I’ve known Karl Grossman for 15 years. We were reporters together at The Long Island Press in the late 60’s, and he’s continued to personify for me crusading journalism at its best.
His new book, Cover-Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know about Nuclear Power, is a devastating indictment of the nuclear industry, thoroughly documented with U.S. government reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Karl makes his bias clear at the outset: “You have not been informed about nuclear power. . . . And that has been done on purpose. Keeping the public in the dark was deemed necessary by the promoters of nuclear power if it was to succeed. Those in government, science and private industry who have been pushing nuclear power realized that if people were given the facts, if they knew the consequences of nuclear power, they would not stand for it.”
The book — which challenges the notion that nuclear plants can be made “safe” — is a culmination of years of environmental reporting, for newspapers, magazines and television. Karl broke the story of the big oil companies’ plans to drill for oil in the Atlantic. In the early 70’s he did his first TV documentary on nuclear plant accident hazards. He has received many awards for his work, including the George Polk Award, one of the most respected honors in U.S. journalism, and teaches journalism at the State University of New York in Old Westbury.
Cover-Up is available for $11.95 from The Permanent Press, Sagaponack, N.Y. 11962.
— Ed.
Cancer. Who reading this doesn’t know someone who has recently died — or is dying right now — from this modern day scourge? And why?
Cancer was the number eight cause of death in America in 1900, accounting for four per cent of all deaths caused. Today (after heart disease) it is the second leading cause of death — accounting for twenty per cent of all deaths. And the cancer rate continues to climb.
All major organizations involved in studying cancer — the World Health Organization of the United Nations, the National Cancer Institute, and the journals specializing in cancer — agree: between seventy and ninety per cent of cancer is the result of environmental factors, particularly the contaminants man has brought in recent decades to the environment.
Which contaminant does what damage is unclear. What is undisputed is that taken together humanity has visited a plague onto itself.
“If one thousand people died every day of cholera, swine flu, or food poisoning, an epidemic of major proportions would be at hand and the entire country would mobilize against it,” declares Dr. Samuel S. Epstein in The Politics of Cancer. “Yet cancer claims that many lives daily, often in prolonged and agonizing pain, and most people believe they can do nothing about it. . . . Cancer, they think, strikes where it will, with no apparent causes. . . . But cancer has distinct, identifiable causes,” he explains. “Cancer is caused mainly by exposure to chemical or physical agents in the environment.
There are those with huge vested interests in the products and processes which cause cancer. So instead of our working on ways to prevent cancer, we are channeled into a preoccupation with a cancer cure. But for cancer, the only cure is prevention.
We are steeping ourselves in a sea of radioactivity. Everywhere in the nuclear cycle radioactivity is produced and once created, stays on and on, ending up in the water, in the earth, in the air and quite likely sooner or later, in you or someone you love.
And a massive dose, even a mid-range dose of radioactivity, the kind you’d get from a nuclear plant accident, is not necessary to produce cancer. “Routine” radioactive emissions will do it.
Radioactivity causes cancer and kills by altering the natural balance of cells, what is called their “electric potential.” Struck by radioactivity, cells may die quickly or lose their ability to duplicate, or they produce abnormal, cancerous cells which become cancerous growths. And injured cells pass on genetic deformities. Radioactivity, even the tiniest amount, can strike the control mechanism within cells to send them out of control.
It takes but one affected cell, which goes on to reproduce, to trigger cancer.
The way radioactivity affects life has been sometimes compared to what would happen if you removed the back of a television set and cut one wire someplace — any wire. You can be sure that it will not improve the way the TV set works. And it can easily lead to complications, that broken circuit affecting another circuit, spreading malfunction. Likewise, when radioactivity clips apart one of the billions of circuits of life, the result can be a black picture.
From the outset of man’s making radioactivity, it became clear that cancer was a constant by-product. Marie Curie and her daughter, Irene, well known for their pioneer work with X-rays, both died of leukemia (blood cancer). Many early radiologists died from overexposure to radiation.
But it was not until the past several decades, with vast quantities of radioactivity entering our environment from civilian and military uses of nuclear power, that the radioactivity/cancer connection became manifest on a wide scale.
It was hard to predict what would happen as radiation production increased, because low-level radiation has an “incubation” or “latency” period of five to forty years. Only in recent years are we beginning to see that doses of radioactivity once thought to be “safe” are not safe — indeed, that there is no safe dose of radiation. And as research has confirmed it, the nuclear establishment has made strenuous efforts to suppress this fact.
Scientific report after scientific report shows that the soldiers who viewed atomic bomb tests in the 1950’s are now falling from cancer, that workers at shipyards handling nuclear vessels are getting cancer, that workers at nuclear laboratories and fabricating centers get cancer at a record rate, that people who live near nuclear plants are developing cancer at a far higher rate than those who do not. The reason: they have been absorbing radiation at rates which had not before been thought dangerous.
Drs. John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin have projected that if the average radiation exposure of the U.S. population is to reach what the U.S. government allows as the limit — .17 rems per year — there will “be an excess of 32,000 cases of fatal cancer plus leukemia per year, and this would occur year after year.”
The Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation of the National Academy of Sciences now estimates that one-half of one per cent of America’s population will develop cancer from man-made sources of radiation at some time during their lifetime. That’s a million cancers.
And still, because of the delay factor for cancer from low-level radiation, we have not fully grasped the magnitude of the problem — that with nuclear power we are planting a harvest of cancer deaths.
But what about “background” radiation?
