|
|
|
|
The Mushroom Cloud to the Child’s Tooth: Health and Environmental Impacts of Nuclear Weapons, and Connections to Nuclear Disarmament
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Lisa Ledwidge
|
| When you think about the health effects of nuclear weapons, what comes to mind? Most likely it is the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like that epitomized by the experience of Dr. Sasaki, the sole uninjured doctor in Hiroshima’s Red Cross Hospital, in John Hersey’s 1946 book, Hiroshima: |
|
| Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many that he began to pass up the lightly wounded; he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, … and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. ... In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied. The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, “Sensei! Doctor!,” and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the aid of the worse wounded. Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and a sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding. |
|
|
As horrific as the aftermath of the detonation of a nuclear weapon on a city may be, there is also a lesser known factor of health damage from nuclear weapons. In 1997, the National Cancer Institute released a study confirming that U.S. atmospheric nuclear weapons testing conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s spewed radioactive fallout east across the country. "Hot spots" occurred thousands of miles from the Nevada Test Site because rainstorms sometimes caused locally heavy deposits of fallout. More or less following the jet stream, the fallout went as far as Minnesota, even Maine, with Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and the country’s breadbasket getting the brunt of it.
The map shows, by county, the estimated average per capita thyroid doses from radioactive iodine, one of the many radioisotopes released by nuclear tests, from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site.
Radioactive iodine, like its nonradioactive counterpart, goes to the thyroid where it can cause thyroid cancer or other thyroid abnormalities. As cows and goats grazed in fallout-contaminated pastures, radioactive iodine (also called iodine-131 or I-131) concentrated in their milk. Children received higher thyroid doses because they drank more milk than adults, and because their thyroids were smaller and still growing.
Shockingly, the NCI data revealed that some children – those who drank fresh milk in the 1950s in high fallout areas – were as severely exposed as the worst-exposed children after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. It is important to keep this in mind when looking at the map, which only shows average doses – averaged over all ages, over each county, and over all milk consumption ranges – not the upper range of doses, which were likely received by farm kids.
Difficult for some people to swallow is that the nuclear weapons establishment knew from the beginning that a Western test site would spread contamination across most of the country. In 1948, the committee assigned to choose a location was told by U.S. Air Force meteorologist Col. B. G. Holzman that an East Coast site would be advisable "because the United States is predominantly under the influence of westerly winds." Instead, the committee chose a Western site because the weapons labs were nearby, which it felt would be helpful in "accelerating the pace of the weapons development program."
The transgressions didn’t end there. In the 1950s, the Eastman Kodak Company quietly threatened to sue the U.S. government because its film products were getting fogged by weapons testing fallout. The packaging material they used for their film was made of corn husks that had become radioactively contaminated by fallout. Rather than go to court, the government decided to instead provide secret advance data to Kodak and other photographic companies so that they could protect their film from testing fallout. But the AEC did not bother to provide milk producers with similar information so that they could protect a vital component of the food supply.
This callous disregard for human life was illustrated in an editorial in California Engineer, an alumni magazine of the University of California, in 1960: "Nuclear testing has so far produced about an additional 6,000 babies born with major birth defects [worldwide]." Yet it added that "you must weigh this acknowledged risk with the demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal."
I’m sorry to report that the culture of the nuclear weapons establishment has not fundamentally changed. U.S. spending on nuclear weapons design and testing is higher than the Cold War average. Ambitious new nuclear weapons programs are being put into place. The U.S. is getting ready to test nuclear weapons again. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy is trying to sweep environmental protection under the rug.
The expansion and maintenance of its nuclear arsenal makes it harder for the U.S. to convince other countries to exercise nuclear restraint. North Korea recently announced it has a nuclear weapon. Iran is refusing to end its uranium enrichment program that it claims is just for nuclear energy. Both countries cite the U.S. as a provocateur. With aggressive nuclear policies, the U.S. is effectively encouraging the hard-liners in those countries.
This point of view is not partisan. Rep. David Hobson, a Republican from the Dayton, Ohio, area and chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, calls new U.S. nuclear weapons programs “very provocative and overly aggressive policies that undermine our moral authority. It is shameful for the administration to propose inadequate funding for [nuclear waste disposal] while seeking a significant increase for the nuclear weapons complex."
Up to now this essay has focused on the bad news side of the nuclear ledger. But we need only look at some of the bright spots in our country’s history to become encouraged. Do you remember when, in the early 1960s, 100,000 women in more than 100 U.S. communities left their homes and offices in a national strike for a nuclear test ban? They were outraged about the presence of strontium-90, another by-product of nuclear tests, in the teeth of their children. Less than two years later, President Kennedy signed the very first nuclear weapons treaty, the Limited Test Ban, which ended U.S. atmospheric testing.
In the mid-1980s, residents in Fernald, Ohio, discovered that the plant in their neighborhood with its red and white checkerboard square water tower, called the Feed Materials Production Plant, wasn’t a Purina pet food plant but rather a factory that processed uranium for the nuclear weapons arsenal. Lisa Crawford, who lived across the street from the plant with her husband and small son, woke up one morning and found workers in Tyvek suits climbing out of her well. It was contaminated from the plant. Community residents filed a lawsuit against the Department of Energy and its contractor, National Lead of Ohio. The lawsuit was settled out of court for $78 million. Soon after, the Fernald plant shut down.
These nuclear disarmament victories were brought about by ordinary people and originated from health and environmental concerns. They join the global to the local, the mushroom cloud to the child’s tooth. They inform and inspire our work to abolish nuclear weapons. They remind us of Margaret Mead’s axiom, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever does.”
What you can do:
• Calculate your estimated thyroid dose from U.S. nuclear test fallout and learn about thyroid cancer online.
• Participate in local events in August commemorating the 60th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• To learn more about and take action on nuclear weapons, visit Nuclear Age Peace Foundation online or Women’s Action for New Directions online.
Lisa Ledwidge is the U.S. outreach director at the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Check out IEER’s information-rich web site at www.ieer.org. Lisa telecommutes from Minneapolis and is available for speaking in the Twin Cities area on nuclear weapons-related issues. Contact her at ieer@ieer.org or 612-722-9700. |
|
|
|
© 2005 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
|
 |
|
Complete July/August 2005 Index - click here
|
|
 |
|
|
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
