the Albany-Troy incident.
Lapp’s article showed that radiation doses far larger than those permitted by federal safety guidelines
must have been received by the children of Troy and numerous other cities that had been subjected tosimilar "rainouts" in the early years of testing. The purpose of the article was to point out that theTroy incident provided an excellent opportunity to find out just what the effects of fallout were. The
surrounding area’s population of half a million persons was large enough to insure that any increase in
the normally low incidence of such radiation-caused diseases as thyroid cancer or childhood leukemia
would show up. (The normal incidence of leukemia among children under ten years old was about
two to three cases per year per 100,000 children. Thus, if any area with only a few thousand children
were studied, no cases at all might be found in some years, even if the radiation were strong enough todouble the normal expected number.) And the detailed radiation measurements taken by Dr. Clark’s
students and the AEC meant that relatively accurate estimates could be made of the doses involved.
The study that Lapp proposed had enormous potential ramifications. At the time, many people ingovernment, military, and scientific circles still believed that mankind could survive the levels of
fallout that would result from a nuclear war, levels thousands of times greater than those frompeacetime testing. The United States had embarked on an extensive civil-defense program based on
this belief. But if it were shown that peacetime fallout levels led to a significant increase in fatal
diseases, then by implication, nuclear war would probably mean the end of mankind, and thus the vast
nuclear war machinery developed by the United States and the Soviet Union would become useless.
In the second place, if it were shown that large numbers of children had already died from the effectsof fallout, then tremendous public revulsion would probably be generated against all activities that
released more radioactivity into the environment. These would include not just the testing of nuclear
weapons, but also the monumental program planned by many governments and industries throughout
the world for the peacetime uses of atomic energy. For nuclear power reactors, atomic gas-mining
explosions, and other forms of nuclear engineering all normally release low levels of radioactivity
and, in the event of an accident, they entail the risk of much worse. And, finally, those individuals
who had been in positions of responsibility would have a terrible guilt to bear for the damage alreadydone.
The appearance of Lapp’s article also served to highlight another extraordinary fact. It was thenseventeen years since the first atomic explosion at Hiroshima in 1945, yet no large-scale cancer
studies such as he proposed had ever been carried out, even though the AEC had long been inpossession of detailed fallout data for many areas of the U.S. A great deal of information existed on
the effects of high doses of radiation, such as those received by the survivors of the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there was no real evidence regarding low-level effects, either fromlaboratory animal studies or from direct observations of large human populations. The lack of animalstudies was somewhat understandable, since no such experiments could be carried out at theextremely low doses produced by fallout without requiring hundreds of thousands or even millions ofanimals and many years to detect the small increases of a rare disease such as leukemia. But in thecase of humans, such a large study population had already been created by the fallout from years of
atomic testing. Yet the AEC had ignored this opportunity to resolve such an important issue. Thus,
those who wished to minimize the danger of continued atomic testing could argue, in the absence ofdata to the contrary, that long-term, low-level exposure such as that from fallout had not been provento increase fatal diseases.

- 18 -

The absence of such studies was all the more striking because there were already strong indications
that such danger existed. It was toward the end of 1955 that Dr. Alice Stewart, head of the
Department of Preventive Medicine at Oxford University, first became aware of a sharp rise inleukemia among young children in England. A young statistician in her department, David Hewitt,had discovered that the number of children dying of this cancer of the blood had risen over 50 percent
in only a few years. In the United States an increase about twice as large had occurred. One aspect of
this rise was extremely puzzling: The leukemia seemed to strike mostly children over two to three
years of age—there was little or no increase for younger children. This had not been the situation
prior to World War II, when both groups had shown a parallel, much more gradual rise. The question
was: What new postwar development could be responsible for the increase in deaths among the older
children?
Dr. Stewart undertook a study to find out. With the assistance of health officers throughout
England and Wales, she obtained detailed interviews with the mothers of all of the 1694 children in
those countries who had died of cancer in the years 1953 to 1955, as well as with an equal number ofmothers of healthy children. By May 1957, the analysis of 1299 cases, half of which involved
leukemia and the rest mainly brain and kidney tumors, had been completed. The data showed thatbabies born of mothers who had a series of X-rays of the pelvic region during pregnancy were nearly
twice as likely to develop leukemia or another form of cancer, as those born of mothers who had notbeen X-rayed. As Dr. Stewart noted, the chance of finding such a two-to-one ratio purely as a resultof statistical accident was in this case less than one in ten million. Thus, in the paper she published inJune 1958, Dr. Stewart concluded that the dose from diagnostic X-rays could produce a clearly
detectable increase in childhood cancer when given during pregnancy.
This was an extremely low dose. It was roughly comparable to the dose that most people receivein only a few years from natural background radiation. (Mankind has always lived with a "natural
background" of radiation, produced by cosmic rays and various naturally occurring radioactive
substances. The annual dose from the radiation averages about 100 millirads.) But still moresignificant, this dose was comparable with what the pregnant mothers of Albany-Troy must havereceived from the fallout of the "Simon" test in 1953.
In this connection, there was another finding of Dr. Stewart’s study that was even more disturbing.
This concerned the timing of the X-rays. Children whose mothers were X-rayed during the first thirdof their pregnancy were found to be some ten times more likely to develop cancer than those whose
mothers were X-rayed toward the end of pregnancy. In other words, the earlier the worse. Thisfinding had much more serious implications for fallout than for medical X-rays. Almost 90 percent ofpelvic X-ray examinations occur shortly before delivery time, but since fallout comes down
indiscriminately on whole populations, it irradiates unborn children at all stages of development,
including the earliest. The fallout hazard was further compounded by the tendency of various
radioactive elements, such as iodine and strontium, to concentrate in vital body organs. This meantthat the doses to the thyroids and bone marrows of unborn children from fallout could be many times
higher than the doses received from diagnostic X-rays by the children in Dr. Stewart’s study, which
had already nearly doubled the cancer incidence.
But in order to establish a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the X-rays and the
additional cancer deaths, there had to be a direct relationship between the amount of radiation
received by the fetus and the chance that the child would develop cancer a few years later. And
indeed, when Dr. Stewart and David Hewitt examined the available records for the number of X-ray
films taken, they found that there were distinctly fewer cancer cases among the children whose
mothers had only one X-ray than among those who had four or more. The number of cases where thisinformation was available was too small to establish a conclusive connection between dose and- 19 -

cancer risk, but there was other evidence that supported this general trend. For example, whenever
the X-rays had been taken only of other parts of the body, such as the arms and legs, so that only asmall quantity of scattered radiation reached the unborn child in the womb, the increase in cancer risk
was only about one-fifth as great as in those cases where the abdominal region itself was X-rayed.
These latter observations were in direct contradiction to a belief that was essential to thecontinuation of all programs for nuclear testing and the peaceful uses of the atom—namely, the socalled "threshold" theory. This theory held that there was a certain low level of radiation exposure, a"threshold," below which no damage would be caused. If this threshold was about the same as theyearly dose from background radiation or from exposure to typical diagnostic X-rays, as various
supporters of nuclear programs maintained it was, then there would theoretically be no ill effects frompast or present weapons tests, from the radioactive releases of nuclear reactors, or even from theradiation persisting after a nuclear war, since this radiation would probably not exceed the threshold if
it were averaged out over a lifetime. But Dr. Stewart’s study implied that if there were any safe
threshold for unborn children and infants it would have to be less than the dose from a single X-ray
picture. And her finding that the risk of cancer seemed to be directly related to the size of the dosesuggested that there might not be any safe threshold at all, and that any increase in radiation exposure
might produce a corresponding increase in the risk. Even if the risk for a certain tiny amount ofradiation was extremely small, say, one chance in ten thousand, then if millions of people were
exposed to this radiation, hundreds would be likely to get cancer. Fallout had already exposed
millions of people to doses comparable to those received by the children in Dr. Stewart’s study, andthe proliferation of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes would make this exposure even more
extensive.
There was widespread refusal to accept the implications of Dr. Stewart’s work. Her findings wereregarded as doubtful for such reasons as their dependence on the memories of the mothers as to thenumber of X-ray exposures received. Other studies were cited that showed no effects from X-rays. It
was said that her study was inapplicable to fallout because it had been shown that a specified dose ofradiation given all at once—as is the case with a diagnostic X-ray—is more damaging than the same
total dose given gradually over a period of weeks, months, or years—as is the case with fallout.
This argument opened up another important area of disagreement about radiation dangers. Were
the cancer-causing effects of radiation cumulative? Or did body cells recover? There was noquestion that body cells did repair themselves in the case of such damage as radiation burns, which
healed with the passage of time. Supporters of the threshold theory hypothesized that this would also
hold true for cancer. This was another bulwark of the "threshold" theory, for, if such recovery did
take place, then there would indeed exist a level of radiation low enough so that the body’s repair
mechanisms could keep pace with the damage.
However, evidence was soon forthcoming that would refute the criticisms of Dr. Stewart’s study
and thereby cast further doubt on the validity of the threshold theory. After the publication of Dr.
Stewart’s results, Dr. Brian MacMahon of the School of Public Health at Harvard University
undertook another study of the relationship between diagnostic X-rays and childhood cancer. He
constructed this study so that there would be no question as to the number of X-rays given to themothers. Using the carefully maintained hospital records of 700,000 mothers who delivered theirbabies in a series of large hospitals in the northeastern United States between 1947 and 1954, hecompared the risk of cancer for the children of the 70,000 mothers who had received one or more Xrays with the risk for the children of the remaining 630,000 mothers who had received no X-rays
during pregnancy.
The results of his study, published in 1962, fully confirmed the findings of Dr. Stewart: There wasa clear and highly significant increase in the risk of cancer for the children who had been X-rayed- 20 -

before birth, and, most important, the risk did indeed increase with the number of X-rays taken. The
overall risk was somewhat smaller than had been found for the British children by Dr. Stewart, but
this could easily be explained by the fact that the dose to the mothers in MacMahon’s study from each
X-ray picture was substantially lower than for those in Dr. Stewart’s, due to improvements in X-ray
technology. As for the studies cited by critics which did not show any increase in cancer risk fromprenatal X-rays, it developed that these were all based on small study populations, and even then theindications were that if these results were carried out to larger numbers they would confirm Stewart
and MacMahon.
But there was still one major question that remained unanswered. To what degree were the effects
of diagnostic X-rays comparable with those of fallout?
There were already many indications that the effects might be similar. Among these was the factthat had prompted Dr. Stewart to undertake her study in the first place, namely, the evidence that inboth the United States and England cancer and leukemia among school-age children had increased
sharply beginning a few years after World War II. This was the period when nuclear fallout was first
introduced into the atmosphere. And now, Dr. Stewart’s and Dr. MacMahon’s studies had served topoint up the following significant aspects of this increase:
First, the effects of X-rays, although very real, were not strong enough to have caused all of thevery large general increase in childhood cancer, which ranged from 50 to 100 percent. Dr. Stewart
herself estimated that X-rays could only have accounted for perhaps 5 percent of this increase.
Second, this general increase had taken place only among children older than two or three—exactly the age group that had suffered the greatest effects from X-rays. This suggested that someother form of radiation might be causing the unexplained portion of the increase, since thecharacteristic age at death was the same.
Third, other possible factors such as the introduction of new drugs, pesticides, or food additives
had been ruled out because these factors had been found to be essentially the same for the healthy andafflicted children alike.
But the main reason why it seemed that fallout was at least as effective as X-rays in producing
childhood cancer was the growing evidence for a direct relationship between the number of X-ray
pictures taken and the risk of cancer. For if the risk increased with each additional picture, as thestudies of Stewart and MacMahon indicated it did, then this clearly implied that there was no
significant healing of the damage and thus that the cancer-causing effects of radiation were
cumulative. This would mean that the effects of a dose received over a period of time from fallout
would be similar to those from an equal dose received all at once from X-rays.
Such a direct connection between the amount of radiation absorbed and the likelihood of cancer
could be predicted on the basis of a theory developed by Dr. E. B. Lewis of the California Institute ofTechnology. According to Dr. Lewis, cancer could be triggered if one particle of radiation scored asingle bulletlike hit on a crucial DNA molecule in the chromosomes of a cell. The DNA contains thegenetic code that controls the functioning and reproduction of the cell. If it were damaged by aparticle of radiation, this might disrupt the governing mechanism and cause the cell to begin theunlimited growth which characterizes cancer.
The significance of this theory was twofold. First, it was already established that such damage to
the DNA was one of the ways that radiation produced hereditary or genetic damage in the female ova
and male sperm cells—the type of damage that results in malformations and other harmful mutations
in offspring. What Dr. Lewis stated, however, was that it was exactly the same type of damage, but tothe DNA of any body cell, that could produce cancer. This was extremely important because it had
already been decisively demonstrated that genetic damage was cumulative. In one experiment after
another, using fruit flies and large colonies of mice, it was found that it did not matter how slowly or- 21 -

quickly a given dose of radiation was administered—in every case the number of defective off-spring
was essentially the same. The resulting effect on offspring was determined only by the total
accumulated radiation dose received, regardless of the length of the time period over which it wasgiven. There were some indications of repair in the ova of female mice, but the effect was relatively
small at best. Thus there existed clear evidence that radiation effects of the type that produced
genetic damage were cumulative, especially in the male sperm cell. But if Dr. Lewis was right, andradiation caused cancer in body cells in exactly the same way as it caused genetic damage inreproductive cells, then this clearly implied that the cancer-causing effect of radiation was also
cumulative. And if this was so, then the greater the radiation dose, the greater the risk of cancer. Dr.
Lewis’s theory therefore supported the findings of Stewart and MacMahon, and simultaneously gave
weight to the theory that the cancer-causing effects of protracted radiation from fallout would be thesame as for X-rays given all at once.
All of this evidence combined pointed toward a single tragic conclusion: Man, especially during
the stage of early embryonic life, was hundreds or thousands of times more sensitive to radiation thananyone had ever suspected.

- 22 -

3
A Small Error in the Assumptions

MY OWN INVOLVEMENT in the subject of fallout hazards began in 1961. That was the year of the
Berlin crisis, when the Soviet Union ended the voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing and the U.S.
government called for a large-scale fallout shelter construction program. The intensified threat ofnuclear war caused much concern in the scientific community, and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, agroup called the Federation of American Scientists, of which I was a member, decided to participate
in a study of the chances for survival of a large industrial city like Pittsburgh in the event of a nuclear
war. Since I was professionally involved in research on new techniques for reducing the radiationdose from medical X-rays, and therefore was interested in the problem of low-level radiation effects,
it was suggested that I join the section investigating the health hazards from fallout.
Almost as soon as we had begun our work, a disturbing fact emerged. All the calculations madeby government agencies as to the radiation protection necessary after a full-scale nuclear war werebased on the assumption that the adult could tolerate the enormous dose of 200 rads spread over a few
days and as much as 1000 rads over a year. Apparently it had been decided by the government’s
scientific advisory groups that it was not necessary to take into account the long-range after-effects ofradiation, either on the survivors themselves or on their offspring. Yet, as I well knew from my own
research, the reason why so much effort was being spent to reduce the dose from medical X-rays wasthat the doses of only a few rads per year received by radiologists in the course of their work had beenfound to decrease their life spans significantly, while among their children there had been a definite
increase in congenital defects. Furthermore, if Dr. Stewart was correct, only 1 to 2 rads would double
the chances of a child developing cancer when the radiation was received in the last few months ofthe mother’s pregnancy, and only one-tenth of this amount might have the same effect when received
in the first few months. Exposed to the radiation levels that would be present in the aftermath of a
nuclear war, then, a great many children born in the years following could be expected to die ofleukemia, cancer, or congenital malformations before reaching maturity.
Additionally, these doses of hundreds of rads that the government agencies considered tolerable
were only estimates of the external doses from the fallout in the environment. The internal doses
from the fallout particles concentrated inside the body, which would be hundreds or thousands oftimes higher still, had not even been taken into account, although the knowledge necessary forcalculating these internal doses was widely available.
It thus appeared that the chances for survival after a nuclear war were being presented to the public
in a far more optimistic light than scientific evidence justified. And then, with the publication in 1962of Lapp’s article in Science, revealing the extremely high internal doses received by the children of
Albany-Troy from the 1953 rainout, it became evident that the same held true for the health effects ofpeacetime fallout. Since by 1962 the intensive nuclear testing was filling the rains all over the world
with radioactivity approaching the amounts that had descended on Troy, the number of children that- 23 -

could be expected to die as a result was very large.
I made an estimate as follows: According to figures presented at congressional hearings, thefallout from each 100 megatons1 of hydrogen bombs tested would give an overall dose of from 200 to
400 millirads to every man, woman, and child in Europe, North America, and Asia. This wasapproximately the total megatonnage of the bombs already exploded in the latest test series as of theend of 1962, and 200 to 400 millirads was roughly equivalent to the dose from a pelvic X-ray. Thus,
if there were indeed no difference in the effects of diagnostic X-rays and fallout, one could expect asmuch as a 20 percent increase in cancer rates for those children born within a year after the recent
tests. Since, at the time, about one child in a thousand normally died of cancer before reachingadolescence, and since four million children were born in the United States each year, then every year
some 4000 children normally developed cancer. Therefore, a 20 percent increase would mean close
to 800 additional deaths in the United States alone. For the rest of the world, the figure would beperhaps ten times larger, all as a result of only the most recent atmospheric tests.
And these figures did not even take into account the probability of much larger doses from local
rainouts, where the fallout was brought down in concentrated form. In the case of Troy, the type of
calculations made by Lapp indicated that an overall dose of anywhere from a few hundred to a few
thousand millirads must have been received by the unborn children in the area, equivalent to a whole
series of pelvic X-rays. Depending on whether they were in an early or late stage of development at
the time, their chances of developing cancer would have been increased 100 percent or more.
Thus it was clearly of the greatest importance to see whether the number of leukemia deaths
among the children of Troy had in fact begun to increase a few years after the fallout arrived. (Acharacteristic delay in the onset of the disease, when radiation was the cause, had been found by bothDr. Stewart and Dr. MacMahon and was also observed among the survivors of Hiroshima andNagasaki, who began developing this fatal form of cancer some three to five years after their
exposure.) Furthermore, it seemed imperative that the worldwide scientific community be madeaware of the implications of the data of Stewart and MacMahon, and of the urgent need for largescale statistical studies of populations exposed to fallout. Accordingly, by late fall 1962, I had
completed an article on the subject and submitted it to Science magazine. This seemed the mostappropriate place for publication, since it was the official journal of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS), the country’s largest scientific professional association, and assuch was read by a large, interdisciplinary audience of scientists throughout the world.
This was, however, an inauspicious time for the publication of an article with such negative
implications for nuclear warfare and peacetime testing. The Cuban missile crisis, which brought theworld to the brink of nuclear war, had just passed, greatly increasing pressure for further development
and testing of nuclear weapons. Therefore, in anticipation of possible publication difficulties, I
decided to submit copies of the manuscript to a few noted scientists in the hope of gaining added
support.
One copy went to Dr. Russell Morgan, chairman of the Department of Radiology at Johns Hopkins
University and head of the National Advisory Committee on Radiation of the U.S. Public HealthService. Dr. Morgan was one of the country’s most knowledgeable experts in the areas of X-ray
technology and low-dose radiation effects. In his reply, he stated that the article brought into focus
important implications of the work of Stewart and MacMahon that had not been fully recognized, andhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
1. One megaton is the equivalent in explosive energy to a million tons of TNT.

- 24 -

recommended that it should be published with only a few minor changes. Dr. Morgan also gave me
his permission to refer to his statement if the paper had to be resubmitted to Science after an initial
rejection.
Another copy went to Dr. Barry Commoner, professor of botany at the University of St. Louis andone of the founders of the Committee on Nuclear Information, a group that pioneered in the publicdissemination of information on the effects of nuclear testing. Dr. Commoner said in his reply: "Ibelieve that it [the article] represents a very important contribution to the subject. I hope that it will
be published in Science just as it stands. . . . Your conclusion regarding the need for large-scale
surveys of the incidence of leukemia and other forms of cancer is of great urgency."
The article, however, was returned by Science, accompanied by copies of two reviews and a letterof rejection from the editor, Philip Abelson. Abelson was a physical chemist who had an extensive
background in the nuclear field. For many years he had worked closely with Glenn Seaborg, later
chairman of the AEC and president of the AAAS, on the development of processes for the productionof uranium, and he was now a member of both the General Advisory Committee of the AEC and the
Project Plowshare advisory committee. (Project Plowshare was the name given to the AEC’s
program for the development of peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.) In his letter, Abelson statedthat he had reviewed the article himself and found that "there is not enough solid material to justify
publication." He further expressed the opinion that "there is really no evidence of the functional
relationship between the number of X-rays taken and cancer mortality." This meant that he did notconsider significant the indications in the work of Stewart and MacMahon that the risk of cancer
increased directly with the increase in X-ray dose, indications which were in sharp contradiction to
the threshold theory.
Upon examining the enclosed comments of the other two reviewers, who were nameless, as is thecustom, I found that one was completely negative, stating that the article presented "no new
observation" and ignored studies that showed no effects from diagnostic X-rays. The other reviewer,
however, recommended publication. Apparently, then, it had been Abelson’s opinion that weighted
the scales in favor of rejection.
A few days after the article was returned, I received an unexpected letter from Dr. James H. Lade,special assistant to the commissioner for radiological health of the New York State Health
Department. Since 1951 Dr. Lade had also been director of the department’s Bureau of Medical
Defense, a part of the state’s extensive Civil Defense Program, which had carried out an "exercise" atthe time of the Albany-Troy incident. As medical director, Lade had been one of those who
participated in the decision that no health protection measures were necessary after the incident andthat no ill effects were to be expected. His letter read as follows:
Dear Mr. Sternglass:
I have had an opportunity to review your interesting paper on "Ionizing Radiation in the
Pre-Natal Stage and the Development of Childhood Cancer," and noted your reference toRalph Lapp’s paper on the Troy-Albany fallout in 1953. We in this department have done alittle investigation of the circumstances which obtained in the Troy-Albany area at that time
and the number of cancer cases and deaths reported in the age group who were under two
years of age at that time. You may be interested in the results of these investigations,summarized in my attached letter to Science.
Yours very truly,
James H. Lade, M.D.
Director

- 25 -

Lade, apparently, either had been the negative reviewer or had been consulted by him. The"Science" letter to which he referred had been published in the November 9 issue in reply to Lapp’s
article. In that letter Lade attempted to minimize the possibility of any radiation effects in the
Albany-Troy area from the concentration of radioactivity in the milk by arguing that the cattle in thearea had not been turned out to pasture until about May 12, 1953, or some two to three weeks after the
fallout had arrived on April 25. He argued that in view of the seven-day half-life2 of iodine 131, theradiation would have decreased to only one-fourth its initial intensity by the time the cattle wereturned out, so that Lapp’s estimates of the dose to infant thyroids were at least four times too high.
Lapp had, apparently, been unaware of this factor when he made his dose estimates, but Lade failed tomention that even if Lapp’s doses were reduced by a factor of four, they would still be vastly greaterthan the permissible limits set by government agencies. Lade’s letter also did not take into accountthe dose from the longer-lived isotopes such as strontium 90, strontium 89, and barium 140, withhalf-lives of 28 years, 50 days, and 13 days, respectively, which would certainly still be present two to
three weeks after the fallout had arrived. Nor did he mention the information published by Professor
Clark in the Journal of the American Water Works Association, namely, that in May and June, manyweeks after the first rainout, fallout from additional tests repeatedly produced new levels ofradioactivity comparable to those measured for April. This meant, of course, that Lapp’s estimates,
far from being four times too high, were actually much too low, for Lapp had based his estimates only
on the April 26 fallout. Lade, as medical director of the Civil Defense group, worked intimately withthe scientists from the New York office of the AEC who sponsored the measurements of radioactivity
in the reservoirs of the area. Thus he presumably would have been aware of this circumstance.
Lade further argued that because of the heaviness of the spring rains, the radioactivity had soon
been largely washed off the vegetables and pasture. But Dr. Clark and his students had found thateven extreme chemical treatment was only partially effective in removing the radioactivity from theleaves and other objects to which it clung. Thus, ironically, the only effect of the rains of May andJune would have been to bring down even greater amounts of fallout than had come down in April.
As a final point, Lade stated that a review of New York Health Department records indicated thatno cases of thyroid cancer had since developed among the children who were under two years of age
in 1953. His letter closed with the remark that "it seems most unlikely that an event which has
resulted in no increase of thyroid carcinoma during the ensuing nine years will lead to such an effectin the future." Yet it was common knowledge among specialists in the field that radiation-caused
thyroid cancer generally takes ten to twenty years to develop. And Lade said nothing about any
increase in the incidence of leukemia, which by this time would certainly be detectable.
It could thus be determined by someone with a scientific background that Lade’s letter contained
absolutely no evidence to support his conclusion that the Troy fallout had been harmless. But how
could the general public ever guess? This was the voice of the New York State Health Department.
Within a few weeks, I resubmitted my article to Science together with a letter referring to thestatement given me by Dr. Russell Morgan. Within less than a month, it had been accepted for
publication.
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
2. The half-life of a radioactive isotope is the time it takes for the radioactivity to diminish to half its original intensity. The half-life of iodine 131 is 7
days so it is termed a short-lived isotope. Strontium 90, with a half-life of twenty-eight years, is a long-lived isotope. The radiation from a shortlived isotope is much stronger because all of it is given off in a shorter time.

- 26 -

4
A Ray of Hope

BY THE SPRING of 1963, when the article finally appeared in Science, the levels of radioactivity inmilk were reaching unprecedented heights all over the United States. Extreme concern was being
voiced both by scientists and the general public regardless of the repeated reassurances by local publichealth officials and the AEC that no danger existed. The intensified pressure began to penetrate to thehighest levels of government, and in June 1963 President John F. Kennedy announced that thiscountry, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had agreed to negotiate a treaty to end all atmospherictesting. He further stated that he had ordered an end to all such testing by the United States. In July
the President delivered an address to the nation in which he urged the ratification of the treaty by the
U.S. Senate. In this address, he referred to the threat of fallout as follows:. . . the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia intheir blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison
with natural health hazards, but this is not a natural health hazard—and it is not a statisticalissue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby—who may beborn long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren
are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.
It appeared that the issues involved in the question of fallout hazards were at last receiving
widespread public recognition. In Congress, hearings on low-level radiation effects were being heldby the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and for the first time citizens’ groups and private scientists
with no government affiliations were invited to testify on this subject. In August I received a letterfrom John T. Conway, executive director of the Joint Committee, requesting my presence at thehearings. Leafing through the transcript of the first half of the hearings held in June, I found a reprintof my Science article. It was followed by a lengthy critique prepared by the AEC’s Division of
Biology and Medicine. On examination, the AEC critique proved to be strikingly similar in wording
and theme to the negative review for Science. It denied that any effects from low-level radiation had
been proven to exist, stating that I had ignored the studies which showed no effects. The AEC
critique, however, went further and cited figures showing an actual reduction in childhood cancer
rates after the heavy atmospheric testing in 1957. But the figures were only for children who wereless than two years old when they died, a peculiar restriction, since Stewart and MacMahon had
specifically demonstrated that cancer caused by the irradiation of unborn children only showed up
after the age of two. No figures for older children were given by the AEC.
The Joint Committee hearings opened on August 20, the same day that Dr. Edward Teller testified
before the Senate against ratification of the Test-Ban Treaty. Dr. Teller, the renowned nuclear
physicist who had been instrumental in the development of the hydrogen bomb, expressed in his
testimony the main arguments advanced by the treaty’s opponents. He raised the possibility of future

- 27 -

military breakthroughs by the Russians, stating his conviction that in the 1961-62 test series they had
acquired knowledge about missile defense that this country didn’t have. "This is the main argument
against the test-ban treaty," he said. "It weakens our defense, and as long as we have reason to
distrust Soviet intentions, the weakness of our defense will invite attack. . . . I came to recognize
many years ago that real cooperation between Russia and us in the near future is impossible." As tothe possibility of danger from fallout, Teller flatly stated: "From the present levels of worldwide
fallout there is no danger. The real danger is that you will frighten mothers from giving milk to theirbabies. By that, probably much more damage has been done than by anything else concerning thismatter." Teller also stated that the treaty would endanger the program for the peaceful uses of nuclear
explosions in the Project Plowshare program. He expressed his belief that such explosions could be
carried out in "a very clean way," so that fifteen minutes afterward people could walk in the resulting
crater "without exposing ourselves to more radiation that we have taken year in and year out in ourlaboratories."
At the same time as Dr. Teller was making this statement, in another part of the capital Dr. C. W.
Mays of the University of Utah was testifying at the Joint Committee hearings about the thyroid doses
received by children in Utah from one of the AEC’s Project Plowshare explosions the year before. As
measured by University of Utah scientists, the doses ranged from 10 to 60 rads—anywhere from ten
to a hundred times the government’s maximum permissible yearly limit for that body organ.
The second day of the Joint Committee hearings, during which I was present, began with thetestimony of Dr. Shields Warren, who represented the National Academy of Science’s Advisory
Committee on the Biological Effects of Radiation. Dr. Warren had been the first director of the
AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, and as such he had been responsible for all of the AEC’s
early research and planning relating to the health effects of fallout. He was also head of the U.S.
delegation to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation. Dr. Warren began
his testimony with a review of the effects of radiation on man, animals, and plants. The lowest doselisted on his chart was 0.001 rad, or 1 millirad, and this was followed by 0.01 rad, which he indicatedas giving "no detectable effect." The next highest dose was 1.0 rad, again with the legend "nodetectable effect." Dr. Warren evidently did not accept the evidence of Stewart and MacMahon,
which indicated that 1.0 rad received during pregnancy produced something like a 50 percent increasein the rate of childhood leukemia and cancer, clearly a "detectable" effect.
Nothing very serious appeared on Dr. Warren’s chart until he got to 1000 rads. At 10 rads thelegend was: "Barely detectable qualitative changes in lymphocytes," while at 100 rads the chartindicated only "mild acute radiation sickness; slight diminution in blood cell counts. Possible nausea
and vomiting. . . ." Yet the studies of Hiroshima had revealed a doubling or tripling of leukemia
deaths among the surviving adults exposed to this dose.
Only at 1000 rads did radiation actually appear lethal: "Depression of blood cells and platelets . . .
death within twenty days." This was profoundly misleading: It was common scientific knowledge
that 50 percent of all individuals exposed to 400 rads to the whole body would die within a matter ofweeks or months, while for 700 rads the figure was 95 percent.
For 10,000 rads, Dr. Warren’s chart listed "Immediate disorientation and coma. Death within
hours . . ." while "death of all living organisms" was reassuringly indicated as not occurring until
10,000,000 rads. In conclusion, Dr. Warren quoted the following passage from the United Nations
1962 report on fallout hazards, which he had helped to prepare:It must be recognized that the human species has, in fact, always been exposed to small
amounts of radiation from a variety of natural sources and that the present additional average
exposure of mankind from all artificial sources is still smaller than that from natural sources.

- 28 -

This, then, had been the voice of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, the National Academyof Sciences, and the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Scientific Commission.
When Congressman Melvin Price asked Dr. Warren what effects he would expect to observe in the
250,000 children in Utah who might have received 4.4 rads to their thyroids, as Dr. Mays had testified
the day before, he replied: "I think it would be hard to find any effect, Mr. Chairman." But as Dr.
Mays had suggested, if one does not look, one is not likely to find such effects, and indeed, no one
had conducted the necessary studies of the children in Utah, in Albany-Troy, or, for that matter,
anywhere else in the world.
The next witness was Dr. E. B. Lewis of the California Institute of Technology, whose "single-hit,"
linear theory of cancer causation supplied an explanation for the findings of Stewart and MacMahon.
This theory had formed the basis of my argument that the cancer-causing effects of radiation were
cumulative and that doses received gradually from fallout would be similar in effect to those received
all at once from diagnostic X-rays. Dr. Lewis’s latest evidence, based on a study of leukemia
incidence among radiologists, indicated that low doses of radiation delivered over a period of many
years could indeed lead to an increased incidence of leukemia, a finding that further buttressed his
original theory.
There was now only one more witness scheduled to be heard before Dr. Brian MacMahon. Thiswas Dr. Hyman Friedell, professor of radiology at Western Reserve University. The main burden of
his testimony, as he stated, was to urge radiation protection agencies to set their standards on the basisof the linear theory of radiation damage, according to which there was no safe threshold of exposure.
Now Dr. MacMahon took the stand. He opened his testimony with an explanation of why certain
other studies had not appeared to confirm Dr. Stewart’s and his own results: "Every one of thenegative studies has been based on small numbers, and in no instance do the results differ in astatistically significant degree from the expectation of a 40 percent increase in cancer risk among
exposed children." Thus, in defense of his own work, Dr. MacMahon had effectively answered one of
the major points in the AEC’s critique of my article. He went on to summarize his results as follows:
I suggest therefore that the existing evidence is overwhelmingly indicative of an increase incancer risk for children diagnostically exposed in utero; that this increase is seen for leukemia
as well as for a variety of other individual forms of cancer; that the best estimate of thisincrease is that it is about 40 percent in excess of "normal" cancer mortality in the UnitedStates.
Turning next to the implications of his findings, he stated:
It seems to me that if this association is accepted, we must consider very seriously thepossibility of cancer production by low doses of radiation such as encountered in X-ray
diagnosis and even fallout.
As to the existence of a possible "threshold," Dr. MacMahon went on to say:
The exposure dose associated with pelvimetry [pelvic X-rays] at the time of these studies is
not known, but it was probably of the order of 2 to 3 rad [for a series of X-rays]—substantiallybelow the 50 rad that has frequently been mentioned as a possible threshold level. If athreshold for leukemia induction exists, then it must be below 2 rads. It would be acoincidence indeed if a threshold existed just below the dosage level at which studies havebeen undertaken.
One other major issue remained to be discussed, and that was the evidence for an increase incancer risk with an increase in dose—termed the "dose-response" relationship. To this point,- 29 -

MacMahon now addressed himself as follows:
Furthermore, there is some indication in both Stewart’s and our own data that a dose-response
relationship exists even within the low-dose range that is being considered.
Thus, MacMahon, together with all the other nongovernment scientists who testified in this part of
the hearings, presented evidence in conflict with the AEC’s claims for the existence of a safe
threshold.
Inevitably, Dr. MacMahon was asked his opinion of the use to which I put his data in my Sciencepaper. He summarized his reply as follows: ". . . the argument used by Dr. Sternglass does notconvince me personally, but, on the other hand, I cannot deny that ultimately his point of view may becorrect." He further stated, however, that he agreed with all the comments in the AEC critique. Thisseemed puzzling, since I felt he had just answered the most serious points in his own testimony. It
became clear that I would have to amass much stronger evidence before my hypothesis could gain the
public support of many scientists.
After a brief recess, Dr. Eric Reiss was called to the witness stand. Dr. Reiss was a St. Louisphysician and a co-founder, with Dr. Barry Commoner, of the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear
Information. In his presentation on behalf of the St. Louis group, he concentrated on the subject of
local fallout incidents resulting from the AEC’s tests in Nevada. Referring to the many reports on
local fallout prepared by the AEC, he pointed out that the general conclusion in all these official
reports had been that "the test program has been carried out without any discernible threat to thesafety of the local population.""In contrast," Dr. Reiss went on to say, "our analysis of the same monitoring data published by the
AEC shows that as a result of nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site, in the period 1951-62, a numberof local populations, especially in Nevada, Utah, and Idaho and probably other communities scatteredthroughout the continental United States, have been exposed to fallout so intense as to represent a
medically unacceptable hazard to children who may drink fresh locally produced milk." He explainedthat the discrepancy between the AEC’s conclusions and those of the St. Louis group arose out of thefact that the AEC only measured the external dose from the fallout in the environment, while hisgroup also measured the internal dose from the fallout particles concentrated inside the body, as Dr.
Lapp had done in the case of Troy.
Dr. Reiss proceeded to present figures indicating that for 10 rads to the thyroid approximately one
in 2860 children might be expected to develop thyroid cancer. Because of the long latent period forthis disease, he explained, the damage would not show up for many years. Possibly ten to twenty. He
then cited estimated thyroid doses of 3 to 18 rads for the large population of Salt Lake City, Utah, as aresult of fallout on May 7, 1952, and 5 to 40 rads for Albany-Troy on April 26, 1953 (this did noteven include the much heavier fallout in June). Such hazardous doses, Dr. Reiss pointed out, arose
not only from atmospheric tests but also from certain underground tests: "Venting [leaking ofradioactivity] has been reported for at least seven underground nuclear tests," said Dr. Reiss, addingthat his group was able to calculate, for example, that "fallout from the underground ‘Gnome’ shot
delivered sufficient fallout to the vicinity of Carlsbad, New Mexico, to cause thyroid dose levels of
from 7 to 55 rads to children."
And then Dr. Reiss turned to an astonishing aspect of the whole problem: If the dangerous internal
doses had been estimated at the time, "simple preventive measures could have been taken to avoid
exposure." It would only have been necessary to warn the inhabitants of the area to avoid drinking
fresh milk produced locally until the iodine levels died down. "We know of no instance," said Dr.
Reiss, " in which such a warning was issued until the summer of 1962, when high iodine 131 levels
observed in commercial milk supplied in Utah led state health officials to divert current milk from the- 30 -

market." And finally, Dr. Reiss noted that correct estimates of internal doses should have beenpossible by as early as 1954 on the basis of the then-available scientific theory.
The questioning of Dr. Reiss was nearing its end when John Conway asked him why his group had
made only theoretical calculations of the thyroid doses without benefit of any direct measurements of
the iodine levels in the milk. "I am delighted you brought that up," Reiss answered, "because it is thenub of the problem. If measurements were available, we would obviously have used them. The
question is, why were no measurements made or reported publicly by those who had been charged
with the protection of our health and safety?"
That evening the Washington Post gave prominent coverage to Reiss’s testimony, as well as to thetestimony given at the Senate’s test-ban ratification hearings. At those hearings, Dr. John S. Foster,Jr., the new director of the AEC’s Livermore Laboratory, where the hydrogen bomb had beendeveloped, had offered his opinion on fallout hazards:
You are asking for a quantitative answer which involves the understanding of an effect,
namely the effect on the human being that is so small compared with his [radiation exposurefrom] background that we have not been able to measure it. One way to look at it would be to
say that the fallout from all past tests affecting man for the next 50 to 100 years would besomething like the same thing as deciding to live a few hundred feet higher up, higher above
sea level; that is what it means.
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia then asked Dr. Foster what importance should be attached tothe public’s fears of fallout. Byrd phrased his question as follows: "If I may pose a hypotheticalquestion, are you saying, in essence, that if you were a senator with the knowledge that you possess inthe scientific field . . . you would disregard entirely this factor [public opinion] in your reaching adecision?"
To which Foster replied: "That is correct, sir, although it would be a very difficult position for me
to put myself into. . . ."The third day of the Joint Committee’s low-level radiation hearings opened with my testimony. I
reviewed all the evidence regarding low-level radiation effects on unborn children, presented myarguments as to the probable similarity in effects of X-rays and fallout radiation, and gave estimatesof the increase in childhood cancer that might be expected from nuclear testing. Then the questioning
period began.
Congressman Craig Hosmer asked me how there could be any evidence in Stewart’s and
MacMahon’s studies for a dose-response relationship when the radiation dose from hospital X-ray
machines was known to differ widely from hospital to hospital, due to variations in the adjustment
and quality of the machines. Such differences would mean that some mothers might have received
the same or greater dose from a single X-ray as others received from two or even three. Therefore,
the finding of Stewart and MacMahon that there was an increase in cancer risk with the number of Xrays taken might not indicate a dose-response relationship. I explained that it was also true, however,that in the case of any one machine, the mothers who received two X-rays from it would definitely
have received twice as much radiation as those who were X-rayed only once. Since the ratio of single
pictures to double or treble pictures taken was generally the same for each X-ray machine, there could
be no question that, on the average, the mothers who received two X-rays had received twice as muchradiation as those who received only one.
Congressman Hosmer next asked why one couldn’t test the validity of the dose-response
relationship simply by examining the statistics for leukemia in children after the test series in the early
1950s. I pointed out that this was precisely what Lapp, Mays, Reiss, myself, and others had urged thegovernment to do without success.

- 31 -The next question involved the principal argument used by the AEC to minimize the possible
effects of fallout. Congressman Holifield asked whether I was aware that testimony had beenpresented by government scientists that fallout from all past testing had raised background radiation
by only some 10 percent. Since the typical background dose was 100 millirads per year, this seemed
to be only 10 millirads additional radiation, much less than the 200 millirads received from a modern
pelvic X-ray, or than the dose of 200 to 400 millirads that I had calculated for the recent test series.
What the spokesmen for the AEC and the Federal Radiation Council had done was to take the total
radiation dose from all the bombs detonated so far—some 700 millirads—and average it out as if itwere received uniformly over a seventy-year life span at a rate of 10 millirads per year. But in fact,
most of the dose comes from the short-lived isotopes that predominate in fallout, and is thus deliveredin the first few months after the tests. To illustrate this, I cited figures published just a few months
before by the AEC’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, located on Long Island, not far from New
York City. According to these figures, during the first six months of 1963, the average radiation
exposure on Long Island had risen to 4.7 millirads per week, as compared with a normal backgroundrate of only 1.7 millirads per week. This meant that in only half a year the dose received byindividuals in this area would be about 122 millirads as compared with a normal dose of only 44
millirads. Thus, instead of the negligibly small 10 percent increase which the AEC’s seventy-year
averaging procedure would give, the actual exposure to an infant in the womb would have been nearly
triple the background rate. And this dose did not even include the effects of internal concentration.
This, then, was the reasoning behind the reassuring statements of the world’s radiation protection
agencies that doses from atmospheric testing were negligible compared with all the sources ofradiation in man’s natural environment.
Congressman Hosmer next raised the point that the greater background radiation due to cosmic
rays in an area of high altitude such as Denver as opposed to that in an area at sea level such as Long
Island should lead to a higher leukemia rate in Denver. But in point of fact, as I stated, the difference
in total background radiation between these two areas is actually quite small because mostbackground radiation comes from sources other than cosmic rays. Cosmic rays contribute only about
30 millirads at sea level, compared to 50 millirads from the rocks and soil and 20 millirads fromtraces of natural radioactive substances in our body. Going to an altitude of 5000 feet increases thecosmic ray dose by only 40 percent, or a total of 12 millirads. Since place-to-place differences of 20
or 30 millirads in the radioactivity of rocks are common, the small difference due to altitude is easily
masked by this factor alone. Furthermore, cosmic rays do not concentrate in critical body organs as
does fallout.
Thus, it would be nearly impossible to find differences in leukemia rates as a result of altitudedifferences even as large as those for Denver and Long Island, considering that MacMahon had to use
a study group of some 70,000 exposed children to clearly establish an effect from about 1000
millirads of X-rays. And I added that there are of course other factors beside radiation that enter into
the likelihood of a child developing leukemia, making such a comparative study of the effects ofslightly different background levels next to impossible.
Following up this point, Congressman Hosmer suggested that if factors other than radiation wereinvolved in the cause of leukemia, did this not invalidate MacMahon’s study? To this I replied that,in such a study, comparisons are carried out with control groups for whom all the other factors are, on
the average, nearly the same as for those exposed to X-rays, thus essentially eliminating the effect ofsuch factors on the outcome.
After some discussion of the size of the dose from fallout, the chairman indicated that thecommittee’s counsel, John Conway, had some points he wished to raise. After a lengthy prelude,
Conway led up to the fact that the Federation of American Scientists’ news release based on my paper- 32 -

said that 100 megatons of nuclear fission energy had been released in the 1962 test series. Conway
argued that since the amount released in 1962 was actually 76 million tons, then my estimate of the
expected number of leukemia deaths was too high.
But it was clear from both my original paper in Science and my written testimony that the figure of
100 megatons applied to the entire test series that began in September of 1961 and ended late in 1962,
not just to the amount detonated in 1962 alone. Thus, the news release, which was not even preparedby me, should have said more precisely, "1961-62 test series."
When this became clear, Chairman Price intervened to point out the simple nature of themisunderstanding, and when Conway nevertheless wanted to pursue the matter further Price thanked
me for my testimony and called the next witness.
The debate over the test-ban treaty continued in Congress through most of September, and then the
U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly for ratification.
A highly revealing postscript to the entire test-ban treaty debate came to light in December, when
the full proceedings of the Joint Committee hearings were published. Inserted in the record was a
letter from Dr. Harold Knapp, a fallout specialist who had recently resigned from the AEC’s Divisionof Biology and Medicine. In his letter, Dr. Knapp made reference to a 1957 incident in which a
nuclear reactor in Windscale, England, had gone out of control and emitted tremendous quantities ofradioactivity into the atmosphere. The contamination from iodine 131 was so great that the crops andmilk for hundreds of square miles around had to be seized and dumped. According to Dr. Knapp’s
letter, in 1960, when he was doing fallout research for the AEC, he came to the startling conclusionthat in Utah "depositions of iodine 131 per unit area at many inhabited ranches and communities muston several occasions have exceeded the maximum iodine 131 concentrations on pasturage found after
the Windscale accident." (Emphasis added.)
As an example, Knapp cited an incident of relatively heavy fallout in the St. George, Utah, area on
May 19, 1953. His calculations indicated that 24 hours after the explosion the iodine levels in milk
must have reached 700,000 to 2,600,000 micromicrocuries per liter. He estimated that the thyroid
dose for an infant who drank one liter (slightly more than a quart) of this milk each day for the three
weeks following the test would be anywhere from 120 to 440 rads.
Knapp wrote a report containing these conclusions in 1960, but the AEC did not release his reportfor publication until August 16, 1963, just a few days before the second half of the Joint Committee
hearings began, by which time it was evident that the independent scientists from Utah and St. Louis
were going to make public their own similar findings. Thus, during the entire early effort to achieve atest-ban treaty, this shocking and vital information was kept from the people and political leaders of
the world, while hundreds of megatons of bombs were exploded by the U.S. and Russia during 196162. And since Knapp’s report had not even been made public by the AEC and the Joint Committee by
the time of the first half of the low-level radiation hearings in June of 1963, it had still been possible
for the AEC to mislead Congress and the public until just before the end. From page 225 of theproceedings of the June hearings:
REPRESENTATIVE HOLIFIELD: And the testimony before this committee has been thattolerable permission dose has not been reached by the amount of radiation that comes frommanmade fallout radiation, is that not true?
DR HARLEY: Yes, Sir.
Dr. Harley was John Harley, the former colleague whom Professor Clark had telephoned at thetime of the Albany-Troy incident. At that time a scientist with the AEC’s Health and Safety
Laboratory in New York City, Harley had since become head of the lab, which had been responsible
for the classified reports on the Troy fallout during the spring of 1953.

