California Coastal Commission Submission by Russell D. Hoffman June 13th, 2001

To:
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: A look at history (1959 Sat. Even. Post article analysis -- 2001)
Cc:

Re: August 29, 1959, The Saturday Evening Post (shown below)
by Russell D. Hoffman

A look at history (1959 Sat. Even. Post article analysis -- June 10th, 2001)

Throughout the past 50 years, those who speak out against the madness of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have been vilified.  They have been marginalized when they can't be ignored, and denounced when they can't be marginalized.  Seldom are they ever given a fair chance to speak out.  (For example, at public hearings these days, you are likely to be allowed two minutes.)  In short, if you merely speak out against nuclear power, you are almost sure to become another one of its victims, ostracized, denigrated, accused in America of being a Communist and probably accused in Russia of being an American spy.  You will be denounced for being a Luddite, a cave-dweller, against progress, against technology, against everything.  You will be reminded that you can be killed crossing the street, as if you're the type to have somehow forgotten to look both ways.  This will happen to you despite that you might be a computer geek, a musician, an athlete, a doctor, a scientist, a mother, a certified genius.  Whatever you are, you will still be denounced.  For being a worrywart, a rabble rouser, a trouble-maker.  You will be told you are uneducated, unable to comprehend the complexity of nuclear power.

If you are not a scientist, you will be denounced for that, and if you are a scientist, you will be accused of thinking outside your field, as the great Linus Pauling is, below.  You can be an American Military Hero, yet STILL you will be, at best, ignored if you speak out against nukes.  You will ruin your career.

It is interesting to see the denigration of the anti-nuke movement and those in it, in the attached article from the Saturday Evening Post, published in 1959.  At that time the Saturday Evening Post was probably one of the top two or three magazines in the country in terms of readership.  The article appears to be sympathetic to the problems with nukes, mentioning many of those problems.  But its real purpose is to make the public who reads it do nothing.  And do nothing they did, in droves, and nothing was done, and nothing is being done now.

Let's look at how this "mind control" was accomplished then.  (And let's call it what it is.)  It is still done now, on CNN and in USA Today, on FOX news, and all around the country.  Local papers are owned by men with financial interests in the local nuclear plant.  That's not a coincidence -- those in the nuclear industry know they need to own the media to survive.  A fair public reckoning would doom them.  So they own the media.  GE, Westinghouse, etc. own our media (you all knew this, right?).

For one example of how the Nuclear Mafia does its work, near the end of the Saturday Evening Post article, the late Dr. Linus Pauling is introduced as a pessimist.  The idea that he might simply be a realist is not mentioned.  It is noted in the article that Dr. Pauling had gathered "signatures of 2000 scientists on a petition to urge international agreement on stopping the bomb tests."  As the saying goes, this may look good on paper, but the article takes an interesting turn.

The article then say's that "Doctor Pauling's critics, who are many, point out that he is a chemist and not a geneticist".  It doesn't name or number these critics, let alone mention how many are scientists like the 2000 who signed Dr. Pauling's petition.  It does not suggest that perhaps, among those 2000 signatures, are geneticists and every other discipline necessary to denounce this madness which was, eventually, denounced worldwide enough to stop it -- above-ground bomb tests was eventually stopped.

We now know well that nuclear weaponry, and nuclear energy as well, are tragic mistakes.  We know that Dr. Linus Pauling and his 2000 scientists were right, not the unnamed and uncounted critics (who are said to be "many", but which could be as few as three, for all we can tell, and they might all merely be politicians and other bureaucrats, and their military advisors).

The article discusses the size of the problem:  "...The AEC... said that 1,000,000 atomic bombs of "nominal" size would have to be fired, roughly one to each 200 square miles of the earth's surface, and all within a short time, to constitute a world-wide hazard..."

