oh come on, strotium 90 adds flavor

[Guest guest]

In These Times

 

April 12, 2002

 

Nuclear Fallout

 

Testing has killed thousands, a new study shows.

 

By Jeffrey St. Clair

 

In the ’50s, when the United States selected the Shoshone

lands in the Nevada desert as the location for testing

nuclear weapons, President Harry Truman said he wanted

someplace remote enough that Americans wouldn’t worry about

the government " shooting bombs in their backyards. "

Ominously, there is no place on earth remote enough to

safely test nuclear weapons. Indeed, the report concludes

that nuclear testing has exposed to radiation nearly

everyone who has resided in the United States since 1951.

 

The new report, conducted by the National Cancer Institute

and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (NCI/CDC), is

remarkable for several reasons, not least because it

represents the first time the U.S. government has released

an assessment of the spread and consequences to human health

of radioactive fallout from global nuclear testing. It’s

also the first time that the government has admitted that a

substantial number of cancer deaths nationwide have been

caused by nuclear testing.

 

The report was commissioned by Congress in 1998 following

public uproar over a 1997 study by the NCI that investigated

the fallout of only one radionuclide, iodine-131, and its

link to at least 11,300 cases of thyroid cancers among

Americans. Iodine-131 was dropped as fallout across dairy

country, where it was consumed by cows and goats and

concentrated in their milk.

 

This examination of global fallout is much broader,

tracking, among other things, exposure to cesium-137. In

addition to charting radiation from the Nevada Test Site,

the NCI/CDC study also looked at fallout from U.S. tests in

the Marshall Islands and Johnson Atoll, British explosions

at the Christmas Islands, and Soviet testing at

Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya.

 

The irradiation of the global environment has been a

uniquely cooperative endeavor, with all of the world’s

nuclear superpowers contributing to the toll. The United

States has carried out 1,030 nuclear weapons tests (the last

on September 23, 1993); the former Soviet Union: 715 tests;

France: 210 tests; England: 45 tests; China: 45 tests.

 

The body count from fallout is insidious, largely hidden in

the slow but relentless accumulation of cancers, such as

thyroid (2,500 deaths), leukemia (550 deaths) and radiogenic

cancers from both internal and external exposure (17,050

deaths). The report calculated the risk of contracting each

cancer based on the level of exposure to radioactive

materials and the associated risk factor over time.

 

" This report and other official data show that hot

spots—areas of intense radiation—occurred thousands of miles

away from the test sites, " says Dr. Arjun Makhijani,

president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental

Research. " Hot spots due to testing in Nevada occurred as

far away as New York and Maine. Hot spots from U.S.

Pacific-area and Soviet testing were scattered across the

United States from California to New Hampshire. " Indeed,

some of the radioactive materials from those tests still

circulate in the atmosphere.

 

Even so, the conclusions are far from comprehensive. The

CDC/NCI study only included tests conducted from 1951

through 1962. That means that it excluded most French

atmospheric testing in the Pacific, pre-1951 testing in the

Marshall Islands, the 1945 New Mexico tests, and many

others, including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The

fallout statistics also don’t account for the deaths and

illnesses of other civilians, including uranium miners,

nuclear plant workers and others who live near Hanford,

Washington, and Rocky Flats, Colorado, where nuclear weapons

were produced until the late ’80s.

 

The CDC/NCI study has been gathering dust for at least six

months, as the Bush administration and Congress tussled over

how to control the import of its grim conclusions. Even in

the ’50s, the Pentagon and the old Atomic Energy Commission

knew that radiation from explosions at the Nevada Test Site

was spreading across the country and into Canada and Mexico.

Yet they largely chose to conceal this information from the

public. And even though the United States is grievously

tardy in taking responsibility for inflicting death on its

own people, it is ahead of the other nuclear-testing

nations, which have remained morbidly quiet on the subject.

 

Bush’s new Nuclear Posture Review calls for the development

and testing of a new generation of nuclear weapons, the

so-called bunker-busters. The plan would not only violate

the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (not yet ratified by the

United States), but it would put another generation at risk.

" While the United States is making every effort to maintain

the nuclear stockpile without additional nuclear testing, "

Defense Department strategists warned in the review

submitted to Congress by the Pentagon in January, " this may

not be possible for the indefinite future. "

[Guest guest]

Hi Fraggle - we never would have guessed, would we?

 

Jo

 

 

 

 

---

Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.

Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).

Version: 6.0.332 / Virus Database: 186 - Release 06/03/02