- 33 -

5
The Evidence Begins to Emerge

IT WAS NOW an established fact that potentially dangerous radiation doses had been received bylarge numbers of people from fallout. What remained to be established was whether or not thesedoses had actually caused any damage. No direct statistical evidence had yet been gathered by either
the AEC or federal and state health agencies, or, if it had been gathered, it had not been published.
This situation was abruptly transformed in March of 1964, when another letter by J. H. Lade of the
New York State Health Department appeared in Science. This letter was written in response torepeated prodding by Ralph Lapp, who kept challenging the department to make public the actual
figures after Lade had claimed in the September 1963 issue of Science that no increase in childhood
leukemia had occurred as a result of the 1953 rainout. The exact words used by Lade in making thisclaim had been:
The cancer report files of this department reveal no increase in the incidence of cancer or
leukemia over the past ten years in children of the Albany, Troy, and Schenectady areas—who
were 15 years or younger in 1963—as compared with children of this age elsewhere in upstate
New York.
Lade’s new letter contained the first detailed information on leukemia deaths among the children of
the area. This was the data on which he had based the above conclusion.
The data consisted of a table that included all reported fatal leukemia cases among children under
fifteen years of age in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area between 1952 and 1962, together with theyears in which these children were born. Examination of the table showed that, beginning in the
fourth to fifth years after the 1953 rainout, the yearly number of reported leukemia cases quadrupled.
This was strikingly similar to the delay in onset observed in the studies of Stewart and MacMahon
and among the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Troy area, after the eighth year, thenumber of cases began to decline once more, as they also did in the two Japanese cities. During theyears 1952-55, before any radiation-caused leukemia cases would be expected to appear, there were atotal of nine cases among children under age ten for whom the data was complete. During the yearsof expected peak incidence, 1959-62, there were a total of thirty cases. Statistical estimatesdemonstrated that the chances were less than one in a billion that this increase of twenty-one cases
could be regarded as purely accidental.
And when the cases were examined according to the year of birth, there was a very noticeablesudden increase in leukemia among the children born in 1953 and 1954, the period when the fallout
radiation would have been strongest. When grouped in two-year periods, the figures in Lade’s tablefor children under ten showed the following:- 34 -

Birth Years___________
1943-44
1945-46
1947-48
1949-50
1951-52
1953-54

No. of Cases____________
4
5
8
5
6
13

How, then, had it been possible for Lade to claim that there had been "no increase in the incidenceof cancer or leukemia over the past ten years in the children of the Albany, Troy, and Schenectady
areas"? Upon rereading his exact statement, it became apparent that he had used a modifying phrase
whose significance would easily escape the casual reader. This phrase was: "as compared withchildren of this age elsewhere in upstate New York."
But the "classified" measurements made by the AEC’s New York lab had shown that the entire
upstate New York area received heavy fallout on April 26, 1953, and again during the next few
months. Under these circumstances, there would of course be little or no difference in leukemia rates
between Albany-Troy-Schenectady and elsewhere in upstate New York. Although he presented nodata, Lade’s statement clearly implied that in fact there had been similar increases in all these areas.
(And indeed, later investigations revealed that there had been such rises all over New York State
following three to five years after the onset of Nevada testing.)
In his 1964 letter, Lade presented a final argument to "rule out the fallout as a major factor in theleukemia incidence in that area for the 1953 births." According to his figures, there were also a large
number of leukemia cases among the children born in 1956. Thus, Lade argued that the sharp rise inleukemia among those born in 1953 could not have resulted from the fallout, since there was also an
increased incidence among the children born in 1956, when there presumably was no major fallout
incident.
This piece of evidence seemed puzzling, especially since all the other data pointed so strongly tofallout. But then, a few months later, new light was thrown on the situation when the news of an
extremely important study appeared in The New York Times. A group of investigators working with
Dr. Saxon Graham at the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute in Buffalo, New York,and at two other cancer research institutions, had found that the children of parents who had been Xrayed as many as five to fifteen years before the mothers became pregnant also had a significantly
increased likelihood of developing leukemia. This finding suggested that radiation could cause a typeof genetic damage to the sperm cells of men and the ovaries of women that would make their children
more prone to developing this disease.
In the case of Troy, then, it was indeed possible that such a genetic effect of radiation could lead toa greater incidence of leukemia among the children born in the years following.
There was another very important finding of the Roswell study: Children who had received
multiple exposures from a series of diagnostic X-rays to different parts of their bodies had a distinctly
greater risk of leukemia than those who had only one part X-rayed. Fallout, due to the concentrationof isotopes in various parts of the body, would lead to exactly this type of multiple exposure. Thus, inthe Troy area, even children who were born before the rainout would be expected to show anincreased risk of leukemia.
Independent studies had now demonstrated that radiation could cause leukemia in children prior toconception, in the womb, and after birth. What would the Troy data show if the cases were examinedaccording to which of these three stages of development the children were in when the fallout

- 35 -

arrived? When this was done, a fact of utmost significance emerged: Those children who had been in
the womb or who were already born at the time of the fallout were, on the average, one or two years
older at death than the children who had been conceived afterward. This was exactly the samecharacteristic shift toward older age at death that had been observed by both Stewart and MacMahon
in their studies of children X-rayed while in the womb, and it had also been observed in studies ofleukemia among infants who had received medical X-ray treatment. It was as if the children of Troy
had been marked with a sign. The fact that the children conceived after the fallout showed the normal
earlier age at death was perfectly consistent, for it is generally acknowledged that there is a large
genetic factor in all normally developing leukemia cases and that a significant portion of these cases
are caused by genetic damage from natural background radiation. Thus the children whose leukemia
had been caused by radiation damage to their parents’ genes would be expected to show the normal
age at death.
None of the data supplied by Lade was therefore inconsistent with the hypothesis that the fallout
had caused the increase in leukemia in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area. And this might well betrue for other types of childhood cancer. Further investigation was definitely indicated. Since I
anticipated difficulty in obtaining more complete and up-to-date data from Lade, I again contacted Dr.
Russell Morgan, chairman of the U.S. Public Health Service’s National Advisory Committee on
Radiation. After reviewing Lade’s data and my conclusions, Dr. Morgan suggested that I use hisname in writing to the New York State Commissioner of Health, Dr. Hollis Ingraham. In July I wrote
Dr. Ingraham, asking for further information relating to cancer incidence in the Troy area andmentioning Dr. Morgan’s concern about the data published by Lade. A few weeks later I received aletter from Lade indicating that he felt sufficient data was already available in his 1964 Science letter.
It appeared that the New York State Health Department did not want to see the matter pursued any
further.

- 36 -

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 inleukemia, 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 ofthe 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 amongsome 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 laterby 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 thedose from diagnostic X-rays is delivered, so, if anything, the results of Dr. Graham’s study shouldhave 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 wasemphasized by Dr. Neel himself during the course of a lecture series in 1963: "In view of the vast- 37 -

body of data regarding the mutagenic effects of radiation, it can scarcely be doubted that the survivorsof Hiroshima and Nagasaki sustained genetic damage." To this he added: "The question is not ‘Isthere 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 thatwhile 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 tothe ova, the embryo, and the infant than anyone had realized when the studies were set up, then theso-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 ofHiroshima, namely Furue, Takasu, and Koi, about 5000 meters from the blast, the external radiationdose 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 inthe 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, andnot for an increase over the rate for preceding years. It seemed incredible that the possible effects ofsuch 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 ofradiation 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 Japanesecities. 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 metersfrom 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 thebomb. 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 inheavy fallout in Japan and in contamination of the fish used widely as a staple item in the Japanesediet. 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 theUnited 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 hadsuggested.

- 38 -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. Withina 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 theoccurrence 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 amilk diet in this area at the time of 1953 could not have had a significant exposure. I fail tosee, 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 beheld 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 "theprotection 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 useof inadequate medical X-ray equipment and procedures. Long convinced that there existed noevidence 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 Xrays. Prior to the June meeting, I sent Dr. Morgan a copy of the paper I had just submitted to Scienceand received a letter from him expressing deep concern about the seriousness of the evidence, as wellas indignation about the refusal of the New York State Health Department to provide the additionaldata.
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 periodthat followed, many of the questions dealt with the inadequacies of Lade’s data—for example, thelack 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 theworld. Among the many phone calls that came during the aftermath was one from an AssociatedPress reporter in Detroit, who informed me that the New York State Health Department had justissued a news release stating that "there is no evidence to support a Pittsburgh professor’s report that- 39 -

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 thesignificance 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 hadcomplained 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 publicknow 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 wetry to avoid publicizing papers that do not contribute to our basic objective, there is no way to prevent
such publicity absolutely." (Emphasis added.)- 40 -

7
Death before Birth

A FEW MONTHS after the Denver meeting, a letter arrived from Science flatly rejecting theAlbany-Troy paper. There were two reviews enclosed, both negative. One contained references tononpublic data available only to the New York Health Department, indicating that the reviewer was amember of that agency. Apparently unaware of the irony, this reviewer claimed that "the number ofcases in the Albany-Troy area used in this study are too few to warrant the conclusion." This was, ofcourse, 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 andthe New York Health Department. Apparently these figures were only adequate to prove there was noeffect.
I now became more determined than ever to pursue the effort to have the full evidence on theworldwide effects of nuclear fallout on childhood leukemia exposed to the scientific community andthe 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 gradualcorrection 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 thenumber 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 ofcases 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 thefigures for annual births in the three counties of upstate New York for which Lade had given theleukemia 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 anincrease in fetal deaths had been looked for by J. V. Neel in his study of genetic effects on thesurvivors 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 ofchange is termed a "leveling off" in the rate of decline. In the case of fetal mortality, such a leveling- 41 -

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 shownby the fact that the decline started again after each discontinuation of testing. More significantly, itreached 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, ascompared 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 AlbanyTroy-Schenectady after the fallout was comparable to that for leukemia, then it would involve the lossof 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 haveoccurred 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 andwent through the data for New York State as a whole. Exactly the same pattern existed: There was asteady decline in fetal deaths toward a minimum of 22.2 per thousand births in 1950, but then the rateactually rose again to 23.3 in 1953 instead of continuing its decline to the 20 per 1000 live births thatwas 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 numberof 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 beensome 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 othershort-lived radioactivity resulted when the spring rains came down in 1963. Unlike the local rainoutsof 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 offetal deaths, more than 95 percent of all live births are reported to the public health authorities, sincenearly 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 dropin 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

- 42 -

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 lostin 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 lesstypical 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 theentire 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.

- 43 -

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 myefforts to publish the article on leukemia in Albany-Troy and concentrate all my energies on thisapparently 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 thatindependent studies to check the findings could be carried out by others as soon as possible? At thatvery moment, the French were continuing their atomic tests in the Pacific, while the Chinese werestarting to detonate larger-than-ever bombs whose fallout was already drifting over the U.S. If therise 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 andleukemia in the first years of life.
Yet what if my interpretation of the data was wrong? Should I spend many more months or evenyears 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 thiswas 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 ofbabies, while every additional nuclear weapons system built would increase the certainty that humanlife would end if these weapons were ever used. The AEC was in the midst of plans to set off anotherlarge cratering explosion in Nevada within the next three months in an effort to prove the feasibilityof excavating a new Panama Canal by means of hydrogen bombs. Such a test was bound to releaselarge 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 scientificcommunity 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 theobjections of reviewers.
Ultimately I resolved to take the findings to the public if discussions with colleagues failed toreveal 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- 44 -

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 largehydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, did California also begin to show a noticeable leveling off in therate of decline. But at no time did this leveling show the sharp rises observed in New York State thatwould 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 nearlyas 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 indeaths 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 andmilk 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 HealthService 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 thateach time the levels of the short-lived isotopes, such as iodine 131 and strontium 89, shot up to theirhighest peaks, there was a sharp rise in fetal mortality within a year. The first of these sharp generalrises occurred after the very large Nevada, Pacific, and Siberian tests in 1957-58, and the second andhighest 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 thanthe carbon 14 and tritium produced by the hydrogen bombs. Inside the body, then, they would givethe fetus the highest dose in the shortest time. Certainly iodine 131 could be a major source ofdamage. 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 havebeen 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 theyears 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 thestrontium, with its half-life of 28 years, would persist in the environment and in the diet, continuing to- 45 -

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 thisaccumulation in the bodies of the parents. If this was so, then after the initial sharp rise caused by theshort-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 themeasured amounts of strontium 90 on the ground and in the milk for different areas of the UnitedStates. 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 asecond slower rise culminating between three and five years later. The second peaks were especiallyhigh, 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 werevastly increased.
The final task that remained was to make certain that there existed no other known explanation forthe 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 othercause 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 ofthese 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 ofmany 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.

- 46 -

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 therates 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 foundthat 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 ofradiation 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 togreatly increase the likelihood that the infants would die in the first year of life. As it was put later inthe report of the conference: "Low-birthweight infants have a much greater chance of dying, andhence 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 theprevailing 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 chanceof 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 levelingtrend 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 thenumber of low-birthweight babies. The same story emerged from the account of Dr. Julie E. Backer

- 47 -

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 themore northerly countries with the heaviest rainfall that were showing the greatest effects on infantmortality. 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 anortheasterly direction by the prevailing jet-stream wind currents, would have deposited theirradioactivity 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 ofthe 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 inNorth 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 suchmeasurements were taken. In fact, in May of 1963, Mandan had shown the highest levels everrecorded 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 incidenceof 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 fromthe 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 overwhich the high-altitude clouds generally drift from west to east, carried along by the "jet streams," theconstant 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

- 48 -

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 theinfluence 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, thesoutheastern 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 notshow 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 theSouthwest. In New Mexico, for example, except for a brief halt in the downward trend following thefirst 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 greaterchange, 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 thehighest 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 righton declining. Yet the medical care and general living standards of the Indian populations in thesestates 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 ofheavy 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 wasan area that originally had roughly the same high infant mortality rate among nonwhites as thesouthwestern 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 thenthis 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 actuallyrose 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 atmospherictesting 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 lessthan 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

- 49 -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 atmospherictesting, reaching 53 by 1966, the last year for which data were available.
Furthermore, examination of the official fallout measurements showed that the high rainfall areasof 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 tothe 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 thenorm 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 bystrontium 90. Instead, they were dying a little more frequently of respiratory diseases, infections, andimmaturity, 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 oflife 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 ofmaternal 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 moredisturbing, 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 ofpregnancy 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 nothave 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 andfetal 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

- 50 -

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; andCanada, 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 infantmortality than that country. Among all these nations, it was the U.S. which was exposed to the mostintense 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 agreater degree than the U.S. Tobacco, food additives, pesticides, and drugs were used throughout theworld 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 infantmortality 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 forsuch 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 wasagreed 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 wasinterviewed 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 thepress. 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 fromthe supposedly confidential report of one of the reviewers that my paper was "weak in its scientificmethods" 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.

- 51 -

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 theintensified attack on medical problems in the postwar years . . . there has been a growth in thevolume 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 healthinsurance 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 homeenvironment, 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 theother hand, the possible adverse effects on mortality of radioactive fallout, air pollution, andother manmade hazards cannot be completely ignored.
In the School of Public Health library, page after page of data showed the same dramatic upwardchanges 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, andbronchitis 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

- 52 -

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 Japanand the onset of atomic testing in the Pacific, the death rates from these diseases suddenly began toshoot up. For example, the annual death rate among white males seventy-five to eighty-four years oldfrom 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 wasparticularly serious in certain states, where the death rates actually rose again after decades of steadydecline. As Moriyama pointed out: "In twelve states and the District of Columbia there appears to bea marked rise in the crude death rate during the past five to ten years as represented by the trend forNorth 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, theopposite 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 periodof 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 inmortality 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 1to 4-year-olds suddenly refused to decline further. For the 5- to 9-year age groups, which the studiesof 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 timein 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 asin 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 ofthese diseases during this period. . . ."- 53 -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 forthe very young and the very old. Thus, whereas the leukemia death rate had remained fairly steadyfor 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 theJapanese 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, afivefold increase during the period of heavy testing. For the youngest children zero to 4 years old, theincrease 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 thoseover 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 tothe 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 toa low of 40 by 1955, actually began to rise again. Thus, in the period from 1945 to 1955, whenindustrial 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, thenChile 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 upwardchanges 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 offission products.
The Chile mortality graphs instantly confirmed this prediction, especially the plot of mortality forthe 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 andcomplete 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

- 54 -

been a steady decline after 1933, except for small rises during the second half of the 1940s, but thenbetween 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 ofregression for 1933-53. The expected rate was 8.6 and the observed rate was 12.3, whichmeans 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 lungdisease, 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 morebiological 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 theNetherlands 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 theseworldwide, 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 biologicalagent 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 theatmosphere in quantities equivalent to tens of millions of pounds of radium, the most powerfulbiological 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.

- 55 -

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-reachinga conclusion required much more evidence before the possibility of any other explanation could beruled 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 andmothers’ 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 networkof 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 ofradioactive 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 sofamiliar.
The lower part of the mushroom’s stem was blown north toward Wilson’s position, which had tobe 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 ofthe 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 themushroom 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- 56 -

Graves and his wife, Elizabeth, observers assigned to the little town of Carrizozo some 40 miles justslightly 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 thebalance while the scientists and Army officers decided whether or not to evacuate it. Ultimately, theyheld off, and within an hour the fallout readings had dropped. Lamont reported that these weredifficult 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 knewthat 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 totravel the 40 miles to Carrizozo at the usual speed of the jet-stream air currents, then, it meant that theparticles that caused the Graveses’ radiation counters to start climbing must have taken about eight tonine 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 themore 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 thehighest 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 tosome degree in the sparsely populated areas of New Mexico itself, and to a greater extent in the moreheavily populated states to the east, northeast, and north. Among the more distant states generally tothe east, those with the heaviest rainfall should show the largest upward changes, since the highaltitude 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 andVirginia, 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 inintensity 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 thesenew 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 andnortheast of the test site, amounting to as much as 30 to 40 percent. This pattern extended over theentire 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 thepoorer nonwhite as well as for the socio-economically better-off white infants.

- 57 -

Two of my colleagues, Donald Sashin and Ronald Rocchio, became quite concerned about thesefindings 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 thecomputer was essentially the same except for one striking difference. For some reason the computermaps 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 theatomic 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 withthese 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 ofgaseous effluent was encountered. For the plutonium produced to be removed from theuranium 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 themby 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 biologicallymore 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 overdry Idaho and Montana as they were blown by the prevailing westerly winds toward the wet easternpart of North Dakota where Mandan was located.
There was also one other peculiarity in the computer-printed maps. Florida, South Carolina, andOklahoma 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 fromthe U.S. Meteorological Records Center, this too fitted the hypothesis: During the week ending July17, 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 thenorthern edge of the Gulf of Mexico and then up the Atlantic coast. About 90 percent of the fallout isbrought 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 Bulletinsummarized the rainfall situation as follows:
Rainfall during the week was again limited mostly to sections east of the Rockies. Heavy 24-

- 58 -

hour amounts occurred the forepart of the week in Northeastern Texas and coastal areas ofGulf 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 ofradioactive 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 theirmothers’ wombs.

- 59 -

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 thereporter 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 thesereports 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 Harleyin 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 ofstrontium 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 ofwhat I had said in my paper. Harley therefore argued that since infant mortality had risen most in thesouthern United States to the east of Nevada and New Mexico, and least in the low-rainfall mountainstates 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 sheetof 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 shippedto 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

- 60 -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 indicatingthat the "gummed film" procedure "may lead to an overestimate of the tropospheric fallout," thetroposphere 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 mycorrelation of nuclear testing with the rises in infant mortality, writing that "fallout before 1954 wasexactly 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 theleukemia 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 werequite 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: "Theconclusion 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 forpoint, 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 theoriginal drawings—or very clear, dark copies—for figures 1 and 3.
Thank you for your assistance.
Sincerely yours,
Merry Selk
Editorial AssistantI 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 generalpublic. This was indeed good news. For although Science had a far wider circulation, the Bulletin

- 61 -

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, hundredsof copies of each issue being sent to the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, andRumania.
Subsequently, I presented all the new evidence before a meeting of the National Council of theFederation 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 toreconsider 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 thefirst 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 inwhich it had drifted.
In the first paragraph of the reply I soon received from him, he stated that he had found theevidence "very impressive, particularly the map of the United States with the percent excess inmortality showing an effect only downwind of the Trinity site." He added that "in view of theenormous 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 theInstitute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, entitled "A Case for Missile Defense." It was clear thatthe basic premise of Dyson’s argument in favor of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system would not bevalid 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 andsaving those cities that could not be attacked. But in the process, the "saved" cities would beinundated 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 andNuclear 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

- 62 -

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 reachthe scientific community at large, responsible scientists would be willing to reconsider their past
judgments.

- 63 -

12
Counterattack at Hanford

IN MAY 1969, for the first time in over fifteen years, as a result of growing concern amongradiobiologists, 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 beensponsored 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 thatwould 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 ofabsorbing isotopes into their bodies. Since the control population consisted of individuals in the samefamilies, 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 thisstudy. 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 notsought, 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 ofvery 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 backgroundradiation.
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 ofpossible 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 bycongressmen Holifield and Price in the course of the 1963 congressional hearings and then promised

- 64 -

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 andmortality data of thyroid cancer, leukemia, and congenital malformations in relation toradiation 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 encounteredduring 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 fromlow-level radiation exposure.
Thus, in all the years since 1963 no large-scale study of the effects of low-level radiation fromfallout had evidently been undertaken.
The Surgeon General’s letter did say that studies of fallout-exposed schoolchildren in Utah werebeing 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 amongchildren who reside in the selected ‘exposed’ area of Utah-Nevada."
Examination of Thompson’s article, however, showed that, although Steinfeld’s statement asphrased 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 fourcases expected. For young women aged 20 to 29 years old, the number was twenty as compared tonine 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 toconsult 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 sinceleukemia 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 thepreliminary program of the symposium, Dr. Alice Stewart would be present. The conference was totake 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- 65 -

from the Trinity site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
At about this time, a completely unexpected letter arrived by special delivery from the New YorkState 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 AlbanySchenectady-Rensselaer country areas in the early 1950s. As you can see from my response, acopy 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 ofanalysis you have done. We are planning to restudy this subject and would be happy to haveyou 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 AlbanyTroy, published years before in Science in the attempt to prove that there had been no effect from thefallout 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 remarkablecoincidence: 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 thatyear, 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 andMedicine. 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-- 66 -

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 thesurvivors 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 Russianscientists had studied the effects of low-level radiation—of the type produced by fallout—fromstrontium 90 and other isotopes when given to various animals before and during pregnancy. Theirobservations 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 asmall 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 theeffects, just exactly as the studies of diagnostic X-rays given during pregnancy had indicated in thecase 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 firstpublished work I was aware of that appeared to offer the kind of crucial laboratory confirmation of thestatistical evidence for the damaging effects of fallout on the newborn.
Early in the conference, however, other evidence was presented, in session after session, thatinternal 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 ofchildren 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 inten 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 tointerview 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 inthe 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 tentimes 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

- 67 -

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 fromfallout. So Griem’s study actually provided, for the first time, direct observational evidence inhumans 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 herfindings 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 theconclusion 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 thissuggestion.
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 ofage at death.
Dr. Stewart also observed that all types of cellular defects produced by radiation "were felt withequal 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 toresist 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 initiatedbefore 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 toradiation. 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 fivetimes the external dose measured by the AEC’s Health and Safety Laboratory—which Sagan had usedin his argument.

- 68 -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 thisdespite 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 notseem to show detectable reductions in weight and litter size. This was in apparent contradiction to thefindings of Moskalev, who was unfortunately not present to defend his work. But then Dr. T. K. Ellisof 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 fromall over the United States, indicated that for Texas, St. Louis, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, andCalifornia 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 internalradiation 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 foundthat 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 ofcesium given to a litter of dogs. Furthermore, the amounts reaching the developing fetus were manytimes 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 ofisotopes 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 amouse 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 fourweeks of development, when the embryo weighs less than a hundredth of a gram, then theconcentration of radioactivity in the embryonic tissue would be the same as if the entire originalamount had been given to a 1-gram embryo. Instead of the relatively minor radiation dose producedby 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 factthat the embryo was already hundreds of times more likely to develop cancer or other forms of

- 69 -

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 biologicalsystems 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 extinguishhimself and all other animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through the effecton the weakest link in the chain of life—the unborn and the very young.

- 70 -

13
The Public’s Right to Know

NOT A WORD of the findings reported at Hanford appeared in the national press or the other public
news media. No science writers had been present, and none of the wire services had covered themeeting, held in a remote part of the country. Yet in view of the accumulated evidence presented at
Hanford, it was now clear that the sensitivity of the early embryo was so great that if a nuclear war
ever broke out only the more resistant reptiles and insects would survive the lingering radiation.
In June 1969 I wrote a letter to The New York Times describing the Hanford findings and theirimplications for the ABM debate. Shortly after the letter appeared, I received a phone call from the
New York correspondent of The London Observer, Joyce Egginton. The first thing Miss Egginton
asked was why there had not been any stories about these startling findings either in the news sectionof The New York Times or in any other newspapers served by the national wire services. In particular,
she wondered why nothing had been reported about my findings in view of the fact that I had justpresented them again at a recent meeting of the Health Physics Society. There, the University ofPittsburgh’s public relations department had made arrangements with the public relations departmentof the Health Physics Society for an interview with an individual who stated that he wanted to write astory on my work for the Associated Press. After the presentation of my paper, this individual
introduced himself, stating that he was in charge of the newsroom for the Society but also often wrote
stories for the Associated Press. He already had much of the story written and merely wanted tocheck certain details. It seemed to be quite a good account. But his story was never carried by the
Associated Press. Not until later did it become clear what had happened.
Meanwhile, the editor of Esquire, Harold Hayes, called soon after Joyce Egginton to ask whether I
would be willing to write a story on my findings for his magazine. In view of the fact that the generalpublic had heard nothing at all of the findings presented in Pittsburgh or at Hanford, I accepted.
A week or two later, I received a call from Hal Stromholt, a writer for the Associated Press officein Pittsburgh. He said that the AP had asked him to do a story on my findings presented at the recent
Health Physics Society meeting, which Joyce Egginton had just reported in The London Observer. I
asked him why the AP had not carried the story that had been written for it many weeks before.
Surprised, Stromholt asked the name of the man who had done this earlier story. I told him, and hethen said that no one by that name either worked in the AP office in Pittsburgh or was employed as anoccasional writer or "stringer." Furthermore, he added that no earlier story could have been sent to
the AP, for they certainly would not have asked him to write a second one on exactly the same news
item. Significantly, the Associated Press did in fact use Stromholt’s story, and it was carriedthroughout the country.
Shortly thereafter the publishers of Esquire decided to stop the press run on the September issue inorder to include the article on infant mortality and nuclear testing as a special insert. Furthermore, inview of the serious implications for the decision on whether the U.S. should build the newantiballistic missile nuclear defense system, which would fill the atmosphere with hundreds of times

- 71 -

as much fallout as all of the past nuclear tests if it were ever to be used, the publishers had decided totake out full-page advertisements in The New York Times and the Washington Post that would
summarize the principal points of the article. They felt that these advertisements might appear in time
to be considered in the Senate debate. Harold Hayes also sent advance copies of the article to every
congressman and senator, together with a personal letter explaining the reason for this unprecedented
action on the part of his magazine.
But for the ABM debate, it was too late. The final vote came only eight days later with a narrow
victory for the Defense Department and the AEC, before the evidence of biological risks had a chance
to be fully considered by Congress and the public.
On October 12, 1969, a few weeks after the Esquire article appeared, The New York Timespublished an account of a critique of my Troy data prepared by Dr. Peter Greenwald, director of the
New York State Health Department’s Bureau of Cancer Control, and Mrs. Sandra Kinch, director ofthe department’s Office of Biostatistics. According to the Times, these two officials said that theiranalyses "tend to refute the validity and the conclusions" of my studies, which they described ashaving "definite factual errors" in the data used. To prove this, they submitted their own table ofleukemia deaths among children under age 10 in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area. The figures theygave were as follows:
Birth Years___________
1940-42
1943-45
1946-48
1949-51
1952-54
1955-57

No. of Cases____________
6
8
9
7
10
13
____
Total: 53

But the figures supplied by Dr. J. H. Lade in his 1964 letter to Science, which I had used in mystudy, were (when regrouped in similar three-year periods):
Birth Years___________
1943-45
1946-48
1949-51
1952-54
1955-57

No. of Cases____________
9
8
9
15
13
____
Total: 54

This was indeed peculiar. Five cases were missing from Greenwald’s table in the critical 1952-54
period, yet the overall total number of cases was nearly the same in both tables. Examination ofGreenwald’s table showed that he had added a new category not present in Lade’s: the 1940-42
period, for which he listed six cases. He had also deleted two cases from the 1949-51 period, with thefinal result that the total number of cases was nearly the same for both tables—even though the exact
five cases that indicated a large increase in leukemia during the critical years 1952-54 were missing.
Why had these five cases been removed? I re-examined the correspondence I had received fromGreenwald. In it he stated that inaccuracies had been found in Lade’s table among five of the eightcases born in the year 1953. But should these five cases have been eliminated from the 1952-54

- 72 -

entry? The answer could be found by examining Greenwald’s critique, in which he described thenature of the inaccuracies in these cases. He stated that two of the children had actually been born in1952 instead of 1953, while another had been born in 1954. But in his table in the Times, Greenwald
had used the time period 1952-54, not 1953. Therefore these cases should have been included in his
table by his own criteria. The fourth missing case was born in Montgomery County, New York,according to Greenwald, and not in the Albany-Troy area. But Montgomery County is right next toAlbany-Troy, so this case could certainly have been caused by the fallout. And the same would holdtrue for the fifth and last child, who was born in New Mexico, according to Greenwald, and brought toTroy as an infant, and thus also would have been exposed to the fallout in the diet. I had
hypothesized in my study that the fallout could have caused leukemia by genetic damage to theparents before conception or by direct damage either to children in the womb or to young infants.
Therefore, there was no reason to exclude any of the five cases from the evidence. If they had been
included, Greenwald’s table would have shown fifteen cases for 1952-54, a doubling over the averagerate for the previous years. Furthermore, the thirteen cases in the 1955-57 period were consistent withthe hypothesis of genetically caused leukemia.
Other distortions of data were present in the critique by Dr. Greenwald and Mrs. Kinch. But how
would the general public ever suspect? This was the voice of the New York State Health Department
and not the AEC. Readers of the nation’s press would simply assume that responsible andindependent public health officials had proven that fallout was harmless after all.
During this period, amid the resultant publicity surrounding the article in the Observer, I was
invited to appear on the NBC-TV "Today" show. According to Hugh Downs, one of the reporters on
the program, the AEC had learned of the plans for my appearance and called the producer, urging him
not to invite me. When the producer refused, the AEC urged that a scientist holding an opposing
view should be present to give an immediate rebuttal. When this also was turned down, the AEC
insisted on equal time as soon as possible after my appearance so that two independent scientists
would be able to present the argument against my thesis. NBC finally agreed to provide equal time
the following week.
On the program itself, Hugh Downs brought this out into the open: "I was just going to say that theAtomic Energy Commission called us yesterday. They were concerned about your appearance on the
program today."I asked the identity of the independent scientists whom the AEC wanted to present. Downs repliedthat one was a physician by the name of Dr. Leonard Sagan from the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, andthe other was a Dr. John Storer from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Both, of course, hadworked until very recently for the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine.
As to the reason why the AEC had urged NBC to cancel my appearance, Hugh Downs reported:"They say that their experiments with animals show that there is no damage to offspring at all fromparent animals given strontium 90 in those low dosages that we get." This was in complete
contradiction with the evidence submitted at Hanford by Moskalev and numerous other independentscientists. The explanation lay, as usual, in the manner in which the AEC studies were constructed.
This point was to be confirmed a few months later in a most unexpected manner by a chief scientist
at one of the AEC’s own laboratories. I had received an invitation to present a paper on my otherresearch work regarding the reduction of diagnostic X-ray doses at a meeting in San Francisco in
October 1969. I was also asked whether I would be willing to debate my fallout thesis on the
Berkeley campus with Dr. Arthur Tamplin, who had written a critique of my work that was about tobe published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and to which I had just written a reply. Tamplin
was a biophysicist at the nearby Livermore Laboratory, operated for the AEC by the University ofCalifornia. During the question period following our debate, someone in the audience brought up the- 73 -

argument that AEC studies had found no significant increase in mortality among the offspring ofexperimental animals fed strontium 90 for long periods of time. Immediately, someone else in theaudience stood up and asked to comment on this question. It turned out to be Dr. John Gofman,
Tamplin’s supervisor, who was Director of the Biomedical Division of Livermore and an Associate
Director of the laboratory. This was the man the AEC had placed in charge of all theirradiobiological studies at Livermore back in 1963, when the hazard from internal fallout doses firstaroused widespread public concern. For years Gofman had been studying the possible connection
between radiation, chromosome defects, and cancer. He told the audience that he had investigated all
the animal experiments carried out by the AEC, and in no case had they been designed to detect thekind of small reduction in birthweight and ability to fight infections that I had suggested as the likely
cause for the increased infant mortality in man. He concluded that, to the best of his knowledge, there
was not a single animal experiment that would contradict my hypothesis, and with that he sat down.
Within less than a year, both Gofman and Tamplin publicly denounced as complete falsehood theposition of the AEC as expressed by Sagan and Storer on the "Today" program, namely, that "thelevels of radiation to which the American public was exposed from fallout have been harmless." As
told by the two scientists themselves in the pages of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, their public
denunciation of the AEC’s position on low-level radiation effects was precipitated by the attempt of
the AEC’s top management to force Tamplin to suppress his own independent calculations, made in
his original critique of my findings, that perhaps as many as 8000 infant deaths per year might havetaken place as a result of genetic damage from nuclear testing. Dr. Spofford English, the AssistantGeneral Manager in charge of the AEC’s entire research program, together with the head of theDivision of Biology and Medicine, Dr. John Totter, as well as Dr. Leonard Sagan and Dr. John B.
Storer, had indicated to Gofman that Tamplin should publish his critique minus his own estimate of
the possible fetal and infant deaths, thus effectively keeping this information from the public.
As Gofman and Tamplin put it: "They wanted us by omission to support their incredible position
as stated on the ‘Today’ show, and to put Tamplin’s estimate into a less widely read scholarly journal,
where it would evidently not be seen by the scientific community at large, the general public, andtheir elected representatives in Congress."
Subsequently, Dr. Gofman resigned his position as Associate Director of the Livermore
Laboratories, and all but one of Tamplin’s research group of twelve people were taken away from him
six months later. Both scientists have continued to testify before various congressional committees
that there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that presently permitted radiation exposurelevels must be cut back to virtually zero. They have proposed that no release whatsoever ofradioactive materials into the environment should be permitted without a full, nonpartial,
interdisciplinary examination of each situation. And they have assembled a vast body of data
indicating that if the radiation doses now allowed by AEC regulations (an average of 170 millirads
per year for the entire population and not more than 500 for any single individual) were to be received
by the entire U.S. population as a result of peacetime uses of nuclear energy, there would be at least
32,000 and perhaps as many as 64,000 additional deaths each year from cancer and leukemia alone.
And these figures did not even include fetal and infant mortality or any more subtle long-range effects
on health.
At the hearings on the environmental effects of electric power generation held by the Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy in November 1969 and January 1970, Gofman and Tamplin presented
their conclusion that a direct relationship exists between low-level radiation doses and thedevelopment of cancer, not only in the fetus and infant, but also in the mature adult. Furthermore,they urged an immediate tenfold reduction in the permissible radiation doses to the general populationfrom all peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

- 74 -

14
The Price of Secrecy

AS LATE AS the spring of 1970, I believed that the radiation resulting from the normal operation of
nuclear power plants was so low as to present no significant hazard to public health. This belief wasbased on the results of an old study of emissions from the first commercial nuclear electric power
plant, located at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Conducted almost ten years earlier, it had measured theradioactivity in the cooling water taken from the Ohio River both before and after it had passed
through the plant. It found that the plant added so little radioactivity to the water that there weretimes when the chemically filtered water leaving the plant was actually less radioactive than the riverwater entering the plant—especially during periods of heavy fallout.
It therefore seemed reasonable to expect that if such low levels of radioactive waste releases had
been achieved in 1957 in the very first nuclear power reactor built in this country, then the later, moreadvanced plants would release even less. But early in 1970 I discovered that this was not the case. In
the published record of the hearings on the environmental effects of electric power generation, heldby the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in November 1969, there were tables supplied by the AEC
listing the amounts of radioactivity discharged into the water and air by commercial nuclear power
plants in the United States. Many plants were listed as actually releasing hundreds of thousands oftimes as much radioactivity into the air as others. For example, in 1967 two reactors had discharged
as much as 700,000 curies, while another had released only 2.4 curies, or some 300,000 times less.
These were truly enormous quantities. Some of the many different isotopes contained in thesegaseous and liquid discharges, such as cesium and strontium, were regarded as hazardous at levels as
low as one ten-billionth of a curie per day in milk or food. A single curie of iodine 131 could make10 billion quarts of milk unfit for continuous consumption, according even to the existing guidelines
adopted by the federal government. Such large releases of radioactivity were in fact comparable tofallout from small tactical nuclear weapons. Although dilution in the air would reduce the hazard topeople living more than fifty miles away from these plants, those living nearby were unknowingly
accepting vastly greater risks to the health of their children.
Furthermore, the permissible levels listed for many of the reactors were enormous. For theDresden reactor, located some fifty miles from Chicago, which had emitted 260,000 curies ofradioactive gases in 1967, the permissible amount had been set at 22,000,000 curies per year by the
AEC. Thus, in terms of permissible levels, the huge amount actually released could be, and was,cited by the power company as representing only about 1 percent of the maximum levels allowed.
Curiously, there was no listing given in the record of the hearings for the Shippingport plant. Why
had the AEC left it out of the material presented to Congress? A few months later, at a meeting of the
Health Physics Society, Charles Weaver, Director of the Division of Environmental Radiation of the
Public Health Service’s Bureau of Radiological Health, presented the results of studies just publishedin March of 1970 on the radioactivity emitted by a series of nuclear plants. According to his report, in

- 75 -

1968 Shippingport had emitted a grand total of only 0.001 curies into the air, or 240 million times lessthan was released the same year by the Dresden reactor near Chicago, Illinois. And the same report
also explained why some reactors released so much more radioactivity than others. They weregrouped according to type of design, and it was only the boiling-water-type reactors that showed suchvery large releases, while the pressurized-water reactors, which included Shippingport, consistently
showed the lowest waste discharges. Some of the commercial pressurized reactors did, however, emitmuch more than others, and all of them discharged significant quantities of radioactive tritium into thecooling water, which was then released into the surrounding rivers and lakes.
Why weren’t all the reactors designed like Shippingport, so as to release the smallest amounts ofradioactivity? The answer could be found in the history of reactor development. The pressurizedwater reactors, like Shippingport, were originally designed for use in nuclear submarines byWestinghouse under the direction of Admiral Hyman C. Rickover. Since they had to operate for long
periods in a sealed, submerged vessel, these rectors had to be designed with a minimum of radioactive
leakage either into the submarine, where the crew had to live for months as a time, or into the water,where the bubbles of radioactive gases would permit easy detection of the submarine’s position. The
Shippingport reactor was in fact a prototype naval propulsion plant owned by the Navy and the AEC,
and not a commercial power plant at all.
Meanwhile, the General Electric Company was encouraged by the AEC to quickly develop a new
type of large power reactor that would be cheap and efficient enough to compete successfully with thefossil-fuel-burning electric power plants in widespread use. For the more complex pressurized reactor
with its double cooling loop, although safer, was too expensive. And so GE developed the much
simpler boiling-water reactor. This design, in which economic considerations were the major factor,
sacrificed protection against radioactive leaks in favor of lower cost and greater efficiency ofoperation. Experiments showed that corrosion was a more serious problem in the single-coolant-loop
GE design. Large amounts of fission products would inevitably build up rapidly in the coolant andescape through pipe joints, valve packings, and high-speed rotating shaft-seals to be discharged into
the air and water. Thus, if a cheap, economical way to generate large quantities of electric power was
to be demonstrated quickly so as to convince the utilities to go nuclear, there was only one solution:
Set the permissible amounts of radioactive waste discharges into the environment so high that theactual releases would always be well below this limit.
By 1959, the first large boiling-water reactor plant was completed at Dresden, Illinois, and in
August of 1960, the first electricity from the 200-megawatt Dresden generators began to flow into thepower grid of the Commonwealth Edison Company, serving the people of Chicago. The releases ofradioactive gases into the atmosphere were relatively low in the first full year of operation, and sowere the discharges of tritium, strontium 90, and other isotopes into the Illinois River. In 1961 only
0.158 percent of the maximum allowable amount had been released into the air, and even liquid
wastes were held down to 6.3 percent of permitted levels. Compared to the amounts of radioactivity
then being released into the water and the air by the renewed testing of nuclear weapons, this wascertainly quite small.
But signs of trouble began to appear the very next year. By the end of 1962, corrosion had begun,and the amount of radioactive gas that had to be discharged into the air increased by almost ten times
to 284,000 curies. Even the radioactivity discharged into the river rose more than three times. By
1963 emission of radioactive gases had been successfully brought back down to 71,600 curies by the
replacement of leaking fuel rods, but the corrosion continued, and gaseous releases shot up to 521,000
curies in 1964.
No longer were the radiation doses to the surrounding population negligibly small compared tobackground radiation, as everyone had hoped. Annual average external doses to the population

- 76 -

within a few miles of the plant could be estimated at 20 to 30 millirads by 1964. This was fast
approaching the 88 millirads that the people in the area normally received from cosmic radiation andnatural radioactivity in the soil, and it compared with what had been produced by weapons fallout.
It was becoming clear that the permissible levels of radiation from nuclear plants could not belowered, as some scientists were beginning to urge, without having to shut the huge plant down only a
few years after it had been built at a cost of well over a hundred million dollars. In fact, pressures
were actually building up from industry and the military to raise the permissible discharges to theenvironment from nuclear activities, especially in the event of an accidental heavy release from areactor or from fallout if weapons tests in the atmosphere were ever renewed. And so, in 1964 and1965, the director of the Federal Radiation Council, Dr. Paul C. Tompkins, who had previously served
as Deputy Director of the AEC’s Office of Radiation Standards and Director of Research in the
Bureau of Radiological Health of the U.S. Public Health Service, announced a twentyfold rise in thepermissible amounts of the most hazardous isotopes in milk in the event of an accidental release. For
the first time in the history of radiation standards the permissible doses to the public were raised rather
than lowered, despite the mounting evidence that there was no safe threshold dose of radiation aspresented in August 1963 before the Joint Committee. And this was done quietly by presidential
executive order, for which no public hearing is required.
When in 1966 the gaseous discharges from the Dresden plant had climbed to 736,000 curies, ormore than twenty times what they had been in 1961 and more than twenty million times more thanShippingport had released the same year, a decision was made to start replacing the corroding
stainless-steel-jacketed fuel rods with more resistant, but also more expensive, zircalloy-clad fuel. By
this time, the liquid releases, containing iodine, strontium, cesium, and other highly toxic elements,
had risen to forty-three times their initial value, and, instead of being a small fraction of thepermissible level, they had actually reached a full third of the AEC standards. Enormous quantities ofthese isotopes went into the Illinois River, flowing past Peoria, where the river water began to be used
for drinking, and on to the Gulf of Mexico, concentrating thousands of times higher in the fish and in
the birds that fed on them.
The example of Dresden clearly showed that it would not be possible to lower permissible
radiation levels without having to shut down the whole series of boiling-water reactors that had now
gone into operation all over the United States, each having cost some one hundred million dollars.
And construction would have to be halted on dozens of even larger reactors in various stages ofdevelopment throughout the United States and the rest of the world.
On June 6, 1970, just a few months after all the new reactor emissions data had been published, theBritish medical journal Lancet printed a full account of Dr. Stewart’s fifteen-year study of theincrease in leukemia and cancer among the nineteen million children in England and Wales that wereborn between 1943 and 1965. Her conclusions were now statistically unassailable: doubling thenumber of X-ray pictures doubled the risk of leukemia and other cancers, and there was no evidence
for a safe threshold even at a single diagnostic X-ray. One modern pelvic X-ray gives about the same
dose to the fetus as is permitted for the general population by the existing federal radiation standards(175 millirads). And when the radiation was given in the first three months of pregnancy, Dr.
Stewart’s data showed that a mere 80 millirads—about the dose that was received from externalradiation alone by the people living near the Dresden reactor in the peak year of emission—would
double the spontaneous rate of leukemia and cancer in the children before they reached the age of ten.
And there had been significant rises in leukemia and fetal and infant mortality in the Troy area atsimilar external dose levels of only 50 to 100 millirads.
There was thus little doubt that detectable health effects should have occurred in the areas
surrounding the Dresden plant and other reactors. But it would require a considerable effort to collect- 77 -

the data from the volumes of the U.S. Vital Statistics, and I had no one to help in such a task, for I had
been unable to obtain any funds for such studies. Fortunately, a group of students who had become
interested in environmental pollution as a result of Earth Day indicated a willingness to help. The
group divided itself into small teams, and each took on the task of gathering the data for a particular
nuclear installation.
Since most of the fission products emitted by reactors are short-lived, persisting only for anywherefrom a few days to a few months, it appeared that the effects on infant mortality would be sharp and
immediate, just as had occurred with the short-lived isotopes in the case of fallout. There would
probably be no significant residual effect, and so the rises and falls in infant mortality should correlate
closely with the rises and falls in the reactor releases.
In October 1970 we examined the infant mortality rates in the counties around the Dresden reactor.
In 1966, within a year after the emissions rose sharply from the relatively low value of 71,600 curies
in 1963 to 610,000 curies in 1965, the infant mortality rate in Grundy County, where the reactor was
located, and in adjacent Livingston County, jumped by 140 percent, or to more than twice its 1964
value. While only thirteen infants in these two counties had died in the year after the minimum
radioactive emission, by 1966 this number had jumped to thirty. And the number of babies born livein these two counties actually decreased slightly from 1170 to 1082 in 1966, so that the jump in rates
per 1000 births was actually even larger.
There could be little doubt about the statistical significance. Established statistical estimation
techniques showed that the possibility of such a fluctuation being accidental was much less than one
in 10,000. But this was not all. The students had gathered the data for all five counties surrounding
Grundy County, as well as for a control group of six counties as far to the west and north of Grundy
as possible within the state of Illinois, counties that bordered neither on the contaminated Illinois
River nor on the Mississippi, where the effluent from other nuclear plants upstream in Minnesota andWisconsin might lead to rises in mortality.
And when we carried out the comparison in the change of infant mortality rates for these twogroups of rural counties of similar climate, medical care, and socio-economic character, the result waseven more conclusive: While the mortality rates in the counties around the reactor had increased anaverage of 48 percent, the upwind control counties actually showed a decline of 2 percent in theiraverage infant mortality rates.
Furthermore, with the prevailing westerly winds, the radioactive gas would drift eastward to Cook
County, where Chicago was located, with a population of some five million. Since the radioactivity
would have become much diluted with distance, only a small rise in mortality rates of a few percent
would be likely. But since so many more children were born every year in Chicago than in Grundy
County, the total number of additional deaths would be significant. And when we checked thefigures, this is exactly what had taken place: Infant mortality in Cook County had gone up by 1.5
percent, during a time when in New York City it had declined by 6.7 percent.
Since some six million people lived within a radius of 50 to 60 miles from the Dresden reactor, andsince the total population of Illinois was ten million, there should have been a significant rise in infantmortality for Illinois as a whole. And there was indeed—from an all-time low point of 23.9 in 1963
to a peak in 1966 of 25.6, in exact coincidence with the peak of gaseous emissions from the Dresden
reactor. This was followed by a renewed decline in both recorded gaseous releases and infantmortality as the defective fuel rods were replaced.
With the advice of Dr. Morris DeGroot, head of the Statistics Department, Carnegie-Mellon
University, who had become interested in the problem, we applied further statistical tests. The results
were always the same: A significant rise and decline in infant mortality in Illinois compared to allother neighboring states in the northern U.S., correlating directly with the rise and decline of