So how bad are things "now" (in 1959)?  The article uses the phrase "many fewer" and the word "only", below, to careful dissuade the reader from thinking that there is any problem:

"...the earth has now been contaminated from pole to pole by many fewer than the 1,000,000 bombs of the strength originally assumed. It has been done with 206 bombs, the equivalent of only 8688 "nominal" weapons of the size that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "

How one can use the word "only" in the above extract is beyond THIS author's mental and linguistic capacity to comprehend.  Yet the Saturday Evening Post did it in 1959, at the height of the Cold War.  "The height of the Cold War."  You've heard that before!  It means we are not at that point now; things are getting better.  But they aren't.  The Nuclear Mafia still rules.

I wonder how many people lost their jobs at Universities, their funding and support, after having their names appear on Pauling's petition?

I wonder how "169 men in 169 cities around the globe", taking one daily-total-accumulated-dose reading in one location each, could possibly have been thought to be sufficient for proper epidemiological studies?  There are more than 50,000 cities in the U.S.A. alone.  It would take at least a thousand times that many data collectors to even begin to have the necessary data, and then you need to track people as they move for decades and decades - you'd need a super-computer to do the tabulation, let alone the modeling.

They want us to remain ignorant as long as possible, unable to track the trends for lack of meaningful data.  Each currently (2001) operating nuclear power plant likewise still has a pitiful few data collectors.  It's all just estimated from guesses at daily general wind patterns, and maybe a few gauges at the source and a few at the fence.  Not nearly enough data. The article actually mentions this sort of problem, in order to keep up the myth that it still needs to be studied: "No scientific issue in many years has so exasperatingly eluded all efforts to lay hands upon the truth."  We can stop studying it now, thank you.  We know the truth.

--  Russell D. Hoffman, Concerned Citizen, Carlsbad, California
Recent essays:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cass2001/index.htm

Note: If you live in Los Angeles or can get there, PLEASE come to the public hearing of the California Coastal Commission THIS COMING WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13th, 2001.  Dry Cask Storage is one of the topics for the day.  It starts at 9:00 am and you need to be there then to fill out a speaker slip (Note: I now have been told that 11:00 am will be acceptable because it is not the first item of the day).  See activists PLEADING for time to present their case!  Watch government LACKEYS lie through their teeth!  See highly paid SPOKESPERSONS act like ROBOTS for the NUCLEAR MAFIA!  If you don't want to speak, you can give your time to someone who needs more than the TWO MINUTES or so that the CCC will allow each participant, lest they hear an IMPORTANT FACT and the CREDENTIALS OR EXPERIENCE of the person giving it, all at once!

The location is the Airport Marriot Hotel.  5855 West Century Blvd.  Bring water and light snacks (energy bars are good choices) as these meetings last for hours and hours.  The important parts only last for a few minutes but they like to keep us waiting all day.  (Contact the CCC at (415) 904-5200 for more information.)


At 11:48 AM 6/10/01 -0600, you wrote:

http://www.itseemslikeyesterday.com/Atomic/article_fallout.asp

 Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Fallout: The Silent Killer

By Steven M. Spencer
(August 29, 1959, The Saturday Evening Post)

A Post editor reports on one of the most controversial - and crucial - problems of the atomic age: How harmful is nuclear weapons testing to us and to generations as yet unborn?

At exactly 12:30 Greenwich civil time every day in the year, 169 men in 169 cities around the globe perform a simple chore of world-wide importance. Each steps out into a roof or into a yard, removes a one-foot square of sticky cellophane from an exposed wooden frame, clips a fresh sheet into place with spring clothespins, folds the old piece into a brown envelope and mails it off to an address on Columbus Avenue in New York City.

Here in the Health and Safety Laboratory of the United States Atomic Energy Commission the bits of gummed film, with their twenty-four hour catch from an increasingly polluted sky, are analyzed and the data put together with evidence from some thirty other sampling systems to make up the atomic weather report.

