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.