- 78 -

radioactive emissions from the Dresden reactor. Relative to Ohio, a few hundred miles to the east,
where the infant mortality rate had been the same as in Illinois before the reactor had been started up
in 1960, the excess infant deaths in Illinois for the years 1960-68 numbered close to 4000. And foreach infant dying in the first year of life, it was well known that there were perhaps three to four thatwould live with serious genetic defects, crippling congenital malformations, and mental retardation,afflictions in many ways far worse than death in early infancy.
The largest numbers of deaths among the newborn infants were caused by asphyxia or respiratory
distress, including hyaline membrane disease, long known to be associated with immaturity, and also
general immaturity and "crib death." These were the very causes that had risen sharply all over theworld during the period of nuclear testing and had only begun to decline again a few years after the
test-ban treaty came into force. Yet here in Illinois, they were still increasing. And among the older
infants, noninfectious respiratory disease deaths rose almost 90 percent, and bronchitis almost 50
percent, in the two years after 1964.
In fact, for all ages, there was a rapid rise in deaths due to such lung diseases as emphysema andbronchitis after the onset of the Dresden emissions. The rise was far greater than in more heavily
polluted New York. In the ten years between 1949 and 1959, these death rates in Illinois increased byonly 9 percent, but they rose by 75 percent in the short period from 1959, when the reactor wascompleted, to 1966, the last year for which data were available. This was more than eight times theprevious annual rate of increase.
Thus, the radioactive gases released from reactor stacks, gases which had been widely regarded as
relatively harmless, now appeared to be far more serious in their effects than had been anticipated.
Although these gases do not concentrate and remain in the human body, they do dissolve readily inthe bloodstream and especially in the fatty parts of many cell membranes when they are inhaled overperiods of hours or days. And some of them transform themselves into the biologically damaging
cesium, strontium, and yttrium inside the body. As a result, the internal radiation damage to the small
air sacs of the lungs, which are lined with cells that produce a crucial fatty substance (lipid) that acts
to keep these air sacs open when the air is exhaled, could be far more serious in causing respiratory
damage than the external radiation dose from the radioactive gases outside the body.
There was still another way, more indirect but more efficient, in which small amounts ofradioactivity could produce deaths from respiratory problems, especially in the newborn. Some of theradioactive chemicals produced by the fission of uranium—such as yttrium 90, the daughter productof strontium—were known to concentrate in the pituitary gland. And recent studies had revealed thatthe critical lipid needed to prevent the lung from collapsing was produced in special cells of the lungunder the chemical control of the pituitary gland in the last few weeks of fetal development justbefore birth. Thus, even slight damage to the pituitary gland from radioactivity in the air or in themother’s diet could lead to a slight retardation in development, so that the lung would not be quite
ready to function properly immediately after birth. And the result would be that otherwise apparently
normal babies would be born underweight and would succumb to respiratory failure shortly after
birth.
The rise in infant deaths from respiratory diseases associated with immaturity also indicated thatthe atmospheric reactor releases should be causing an increase in low-birthweight babies. This
expectation was confirmed by the data for Grundy County, where the Dresden reactor was located.
The number of low-birthweight babies born in this county rose and declined in exact synchronism
with the measured gaseous emissions, the rises going as high as 140 percent. No such increases in thenumber of underweight babies took place in the six control counties more than 40 miles west of thereactor.
The sudden rise in emphysema and bronchitis all over the United States and other countries, noted- 79 -

by I. M. Moriyama, followed the onset of large-scale atmospheric releases of radioactive gas and dustin the early 1950s, also fitted the hypothesis that radioactivity in the air was causing lung damage.
When we plotted the emphysema and bronchitis death rates for the states where ordinary air pollution
was lowest but radioactivity in the air itself was highest, such as dry, dusty Wyoming, Utah, and New
Mexico, where the winds picked up the radioactive dust again and again, we found that after declining
in the 1940s, the respiratory death rates per 100,000 people suddenly began to rise sharply between
1946 and 1951, exceeding those in the much more polluted but higher-rainfall states of the east suchas New York and Massachusetts, where the radioactivity was cleansed from the atmosphere andsoaked into the ground by the rains. By the early 1960s, even in the heavily polluted coal-and steelproducing state of Pennsylvania, these types of respiratory deaths, normally attributed only toordinary air pollution, were lower than in the clean mountain air of Wyoming.
Clearly, air pollution from ordinary fossil-fuel-burning power plants, which had doubled steadily
every ten years for many decades, could therefore not be blamed for all of the alarming rise in lungdisease deaths. Instead, all the evidence pointed to radioactive air pollution, both from fallout andfrom nuclear power plants, as the greatest single contributor to the rise in all types of chronic lungdisease around the world, multiplying the effects of the other pollutants—including cigarettes, as in
the case of the uranium miners.
Furthermore, there was one source of radioactive pollution that was potentially even more serious
than the boiling-water reactors. This was the effluent from the nuclear-fuel processing plants. These
plants recovered uranium from the spent reactor fuel elements, as well as plutonium, which could besold back to the government for use in building bombs and missile warheads. In the process,radioactive gases and large amounts of other fission products were discharged into the air andadjacent rivers. Here all the efforts to prevent the escape of radioactivity from the reactors
themselves were therefore completely nullified.
The students gathered the data for the first commercial fuel-reprocessing plant, located in West
Valley, New York, some 25 miles south of Buffalo. This plant had gone into operation in April 1966,
and reports on its radioactive gas releases, as well as measurements of liquid waste releases and doses
from the food produced nearby, had just been published by the U.S. Bureau of Radiological Health in
May 1970. When we looked at the available data for infant mortality in Cattaraugus County, where
the plant was located, we saw that infant mortality had jumped up 54 percent between 1966 and 1967,
far above the rate for New York State as a whole. Once again, every adjacent county had gone up
dramatically at the same time, while the next ring of counties rose only slightly. And those beyond 50
miles all showed declines in their infant death rate, as did New York State as a whole and all theadjoining New England states to the east.
But this situation was not confined to New York State. In some of the counties in Pennsylvania
just to the south of the plant, the same rise in infant mortality had taken place. Warren County,
directly to the southwest along the valley of the Allegheny River, had gone up almost exactly thesame amount as Cattaraugus County. And along the Allegheny River below Cattaraugus County
where the plant was located, infant mortality had either jumped up or refused to decline further, theeffect diminishing with distance all the way down to Pittsburgh.
The map of the area made the explanation evident: The small tributaries that flowed into theAllegheny River as it passed through New York State originated within a few miles of the fuelprocessing plant near West Valley, where the radioactivity discharged from the stack and the storage
reservoirs seeped into the watershed for the entire Allegheny River system. Along the Allegheny near
the Pennsylvania border, infant mortality had risen 56 percent in Warren County and 48 percent in
Venango, through which it passed next. Even as far away as Armstrong County, more than 100 miles
downriver, infant mortality had gone up 4 percent that same year, while Pennsylvania as a whole- 80 -

showed no such rise, though it was not declining as rapidly as rural states having no nuclear facilities.
Evidently it was not just the inhalation of the atmospheric gases that was important in infantmortality, but also their deposition by rainfall in the headwaters of the Allegheny river, contaminatingwater, fish, milk, and vegetables with radioactive cesium, strontium, iodine, and other toxic elements.
When we checked the levels of radioactivity in milk reported by the Public Health Service, we
found the confirmation of what we had begun to suspect: Of all the milk-sampling stations in theentire United States reporting for the 12-month period ending in March 1970, only those in
Pennsylvania showed a level of short-lived iodine 131 greater than 1 micromicrocurie per liter. And
there was a more disturbing piece of evidence: strontium 90 had climbed back up to more than half
the level that existed at the peak of atmospheric weapons testing, and it was still rising. The West
Valley plant was the first commercial facility of its type in the United States, and it emitted far greater
amounts of toxic radioactive elements into the environment than did any single nuclear reactor,
including Dresden. Yet many more of these plants were planned for the future.
There simply could be no further doubt as to the cause of the rising infant mortality around theWest Valley plant: Measurements carried out by the Public Health Service and published in May
1970 showed that, aside from the dose produced by the krypton gases released into the air, doses ashigh as 250 millirads from cesium and 532 millirads from strontium would be received in a single
year by any individuals who ate significant amounts of the area’s heavily contaminated fish and deer.
These were doses much greater than the 100 millirads normally received from natural backgroundradiation. In fact, they far exceeded even the annual doses during the height of nuclear testing. And
these dose calculations were only for the adult, and not for the much more sensitive fetus and infant,where the even more intensive concentration in various critical organs would make the doses far
higher still.
The findings were further confirmed when the infant mortality rates in the counties around the
AEC’s Hanford Laboratories in Washington were graphed. It was at Hanford that nuclear fuel was
first processed to produce the plutonium for the Trinity explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in
1945. During this period large quantities of radioactivity were released by the Hanford plant. These
releases had explained the early infant mortality rise in Montana and North Dakota that showed up on
the Trinity map. But at the time, I did not examine the effect on the counties around the Hanford
works itself. Now, when we compared the infant mortality rate for 1945, after the emissions had
occurred, with the rate for 1943, before the plant had been started up, we found that the rate for
Benton County, where the plant was located, had jumped 160 percent. Umatilla, the adjoining county
to the south, had gone up 60 percent, while Franklin, directly to the east, increased 50 percent andWalla Walla, just to the southeast of Franklin, rose 10 percent. Yet infant mortality for the state ofWashington as a whole declined, as it also did in Oregon.
And within a few more months, the results for Consolidated Edison’s Indian Point plant on the
Hudson River in Westchester County, 20 miles north of New York City, disclosed similar rises anddeclines in infant mortality that correlated with the rises and falls in the plant’s radioactive releases,
including observable effects on New York City itself. Yet this was a pressurized-water reactor, thetype that generally had the lowest releases of all, and it was located in an area of excellent medicalcare. Evidently it had not been possible to maintain the standards of a naval-type plant and remaincommercially competitive with the boiling-water plants. Similar situations existed around all thereactors we checked in various parts of the country. Even the small research-type reactors, such as
the TRIGA, installed on college campuses and in laboratories all over the world, appeared to becapable of causing the same effect. When figures on the year-by-year emissions of the TRIGA
reactor at Pennsylvania State College became available, we compared the infant mortality rates in thesurrounding town, State College, with those in Lebanon City, a similar town some 100 miles to the- 81 -

east. State College showed precipitous rises and falls in infant mortality, corresponding closely withthe rises and falls in emissions from the TRIGA. The State College rate went from 9.9 per 1000
births in 1963 to 24.7 in 1968. During the same period, the rate in Lebanon City, as well as in
Pennsylvania as a whole, declined steadily from the peak reached during the atmospheric tests of
1961-62.
Since the population of State College was comparatively small, however, a remote possibility
existed that these increases could be due to chance fluctuations. So we next examined infantmortality rates around the TRIGA on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, where thepopulation was much larger. From 1962, when the reactor commenced operation, through 1965, theyear it reached full power, infant mortality increased by 300 percent. In this study, for the first time,
we also had an opportunity to look at another category of possible radiation effects: deaths fromcongenital malformations. During the same period in Urbana these deaths increased by 600 percent,from 3.5 per 100,000 in 1962 to 23.5 in 1965. And in 1968, after the reactor was shut off, they turned
downward to 6.6 per 100,000, while infant mortality showed a similar drop. In McLean County,
which extended 20 to 60 miles northwest of Urbana and thus would not have been significantly
exposed to the effluent, both categories of death declined steadily throughout the same period. The
surprising strength of the effects from the TRIGA emissions, which were much lower than theemissions from the larger reactors we studied, could be explained by the fact that the TRIGAs werelocated right in the middle of densely populated areas. Therefore, the emissions would reach thedeveloping infants in much more concentrated form, with much less time for the short-lived isotopes
to lose their radioactivity.
It was the announced intention of the AEC, numerous public utilities, and the government that thiscountry’s energy needs would be supplied largely by nuclear-power reactors in the near future. Only
fifteen or twenty such reactors were in actual operation, but more than a hundred were underconstruction or planned, as were the necessary number of fuel-reprocessing plants. But if our findings
proved correct, then the entire program, with its phenomenally large investment of funds andscientific energy, would become virtually useless in its present form. Considering the apparent effects
from normal operation of these plants, during which no more than one ten-millionth of their stored-up
radioactivity had ever been discharged, a single large accidental release could be a national
catastrophe of nuclear warfare dimensions. If the general public grasped this fact, then most people
would probably consider the risk of this technology far too great to be accepted. But through all theyears while reactor technology was being developed, the possible dangers of low-level radiation—either from fallout or from nuclear power plants—had been publicly minimized by the military, byindustry, and by the health agencies that had given their stamp of approval to nuclear activities. The
warning signs had been ignored or suppressed. And little or no funds had been made available fordevelopment of the potentially safer and more efficient alternatives to nuclear power, such as coalgassification or magnetohydrodynamics, which would permit the continued use of the still-enormous
reserves of fossil fuels. Little or nothing was done to find means of harnessing the vast stores ofgeothermal energy in the crust of the earth, or the pollution-free energy of the sun. Yet there waslittle question that these alternative means of electric power production could have been successfully
developed.
Our reactor findings were met with opposition as strenuous as that which greeted the evidence on
the effects of fallout. Notable among our critics was Edythalena Tompkins, a public-health scientist
who was recently placed in charge of all studies of radiation effects on the population by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. Edythalena Tompkins was also the wife of Paul C. Tompkins, thedirector of the Federal Radiation Council who in 1964 had presided over the first raising of
permissible radiation levels in history. Additionally, she had been a critic of the fallout evidence,- 82 -

particularly that relating to the effects of the Trinity test. In the spring of 1970, a student at thePittsburgh School of Public Health had informed me that Mrs. Tompkins had told him there wereserious errors in my map of infant mortality after the Trinity explosion. My map had shown no rise ininfant mortality among the white population in three states that were in the path of the fallout—
Oklahoma, Florida, and South Carolina. The explanation for this was that according to the official
weather map these states had received little or no rain and thus little fallout during the week following
the Trinity explosion. This fact had provided an important confirmation of my hypothesis. However,Mrs. Tompkins had told this student that just the opposite had been the case: The infant mortality inthese states had actually risen, just as it had in the states that received the rains. He then gave me aseries of five maps that had been prepared by Mrs. Tompkins, and on all of these maps the three key
states did indeed show sharp increases in white infant mortality during the five years following
Trinity.
This appeared to be a devastating piece of evidence, but my associates and I rechecked our figuresand found that only in these three crucial states did they differ from those on Mrs. Thompkins’s maps.
I suggested to the student that he himself recalculate the figures. After doing so he informed me that
our figures were the correct ones and then called Mrs. Tompkins for an explanation. Mrs. Tompkins
said that she had evidently made a mistake, but that in any event these maps were not intended for
publication. Subsequently, however, AEC representatives and members of the Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy stated publicly that my infant mortality figures for the states that had low rainfalls
after the Trinity test had been proved to be inaccurate and that the true figures completely invalidated
my conclusions. Yet the only time these particular figures had ever been challenged was by Mrs.
Tompkins.
After our group began making the reactor findings public, Mrs. Tompkins, by now with the newly
formed Environmental Protection Agency to which she and her husband had been transferred, began
conducting her own studies of this subject too. Her method was to calculate the infant mortality rates
in a series of circular areas surrounding the reactor, and compare these figures for five-year periods
before and after the reactor had gone into operation. She concluded that even the most heavily
emitting boiling-water reactors had no detectable effect on infant mortality.
Since vital statistics are recorded by county and not by circular regions around reactors, however,Mrs. Thompkins’s method first of all necessitated that she make her own estimates of both the
population figures and the infant mortality rates. And her use of concentric ring-shaped areas omitted
a very important consideration: The emissions from reactors are not evenly distributed in all
directions. Their distribution depends not only on the direction of the prevailing winds, or on
geographical features such as high mountains and resulting differences in rainfall, but also on thediscretion of the reactor engineers, who can and do time the releases to coincide with a certain winddirection that may or may not be the prevalent one. And then, of course, the counties that take theirdrinking water and fish from the rivers, lakes, or oceans into which the reactor releases its liquid
effluent would also be expected to show sharper increases than the others. Thus, highly asymmetricalsituations can develop around reactors, situations in which the counties most heavily exposed to theeffluent show sharp rises and falls in infant mortality that correlate directly with rises and falls in thereactor releases, while in other counties, such as those upwind to the west of Dresden, the rate may
continue the decline that began shortly after the cessation of atmospheric testing. Thus, if all thesurrounding counties are averaged together over five-year periods, as in Mrs. Tompkins’s method, theoverall figure may show little or no increase in infant mortality. Furthermore, in the case of reactorsthat began operation in the early 1960s in areas that had received heavy fallout (as had the threeboiling-water reactors studied by Mrs. Tompkins), it is possible by this technique to demonstrate an
actual decline in infant mortality after the reactors were started up and the fallout levels died down.

- 83 -

But in all of these cases, if one examines the yearly figures, the infant mortality rates in the counties
heavily exposed to the reactor effluent show sharp rises and falls in direct correlation with thereleases, declining steadily with distance in any direction from the reactor when the counties are ofsimilar socio-economic and climatic character.
Significantly, an independent statistical study of this subject was presented at a scientific meetingin July 1971 by Dr. Morris H. DeGroot, head of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at
Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. DeGroot found that infant mortality increases did take place inclose correlation with releases of radioactivity from the heavily emitting reactors at Dresden, Illinois;
Indian Point, New York; and Brookhaven, Long Island. Perhaps most important was his finding thatin the area around the reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania—the only other reactor studied by Dr.
DeGroot—there was no correlation between releases and changes in infant mortality. As the official
release figures showed, the Shippingport reactor had the lowest gaseous emissions of any reactor in
the country, since it was a non-commercial naval submarine type of plant.
But later in 1971, the most comprehensive independent study of all was completed. It was
conducted by Dr. Lester B. Lave and his associates, Dr. Samuel Leinhardt and Martin B. Kaye, of the
Graduate School of Business Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University. This was a study offallout effects, but the results apply equally to reactor emissions. The three scientists concluded that,during the time period studied (1961-67), fallout appears to have been the single most importantfactor affecting fetal, infant, and adult mortality, more important than ordinary air pollution. Throughthe use of computerized statistical techniques they corrected their estimates to account for the effectsof such variables as sulfur dioxide, socio-economic factors, background radiation, and others in 61
metropolitan areas of the United States. The principal findings and their implications may be briefly
summarized as follows:
Infant mortality is strongly associated with levels of strontium 90 and cesium 137 in milk,
especially the former. The association is such that for every single micromicrocurie of strontium 90
per liter of milk there is an increase of 12 infant deaths per 100,000 births. Since, during 1961-67,
there was an average of 15.8 micromicrocuries per liter of milk in the U.S., then these findings
indicate that during this period there were close to 7600 infant deaths every year due to fallout. For
the world population, this would mean an extra 100,000 infant deaths per year. But during the peakof testing, these levels reached between 50 and 100 micromicrocuries per liter in many locations
around the world, and as late as 1971 they were still between 5 and 15 in most parts of the northernhemisphere. And they then began to rise again following the large French and Chinese test series andthe rapid growth in releases from nuclear reactors and fuel reprocessing plants.
Dr. Lave’s group also found that mortality rates for the whole population—in other words, allcauses of death among all ages—were also highly correlated with fallout levels. The calculations
showed that there were 1.29 extra deaths per 100,000 people for each single micromicrocurie ofstrontium 90 per liter of milk. At the 1961-67 levels, this amounts to some 40,000 extra deaths eachyear in the United States, and thus some 600,000 among the world’s population of over three billion
people.
And during the fifteen-year period of heavy nuclear testing that began in the early 1950s, when the
short-lived iodine and other isotopes were added to the strontium 90 in the milk, there would havebeen many millions of extra deaths.
At long last, more than a quarter century after Hiroshima, studies of the health effects of fallout
were being made by independent scientists outside the government such as Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye.
But as I was not to learn until much later, neither the public nor the scientific community at large
would be able to learn of these results. When the Carnegie-Mellon scientists submitted their paper to
Science, Abelson refused to publish it, even though a similar paper by the same group linking

- 84 -

ordinary air pollution to mortality increases using the same statistical techniques had been publishedby Science earlier.
The paper was finally accepted for publication in the much less widely read journal Radiation Data
and Reports, published monthly by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the important findingsof Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye never appeared in print. Just before publication, when the plates had
already been prepared, the authors received word from the editor that objections from highly placed
government officials forced them to destroy the plates. The article has never appeared in the scientific
literature, and at the end of 1974, publication of Radiation Data and Reports ceased with theDecember issue after fifteen years of providing the only comprehensive source of data onradioactivity in the environment, following deep budget cuts in the Office of Radiation Programs
ordered by the Nixon administration.

- 85 -

15
Fallout at Shippingport

THE STUDIES of Lave and DeGroot provided independent evidence that infant mortality wascorrelated with low-level radioactivity from nuclear-weapons fallout and reactor releases, but anumber of puzzling questions remained unanswered. It was understandable in the light of Dr.
Stewart’s latest findings, published in 1970, that infant mortality might go up significantly as a resultof early intrauterine exposure due to the hundredfold greater sensitivity of the fetus in the first threemonths of development as compared to the adult. It was difficult to understand, however, how total
mortality rates, dominated by the older age groups rather than by the small number of newborn
infants, could possibly be affected as strongly as Lave’s study had shown.
Still another puzzle was the finding by DeGroot that although infant mortality rates in Beaver
County, where the Shippingport reactor was located, did not decline as rapidly as for the state ofPennsylvania as a whole, there was no correlation between the abnormally high infant mortality rates
and the officially announced small releases from the plant.
Both of these puzzles were destined to find their solution in a most unexpected manner within ayear after DeGroot’s and Lave’s studies had been completed. Late in 1972, a notice in the Pittsburgh
newspapers announced that hearings would shortly be held by the Atomic Energy Commission to
grant an operating license for the Beaver Valley Unit I reactor, which was then nearing completion.
This power station was being built right next to the original Shippingport reactor on the Ohio River,some 25 miles downstream and to the west of Pittsburgh. According to the newspaper story, it would
be of the same pressurized-water type that had been pioneered in Pittsburgh by Westinghouse, under
Admiral Rickover’s direction, except that it would be some ten times larger.
Knowing that it was a naval type of reactor with a double cooling loop to minimize the amount ofgas that would have to be discharged into the atmosphere caused me to feel little concern, especiallyin view of the fact that the AEC had only recently announced that it was proposing to tighten up thestandards for permissible emissions. (These new standards had been issued following hearings inWashington at which I had been asked to testify in behalf of various environmental groups on theneed to lower permissible doses.) Also, Westinghouse had just announced that it had been possible tooperate Shippingport with "zero" gaseous releases in 1971, so that I felt certain that this much moreadvanced new power station only a short distance upwind from Westinghouse headquarters and theBettis Nuclear Laboratories, where the first submarine reactors had been built, would surely beprovided with the very latest in the available equipment for containing all radioactive gases.
Thus, when some of my students asked me whether I planned to attend the hearings I expressed no
great concern, saying only that I might take a look at the Safety Analysis Report being kept in the
public library of the nearby town of Beaver, a few miles from Shippingport, to make sure that theplanned emissions were indeed as low as I expected them to be.
A few weeks later, an opportunity presented itself to check on the proposed releases. I had to go to- 86 -

the nearby Pittsburgh airport to pick up my mother, and since the Beaver County Library was only a
few miles from the airport, I left a few hours early to check the figures.
Since I had examined similar reports for the Davis-Besse and other plants within the past year, it
did not take me long to find the information I was looking for. But what I found shocked me
profoundly. Instead of gaseous releases of only a small fraction of a curie, such as had been reported
for Shippingport in recent years, the more advanced commercial plant about to go into operation wasapparently designed to release some 60,000 curies of fission gases per year into the already heavily
polluted air of the Ohio River valley. This was millions of times more than was claimed to have beendischarged annually from the old Shippingport plant in recent years, even though the power output
would be only ten times greater.
In fact the summary of past releases from nuclear facilities published by the Bureau ofRadiological Health had listed only 0.35 curies of fission gases at the time of the highest reported
discharges back in 1963, for which the calculated dose was 0.87 percent of the maximum permissibleof 500 millirems to someone living near the plant. This meant that the estimated radiation dose
produced by 0.35 curies was only about 4 millirems. Yet even at these relatively low calculated
external doses (due to gas releases), there seemed to be a disturbing rise in infant mortality insurrounding Beaver County and especially the nearby town of Aliquippa, some 10 miles to the east in
the Ohio valley.
There were thus only two possibilities. If the reported figures on the likely magnitude of gaseous
releases from the new large reactor were correct, there would very likely be a major increase in infantmortality and other detrimental health effects unless vastly more efficient means of trapping the gases
were installed to bring them down to the levels reported for the existing reactor.
The other possibility was that the actual releases from the Shippingport plant had somehow beenmuch larger than the amounts officially reported. And this would of course explain why DeGroot did
not find a relationship between the tabulated releases and the yearly changes in infant mortality for the
Shippingport plant.
Deeply troubled by these findings, I decided to contact the utility lawyer for the City of Pittsburgh,
Albert Brandon, who had long been battling the Duquesne Light Company’s growing requests for rateincreases needed to finance the escalating cost of the Beaver Valley nuclear plant. My hope was topersuade the city to intervene in the upcoming license hearings in order to get to the bottom of the
disturbing discrepancy between the annual claim for "zero-release" nuclear plants and the actuallyplanned emissions. Even though it was too late to stop the plant from going into operation, perhaps it
would still be possible to force the utility to install the latest equipment for trapping the radioactive
gases so as to reduce to a minimum the health risk to the people living in the area.
Concerned by these facts, Brandon promised to discuss the matter with the mayor, Pete Flaherty.
A few days later, a meeting was arranged, and after a brief discussion, Flaherty agreed to have theCity of Pittsburgh become an intervenor in the upcoming license hearings, together with a group of
local environmentalists to whom I had previously outlined my findings.
Shortly after the public announcement that the City of Pittsburgh would intervene in the hearings
for the new plant, I received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as the manager of the
new power station being built at the Shippingport site. He said that great efforts were being made toassure the safety of the people in the area, and that he would be glad to send me the detailed plans forthe environmental monitoring that would be done to assure that no harmful amounts of radioactivity
could reach the public.
Within a day, a large manila envelope was delivered to my office at the university from theDuquesne Light Company. As I leafed through its contents, I noticed a series of documents entitled"Pre-Operational Environmental Radioactivity Monitoring Program at the Beaver Valley Power

- 87 -

Station" in the form of quarterly reports for the years 1971 and 1972. The documents had been
prepared by the N.U.S. Corporation of Rockville, Maryland. These were apparently part of theEnvironmental Report for the Beaver Valley Power Station Unit II Construction Permit Application,
submitted to the AEC in November 1972 as required by the new National Environmental Protection
Act, which had just come into effect. Thus, the data were gathered to establish the radiation levels
existing at the site prior to the operation of the new plant, providing a baseline for comparison withlater measurements that would be gathered once the plant had gone into operation.
As I began to look through the tables with their long lists of numbers, I noticed that there weresome very high measurements for the external gamma doses in early 1971, measured in microrems
per hour. When I worked it out in the more familiar units of millirems per year, I could hardly
believe the result: In March the rate was 370 millirems per year for Station No. 10, located in the
town of Shippingport, compared to the normal values for the area of 70 to 90 millirems per year.
There were a few more readings at this location in the range of 300 to 350 millirems per year by June,and not until January of 1972 did the numbers return to the normal rate of 86 millirems per year.
Other locations showed comparable peaks of gamma radiation, but the highest were in the town of
Shippingport closest to the site or on the site itself. Could it be that these extremely high radiationdose rates were produced by the old Shippingport plant, for which the official reports had shown
almost no gaseous releases at all?
Turning to the tabulations of strontium 90 in the milk, I saw immediately that the levels measured
in the farms around Shippingport were much higher than in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Cincinnati, andBuffalo as reported in Radiation Health Data and Reports for the early part of 1971. The fact that theextremely high readings were confined to the Shippingport area made it unlikely that they were due toworldwide fallout from high-altitude atmospheric bomb testing.
To check this further, I plotted the concentrations of strontium 90 in the soil and found that it
dropped off sharply with distance away from the plant both east to west and north to south. In Aprilof 1971, the levels within three-quarters of a mile were fifty times greater than the typical levels
produced by worldwide fallout, and by early in 1972, the rains had apparently washed most of theactivity into the Ohio River, the measured levels having gone down from their peak of 6000
picocuries per kilogram to less than 100.
Clearly, such a highly localized concentration of strontium 90 in the soil centered on the
Shippingport plant could not be explained by worldwide fallout, which is more or less uniformly
distributed around the globe as the rains bring down the fine particles circulating in the upper
atmosphere.
Still further confirmation of the localized nature of the radioactive contamination came from themeasurements of short-lived iodine 131 in the milk. Beginning in December of 1971 and peaking in
February 1972, the levels of iodine for the six dairies within a 10-mile radius started to rise above 10
picocuries per liter, the Range I reporting level set by the Federal Radiation Council for continuous
consumption, reaching as high as 120 picocuries per liter. This was well above the 100 picocurieper-liter limit of Range II, and it equaled the kind of values reached in the eastern United States
during the height of nuclear-bomb testing.
Yet when I looked up the monthly iodine 131 levels for other locations in Pennsylvania (such as
Erie, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia) in Radiation Health Data and Reports, they were all listed with"zero" values, or below the limit of detection. Clearly, it was extremely unlikely that any Chinese
fallout would somehow concentrate radioactive iodine 131 over the Shippingport site, leaving the
nearby areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania without any detectable increases of radiation in the milk.
As a final check, I compared the monthly values of strontium 90 in the milk within a 10-mileradius of Shippingport with the monthly electrical power output in kilowatt-hours published in- 88 -

Nucleonics Week. Both strontium 90 and power output peaked in January 1971 and again in April,moving up and down together until the plant was closed for repairs later in the summer. After theplant was shut down, both the local and the Pittsburgh milk showed a sharp reduction in strontium 90
levels, from a peak of 27 picocuries per liter nearest the plant in early 1971 down to 7 picocuries perliter measured in Harrisburg that summer. As I learned later from an analysis of the milk-marketing
reports, the city of Pittsburgh obtained about a third of its milk from an area within 25 miles of the
Shippingport plant. This finding was consistent with the fact that the Pittsburgh milk showedstrontium 90 concentrations some 30 percent higher than the Cincinnati and Philadelphia milk in early1971.
Yet during the time of the sharp peaks in radiation levels in the air, the soil, and the milk that
occurred between January and June of 1971 near Shippingport, there were no nuclear-weapons tests
carried out in the atmosphere by any nation as reported in the monthly issues of Radiation Health
Data and Reports.
After weeks of graphing and analyzing the data with the help of colleagues, volunteers from local
environmental organizations, and students at the university, there could be no doubt about the result:
The data collected by the Duquesne Light Company’s own hired team of experienced healthphysicists clearly indicated that the Shippingport plant must have been the source of radioactivity inthe environment many thousands of times as great as had been claimed in the official reports to stateand federal agencies. Instead of annual radiation doses of less than 0.5 millirems claimed by theutility, the combination of external radiation (measured by the dosimeters) and internal radiation(from the gases that were inhaled or ingested with the milk, the water, and the local meat andvegetables) was many hundreds of millirems per year. Indeed, this dosage exceeded the level ofradiation that was received by the people of this area during the height of nuclear-weapons testing.
Moreover, the scientists who had carried out these measurements had clearly failed to warn either theutility officials who had hired them, the public-health officials at the state or federal level, or the
public, whose health and safety were being endangered by the secret fallout from the plant.
Faced with these disturbing discoveries, the leaders of the local environmental groups in Beaver
County decided to hold a public meeting at which both the Duquesne Light Company and spokesmen
for a Pittsburgh environmental group would be able to present their views to the people of the area.
The meeting took place early in January of 1973 at a shopping mall in the town of Monaca, just a few
miles from the Shippingport plant. After the superintendent of the Shippingport plant explained thatthe new power station would be "the Cadillac of the industry"—with a waste-disposal system thatwould permit only "minimal" amounts of radioactivity to escape—the head of Environment
Pittsburgh, David Marshall, and I presented the data gathered by the Duquesne Light Company’s own
consultants. Slide after slide showed the localized concentrations of radioactivity in the milk, the soil,
and the river sediments rising to many times their normal value, together with the peaks during themonths when there was no nuclear-weapons testing. Obviously, the findings in our presentation werecompletely at variance with what the utility had told the local people over the years.
The Duquesne Light officials were unprepared for this damaging evidence and could only lamely
repeat their assurances that the new plant would have negligible impact on the health of the public. It
took them a few days to prepare an advertisement for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in which theyclaimed that they had operated their Shippingport facility safely—without releasing more than a small
percentage of the releases allowed by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Commonwealth ofPennsylvania, and therefore without injuring any member of the public. But the people who had
attended the meeting were no longer so certain that this was the case, and there was a demand for an
independent investigation of these disturbing findings by the various environmental groups in
Pittsburgh and Beaver County before a new and still larger reactor would be given a license. This- 89 -

demand was supported by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Pete Flaherty, and his utility lawyer, Albert
Brandon.
Confronted with the evidence of very high levels of strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131 in
the area in 1971, while "zero" release had been officially reported, I began to wonder about earlier
releases. The plant had been in operation since 1958, so in light of the unreliable claims by thecompany, I wondered if there might indeed have been long-term exposure to the people of Beaver
County and nearby Allegheny County, in which the city of Pittsburgh was located. In particular,
enough time had elapsed for leukemia and cancer to develop, so that one might for the first time beable to determine whether the operation of commercial nuclear plants did or did not lead to the samekind of cancer increases that I had begun to see following the start of nuclear-weapons tests in
Nevada, the Pacific, and Siberia.
My students and I started to examine the annual vital statistics reports for Beaver County,
Allegheny County, and the major towns at different distances from Shippingport up and down the
Ohio River. Within a few days the first results were tabulated, and the figures were startling. In the
town of Midland, just a mile downstream from Shippingport, the people drank the Ohio River water.
The cancer death rate in this town had risen from a low of 149.6 per hundred thousand population in
1958, when the plant started to operate, to a peak of 426.3 by 1970. This was an increase of 184
percent in only twelve years.
For Beaver County as a whole, surrounding the plant, the rate had risen from 147.7 to 204.7 in theten years from the time the plant had gone on line with so much hope for a cleaner and healthierenvironment. This was a rise of close to 40 percent during a time when the state of Pennsylvania as awhole showed an increase of only 10 percent and the U.S. cancer mortality rose by only 8 percent.
From a low of 293 cancer deaths in Beaver County in 1958, the number had risen to 418 by 1968, an
increase of 115 cancer deaths per year, when there should have been no more than an additional 30 if
the county had continued to follow the average pattern for the state.
Likewise, the Pittsburgh cancer death rate had climbed by 31 percent between 1958 and 1968,
despite the steady cleanup of ordinary air and water pollution that had begun right after World War II,
when the burning of soft coal in the city was ended and a major effort was begun to clean up the air
and water.
Similarly, in the towns along the Ohio River downstream from Shippingport and Midland, cancer
rates had climbed sharply, the more so the closer they were to the plant. For East Liverpool, justacross the border in Ohio and some 10 miles downstream, the cancer death rate had risen 40 percent
by 1968 and 67 percent by 1971. In Steubenville, some 30 miles downstream, the cancer mortality
rate was up 25 percent by 1968, and even as far away as Cincinnati, some 300 miles down the Ohio
River, the cancer deaths had climbed 24 percent, while they increased only 6 percent for Ohio as awhole.
Further evidence suggested that the releases from Shippingport had added heavily to all the othersources of carcinogens, from bomb tests to chemical plants. The city of Columbus, Ohio, which did
not use the Ohio River for its drinking-water supply, actually experienced a 10 percent decline in its
cancer rate during the same period, even though it suffered from all the other likely sources ofcarcinogens, including automobile exhaust, cigarettes, food additives, hair dyes, artificial sweeteners,
and so on.
But if Shippingport was responsible for these striking cancer rises in the towns using the Ohio
River for their water supply, then the discharges into the river would have had to be vastly greaterthan the amounts for which the plant had been licensed. Was there any evidence that the activity inthe water had been much greater downstream than upstream of the plant? After all, it was clear that it
could not be the milk that was responsible for transmitting the radioactivity all the way to- 90 -

Steubenville and Cincinnati.
Fortunately, there was a way to check this. For many years, the Pennsylvania State Department ofEnvironmental Resources in Harrisburg had been making quarterly measurements of the radioactivity
in all the major streams of the state at various points along each river. When the students hadcollected the data for the Ohio and other streams in western Pennsylvania, the answer began toemerge. There was a large peak in the Ohio River radioactivity in late 1970 and early 1971, exactly
the time when the N.U.S. data had shown a large peak of radioactivity in soil, milk, river sediment,
and fish. At Midland, just a little over a mile below the Shippingport plant, the gross beta activity had
climbed from a low of only 3 picocuries per liter to a high of 18. But for the two rivers that joined in
Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, measured at locations more than 30
miles away, upstream to the east the rise was no greater than 5 of these units.
Thus, the rise in river radioactivity could not have been due to fallout, which would have affected
the more distant upstream areas just as strongly. But it was consistent with high, unreported gaseous
releases that would settle on the land and then be washed into the Ohio River with the rain andmelting snow. In fact, the rapid disappearance of the high values of long-lived strontium 90 in thesoil around the Shippingport plant between early 1971 and 1972 could be explained only by the actionof rain carrying the radioactivity from gaseous releases into the local streams and rivers. Thispossibility was further supported by the fact that the two nearest small rivers that joined the Ohio justa few miles upstream from Shippingport, the Beaver River and Raccoon Creek, both showed evenlarger rises in activity, reaching peaks of 20 picocuries per liter during the same quarter.
It was apparently not any direct liquid discharges that were involved, which by the terms of theoriginal license were to be held to less than 0.56 curies. Rather, the radioactivity must haveoriginated from airborne releases that settled on the surrounding land as far upstream as 20 to 30
miles. Only releases into the air could also explain the large increases in milk activity all around thefarms surrounding the Ohio River in Beaver County.
This would make it possible to understand the paradoxical finding that even "upstream" locations
and tributaries of the Ohio within 20 to 30 miles, showed peaks in radioactivity when the local milkrose in strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131. And it would explain why cancer rates in cities as
far away as Pittsburgh, upstream by 25 miles, could have their water supplies contaminated. The
wind was blowing the radioactive gases up the Ohio Valley to the streams that filled the reservoirs
serving Pittsburgh, just as the fallout from the "Simon" shot in Nevada had contaminated thereservoirs of Albany and Troy back in the spring of 1953.
Clearly, if such releases were taking place but were somehow not reported, even cities using
tributaries of the Ohio entering the river 10 to 30 miles upstream from Shippingport, as well as
communities far downstream, could have their drinking water affected and their cancer rates
increased by the invisible, tasteless, and odorless radioactive fallout secretly discharged into theambient air.
By looking up the amount of water carried by the Ohio per second at Midland for each month of
the year, it was possible to calculate how many curies had been carried downstream from the airborne
releases in late 1970 above and beyond the amounts in the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers thatjoined to form the Ohio some 25 miles upstream from the plant. The total worked out to 183 morecuries in the Ohio below the plant in a year than were carried by the Allegheny and Monongahela
Rivers, which combined to form the Ohio. This was 300 times more than the original permit hadallowed for direct discharges into the Ohio River from the Shippingport plant, and 2500 times morethan the 0.07 curies that the Duquesne Light Company had officially reported for liquid discharges in1970 to the state and federal health agencies.
There were apparently hundreds to thousands of times as many curies of highly toxic radioactivity

- 91 -

in the Ohio River than were allowed by state and federal limits, designed to protect the health of thepeople using the Ohio for their drinking water. The radioactivity did not come from the direct liquid
discharges, however, but through the run-off of unreported gaseous releases that had settled on theland.
Here, then, was at least one piece in the puzzle as to why not only infant mortality but mortality at
all ages had been affected so strongly, despite the relatively small external radiation doses fromgamma rays on the ground that irradiate the whole body uniformly. It was the airborne gaseous
activity and the run-off into the rivers serving as drinking-water supplies that had apparently carried
the more damaging short-lived beta-ray-emitting chemicals rapidly into the critical organs of thepeople, in addition to the other pathways via the milk, the vegetables, the fruits, the fish, and the meatthat were most important for the long-lived strontium 90 and cesium 137. And although adults weremore resistant to the biological damage than the developing fetus, they received the doses steadily
over many years rather than just for a few months, by continuously drinking the water, inhaling thegases, and eating the food that was contaminated first by the fallout from the bomb tests, and then by
the secret gaseous releases from the peaceful nuclear reactors along the rivers of the nation.
Of equal significance were the implications for one of the most important questions DeGroot was
unable to answer: Why had he not found a correlation between the changes in infant mortality in
Beaver County and the published radioactive releases in the case of the Shippingport reactor, while hehad discovered such a correlation for the other three nuclear reactors he had studied? Clearly, if there
existed such large unreported releases as the data gathered by the N.U.S. Corporation, theEnvironmental Protection Agency, and the State of Pennsylvania seemed to indicate, then one could
not possibly expect to find a direct relationship between the announced annual releases and thechanges in mortality rates.
Now a new and most disturbing question had arisen: How was it possible for large quantities ofradioactive gases to escape from the Shippingport plant without being officially reported as requiredby the existing regulations? Not until many months later was this riddle destined to be solved in amost unexpected manner.
In the meantime, there was a growing public debate over the abnormally high levels ofradioactivity around the Shippingport plant and the sharp rise in infant mortality in such nearby towns
as Aliquippa. I documented my findings in a report and sent it to the governor of Pennsylvania,
Milton Shapp, in January of 1973. Early in the spring, Governor Shapp announced his intention toappoint a special fact-finding commission of independent scientists and public health experts who
would hold hearings on the question and issue their own report within a few months.
The latest numbers for infant mortality in Aliquippa, some 10 miles downwind and to the east of
the plant, were indeed alarming. For the years 1970 and 1971, the years of high levels ofradioactivity, Aliquippa’s infant mortality rate climbed to a twenty-year high of 44.2 and 39.7 per1000 live births. These were more than double the overall state rates of 19.9 and 18.2. Yet back in
1949 and 1952, when ordinary air pollution from the steel mills was much greater, but before
Shippingport had started, Aliquippa’s infant mortality rates had been as low as 16.0 per 1000 births.
This could not be simply explained by a change in the composition of the population, which had
remained essentially constant, the nonwhite population representing 21 percent of the total in 1960
and 22 percent in 1970. And for the State of Pennsylvania and the United States as a whole, infantmortality had resumed its previous decline after the end of atmospheric bomb tests by the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union for both the white and nonwhite population.
News of the controversy had reached the cities along the Ohio below Shippingport, and in April I
was asked to present my findings at a public lecture at the University of Cincinnati by a local
environmental group and university professors concerned about the construction of the Zimmer

- 92 -

nuclear power station upstream from the city’s water intake. At the end of my presentation, membersof the university’s Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering attacked my findings, charging
that numerous state and federal government health agencies, including those of the State ofPennsylvania, had found no substance to my allegations in the past and that I had been repudiatedespecially by such prestigious organizations as the Health Physics Society, the American Academy of
Pediatrics, the National Academy of Science, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Environmental
Protection Agency.
As Dr. Bernd Kohn, director of the Radio Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering Research Center put
it: "In each case, an epidemiologist has refuted his claim by the same data." But Dr. Kohn and theother engineers present were unable to point out how else to explain the startlingly high localized
values of strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131 in the environment around Shippingport, otherthan that it was likely to be Chinese fallout.
However, when I showed the data to the mayor of Cincinnati, Theodore M. Barry, he wrote a letter
to Governor John J. Gilligan of Ohio, requesting an investigation by the Ohio Environmental
Protection Agency. Also, the chairman of the energy conservation committee of the Cincinnati
Environmental Task Force, after seeing the data on radioactivity and cancer mortality changes around
Shippingport and the other reactors that had been studied by DeGroot and me, announced that hewould recommend that the City of Cincinnati become an intervenor in the public hearings on an
operating license for the Zimmer plant.
The next day, the Cincinnati Inquirer carried the following two headlined stories on its front page:"Mitchell Denies Knowledge of Plans to Bug Watergate" and, just below, "AEC Denies Radiation
Damage to Ohio River."In the light of the enormous discrepancy between the official claims of "zero releases" and the
N.U.S. findings of much larger than normal amounts of strontium 90 in the soil, the milk, and theriver sediment around Shippingport, the coincidental juxtaposition of these two stories took on an
ominous ring. The facts that had emerged so far were hardly consonant with the AEC’s claim in theInquirer story that "the release of effluents from the Shippingport Atomic Power Station is carefully
controlled and monitored so as not to endanger the public."
The story went on to say that "the radiation levels in these effluents are so extremely low that theypose no threat to the people in the cities mentioned by Dr. Sternglass." It all sounded exactly like theold reassurances that had been issued by the AEC at the time of the nuclear tests in Nevada, and thedenial by former Attorney General John M. Mitchell before a federal grand jury that he had any priorknowledge of the Watergate case and always vetoed any bugging plans that were suggested while he
was President Nixon’s campaign manager.
There would soon be another kind of grand jury appointed to hear the differing claims ofgovernment officials and independent scientists who had stumbled upon information that was notmeant to reach the ordinary citizen of our country.
Newspaper stories in the Pittsburgh area repeating the denial of large discharges from Shippingportand blaming the high readings either on fallout or on errors in the measurements were clearly
indications of deep concern by the AEC, Duquesne Light, and N.U.S. All three organizations now
knew that before long they would be facing hearings by an independent body of knowledgeable
scientists. The bureaucrats and scientists in the AEC knew that this time the hearings would not be
under their control, unlike the case of the usual licensing hearings, where both the hearing officers andthe staff were appointed by the agency whose mandated task it was both to promote and regulate thesafety of the nuclear industry.
But the full extent of the behind-the-scenes efforts to make the public believe that nothing had
happened at Shippingport did not emerge until long after the hearings of the fact-finding commission