No matter how you read it the report is not good. For it concerns the clouds of radioactive particles, invisible but potentially harmful and even lethal, which have been blown into the air by the explosion of nuclear bombs and which drift back down upon us as fallout. Just how bad the report is depends on who is interpreting it, and some say no weather report since the one given to Noah has carried such foreboding for the human race. Certainly man has seldom faced an issue so troublesome.

The pervasive by-product of weapons testing now blankets the entire planet. It contaminates the air, the sea and the soil. It lies twice as thick over the Northern Hemisphere as the Southern, and is more heavily concentrated in the United States than anywhere else on the earth's surface. And every living creature, man included, has in its body a few particles of radioactive strontium 90, some of which will remain for life.

Moreover, the fallout will get worse before it gets better, even if bomb tests are never resumed. The spring of 1959, contrary to some of the forecasts, was radioactively the "hottest" yet, due in large part to the Russian tests of last fall. Scientists estimate that the burden of accumulated bomb debris now floating in the stratosphere, even to ten miles up, is so great that "drip-out" to the ground will actually increase for seven or eight years before it begins to taper off.

Upon these basic facts of fallout the experts are in fair agreement. But there is sharp and disturbing disagreement among them, and among Government officials, members of Congress and plain ordinary citizens, as to what the fallout figures mean in terms of hazard to the present and future populations of the world.

How concerned should we be, then, about the amounts of radioactivity in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the milk we give our babies and growing children? Is fallout partly responsible for the reported rise in leukemia? Is it also inducing other forms of cancer? Will it shorten our lives through subtle, nonspecific effects, as laboratory-applied radiation has shortened the lives of mice?

And what about the genetic effects? Are we now, without knowing it, sowing bad seed that will cause an increased number of physical and mental defectives to be born to future generations? And finally, are the biological risks, no matter how small or large, worth taking as the cost of developing bigger, cheaper or more "discriminating" nuclear weapons?

Such questions do not lend themselves to quick, precise answers. No scientific issue in many years has so exasperatingly eluded all efforts to lay hands upon the truth. But the public, paying out its tax billions for the bomb tests and the study of their troublesome debris, deserves more understandable answers than it has received.

Moreover, the public's understanding is not improved by semantic efforts to put a benign face on the atom with such "happy" terms as Project Sunshine, the AEC's original name for the fallout-measuring program. One scientist suggestedthis may have been chosen to counteract the gloomy impact of an earlier Project Gabriel. In any event, fallout has no more positive connection with sunshine and health than does the bomb itself.

The citizen is more bewildered by reading on one day a warning headline: Atom Test Called Perilous Rate, and on the following morning a reassuring one: Study Minimizes Fallout Danger. Both appeared in the same newspaper, the trustworthy New York Times, and both articles were accurate accounts of testimony at hearings on fallout from nuclear-weapons tests, held last May by the radiation subcommittee of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy.

The cloudy state of fallout information has long been a topic of critical comment in Congress and in the press, and the blame has usually been placed on the Atomic Energy Commission. That clearer information is needed no one will deny. But there is doubt that a completely unbiased picture should be expected from an agency which, in origin and spirit, is so closely allied to the Defense Department. Wedded to atomic weapons as the main safeguard of peace, it is apt to weigh radioactive hazards by a different scale of values than do those who see the atomic-arms contests as a senseless gallop toward human extinction.

This brings us to the core of the controversy that has kept the public in such a state of confusion. For its picture of fallout the public has had to rely upon the interpretation of fragmentary data by authorities with different viewpoints and policies. They can make the picture dark or light, depending on how they mix emphasis and adjectives with facts that are, at best, incomplete. They can even omit a detail here and there, by accident or for the sake of over-all effect.

