Reprinted online by permission of the author. Initial news reports said the spacecraft fell harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 miles southeast of Easter Island, and 2,000 miles northwest of Santiago, Chile. But on Nov. 29, the U.S. Space Command reported that the probe may have scattered debris along a path that's just 20 miles away from a Chilean city. The news release, which corrected the space command's earlier prediction about where the probe fell, went virtually unnoticed by the press. We now believe that the object that re-entered on Nov. 17, which we first thought to be the Mars '9u probe, was in fact the fourth stage of the booster rocket.
Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, says plutonium is so deadly that 'less than one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. This path is centered approximately 20 miles east Of the Chilean city of Iquique and includes Chilean territory, the border area of Bolivia and the Pacific Ocean. This incident should serve as a wake-up can to the madness of launching spacecraft with radioactive material. Six of the 39 missions of the former Soviet Union have failed including the Cosmos 954 satellite which carried radioactive when when it broke apart as it plunged to earth in 1978, scattering a 124,000 square-kilometer swath of northwestern Canada with nuclear debris. It fell in 1964, disintegrating as it came down.