- 93 -

had taken place at the end of July. The story was pieced together later in an article by a free-lance
investigative writer, Joel Griffiths, and published in an article in the Beaver County Times on June 7,
1974, after the AEC had issued licenses for the operation and construction of the Beaver Valley
Power Station Units I and II.
Quite unexpectedly, the story came to light as the result of a routine request submitted by theattorney for the City of Pittsburgh, Albert Brandon, in connection with the discovery procedures
preceding the licensing hearings for the new reactors at Shippingport. (This was a few months after
the Shapp Commission hearings in Aliquippa had taken place.) Brandon had asked for copies of all
correspondence and internal memoranda connected with the Shippingport controversy in the files of
the AEC. And then, one day in the fall of 1973, not long before the licensing hearings were scheduled
to begin, a large envelope arrived at Brandon’s office with a devastating series of internal memoranda,
letters, and other documents revealing what had taken place behind the scenes.
As Griffiths described it in his article, early in 1973 the AEC’s Earth Science Branch had
conducted an in-depth investigation of the situation and concluded that "it is highly unlikely that theradioactivity was of Chinese origin. Most likely it was either of local origin, or the result of
inadequate sampling procedures." Griffiths wrote that this was a crucial finding. "Local origin" was aeuphemism for Shippingport, since there was nothing else in the vicinity that could have produced
that amount of radioactivity. Thus, if the radioactivity had in fact been there, Shippingport was
clearly implicated. The only other possibility was that maybe the radioactivity had really not been
there in the first place.
As Griffiths put it:This was where "inadequate sampling procedures" came in. The idea was that N.U.S.
might have bungled procedures it had used to measure the radioactivity in the samples of soil,
milk, and other items from Beaver Valley and somehow produced hundreds of erroneous
readings, and all of them too high. This, however, was synonymous with the conclusion that
N.U.S. was incompetent.
There was only one way this question could be settled in a conclusive manner. Some of theradioactivity in the samples that N.U.S. scientists had collected in 1970 and 1971 was long
lasting. If N.U.S. could turn up some of the original samples that had shown the high levels,
they could be reanalyzed to see if the radioactivity had really been there.
According to the records, N.U.S. conducted a search in February 1973 at its Rockville
headquarters to see if any of the original high samples were still around. Unfortunately, it was
the company’s stated policy not to retain samples for more than a year after analysis, and none
could be located.
Griffiths went on to relate an interesting development:
By this time, a sharp divergence of opinion had grown between N.U.S. on the one hand andthe AEC and health agencies on the other. Faced with a choice between attributing theradioactivity to Shippingport or to N.U.S.’s incompetence, the AEC and others picked
incompetence and began leveling various technical charges against the N.U.S. reports. This
placed N.U.S. in a delicate position. If their reputation was to be salvaged without crucifying
their employer, the Duquesne Light Company and the AEC, N.U.S. had somehow to provethat the radioactivity had been there but had not come from Shippingport. So despite all theevidence, N.U.S. picked fallout.
In March, 1973, N.U.S. completed a draft report on the Shippingport situation, defending

- 94 -

the accuracy of its original high readings but attempting to prove that they were notparticularly unusual and were probably due largely to Chinese bomb tests.
This draft report was sent to Dr. John Harley, director of the AEC’s Health and Safety
Laboratory. Dr. Harley had been playing a leading role in the AEC’s investigation of the
Shippingport affair, and he was well aware that the high radiation levels could not be
explained by fallout.
In fact, I knew that he had worked in this field for years and had previously been involved withminimizing the health impact of the fallout from the "Simon" test that had rained over Albany andTroy back in 1953. He had also played a major role in trying to discredit the findings I had made thatshowed a connection between the upward changes in infant mortality from the atmospheric tests in
the Pacific and Nevada and the levels of fallout in the milk and diet through the use of the misleading"gummed film" data, which falsely showed high strontium 90 levels in the dusty, dry areas where themilk levels were actually quite low.
As Griffiths’s story indicated:
The memoranda in the AEC files showed very clearly that Dr. Harley was not happy with
N.U.S.’s draft report.
In comments for the AEC’s files, dated March 8, 1973, Harley fumed: "This draft proves tomy satisfaction that the work of this organization is incompetent. . . . It is obvious that theirstaff is not familiar with the field and is not competent to evaluate their data or those ofothers."Harley went on to list several examples of N.U.S.’s incompetence in their attempt to prove
the fallout theory and in other aspects of their report, remarking that "Investigation would
certainly turn up gross calculation errors or even that some doctoring of the numbers had
occurred."He signed off: "I believe the situation is very serious."
Serious indeed. Could Dr. Harley have been referring to that team of "outstanding
scientists" who, according to Duquesne’s ads, were engaged in the vital work of making
people aware that their large nuclear plant was to be "absolutely safe to the public health"?
Yes, he was.
More serious was that N.U.S. had already performed extensive safety studies for somethirty-four other nuclear power plants, many of which had already started operating.
If they were bunglers . . . .
Dr. Harley’s accusations of incompetence were more incongruous in view of the apparent
excellent credentials of the N.U.S. staff, including the two members who prepared the draft
report.
One, the vice-president in charge of all N.U.S. nuclear safety work, Dr. Morton Goldman,had spent ten years as a nuclear safety expert with the U.S. Public Health Service (now theEnvironmental Protection Agency) and was a consultant to state and federal health agencies.
The other, Joseph DiNunno, the scientist directly responsible for the Beaver Valley survey,
had received all his training and experience in the AEC’s own reactor safety branch.
Why, N.U.S. almost was the AEC and EPA. Incompetence? Doctoring of figures?
Nevertheless, a couple of months after Dr. Harley’s outburst, the AEC issued a definitive
report stating that the high radiation levels had been due to N.U.S. bungling. The report washand carried to the Pittsburgh newspapers before N.U.S. even got a chance to look at it.
Shortly thereafter, on June 7, 1973, according to AEC documents, the president of N.U.S.,

- 95 -Charles Jones, called the AEC. Jones maintained stoutly that the radioactivity really had been
there and that there was nothing wrong with N.U.S.’s methodology.
The AEC representative to whom he spoke, Dr. Martin B. Biles, director of the Division of
Operational Safety, disagreed. Jones then complained that the unfavorable publicity wasdamaging his company and something must be done. Dr. Biles suggested a meeting.
On June 20, 1973, a meeting was held between Dr. Goldman and DiNunno of N.U.S., Dr.
Harley and Dr. Phil Krey of the AEC, and a Duquesne Light Co. attorney.
According to Dr. Harley’s subsequent memo to the AEC’s files [dated June 22] it was afruitful meeting.
Goldman and DiNunno began by admitting [in a separate memorandum for the files] thatsomeone in N.U.S. had indeed doctored up figures to support the company’s position [in pastwork for the AEC’s Health and Safety Laboratory] although there were unfortunately nolaboratory records to verify the fact. This aside, however, they had a wonderful new
development to report. In the time since President Jones had talked to the AEC, N.U.S. had
found some of the original high samples from Beaver Valley.
Now it would be possible to see if that radioactivity had really been there.
This was indeed fortuitous, especially since these samples were by then nearly two years
old and the company did not usually retain its samples for more than a year. Evidently they
eluded the original search for samples in February.
According to Dr. Goldman, all the company’s employees had been instructed to ransack thepremises, and the samples had been turned up by two lab technicians in a storage basement
where such samples were not usually kept.
Despite the AEC’s earlier misgivings about N.U.S.’s credibility, the legitimacy of these
newfound samples was accepted without question. Arrangements were immediately made tohave them reanalyzed by the AEC, the EPA, an independent private lab, and N.U.S. It wasalso decided that N.U.S.’s performance in the reanalysis would serve as a test of whether thecompany had recovered its competence.
So what happened?
The samples were reanalyzed and no more radioactivity! Some of the samples turned out
to be as much as twenty times lower than before, but N.U.S. had got it right this time. Their
analytical methods were corrected at last. They were saved. Everybody was saved.
The press was notified.
There were a few loose ends.
N.U.S. had to explain why so many of its measurements had been twenty or more times toohigh in 1971. The company reviewed its laboratory records again and made a new discovery:
all through 1971 there had been systematic errors in several of its analytical methods, alltending to produce only erroneously high readings.
That was it. The case was closed.
NUS’s safety work for thirty-four other reactors, and even the low readings it somehow
managed to obtain at various times and places in Beaver Valley, was allowed to standunchallenged. Dr. Goldman and DiNunno fired several employees, including the lab chief,
who never stopped defending his measurements, and N.U.S. has since continued in its work ofmaking nuclear power plants "absolutely safe to public health."
None of this, of course, was known either to me or the members of the fact-finding commission
when the hearings began on July 31, 1973 in the town of Aliquippa. The panel appointed byGovernor Milton J. Shapp and chaired by Dr. Leonard Bachman, the Governor’s Health Services

- 96 -

Director, consisted of seven members in addition to the chairman, representing a broad range of
disciplines and wide experience in matters related to public health. Only five of the panel members,
however, were independent university-based scientists outside the state government, and only three ofthese had personal experience with studies of radiation effects in man.
Of the three, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, Neely Professor of Health Physics at the School of Nuclear
Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, editor-in-chief of the journal Health Physics, first
President of the International Radiation Protection Association, and Director of the Health Physics
Division of the AEC’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1944 to 1973, had the longest association
with the problems of radiation, its control, and its measurement.
Next in the length of his professional involvement with radiation and its effects on man was Dr.
Edward P. Radford, Professor of Environmental Medicine at the School of Hygiene and Public
Health, Johns Hopkins University, who had recently served on the National Academy of Science’s
Committee on the Biological Effects of Radiation.
The third scientist with recent experience in the evaluation of the effects of radiation on humanpopulations was Dr. Morris DeGroot, Professor of Mathematical Statistics and Chairman of the
Department of Statistics at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Of the other two university scientists, one was Dr. Paul Kotin, Provost and Vice-President of the
Health Science Center and Professor of Pathology at Temple University in Philadelphia, formerly
Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, with a special interest in theenvironmental causes of cancer, and a consultant to both the National Cancer Institute and theEnvironmental Protection Agency.
The other member of the scientific panel was Dr. Harry Smith, Jr., Dean of the School ofManagement at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York, who was a biostatistician activein the health field over many years, serving as consultant to the National Center for Health Statisticsof the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Also serving on the Governor’s Commission was the Secretary of Health for the State ofPennsylvania, J. Finton Speller, M.D., and the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department ofEnvironmental Resources, Maurice K. Goddard.
Although this was not known to me at the time, it would actually be the staffs of these two state
officials who would prepare the final report, since there was no provision for any funding of an
independent staff responsible only to the scientist members of the committee. In particular, theradiological portions of the report were to be drafted by Thomas M. Gerusky, Chief, Office ofRadiological Health, and Margaret A. Reilly, Chief of Environmental Surveillance in Gerusky’s
office, both of whom reported to Secretary Goddard. The sections of the report dealing with healtheffects were to be prepared by Dr. George K. Tokuhata, an epidemiologist recently appointed as
Director of Program Evaluation in the Department of Health. All three of these key individuals had in
the past made public statements denying the validity of my findings on low-level radiation effects
from fallout and releases from nuclear plants. As Griffiths later learned in a series of interviews withsome of the commissioners also published in the Beaver County Times, the final report kept being
delayed again and again because the staff kept creating drafts which reflected the view that there were
no serious problems connected with Shippingport, and which the commissioners were unwilling tosign.
But on the day of the hearings, I was very hopeful that at long last an eminent group of concernedscientists and public health officials would provide the kind of scientific jury able to evaluate fairly
the serious evidence for unreported releases and disturbing increases in mortality rates that had
recently come to light.
After Dr. Bachman had opened the hearings and introduced the members of the panel, I

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summarized the data I had previously submitted in two reports to the governor in a series of slides. In
addition, I presented further evidence on the changes in mortality rates involving other chronic
diseases besides cancer in a number of towns along the Ohio. Thus, in East Liverpool, 5 miles
downstream from Shippingport, heart-disease mortality had risen some 100 percent from its low pointof 370 per 100,000 deaths in the period 1954-56 to 730 by 1971, while Ohio as a whole had remained
constant at about 370 to 390 throughout this period. Yet back in the early 1950s, before Shippingport
had started, there was more ordinary pollution from chemicals and coal burning in the Ohio River,from which the drinking water for East Liverpool originated. And in the ensuing two decades, there
had been major efforts to clean up the air and water.
I then presented other recent data in support of the possibility that the action of radioactive fallout
on all aspects of human health may have been seriously underestimated, thereby explaining theunexpectedly sharp rises in both infant mortality, cancer, and chronic diseases in Aliquippa andnearby river towns since the nuclear plant had gone on line.
Some of this data came from an extensive collection of heath statistics gathered by Dr. M. Segi at
the School of Public Health, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, from work sponsored by the JapaneseCancer Society. It showed that many types of cancers known to be caused by radiation rose sharply
all over Japan, and not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, beginning some five to seven years after thebombs were detonated. Thus, while pancreatic cancer had been level for a period of more than ten
years prior to 1945—during a period of rapid industrialization, production of chemicals, and growthof electric-power generation by coal—it shot up some 1200 percent by 1965, and only recently began
to slow down its enormous rate of climb following the end of major atmospheric bomb testing. The
pancreas is also the organ involved in diabetes, a disease that had also shown sharp rises not only inJapan but in the United States, and specifically in the Beaver County area.
Similar patterns emerged from plots of Dr. Segi’s data for prostate cancer and lung cancer, theformer rising to 900 percent of its pre-1945 incidence, and the latter to 750 percent. And again asimilar pattern had taken place near Shippingport, where lung cancer for the nearest sizable town ofMidland had risen 500 percent from its 1957-58 rate of 22 to a high of 132 per 100,000 population by
1970, while it had risen only some 70 percent, from 22 to 38 per 100,000 in Pennsylvania as a wholeduring the same period.
Again, these patterns could not simply be blamed on cigarette smoking alone, although it was
known that uranium miners who smoked had some five to ten times the lung cancer mortality rate
than those who did not, so that those who both worked in the mines and smoked showed a twentyfive- to hundredfold greater risk of dying of lung cancer as compared with those who neither smokednor were exposed to the radioactive radon gas. Thus, in effect, the releases of radioactive gases into
the already polluted air of Midland has produced the same kind of synergistic effect, as if the people
in that town just a mile away from the Shippingport plant had suddenly started to work in the uranium
mines.
Thus, the data for the changes in cancer rates in the area for which levels of radioactivity in the air,
the water, the milk, and the total diet had been measured as comparable with the levels produced by
fallout from bomb tests in Siberia and the Pacific drifting over Japan during the 1950s clearlysupported the reality of the data gathered by the N.U.S. scientists recently, and also the reality of theexistence of much-higher-than-reported releases from Shippingport in the past.
In further support of the argument that relatively low doses of radiation from nuclear reactor
releases can have readily detectable results on human health, I summarized the evidence that infantmortality in Beaver County and other areas along the Ohio had increased in 1960 and 1961 following
an accidental release of radioactive isotopes in the course of a fuel-element melt-down at the Waltz
Mills nuclear reactor on the Youghiogheny River, some 20 miles upstream from the city of

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McKeesport in April of 1960.
Within a year after that little-known accident, infant mortality rates doubled in McKeesport andthen slowly declined again to the level of the rest of Allegheny County, which gets its drinking water
mainly from the Allegheny River. And the effects could be seen in a steadily declining pattern of
infant mortality peaks along the Monongahela and Ohio River communities for 160 miles
downstream.
In the course of the questioning period that followed my presentation, I was asked how it waspossible that such relatively small doses comparable to normal background levels could lead to suchlarge changes in mortality rates, when it apparently took ten to a hundred times these levels to double
the risk for the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response I cited the startling results of a
recent study published in the journal Health Physics in March of 1972 by a scientist working for the
Canadian Atomic Energy Laboratories in Pinawa, Manitoba, Dr. Abram Petkau. Dr. Petkau had been
examining the basic processes whereby chemicals diffuse through cell membranes. In the course of
these studies, he had occasion to expose the membranes surrounded by water to a powerful X-ray
machine, and observed that they would usually break after absorbing the relatively large dose of 3500
rads, the equivalent of some 35,000 years of normal background radiation.
This certainly seemed to be very reassuring with regard to any possible danger to vital portions ofcells as a result of the much smaller doses in the environment from either natural or man-madesources. But then Dr. Petkau did something that no one else had tried before. He added a small
amount of radioactive sodium salt to the water, such as occurs from fallout or reactor releases to ariver, and measured the total absorbed dose before the membrane broke due to the low-level
protracted radiation.
To his amazement, he found that instead of requiring a dose of 3500 rads, the membrane ruptured
at an absorbed dose of three-quarters of one rad, or at a dose some 5000 times less than one rad, muchless than was necessary to break it in a short, high-intensity burst of radiation such as had occurred at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dr. Petkau repeated this experiment many times in order to be certain of this disturbing finding,and each time the result confirmed the initial discovery: the more protracted the radiation exposure
was, the less total dose it took to break the membranes, completely contrary to the usual case ofgenetic damage, where it made no difference whether the radiation was given in one second, one day,one month, or one year.
By a further series of experiments, he finally began to understand what was taking place.
Apparently a biological mechanism was involved in the case of membrane damage that wascompletely different from the usual direct hit of a particle on the DNA molecules in the center of thecell. It turned out that instead, a highly toxic, unstable form of ordinary oxygen normally found incell fluids was created by the irradiation process, and that this so-called "free radical" was attracted tothe cell membrane, where it initiated a chain reaction that gradually oxidized and thus weakened themolecules composing the membrane. And the lower the number of such "free radicals" present in thecell fluid at any given moment, the more efficient was the whole destructive process.
Thus, almost overnight, the entire foundation of all existing assumptions as to the likely action ofvery low, protracted exposures as compared to short exposures at Hiroshima or even from brief, lowlevel medical X-rays had been shaken. Instead of a protracted or more gentle exposure being lessharmful than a short flash, it turned out that there were some conditions under which it could be theother way around: The low-level, low-rate exposure was more harmful to biological cells containing
oxygen than the same exposure given at a high rate or in a very brief moment.
No longer was it the case that one could confidently calculate what would happen at very low,
protracted environmental exposures from studies on cells or animals carried out at high doses given in

- 99 -

a relatively short time. It was clear that the direct, linear relation between radiation dose and effectwas no longer the most conservative assumption, for it was based on the implicit assumption that agiven dose would always result in a given increase in risk, no matter whether the radiation wasabsorbed in one second or one year. Clearly, if Dr. Petkau’s findings were to be confirmed by otherexperiments in the future, our whole present understanding of low-dose radiation effects would haveto be revised, since small exposures might turn out to be far more harmful to living cells than we had
ever realized.
Thus, I pleaded we should not reject evidence for much higher than expected infant and cancer
mortality rates merely because that evidence did not seem to agree with our previous estimates basedon high-level, high-rate exposures at Hiroshima and in various studies. I now believed that we had tobe prepared to revise drastically our expectations as to what apparently innocuous low-level, chronic
radiation exposures to critical cells and organs from environmental sources might do.
My own testimony was followed by that of Dr. Irving Bross, a well-known biostatistician from theRoswell Park Memorial Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, who had himself been studying theeffect of low-level radiation on childhood leukemia for many years. In summarizing his findings Dr.
Bross stated that there exists a wide range of individuals with very different degrees of sensitivity toradiation, depending upon their age and their past medical history.
This fact alone would invalidate any estimate of the likely effect of small radiation exposures to alarge human population, since these had been based on the average adult, obtained at high doses, andon the assumption of a linear relationship between dose and effect. For a non-homogeneous group,
the more resistant individuals such as healthy young adults would not show any significant effects,
while either the very young or the very old and those with immune deficiencies, allergies, and otherspecial conditions might show an unexpectedly large effect. As Bross had put it in a letter to The New
York Times published just a few weeks before he testified: "It follows that procedures for calculating‘safe levels’ based on ‘average exposures’ of ‘average individuals’ are not going to protect thechildren or adults who need the protection most."
Next was the testimony of the Deputy Director of the Division of Biology and Medicine of the
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all biomedical and environmental research, Dr. W. W.
Burr, Jr. This witness, as recorded by the reporter for the Beaver County Times, Bob Grotevant,"tabbed all allegations about a definite correlation between radioactive emissions from the
Shippingport plant and increased infant deaths and cancer cases made by Dr. Sternglass as‘unsupportable.’" Burr then announced that a number of follow-up tests after publication in 1971 of"erroneous" test data by the N.U.S. Corporation "proved that no such high levels of any radioactive
products existed near the plant."
This, then, was the way that had been chosen by the AEC to deal with what had happened, as wewere to learn later from the internal memoranda, and one witness after the other for N.U.S., for theutility, for the EPA, and for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania followed the line agreed upon in thecorrespondence and secret meetings described in the memoranda. Each independent set of data wasrejected as unreliable or meaningless when it showed the existence of high radiation levels or
increases in mortality rates.
As Anna Mayo, who covered the proceedings for The Village Voice, put it in an article published a
few months later, "it was all redolent of—you guessed it—Watergate. In the audience,
environmentalists gnashed their teeth, wishing that the Shippingport horrors could have been exposedon national television. If Duquesne Light would cover up, would not Con Ed, LILCO, or
Commonwealth Edison do the same if Indian Point, Shoreham, or Dresden were at stake?"
Indeed a great deal was at stake: In 1973 some thirty-eight new nuclear reactors were in theprocess of being ordered, the largest number ever in one year, each representing a potential business- 100 -of about a billion dollars. And it was the stated aim of the Nixon administration and the nuclear
industry to see a thousand of these reactors operating near the cities of our nation by the end of the
century. It would indeed be difficult for any human beings not to have minimized the danger when athousand billion dollars were at stake.
As expected, when the report of the Governor’s Commission finally appeared a year later, after the
licenses had been granted to Beaver Valley Unit I and II, it did not call for a moratorium on nuclear
power plants, as Anna Mayo had suggested it should at the end of her article. In fact, she had
predicted the outcome exactly. As she had put it bitterly: "About the most that can be expected is amodest plea for further studies: that is, more and more necrophiliac nitpicking."
The summary of the commission’s report set the tone of the entire document. By carefully using
certain qualifying words that are easily passed over by the hurried reader, such as "substantial,""systematic," or "significant," a draft had finally been prepared by Tokuhata, Gerusky, and Reilly thatthe members of the committee could no longer continue to refuse to sign after months of efforts toarrive at some sort of acceptable wording. It provided sentences which, when taken separately, could
be widely used by the utility to claim that it had been completely cleared. For example, consider thevery first sentence: "There is no substantial evidence that the quantities of radioactive materials
released by Shippingport Atomic Power Station have been greater than reported by the plant
operators." This sentence was followed, however, by one that would satisfy the consciences of someof the more concerned commissioners: "However, the absence of comprehensive off-site monitoring
during plant operations precludes accurate verification of the data on plant releases," and so on
throughout the long and inconclusive report.
Far more revealing than the report as to the true feelings of four of the five independent scientists
on the commission willing to go on record were the answers to questions submitted to them by
Griffiths in his article, which appeared just before Governor Shapp released the report in June of1974.
For instance, to the question, "Did the data in the original N.U.S. report point to Shippingport as
the source of the high radiation data," the scientists answered as follows:
DR. DEGROOT: "If we accept those data, then the circumstantial evidence points to
Shippingport largely because of the location of the radioactivity and the lack of plausible
alternate sources."
DR. MORGAN: "The original N.U.S. data very strongly suggested to me that the radioactivity
came from the plant. If you take the data as fact, you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyother source that could explain it."
DR. RADFORD: "Well, there was some indication in the original N.U.S. data that there was arelease from some source. As to whether that source was Shippingport, I’d have to look up
the data again."DR. SMITH: "I can’t find any direct connection between the radiation levels measured by
N.U.S. and the Shippingport plant. All that mish-mash is so unscientific that one would
never be able to draw any valid scientific inferences from it."
Another question referred to the discrepancy between the original N.U.S. analysis and thereanalysis: "After N.U.S. reanalyzed its data, the high radiation levels disappeared. Did thisreanalysis prove to you that the radioactivity was never there?"
DR. DEGROOT: "No, it did not. It did convince me that the reanalysis was highly unreliable.
However, I am equally convinced that the original N.U.S. data showing high levels cannot

- 101 -be considered reliable evidence. There are just so many inconsistencies in their work that I
cannot accept any of it. . . . This comment does not mean that all their high readings were
wrong. In fact, I find it highly unlikely that N.U.S. could have made systematic errors, all in
one direction, in several different analytical techniques."
DR. MORGAN: "The explanations advanced by N.U.S. did not at all convince me. For
example, if they had found something wrong in only one of their systems, it would not be
too surprising. We all make mistakes. But to have systematic errors in several different
analytical techniques, all tending to produce only high readings—the chances of that arequite low. . . . There appears to be a strong suggestion of dishonesty, and that estimate isborne out by written comments from Dr. John Harley of the AEC, whose integrity I respect.
Dr. Harley found that N.U.S. seems to have doctored some of their data to fit theirarguments. If a person will do that with one set of scientific data, it is very possible he will
do it with another. . . . So, as far as I can see, there is no proof that the radioactivity levels
around Shippingport were not quite high in the past. For a long period now the radioactivity
levels in milk in that general area have been high according to the public-health agency
surveys, which are completely separate from the N.U.S. survey. This has never been
explained."
DR. RADFORD: "Well, they had three separate laboratories reanalyze some of the original
1971 milk and soil samples, and each lab got similar low readings. If these samples werevalid, then it is pretty clear there was not much radioactivity there to begin with. Now ofcourse you could say they dug up soil from somewhere and analyzed it—I cannot argue
that."
DR. SMITH: "I think that the degree of scientific merit on one side really was better. I would
accept the explanations advanced by N.U.S."
Another question: "Was there any evidence in the mortality statistics that Shippingport had caused
health damage, or did the statistics tend to refute this?"
DR. DEGROOT: "We cannot really decide the issue because of the poor quality of theavailable health statistics and because the population is not large enough for a reallymeaningful statistical analysis. But there is certainly nothing in the available data to lower
the probability that there may have been health damage. It is true that the Pennsylvania
State Health Department went back and discovered errors of a certain type in its publishedinfant mortality rate for Aliquippa in 1971, and that the ensuing corrections sharply lowered
the rate. . . . However, I feel it is likely there were also errors of another type which could
have raised the rate back up again. Unfortunately, the resources were not available toinvestigate this possibility. So, to my mind, the corrections are incomplete. The only typeof error investigated was one that would reduce the number of deaths and lower the rate. . . .
In any case, I think there remain some anomalies that have not been fully explained. For
example, I did an analysis of infant mortality in Aliquippa, and the rate definitely seems tohave shifted upward recently. To my mind this upward shift is not fully explained bydemographic or socioeconomic factors. I do not know if any of it is due to Shippingport,
but I think it warrants further investigation."
DR. MORGAN: "I do not personally feel that the mortality statistics refute the possibility ofsome adverse effects on the population’s health. Taking the original published data, it
appears to me that there was an effect. However, after the Health Department got throughmaking corrections and applying all the epidemiological and statistical techniques to the- 102 -mortality rates for the population near the reactor, they seem to have come up with thebelief that there were no significant health effects. . . . I cannot help but be a little skeptical.
To me, if you are going to make all these corrections for the population that might havebeen exposed to radiation, you have to give equal consideration to the unexposed control
population. It was very obvious to me that if they had, it would have made a difference in atleast one instance."
DR. RADFORD: "The statistical evidence favors the hypothesis that the plant did not cause
any health damage. For example, the mortality rates do not decline with distance in all
directions away from the plant. The mortality rates for Beaver County as a whole are quite
low, and on that basis one would be hard-pressed to say that Aliquippa was affected, since
the rest of the county should also be high. . . . Then, when the mortality rates for Aliquippa
are corrected for errors, you see that Aliquippa is no worse off than any other town withcomparable population characteristics."
DR. SMITH: "In my opinion the mortality statistics indicate there was no effect from thereactor. The adjusted mortality rates are not abnormally high. One comes to the conclusionthat the Shippingport area may not be the greatest place to live, since the mortality rates arehigher there than in many other communities, but such high rates are normal, expectedoccurrences in places with the kind of demographic and socio-economic characteristics you
find around Shippingport. . . . Also, I have to find a scientific link between radiation
exposure and infant mortality, and this requires a great deal of what I call logicalextrapolation or inferences step by step through a process which proceeds from the birth of achild to its ultimate death, and I cannot find sufficient evidence for that link in this case."
Although the majority clearly were deeply suspicious of the "reanalysis" of the radiation data andthe "adjustment" of the vital statistics by Tokuhata, I was surprised by Radford’s comment that themortality rates do not decline with distance away from Shippingport, and that therefore the evidence
favored the hypothesis that the plant did not cause any health damage.
Not until later, when I saw the final report, did I see what could have led Radford to thisconclusion. In Table 13, Tokuhata had listed the cancer death rates according to distance from
Shippingport for the years 1961 to 1971. There were columns for the rates within 5 miles, between 5
and 10 miles, beyond 10 miles, for Beaver County, and for Pennsylvania as a whole. And at thebottom of each column, there were listed the average mortality rates for each of these regions.
When I looked at them, I was startled to find that Radford seemed to be right. The lowest rate didin fact exist for the circle 5 miles in radius around Shippingport: 155.7 compared with 170.4 in the
next, more distant region 5 to 10 miles away from the plant, and a still higher rate of 182.3 forPennsylvania as a whole. This certainly seemed to suggest that radiation was good for one’s health,and that the closer one lived to the reactor, the better off one would be.
What exactly had Tokuhata done to arrive at this conclusion that had obviously convinced Radford
and Smith? It took me a while to work it out, but when I did I was furious. Looking down the entries
for each year from 1961 to 1971, I saw that all areas showed lower cancer rates in 1961 than in 1971,
but that the area nearest to Shippingport had happened to have by far the lowest rates to begin with,well before any major releases had occurred from Shippingport and well before any increases incancer mortality due to Shippingport could have shown up in the statistics. It had been a largely ruralarea, relatively free from pollution and therefore with relatively good health, cancer mortality having
reached a low point of only 102.6 per 100,000 population in 1964, lower than any other listed at any
time for any area in the table. The average for the first four years, 1961-64 was only 133.4, comparedwith 155.3 for the 5-to-10 mile range and 176.8 for Pennsylvania as a whole.

- 103 -But by the time that the 1963-64 Shippingport releases had had a chance to act, namely by 196970, the area nearest to Shippingport had increased the most, shooting up to a peak of more thandouble its lowest rate of 102.6, namely to 225.6 in 1969 and 218.9 in 1970, while the more distantareas increased much less. Thus, the 5-to-10-mile-distant zone had risen to 189.2 by 1969 and 191.2
by 1970, while the area of Beaver County beyond 10 miles from Shippingport was listed at only 164.9
and 164.3 for these years.
In fact, taking the last four years of 1968 to 1971 in the table when cancers had had a chance tomanifest themselves, and comparing them with the first four years when the effect of any releases
could not yet have appeared in the mortality statistics, it was clear that the data fully confirmed myearlier findings obtained from the Vital Statistics reports of Pennsylvania and Ohio by town and bycounty. The greatest increases had indeed taken place for the people nearest to the plant: a rise of 38
percent compared with only 22 percent for the next zone and 20 percent for the area beyond 10 miles,
while Pennsylvania as a whole showed only a 6 percent increase in cancer mortality.
Thus, by averaging over all the eleven years listed in the table so as to include the years of lowest
cancer rates for the rural area around Shippingport before the plant could have had any effect on
cancer rates, Tokuhata had successfully managed to give the impression that the closer one lived tothe plant, the less was the risk of cancer.
There was one question that had remained unanswered even by the internal documents from the
AEC files: How and where in the plant did the radioactive gases escape without being officiallyreported, as required by both state and federal regulations?
As so often before in the Shippingport story, the answer came in the most unexpected manner, thistime not through the mail but in a phone call late one evening a few weeks after the Aliquippa
hearings had ended.
The caller said that what had been brought out at the hearings so far was in the right direction, butthat the full story behind the high radioactivity in the area could be found by putting the plant
operators on the stand in the forthcoming licensing hearings that were to be held by the AEC later inthe year. What we needed to do was to have the men explain during cross-examination the details of
the treatment system for the radioactive gases, and then force them under oath to say whether they
had found any anomalous conditions in the hold-up tanks where the radioactive gases were supposed
to be stored for many weeks to allow the shorter-lived radioactivity to decay before they would bedischarged from the monitored stack.
This was of course the kind of break we had hoped for. Together with the internal memoranda of
the AEC that had revealed the attempt to explain away the findings of high radioactivity in the air, thesoil, the milk, the water, and the local diet, it would complete our case for arguing that the Duquesne
Light Company should not be given a license to operate two even larger nuclear reactors, since theiremployees were either too incompetent or too corrupt to do so without endangering the health andsafety of the public.
And so I obtained the detailed engineering drawings of the gas-treatment system for the
Shippingport plant from articles published in the literature, and explained the complex system to theattorney for the city, Al Brandon, who would have to do the actual cross-examination.
The hearings by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on the operating permit for Beaver Valley
Unit I and the construction permit for Unit II finally got under way in the fall of 1973 in the Federal
Court House in Pittsburgh. Although we had few illusions as to what the ultimate decision would
eventually turn out to be, we at least hoped to expose to the public what had actually been going on
behind the scenes at the Shippingport plant, widely advertised all over the world by Westinghouseand Duquesne Light as the cleanest and safest nuclear reactor in the world.
For a while we did not know whether we would be allowed to put the operators of the plant on the- 104 -stand. But then the ruling came down, and it all really happened.
The first few men, when shown the diagrams of the gas-treatment system, claimed that they were
not aware of anything abnormal. But suddenly, one of the men, when pressed by Brandon as towhether he had ever noticed anything unusual in the operation of the system, and whether there might
not have been some leakages from the gas-storage tanks in the yard, admitted that he had observed
something that had caused him to become concerned.
Some time in late 1970 or early 1971 he had noticed an unusual drop in the amount of recorded
radioactive gas releases in the plant log, and he had mentioned it to his supervisor, who told him not
to worry about it. Questioned by Brandon he admitted that the situation persisted over a period of a
few weeks, and that he then decided to investigate what might be going on for himself. He went out
into the yard where the large gas-storage tanks were located and found that a lock on one of the rusty
valves had been broken. The valve looked as if it might be leaking. Using a small brush to paint asoap solution over the suspected area, he saw bubbles being formed, indicating that radioactive gas
was in fact leaking from the tank.
Again, he said that he reported the situation to his supervisor, who told him that he would take careof it, and that he should not concern himself with this problem any more since this was not part of his
job.
As Brandon expected, none of the supervisors he put on the stand could recall this incident, and the
local newspaper that evening reported that the plant personnel had testified that there were no
problems in the plant.
Dr. Morton Goldman, the vice-president of N.U.S. and former public-health officer in the U.S.
Department of Health, Education and Welfare, testified under oath that all their early high readings ofradioactivity had been in error, substantiating the testimony of the plant supervisors that no unusual or
unreported releases could have taken place, and a few months later the Atomic Safety and Licensing
Board issued the permits for the new reactors.
Once again, the industry had managed to win the battle in the special courts set up by the AEC,
which controlled the judges, the staff, and the rules of procedure for the benefit of the industry it was
designed to promote and protect.
It was only the people that were the losers. Two years after the licenses were granted and five
years after the high radiation levels had been measured by the N.U.S. Corporation, with the same timedelay as in Hiroshima, the cancer rates in Beaver County and Pittsburgh climbed to a second peak.
They rose a full 23 percent in Beaver County and an unprecedented 9 percent in Pittsburgh in thecourse of only three years: The rise to an all-time high of 304.8 per 100,000 population took place
after a generation of costly efforts to reduce the ordinary pollution from fossil fuels in the air andchemicals in the water.
But the heaviest price of all was to be paid by the men who worked at Shippingport, as I was tolearn at another kind of hearing at Aliquippa seven years later.
When preparing testimony for a hearing before a workmen’s compensation referee in behalf of thefamily of a man who had died of bone-marrow-type leukemia while working at the Beaver Valley
nuclear plant next to the old Shippingport reactor, I was shown the death certificates of twenty-one
other operating engineers who had died between 1970 and 1979. All of them had been working withpumps and other heavy equipment to clean up the radioactive spills and move the radioactive wastes
on the site. Out of these twenty-two men, ten had died of cancer, more than twice the number
normally expected.
Even more significantly, four of these ten were of the bone-marrow-related type, namely multiple
myeloma and myelogenous leukemia, known to be most readily induced by radiation, when less than
one in twenty cancers of this type would have been expected.

- 105 -The men who worked at Shippingport were only too well acquainted with these facts. There was acommon saying among them: high pay and early death.
Yet there was also a sign of hope for the future. After Shippingport was shut down by an
explosion of hydrogen gas in its electrical generator early in 1974, infant mortality in the town of
Aliquippa declined to an all-time low of only 11.3 deaths per thousand babies born in 1976.
If the public could only learn these facts as the nation entered the third century of its revolution
against the arbitrary authority of another distant government careless of the inalienable human rights
to life and liberty, even the tragic tide of rising cancer and damage to the unborn could eventually bereversed.

- 106 -16
The Minds of the Children

DRAINED by the long battle to warn the people of Beaver County and Pittsburgh of the dangers
arising from the "normal" operations of nuclear plants, I decided to devote myself again to my muchneglected research in physics and radiological instrumentation. Many people had by now taken up
the fight to warn the public about other previously unrecognized dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle, all
the way from the mining and milling of uranium ore to the ultimate disposal of the long-lived
radioactive wastes and the possible theft of plutonium by terrorist groups to make home-made bombs.
Thus, when Henry Kendall of the Union of Concerned Scientists joined forces with Ralph Nader in
exposing the previously hidden risks of a major accident in early 1974, I felt that the battle was ingood hands while I caught up with my other responsibilities.
Now and then I would of course be asked to speak or testify at licensing hearings or court cases,
but with the revelations of secret abuses of power in the Nixon administration and the formation ofNader’s "Critical Mass" organization of anti-nuclear groups in the fall of 1974, I had the feeling thatthe public’s blind trust in its government leaders had at last been shaken, and that the tide had begun
to turn. It seemed to me that the nuclear juggernaut would eventually be halted as a new generationof young scientists, engineers, and political leaders born after Hiroshima could take an unbiased lookat the enormous problems that had been kept from the public and that were now increasingly coming
to light.
What did continue to concern me very much were the repeated episodes of heavy fallout ofradioactive iodine from Chinese nuclear tests that continued to damage the thyroids of the unborn andthe infants, but that continued to be downplayed by state and federal health agencies. There was also
the failure of any real progress toward an end to the multiplication of nuclear bombs, despite thesigning of the SALT treaty that at least for the moment had halted an all-out anti-ballistic missilerace.
In addition, there were also the continuing underground bomb tests by the U.S., the Russians, theFrench, and the British. No one paid much attention to these anymore, but on numerous occasions in
the past such tests had spewed forth radioactive gases that kept raising the risk of cancer andthreatening the life and health of the newborn thousands of miles away.
I remembered only too well the tragic story of one of the worst of such accidents. On December
18, 1970, more than seventeen years after Professor Clark and his students accidentally discovered therainout in Troy, New York, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission conducted an underground nuclearweapons test at the Nevada Test Site. Code-named "Baneberry," this Hiroshima-sized bomb was
exploded some 800 feet underground. The explosion opened up a fissure in the rock, and large
quantities of radioactivity escaped upward into the atmosphere. In the vicinity of the test site, theslowly drifting cloud of radioactive dust produced readings of 25 rads per hour on the ground.
Hundreds of employees were seriously overexposed and had to be quickly evacuated.

- 107 -Shortly after the accident, the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine and the Utah State
Division of Health notified a team of fallout specialists working at the University of Utah undercontract to the AEC. The team, headed by Drs. Robert C. Pendleton and Charles W. Mays, scientists
who had long warned of the dangers to the infant thyroid from radioactive iodine, immediately set
about determining the direction and intensity of the radioactive clouds. From the Salt Lake Weather
Bureau they learned the speed of the winds at the time of detonation, while the Nevada Operations
Office informed them that the radioactive leakage had occurred during a period of very strong wind
shear, with winds at different altitudes blowing in different directions. The team was able to estimatethat during the next twenty-four hours the lowest part of the cloud would probably go to the east ofWinnemucca, Nevada,while the layer above would be blown across Utah to the southeast. The nexthighest layer was apparently headed for New Mexico, while the topmost parts were expected to be
carried into Utah between Highways 56 and 21.
Once the direction of the fallout was estimated, the extensive network of sampling stations aroundthe state, constructed in the years since the dangers from fallout in the milk were discovered, could go
into operation, estimating the strength of the radioactivity in the air and on the ground. This wasindeed a far more sophisticated operation than the one mounted so long before by Dr. Clark’s
students, driving from town to town in their jalopies carrying rudimentary Geiger counters. And in
this case, there was no problem about estimating the internal radiation dose, something that had noteven been considered in Troy back in 1953. Now, a program run jointly with the Utah Division ofFish and Game was put into action to procure samples of the local wildlife that had been in the path of
the fallout. Conservation officers were enlisted to collect deer that had recently been killed on the
highways, while sheep, deer, and rabbits were shot in areas where they were regarded as a nuisance.
These animals were to be dissected in the laboratory, where the concentrations of isotopes in theirbody organs would be measured.
On December 19 and 20, teams departed from Salt Lake City to obtain samples of snow andvegetation. Instead of the burdock leaves favored by Dr. Clark and his students, the fallout specialists
took samples of alfalfa, sagebrush, and juniper. Some of the alfalfa samples consisted of loose hay
from exposed bales.
According to the laboratory results, the most prominent gamma-radiation-emitting isotopes in the
Baneberry fallout were the short-lived, intensely radioactive iodine 131 and iodine 133. These were
found in the lungs, thyroids, stomachs, and fetuses of deer and sheep, as well as in snow, milk, andvegetation. The fallout specialists were able to determine that if the Baneberry explosion had
happened to take place in the warmer months, when the cows were out to pasture, the total dose to the
local children from iodine in the milk would have been approximately 120 millirads, with somereceiving much higher exposures. This did not include the dose from the other isotopes inhaled oreaten. Furthermore, the scientists observed that low wind velocities and an atmospheric inversion had
fortunately served to keep the fallout that reached Utah fairly stationary for a number of days in aposition over relatively unpopulated areas. This allowed quantities of the heaviest fallout particles tosettle to the ground, while the short-lived isotopes lost much of their radioactivity before the cloud
was blown over the more populated areas. If these fortuitous circumstances had not existed, the doses
might have been much higher for the people of Utah, perhaps as high as in Troy in 1953.
As it turned out, the predictions of where the fallout would drift were wrong. The heaviest clouds
went north and northeast toward Idaho, Washington, and Montana, where rain and snow brought
down much more radioactivity than in Utah. Subsequently, the fallout from Baneberry was detectedacross the northern U.S. by large rises in the cesium 137 levels in milk, as could be seen in the stateby-state tabulation of cesium levels for December 1970 printed in the April 1971 issue of Radiation
Health Data and Reports. Data for the radioactivity on the ground also showed that the fallout had

- 108 -drifted into Canada, thus violating the provisions of the 1963 test-ban treaty, which does not permit
nuclear tests that release radioactivity beyond the national borders of the nation conducting them.
But as far as the general public was concerned, there was only the following statement by the
AEC, carried by The New York Times and the rest of the press around the country:
The Commission said that the radioactivity was of such low intensity that it presented no
danger. It was detected at altitudes of several thousand feet, and only the most minute tracesof radioactive contamination would reach the ground, the Commission said. The AEC . . .
said that nowhere outside the immediate area of the test was the fallout dangerous to humanlife or health.
In the spring of 1971 our group gathered the data for radioactivity in the air, in the milk, and on the
ground both before and after the Baneberry test. This was then correlated with the mortality figures
for infants born following the explosion, as reported in the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics. In all of thestates where the total radioactivity rose highest—Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Washington,
Nebraska, and as far away as Minnesota and Maine—infant mortality also rose sharply during the first
three months after the test. Across the rest of the U.S., the pattern of general decline continued.
It was shortly after reading another story in the papers about how the United States and the Soviet
Union had failed to agree once again on a treaty to halt all underground nuclear tests that my attention
was caught by an article in The New York Times about an apparently unrelated subject. The report
dealt with the fact that in 1975 the scores in the nationwide Scholastic Aptitude Tests had dropped by
the largest amount in two decades. While there had been a more or less steady decline in both theverbal and the mathematical scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than 2 or 3 points, theaverage verbal scores had suddenly dropped 10 points in a single year. Since our son was taking the
S.A.T. tests that year, I read the article with more than casual interest.
Suddenly the question flashed through my mind: When were these young people born or in theirmother’s womb? Most of them were 18 years old when they graduated from high school. What was
18 taken from 1975? It was 1957, the year when the largest amount of radioactive fallout evermeasured descended on the United States from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons everdetonated in Nevada. Just as in the case of the Baneberry test, the radioactive iodines must have goneto the thyroids of the infants in their mother’s womb, where it would retard their growth anddevelopment ever so slightly so that it was not readily noticeable, and only when the children were
tested 17 to 18 years later on a nationwide scale would it show up in a sharp drop in intellectual
performance.
Clearly, if the effects were serious enough to lead to a rise in infant mortality and congenital
defects back in 1957, as I knew had taken place, then for every baby that died shortly after birth, there
must have been many who were minimally brain-damaged or whose cognitive growth may not havereached its full potential.
I remembered from the 1969 Hanford symposium that this was exactly what had happened to theyoung children on the Marshall Islands after the radioactive cloud from the "Bravo" hydrogen-bomb
test in 1954 had accidentally showered the island of Rongelap, 150 miles away, with fresh fallout. As
reported by Conard at that meeting, in the following fifteen years, all the children developed thyroid
disease of one form or another and showed severe growth retardation, both in their bodies and the sizeof their brains.
But the thought was really too disturbing to contemplate in all its enormous implications. Perhaps
it was just a coincidence and nothing more. After all, as the Times story made clear, there were somany other possible factors that could have been involved, including a deterioration of the schools,

- 109 -more disadvantaged students taking the tests, more urban problems, and the whole upheaval of theVietnam war. Even too much television viewing had been blamed for the drop in reading ability, as
well as a general decline in motivation among young people. But I was glad that I had urged my wife
and all our friends to give powdered milk to their children during their years of infancy, in which theshort-lived iodine 131 had had a chance to decay away.
Not being an expert in the field of psychological testing, I clearly was out of my depth.
Consequently, I decided to put the idea aside for the moment, thinking that perhaps some day there
might be an opportunity to discuss it with colleagues and friends more knowledgeable in this field.
Besides, I saw no obvious way to test this idea further at this time. It was true that the decline had
begun only in 1963, eighteen years after 1945, when the first bombs were detonated and infantmortality began to halt its decline. But only time would tell whether the decline would end when thestudents taking the test were those who were born during the temporary nuclear bomb test moratorium
between 1959 and 1961. (This group would be taking the S.A.T. in 1977 and 1978.)In the face of widespread public alarm, a special panel on the decline in Scholastic Aptitude scores
was created under the direction of former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz. The Wirtz panel
commissioned more than two dozen special research studies under the joint sponsorship of theCollege Board and the Educational Testing Service; these studies were published in 1977 together
with a summary report, a copy of which I sent for when its completion was announced in anotherarticle in The New York Times.
It was clear from the report that despite this major effort to identify the cause or causes of the
disturbing decline in test scores, no single factor or group of factors seemed to explain the observed
pattern of decline. The various studies did conclude, however, that certain factors were not likely tohave played a significant part in the sudden decline. For example, cultural bias, differences in thepredictive ability of the tests for whites and blacks, changes in the difficulty of the test, and tests
getting out of line with high school practices and standards were eliminated as likely explanations.
Since even after this major research effort no one had come up with any really adequate
explanation, I decided to discuss my hypothesis with an old friend, Dr. Henry P. David, a psychologist
living near Washington, whenever the opportunity would present itself next.
To my surprise, after listening quietly to my explanation for a long while, he did not think that it
was so impossible after all. There had apparently been a growing recognition in the psychologicalcommunity that many physical factors acting on the developing baby during pregnancy—including
cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and anesthetics used during delivery—could result in retarded growth,underweight births, and various degrees of learning and behavioral problems later in childhood.
Thus encouraged, I decided to pursue the matter further, particularly since one of the predictions of
the hypothesis had just been confirmed: As suddenly as the annual drop in verbal S.A.T. scores hadgone to ten points in 1975, it had just as unexpectedly stopped dropping so precipitously in thefollowing two years, declining by only three points in 1976 and a mere two points by 1977.
Many years ago, I had had occasion to look up the total amount of fission energy released by small
tactical weapons detonated in Nevada as measured in kilotons, or thousands of tons, of equivalentweight of TNT. (The Hiroshima bomb was approximately 15 kilotons.) When I found the figures,
they were 303 kilotons in 1957, 18 kilotons in 1958, and none in 1959. So far, at least, the idea had
withstood its first test, and the ability of a theory to make a correct prediction is universally regarded
as a very crucial factor in accepting it. But I needed to find someone in the field of educational testingwith whom to work on the further examination of these ideas.
It so happened that shortly after I had started to look for a collaborator, I received a letter from Dr.
Steven Bell, an educational psychologist at a small college in Georgia. In the letter he told me that hehad heard about my findings on infant and fetal mortality changes that were correlated with fallout,- 110 -and he asked whether I had ever considered the possibility that it might have had an effect on learning
ability.
Delighted with this coincidence, I wrote back that indeed I had begun to suspect this, and that I
would be happy to work with him on this question. I included copies of all my relevant papers andsome preliminary plots showing a correlation of the declining S.A.T. scores with the pattern ofaccumulated external gamma-radiation doses measured at the Brookhaven National Laboratories.
Oddly enough, this had been introduced into the record of the licensing hearings for the Shoreham
nuclear plant some years ago by proponents for its construction when I was asked to testify as to thepotential danger that the planned releases might present for children born in the area.
As it turned out, Bell had for some years become increasingly concerned about the possibility thatphysical and chemical agents in the environment might have much more serious effects on I.Q. andachievement test scores than had been suspected. Such factors acting on the baby in the mother’swomb would be indistinguishable from hereditary problems, so that individuals born in anenvironment where there were such deleterious factors present might show learning disabilities thatwould wrongly be blamed either on "bad genes" or the poor social and educational environment
alone.
Since very often the poor were blacks, Indians, or Puerto Ricans, the generally lower I.Q. and
S.A.T. scores of these groups as a whole could mistakenly be blamed on genetic factors when actually
there could be an unrecognized effect of such physical and chemical agents as DDT, cigarettesmoking, air pollution, herbicides, poor diet, high fallout, and drug use during pregnancy—factorsthat had been generally ignored by psychologists studying intellectual development in the past. And
since poor diet and health are more common among the poor, minority groups would be
disproportionately affected by these factors.
Certainly all the earlier studies on infant and fetal mortality rates had consistently shown that
nonwhites suffered about twice the mortality rates of infants within the white population, and this was
widely recognized as being connected with poverty and poor diet and not with any inherited factors.
When the mortality rates had stopped declining after the onset of heavy nuclear testing in the early
1950s, the greatest negative effects were in the nonwhite population of the rural south and the urban
ghettos of the Northeast, where not only the fallout but also the poverty was greatest. And even after
the end of the heaviest fallout from the atmospheric bomb tests in the mid-1960s although both whiteand nonwhite infant mortality were declining rapidly once more, as I had predicted back in 1969, theabsolute mortality rate for nonwhites was still twice what it was for the white populations in suchurbanized states as Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois.
But wherever there were no large groups of very poor populations and the environment was
relatively free from both ordinary industrial and radioactive pollution—as in Hawaii, Alaska,
Montana, and New Hampshire—infant mortality rates were plunging to unprecedented low levels in
the late 1970s. The rates were dropping far below those of the urban states with large nuclear
reactors, such as New York and Pennsylvania, despite the higher number of physicians per person andthe greater access to hospitals with special units for the care of premature babies. And a similar
pattern had begun to show in cancer rates.
All of these considerations supported the hypothesis that radioactive fallout might have been one
widely distributed factor that had been neglected in the search for a cause of the declining learningand reading abilities of the young students born in the 1950s. But how could this be tested further?
Bell and I had sent for one of the studies carried out for the Wirtz commission by Dr. Rex Jacksonof the Educational Testing Service. The study contained a detailed statistical breakdown of the scoresby region since 1971. Since fallout also had differed in intensity for different regions of the UnitedStates, here was another chance to check the hypothesis.