The AEC's present position is in favor of "an agreement stopping all nuclear tests in all environments under arrangements assuring the proper safeguarding of the agreement". It has also maintained that in the absence of such an agreement the risks of weapons testing ar far less than the risks of falling behind in the perfection of atomic bombs.Through the years the AEC has given the impression that the fallout hazard from weapons testing was "Small" or "negligible" or "insignificant" or of an order that "could be ignored, as far as danger to health was concerned." In its 1950 volume, The Effect of Atomic Weapons, the AEC acknowledged the fears of "worldwide contamination" even then being expressed in some quarters, but dismissed them as "groundless". It said that 1,000,000 atomic bombs of "nominal" size would have to be fired, roughly one to each 200 square miles of the earth's surface, and all within a short time, to constitute a world-wide hazard. "This clearly represents a highly improbable situation," the statement concluded.

Arrival of the H-bomb, which jumped the explosive power a thousand times or more, made the "improbable situation" much less improbable and clearly demonstrated the unreliability of prophecy in an atomic age. Although the degree of hazard is still being debated, there is no question that the earth has now been contaminated from pole to pole by many fewer than the 1,000,000 bombs of the strength originally assumed. It has been done with 206 bombs, the equivalent of only 8688 "nominal" weapons of the size that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each of those was equal to 20,000 tons of TNT.

The AEC reassurances were more carefully qualified as the bombs got bigger, the ashes spread farther and the facts became clearer. And forecasts made on the basis of "the present rate of testing" became less meaningful as the rate of testing accelerated. But the commission continued to minimize the hazard, even down to the present time.

The implied assumption of the AEC is that natural background radiation is harmless. But some geneticists believe it may account for at least a part of the world's leukemias and bone cancers. Hence we may be wrong in assuming we can allow the general level of radioactivity to rise without imposing a penalty somewhere, on someone.

Another AEC argument which some have found most disturbing is " the insistence that the risk of fallout is much less than risks we voluntarily take repeatedly - such as those involved in riding in an automobile or going for a swim at the beach." As Doctor A.H. Sturtevant, professor of genetics at California Institute of Technology, member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Genetic Effects of Radiation, stated "While the risk is less from fallout, the essential point is that it is one over which the individual has no control. It has been argued that the risk from fallout is not very different from that of wearing a wrist watch with a radium-painted dial. Even if this comparison is accurate the fact that some of us do not wear such watches, and would complain loudly if anyone tried to insist that we and our children must do so."

In short, we retain a degree of choice and control over the everyday risks which we do not have over fallout. We can stay off the highways on crowded holiday weekends, drive with less speed and more caution when we do take the road, and swim close to the shore when the waves are high. To that extent the analogy with fallout is not a valid one.

Exactly how many people are affected by fallout radiation is one of the great unresolved questions. The most pessimistic view is that of Dr. Linus Pauling, California Institute of Technology chemist and Nobel laureate. Two years ago he gathered signatures of 2000 scientists on a petition to urge international agreement on stopping the bomb tests. At that time he calculated that 10,000 persons had already died or were dying of leukemia caused by fallout, and that continued testing would cause 200,000 mentally or physically defective children to be born in each of the next twenty generations.

"For every big bomb that is exploded", he said recently in a speech at the University of Michigan, "I estimate that fifteen thousand children are caused to be born with gross physical and mental defects....Each of us-Russian and the United States - has enough bombs to destroy the whole world. We have now reached the ultimate in destructive power. It is therefore time to give up this idiot's race and to work, as the nations are now working at the Geneva Conference, to ban the bomb and strive toward coexistence and peace."

Doctor Pauling's critics, who are many, point out that he is a chemist and not a geneticist and that his estimates of damage are much higher than any genetic evidence warrants. But the sober statements of Doctor Sturtevant and others of the nation's outstanding geneticists are in themselves sufficiently disturbing to merit attention.

When it all boils down to is a question of human risk versus military risk. The United States is faced with the necessity of weighing a definite but as yet unmeasurable hazard against an uncertain benefit. The hazard is that continued nuclear testing - and perhaps even the testing we have already done - will create more physical and mental defectives within the world's future population, and possibly even some cancer or life-shortening in the present generations. The uncertain benefit is that testing will discourage Russia from attacking us.

Next story: Beauty in the Machine Age.
Last story: Atomic Fission Holds Key to Host of New Products.



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