Doubts were also raised as to whether the lax regulations could save atomic power. With high interest rates, slumping demand, and growing skepticism over reactor performance, the administration's regulatory carte blanche offered no guaranteed rescue from the industry's economic morass. If the health indicators at Three Mile Island and other nuclear facilities are correct, it may take far less radiation to damage human and animal health than anyone ever imagined. The threat of such a holocaust has become increasingly real. A human embryo in its second month of development weighs 0.1 gram, one 600,000th the weight of its mother.
Radiation doses received by the mother can have enormous impact on the unborn fetus.
Few, if any, could survive the shock of an atmosphere laden with the amounts of radiation likely to be released in a nuclear war. And the hundreds of American bomb tests in the 1950s and early 1960s offered indicators not originally intended by the military. Nor would it make much difference where the bombs landed. Four days after the Chinese exploded a bomb on their own soil in September of 1976, dangerous levels of radiation were recorded in milk throughout New England. An American attack on the Soviet Union or a Soviet attack on America would ultimately have the same basic impact on future generations in each country.