- 111 -If it was indeed the poor schools of the large urban areas that were mainly responsible for the dropin scores, then clearly the greatest declines should have taken place in the Middle Atlantic Region,
which included New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the District ofColumbia, together with the Midwest populations in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio, with their large
ghetto areas.
On the other hand the Western Region, which included the states of Alaska, Hawaii, California,
Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado, with their relatively
rural populations and relatively fewer urban ghetto problems should clearly show the least decline.
But exactly the opposite was the case. Comparing the scores for the high school graduating classes
of 1976 with those for 1974, during which the United States as a whole dropped 13 points in theverbal test, the West dropped 19 points compared to only 9 points for the Midwest and 14 points for
the Middle Atlantic states.
Even the South, with its relatively low average income, poorer school systems, and lowest
educational expenditures, dropped by much less than the West, namely by only 13 points. No otherregion declined as much as the western United States, with its relatively clean air, clean water, andgenerally higher average socio-economic level.
Nor would the wide difference in the drop fit the hypothesis that it was television viewing that was
responsible for the great drop in reading and mathematics scores. It was difficult to believe that thechildren in Illinois, Ohio, and New York watched television so much less than those living in
California, Washington, and Idaho.
Certainly the ghettos of Chicago, Detroit, and New York had suffered a much greater social
upheaval than most of the West, except for Los Angeles, and they clearly contained the greaternumber of minority groups, broken homes, one-parent families, and run-down schools plagued byvandalism, absenteeism, and violence in the classrooms. But the decline in scores did fit the patternof the weapons-test fallout during the years of 1956 to 1958, when these children were born.
By far the largest amount of fallout from the Pacific and Siberian tests had rained out over Hawaii,
Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, where the coastal mountain ranges near the population
centers of Seattle and Portland showed the highest amounts of strontium 90, cesium 137, and otherradioactive substances in the milk and diet. And in Nevada and Utah, the large 1957 series oftactical-nuclear-weapons tests had brought down the highest levels of short-lived iodine 131 in themilk ever recorded. It was, in fact, in the clean coastal counties of the Pacific Northwest where lungcancer rates had risen most sharply.
By contrast, the areas of the Midwest such as lower Illinois, Indiana,and Ohio had been spared theheaviest fresh fallout, which drifted mainly across the northern United States from the Nevada testsite over Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, until it reached theAppalachian Mountains of northern New York and New England. There the heavy rain and snowfall
as well as the greater air pollution would bring it down in large amounts, just as the acid rain brought
down the sulphur dioxide emitted by the coal plants of the Midwest. Together with the effects ofpoverty and ordinary air pollution of the industrial East, this could explain why the Middle Atlantic
and New England states showed an intermediate drop in scores of only 12 to 14 points, between theWest’s 19 points and the 8 points of the Midwestern plain.
Bell and I realized that it would be extremely important to obtain the scores for some of theindividual states, but these were not listed in any of the existing publications. Not until the summer of
1979, shortly before we were scheduled to present an invited paper at the meeting of the American
Psychological Association in September, did we find a way to obtain the scores for four out of the fivestates for which the U.S. Public Health Service had measured the fallout levels back in 1957.
Apparently, some of the states did not want their S.A.T. scores to be published, and so the College

- 112 -Board was able to release to us only the data for California, Utah, Ohio, and New York, but not for
Missouri.
But as soon as I opened the letter with the data I knew that the hypothesis was once again
supported by the evidence: By far the greatest drop between 1974 and 1976 had indeed occurred in
the state with the highest levels of radio-iodine in the milk, namely Utah, and the smallest drop wasrecorded for the midwestern state of Ohio, largely to the south of the drifting clouds of fallout that had
passed over Minnesota, Michigan, New York, southern Ontario Province in Canada and northern New
England. The magnitude of the effect was difficult to believe, but here in the letter from the College
Board were the hard numbers: Utah had dropped 26 points and Ohio only 2.
There was just no way that such an enormous difference in the sudden drop could be explained
solely by socio-economic factors, differences in the quality of teachers, school curricula, televisionviewing, amount of cigarette smoking, drug use, alcohol consumption, or other gradually changing
physical factors in the environment such as air pollution or pesticides.
In fact, if smoking, alcohol, and drug taking during pregnancy had been a factor, Utah, with its
large Mormon population, should have declined less and not more than Ohio and New York. But it
was the other way around: The population with lower cigarette consumption, alcohol, and drug
problems during pregnancy had the greater decline in Scholastic Aptitude scores by many times thenormal statistical fluctuation of 2 to 3 points.
Nor could differences in the genetic factors of the two populations be blamed: They were bothpredominantly white, and in fact the Mormons had originally come from the East and Midwest.
Besides, genetic or inherited factors would lead to long-term differences, not the sudden changes that
had taken place. Tragically, it now appears that we had unwittingly carried out an experiment withourselves as guinea pigs on a worldwide scale. This discovery made me more determined than everto do everything in my power to make sure that the terribly costly lesson would be learned before
mankind would make further and perhaps more irreversible mistakes with fallout from nuclear war or
nuclear reactor accidents, in which the radioactivity equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs mightsuddenly be released over vast areas the size of entire states or nations.
But as we pointed out at the Psychological Association meeting, there was also reason for hope inthe data for individual states. First of all, the test scores in Utah rebounded partially by 9 points thefollowing year, when the nuclear test ban apparently showed its effect for the children conceived
eighteen years earlier. At least some of the damage was not permanent, presumably because it
affected the fetal thyroid more than the mother’s, and the iodine was gone from the milk within amatter of a few months after the bomb tests ended, although damage from strontium 90 and its
daughter product, yttrium 90, to the pituitary gland would continue for many years, since it had
accumulated in the bones of young women for decades.
Also, it was encouraging that the average level of performance on the tests had been so muchhigher in Utah than in any of the three other states for which we had the data. Although California,
New York, and Ohio all showed scores in 1974 that were above the U.S. average of 440, down 38
points from the maximum of 478 in 1963, Utah had by far the highest score, namely 532, comparedwith 459 for Ohio, 454 for New York, and 450 for California.
Thus, it appeared that given the kind of quality school system that the people of Utah had
established, together with the good diet, the low amount of smoking, drug use, and alcohol
consumption during pregnancy, it was possible to attain a much higher degree of performance on thistype of achievement test. The potential for raising the school performance of our children in the
future was therefore clearly immense if we could only learn to use our vast productive capability toprovide better diets, better schools, and better prenatal care as the Mormons had been able to do.
Instead we were investing more and more of our national income in gigantic nuclear reactors for both- 113 -military and civilian purposes that were filling the air and drinking water with invisible radioactive
poisons, destroying the most important resource of our nation, the physical and mental health of ourchildren.
Furthermore, this high intellectual performance was achieved in Utah despite serious local
pollution problems from copper smelters, large coal-burning plants, and as many automobiles per
capita as anywhere else in the United States. (Neither copper smelters, coal plants, nor automobiles
produce strontium 90 or iodine 131.) It was obviously not necessary to return to a primitive,nonindustrial society for people to have capable children or to live a long, healthy, and useful life.
For not only did the people of Utah have children with test scores that were far above the average ofthe rest of the United States, but they also had among the lowest rates of heart disease and cancer inthe entire nation.
Since the Mormon customs discouraged smoking, they did not experience the large synergistic
multiplying factor for lung cancer that smokers experienced when the radioactive fallout arrived. Just
as the uranium miners who did not smoke were better off than their coworkers who did, the Mormons
were able to clear out of their lungs the fine radioactive dust particles more rapidly than those whoselung clearance was slowed down by the nicotine in cigarette smoke. Thus, their religious customs
resulted in much lower amounts of both man-made and natural radioactivity staying in their lungs orentering their bloodstream, reducing greatly the risk of low-level exposure leading to rises in lungcancer, heart ailments, and other chronic diseases.
Both Bell and I were surprised by how well our rather startling hypothesis was received by thelarge number of psychologists who came prepared to question our theory. In the ensuing discussion,questions were raised as to whether a change in the mix of the students taking the tests might not
explain a good portion of the long decline in test scores. That is, could the decline in scores be
explained by the increase of students from lower-income homes who in the past would not havethought of going to college? This was indeed likely to be the case in the early years, according tosome of the studies published by the Wirtz Commission, but it could not explain either the sudden
sharp drop followed by a halt in the late 1970s, when the total number of students taking the tests was
actually declining. Nor could an increase in the number of less well-prepared students explain the
recent wholesale decline in the number of students who could score above 600 or 700 out of thepossible maximum of 800 points in these tests.
It was, in fact, the extremely sharp decline in the number of very high-scoring students that
presented the greatest potential problem for a society increasingly dependent on verbal andmathematical skills to run the computers, design the automated machines for the factories and farmsof the future, administer an increasingly high-technology society, and operate the sophisticatedelectronic weapons of a modern army. Instead of 189,300 students who had been able to score above
600 in the verbal test among those born in 1952-53, there were suddenly only 110,300 for the birthyears of 1957-58, a drop of 42 percent. And an even greater drop occurred for the top students onwhom our society would depend for much of its new ideas, creativity, and leadership skills in the arts,
the sciences, and engineering, namely those who were able to score over 700. In this category, thenumbers were cut by more than half, from a high point of 33,200 born before the Nevada tests began
in 1949-50 to a low of only 14,800 for those born in 1957-58, the years of the heaviest fallout fromour weapons testing.
It was only too evident that if the radioactivity in the environment led to early infant mortality,
childhood cancer, thyroid damage, and underweight births, then also the learning ability of thesurviving children might never develop its full potential.
And it would be the steady decline in the ability to read and reason and not so much the risingcancer rates in old age that would be the real seed for the self-destruction of a modern technological- 114 -society. The children that could not read or cope with mathematics and science would drop out ofschool and become permanently unemployable. And these young people would feel increasingly
resentful toward those whom they blamed for their failure: their teachers, their parents, and theirpolitical leaders. Even worse, they would blame themselves and suffer from low self-esteem.
Many of the unemployed and discouraged young people would drift into crime, vastly raising thelevel of violence and fear in the cities. Not knowing what caused their problems, they would
increasingly resort to drugs and alcohol to overcome their sense of failure and hopelessness, raising
the rate of juvenile suicide and crime still further.
Not being aware of the subtle thyroid damage with its resultant lethargy, parents would blame theteachers, and teachers would blame the parents for the increasing loss of interest, discipline, reading
ability, and general motivation of the students. Vast sums of money would be spent in efforts to help
the slow learners and the many handicapped students suddenly flooding the schools, draining theresources of society at the very time when there would not be enough highly skilled, resourceful, andinventive young people produced to improve the teaching and raise the productivity of factories,
businesses, and farms. At the same time, the cost of health care would spiral as more and moredeveloped early chronic disabilities, a situation that would lead to increasing absenteeism fromoffices, schools, and factories, and thus further reduce the output of goods and services while
expectations continued to rise.
As productivity dropped while the need for costly special education and disability payments rose,the vast amount of borrowing that government would have to do to provide for the rapidly growing
number of unemployed, handicapped, and sick would drive up the rate of inflation more and more.
To keep ahead of the inflation, as well as to dampen its flames, the banks would have to raise theirinterest rates so as not to lose money by lending. Industrial machinery could not be modernizedbecause borrowing the money would become too costly. The factories and farms would fall still
further behind in their ability to meet the growing demand for manufactured goods and food, further
adding to the pressures of inflation.
At the same time, the smaller supply of capable and creative young people needed to fill the jobs asengineers, scientists, doctors, nurses, computer specialists, teachers, managers, and officers for theincreasingly sophisticated factories, offices, schools, hospitals, and military services would drive up
salaries, adding still more fuel to the inflationary fires. More and more plants would be forced to shut
down because they could not compete with more modern factories in other countries whose young
workers were more productive because these countries were not in the direct path of the fresh fallout
from Nevada and therefore less heavily exposed to short-lived iodine. Also a greater fraction of the
reduced supply of talented and inventive young people would be absorbed in the unproductive tasksof developing ever more complex and costly nuclear-weapons systems and reactors, thus further
weakening the economic situation of the nation as it was forced to import ever larger amounts ofcivilian goods and machinery from other countries.
As I thought about this scenario, I wondered how much of this had already begun to happen, as
juvenile crime and suicide suddenly doubled and tripled in the mid-1970s among the children born in
the late 1950s all over the U.S. and in northern industrial countries, where the fresh fallout had comedown most heavily. The end of weapons testing in Nevada had led to a halt in the decline ofintellectual ability among those tested eighteen years later, especially those born well after 1963,
when bomb testing ended. There were now fewer children born blind and deaf showing up in thestatistics, and there were fewer leukemia cases, brain tumors, and suicides among children andadolescents. Fewer crimes were being committed by young people under 18 years old than during themid-1970s, when the intellectual achievement scores had dropped most rapidly, although the latest
crime statistics showed a second large jump in 1979, corresponding to the second series of heavy

- 115 -atmospheric bomb tests 17 to 18 years earlier in 1961-1962.
There were now also fewer who were born immature, underweight, and thus dying of chronic andinfectious diseases, except near the growing number of nuclear reactors that started operating in theearly 1970s.
There was to be yet another development that strongly supported the hypothesis that fallout had
unanticipated effects on mental development of the young. Just six months after the meeting of theAmerican Psychological Association in New York where we had presented our findings, anotherscientific meeting took place in Baltimore devoted to the biological effects of ionizing radiation. At
this meeting, Dr. Charlotte Silverman of the Bureau of Radiological Health in the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services presented a paper entitled "Mental Function Following Scalp XIrradiation for Tinea Capitatis in Childhood," a condition more commonly known as ringworm of thescalp.
Dr. Silverman summarized the results of studies of two groups of children treated by means of Xrays, a method no longer used. One group of 2,215 children was followed at New York University
Medical Center, and another group of 10,842 children at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel
was followed over a period of 20 to 25 years, together with matched groups of non-irradiated controls.
Aside from an increase in the number of brain and thyroid tumors, there was also an excess of
nervous, mental and behavioral problems in the irradiated groups. As Dr. Silverman reported, "TheNew York investigators found a higher incidence of treated psychiatric disorders among the irradiatedwhich persisted during an observation time of about 30 years."
For the Israeli group as originally reported by Drs. B. Modan and E. Ron at the Sixth International
Congress of Radiation Research in Tokyo earlier that year, Dr. Silverman summarized the results asfollows:
Several measures of brain function, mental ability and scholastic achievement demonstratethat the irradiated children suffered impairment. These findings are consistent with and extend
previous findings of suggestive brain damage from radiation.
The doses to the thyroids of the children were listed as having been in the range of 6 to 9 rads, well
below the doses of 10 to 60 rads received by the children of Utah from the fallout of the Nevada tests
reported by Dr. C. W. Mays at the August 1963 Congressional Hearings for the children of Utah in
1962, or the 5 to 40 rads estimated by Dr. Eric Reiss for the children of the Troy-Albany area where
heavy rainouts in distant areas had first been discovered.
Since the thyroid doses to the more sensitive developing fetus are generally 10 to 20 times as great
as for the young infant, it was therefore not surprising that effects on brain function, mental ability
and scholastic achievement should be observable for the children born in Utah and other areas
subjected to bomb fallout during the years of nuclear weapons testing.
Shortly after the Baltimore meeting, the College Board sent me the SAT scores for 45 out of the 50
states up to the most recent testing period of 1978-79, 17 years after the second nuclear weapons
series of tests in 1962. It was clear that this more detailed data would provide a crucial test of ourprediction that there should be another sharp drop in the scores associated with the series of Nevada
bomb tests, and that the greatest declines should again be observed for the western United States
downwind from Nevada.
After going through the table, I saw that the answer was quickly apparent. Among all the states
listed, Utah again showed the sharpest decline in the entire United States, 11 points in a single year.
The declines diminished with distance away from Utah across the northern United States until theyreached 5 points in New York, 3 points in Connecticut and only 1 point in Rhode Island.

- 116 -How long would it take before the public would be able to learn of these facts? How long would ittake before the damage that the governments deeply committed to nuclear technology for weaponsand energy were continuing to inflict upon their own children would be ended? There were, ofcourse, hopeful signs among those born in rural areas far from the nuclear plants in the years since thebomb fallout had stopped. Would any government leaders dominated by fear of foreign enemies beable to find the courage to carry out the epidemiological studies that had been called for so often in
the past and admit the tragic errors that had been made? Or were we all helplessly lock-stepped on
the road to the self-destruction that blind persistence in the course we had taken would surely bring toour nation and all those who had followed us in the frantic rush toward the false promise of unlimited
power presented by the discovery of self-sustaining fission?
All this had enormous implications for the proposed new missile systems and the scenarios used tojustify their need. If indeed the fallout from the bomb tests in Nevada was the principal new factor
responsible for the unprecedented sudden drop in mental abilities among newborn in those tragic
years, then the detonation of just two or three half-megaton warheads on the missile silos in Nevada
and Utah would cause a drop equal to that observed during the seven years of small-tactical-weapons
testing. What then would a massive strike of many thousands of such warheads, exploded near thesurface on our missile silos in the West, mean for the future of our nation, even if not a single one of
our cities were destroyed? Knowing the enormous sensitivity of the fetus in the mother’s womb, wasit really credible that any President of the United States could be blackmailed into not firing our
missiles after such a hypothetical attack in the hope of "saving" the population in the cities of theeast? And what would it profit the leaders of another country that had launched such a blow against
us if within days, a massive cloud of drifting fallout would poison the air, the food, and water of theirchildren for generations, even if not a single one of our missiles should ever reach their land?

- 117 -17
Incident at Three Mile Island

A FEW MINUTES after ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, March 28, 1979, I was sitting in mystudy trying to understand the full implications of what I had learned during a week-long trial in
Philadelphia. At issue in the trial was the degree of genetic damage done to the soldiers who had
been marched under the highly radioactive clouds during the Nevada tests back in the 1950s. Just as I
was trying to sort out my thoughts on the discovery of the large doses the men had received bybreathing in the dust and gases, the telephone rang.
It was a reporter calling from radio station WPLR in New Haven, Connecticut, a station fromwhich I had received a number of calls over the past year, ever since I had testified at a Congressionalseminar on the increases in infant mortality and cancer following large radioactive releases from theMillstone Nuclear Plant some 25 miles east of New Haven. The reporter wanted to know my reaction
to a news bulletin that had just come over the wire, according to which a general emergency had beenannounced at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
According to the report, high radiation levels had been measured inside the main containmentbuilding of Unit II, and most of the plant personnel who were not essential were being evacuatedfollowing the accidental release of radioactive steam from the primary loop of the reactor.
From the little information in the first wire-service bulletin, I could only guess that this might be
the beginning of a potentially serious accident. Normally, the steam from the primary loop of apressurized-water reactor contains relatively low levels of radioactivity, and if there was enough toforce evacuation of all but the most essential people in the control room, there had to be major
damage to fuel elements in the reactor core. And since the motion picture The China Syndrome hadjust opened, my thoughts immediately turned to the possibility that right here in Pennsylvania, where
the first commercial nuclear reactor had been built with so much hope, we might also experience thefirst melt-down and catastrophic release of radioactive gases about which a growing number ofconcerned scientists had tried to warn the public for years.
The first thing I did was to call Tom Gerusky at the state’s Bureau of Radiological Health inHarrisburg, but the line was busy. I then decided to call the local offices of the Associated Press andUnited Press International in Pittsburgh to see whether more recent bulletins contained any moredetailed information. What I learned from these reports was not reassuring. Apparently, radiationlevels inside the containment building were still rising, and there were fragmentary reports ofradioactive gas releases taking place, leading to above-normal radiation readings near the site, locatedsome 10 miles south of the city of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River.
At the same time, spokesmen for the utility were being quoted as claiming that there was noserious problem, and certainly no need for nearby residents to evacuate the area.
Which way were the winds blowing? Were they blowing north, toward the densely populated
metropolitan area? I called the U.S. Weather Bureau and learned that early in the morning the winds

- 118 -had been blowing generally south and southeast, toward the rural counties of York and Lancaster, at a
relatively low velocity. This was of course relatively good news for the large population ofHarrisburg, but not such good news for the people in York and Lancaster counties. The low windspeed would mean relatively high concentrations of gases in the air, which in turn might lead topotentially large inhalation doses—as large as those I had just calculated for the soldiers in Nevada.
And the fine drizzle in the air would bring down radioactive iodines into the local pastures, thus
presenting still another problem for the people of this heavily agricultural area even if a major meltdown of the reactor core should be averted.
The telephone rang again, and this time it was someone from the Mobilization for Survival in
Philadelphia, asking me whether I would be willing to go to a press conference in Harrisburg the next
day together with Dr. George Wald of Harvard University. The purpose of this conference would be
to present an alternative source of information for the people in the area on the potential healthhazards from the accident. (So far, the people in the area had received nothing more than the blandreassurances being offered by the utility and the spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
the government organization formed from the old AEC when it was reorganized a few years ago).
The thought passed through my mind that by tomorrow, Harrisburg might not be a very healthy
place to bring a lot of reporters together for a news conference, but I tentatively agreed to go,provided there were no further serious or unforeseen developments. In the meantime, I would have totry to gather as much information as possible about just what was going on in the reactor. I needed tohave a clearer feeling for the nature of the danger that the people in Harrisburg were facing.
Again I tried reaching Gerusky’s office in Harrisburg, but without success. Obviously, everyone in
the world was trying to reach him or Margaret Reilly, the only people who had any firsthandinformation on radiation levels aside from the utility’s own people—and the utility’s people could not
be trusted to give out the true data.
The telephone rang again, and this time it was KDKA-TV, the Westinghouse station in Pittsburgh,wanting to interview me for their evening news program. They read me the latest wire stories, andthe implications were getting increasingly more serious as the full extent of the accident began toemerge. Apparently a cooling pump had failed to function, and a series of events led to the openingof a safety valve that allowed large amounts of cooling water to escape into the main containmentbuilding. This sounded ominous, but it was all still very confused.
Later in the afternoon, a reporter from ABC-TV in New York called to say that he heard that I wasgoing to go to Harrisburg the next day. Would I be able to bring a survey meter along so that there
would be some way that they could get independent information on what the radioactive levels at
different distances from the reactor really were? I told him that I would try to do so if I could manage
to borrow one from our nuclear medicine group.
That evening, Frank Reynolds reported on the ABC Evening News that there had been a large
release of steam from the reactor early in the morning, that the accident had actually begun at 4:00
A.M., and that state officials were very upset about not having been notified immediately. There wereapparently radiation releases from the turbine building, and there was indeed some damage to fuelrods in the core, as I had deduced from the earlier reports.
There was only one reliable source of information that I knew I could trust, and this was Henry
Kendall of the Union of Concerned Scientists at M.I.T. Kendall had been responsible for bringing out
the true danger of a major accident and the inadequacy of the emergency core-cooling system forpreventing a melt-down of the core that would lead to the dreaded "China Syndrome." This was an
in-joke among nuclear engineers for the scenario in which a molten mass of uranium, plutonium, andfission products would melt its way through the steel reactor vessel and through the concrete
foundation deep into the earth, "all the way to China," with the release of much of the one thousand- 119 -Hiroshima bombs’ worth of radioactivity into the air if the containment were to be ruptured.
I finally was able to reach Kendall late in the evening at the home of his mother, who was seriously
ill. He filled me in on what he had been able to learn. Apparently twenty-two previous cases ofdefects in the valves and pumps of this type of reactor had been reported to the NRC in recent years,
but nothing had been done to correct the problem. As a result of the loss of cooling water, much more
fuel damage had apparently occurred than had been expected. But there was essentially no adequate
instrumentation provided to allow one to analyze exactly what was happening inside the reactor corein this kind of major accident. The designers had simply assumed that it would never happen.
The emergency core-cooling system apparently had been put into effect, but from what Kendall
was able to piece together at this time, the reactor was at least not on what he called "a main track
toward a complete melt-down," though a melt-down was still possible.
What was certain was that radiation levels inside the reactor containment building had risen to thehighly lethal level of 4000 rads per hour, enough to kill an adult in five minutes, so that according to
his rough calculation, even on the outside of the thick concrete wall the levels might be as high as 4
rads per hour. This implied a great deal of damage to the fuel elements in the core, which must haveat least begun to melt. Reports that he had received also talked about external gamma radiation doses
accumulating at the rate of 1 millirad every hour a mile or so away, or some one hundred times thenormal background rate.
Kendall ended up by telling me how he and his associates had just discovered that five years
before, the NRC had learned of serious defects in the computer programs for calculating the design ofthese plants to survive earthquakes, but that the NRC had kept it quiet until his group had discovered
it independently. And he added that the Rasmussen estimate of the risk of a major accident had been
underestimated by at least two hundred times, and that it was more like one in one hundred per year
rather than one in twenty thousand per plant. Using Kendall’s figures with fifty plants operating, apotentially major accident like Three Mile Island could happen once every few years.
This information made it clear to me that evacuation of the people, and particularly pregnant
women, living within a few miles of the reactor should have been ordered long before, since the total
doses to internal organs from inhalation of the fission gases were likely to be ten to one hundred times
greater than the external gamma dose levels Kendall had told me about. Just as in the case of the
Albany-Troy incident years ago, where the external whole-body dose was only about 100 millirads
over a period of ten weeks, it would be the doses to the thyroids of the infants and the unborn in theirmother’s womb that would be much greater and far more serious in their effects. Perhaps in a single
day, thyroid doses to the unborn would reach the values of a few hundred to a few thousand millirads,
equivalent to a series of abdominal X-rays, for which Dr. Alice Stewart’s data had indicated as muchas a doubling or tripling of the risk of leukemia and cancer for those in the early phases ofdevelopment.
Yet on the radio and television news that evening, there were still the bland reassurances from theMetropolitan Edison Company officials who operated the reactor. According to the president of thecompany, Walter Creitz, the public was not in danger, no one was killed, and no one had been injuredby the accident.
There were also the usual reassuring phrases by the public-relations people of the NRC, with theircarefully chosen qualifying words. According to them, there was "no immediate danger to life." Putin this way, it was literally true; so far, there were no immediately lethal doses, and any infants intheir mothers’ wombs who were endangered would not die until many months or years later, whilesome types of chronic diseases and cancers would not show up for decades.
At six o’clock the next morning the telephone woke me, and I was afraid of the news that it mightbring. But it turned out to be bad news of a totally different and unexpected kind. It was my mother- 120 -in Buffalo, who said that she could not sleep all night because of severe abdominal pain: could I
please come to see her right away? She had suffered a heart attack a year before and had been in poor
health, but more recently she had been well enough to do without a companion. As a result, she wasnow alone.
I did not know what to do. I was scheduled to be in Harrisburg at noon, and I did not see how I
could break that commitment to the many people who were in danger from the radioactive gases stillleaking from the plant. So I told her that I would call my brother in New York, and that if he could
fly up in the morning, I would come to Buffalo in the afternoon, directly from Harrisburg. In themeantime, she should call her neighbor, who had been very helpful in the past, and ask him to drive
her to the emergency room at the hospital, where I would call her.
Fortunately, my brother was able to go to Buffalo at once, and I set out for the airport to catch theflight to Harrisburg after stopping at the hospital to pick up the survey meter that I had agreed to takealong.
I had checked the morning news just before leaving the house to learn the latest status of the plant.
Daniel Ford, who worked with Henry Kendall, appeared together with Walter Creitz on the Today
show. Apparently radiation measurements indicated a lower release rate than the night before,
although radioactivity had by now been detected as far as 16 miles away. The temperature of thereactor was being lowered, and Creitz talked confidently about pumping out the radioactive waterfrom the containment building in the hope of putting the reactor back on line again in the not-toodistant future.
Ford indicated that for the moment the reactor seemed to have been stabilized, that the emergency
core-cooling system had been turned off, but that the NRC felt that there were still serious problems
in keeping the reactor under control. At least it seemed to me that there had been no major
deterioration of the situation during the night. From the airport I had called the hospital in Buffalo
and learned that my mother had been sent home with what appeared to be nothing more serious than astomach flu, and so I decided to get on the plane together with a great many other passengers, some ofwhom must also have wondered about the wisdom of flying to Harrisburg that morning. But none ofthem could have had any inkling of the full extent of the quiet tragedy that had already begun as theradioactive gases silently seeped from the damaged reactor only a few thousand feet away from where
we would land on that gray, drizzly day in Harrisburg.
Just before boarding the plane, I decided to recheck the survey meter that I had placed in mybriefcase. It still read the normal level of slightly less than a hundredth of a millirad per hour, and thereading did not change detectably after we had reached our relatively low cruising altitude for thehalf-hour flight east to Harrisburg across the two- to three-thousand-foot ridges of the Appalachian
Mountains.
Next to me sat a young woman who evidently became quite curious when I opened my briefcase tolook at the dial of the survey meter. She asked me what I was doing. It turned out that she was anurse from our hospital on her way to Harrisburg to attend a conference on emergency medical care,and to compound the strange coincidence, her husband worked as a nuclear engineer for
Westinghouse. I explained to her that I was planning to measure for myself the radiation levels in the
Harrisburg area at different distances from the stricken plant in order to have some idea as to themagnitude of the hazard that the continuing releases were posing for the people in the area,
particularly for the unborn.
Soon it came time for landing, and once again I turned on the survey meter to see what theradiation levels were a few thousand feet in the air, a few miles northwest of the Three Mile Island
plant. As we both watched with growing concern, the needle began to move up-scale, until when wewere just a few hundred feet in the air over the river close to the end of the runway, the meter- 121 -indicated a dose rate fifteen times what would be normal. There could be no doubt about it: Somethirty-six hours after the accident, large amounts of radioactive gases were still escaping from thereactor whose twin cooling towers loomed ominously only a mile or so away through the haze.
Apparently, the wind had shifted and the invisible gases were now drifting northwestward—up theriver and toward Harrisburg.
The plane was delayed and so I was late for the news conference scheduled for noon in the
Friends’ Meeting House in downtown Harrisburg. This meant that there was no time to check theradiation levels still closer to the plant. But a quick measurement outside the airport terminal showed
the readings to be ten times their normal value, confirming the high reading in the plane.
On the way into the city, I noted down the readings every mile as the taxi driver read me thedistances. Three miles from the airport, the readings dropped to only three to four times normal, but
at 4 miles, they rose again to eight and nine times their usual rate. This meant that there were hot
spots, either due to gas pockets or to fallout deposited on the ground in the course of the past day anda half of releases.
The high readings could not be due to any direct gamma rays penetrating the four-foot-thickconcrete walls of the reactor’s containment building, since they would have diminished steadily andrapidly with the increasing distance. But they were consistent with large gas releases now drifting
toward downtown Harrisburg, where the readings were still three to four times the normal rate as weapproached the dome of the State Capitol 12 miles from the airport.
The news conference was already in progress when I arrived. There were a surprisingly large
number of reporters with microphones, tape recorders, and television cameras crowded into therelatively small meeting room, with Dr. George Wald of Harvard sitting at a table toward one end.
I apologized for being late, and then took out my survey meter to measure the radiation rate in theroom. The reading was still three to four times normal, or essentially the same as outside. Clearly,
the walls of the building did not provide any significant protection. Most likely, it was the gamma
radiation from the radioactive gas that was by now at the same level as outside the building. Even
closing the windows would have been futile at this point.
The intensity of the questions from the reporters reflected the great concern that existed, and I felt
acutely the great difficulty of having to explain, without causing a panic, the seriousness of thesituation that already existed for the pregnant women and infants. I explained that at the moment, theradiation levels were not serious enough for the normal, healthy adult as long as they would notincrease because of further releases. Asked what I would recommend in the light of my knowledge ofthe situation, I said that at the very least, pregnant women and young children should be urged toleave the area within a few miles of the reactor because of the likelihood of continuing releases ofradioactive iodine that would concentrate in the fetal thyroid as well as in that of the infants andyoung children.
By limiting my recommendation in this manner, I hoped that there would not be any sudden rush
toward a mass evacuation of the whole population, which might cause serious traffic jams andaccidents. I was primarily concerned with preventing panic, especially since according to my latest
information, there was apparently no immediate threat of a complete melt-down. And since thegreatest danger existed for the unborn and very young, at least they would not be exposed any further,although at that point I did not know whether most of the dose had already been received, or whether
there would in fact be any further large releases.
I also urged that pregnant women and young children should not drink fresh milk or local water forthe next few weeks, until detailed measurements could be carried out to determine the precise levelsof radioactivity. The most immediate hazard was clearly from the inhalation of the fresh radioactive
gases by expectant mothers, which would lead in a matter of hours to significant amounts of

- 122 -radioactive iodine transmitted through the blood stream to the placenta and from there to thedeveloping infant’s small thyroid gland.
When someone asked Dr. Wald whether the public should believe me or the spokesmen for theutility who had just reassured them that there was no danger, he answered that under suchcircumstances, one should always ask oneself who has the greater financial interest, the industry or
the concerned scientist trying to warn the public. Under the present circumstances, he personallywould tend not to accept the reassurances of the industry spokesmen and would tend to believe that
there was indeed reason for deep concern, as I had indicated. There was no safe level of radiation,and the unborn and the young are clearly more vulnerable than adults.
The news conference broke up shortly thereafter, and a number of reporters wanted to have moredetails on my findings. Unfortunately, I felt under great pressure to get back to the airport so as not tomiss the next flight to Pittsburgh with a connection to Buffalo. I was still deeply troubled about mymother’s condition, and I could not stay very long to answer all the many difficult technical questions
posed by the reporters.
I did manage to catch the afternoon flight, and as soon as I got off the plane in Pittsburgh I went toa telephone to call my mother’s house. When I received no answer, I had a deep sense of foreboding,and immediately called the emergency room at the hospital. The nurse who answered told me to waita minute, until she could get the doctor on duty, and a few moments later I learned that my motherhad just died in the emergency room from what appeared to have been a sudden, massive rupture of
the abdominal aorta. The doctor told me that my brother had been with her, and that it happened sosuddenly that she lost consciousness instantly. There was no long period of concern or pain, and she
passed away in my brother’s arms. For this I was of course grateful, but it could not change the factthat suddenly my mother was gone, and I had made the decision not to be with her at her time ofgreatest need.
The next few days were like a nightmare, in which I was torn between my private grief and thedemands of an outside world clamoring for advice and help in the face of the growing fear that thereactor at Harrisburg might still melt down. An unexplained bubble of hydrogen threatened theefforts to keep the core adequately cooled, and all through this period uncontrolled releases ofradioactive gases continued to take place, despite frantic efforts to bring the situation under control.
The next day, while making the funeral arrangements for my mother in Buffalo, I learned that
Governor Thornburgh had ordered the immediate evacuation of all pregnant women and children
below school age from the area around Three Mile Island. It would be too late for many, but at least
some lives would be saved, and I was grateful that my efforts to warn the people of the area had notbeen totally in vain.
Even though I had told my secretary that I could not take any calls in Buffalo, it was impossible tostop them all. In a way, the sense of being needed kept me from giving in to the deep sense of loss,
and the continuing demands of life probably helped me to overcome the period of deepest grief. My
mother had been a pediatrician and obstetrician, and she had always been greatly concerned about myfindings. Somehow I knew that she would have wanted me to help the people who were so terribly
troubled, even during this period of greatest personal and family upheaval.
When a few days later I tried to reach Henry Kendall to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of what
was happening in the stricken reactor, I learned that his mother had also died during that terrible
week. And, just as in my own case, the enormous needs of the outside world seemed to have helped
him through his period of great personal crisis. It was a week that would forever remain deeply
etched in our memories, and those of hundreds of thousands living nearby, who would never forget
the days when their world had so suddenly threatened to come to an end.
On April 4, 1979, exactly a week after the accident at Three Mile Island had begun, Congressional

- 123 -hearings were scheduled to take place in an effort to learn what the long-range health effects of theaccident were likely to be. They had originally been planned by Representative Lester Brown, andduring the previous weekend, I had been asked whether I would be able to come to Washington totestify. It was not an easy decision to accept the invitation so shortly after my mother’s death, but I
agreed to come at the urging of environmental groups. The environmentalists feared that otherwise
only officials of government agencies would be testifying, and in the past these officials had been on
record as denying the seriousness of low-level radiation exposures from weapons fallout and normal
nuclear plant releases.
Two days before they were to begin, the hearings were shifted to the Senate under thechairmanship of Senator Edward Kennedy, and the environmental groups were told that my testimony
was no longer desired. It was clear that both within the nuclear industry and the government agencies
charged with the promotion of nuclear energy, every effort would now be made to save the industry.
Clearly, this required that there should be no evidence presented that would suggest the possibility
that anyone would die as a result of the accident.
President Carter, himself a former nuclear engineer trained in Admiral Rickover’s nuclear
submarine service, had just flown to Harrisburg together with his wife in order to reassure the people
that there was no serious danger either from the gases that continued to leak from the damaged plant,
or from the hydrogen bubble that was still threatening a melt-down.
At that very time, lawsuits were underway by servicemen who had been deliberately exposed to
the radioactive fallout from nuclear-bomb tests in the 1950s. The servicemen were seeking
compensation for the leukemia and cancers that had shown up among them at many times the normal
rate. Another lawsuit, which had just come to trial in Philadelphia the week before Three Mile Island,
involved a petition filed in behalf of men who participated in military exercises at the Nevada Test
Site. At issue was whether or not the government should be required to notify the men that they had asignificant risk of genetic damage that could affect their decision to have children. And finally,
hundreds of individual lawsuits had been filed against the government by residents of Nevada andUtah for leukemia and cancer cases resulting from the years of exposure to the fallout clouds from thetactical-weapons tests.
Under these circumstances the last thing either the industry or the government wanted was
testimony that might set off still another flurry of potentially costly damage suits in the Harrisburgarea by women who were pregnant, some of whom might have miscarriages or lose their babies at thetime of birth. Even the possibility of one such suit could threaten the survival of the nuclear industry,already reeling from the shock of an accident that it had assured the public would be as unlikely as
being hit by a meteor while walking on the street.
The hearings by the Kennedy Committee did indeed go exactly as the concerned environmentalgroups expected. One government witness after another sent to testify by the White House assured
the public that among the two million people living within 50 miles, and the hundreds of thousands
who would normally be expected to die of cancer, there might perhaps be one or at most a few extra
cancer cases, clearly a totally undetectable and therefore insignificant number. And, of course, not aword was said about the much more likely effects on infant mortality.
Only Dr. K. Z. Morgan, who had been one of the members of the panel appointed by Governor
Shapp to hear the evidence on possible health effects of the Shippingport plant six years earlier,expressed concern over the neglect of the beta radiation in the official estimates of the radiation dose.
But before he had a chance to explain the significance of the hundredfold greater beta as compared to
gamma dose for internal organs such as the thyroid gland, the hearings were quickly adjourned.
Clearly, the public would once again be misled by the combined efforts of the old Atomic Energy
Commission scientists now working for the NRC and the Department of Energy following the second

- 124 -reorganization of the old AEC. Once again, they were joined by the Department of Health, Educationand Welfare, as had happened during the period of heavy bomb testing. Ironically, the previously
secret details of the effects of bomb testing were being released that very week as a result of a
Freedom of Information request filed by the Washington Post.
As told by Bill Curry in an article that appeared on April 14, 1979,
Officials involved in U.S. atomic bomb tests feared in 1965 that disclosures of a secret study
linking leukemia to radioactive fallout from the bombs could jeopardize further testing andresult in costly damage claims according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. That
study, as well as a proposal to examine thyroid cancer rates in Utah, touched off a series of
top-level meetings within the old Atomic Energy Commission over how to influence orchange the two studies.
The article then went on to say,
The documents also indicate that the Public Health Service, the nation’s top health agency,
which conducted the studies joined the AEC in reassuring the public about any possible
danger from fallout.
Here then was the long bitter story emerging at last, just as it was being repeated—not in the caseof fallout from nuclear-weapons tests carried out in the national interest at distant test sites in the
Pacific and the Nevada desert, but in the case of invisible releases from peaceful nuclear reactors near
the nation’s cities, in the private interest of an industry spawned by the secret military atom.
Nearly 40,000 pages of files dealing with radiation revealed a disturbing story of deception
perpetrated in the national interest. Not surprisingly, the full consequences of this deception for thenation’s health were never adequately examined.
Reading the list of what Curry discovered made me realize something that I had only begun tosuspect in recent years, namely that some individuals in the government knew long before I had
stumbled upon it accidentally how serious the fallout from weapons testing really was. As early as
1959, a study found higher levels of radioactive strontium 90 in the bones of younger children in thefallout zone. And, as Curry added, "coincidentally a Utah state epidemiologist found this year thatchildren living in the zone during the weapons testing had 2.5 times as much leukemia as children
before and after the testing program." This was the study by Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, published in the
New England Journal of Medicine just a few weeks before Three Mile Island.
But what shocked me even more was Curry’s account of a much earlier government study
suggesting a link between fallout and leukemia that was begun even before I had submitted my firstarticle to Science dealing with this possibility, back in 1963. Apparently, a 1959-60 spurt in leukemia
in the southwestern Utah counties of Washington and Iron had been noticed by Edward S. Weiss of
the Public Health Service, and he had immediately suspected fallout. The study, which showed thatthe two counties experienced 9 more leukemia cases than the 19 statistically expected, was essentiallycompleted by July 1965, when Weiss submitted it for publication in a Health Service journal. Curry
reported in the Post what happened next:
By September 1 of that year, a copy of Weiss’s paper had been sent to the AEC, as had the
Public Health Service’s proposal to test school children in southwest Utah for thyroid
abnormalities.
The AEC discussed the two studies that morning. The same day, a White House science- 125 -adviser called the Health Service to ask, "What would be the federal government’s liability forany health problems found?"By five that afternoon, a joint AEC Health Service-White House meeting was set for the
next day—with three HEW lawyers present, an extraordinary sign of the legal problems thestudies could cause.
At the meeting, AEC representatives criticized the leukemia studies and the proposed
thyroid study. It was agreed they would submit suggestions for changes.
A week later, the AEC was ready with a proposed letter to the surgeon general, the head of
the Public Health Service. Dwight A. Ink, then assistant general manager of the AEC, told his
commissioners:"Although we do not oppose developing further data in these areas (leukemia and thyroid
abnormalities), performance of the . . . studies will pose potential problems to the commission:
adverse public reaction, lawsuits and jeopardizing the programs at the Nevada Test Site."[Italics added.]
Not only would the study have jeopardized the commission’s program at the Nevada Test Site forusing strings of hydrogen bombs to build a new Panama Canal and to test designs for anti-ballisticmissile warheads in the atmosphere, but as I learned later, it might also have endangered theambitious program of rapidly building a whole new generation of gigantic nuclear reactors all overthe nation, each ten times as large as Shippingport, which were about to be considered for licensing.
Among these were to be the plants of Beaver Valley, Millstone, and Three Mile Island.
As Curry’s story made clear, this was to be the end of the report that might have given the public
and the scientific community a timely warning of the unexpected seriousness of the planned normal
and accidental releases of low-level radiation before the enormous financial commitment to a trillion
dollars’ worth of nuclear plants had been made by the nation’s utilities.
In fact, it was clearly no coincidence that at exactly this time, namely the years 1964 and 1965, theJohnson White House had ordered a twentyfold increase in the permissible levels of iodine 131 andstrontium 90 in the milk before it needed to be withdrawn from the market. (This fact came to light inthe course of hearings by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Radiation Standards held in
1965.) And it was also the time when the Johnson administration had made a secret commitment to amajor involvement of American armed forces in Vietnam, where tactical nuclear weapons might haveto be threatened or used if the Chinese should enter the conflict, as they had in Korea. That was
clearly not the time to alarm the American people about the possible risk of leukemia, thyroid disease,and congenital defects among newborn children from the clouds of radioactive fallout that werecertain to drift back over the United States if these weapons were ever used.
As Curry’s story made clear, the AEC was determined to prevent the publication of the Weissstudy, which would of course have fully substantiated the concerns of scientists such as Linus
Pauling, Barry Commoner, Eric Reiss, E. B. Lewis, Jack Schubert, Ralph Lapp, myself, and manyothers who had warned of the possible rise in congenital defects, thyroid cancer, and especiallychildhood leukemia only a few years earlier. But our concerns had largely ended with the signing of
the test-ban treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the fall of 1963, just before Kennedy was
assassinated. The release of the Weiss study would clearly have evoked renewed opposition from thescientific community and the public to the vast military and civilian programs that were being plannedby the Pentagon, the AEC, and the nuclear industry for the use of bombs to dig canals and for vastly
increasing the radioactivity in the environment from the production of weapons and the routine
releases from giant commercial nuclear power plants.
The next part of the story in the Washington Post was therefore the inevitable next step in a Greek

- 126 -tragedy that would eventually lead to Three Mile Island and the crisis that a stunned nation would
face when the promised source of cheap, clean, and economical nuclear power to replace the imported
oil would suddenly turn into a national nightmare on their television screens:
The next day, Sept. 10, Ink sent to the surgeon general a critique containing criticisms of
the study’s scientific basis which were made public in January with the Weiss report. The
letter did not, however, make any reference to the AEC’s concerns about damage suits,
adverse publicity or its effect on the testing program.
Meanwhile, the Public Health Service was gearing up to announce the thyroid study and to
disclose the leukemia study. Weiss’ study was formally prepared and dated Sept. 14. Twodays later, the thyroid study was announced, but there was no mention of the leukemia
findings.
One Health Service document suggests that the service itself may have even suppressed thestudy temporarily to avoid excessive press coverage of the thyroid study. "All of this interest,"
an official wrote of the congressional and press concern for fallout studies, "will be intensified
if publication of the leukemia portion of the study occurs before the [thyroid] project begins."
Earlier, the Health Service had decided to minimize any publicity of the thyroid study.
The result was that the Weiss study was not released and in 1966 was still under review andrevision. It was never released.
It was now clear what Surgeon General Jesse L. Steinfeld had referred to when he answered an
inquiry from Representative William S. Moorehead back in 1969. Moorehead wanted to know what
had happened to the promised large-scale epidemiological studies on thyroid cancer, leukemia, andcongenital defects in relation to fallout radiation requested by Congressmen Holifield and Price after
the August 1963 hearings on low-level radiation. Steinfeld had written that the feasibility studies forsuch a program led to a decision that "a national program was not indicated" and that "the feasibility
studies were not published." Those were the studies of Edward S. Weiss, a Public Health Service
Officer who had tried to protect the lives and health of the people of the United States in accordancewith his professional oath.
And as inexorable as that fateful decision was to suppress the truth about the biological effects of
the worldwide fallout from nuclear-weapons testing in the interest of national security, it would now
be necessary for the government to keep from the people of this country and the rest of the world thetruth about what I knew would surely happen in the wake of the drifting fallout clouds from Three
Mile Island.

- 127 -18
Too Little Information Too Late

THE TRUTH WAS more difficult to suppress this time than it had been in the atmosphere of fear
engendered in the cold war of the McCarthy years, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam war.
Nonetheless, an attempt to keep the facts from the people was clearly being made.
The same Freedom of Information Act that had made it possible for the Washington Post to reveal
how the truth about the bomb tests in Nevada had been kept from the American people was used only
a few days later to provide the first clue to what really happened at Three Mile Island.
On Monday, April 16, 1979, only two days after Bill Curry’s story had gone out over the wires, thePittsburgh Post-Gazette carried across the top of its front page a special report from the AssociatedPress with excerpts of tape recordings of the proceedings of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
during the crisis at Three Mile Island. Strangely enough, as in the case of the Watergate affair, it
would be the private conversations of top government officials recorded on magnetic tape andunexpectedly released to the news media that would provide the crucial information.
My own awareness of the existence of the tapes had begun with a rather amusing phone call from a
Washington Post reporter. He wanted me to comment on a not very complimentary, and very bitterand sarcastic remark made by one of the NRC staff members on what I was likely to say about thedoses that would be received by the people near Three Mile Island during the first few days of crisis.
When the excerpts of the NRC officials’ comments appeared in the Post-Gazette, I saw immediatelythat my worst fears about the true magnitude of the radiation doses were likely to have been correct. I
was sure that there would once again be a large rise in fetal deaths, congenital abnormalities, infantmortality, and childhood leukemia, followed by the delayed rises in infectious diseases, heart disease,and cancer among those exposed in the years to come.
The excerpts opened with the following comment by Lee V. Gossick, Executive Director forOperations of the NRC on Friday, March 30, the day after I had urged the evacuation of pregnant
women and young children at the news conference in Harrisburg:"Bill, we have got a deteriorating situation up there with regard to some releases. The Governor isasking us to confirm what he is getting from the plant, which says that they had an uncontrolled
release of stuff."
To this, Harold Denton, Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in charge of all NRC
activities at Three Mile Island, answered:"They are getting 63 curies per second, and I can’t explain to you the mathematics, but what they
are saying is if that’s true, by comparing it with what we know the shutdown rate was and themeasurements taken at the north gate, and those were yesterday, they were on the order of three times
what they were yesterday, which would put us in the 1200 millirems per hour."
These were truly enormous release rates of fresh fission gases, since in a single hour (consisting of3600 seconds) there would be 3600 times 63 or some 226,000 curies being released in an uncontrolled

- 128 -manner without detailed analysis or significant hold-up to allow the most dangerous short-lived
isotopes to decay. Even Millstone, the worst of all reactors, had not released more than fifteen times
that much in a whole year.
The corresponding radiation dose of 1200 millirems per hour, equivalent to the dose of some 50 to
100 chest X-rays, was presumably measured in the narrow plume close to the release point at theplant, since it was ten thousand times the dose-rate that I had recorded the previous day in the airplaneand on the ground a few miles away in the pockets of trapped gas. The road into Harrisburg wasevidently well away from the narrow, invisible plume of radioactive gases meandering upstream, tothe northwest, toward Middletown and Harrisburg with the slowly moving prevailing winds.
Wherever it touched down, it would lead to an enormous inhalation dose in a very short time.
The taped conversation continued with the following question by Peter Bradford, one of the NRC
commissioners who was not trained as a nuclear engineer:
BRADFORD: What actual measurements do you have?
GOSSICK: I can’t give you any at the moment. I don’t have anything that is current since thishappened here, you understand. The source has been sealed up again and I think this isprobably being released for one or two hours. We don’t know, however, whether that’s
good for any period of time.
GILINSKY (NRC Commissioner): Do we have any monitoring equipment—
DENTON: There is a lot up there, Vic, but it takes a while for it to ever get back here.
FOUCHARD (Director of Public Affairs for the NRC): I just had a call from my guy in the
Governor’s office and he says the Governor says the information he is getting from the plantis ambiguous, that he needs some recommendations from the NRC.
DENTON: It is really difficult to get the data. We seem to get it after the fact. They opened
the valves this morning, on the let-down, and were releasing at a six-curie-per-second rate
before anyone knew about it. By the time we got fully up to speed, apparently they had
stopped, there was a possible release on the order of an hour or an hour and a half—
GILINSKY: And when did this plume—when was the puff released?
DENTON: Within the last two hours.
HENDRIE (Chairman of the NRC): Presumably it has just terminated recently, then.
DENTON: We don’t know how long, but if it was a continuous release over a period of anhour or an hour and a half, which from what I understand which is a kind of lot of puff.
HENDRIE: A couple-of-knots wind and the dammed thing—the head edge of it is already past
the five-mile line.
HENDRIE: There has been a suggestion for a five-mile evacuation in the northeast direction.
I take it—
DENTON: A good five miles, I would say from first impression.
BRADFORD: It ought to be made clear that you are not talking about lethal doses.
FOUCHARD: Mr. Chairman, I think you should call Governor Thornburgh and tell him what
we know. I don’t know whether you are prepared at the present time to make a commission
recommendation or not. The Civil Defense people up there say that our state programs
people have advised evacuation out to five miles in the direction of the plume. I believe thatthe commission has to communicate with the Governor and do it very promptly.
GILINSKY: Well, one thing we have got to do is get better data.
FOUCHARD: Don’t you think, as a precautionary measure, there should be some evacuation?
HENDRIE: Probably, but I must say, it is operating totally in the blind and I don’t have any
confidence at all that if we order an evacuation of people from a place, where they have- 129 -already gotten a piece of the dose they are going to get into an area where they will have
had 0.0 of what they were going to get and now they move some place else and get 1.0.
GILINSKY: Does it make sense that they have to continue recurrent releases at this time?
DENTON: I guess I tend to feel that if they really didn’t stop the release a half an hour ago—
it’s probably best to leave it to the operational people up there. The cloud hasn’t had achance to get down to these low levels.
AHEARNE (NRC commissioner): But Harold, what confidence do you have that they won’t
embark on the same thing?
DENTON: I don’t have any basis for believing that it might not happen—is not likely tohappen again. I don’t understand the reason for this one yet.
HENDRIE: It seems to me that I have got to call the Governor . . . to do it immediately. We
are operating almost totally in the blind, his information is ambiguous, mine is nonexistent,
and—I don’t know, it’s like a couple of blind men staggering around making decisions.

This last remark by Chairman Joseph M. Hendrie was to be quoted repeatedly by the news media
later, but strangely enough it was always referred to in the context of the danger of a major meltdown. But clearly, either by reason of ignorance or design, the public was not told that the remark
was made in the context of the danger from the ongoing large gas releases that were rapidly
approaching the critical EPA emergency dose of 25,000 millirems to the whole body or key organs
such as the thyroid from internal and external sources combined. This high level had been set by theFederal Radiation Council back in 1965 and later adopted by the EPA as the maximum allowable
dose before countermeasures or an evacuation of the population should be ordered. Certainly neither
the people living nearby nor the reporters at the site had ever been told of the large radiation doses
from the inhaled gases that they were receiving.
The excerpts from the tapes continued to record the enormous concern about the growing radiation
doses from the inhalation of the gases to the people in the area:
FOUCHARD: Is there anybody who disagrees that we ought to advise the Governor on what
to do?
DENTON: I don’t. Just on the basis of what we know. It’s a good first step.
HENDRIE: Go ahead with the evacuation?
DENTON: I certainly recommended we do it when we first got the word, commissioner.
Since the rains have stopped and the plume is going—I would still recommend a
precautionary evacuation in front and under. And if it turns out we have been too
conservative—
GRIMES: My view is that it might have been useful right near the site, but now it is down
below the EPA [unintelligible] level, so it probably is the most that should be done, in myview, is to tell people to stay inside this morning.
AHEARNE: I was going to ask, what about pregnant women and children?
GILINSKY: Well, Brian says it is a factor of 10 that can be gained by staying indoors.
Anyway, I just think it is worth getting that half hour to find out, first of all, you are alerting
people that they are going to have to do something, and they are not going to be able to dosomething in a half-hour anyway.
HENDRIE (on telephone): Governor Thornburgh, glad to get in touch with you at last. I mustsay that the state of our information is not much better than I understand yours is. It appears
to us that it would be desirable to suggest that people out in that northeast quadrant within

- 130 -five miles of the plant stay indoors for the next half hour.
We have got one of those monitoring aircraft up and seem to have an open line to it and
we ought to be able to get some information in the next 10 to 15 minutes. They can tell us
whether it would be prudent to go ahead and start an evacuation out in that direction.
THORNBURGH: So your immediate recommendation would be for people to stay indoors?
HENDRIE: Yes, out in that—out in the northeast direction from the plant.
THORNBURGH: The northeast direction from the plant to a distance of?
HENDRIE: To a distance of about five miles.
I have got a reading. During one of these burst, releases up over the plant several hours
ago, up over the plant about 1200 millirems per hour which seems to calculate out, by thetime the plume comes to the ground where people would get it, would be about 120
millirems per hour. Now, that is still below the EPA evacuation trigger levels; on the other
hand, it certainly is a pretty husky dose rate to be having off-site.
Here it was: the NRC knew that the true doses were not just a few millirems to the people in thearea, as had been claimed at the Kennedy hearings, with maximum values of the order of 75 to 100
millirems nearest to the plant.
They knew just as I did that the greatest dose arose not from the external gamma radiation
measured by a survey meter or a film badge, but from the internal beta radiation from the inhaledfission gases and particles in the lung, the thyroid, and the other critical organs that concentrate thedifferent substances according to their various chemical properties. So when the external gammadose rate on the ground was of the order of 1 to 2 millirems per hour, the true dose rate to the lung andother critical organs could be as much as 50 to 100 times greater, or of the same general magnitude as
the 120 millirems per hour Hendrie himself had just mentioned.
But they also knew, as I did, that if they ever were to order the full evacuation that should havebeen ordered long before, it would not only have caused a panic among the completely confused andunprepared population, it would also have been the end of the nuclear industry, whether or not thecore would ever go to a complete melt-down.
And so more precious time in which to save lives was being lost by recommending only thatpeople should stay indoors, as was clear from the taped conversation with Governor Thornburgh. At
that very moment Governor Thornburgh was under enormous pressures from those wanting to protect
this important Pennsylvania industry on the one hand, and his Secretary of Health, Gordon MacLeod,on the other hand, who was at that very time urging that at least the pregnant women and young
children should be evacuated.
But the NRC was clinging to the hope that an evacuation of any kind would not have to be ordered
because of the continuing gas releases:
KENNEDY: Don’t we know that it has been stopped?
FOUCHARD: Vice-President Herbein of the company reports it has been stopped. Chairman
Hendrie has talked to the Governor and recommended that he advise people to stay indoors
up to a distance of about five miles for the present time.
GOSSICK: We have just lost telephone contact with the site. I assume that it is telephone
problems, but—[inaudible]. Okay, we have got communications with a trailer up there, but
we have lost contact with the control room. . . .
GILINSKY: Let me ask you, what is the status of the reactor, by the way?
CASE: Same as it was an hour ago, I guess.
GILINSKY: What is the state of the core?

- 131 -CASE: Well, it is about like it was yesterday. The temperature is about 280 degrees, thepressure is up [inaudible] . . .
Here was the proof that up to that very moment the primary consideration in the decision toevacuate the people was not the awareness of a serious chance of a melt-down of the core, but thecontinuing uncontrolled releases of radioactive gases that were threatening to give internal exposures
to the public on the order of tens of thousands of millirems.
In fact, the subsequent excerpts made it clear that only at this point in the desperate deliberations
did the knowledge of extensive core damage and a hydrogen explosion reach the NRC
commissioners:
HENDRIE (TO DENTON): I have talked to the President and I think you ought to go down to
the site. He will be sending down, immediately, a sort of communication system that hetakes with him when he travels. He will send somebody with it and he wants to be in aposition to pick up the telephone and go right through to the site, and be able to talk to his
man down there for information and recommendations on what to do. . . .
MATTSON: [Director of the Division of Systems Safety] . . . Now, B and W [Babcock andWilcox] and we have both concluded . . . that we have extensive damage to this core. That
corroborates with the releases we are seeing. . . . My best guess is that the core uncovered,stayed uncovered for a long period of time, we saw failure modes, the likes of which has
never been analyzed. . . . We just learned . . . that on the afternoon of the first day, some 10
hours into the transient, there was a 28-pound containment pressure spike. We are guessingthat may have been a hydrogen explosion. They, for some reason, never reported it here
until this morning. That would have given us a clue hours ago that the thermocouples wereright and we had a partially disassembled core.
HENDRIE: Where abouts is the bubble?
MATTSON: The bubble is in the upper head. The upper head volume at 1128 cubic feet as
best we can tell. The estimate of the gas in that volume now is 1000 cubic feet, best that we
can tell. That is at 1000 psi. If you take the plant to 200 psi, then—HENDRIE: Yes, you are going to blow right down and empty the core.
MATTSON: I have got a horse race. I’m putting in high head, and if I get down in pressure,
low head and coolant, it is coming in the cold leg, it is going down to the lower plenum, it iscoming up through the core, it is splashing and it runs into the noncondensibles, I’ve got acore partially full or maybe totally full of noncondensibles. . . . We have got every systems
engineer we can find, except the ones we put on the helicopter, thinking the problem, how
the hell do we get the noncondensibles out of there? . . . Do we win the horse race or do welose the horse race? And if you are lucky and there is not a lot of—you have overestimatedthe noncondensibles, you might win. If you are not lucky and you have got the rightnumber on the noncondensibles you might lose it.
HENDRIE: . . . It sounds to me like we ought to stay where we are. I don’t like the sound ofdepressurizing and letting that bubble creep down into the core.
And then came the following most revealing words from Roger Mattson, Director of the Divisionof Systems Safety, whom I knew to be very knowledgeable with regard to radiation dose calculations.
MATTSON: Not yet. I don’t think we want to depressurize yet. The latest burst didn’t hurt
many people. I’m not sure why you are not moving people. Got to say it. I have been

- 132 -saying it down here. I don’t know what we are protecting at this point. I think we ought tobe moving people.
HENDRIE: How far out?
MATTSON: I would get them downwind, and unfortunately the wind is still meandering, but
at these dose levels that is probably not bad because it is [inaudible].
KENNEDY: But downwind how far?
MATTSON: I might add, you aren’t going to kill any people out to 10 miles. There aren’t thatmany people and these people have been—they have had two days to get ready and prepare.
KENNEDY: Ten miles is Harrisburg.
MATTSON: 40,000 [inaudible] five miles. . . . It’s too little information too late,unfortunately, and it is the same way every partial core melt-down has gone. People haven’t
believed the instrumentation as they went along. It took us until midnight last night toconvince anybody that those goddamn temperature measurements meant something. Byfour o’clock this morning, B and W agreed.
Not until later in the day did Governor Thornburgh finally agree to the compromise plan ofordering evacuation of pregnant women and young children. But as I was to learn in an unexpectedmanner a few months later, most of the damage had already been done before the evacuation wasordered.
During the latter part of the summer I received a phone call from someone who asked me for acollection of all my articles on the effects of low-level radiation. He said that he was working on a
study of the total economic and health impact of the Three Mile Island accident for the Presidential
Commission chaired by Dr. George Kemeny of Dartmouth College, and he wanted to include an
upper-limit estimate based on my statistical findings around various nuclear plants and after various
fallout episodes.
I was surprised by this request, since I had not been asked to testify before the KemenyCommission, which had been holding extensive hearings all summer long. Also, I wondered how thecaller could use my earlier studies if there were no detailed estimates of releases and dose
measurements available. The NRC had claimed that all the meters in the stack had gone off scale sothat no one knew or would ever know just how much had actually been released.
And so I asked whether he had any detailed information on the quantities of gases released or theamounts of radioactivity in the air, the milk, and the diet on which to base a meaningful estimate of
the likely health effects and their costs.
To my surprise, he said that he had such a document prepared for the Metropolitan Edison
Company by their own environmental consultants, Pickard, Lowe and Garrick, and that he would beglad to send me a copy for my examination, since it was being widely circulated within the NRC andthe Kemeny Commission.
A few days later, the two-inch-thick document entitled "Assessment of Offsite Radiation Dosesfrom the Three Mile Island Unit 2 Accident TDR-TMI-116," dated July 31, 1979, arrived in the mail.
And there, in the second paragraph, was the proof that the evacuation ordered on the third day had
indeed been too late:
Based on techniques used in this analysis, dose estimates are consistent with the release of
seven million curies of noble gases in the first one-and-one-half days of the accident, twomillion in the next two days and one million in the next three days, and a relatively small
amount thereafter.

- 133 -By Friday afternoon, the third day of the accident, when the evacuation took place, between 7 and9 million curies out of an estimated 10 million curies of radioactive fission gases had already beenreleased, together with a corresponding fraction of the 14 curies of radioactive iodine 131 as given on
page III of the report. And since the report also concluded that most of the thyroid dose was due toinhalation—and not ingestion of drinking water or milk—in the first five days of the accident, it was
clear that by the time the evacuation of the pregnant women had been ordered, most of the thyroid
dose to the developing fetuses had already taken place.
These were indeed very large amounts of radioactivity, comparable to those that arrived from the
Chinese bomb tests in October 1976 on the East Coast, and for which I had found a 20 to 60 percent
increase in infant mortality in the following three months all the way from Delaware to Maine. Just
two years earlier, I had prepared a paper on this incident for the Committee on the Biological Effectsof Ionizing Radiation of the National Academy of Sciences for its meeting in Washington on July 17,
1977, in which the levels of radioactive iodine 131 in the milk reported by the EPA were summarized.
Looking at the Metropolitan Edison Company’s own measurements in some of the nearby towns, I
saw it was evident that levels of iodine 131 had been produced by the Three Mile Island accident
comparable to those that had been produced by the heavy rainout of the drifting Chinese fallout as it
met a severe rainstorm moving up the East Coast from Delaware to Maine. For the Hardison Farm, tothe north of Three Mile Island, the report listed 110 picocuries per liter on April 25, almost a monthafter the accident. By that time, the activity would have decayed away to only about one-eighth to
one-sixteenth of its maximum value, so that the peak values in local farms, if there had been adequate
monitoring at the time, would have been in the range of 800 to 1600 picocuries per liter. The amount
one worried about was measured in picocuries, which was only a millionth of a millionth, or atrillionth, of one curie. Yet 14 curies or 14 trillion of these units had been discharged into the air,breathed by the pregnant women in the area, and added to what they ingested with the milk. The
report showed concentrations in the air as high as 20 picocuries per cubic meter. Since 1 cubic meter
was roughly the volume of air inhaled by an adult every hour, 20 picocuries of iodine 131 entered apregnant woman’s lungs each hour at these concentrations.
The milk concentrations compared with the highest values listed in the EPA’s December 1976
tabulation published two months after the Chinese fallout had arrived. These had ranged from 36
picocuries per liter in Rhode Island to 123 in Connecticut. At that time, infant mortality rose 60
percent in the first quarter of 1977 compared to the same period in 1976 in Delaware, 41 percent in
New Hampshire, 17 percent in Maine, and 13 percent in Connecticut. But what was even moresignificant was that in Massachusetts, where the health department had ordered the cows to be fed
stored hay which was relatively free from fresh fallout, infant mortality continued its rapid decline.
Furthermore, infant mortality kept decreasing in the United States as a whole by 7 percent, as it did in
Rhode Island, which receives most of its milk from Massachusetts.
Thus, if the measurements reported by Picker, Lowe and Garrick were accurate, there simply
would have to be a sharp rise in infant mortality in the Harrisburg area and those parts ofPennsylvania and other nearby states over which the radioactive gases released in the first three days
had drifted. On the other hand, infant mortality should again continue its normal decline in areas that
happened to be spared by the invisible clouds of radioactive gases from the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant.
But in which direction was the wind blowing during the period of highest release rates? Was there
any way to find out how much was coming out at any given moment? After all, according to a story
sent out by the Washington Post News Service and published on April 22, the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission had been told by one of its staff people, Albert Gibson, that the radiation monitors in thestack went off scale on the morning of the accident. Thus, in answer to Commissioner Victor

- 134 -Gilinsky’s question, "So we don’t really know what went up," Gibson replied, "That’s correct."
The story went on to say that as much as 365 millirems per hour of beta and gamma radiation wererecorded on the ground some 1000 feet from the stack, and a helicopter had recorded three times thislevel in the air over the vent, confirming once again that the dose rates were far higher than the public
had been told at the Senate hearings when the beta radiation that accounts for most of the internal
dose from inhaled gases is taken into account. But Gibson went on to say that "those measurements
were very inconclusive," and that "without knowing the precise weather patterns, we don’t know ifthey were made at the appropriate locations."
However, leafing through the report of Met Ed’s environmental consultants, I found that thesewere all completely misleading statements. Contrary to what the NRC commissioners and the public
were being told, there were radiation monitoring instruments in the plant that never went off scale,
namely in the auxiliary building, whose readings were directly related to the amount of radioactivegas being released. Here was the way the utility’s consultants described how it was possible to know
how much gas was being released every moment:
Strip chart records from all noble gas radiation monitors in the plant ventilation exhaust show
no significant radiation levels during the first three hours of the accident. Since these monitors
are in the most probable pathway for release, it is concluded that no significant releases
occurred before 0700 March 28. Shortly after 0700, however, these monitors, which aredesigned to read normal low levels, indicated rapidly increasing radiation concentrations.
Within a few minutes, they went off scale on the high side. At about the same time, the inplant building area monitors which measure radiation levels inside the fuel handling andauxiliary buildings began to record increasing levels from about 1 milliroentgen to 100
milliroentgen per hour at 0740. At about 0900 the readings began to increase again to reachabout 100 milliroentgen per hour at 1000 hours. They continued to fluctuate at high levels forabout four days. One or more of these area monitors continued to read on scale during thecourse of the accident.
The report went on to explain in detail that by means of these measuring instruments it waspossible to know what went out the stack because:. . . radiation levels measured by area monitors in the auxiliary and fuel handling buildings areproportional to the rate at which airborne gamma activity was released to the environment . . .
In table after table and chart after chart, the releases and gamma radiation doses in different
directions were worked out in detail. For every hour of the accident from 4 A.M. on March 28 until
midnight of the fourth day, the readings of the area monitors were given together with the hourly
wind direction and wind speeds. It showed that during the period of highest releases, from 10 A.M.
on Wednesday the 28th to 7 A.M. on Thursday the 29th, the winds were blowing north, northwest,
and west at 6 to 9 miles per hour, sending the radioactive gas toward upstate New York and western
Pennsylvania. Only later, when the rate of release had decreased tenfold, did the winds shift briefly tothe south, becoming more variable thereafter.
By the time the winds were blowing toward the northeast on Saturday, the fourth day of theaccident, the intensity had dropped to less than one-twentieth of its peak value, thus largely sparing
the most densely populated areas of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City.
No wonder the NRC staff did not want to let the public know that they knew exactly in which
direction the most radioactive clouds had moved, since this information could then be used to tie any

- 135 -later localized rises in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and cancer to the radioactive gas clouds fromThree Mile Island. In fact, I remembered only too well the attempts of some of the same individuals
formerly working for the AEC to discredit my findings on the rises of infant mortality across thesoutheastern United States following the first nuclear-bomb test at Alamogordo by claiming that thewinds were not blowing in that direction. And they certainly did not want any of this to become
known before the Kemeny Commission was scheduled to complete its report in early November.
Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to keep such knowledge from thepublic and the scientific community at large. The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and stateagencies knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced by the people of Utah,
Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across the northern United States as far as New York and
New England during the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the largest and mostheavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or
two.
If, indeed, there should once again be sudden rises in infant mortality in areas where theradioactive clouds had drifted and the public should learn of them when the televised nightmare ofThree Mile Island was still fresh on everyone’s mind, this public knowledge would threaten thegovernment’s and the nuclear industry’s vast program to build a thousand of these giant reactors by
the end of the century near all the major cities, and would result in costly damage suits, exactly as in
the case of the Nevada tests.
I had tried to obtain the preliminary data on monthly infant mortality rates by county from the
Health Department in Harrisburg without success. I was told that this data had not yet been sorted out
and processed, and that it would be many months before it could be properly assembled, even thoughsuch data had already been sent to me by the Maryland Health Department. All research on the healtheffects of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania were under the direction of Dr. George Tokuhata, thesame man who prepared the statistical portion of the Shapp Report exonerating Shippingport back in
1973. There was clearly no hope for any help from that direction.
All I could do was to wait for the state-by-state data on monthly infant deaths and births publishedby the Center for Health Statistics in Washington, which was usually three or four months behind.
Thus, if significant effects would first show up for infants two to three months after the accident, orfor the months of May and June, the earliest numbers indicating an effect would not become publicly
available until August or September, too late for any presentation to the Kemeny Commission.
Nevertheless, I decided to gather whatever data I could as soon as possible, for an enormous media
campaign had been launched by the nuclear industry to convince the public that there were no serious
health effects due to the accident at Three Mile Island. No one had died, and no member of the public
had been injured; the safety systems had worked, and there was no reason to abandon this importantsource of energy at a time when the United States depended so heavily on imported oil from theunstable Middle East.
In mid-August, the latest monthly report from the U.S. Center for Health Statistics for the month of
May arrived in the library. Calculating the rates of infant deaths per 1000 live births, I found what I
had expected. Instead of declining from the winter high, infant mortality in Pennsylvania had gone up
following the accident at the end of March. Compared to 147 deaths in February and 141 in March,
there had been 166 in April and 198 in May, an unprecedented rise of 40 percent. Yet, the number ofbirths had actually declined from 13,589 in March to 13,201 in May. Thus the rate of infant deaths
per 1000 live births had increased even more, namely by 44 percent, from 10.4 in March to 15.0 inMay.
Yet, at the same time, the rate for the United States as a whole between March and May had
declined 11 percent as it normally did, dropping from 14.1 to 12.6 per 1000 live births.

- 136 -These were highly significant changes, the Pennsylvania figures for March and May representing
an increase of 57 deaths, which was more than three times the statistically expected normal
fluctuation of about +/- 16, and thus unlikely to occur purely by chance in less than one in a thousand
instances. But how else could I test the hypothesis that these increased rates were likely to be due tothe releases from Three Mile Island without having the county-by-county and the Harrisburg figuresavailable to me?
Having learned from the utility’s own report that the heaviest releases had occurred when the wind
was blowing north, northwest, and west, and having seen reports in the papers of high levels ofradioactivity being measured in Syracuse, New York, some 150 miles to the north, at the time of theaccident, I decided to examine the figures for New York State. By a fortunate coincidence, the U.S.
Vital Statistics gave separate figures for New York City and the rest of the state, most of whose
population was located in upstate New York—north, northwest, and northeast of Harrisburg some 100
to 200 miles away. Here, then, was a clear prediction of the hypothesis that could be tested: The
figures for the rest of the state outside of New York City should have gone up, while New York City
should either have shown no change or an actual decline.
And this is exactly what the numbers showed: Between March and May, infant deaths outside
New York City climbed an amazing 52 percent, by 63 deaths, from 121 to 184. For New York City
during the same period the number declined from 166 to 129. Again, these changes were many times
as large as normal fluctuations, and the number of births changed relatively little, or by less than 10
percent, so that there could be no doubt about the significance of these changes in infant deaths.
So far, the hypothesis had passed its first major tests, but would it hold up for the other nearby
states? What about Maryland to the south, where some of the gases had drifted in the morning andafternoon of the second day, according to Met Ed’s report. The numbers were smaller than for the
more populous states, but the changes continued to support the hypothesis: Infant mortality rose 26
percent, from 39 to 49 deaths, while the number of births remained essentially unchanged—4013 inMarch and 4076 in May.
What about New Jersey, to the east and northeast of Harrisburg? If the hypothesis was correct,
there should not be any significant increase, since by the fourth day of the accident, when the winds
shifted toward New Jersey, the rate of release had already sharply declined. Again, the hypothesis
held up under the test. Between March and May, New Jersey infant mortality rose by only 8 deaths,
from 87 to 95. This is not considered a significant increase, with the spontaneous statisticalfluctuation of about +/- 13 normally expected.
What about Ohio to the west, which had for decades closely paralleled Pennsylvania in its
declining infant mortality figures? Did it show the same 40 to 50 percent rises of Pennsylvania and of
New York State outside New York City? It was not to be expected that the gases would have drifted
more than 200 to 300 miles west of Harrisburg, counter to the generally prevailing west-to-east
movement of air masses across the United States, and so there should really be very little change in
the Ohio figures. Again the numbers bore this out: Between March and May, infant deaths declinedin Ohio from 177 to 160, the rate remaining constant at 11.5 per 1000 live births.
There simply could be no other explanation for such a localized pattern of sharply increased infant
deaths in the areas where confined winds had blown the radioactive gases, while infant mortality rates
were steady or declined in all the surrounding states that were not in the direction of the winds during
the first two days of highest releases.
And yet, it would be important to have some figures for the area that was most heavily exposed
close to the plant. If the figures around Harrisburg should indeed show much higher rises in infantmortality than the 44 percent for Pennsylvania and the 50 percent for New York State outside New
York City, then it would be difficult to reject the hypothesis that it was indeed the radioactive gases

- 137 -from the stricken plant that were responsible for the unusual increase in newborn deaths.
But only Tokuhata had the data for the 5-mile and 10-mile zones around the plant, and there was
no way that I would be able to obtain them. From everything I had been able to piece together, thenumbers in Harrisburg had to show very large increases if areas as far away as 150 miles in upstate
New York showed 50 percent rises in infant deaths. From my earlier studies on fallout clouds, I knewthat the effect would roughly decrease in inverse proportion to the distance from the point of release.
Thus, for Harrisburg, only 10 miles to the north of the plant, the rise in newborn infant mortality
would have to be as high as 300 percent to 600 percent, corresponding to a four- to sevenfold increase
above normal to be consistent with the rises in upstate New York.
How could I get at least an indication of whether this was the case? Just at this very moment, away opened up to obtain this crucial information without the need to obtain access to thePennsylvania Health Department’s carefully guarded data.
Earlier in the summer I had been invited to address a public meeting in Harrisburg on the likely
health effects of the accident at Three Mile Island. At the end of the meeting, someone introduced
himself to me, and asked me whether he could be of any help. His name was Warren L. Prelesnik,
and he told me that he was deeply concerned, since he had just moved to the area with his family
shortly before the accident, and that he was working in the Harrisburg Hospital as executive vicepresident in charge of administration.
I asked him whether it might be possible to obtain information on the monthly number of births
and infant deaths together with their cause over the past few years, and he said that he would try to
see what he could do.
More than a month later, when I had already given up hope of receiving any information, there
arrived in the mail a letter with a list of the monthly infant deaths, fetal deaths, stillbirths, and live
births in the Harrisburg Hospital for the previous two years.
At first there seemed to be no obvious change, if one looked at the total numbers of all types offetal and infant deaths combined. But then I examined separately the category of newborn or
neonatal infant deaths—those that were born alive but died within the first year, but mainly in the first
few hours after birth. Here was the evidence I needed. In February, March, and April of 1979, there
had only been 1 infant death per month. But for each of the two months of May and June, there were
4. Effectively, since the number of births had not only remained nearly the same but had actually
declined slightly, this was more than a fourfold increase in the mortality rate, or of the rightmagnitude required to fit the observed 50 percent rise in the more distant area of upstate New York.
From an average of 5.7 per 1000 live births in the three months of February, March, and April—
before the releases could have had an appreciable effect—the newborn mortality rate had risen to 24.1
for May and 26.0 for June, an unprecedented summer peak that did not occur the previous year. In
fact, for May and June of 1978, there had been a total of only 3 infant deaths, while for the same
period in 1979 after the accident, there had been 8.
As some of my colleagues with whom I discussed these findings agreed, by themselves theHarrisburg Hospital numbers were of course small, and only marginally significant, representing only
about one-third of all the births and deaths in Harrisburg. But taken together with the vastly moresignificant and independent numbers for all of Pennsylvania, upstate New York, New York City, New
Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio, there was now a much greater degree of certainty: It would have beenmuch too much of a coincidence—perhaps less than one in a million—for all these different numbers
to show the pattern they did.
At this very moment, there arrived an invitation to address an international meeting of engineers
and scientists in Israel. The meeting was devoted to studying the environmental problems ofindustrialization of Third World nations. It was to be held in December, and I was asked if I would be- 138 -willing to address the meeting on the environmental health problems connected with nuclear energy.
I could hardly believe that such an opportunity to bring these facts into the open should come at
precisely the time when the data from the Harrisburg Hospital had convinced me more strongly thanever of the great danger of nuclear reactors. I decided to accept the invitation and to devote myself inthe remaining few months to preparing a detailed paper that would begin with a review of theprevious evidence on the effects of low-level radiation from fallout and normal nuclear plant releases
and end with the evidence for the rise of infant deaths after Three Mile Island.
One of the remaining important questions that had to be checked, however, was the time and causeof death. Clearly, if the excess deaths were connected with the radioactive iodine released from theplant, then they should be associated with underweight births or immaturity, since damage to the fetal
thyroid would slow down the normal rapid growth and development of the baby in the last few
months before birth. The development of the lungs, which have to be ready to begin breathing at the
moment of birth, is one of the most critical phases of late fetal development. Any developmental
slowdown would be most life-threatening if it led to the inability of the tiny air sacs in the lungs toinflate and start supplying the blood with oxygen. Failure of the lungs to function properly would
therefore lead to immediate symptoms of respiratory distress, and if efforts to treat the baby should
not succeed, it would die in a matter of minutes, hours, or days of respiratory insufficiency or hyaline
membrane disease.
Thus, one would not expect to find as large an increase in spontaneous miscarriages well before
birth as newborn deaths within a short time after birth, since the lungs did not need to start
functioning until the baby was born. Also, there should be no significant increase in gross congenital
malformations a few months after the accident, since by the time the baby in the mother’s womb hadreached the sixth or seventh month of development, all the major organs had already fully developed.
Thus, only some six to seven months after the accident would one expect some increase in serious
physical malformations, since these infants would have been exposed to radiation in the first threemonths of development of critical-organ formation.
The data from the Harrisburg Hospital supported these expectations. There was much less of anincrease in the number of spontaneous miscarriages and stillbirths than in the number of newborn
babies that died shortly after birth because of immaturity and respiratory distress, indicating the strong
likelihood that it was the effect of iodine 131 and other shorter-lived iodines such as iodine 133 that
had damaged the ability of the thyroid to produce the necessary hormones needed for normal growthand development.
In fact, it was for this reason that I had publicly urged widespread screening for hypothyroidism at
the time of the news conference in Harrisburg on the second day of the accident, the kind of simple
test that could prevent permanent mental retardation if detected and treated early. This test was
already being used routinely for every newborn baby born in hospitals of a number of states in New
England, the Northwest Coast, and Pennsylvania, but not yet in New York or Maryland. There would
have to be a rise in the incidence of this condition if my past findings on the increase in underweightbirths and subtle forms of mental retardation during the period of heavy nuclear-bomb testing wereindeed related to the action of radioactive fallout. But not until many months later, long after theKemeny Commission hearing had been completed, would I learn that a rise in hypothyroidism had
already been discovered by the Health Department of the State of Pennsylvania among the newborn
babies in areas where the invisible radioactive gases from Three Mile Island had been carried by thewinds.

- 139 -19
The Present Danger

THE POTENTIAL EFFECT of the radioactive iodine on thyroid function and mental development
was very much on my mind at that moment, since in early September I had presented our findings on
the relation between fallout from bomb-tests and declines in the S.A.T. scores at the annual meetingof the American Psychological Association in New York. The likelihood that there would once again
be widespread damage to the learning ability of children in areas reached by releases of radioactive
fission gases, this time from peaceful nuclear plants either during normal operations or as a result ofaccidents such as the one at Three Mile Island, was in a way more disturbing than the evidence forrising infant deaths and later cancers.
The nation could survive if there were a few more infants that died shortly before or after birth. It
could even survive if there were many more adults who would die of cancer or heart disease at age
seventy rather than at eighty. But no nation could survive in the long run if it continuously damaged
the mental ability of its newborn children, especially in an age where verbal and mathematical skills
were increasingly essential to the functioning of a high-technology society. And since fewer children
were being born, and the advances of modern medicine had increased greatly their chances of survival
to adulthood even if they were physically and mentally handicapped, it would not take much morethan a few generations for a nation with nuclear plants near its cities or sources of milk and water todestroy its health, its productivity, and thus its ability to compete with others who used lessbiologically damaging ways to meet their needs for energy.
Therefore, when I received an invitation to present my most recent findings at a meeting of theConnecticut Parent-Teachers Association in Hartford a few weeks later, I decided to accept. Hartford
was not more than 40 miles northwest of the Millstone Nuclear plant, whose iodine 131 emission
back in 1975 was officially listed as 10 curies by the NRC. This was almost as great as the amountadmitted to have been released at Three Mile Island by the utility’s own environmental consultants.
For this reason, I decided to present my findings on the effects of Millstone as a way to estimate what
the future health effects of the accident in Harrisburg were likely to be.
Strangely enough, it was through my concern about the possible effect of the October 1976
Chinese fallout discovered in southeastern Pennsylvania by the operators of a nuclear plant on theSusquehanna River not far from Three Mile Island that I first learned of the high releases from theMillstone reactor.
Apparently, as in the case of the Albany-Troy episode back in 1953, a heavy rainstorm brought
down very large amounts of fallout from a nuclear cloud, setting off radiation alarms at the Peach
Bottom Nuclear Power station near the Maryland border. That rainout had caused the evacuation ofmany of the workers from the plant. The EPA had failed to warn either the public, state healthauthorities, or the reactor’s health physicists of the potentially high local fallout, hoping that it might
not happen. Only when the plant supervisor got in touch with Thomas Gerusky at the Pennsylvania

- 140 -State Bureau of Radiation Control and checks were made at other locations such as the Three Mile
Island plant did it become clear that the high iodine 131 levels were due to fallout, and not an accident
at Peach Bottom.
When the iodine levels in the milk started to climb to a few hundred picocuries and no one had
warned the public that pregnant women should not drink the milk, a colleague of mine at the
University of Pittsburgh and I decided to hold a news conference to issue such a warning.
As it turned out, Gerusky decided not to order the cows to be placed on stored hay, even thoughsome areas in Pennsylvania reached levels close to 500 picocuries per liter. Only in Massachusetts
and briefly in Connecticut and New York did the health departments order dairy cattle to be switched
to uncontaminated feed, and only in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which obtained most of its milk
from Massachusetts, did infant mortality continue its sharp decline in the following few months
among all the New England states.
When a news story with my findings on the rises in infant mortality following this episode waspublished by the Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service in the summer of 1977, I
received a phone call from a newspaper reporter in Connecticut, who asked me whether I had
examined the possible effect of the Millstone plant releases on the pattern of infant mortality changes
in New England. Someone had given him a copy of a recent annual environmental report for thisplant, and he wondered whether I might be willing to look at it for him since he was unable tointerpret its significance.
When the report arrived a few days later, I turned to the pages dealing with milk measurements. I
could hardly believe my eyes. The control farms located in a direction where the wind rarely carried
the gases from the stack showed levels of strontium 90 of only 5 to 7 picocuries per liter, similar to
the rest of the East Coast. The concentrations in other nearby farms, however, reached values as highas 27 of these units, higher than those typical for Connecticut during the height of nuclear-bomb
testing back in the early 1960s and similar to the highest concentrations measured by N.U.S. at
Shippingport. For the people living within 10 to 20 miles of the plant, nuclear-bomb testing mightjust as well have never ended.
And when I looked at infant mortality in New England in preparation for a lecture at the University
of Rhode Island, the familiar pattern I had seen at Dresden, Indian Point, and Shippingport once again
confirmed the seriousness of these levels of fallout in the milk. While throughout the 1950s and1960s all the New England states had shown the same infant mortality rate, following the onset of
releases from Millstone in 1970, Rhode Island, directly downwind, suddenly stopped declining as
rapidly as all the other states. By early 1976, before the October fallout arrived from China, Rhode
Island had nearly twice the infant mortality rate of New Hampshire.
Shortly after I presented these findings at the University of Rhode Island, I received a telephone
call from State Representative John Anderson of the Connecticut legislature, asking me whether I
would be willing to undertake a more detailed study of the possible health effects of Millstone and thenearby Connecticut Yankee Reactor at Haddam Neck for the people of Connecticut. I agreed on thecondition that he would send me the full environmental reports for the two plants for every year of
their operation, together with the detailed annual vital statistics reports of the State of Connecticut.
A few weeks later a large box arrived containing the reports. The story they revealed was arepetition of what had taken place at Shippingport, except that this time the environmental and healthdata were much more detailed and extended over many years before and after the start of operation.
Again, the strontium 90 levels in the soil and milk increased as one approached each of the twoplants. The levels were a few times higher near the Millstone Plant, with its boiling-water reactor(BWR), than near the Haddam Neck plant, with its pressurized-water reactor (PWR), which was
similar to Shippingport and Three Mile Island.

- 141 -This time, however, data was available for every year of operation on a month-by-month basis, andit was possible to see how in the first few years of operation, the strontium 90 levels were no different
near the plants from those in the rest of New England. But gradually, as the fallout from bomb testing
was washed into the rivers and the ocean by the rains, the soil and milk levels declined all over New
England, while they stayed high or even rose for the farms within a 10- to 15-mile radius of theplants.
On a number of occasions, when there was a particularly heavy fallout from a Chinese nuclear test,
as in October of 1976, the records of the milk measurements showed the arrival of the fallout veryclearly as a peak, particularly for the short-lived iodine 131 and strontium 89, and to a lesser degree
for the long-lived cesium 137 and strontium 90. But what was even more disturbing were the evenlarger peaks of strontium 90 and cesium 137 in July and August of 1976, months before the bomb wasdetonated, not only in the local farms but as far downwind as Providence, Rhode Island.
Yet the summary in the front of the utility’s environmental report for 1976 maintained, as it had
every year, that the strontium 90 and cesium 137 in the milk was attributable to fallout from nuclear
testing. It was sad to see that the once so hopeful nuclear industry now needed the continuation of
nuclear-bomb tests to stay in operation.
To calculate the radiation doses to the bones of children, I used the high local excess values ofstrontium 90 in the milk along with the NRC’s own calculational model given in NUREG 1.109. The
results were of the order of a few hundred millirems per year, many hundreds of times the value ofless than 1 millirad arrived at by the utility when the strontium 90 was left out of the calculations, andfar above the maximum of 25 millirems per year that was proposed by the EPA as the maximum
permissible value from the nuclear fuel cycle.
Thus it was no surprise that the EPA as well as the NRC issued statements after my reports had
been sent to State Representative Anderson and Congressman Christopher Dodd, in whose district theMillstone Plant was located, which claimed that the high strontium 90 and cesium 137 levels in themilk near this plant were due to fallout and could not be attributed to releases from the plant. The
EPA and NRC never even attempted to explain why the levels of these radioactive substances should
increase as one approached the stack from every direction.
Instead, these government agencies, on whom the public depended for the protection of its healthand safety, tried to mislead the public. They claimed that there was little strontium 89 present alongwith the strontium 90, as is always the case when fresh fission products escape into the environment,
and that therefore the strontium 90 could not be due to plant releases.
But what the nonspecialist could not have known is that strontium 89 has a very short half-life of
only 50 days compared with 30 years for strontium 90. While the long-lived strontium 90 continues
to build up in the soil around the plant, the strontium 89 rapidly decays away. Thus, when the cows
return to pasture in the spring and summer, the milk shows predominantly the accumulated strontium
90, and very little of the short-lived strontium 89.
In fact, it is just as in the case of a coal-burning plant, where both steam and dust are emitted fromthe stack. Clearly, one would not expect to see the surrounding area covered with water, which
evaporates rapidly just as short-lived isotopes disappear. Instead, one would expect to find a highlevel of ashes accumulating, decreasing with the distance away in every direction, just like the longlived strontium 90 particles in the soil and milk around a nuclear plant.
But the nuclear scientists and engineers in these agencies, taking advantage of the widespread lackof scientific knowledge among the general public, its representatives, and even the heads of their own
bureaucratic organizations, acted to protect the national interest as they saw it. Thus, they used theirexpertise to mislead the public, firmly believing that the need for energy independence or thewillingness to use nuclear weapons far outweighed any conceivable small impact on human health.

- 142 -Having the detailed figures on the officially announced releases as well as the uncontested
measurements of radioactivity in the milk around Millstone over the years, I could compare thereleases directly with those from Three Mile Island. Over a period of five years, Millstone had
released half as many total curies of radioactive gases of all types into the atmosphere as Three Mile
Island did in five days, including roughly comparable amounts of iodine 131. According to the healthstatistics, infant mortality in Rhode Island, some 20 to 40 miles away, was twice as great as for themost distant states after Millstone had operated for five years. Therefore, in my first approximation,
there would have to be at least a 50 to 100 percent rise in infant mortality and childhood cancers inthe Harrisburg area, which would be followed in the decades to come by cancer rises among the older
population, perhaps leading to as many as 4,000 to 8,000 extra cancer deaths in the next few decades.
There was no need to extrapolate from very high doses to very low doses, since the amounts
released in both cases were comparable. Both for the Millstone and Three Mile Island releases, thedoses were in the range of tens to hundreds of millirems per year, and they were due to comparable
types of radioactive elements created in the course of nuclear reactor operations.
But precisely because the releases from Three Mile Island were not so very different in magnitude
from what the NRC and EPA had set as permissible for normal nuclear reactor releases in the courseof a year, it was clear to me that enormous efforts would have to be made both by the government
health agencies and the nuclear industry to keep knowledge of the likely health effects of the accident
from reaching the public or their elected representatives in Congress. And this is precisely what
happened in the weeks after my talk in Hartford, when the long-awaited report of the KemenyCommission was being prepared in its final form.
I had been approached by ABC to appear on the show Good Morning America to present myfindings, which were apparently in sharp contrast to the conclusion of the Kemeny report, a draft ofwhich was read to me by the producer. According to this draft, which had a discussion of potential
health effects that was confined to only a couple of pages, the only effects were psychological, withno detectable increases expected on infant mortality or cancer rates. In effect, the KemenyCommission had accepted the optimistic report by the NRC, the EPA, and HEW a few days after theaccident.
Apparently no efforts had been made to look at the actual statistics on infant mortality andmiscarriages that had shown significant rises as early as May and June, four to five months before thefinal draft was being prepared in September and October. Yet, if the commissioners had wanted to,they could easily have obtained the same data I had been able to find in the records of local hospitals
and the reports of the U.S. Center for Health Statistics for every state in the United States. If there
really had been no increase in stillbirths and infant deaths, this would surely have been the best way toreassure the people of Harrisburg and the rest of the world living near nuclear reactors, once and forall ending the concern about nuclear power, silencing the critics, and freeing the industry from theuncertainty that was leading to its rapid decline in the wake of Three Mile Island.
But this was clearly not the course chosen. The actual data would have shown an increase inmortality rates near the plant during the summer months, while they declined in nearby areas notreached by the plume so carefully recorded in the utility’s own internal reports available to theKemeny Commission. Such a pattern would have been as difficult to explain away as the peaks ofstrontium 90 infant mortality and cancer increases around Shippingport and Millstone in the past,
hardly reassuring for a public that had by now learned to distrust deeply the public statement of utility
officials and government scientists whenever it came to the health effects of low-level radiation frombomb fallout or nuclear facilities.
Not being able to allow the truth to emerge, the government and the industry resorted once again to
the familiar tactics of suppression and attempts to discredit the critics, as I would learn in the days

- 143 -following the official release of the Kemeny Report in early November.
I was supposed to appear on Good Morning America the day after the Kemeny Commission report
was published. All arrangements had been made when I received a phone call from the producer
saying that the format of the show would have to be changed, that they would need to find someone
who would represent the industry and government point of view to debate me, and that this would
mean a day’s delay in my appearance. The following morning, I received another call from theproducer, who said that they had found someone who would represent the other side, and that the
program was now scheduled for 8:15 A.M. the next day. My tickets had been paid for, the hotel room
in New York reserved, and a limousine ordered to pick me up and take me to the studio.
But the opportunity to present the other side of the story to a nationwide audience in answer to thebland assurance of the Kemeny Commission broadcast the day before never came. Just a few hours
before I was scheduled to leave for New York, a call came from ABC saying that there was a lastminute change in the schedule, and that they had to cancel my appearance. I remembered theenormous pressures that had been exerted by the Atomic Energy Commission on the producers of the
NBC Today show back in 1969 when I was scheduled to appear to talk about the effects of bomb
fallout on infant mortality. But this time, it seemed likely to me that the pressure came from acommercial nuclear industry fighting for its life, and apparently these forces were too powerful evenfor a large television network such as ABC.
A news conference had been arranged by a local citizens’ group in Harrisburg for noon, following
my scheduled appearance on Good Morning America, and so instead of flying to New York, I took theplane to Harrisburg early the next day. It was the same flight I had taken the morning of the first news
conference, when the radioactive gases were causing my survey meter to give me the warning of thelarge gas releases that the industry did not want to become known.
The news conference took place in the same small room of the Friends’ Meeting House where thefirst one had been called on the second day of the accident. Dr. Chauncey Kepford, who had been oneof the first scientists in the area to warn of the danger of the Three Mile Island plant, long before it
went into operation, summarized his findings that the radiation doses were much larger than had been
calculated from the simplified mathematical models used by the NRC and adopted by the KemenyCommission. Because of his efforts to warn the local group of concerned citizens to prepare theircase against the plant, he had been fired by Pennsylvania State University, something that he had beenable to prove in court when he had sued the university for damages. Now he had nothing more tolose, and so he was able to provide independent evidence that the health effects of the accident would
be much greater than the public had been led to believe.
I then outlined the substance of my findings based on the state-by-state data in the U.S. Monthly
Vital Statistics. The data showed sharp rises in infant mortality in Pennsylvania and the area of New
York State outside New York City, while the rates continued to decline in the areas of Philadelphia
and New York City, where the radioactive plume had not been carried by the winds. I also cited theevidence of higher infant mortality rates in the Harrisburg and Holy Spirit Hospitals (in the
Harrisburg area) for the months following the accident as compared with the same period a year
before.
To this I added the latest findings that the rate of infant deaths had also gone up as far away as thePittsburgh area, toward which the radioactive gases had drifted in the early period of high releases asrecorded in the records of the largest hospital (namely the Magee Women’s Hospital, associated with
the University of Pittsburgh). According to the records of the hospital, which accounted for about
half the births in Allegheny County, the number of deaths for the three-month period of May, June,
and July had gone up 93 percent—from 27 in 1978 to 52 in 1979—while the births had remained
essentially constant, rising only 2 percent—from 2166 to 2221. Furthermore, detailed examination of

- 144 -the causes of death revealed that the excess was due to an unexplained increase in prematurity,
underweight births, and respiratory distress of the type found in the Harrisburg Hospital. There had
not been any epidemic of other diseases or problems associated with the delivery process.
I concluded by saying that the evidence was therefore very strong that in the first few months
following the accident, a few hundred excess deaths above normal expectations took place inPennsylvania, contrary to the claims of the industry and the Kemeny Commission that there would be
no detectable additional cases of cancer, developmental abnormalities, or genetic ill-health as aconsequence of the accident at Three Mile Island.
There were a few questions after I handed out copies of the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics tables I
had used, together with other tables and graphs summarizing the findings. The executive vicepresident of the Harrisburg Hospital, Warren Prelesnik, who had given me the figures for his hospital,
was present in the event that a reporter might wish to confirm the numbers, but no one inquired
further, and the news conference broke up.
Television cameras representing the major networks had been present; some of the network
reporters interviewed me separately immediately following the news conference. But neither thatevening nor the next day was there any mention of these disturbing findings either on the local news
in Pittsburgh or on any of the national television news programs. There were a few very brief local
radio news items, but not a word of the news conference appeared in any Pittsburgh or Philadelphia
papers.
It was as if an iron curtain had descended around the Harrisburg area, sealing off the people of therest of the United States and the world from the news that would have warned them of a totally
unexpected severe effect of low-level fallout. But neither the nuclear industry, the military, nor thestate and federal governments committed to nuclear power wanted them to know. What so many
people had feared would happen in a society committed to nuclear power had in fact taken place. The
most important of all our civil rights, the freedom to learn of matters affecting our lives and those of
our children through a free press, was being secretly subverted by an enormously powerful nuclear
industry and a military establishment that had spawned and nurtured it, all in the interest of national
security.
Since in our society there are so many independent magazines, newspapers, radio stations, andnews services, unlike in a monolithic society such as the Soviet Union, there is no way to insure
absolutely that a determined "dissident" scientist armed with publicly available government data canbe prevented from having his message eventually reach the people. Therefore, the best way toprevent wide dissemination of undesirable information is to destroy the credibility of any individual
seeking to reach the public and the scientific community at large. In this way, the message would
either not be transmitted by wary news media or it would not be believed, especially if it was notreported in sufficient detail. This was, in fact, the tactic that was adopted following the news
conference in Harrisburg. In the course of a detailed investigation for a story published in the June
1980 issue of the Canadian magazine Harrowsmith, one of its associate editors, Thomas Pawlick, aformer investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press, found out the following:First to attack Sternglass was The Harrisburg Patriot newspaper. A November 1979 article byRichard Roberts questioned Sternglass’ figures on infant deaths in the city, charging that they
did not "jibe with the hospital’s statistics" as supplied by Harrisburg Hospital corporate
relations officer Ernest McDowell. In a later unsigned editorial, the paper skirted the limits oflibel, charging that the scientist was "inept at gathering statistics, or worse, he simply
fabricated them to fit his conclusion." The editorial added: "For a scientist to present grossly
inaccurate data is inexcusable. But to fit the method of analysis to a conclusion makes the- 145 -scientist’s motives suspect. Sternglass seemed principally concerned about his talk with theextent to which his appearance was documented by the media." There was no rise in infant
deaths, concluded the Patriot.
According to Harrisburg Hospital executive director Warren Prelesnik, who supplied theinitial figures used by Sternglass, "no fabrication took place," and Sternglass’ motives were far
from suspect:"Dr. Sternglass used figures from a Hospital Utilization Project (HUP) computer read-out
supplied by us," says Prelesnik. "The first set of figures we gave him, which he used in goodfaith, excluded, I believe, one or two cases (the discrepancy mentioned previously). This
happened because we interpreted the term ‘infant’ differently than he did at first. We
corrected this in a second set of figures I gave him on November 20, 1979. As for the figures
quoted by Mr. McDowell, they came from a different source, that is, the hospital’s PediatricMortality statistics."
The Pediatric Mortality statistics include not only infant deaths, but those of older
children—up to 11 years of age in one case—as well as abortions and stillbirths. Averaged
out, McDowell’s figures would show little change after the accident. Only when infant deaths
are isolated from the whole, as in Sternglass’ report, does a post-accident rise show up.
The newspaper had undeservedly maligned Sternglass, whose claim of a rise in hospitalstatistics was correct. His figures for Magee Hospital in Pittsburgh were never questioned.
Nor did the article in the Harrisburg Patriot question or even refer in a single word to the highly
significant numbers taken right out of the official U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics reports. But within a
few weeks, nuclear industry spokesmen all over the world were quoting the Harrisburg Patriot
editorial in attempts to discredit the paper which I delivered at the World Congress of Engineers andArchitects in Tel Aviv, Israel, in December. This was especially the case in Sweden, where a great
public debate on nuclear energy was in progress in connection with a referendum scheduled for early
1980.
But in the battle to restore my credibility, I received unexpected support from someone who had
been on the inside of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Dr. Gordon MacLeod. In fact, Dr.
MacLeod headed the department during the period of the accident, having been confirmed in his
position only twelve days before it occurred. He had been forced to resign shortly before the KemenyCommission report was made public, and had returned to the University of Pittsburgh, where heheaded the Department of Health Care Administration in the School of Public Health. As Pawlick
described it in his Harrowsmith article:
In an interview with a reporter for The Washington Post [published February 2], MacLeod
revealed that 13 babies (later corrected to 14) in three Pennsylvania counties in the path of theradioactive plumes had been born with hypothyroidism—ten more than would normally havebeen expected to occur. This initial figure was later expanded to include a total of 27 postaccident hypothyroidism cases throughout the whole state.
This disclosure prompted the state Department of Health to release its own figures, which
confirmed that a higher than normal number of cases of hypothyroidism had been noted in the
county immediately downwind of TMI.
On March 30, 1980, Dr. MacLeod went further. In a controversial speech delivered at
Pittsburgh’s First Unitarian Church, he stated that "recent data collected by the Pennsylvania
Health Department show an increase in infant mortality within 10 miles of Three Mile Island
when compared with the same population in the same time period for the preceding two

- 146 -years." He pointedly noted that this information had not been made public by the healthdepartment.
The exact figures for the population within 10 miles were 20 infant deaths in 1977, 14 in 1978, anda jump to 31 after the accident in 1979 for the six-month period April through September, while thenumber of births remained essentially constant. This meant that there had been a doubling in theinfant mortality rate.
But of even greater importance, despite the relatively small size of the numbers, was the fact thatfor the area still closer to the reactor, the zone within a 5-mile radius, the rate had increased evenmore. In 1977 there had been only 3 infant deaths in this zone, declining to only 1 death in 1978. But
in the six months after the release of the radioactive gases, the number rose sharply to 7 deaths, inclose agreement with the sevenfold rise in the updated newborn death rate at the Harrisburg Hospital.
Pawlick told the story this way:
The Department of Health, its public credibility at stake, was forced to issue a news release
April 2, in which it admitted that the rate of infant deaths per thousand live births "within ten
miles of Three Mile Island" from April 1 through September 30, 1979 (after the accident) was
15.7, compared to a lower death rate of 13.3 per thousand for the entire state. The release,
however, confused the issue by not comparing the April-September 1979 death rate with thesame period in 1978. Instead, it recounted the figures for the period October 1978 throughMarch 1979 (before the accident)—figures for the winter months, which are normally higher
than summer months anyway. The rate for this rather irrelevant period was 17.2 per thousand.
Suddenly, despite all the efforts of the nuclear industry, the NRC, the EPA, the Pennsylvania
Department of Health, and the Harrisburg Patriot, my findings had been substantiated by the mostcredible of all sources, the Secretary of Health of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at the time of
the accident. Moreover, the Office of Vital Statistics of the Pennsylvania Department of Health had
reluctantly confirmed his figures.
But the battle over the statistics at Three Mile Island was far from over; bigger guns would have to
be brought into action. The very next day, The New York Times carried a story on these death rates
headed: "No Big Change Found in Infant Death Rate Near Three Mile Island." It was a special
interview with Tokuhata in which he claimed that studies just completed by his department found "nosignificant changes in these rates before and after the Three Mile Island Accident." As Pawlick
pointed out, however:
The Department of Health news release and the New York Times story both neglected tocite the figures for people living within a 5-mile radius of the nuclear plant that failed, as wellas to cite the figures for the same months in earlier years. In an April 7 letter to the Times’
editor, Dr. MacLeod made up for this deficiency. He did not reveal his sources, but it is
supposed they were former colleagues within the Department of Health. (Indeed, a secretaryof Dr. George Tokuhata, director of the department’s Bureau of Health Research, admitted
that the department’s February 2 and April 2 news releases cited figures "that weren’t
originally intended for the public or the press, but the material was leaked. Somebody leaked
the figures and we had to confirm them.")
In his letter, MacLeod revealed that the infant death rates for those living within both a 10mile and 5-mile radius of the stricken reactor had, indeed, risen sharply after the accident
when compared to earlier years. In 1977, between April and September, the death rate was 6.7
per thousand within 5 miles of the plant and 10.5 per thousand within 10 miles. In 1978, the- 147 -rates fell to 2.3 per thousand and 7.2 per thousand, respectively. But in 1979, after theaccident, they jumped to 16.2 per thousand in a 5-mile radius of the plant and 15.7 within a
10-mile radius. MacLeod’s figures substantially confirmed what Sternglass had been saying
right along, that babies died in much higher numbers after the accident than they had been
dying before it.
There was only one problem: The New York Times had refused to publish Dr. MacLeod’s letter,
which, with its crucial numbers, would have restored my public credibility.
Instead, the Times published a long article on the front page of its "Science" section by its reporter
Jane Brody, on April 15, in which federal and state government spokesmen such as Dr. George
Tokuhata tried to discredit both Dr. MacLeod’s findings on hypothyroidism and my results on therises in infant mortality.
What was particularly disturbing was the fact that neither Dr. MacLeod nor I was given an
opportunity to reply to the statements of the spokesmen for the State of Pennsylvania and the U.S.
Center for Disease Control in Atlanta cited in the Times article. MacLeod had received no call at allfrom Jane Brody, as I learned later, and the only questions I was asked had to do with the charge byArthur Tamplin, the man who had been asked by the AEC to criticize my findings on infant mortality
and bomb fallout back in 1969, that my studies were "incomplete."
Only three days later, still another attack was launched by the Times, this time on the editorial
page. As Pawlick noted, the editorial was almost as insulting as the earlier editorial in the Patriot,
accusing MacLeod of irresponsibility and me of "mishandling data," branding both of us as "Nuclear
Fabulists" in its headline.
Thereupon, MacLeod sent another letter to the Times dated April 22, this time with a note to theeditorial page editor, Max Frankel, asking whether The New York Times made it a policy to pillory
individuals on its editorial page without giving them an opportunity to reply.
This time, MacLeod was told to call the science editor of the Times, William Stockton, who
indicated that he had some problems with the letter, among which was MacLeod’s listing of the actual
numbers. Stockton also wanted to know why MacLeod did not disassociate his position on nuclear
energy from mine, since he apparently was not opposed to nuclear power, something that MacLeod
refused to do.
After further discussion, Stockton indicated that he would recommend publication of the letter only
if MacLeod were willing to revise it. One alternative was to leave out the actual numbers that were
subject to misuse, as well as a discussion of the sex ratio among the children born in the area cited by
one of the federal government critics, which MacLeod had pointed out to have been completely
erroneous. The letter as finally published by the Times on May 14 began as follows:
To the Editor:Your April 18 editorial accusing me of telling nuclear scare stories and dealing recklessly
with statistics is flawed by errors or omissions and ignorance of the facts.
The editorial, based on Jane Brody’s news story three days earlier, can only revive publicdistress over data handling by state and federal officials. Had Jane Brody or your editorialist
interviewed me, I could have told them immediately that I am not opposed to the use of
nuclear energy. And I could have repeated that it is premature to blame the clustering of
thyroid defects and the increase in infant deaths on the accident at Three Mile Island; but it
cannot be ruled out yet, as federal and state officials have tried to do.
More than a year after the nuclear accident I released raw infant-mortality statistics whichwere then six months old. My announcement prompted the state to release infant deaths per

- 148 -thousand live births within 72 hours. Although both statistical measures are at best crude
monitors of infant deaths, they should have been made public months before. After all, publichealth data belong to the public.
After pointing out that the data published so far did not include the numbers for the babies exposedin the first three months of development, when the embryo is especially sensitive to radiation, he
continued as follows:
Yet to be explained is why 5- and 10-mile infant deaths around Three Mile Island during
the six months following the accident climbed sharply, compared with the same period in
previous years. In fact, the increases in the 1979 infant death rates over 1978 were statisticallyhighly significant. Such significant increases in infant death rates following a nuclear reactor
accident warrant complete candor and disclosure, not delay and denial. Had a decrease ininfant deaths occurred, I trust it would have been widely publicized.
Here then was the crucial statement indicating that the numbers were found to be statisticallyhighly significant by independent statisticians whom MacLeod had consulted, contrary to the claimsof both Tokuhata and the scientists at the Center for Disease Control. But the actual numbers thatwould have convinced many skeptical scientists and laymen of the truth of what I had been saying
over the years were left out. But so was any remark that could have been used to support theindustry’s attack on my credibility.
Turning next to the question of the significance of the increase in hypothyroidism, MacLeod wenton as follows:
Despite the shortcomings in Brody’s article, she contradicts your editorial undermining me
for recklessly linking thyroid defects to radiation released from the crippled reactors. She
stated, "Dr. MacLeod, however, did not attribute the cases to the accident."
I had expressed concern about a three months’ delay by the Pennsylvania Health
Department in announcing an unusual cluster of 12 times the expected number of hypothyroid
cases in the county immediately downwind of Three Mile Island. My advice was accurately
reported at the time as made only to encourage early detection of thyroid deficiency from any
cause in unscreened newborns lest an untreated infant become a cretin.
The credibility of an official denial that radiation from the accident could have any effectwhatsoever on fetal thyroid glands was clouded by an error made by an epidemiologist fromthe Center for Disease Control. In the news article, Dr. Greenberg mistakenly states that
Pennsylvania had fewer newborns with thyroid defects than "all the areas in North America
with screening programs."
That simply is not true. In the February 1979 issue of Pediatrics, both Montana and Idaho
had far lower rates of thyroid defects in newborns than Pennsylvania had following the nuclear
accident. Also, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have lower rates of thyroid defects in newborn
than all of Pennsylvania.
Again, there were no exact numbers, but the article MacLeod had referred to, published by Dr.
Stephen LaFranchi of the Oregon Health Science Center, showed that Montana had only one case of
hypothyroidism for nearly 12,000 births. This was a much lower rate than for Pennsylvania in thenine months following the accident, when there were 27 cases in 119,000 births, or 1 case in 4400
live-born infants, a rate that was almost three times greater than in Montana. Yet for the nine months
prior to the accident, Pennsylvania health authorities had discovered only 17 cases for about the same- 149 -number of births. This was 37% lower, and thus closer to the rate of Montana, where there were no
nuclear reactors at all.
Significantly, LaFranchi’s paper also showed that Alaska, where according to the EPA’s own data
the heavier Chinese fallout had come down in recent years, showed a much higher incidence of
hypothyroidism than Montana, namely a rate of 1 for every 3778 births, lending still more support tothe hypothesis that low levels of iodine 131 were responsible for the increase in Pennsylvania
following the accident. Furthermore, there was direct evidence of much higher thyroid doses than had
been measured by the dosimeters from studies of field mice or voles examined by a group of
independent scientists from nearby Millersville State College, preliminary reports of which had
already become available. The iodine 131 found in the thyroids of these animals were in factcomparable to those found by the Utah scientists following the "Baneberry" accident back in 1970.
MacLeod concluded his letter as follows:
I am especially concerned about those citizens in central Pennsylvania who have lost
confidence in the credibility of official statements since the accident over a year ago.
MacLeod had drawn attention to the real problem: the fact that it was the credibility of public
officials entrusted with the health and safety of the people that had been destroyed.
When Pawlick called Dr. Frank Greenberg at the Center for Disease Control to obtain his reaction,
he was unable to explain his error. Asked why such a misstatement had been made, he at first said,"Well, we can’t really compare one state against the other. . . ." According to Pawlick’s story, he thenput him on hold. His secretary subsequently came on the phone to report that "Dr. Greenberg has
been called away on an emergency." She added that it would not be worthwhile to contact him later.
Continuing the report on his investigation, Pawlick then turned to the way that Dr. Gary Stein of
the CDC in Atlanta and Pennsylvania’s Dr. George Tokuhata attacked the state’s own figures in theTimes article, using them as a sort of statistical "straw man" while ignoring much of the data reportedby MacLeod and me.
Among the claims made by Tokuhata was that the Harrisburg infant mortality figures could not be
used because the heavy black population had an unusually high infant mortality. That was exactly thekind of argument he had used in trying to explain away the high infant mortality rate in Aliquippa
near the Shippingport plant seven years earlier, and it was equally misleading to the present situation.
In both cases, it was the change in infant mortality that mattered before and after the releases, not its
absolute value. It was clearly absurd to explain a doubling of the infant death rate by a sudden
doubling in the black population or in the number of black babies born. In Aliquippa, the infant death
rate had declined sharply within a year after Shippingport had been shut down, and there was no
exodus of black people from the area.
Tokuhata also charged that my analysis had been based on "the wrong number" for the July 1979
infant mortality rate, which had been listed incorrectly in the U.S. Vital Statistics as 271 when it
should have been 185. He claimed that this was an error made by the Center for Health Statistics inWashington due to a mix-up of fetal with infant deaths, which he had discovered after reading myThree Mile Island paper, as his secretary had told me when she had called me on March 14 a few
weeks before the first Times story appeared on April 3.
Again, the nuclear industry, in its attack on my findings at Three Mile Island, learned of this"error" amazingly quickly. Only three days after the phone call from Tokuhata’s office advising meof the mistake in the official statistics that conveniently reduced the number of deaths for July to justabove the U.S. rate, the "error" was cited by a young Westinghouse engineer in a radio debate withme in Pittsburgh, well before any public announcement or article had reached the Pittsburgh news- 150 -media.
As it turned out, even this adjustment of the published vital statistics did not alter the overall
pattern of unprecedentedly high infant mortality rates for the entire period of May through December
1979 in Pennsylvania and in New York State outside New York City. The figures in the U.S.
Monthly Vital Statistics for Pennsylvania told the story: Whereas shortly after the winter peak, or in
February and March, Pennsylvania had an infant mortality rate 15 to 26 percent below that of theUnited States, for every month thereafter it exceeded the U.S. rate, even after the alleged mistake inJuly was corrected. As explained to me in a letter sent by Tokuhata early in April of 1980, theerroneously high figure for July was compensated for by reducing the number listed for August by 86
deaths, thus keeping the running total from January to August correct. Since the monthly figures are
only regarded as provisional in any case, this method of correction is used rather than one in which
each monthly figure is revised. This reduced the listed figure for August to 119, however, when infact the August figure would have been 205 if no mistake had occurred in July. The highest excess
for Pennsylvania had therefore actually occurred in August, when the Pennsylvania rate exceeded thatfor the U.S. by 34 percent. But the total number of infant deaths for July and August combined was
unchanged at 390.
Thus, contrary to Tokuhata’s claim in Brody’s article that when the correct number was substituted"there was no increase in infant mortality last summer," there was in fact a large excess over the
winter quarter relative to the rate for the U.S. as a whole. This can be seen more easily in the tablebelow:
Pennsylvania and United States Infant Mortality (0-1 Year old at death) 1979,
With corrections in July and August* (Data from the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics)

Pa.
Deaths______

Pa.
Births______

Pa._Rate
Per
1000
Births______

U.S._Rate
Per
1000
Excess_of
BirthsU.S.
________________

Average
Excessof_Pa._Per
Quarter__________

Jan.
216
13,112
16.5
13.8
+19%
Feb.
147
11,892
12.4
14.6
-15%
-8%
March
141
13,589
10.4
14.1
-26%
_________________________________________________________________________
April
166
12,520
13.3
13.2
+ 1%
May
198
13,201
15.0
12.6
+19%
+8%
June
163
12,293
13.3
12.9
+ 3%
_________________________________________________________________________
July
185*
14,680
12.6
12.5
+ 1%
August205*
13,918
14.7
11.0
+34%
+14%
Sept.
199
14,275
13.9
12.9
+ 8%
_________________________________________________________________________
Oct.
208
13,161
15.8
12.9
+22%
Nov.
182
13,271
13.7
13.1
+ 5%
+13%
Dec.
175
11,871
14.7
13.2
+11%
_________________________________________________________________________* The figures for July and August actually listed in the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics for thesemonths are 271 and 119 respectively, which add up to the same total of 390 as the corrected
numbers.

- 151 -If the figures for the State of Pennsylvania had followed their decade-long pattern of infantmortality rates 5 to 10 percent below that of the United States in the summer of 1979, as they did in
the three months before the accident (-8 percent), there would have been some 268 fewer infant
deaths than the 1413 that actually occurred.
Moreover, when I added the figures for New York State outside New York City where the Augustexcess over the low point in March was a startling 69 percent—namely 20.1 versus 11.9 per 1000
births—the total deaths above normal expectations for Pennsylvania and New York combined rose by
353 to the much larger figure of 621 for the accident at Three Mile Island. And no one had as yet
suggested any errors in the published figures for New York State.
So great were the excess mortality rates for the rural and small-town areas of upstate New York
that I decided to try to check them with yet another set of data, namely figures reported weekly by thelarger cities directly to the CDC in Atlanta and published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
Reports.
What I discovered there confirmed the findings based on both hospital records and the Monthly
U.S. Vital Statistics. In city after city in the path of the invisible gas clouds drifting west and north,infant mortality in July 1979 had risen sharply over the same month in the year before the accident.
For Pittsburgh, it was a jump from 5 to 17 deaths, a rise of 240 percent. For Syracuse, the deathsrose from 10 to 18, or by 80 percent. And for Albany, the change was from 6 to 10, an increase of 67
percent.
But when I examined the figures for areas such as Philadelphia and New York City, not reached by
the most intense clouds of radioactive gases, instead of rising, infant mortality declined, as it has been
doing since the mid-1960s, when the fallout from the U.S. and U.S.S.R. atmospheric bomb tests
began to decline. For Philadelphia, the number of infant deaths in July declined from 61 in 1975 to
50 in 1979. For New York City the decline was from 136 to 127.
Thus, still another set of official data confirmed my original findings as well as the data MacLeod
had forced into the open, and I knew that Tokuhata’s attempt to mislead the public in the pages of theTimes would eventually backfire, still further increasing the tragic mistrust of the public for its
institutions.
As Pawlick’s Harrowsmith story put it:
The statistical battle still drags on, but more than numbers are involved in the controversy.
The public’s right to know is also at stake, as MacLeod insists. So is the future safety ofPennsylvania residents, as radioactive gases such as krypton 85 are vented into the outside air
during the TMI cleanup process. (In an April 16 letter to the NRC, the Roswell Park
Memorial Institute’s Dr. Irving Bross called the krypton venting "a criminal action" andwarned that it would "produce at least 50 excess infant deaths in the area.")
But in the account of the aftermath of Three Mile Island, there was one ray of hope: There were atleast a few public officials not corrupted by the power of the nuclear industry, who had the courage to
speak their minds even if it meant that they might lose their jobs, as Gordon MacLeod had. As
Pawlick described him:
Dr. MacLeod, sitting in a squeaky swivel chair in his linoleum-floored office at the
University of Pittsburgh, is the very picture of academic reserve. Looking like he has been
sent from Central Casting, he embodies arched-eye-browed, thin-lipped scientificrespectability. MacLeod takes great pains to emphasize that he is not by any means antinuclear. He is simply pro-truth, and by now totally convinced that that was why he was fired.

- 152 -"The (Pennsylvania) health department is being exceedingly restrictive with regard to therelease of data," he says, his chair emitting a high-pitched squeak as he rocks gently,
meditatively from side to side, weighing his words. "There is also a timing problem becauseof the anxiety among the population. In the case of the hypothyrodism they knew about thedata from October of 1979 and it wasn’t until three months later that the public and the
medical profession were alerted.
"As for infant mortality, somebody [in the health department] had a hypothesis that the
infant death rate would be affected within a 5- and 10-mile radius by the accident, and studies
were launched and they are collecting data. If we have these kinds of figures for the six
months after the accident [namely, those detailed in the April 2 health department press
release], why haven’t we gotten the preliminary data for the nine months yet? Only thosechildren born later than September 1979 would have been exposed to radiation during the firsttrimester of pregnancy, that is, the time at which birth defects can occur. These later figures
may be even higher."
According to Dr. Tokuhata, the results of a study of "pregnancy outcomes" for women who
conceived between March 1979 and March 1980 will not be released before 1982. (Tokuhataalso described several other post-accident studies in progress, including studies of thepsychological effects of the accident on local residents. Although psychological data will
doubtless yield much valuable information, their chief use to date seems to be to provide
ammunition for industry defenders attempting to give the impression that any claims of healthdamage are really all in people’s minds.)"When I was called by former colleagues in the department and told these data, I asked ifthey were going to release them [the 5- and 10-mile radius data], and they said no, and I told
them I was profoundly dismayed because the population is waiting to find out one way or theother," MacLeod continues. Any unusual patterns found in such studies "warrant complete
candor and disclosure, not delay and denial," he insists, and delaying the release of data until
1982 could seriously hurt the "credibility of health professionals."
Ironically, it may have been his own attempt at candor and disclosure that cost him his
cabinet post. "The Governor asked for my resignation on October 9, 1979," he recalls, notingthat "the sequence of events" preceeding it was briefly as follows:
On October 4, copies of an environmental report prepared by the Governor’s Commission
on Three Mile Island and submitted later to the President’s Commission on the accident were
distributed at a meeting of the Governor’s Commission members. The report quoted aPennsylvania Department of Environmental Resource employee, whose testimony MacLeod
found riddled with "misstatements and misrepresentations." On the advice of fellow statecommissioners, he decided to point them out to the President’s Commission and to the head of
the Department of Environmental Resources, Clifford Jones.
As an example of some of the points the DER report left out, MacLeod notes that: "Themaximum airborne iodine concentration occurred in mid-April, in connection withreplacement of the auxiliary building charcoal filters and probably a far higher release of radio
iodine occurred at that point, and we don’t have the raw data for that [in the DER report]. It
doesn’t mention it."
MacLeod dictated a letter noting the report’s shortcomings and sent it to the Presidential
Commission, then he telephoned Jones. "I said, ‘You’ve got a problem, Cliff, a man in yourdepartment who is misrepresenting the facts before the Presidential Commission, and this will
embarrass the [Governor’s] administration.’ And he [Jones] got angry at me. That was
Thursday. Then on Saturday I got a call from the governor’s office to come in on Tuesday- 153 -morning. He [the Governor] sort of uncomfortably asked me then for my resignation."
Pressed for an explanation for the firing, MacLeod says Thornburgh "told me he had talked to
Clifford Jones. I’m not sure whether it was a turf problem between the two departments, orwhat it was all about."
Asked about the firing, Thornburgh’s press secretary, Paul Crithclow, said MacLeod was
dismissed because "he had a great deal of trouble working with other cabinet officers and otheradministration officials." Without being asked, he volunteered the information that "his[MacLeod’s] behavior during that period [that of the accident] was erratic," and insisted onreading extracts from the Times’ "Nuclear Fabulists" editorial aloud over the phone.
MacLeod was replaced by H. Arnold Muller, a physician specializing in emergency medical careand the handling of battlefield casualties, with ten years of service in the military. Muller did nothave any public-health background, but he did have a continuing financial connection to a projectsponsored by the war college at a military base near Harrisburg.
At a meeting at the Pennsylvania Association of Hospital Auxiliaries at Hershey, Pennsylvania,
early in May—just before the venting of the radioactive gases in the containment building had been
approved by the Governor—he had said that fears stemming from the accident at Three Mile Island
were unfounded. According to the story in the Harrisburg Patriot of May 7, Muller claimed that"there is nothing to indicate that there has been any illness whatsoever" as a result of the previous
year’s nuclear accident. Urging that the Three Mile Island accident should be put in proper context,
he continued by saying, "Nobody died at TMI, nobody came close to dying." Referring to his
experience in the case of automobile accident victims, he asked the women, "Where are all the crying
people when a man dies on a street" as the result of a drunken driver? "There are none," heconcluded.
Only a few days earlier, at a meeting on "The Roles of Local and State Health Departments in theManagement of Radiological Emergencies" at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health,Muller had indicated, to the astonishment of everyone present, that the state would release only thehealth data that he could understand and approve.
On May 19, this department issued a news release prominently reported in The New York Times thefollowing day under the headline "Fewer Infant Deaths Near Three Mile Island." In this article, thecrucial figures for the infant mortality rate within a 5-mile radius around the plant—a rate that had
increased sevenfold—were left out. Just like the misleading data that had been handed out to theHarrisburg Patriot reporter on the day of the news conference in November by the head of public
relations for the Harrisburg Hospital, the data here had been lumped together with miscarriages andstillbirths under the category of "perinatal mortality." These rates hardly changed at all, especiallywhen compared for the entire year from January through December of 1978 and 1979, because theeffect of growth retardation on lung function does not show up until just after birth.
Instead, it was clear to me that the UPI story printed in the Times misled the public by comparing
the low infant mortality rate for the high socio-economic, white suburban area within 10 miles of thereactor, which had been far below the rest of the state before the accident, with the figures for the state
as a whole: "The figures show the infant death rate (deaths under one year) to be 11.5 per 1000 live
births within a 10-mile radius of TMI. The statewide figure for the same period of time [all of 1979]
was 13.3 infant deaths per live births." This was exactly the technique used by Tokuhata to hide thelarge rise in cancer rates around Shippingport compared with their previously low values relative tothe state as a whole seven years earlier.
But if the public had been able to see the actual tables released by the Pennsylvania Department of
Health broken down by quarters, they would have seen otherwise. In the crucial summer months after- 154 -the accident, when the infants in their mothers’ wombs that had functioning thyroid glands at the timeof the accident were born, the infant mortality rate within the 10-mile zone had doubled, exactly as
MacLeod had learned from deeply troubled health officials in Harrisburg.
Thus, for July, August, and September, when death rates are usually at their lowest, infantmortality rates within 10 miles had been 4.9 in 1978, and 12.8 after the accident in 1979, a rise of 160
percent. Nor was there any reference to the summer increases for Pennsylvania as a whole as reported
in the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics, far above the rates for the rest of the United States.
Yet the state’s news release signed by Muller, as quoted in the UPI story, concluded as follows:
After careful study of all available information, we continue to find no evidence to date thatradiation from the nuclear power plant resulted in increased number of fetal, neonatal or infant
deaths.
Neither the UPI nor The New York Times had fulfilled their normal journalistic responsibility to the
public to obtain comments from those who could have pointed out the misleading nature of the news
release. In a matter of such great concern and importance for the future health and well-being of thechildren of Harrisburg and the entire world, was this too much to ask for?
Ironically, the willingness of The New York Times and the UPI to lend themselves to the attempt tocover up the full dimensions of the deaths at Three Mile Island was to be proven futile within a few
months, as a result of the persistence of two television news reporters who became disturbed when
they discovered a series of inconsistencies and anomalies in the tables of statistics released by thePennsylvania Health Department in May of 1980. In going over the numbers for fetal deaths in thearea within 10 miles of TMI for 1979, they noticed something that was mathematically impossible.
They found that for the month of January, the average fetal death rate listed for the entire area wassmaller than either the rate in the city of Harrisburg or the rate for the suburban area within the entire
10-mile zone taken separately.
Their suspicions aroused, they continued their detailed examination of the official figures andnoticed that the rates of fetal deaths with and without therapeutic abortions for the suburban portion of
the 10-mile zone were exactly identical month for month through all of 1979. This was very strange
indeed, since it meant that there was not a single reported induced abortion for all of that year in thearea closest to the reactor, where the concern of pregnant women was greatest.
Even stranger was the fact that for the city of Harrisburg, the table showed a difference between
fetal deaths for the period April to September with and without induced abortions only for May. This
meant that there was only a single induced abortion listed for the summer of 1979 in any part of theheavily populated 10-mile zone around Three Mile Island. Yet, another table in the released material
showed 11 induced abortions in 1978 and 10 in 1977 for the same 10-mile area around the stricken
plant during the same six-month period.
Deeply troubled by their findings, the two reporters went to see MacLeod about a possible
explanation. He agreed that there was something wrong with the numbers as listed, and promised tocheck into the matter further, which he did by consulting a number of statisticians at the University
and the State Health Department. None of the individuals he consulted could give an explanation,and one person who had access to the original data as kept in the State’s computer said that the
numbers were altered in the release.
Shortly thereafter, I happened to stop by at MacLeod’s office, when he told me of these very
disturbing facts. Apparently it had not occurred to either one of us that the data released might
actually have been doctored in some manner when we first heard of the May 1980 news release issuedby MacLeod’s successor. It seemed incredible that someone might want to do something so glaring,- 155 -yet when we examined the figures further, a whole series of gross inconsistencies emerged, all tending
to reduce the number of deaths during the critical summer months when the U.S. Monthly Vital
Statistics had shown the greatest rise of infant deaths both in Pennsylvania and upstate New York
relative to the United States as a whole.
As to the sudden decline of therapeutic abortions in the Harrisburg area, MacLeod had called someof his physician friends in Harrisburg and learned that they had performed just about the same number
in 1979 as in 1978. And when I looked at a summary for the Harrisburg Hospital sent to me earlier byPrelesnik, there were a total of 10 therapeutic abortions listed for April through September in 1978
and 21 for 1979, totally at variance with a 90% drop to essentially none for 1979 listed for this period
in the May release of the Health Department.
Remembering the mistake of an excess of 86 infant deaths in July that was supposedly made andwhich Tokuhata said had been corrected in the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics for August, I decided tocheck what the number of infant deaths were for July and August in the May 1980 Health Department
release. Knowing the number of births which had apparently not been in error, it was a simple matterto calculate the number of infant deaths from the infant mortality rates listed. For July, using the rateof 11.9 deaths per thousand births and the 14,680 live births, one obtained 175 infants that had diedaccording to the May 1980 release. For August, the listed rate of 10.2 and the 13,918 births gave 142
infant deaths, for a combined total in July and August of 142 plus 175, or 317.
But this was 73 deaths less than the 390 given in the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics for the twomonths after the alleged error had been corrected. The number of infant deaths listed had quietly
been further reduced so as to get a still lower rate.
For the three summer months of July, August and September, the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics
gave 589 infant deaths after the August correction had been made. But the figures released by Mullerin May 1980 gave a total of only 501 infant deaths, 88 fewer than had been reported to Washington in
1979. Altogether these two adjustments reduced the number of infant deaths by 174, compared withthe figures originally reported to Washington in the summer of 1979. This resulted in a low infantmortality rate of only 11.7 per thousand births instead of 13.7 for the summer quarter, bringing it
down to below the U.S. rate for the summer quarter of 12.1. Thus it would be possible to maintain
Muller’s claim in the official release that "after careful study of all available information we continue
to find no evidence to date that radiation from the nuclear power plant resulted in an increased
number of fetal, neonatal or infant deaths."
The damage done to the developing infants at Three Mile Island will not be as easily swept away
as a single public-health official, more concerned about trying to protect human life and health than apowerful technology gone out of human control.
I knew only too well how often this had happened before without the knowledge of the public. I
knew how the budgets of public-health agencies, such as those of New York State, had been cut inorder to stop the publication of the detailed annual health statistics that would allow otherconscientious officials or independent investigators to alert the public to the danger of emissions fromnewly built nuclear reactors or fallout from distant nuclear detonations. The fragmentary summaries
of data that replaced the detailed reports beginning in 1970 were a very inadequate substitute. I also
knew that the budget of the EPA had been cut by the Nixon administration to force an end to the
publication of Radiation Health Data and Reports in 1974. That was the year after the nuclear
industry and the agencies that promoted it had learned from the Shippingport hearings how thedetailed monthly data on strontium 90 gathered by the states could be used to pinpoint the newsources of radioactivity in the milk. Used intelligently, such detailed data might lead to costly
damage suits, just as in the case for the fallout from Nevada.
After those who were primarily concerned about public health had been forced out of the NRC and- 156 -EPA, it was a simple step to end the previously required monitoring of strontium 90 by the nuclear
plants, ostensibly as an economy measure. Interestingly, however, the end of monitoring came in
1979, the same year in which the permissible doses to critical organs from the nuclear fuel cycle werereduced by a factor of twenty. Those scientists who knew that strontium 90 gave the greatest dose perpicocurie of all substances released by nuclear bombs or nuclear reactors would no longer be able toprotect the public precisely because the most crucial data was no longer being collected. And those
few who wanted to warn the public risked the destruction of their scientific reputation and careers.
As I explained to Pawlick at the end of our interview, one of the greatest unanticipated threats of
low-level radiation to the human body comes from its action on normal, life-giving oxygen
molecules, turning them into powerful toxic agents. Among the most important systems they attack
are the immune defenses of the body, which detect and destroy not only foreign bodies such as viruses
and bacteria, but also ordinary cells that have somehow gotten out of normal control. These are theso-called malignant cancer cells, which multiply rapidly until they become so numerous that they
inhibit the normal functions of vital organs, a condition that eventually leads to the death of theorganisms as a whole.
In this sense, there is a close analogy between the human body and a complex human society.
They can both be destroyed by outside forces, or they can destroy themselves if they lose the ability torecognize "super-normal" individuals with an unusual ability to propagate their kind in an uncheckedmanner.
In our rapidly changing science-based society, it is the freedom to investigate and communicate
important scientific or public health findings quickly and widely—no matter how disturbing orcontroversial—that is the key element in the protective system needed to alert a society to potentially
dangerous developments before they become irreversibly destructive.
The rapid growth of a powerful military and commercial nuclear technology was largely
unchecked by the normal protective processes of free communication and public discussion. As aresult, the unique economic and political forces of the industrial, military, and scientific organizations
to which the atom gave birth are like a malignant cancer in our society, unrecognized and unchecked
while it developed under the cover of secrecy to its present enormous size. If we continue to allow
our government, which brought this technology into being for purposes of national security, tocontinue in its efforts to aid and abet the suppression of the freedom of publication in this vital area,
then the crucial early warning system that our society needs to survive will have been destroyed.
In the name of national security, our scientists and engineers have created Frankenstein’s monster,
capable of destroying life in this world. Ironically, in order to realize the dream of ending all wars
and developing the peaceful atom that would atone for the horror of Hiroshima and make up to
mankind for the threat of destruction that would forever hang over the world in the years to come,they needed to ally themselves with the military, political, and economic interests that alone could
supply the enormous financial resources needed to realize their dream. Indeed, Eisenhower had tried
to warn the nation of this danger at the end of his presidency.
The alliance of science and technology with the military and political forces is, of course, as old ascivilization itself, since only through the fear of powerful enemies would the public provide thenecessary funds to develop costly new technologies, all the way from better steel for swords togigantic missile systems capable of pinpoint accuracy in delivering nuclear bombs to their targets.
But when the testing of nuclear weapons and the leakage from commercial reactors were found tohave unanticipated serious biological effects on the population, it became necessary to secretly
subvert the very freedom of publication and continued correction of errors on which the success ofmodern science and technology itself has been based.
In their understandable desire to see the blessings of the peaceful atom come about in their- 157 -lifetime, and concerned not to endanger the sources of capital for the research and development
essential for the advancement of science and technology required by modern society, those involved
with the development, promotion, and regulation of nuclear technology and the protection of publichealth were too often willing to participate in the effort to hide the consequences of nuclear testing or
normal and accidental releases from nuclear reactors, especially when the requirements of national
security were cited to them in periods of international tension.
Ironically, the need to believe that peaceful applications of the atom were possible played into thehands of those in the military who wanted to use nuclear weapons in limited wars, since both required
the assumption that low-level radiation from distant, worldwide fallout or from nuclear plants was
essentially harmless. Thus, the most concerned and idealistic scientists who had worked on the bomb
and who later dedicated themselves to the realization of the peaceful benefits of the atom, because
they were willing to believe the harmlessness of very small amounts of radiation and the negligible
magnitude of the doses from nuclear reactor operations, were in effect contributing to the increased
likelihood of nuclear war.
Thus, the deeply felt hope for safe, clean, and economical nuclear power kindled by the nuclear
scientists tragically aided the plans of leaders of the nuclear nations to find ways to use nuclear
weapons in all types of military confrontations. Only the continuing denial of the seriousness ofworldwide fallout would give credibility to these threats.
Only a few months before Three Mile Island, James Reston, writing in The New York Times, asked
what "the present danger" facing our nation really was:Is it a military threat from the Soviet Union or an economic threat from some of our allies
who are outworking and outproducing us?
In short, is the threat external or internal? What worries the world about the United States
today: that it is spending only 117.3 billion dollars this year on defense—the highest
peacetime military budget in our history? Or that the United States is spending more of its
economic and moral capital than ever before and losing confidence in itself and the confidenceof the free world?
Reston went on to quote Lincoln from an address given in Springfield, Illinois, on January 27,
1837. Lincoln’s words now take on a particularly strong relevance:
At what point shall we Americans expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we
fortify against it? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean andcrush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all thetreasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest with a Bonaparte for acommander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make track on the Blue Ridge ina trial of a thousand years.
And then came this most strangely prophetic passage:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it
must spring up amongst us: it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we mustourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time ordie by suicide.
As Reston concluded, "it could be, of course, that Mr. Lincoln is out of date in this nuclear world,

- 158 -but at least his point is worth debating. The ‘present danger’ may be the failure to debate what itreally is."But when vital information is secretly kept from free people, they are no longer free, and there canbe no meaningful debate of the most crucial problem facing our nation and the rest of the people ofthis world, namely whether we shall learn how to live through all time by finding a way to end thenuclear cancer threatening our nation, or die by nuclear suicide.
If we have any moral or ethical obligations at all as human beings, they surely include theobligation to insure the survival of our species and thus the opportunity for our children and theirdescendants to develop to the fullest the miraculous potential of the human mind. As the French
philosopher-scientist Jean Rostand has phrased it so eloquently on behalf of humanity as a whole,"The duty to survive gives us the right to know."- 159 -Bibliography

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- 164 -GENERAL REFERENCES UTILIZEDI. U.S. Government Publications and Hearings Relating to Fallout, Radiation Standards,
Nuclear Weapons Effects, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Basic radiation protection criteria. Jan. 15, 1971. Recommendations of the National Council on
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hearings on fallout; (b) May 1959 hearings on fallout; (c) June 1959 hearings on the biologicaland environmental effects of nuclear war; (d) June 1962 hearings on fallout; (e) June 1963
hearings on fallout; (f) August 1963 hearings on fallout; (g) June 1965 hearings on federal
radiation council protective action guides.
U.S. Congress. Part 1 (October-November 1969) and Part 2 (January-February 1970). Environmental
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II. Biological Hazards of Nuclear Radiation
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Press, pp. 145-221.
_______. June 1973. Epidemiological studies of fallout and patterns of cancer mortality. AEC
Symposium Series, vol. 29, Proceedings of the Hanford Biology Symposium (Conf-720505).
_______. 1977. Radioactivity, chap. XV in Environmental Chemistry, ed. J. O. Bockris. New York:
Plenum Press.
United Nations. 1958, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1969. Reports of the United Nations Scientific Committee
on the effects of radiation. The 1969 report deals especially with the evidence for low-doseradiation effects on human chromosomes and the central nervous system.
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. October 1969. Inhalation carcinogenesis. Symposium Series,
vol. 18, Proceedings of a Biology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Conference, USAEC
Division of Technical Information, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
U.S. Congress. May-June 1957 (2 vols.) and May 1959 (2 vols.). The nature of radioactive fallout
and its effect on man. Hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 85th Congress.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

III. Trends in Mortality and Statistical Sources
Moriyama, I. M. 1960. Recent change in infant mortality trend. Public Health Report 75:391-405.
_______. 1964. The change in mortality trend in the United States. National Center for Health
Statistics, Report No. 1, Ser. 3.
Segi, M., Kurihara, M., and Matsuyama, T. 1965. Cancer mortality in Japan, 1899-1962. (Also later
supplements.) Department of Public Health, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai,
Japan.
Shapiro, S., Schlesinger, E. R., and Nesbitt, R. E. L., Jr. 1968. Infant, perinatal, maternal, andchildhood mortality in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1970 and earlier editions. Statistical abstract of the United States. U.S.
Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Public Health Service. November 1965. Infant mortality trends—United States and each state,

- 166 -1930-1964. National Center for Health Statistics, Report No. 1, Ser. 20.
_______. November 1965. Changes in mortality trends in Chile. National Center for Health Statistics,
Report No. 2, Ser. 3.
_______. November 1965. Changes in mortality trends in England and Wales, 1931-1961. National
Center for Health Statistics, Report No. 3, Ser. 3.
_______. June 1966. Report of the international conference on the perinatal and infant mortality
problem of the United States. National Center for Health Statistics, Report No. 3, Ser. 4.
_______. March 1967. International comparison of perinatal and infant mortality—the United Statesand six West European countries. National Center for Health Statistics, Report No. 6, Ser. 3.
_______. June 1968. Recent retardation of mortality trends in Japan. National Center for Health
Statistics, Report No. 10, Ser. 3.
_______. Monthly vital statistics reports. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, National
Center for Health Statistics, Rockville, Md. 20852.
_______. Annual volumes, vital statistics of the United States. Department of Health, Education andWelfare, National Center for Health Statistics, Rockville, Md. 20852.
World health statistics annual. Vital statistics and causes of death. World Health Organization,
Geneva, Switzerland. (Data for fifty-four countries.)

IV. Studies of Low-Level Radiation Effects Produced by X-rays or Natural Background
Radiation in Human Populations
Barcinski, M. A. July 15, 1971. Chromosome analysis of population in Brazilian areas of highnatural radioactivity. Presented at the Annual Meeting, Health Physics Society, New York.
Unpublished Report of the Institute of Biophysics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Bertel, R. 1979. Maternal child health effects from radioactive particles in milk, Wisconsin 1963-75,
American Public Health Association Annual Meeting, New York.
Bross, I. D. J., and Natarajian, N. 1972. Leukemia from low-level radiation, New England Journal of
Medicine. 287:107.
Diamond, E. I., Schmerler, H., and Lillienfeld, A. M. 1973. The relationship of intrauterine
radiation to subsequent mortality and development of leukemia in children, American Journal of
Epidemiology. 97:283.
Gentry, J. T., Parkhurst. E., and Bulin, G. V. 1959. An epidemiological study of congenital
malformations in New York State, American Journal of Public Health, 49:497.
Graham, S., Levin, M. L., Lillienfeld, A. M., Schuman, L. M., Gibson, R. G., Dowd, J. E., andHempelman, L. 1966. Preconception intrauterine, and postnatal irradiation as related to leukemia.
National Cancer Institute, Monograph 19:347-371.
Jacobsen, Lars. 1968. Low dose x-ray radiation and teratogenesis. Copenhagen: Munksgaard
Publishing Company.
Kochupilai, N., Verma, I. C., Grewai, M. S., and Ramalinga, Swami, V. July 1, 1976. Down’s
syndrome and related abnormalities in an area of high background radiation in coastal Kerdla,
Nature, 262.
Lewis, E. B. May 15, 1957. Leukemia and ionizing radiation. Science 125:965-972.
_______. Dec. 13, 1963. Leukemia, multiple myeloma, and aplastic anemia in Americanradiologists. 142:1492-1494.
Macht, S. H., and Lawrence, P. S. 1955. National survey of congenital malformations resulting fromexposure to roentgen radiation. 73:442-466.

- 167 -MacMahon, Brian. 1962. Prenatal x-ray exposure and childhood cancer. Journal of National Cancer
Institute 28:1173-1191.
Mancuso, T. F., Stewart, A., and Kneale, G. 1977. Radiation exposures of Hanford workers dying
from various causes. Health Physics 33:369.
March, H. C. 1944. Leukemia in radiologists. Radiology 43:275-278.
_______. 1950. American Journal of the Medical Sciences 220:282.
Peterson, N. J., Samuels, L. D., Lucas, H. F., and Abrahams, S. P. September 1966. An
epidemiological approach to low-level radium-226 exposure. Public Health Reports 81:805-814.
Rugh, Roberts. February 1969. The effects of ionizing radiation on the developing embryo and fetus.
Seminar Paper No. 007, Bureau of Radiological Health, U.S. Public Health Service, Rockville,
Md.
Seltser, Raymond. 1964. Studies of mortality among American radiologists. Journal of theAmerican Medical Association. 190:90.
Stewart, A., Pennibacker, W., and Barber, R. Oct. 6, 1962. Adult leukemias and diagnostic x-rays.
British Medical Journal 2:882-890.
_______, Webb, J., and Hewitt, D. 1958. A survey of childhood malignancies. British Medical
Journal 1:1495-1508.
_______, _______, _______, and Giles, D. 1956. Studies of children irradiated in utero. Lancet
271:447.
Uchida, Irene A., Holunga, Roberta, and Lawler, Carolyn. Nov. 16, 1968. Maternal radiation andchromosomal aberrations. Lancet.
United Nations. 1969. Radiation-induced chromosome aberrations in human cells. Report of theUnited Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation, Annex C, p. 156 (Supplement
No. 13 (A/7613)).

V. Data on Radioactivity in the Environment and Releases from Nuclear Reactors and Fuel
Reprocessing Facilities (U.S. Government reports available from the Clearing House forFederal Scientific and Technical Information, Springfield, Va. 22151)
Cochran, J. A., et al. July 1970. An investigation of airborne radioactive effluent from an operating
nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. U.S. Public Health Service, Bureau of Radiological Health(BRH-NERHL-70-1).
Magno, P., et al. November 1970. Liquid waste effluents from a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.
U.S. Public Health Service, Bureau of Radiological Health (BRH-NERHL-70-2).
Radiological health data and reports. 1957-1974. Published monthly by the Environmental
Protection Agency (formerly the Bureau of Radiological Health, U.S.P.H.S.), 5600 Fisher’s Lane,
Rockville, Md. 20852. Contains monthly reports on radioactivity levels in the milk, water, air, andprecipitation together with articles relating to environmental radiation.
Reinig, William C., ed. 1970. Environmental surveillance in the vicinity of nuclear facilities.
Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher.
Shleien, B. May 1970. An estimate of radiation doses received in vicinity of a nuclear fuelreprocessing plant. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Radiological
Health, Rockville, Md. (BRH-NERHL 70-1); also July 1970, BRH-NERHL-70-3.
U.S. Public Health Service. March 1970. Radioactive waste discharges to the environment from
nuclear power facilities. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Radiological
Health, Rockville, Md. (BRH-DER 70-2).

- 168 -_______. March 1970. Radiological surveillance studies at a boiling water nuclear power station.
Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Radiological Health, Rockville, Md.
(BRH-DER 70-1).

VI. General References on the Hazards of Nuclear Power Generation and its Alternatives
Abrahamson, Dean E. 1970. Environmental cost of electric power. Scientist’s Institute for PublicInformation, 30 East 68 Street, New York, N.Y. 10021.
Bryerton, Gene. 1970. Nuclear dilemma. New York: Ballantine Books, Inc.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The energy crisis. Part I, September 1971; Part II, October 1971;
Part III, November 1971. The alternatives to fission power are presented in Part II.
Curtis, Richard C., and Hogan, Elizabeth. 1969. Perils of the peaceful atom. New York: Ballantine
Books, Inc.
Fabricant, Neil, and Hallman, Robert M. 1971. Toward a rational power policy—energy, politics
and pollution. New York: George Braziller, Inc.
Gofman, John W., and Tamplin, Arthur R. 1971. Poisoned power—the case against nuclear power
plants. Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press.
Honicker vs. Hendrie—1978. A law suit to end atomic power. Summertown, Tenn.: The Book
Publishing Company.
Inglis, David R. 1973. Nuclear energy: its physics and its social challenge. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Keisling, Bill. 1980. Three Mile Island—turning point. Seattle: Veritas Books, Inc.
Lovins, Amory B. 1977. Soft energy paths: towards a durable peace. New York: Penguin Books.
Novick, Sheldon. 1969. The careless atom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Olsen, McKinley C. 1976. Unacceptable Risk. New York: Bantam Books, Inc.
Radiation Standards and Public Health 1978, Environmental Policy Institute, 317 Pennsylvania Ave.,
S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.
Reader, Mark, et al. 1980. Atom’s eve: ending the nuclear age, an anthology. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company.
Rosenberg, Howard L. 1980. Atomic soldiers. Boston: Beacon Press.
Schrader-Frechette, K. S. 1980. Nuclear power and public policy—the social and ethical problems
of fission technology. Boston: Reidel Publishing Company.
Shut down—1979, Nuclear power on trial. Summertown, Tenn.: The Book Publishing Company.

- 169 -ADDENDA TO BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caldwell, G. G., Kelly, D. B., Heath, C. W., Jr.. October 1980. "Leukemia among participants inmilitary maneuvers at a nuclear bomb test." Journal of the American Medical Association
244:1575-1578.
Field, R. W., Field, E. H., Zegers, D. A., and Steucek, G. L. 1980. "Iodine-131 in thyroids of themeadow vole in the vicinity of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Plant." Department of
Biology, Millersville State College, Millersville, Pa. 17551 (Submitted to Health Physics).
Franke, B., Kruger, E., Steinhilber-Schwaab, B., Van de Saud, H., and Teufel, D. 1979. "Radiation
exposure to the public from radioactive emissions of nuclear power stations." Critical analysis of
the official regulatory guides, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, 6900 Heidelberg,West Germany.
Gong, J. K., Glomski, C. A., and Bruce, A. K. 1980. "Effects of radiation in the I.O.R. range," inProceedings of the Symposium on Biological Effects, Imaging Techniques and Dosimetry of
Ionizing Radiations, Rockville, Md., June 6-8, 1979, U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, HHS Publication No. (FDA) 80-8126.
Gyorgy, Anna. 1979. No Nukes—Everyone’s guide to nuclear power. South End Press, Boston,
Mass. 02123.
Koteles, G. J. 1979. "New aspects of cell membrane radiobiology and their impact on radiation
protection." Atomic Energy Review 17: No. 1 3-30, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna,
Austria.
Lyon, J. L., Klauber, M. R., Gardner, J. W., et al. 1979. "Childhood leukemia associated with fallout
from nuclear testing." New England Journal of Medicine 300:317-402.
Modan, B., Mart, H., Baidatz, D., et al. 1974. "Radiation induced head and neck tumors." Lancet
1:277-279.
Najarian, W. A., and Colton, T. 1979. "Mortality from leukemia and cancer in shipyard nuclear
workers." Lancet 1:1018-1020.
_______, Colton, C., Greenberg, E. R., Barron, J. June 1980. "An analysis of deaths among nuclear
shipyard workers." Final Report, Contract 80-1574, National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health, U.S. Public Health Service (Submitted for publication in the New England Journal of
Medicine).
Petkau, A., and Chelack, W. S. 1976. "Radioprotective effect of super-oxide dismutase on model
phospholipid membranes." Biochimica and Biophysica Acta 433:445-456.
Silverman, C. July 1980. "Mental function following scalp irradiation for tinea capitatis inchildhood." Symposium on biological effects, imaging techniques and dosimetry of ionizing
radiation," p. 36. Rockville, Md., June 6-8, 1979, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
HHS Publication No. (FDA) 80-8126. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
Sternglass, E. J. 1973. Reports to Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania on abnormal radiationlevels and mortality rates near the Shippingport Nuclear Power Station, January and May 1973
(Unpublished).
_______. 1977. "Radioactivity." Chapter XV in Environmental Chemistry. Ed. J. O. Bockris, New
York, N.Y., Plenum Press.
_______. 1978. "Cancer mortality changes around nuclear facilities in Connecticut." Proceedings ofSecond Congressional Seminar on Low-Level Ionizing Radiation, February 1978. Published by
the Environmental Policy Institute, 317 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20003.

- 170 -_______, and Bell, S. 1979. "Fallout and the decline of aptitude scores." Presented at the September
1979 Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (Submitted for publication in the
Journal of the American Psychological Association).
_______. 1979. "Infant Mortality Changes Following the Three Mile Island Accident." 5th World
Congress of Engineers and Architects, Tel Aviv, Israel, December 1979.
Stewart, Alice M., Kneale, G. W., and Mancuso, T. F. 1980. "A cohort study of the cancer risks fromradiation to all workers at Hanford." British Journal of Industrial Medicine (in publication).
"Time Bomb—A nuclear reader from the Progressive." 1980. Ed. by James Rowen, The Progressive
Foundation, Madison, Wis. 53703.
"Announced United States Nuclear Test Statistics." 1976. U.S. Energy Research and Development
Administration, Washington, D.C.
U.S. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment. 1979. "The Effects of Nuclear War." U.S.
Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
U.S. Congress. "Effect of radiation on human health." Hearings before the Select Committee on
Health and the Environment of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House ofRepresentatives, 96th Congress, 2nd Session, Vol. 1. January and February 1978, Serial #95-179
and Vol. 2, July 1978, Serial #95-180. (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
20402, 1979)
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Bureau of Radiological
Health, Rockville, Md. 20857: Proceedings of Symposium on Biological Effects, Imaging
Techniques and Dosimetry of Ionizing Radiation, July 1980. HHS Publication No. (FDA) 808126.
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Reports on releases of radioactivity in effluents and solid
wastes from nuclear power plants," issued for all years since 1972. NUREG-75-001 for 1973
(issued January 1975); NUREG-0077 for 1974 (issued June 1976); NUREG-0218 for 1975
(issued March 1977); NUREG-0367 for 1976 (issued March 1978); T. R. Decker, 12105 MNBB,
Washington, D.C. 20555.

- 171 -Glossary

Alpha rays: Comparatively large, slow particles emitted from the nucleus of an atom. They areeasily stopped but can cause great damage if the chemicals emitting them are inhaled or ingested.
Background radiation: Radiation (at a typical rate of 60-100 mrem per year) coming from space orfrom the earth. It can be both natural and man-made.
Beta rays: Charged particles (electrons) emitted from the nucleus of an atom that are smaller andfaster than alpha rays and can penetrate several layers of tissue up to a few millimeters, or a few
meters of air.
Curie: A measure of the amount of radiation emitted per second by radioactive chemicals, named
after Marie Curie, the discoverer of radium. It is the number of disintegrations taking place eachsecond in 1 gram of radium, leading to the emission of some 37 billion gamma rays or otherparticles every second.
millicurie—one one-thousandth of a curie.
microcurie—one millionth of a curie.
picocurie—one trillionth of a curie or one micro-microcurie.
Fuel cycle: The sequence of steps needed for the production and combustion of fuel to produce
nuclear energy including mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, transportation, and waste
storage.
Gamma rays: A very high energy form of radiation similar to X-rays emitted from the nucleus of an
atom that can penetrate steel and concrete.
Kiloton: A measure of the power of an atomic bomb, equal to the detonation of 1000 tons of TNT.
The first A-bombs had a size of 10-20 kilotons, now regarded as small, tactical weapons.
Megaton: A million tons of TNT in explosive force, or the energy of 1000 kilotons, some 100 times
that released by the first atomic bombs.
Rad and millirad: A radiation measure that refers to the energy absorbed per gram of tissue which isequal to about 83% of the Roentgen value. A millirad or mrad is a thousandth of a rad.
Rem and millirem: A radiation measure that reflects the difference in biological damage of theradiation dose produced by different particles. The relation between rad and rem depends on thekind of particle emitting the radiation: for gamma rays, 1 rad = 1 rem; for beta, 1 rad = 10 rem;
for alpha, 1 rad = 30 rem.
Roentgen: The original term used for measuring the amount of ionizing radiation incident on the
body. It is equal to the quantity of radiation that will produce one electrostatic unit of electricity in
one cubic centimeter of dry air at 0 degrees C.

- 172 -[The index has been included verbatim from the original book. Although the page numbers are not correct
for this copy of the book, it was felt the subjects noted here would still be useful as reference —ratitor]

Index

AAAS see American Association for the Advancement of Science)
ABC Evening News, 200
Abelson, Philip, 23,75, 93
Abortions, spontaneous (see Fetal deaths)
Accidents, 178major risk of, 201-202
Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Radiation (National
Academy of Science), 29
AEC (see U.S. Atomic Energy Commission)
Ahearne, Commissioner (NRC), 221-222
Alamogordo (see Trinity)
Albany-Troy incident, 1-5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 20, 21-22, 23-24, 25, 26, 31
33, 34, 40, 102-103, 104, 149, 156, 178, 179, 180
and childhood leukemia, 41-45, 47, 48, 50-52, 55-59, 61, 75, 81,
95, 106, 107, 113-115 124
and fetal deaths, 57-59, 64
Alexander, R. E., 52-53
Alternatives to nuclear power, 134
Alvarez, Luis, 86, 97
American Academy of Pediatrics, 152
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 22, 23
American Journal of Public Health, 101
American Psychological Association, 241
Anderson, John, 244, 245
Antiballistic missiles, 97-98, 112-113, 178, 195, 212, 270
Arakawa, E. T., 49
Associated Press, 52, 112, 198, 217
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 48, 104
Atomic Energy Commission (see U.S.)
Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, 174, 175
Atomic tests (see Tests)
Atomic war (see Nuclear)"Average exposure" and "safe levels," 166, 207
Bachman, Leonard, 159, 161
Backer, Julie E., 68
Bainbridge, Kenneth, 86"Baneberry" (bomb), 178-181, 182
Barium, 25
Barry, Theodore M., 153
Beaver County Times, 154, 160-161, 166
Beaver Valley (see Reactors)
Bell, Steven, 184-185, 186, 188, 191

- 173 -Berlin crisis, 8, 19
Beta radiation, 148-149, 150, 210, 223,230
Biles, Martin, 157
Birthweight, decline of, 67, 68, 69-70, 104, 108, 116, 128, 184, 194,
238, 239, 250
Blind trust, 178
Bradford Peter, 219-220
Brandon Albert, 141-142, 146, 154, 174-175"Bravo," 182
Brody, Jane, 256, 257, 258, 261
Brookhaven (see Reactors)
Bross, Irving, 165-166, 263
Brown, Lester, 208
Brown, Stuart, 75, 93
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 75, 96-98, 116, 117
Bureau of Radiological Health (see Pennsylvania; U.S.)
Burr, W. W., 166
Byrd, Robert, 35
Campbell, Hubert, 80
Canadian Atomic Energy Laboratories, 163
Cancer, 11, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28, 30, 32, 61, 67, 73, 78, 85, 100, 105,
106, 109, 116-117, 118, 147-148, 150, 153, 160, 161, 162, 166,
172-173, 175-176, 178, 186, 190, 197, 210, 218, 241, 247
childhood, 78, 80, 118, 124, 192, 194, 202, 247, 248, 250
Japan, 81
and DNA, 16, 31, 164"free radical" oxidation, 163-165
and lawsuits, 209, 269
lung, 83, 162, 187, 191
pancreas, 162
prostate, 162
and servicemen in bomb tests, 206
studies, 10-17
thyroid, 9, 23, 25-26, 29, 31, 33-34, 39, 100-102, 202, 210, 213, 214
Cancer, social, 269-273(See also Leukemia)
Carbon, radioactive, 64
Carter, President Jimmy, and gas at Harrisburg, 209"Case for Missile Defense, A" (Dyson), 97-98
CDC (see U.S. Center for Disease Control)
Center for Health Statistics (see U.S. National)
Cesium, 64, 90, 108, 120, 123, 127, 130, 131, 137, 146, 149, 150,
152, 180, 187, 245"Change in the Mortality Trend in the United States, The" (Moriyama), 77-78
Chase, Helen C., 74"China Syndrome," 202
China Syndrome, The (film) 198
Cincinnati Environmentai Task Force, 153
Cincinnati Inquirer, 1, 53
Clark, Herbert, 1-5, 8, 9, 25, 40, 49, 178, 179, 180
Coal gassification, 134
Committee on Nuclear Information, 22
Commoner, Barry, 22-23, 33, 65, 213
Congenital defects, 20, 28, 47, 61, 100, 101, 104, 105-107, 127, 133,

- 174 -

150, 182, 192, 194, 213, 214-215, 218, 238
Congressional hearings, 28-40, 100, 118
Connecticut Parent-Teachers Association, 242
Connecticut Yankee (see Reactors, Haddam Neck)
Conway, John T., 28, 34, 38, 95
Cosmic rays, 37, 123
Credibility of critics, destruction of, 251-261
Credibility of public officials, 259, 263, 265(See also Governmental deception)
Creitz, Walter, 202, 203
Crithclow, Paul, 266"Critical Mass" (Nader), 177
Cuban missile crisis, 22, 217
Cumulative effects of radiation, 15-17, 31, 109-110
Curry, Bill, 210-213, 217
David, Henry P., 183-184
Day of Trinity (Lamont), 86
Decontamination, difficulty of, 4, 25
Defense system, nuclear (see Nuclear war)
DeGroot, Morris H., 126, 136, 139-140, 141, 151, 153, 160, 168-171
Denton, Harold, 218-222
Detroit Free Press, 252
Diabetes, 162
DiNunno, Joseph, 157-159"Dissident" scientists, 251-252, 269(See also Credibility of critics)
DNA and cancer, 16, 31, 164
Dodd, Christopher, 245
Douglas, Charlotte A., 68
Downs, Hugh, 115-116
Dresden (see Reactors)
Duquesne Light Company, 142, 145-146, 150, 154, 155, 157, 174
Dyson, Freeman J., 97-98
Earth Day, 125
Edsall, John T., 96
Educational Testing Service, 186
Effects of Nuclear Weapons, The (AEC publication), 87
Egginton, Joyce, 111, 112
Eisenbud, Merrill, 2, 64
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 270
Electric power production, 134(See also Reactors)
Ellis, T. K., 108
Embryo, fetus, sensitivity of, 109, 111, 139, 206, 238, 257(See also Pregnancy)
English, Spoffard, 117
Environment (magazine), 69
Environment Pittsburgh, 146
Environmental Protection Act (see National)
Environmental Protecbon Agency (see U.S.)
EPA (see U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Esquire magazine, 112-113

- 175 -Fallout data, public access to, 63, 264-265, 267, 268-269, 270-273(See also Governmental deception)Federal Radiation Council, 36, 123, 134, 144, 221
Federation of American Scientists, 19, 38, 75
National Council of, 96-97
Fertility, decline of, 104
Fetal deaths, 56-59, 61, 62-64, 67, 68, 73, 74, 78, 85, 93-98, 104, 105-106,
108-110, 117, 118, 137, 185, 209, 218, 232, 238-239, 247-248, 267
and Trinity, 88-91
Fetal development (see Embryo)
Finch, S., 48
Flaherty, Pete, 142, 146
Ford, Daniel, 203
Foster, John S., 35
Fouchard, Director, 219-220, 221, 222
Frankel, Max, 256
Frankenstein, 270"Free radical" oxidation, 163-165
Freedom of information, 270 273
Freedom of Information Act, 210, 217
Friedell, Hyman, 31
Fuel processing plants (see Nuclear)
Gamma radiation, 3, 143, 150, 180, 184, 201, 202, 205, 210, 223, 230, 231
Gases, radioactive, 127, 128, 129-131, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150-151,
162, 173-176, 249, 263, 266(See also Three Mile Island)
General Electric Company, and economics, 121-122
Genetic damage, 44-45, 115, 117, 177 164, 197, 209, 250
detection of, 48 49, 56
Geothermal energy, 134
Gerusky, Thomas M., 160, 167, 198, 199, 242, 243
Gibson, Albert, 230
Gilinsky, Victor, 219-221, 224, 230
Gilligan, John J., 153
Goddard, Maurice K., 160
Gofman, John, 116-117, 118
Goldman, Morton, 157-159, 175
Good Morning America (ABC-TV), 247, 248-249
Gossick, Lee V., 218-219
Government agencies, officials and testimonies, 208
Government leaders, blind trust in, 178
Governmental deception, 211-215, 217-227, 230-232, 245-246, 255-259, 264-273
Graham, Saxon, 43, 48
Graves, Alvin and Elizabeth, 86-87
Greenberg, Bernard, 69
Greenberg, Frank, 258, 260
Greenwald, Peter, 103, 113-115
Griem, M. L. 105-106, 107
Griffiths,Joel 154-159, 160-161, 167
Grotevant, Bob, 166
Groves, Leslie R., 87
Haddam Neck (see Reactors)
Half-life (isotopes), 24-25

- 176 -Hanford, 89, 90, 131-132
conference at, 99, 102-110, 111, 112, 116, 182
Harley, John, 2, 40, 93-95, 107, 156-158, 169
Harrisburg (see Reactors, Three Mile Island)
Harrisburg Patriot (newspaper), 252-253, 255, 256, 266, 267
Harrowsmith (magazine), 252, 253-255, 263
Hayes, Harold, 112-113
Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, 67
Health Physics (journal), 159, 163
Health Physics Society, 51-53, 111-112, 120, 152
Health Science Center, 160
Hendrie, Chairman (NRC), 220-223, 224, 225-226
Hewitt, David, 11, 12, 50
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10, 21-22, 30, 42, 56, 67, 72, 78, 80, 81,
138, 161-162, 163, 164, 165, 175, 178, 184, 189, 200, 270
and leukemia from fallout, 47-50, 104
Hirst, Katherine M., 68
Holifield, Congressman, 36, 39-40, 100, 214
Hosmer, Craig, 35-38
Human obligations, 273
Hypothyroidism, 239, 253-254, 256, 258-259, 264
Immune defenses, body’s, 269
Indian Point (see Reactors)
Infant mortality, 63, 64-75, 77, 78, 85, 88, 90, 93-98, 100, 102, 107,108-110, 112, 116-117, 118, 125-133, 139, 141, 150-152, 156, 161,
163, 165, 166, 171-172, 176, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185-186, 192,
197, 210, 218, 223, 229-230, 232, 243-248
Chile, 82-83
Hawaii, 71-72
and Three Mile Island, 232-239, 241, 248-268
and Trinity, 88-91"Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests" (Sternglass), 98
Information, public right to, 270-273
Ingraham, Hollis, 45
Ink, Dwight A., 212, 214
Institute for Biophysics (Moscow), 104
Internal exposure (see Isotopes and body organs)International Radiation Protection Association, 159
Iodine, radioactive, 8, 12, 24, 34, 39, 58, 63, 64, 89, 123, 130-131,
138, 144, 146, 149, 152, 178, 179, 180, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190,
193, 199, 206, 213, 228, 238, 239, 242-243, 245, 259, 265
Isotopes, 36-37, 89, 122, 123, 163
and body organs, 7-8, 12, 20, 33-34, 37, 44, 100, 104-105, 108-110,
120, 127-128, 179-180
half-life, 24-25
short-lived, 63, 64-65, 91, 125, 133, 218-219, 246
Jackson, Rex, 186
Japan, 81(See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
Japanese Cancer Society, 161
Johnson, Lyndon B.; Johnson admin-stration, 213
Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (Congressional), 95, 135
hearings on low-level radiation effects, 28-40, lOO-101, 118, 119-- 177 -120, 123, 213, 214-215
Jones, Charles, 157, 158
Jones, Clifford, 265-266
Journal of the American Water Works Association, 5, 25
Kaye, Martin B., 137
Kemeny, George; Kemeny Commission, 227-228, 232, 233, 239, 247, 248-249,
250, 253
Kendall, Henry, 177, 200-202, 203, 208
Kennedy, Edward; Kennedy Committee, 207, 210, 223
Kennedy, John F., 213
address on fallout, 27-28
Kepford, Chauncey, 249-250
Khrushchev, Nikita, 213
Kinch, Sandra, 113-115
Knapp, Harold, 38-39
Kohn, Bernd, 152
Kotin, Paul, 160
Krey, Phil, 157
Krypton, 89-90, 131, 263
Lade, James H., 23-26, 41-43, 45, 47, 49, 50-52, 55, 56, 103, 113-114
LaFranchi, Stephen, 259
Lamont, Lansing, 86, 87
Lancet (journal), 124
Lapp, Ralph, 9-10, 20, 21, 242s, 33, 36, 41, 65, 213
Lave, Lester B., 137, 139-140
Learning ability (see Mental retardation)
Leinhardt, Samuel, 137
Leukemia, 30, 37, 44, 67, 80, 85, 101, 118, 147, 176, 214-215
and Albany-Troy incident, 41-45, 47, 48, 49, 50-52, 55-59, 61, 75,
81, 95, 103, 106, 107, 113-115, 124
childhood, 9, 11, 15, 20, 21-26, 27, 28, 36, 37-38, 43-44, 61, 73,
78, 102, 105, 165, 194, 211-215, 218
and Japan, bombs on, 47-50, 104
and lawsuits, 209
radiologists, among, 31
and servicemen in bomb tests, 209
and X-rays, 11-17, 20, 23-24, 30, 31-33, 35-36, 37-38, 43-44, 48,
104, 105-107, 124, 202
Lewis, E. B., 16-17, 31, 213
Lewis, Richard S., 96, 97
Lincoln, Abraham, 272
Livermore Laboratories, 116-117
London Observer, The, 111, 112, 115
Los Angeles Times, 243
Lung damage, 128-129
Lyon, Joseph L., 211
McCarthy, Joseph R.; McCarthy years, 217
McDowell, Ernest, 252
MacLeod, Gordon, 253-254, 255-260, 263, 264-266, 267
MacMahon, Brian, 14-15, 17, 21-22, 23, 28,30, 31, 35-36, 37-38, 42, 44, 80, 107
at Congressional hearing, 31-33
Magnetohydrodynamics, 134

- 178 -"Mandan Milk Mystery, The," 69-70, 90
Marshall, David, 146
Marshall Islands, 182
Martel, E. A., 94
Maternal mortality, 73, 80
Mattson, Roger, 225-227
Mayo, Anna, 166, 167
Mays, Charles W., 29, 31, 36, 179
Measuring fallout, 9495, 107, 156
Melt-down, 198, 199, 200, 201, 206, 207, 209, 221, 223, 224-226, 227
Mental retardation, 127, 181-195, 239, 241-242
economic effects of, 193-194
Meteorology and Atomic Energy (AEC publication), 89
Metropolitan Edison Company, 202
report on Three Mile Island, 227-228, 230-231, 235
Milk, radioactive, 8-9, 24-25, 27, 33, 34, 39, 51, 59, 63, 64, 65, 69-70,
90, 91, 94, 107, 108, 123, 130-131, 137-138, 143-145, 146, 148, 149,
150, 153, 155, 156, 169, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 187, 188, 189, 213,
228-229, 243-246, 269
Millstone (see Reactors)
Miscarriages (see Fetal deaths)
Missiles (see Antiballistic)
Mitchell, John M., 153
Mobilization for Survival, 199
Money talking, 167, 176, 206-207, 266(See also Nuclear industry)
Moorhead, William S., 100, 214
Morgan, Karl Z., 51-52, 159, 168-171, 210
Morgan Russell, 22, 26, 45
Moriyama, I. M., 66-67, 73, 77-79, 128
Mormons, 189-191
Mortality rates, general, 77-83
in Chile, 82-83
in Japan, 81
Moskalev, Y. 1., 104, 108-109, 116
Muller, H. Arnold, 266 267, 268
Nader, Ralph, 177
Nagasaki (see Hiroshima)
National Academy of Science, 29, 30, 152
committee on radiation, 159, 228
National Advisory Committee on Radiation, 22, 45
National Environmental Protection Act, 142-143
National Institute of Environmental Health Science, 160
Neel, J. V., 48, 56, 57
Nevada (see Tests, atomic)
New England Journal of Medicine, 50, 211
New Mexico (see Tests, atomic)
New York State Health Department 4, 23-24, 25, 26, 41, 45, 50, 52, 55,
95, 102-103, 104, 107, 113-114, 115
New York Times, The, 43, 111, 113-114, 166, 181, 182, 183, 255-259,
260, 266, 267, 268, 271
News coverage of fallout danger, 111-118, 221, 251-259, 268
Nixon, Richard M.; Nixon administration, 153, 167, 177, 268
North Dakota, contaminated milk in, 69-70, 90

- 179 -infant mortality, 89
NRC (see Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Nuclear defense system (see Nuclear war)
Nuclear engineering, 10(See also Reactors, design)
Nuclear fuel cycle, 177, 245
Nuclear fuel processing plants, 129-133, 137
Nuclear industry, saving, 209, 210-215, 223-224, 232, 245, 249(See also Credibility)
Nuclear power, alternatives to, 134
Nuclear reactors (see Reactors)
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 199, 201-203, 210, 242, 245, 247, 249, 269
and Three Mile Island, 217-227, 230 232, 255, 263
Nuclear suicide, 273
Nuclear war, 9-10, 13, 19-20, 22, 97-98, 99, 111, 133, 189, 193, 213, 270, 271
defense system, 97-98, 112-113, 178, 195, 212, 270(See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
Nucleonics Week, 144
N.U.S. Corporation, 142, 148, 153, 154, 155-159, 162, 166, 168-169, 175, 243
Obligations, human, 273
Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, 218
Office of Radiological Health, 160
Official statements, credibility of, 259 263, 265(See also Governmental deception)
Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, 153
Oregon Health Science Center, 259
Oxidation, "free radical," 163-165
Oxygen molecules, action of radiation on, 269
Pacific (see Tests, atomic)
Pancreas, 162
Parsons, William, 86
Pauling, Linus, 213
Pawlick, Thomas, 252, 253-254, 255, 256, 260, 263, 264, 269
Peach Bottom (see Reactors)
Pediatrics, 259
Pendleton, Robert C., 179
Pennsylvania Bureau of Radiological Health, 198
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, 148, 160, 265
Pennsylvania Department of Health, 170, 232-233, 236, 239, 253-255,
258, 264, 267
Pennsylvania State Bureau of Radiation Control 242
Petkau, Abram, 163-165
Pfeiffer, E. W., 69
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 146, 217, 218
Pituitary gland, 128, 190
Plutonium, 89, 102, 129, 200
theft of by terrorists, 177
Pregnancy and radiation (X-rays and fallout), 11-17, 21, 23-26, 30,
31-33, 35, 36, 44, 48, 104-107, 108-110, 115, 124, 139, 181-195,
202, 205-208, 209, 218, 224, 227-230, 238-239, 243, 257, 264, 267
Prelesnik, Warren L., 236, 252
Price, Melvin, 30, 38, 100, 214
Project Plowshare, 23, 29

- 180 -Public Health Service (see U.S.)
Public officials, credibility of, 259, 263, 265(See also Governmental deception)
Rabinowitch, Eugene, 75, 96
Radford, Edward P., 159, 168-172
Radiation Health Data and Reports, 144, 145, 180, 268
Radio Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering Research Center, 152
Radioactivity levels, standards of (see U.S. Atomic Energy Commission)
Radon, 162
Rain and fallout, 1-5, 9, 20, 21, 25, 41-45, 50, 57, 58, 67-68, 70-72,
87-91, 104, 129, 130, 134-136, 144, 149, 199, 229, 242
Rasmussen estimate (risk of major accident), 201
Reactors, nuclear, 10, 13, 119-129, 133-176, 186, 189, 190, 193, 194,
211, 212, 232, 238, 247, 268, 270
Beaver Valley, 140 142, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 167, 174-175, 176, 212
Brookhaven, 136
design-types and amounts of release, 121-124, 129, 132, 136, 140, 198, 244
Dresden, 120 121, 122-124, 126-128, 131, 136, 166, 243
Haddam Neck, 244
Hanford, 89, 90, 131-132
Indian Point, 132, 136, 166, 243
and mental retardation, 241-242
Millstone, 197, 212, 219, 232, 242-248
Peach Bottom, 242
Shippingport, 119-121, 123, 136, 139-177, 210, 212, 233, 243, 244,
248, 260, 269
and fact-finding commission, 159 173
Shoreham, 166, 185
Three Mile Island, 197-215, 217-239, 242, 246-247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 271
and infant mortality, 232-239, 254 268
Senate hearings on, 208 210, 230
tapes of NRC proceedings, 217-227
TRIGA, 132-133
Waltz Mills, 163
Windscale, 39
Zimmer, 152, 153(See also Nuclear fuel-processing plants)
Reilly, Margaret A., 160, 167, 199
Reiss, Eric, 33-34, 36, 213
Respiratory diseases, 78-79, 81, 127-129
Reston, James, 271-272
Reynolds, Frank, 200
Rickover, Hyman C., 121, 140, 209
Roberts, Richard, 252
Rocchio, Ronald, 88-89
Rosenthal, Harold, 108
Rostand, Jean, 273
Roswell study (leukemia), 43-44
Rotblot, Joseph, 65"Safe levels" and "average exposures," 166, 207
Sagan, Leonard A., 103-104, 107, 115-116, 117
St. Louis Committee (Citizens’ Group) for Nuclear Information, 33, 69
SALT treaty, 178

- 181 -Sashin, Donald, 88-89
S.A.T. (see Scholastic Aptitude Tests)
Scholastic Aptitude Tests (S.A.T.), 181-195, 241-242
Schubert, Jack, 213
Schull, W. J., 48
Science magazine, 9, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32, 38, 41, 45, 51,
52, 55, 62, 75, 93, 95-97, 103, 113, 211
Scientist and Citizen (magazine), 69
Seaborg, Glenn, 23
Segi, M., 161-162
Selk, Merry, 96
Sensitivity to radiation, degrees of, 165-166
Shapiro, Samuel, 67
Shapp, Milton, 151, 154, 159, 167, 210, 233
Shelters, fallout, 19-20
Shippingport (see Reactors)
Shoreham (see Reactors)
Siberia (see Tests, atomic)"Simon" (bomb), 2, 5, 12, 149, 156
Smith, Harry, 160, 168-172
Social cancer, 269-273
Solar energy, 134
Speller, J. Finton, 160
Stein, Gary, 260
Steinfield, Jesse L., 100-101, 214-215
Sternglass, Ernest J., 19-21, 49-51
at Congressional hearing, 35-38
credibility attacked, 251-261
Harrisburg, surveying in, 204-206, 219, 249
papers and testimony on low-radiation danger, 21-28, 31, 32-33, 38,
51-53, 55-56, 75, 93-98, 102-103, 104-105, 107-112, 116, 197, 211,
227, 232, 237-238, 249, 253, 260-261
Stewart, Alice, 10-17, 20, 21-22, 23, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35-36, 42, 44, 50,
80, 102, 105-107, 124, 139, 202
Stillbirths (see Fetal deaths)
Stockton (science editor of The N.Y. Times), 256-257
Storer, John, 115-116, 117
Stromholt, Hal, 112
Strontium, 7-8, 12, 24n, 25, 63, 64-65, 70, 72, 73, 90, 91, 93-94, 104,
107, 108-109, 116, 120, 122, 123, 127, 128, 130, 131, 137-138,
143-145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 153, 156, 187, 189, 190, 211, 213,
243, 244, 245-246, 248, 269
Suicide, national, 272
Synergism, 83, 162, 191
Tamplin, Arthur, 116-117, 118, 256
Teller, Edward, 28-29, 65
Terry, Luther L., 100
Tests, atomic, 8-9, 10, 13, 15, 19, 20-22, 25, 27, 28, 38, 39, 57, 59,
61, 62, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79, 112-113, 122, 123, 127, 131,
136, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 148, 152, 162, 183, 185, 187, 192,
195, 209, 239, 243, 244, 245, 263, 270
Algeria, 69
China, 61, 62, 74, 137, 144, 152, 154, 156, 178, 228-229, 242, 244,
245, 259

- 182 -effects of, official lying about, 210- 215
hydrogen bomb, 21, 50, 62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 81, 82, 99, 182, 212
Russian, 8, 79
Nevada, 2, 12, 33, 43, 62, 63, 67-69, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 102, 147,
149, 153, 156, 182, 184, 187-188, 192, 193, 194-195, 197, 199,
209, 211, 212, 217, 232, 269
and mental retardation, 181-195
and suits for damages, 209, 269
New Mexico, 70, 71, 78, 79, 80, 85-91, 97, 102, 131, 232
Pacific, 50, 61, 62, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 81, 82, 147, 156, 162,
182, 187, 211
Siberia, 8, 50, 63, 81, 147, 162, 187
Test-Ban Treaty, 27, 28-29, 30-31, 38, 39, 70, 73, 127, 180, 189, 194, 213
underground, 34, 178, 181
Thompson, G. D. Carlyle, 101-102
Thornburgh, Governor (Pennsylvania), 207, 220 223, 224, 227, 266
Three Mile Island (see Reactors)"Threshold" theory, 13-14, 23, 31, 32, 51, 100, 117-118, 123
Thyroid gland, 8, 9, 25-26, 29, 31, 33-34, 39, 100 102, 178, 179, 182,
189, 192, 202, 206, 210, 212-214, 221, 223, 228, 238, 239, 252, 254,
256, 257, 258-259, 264, 267"Today" show (NBC-TV), 115-116, 117, 203, 249
Tokuhata, George K., 160, 167, 171-173, 233, 236, 255-256, 258, 260-261,
264-265, 267
Tompkins, Edythalena, 134-136
Tompkins, Paul C., 123, 134
Totter, John, 117
TRIGA reactors, 132-133
Trinity (Alamogordo), 85-91, 97, 102, 131, 134-135, 232
Tritium, 64, 121, 122
Troy (see Albany-Troy)
Union of Concerned Scientists, 177, 200
United Nations Report on Atomic Radiation (1962), 30, 95
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation, 29, 30
United Press International (UPI), 198, 267, 268
Uranium, 129, 177, 200
miners and cancer, 83, 129, 162, 191
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 10, 23, 27, 31, 33, 35, 39, 41, 63,
70, 87, 89, 99-100, 108, 113, 115-117, 121, 133, 135, 142, 152, 153,
154, 159, 166, 169, 175, 178, 181, 199, 210-214, 232, 249, 256, 269
Division of Biology and Medicine, 28, 30, 38, 95, 104, 116, 117, 178-179
Health and Safety Laboratory, 2, 4-5, 9, 25, 40, 43, 64, 90, 93-98,
107, 156, 158
Quarterly Bulletin, 93
and nuclear explosions, peaceful uses of, 23, 29
radioactivity levels, standards, 3, 8, 30, 32, 33, 36-37, 39, 55,
93-95, 116, 117-118, 120, 122, 123-124, 134, 140-141, 150
research and planning, 29-30
and Shippingport, 154-159, 166-167, 173-174
tests in Nevada, 2, 45, 33, 62, 63
U.S. Bureau of Radiological Health, 129, 141
U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), 256, 258, 260, 263
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 134, 135, 151, 152, 157,
158, 160, 166, 221-223, 228-229, 232, 242, 245, 247, 255, 259, 268, 269

- 183 -U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 66, 70, 233, 248, 260
U.S. Office of Health Statistics Analysis, 74
U.S. Public Health Service, 22, 45, 100, 107, 108, 120, 123, 130, 131,
157, 188
and lying about fallout, 211-212, 214 215
and publication of fallout data, 63, 94
Utah instances, 29, 31, 39, 101-102, 178-179, 187, 188-191, 209, 210,
211-212
Vietnam war, 213, 217
Village Voice, The, 166
Wald, George, 199, 205, 206
Waltz Mills (see Reactors)
War, nuclear (see Nuclear)
Warren, Shields, 29-31
Warren, Stafford, 87
Washington Post, 34, 113, 210-212, 214, 217, 218, 230, 253
Washington Post-Los Angeles Times News Service, 243
Wastes, radioactive, 177
Water, contaminated, 3-5(See also Shippingport)
Watergate, 153, 166, 217
Weaver, Charles, 120
Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin, 90 91
Weiss, Edward S.; Weiss study, 211-215
Wilson, Charles, 65
Wilson, Robert, 86
Windscale incident, 39
Wirtz, Willard; Wirtz commission, 183, 186, 191
X-rays, 19-20, 21, 22, 35-36, 50, 51, 67, 104, 109, 116, 219
and "free radical" oxidation, 163-165
and leukemia, 11-17, 20, 23-24, 30, 31-33, 35-36, 37-38, 43-44, 48,
104, 105-107, 124,202
Xenon, 89
Yamazaki, James N., 102-103, 104, 107
Yttrium, 127, 128, 189-190
Zimmer (see Reactors)