There have always been some natural sources of radiation in the world — from cosmic rays and uranium and the several other radioactive elements in the earth’s crust — but that doesn’t make it safe, either. Where radiation is highly concentrated in the earth’s ground (areas such as Kerala, India), studies have shown corresponding effects on health. Drs. Gofman and Tamplin have calculated that background radiation in the U.S. — some .1 rem or 100 millirem a year — causes 19,000 cancer and leukemia deaths yearly and as many as 588,000 deaths resulting from genetic defects which produce heart disease and diabetes. But nothing can be done about background radiation. It is something we have to live with and minimize, if possible. There is no reason to add to it.
How does radioactivity kill?
Radioactivity, explain Drs. Gofman and Tamplin in their key book on the subject, Poisoned Power, causes “massive, non-specific disorganization or injury of biological cells and tissues.”
From a massive dose of radioactivity, the kind that would be released by a nuclear plant accident, there is “a general disruption of the charge within the brain cells, causing swelling and hemorrhage within the brain,” explains Harvard University-educated physician and surgeon Dr. Stephen Sigler. There is “acute radiation sickness, bloody diarrhea, vomiting, aplastic anemia, skin burns” from a dose of two or three thousand rem, and death will follow in a matter of hours. “There is cerebral edema,” explains Dr. Sigler. “The brain is so disrupted that it swells and death ensues because of swelling and compression of the vital structures. Another form of acute radiation sickness is sudden cessation of multiplication of gastro-intestinal cells. Massive gastro-intestinal bleeding follows. A third form is acute aplastic anemia where there are no clotting factors or white cells or red cells because of sudden cessation of bone marrow and lymph node production.”
The bone marrow, where new blood cells must be made continually and rapidly (a red blood cell normally lives 120 days) is the central target for the mid-range dose of radioactivity, about 500 rem, also what a nuclear plant accident would bring.
Aplastic anemia is the failure of the bone marrow to produce blood platelets, the clotting factors that allow blood to coagulate and keep us from bleeding to death. Leukemia is a blood cancer in which abnormal blood cells are produced. Radioactivity “by its alteration of the bio-electric potentials within the cells of the bone marrow,” explains Dr. Sigler, can cause aplastic anemia or leukemia. In these cases death is somewhat slower than from a massive radiation dose.
The British Medical Research Council describes the consequences of mid-range radioactivity this way:
“The first effect . . . is a sensation of nausea developing suddenly and soon followed by vomiting and sometimes by diarrhea. In some people, these symptoms develop within half an hour of exposure; in others, they may not appear for several hours. Usually, they disappear after two or three days. In a small proportion of cases, however, the symptoms persist; vomiting and diarrhea increase in intensity; exhaustion, fever, and perhaps delirium follow; and death may occur a week or so after exposure. Those who recover from the phase of sickness and diarrhea may feel fairly well, although examination of the blood will reveal a fall in the number of white cells. Between the second and fourth weeks, however, a new series of ailments, preceded by gradually increasing malaise, will appear in some of those exposed. The first sign of these developments is likely to be partial or complete loss of hair. Then, from about the third week onwards, small hemorrhages will be noticed in the skin and in the mucous membranes of the mouth, which will be associated with a tendency to bruise easily and to bleed from the gums. At the same time, ulcerations will develop in the mouth and throat, and similar ulceration occurring in the bowels will cause a renewal of the diarrhea. Soon the patient will be gravely ill, with complete loss of appetite, loss of weight, and sustained high fever. Feeding by mouth will become impossible, and healing wounds will break down and become infected. At this stage the number of red cells in the blood is below normal, and this anemia will increase progressively until the fourth or fifth week after exposure. The fall in the number of white blood cells, noted during the first two days after exposure, will have progressed during the intervening symptomless period, and will by now be reaching its full extent. The changes in the blood count seriously impair the ability to combat infection, and evidence from Nagasaki and Hiroshima shows that infections of all kinds were rife among the victims of the bomb. Many of those affected die at this stage and, in those who survive, recovery may be slow and convalescence prolonged; even when recovery appears to be established, death may occur suddenly from an infection which in a healthy person would have only trivial results.”
The consequences of low-level radioactivity are yet more delayed — with cancer showing up five to forty years later, after an incubation or latency period.
Why the delay?
Explains Dr. Sigler: “It takes a while for the genetic effects of these altered electric potentials produced by the radiation to accumulate in enough cells to actually produce the abnormal clinical picture of leukemia. In other words, out of a million duplicating marrow cells one or two might be affected by the radiation. It would take a while for this clone to multiply enough to actually get to a clinical level. The latency period is the time required for the atypical cells to become predominant in the cell population, for the multiplication process to get large enough to dominate the blood picture or to emerge as a tumor in an organ.”
Often the pathway for low-level radioactivity is ingestion — through the food we eat, the water we drink or the air we breathe.
Life is defenseless against the 200 fission products created in fission — the lethal twins of safe, stable elements in nature. The body cannot tell safe strontium from strontium-90, its lethal radioisotope, or safe cesium from cesium-137, its lethal radioisotope. Life cannot distinguish between the stable chemicals it needs and the radioactive twins that will harm it.
And many of the radioactive twins are drawn to specific organs of the body — the organs that require their safe, stable counterparts.
The radioactive twins concentrate in whatever organ they’re attracted to. Many go to the bones and bone marrow. Others go to the soft tissue. That’s “the bowel, or the lung, or the kidney,” explains Dr. Sigler, and “wherever it concentrates” tumors may well appear.
What about the effects of plutonium?
As Nobel Laureate in medicine, James D. Watson has declared: “I fear that when the history of this century is written, that the greatest debacle of our nation will be seen not to be our tragic involvement in Southeast Asia but our creation of vast armadas of plutonium, whose safe containment will represent a major precondition for human survival, not for a few decades or hundreds of years, but for thousands of years more than human civilization has so far existed.”
Explains Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, “We’re talking about a substance that is so incredibly toxic that everybody who comes in contact with it and gets it into their lungs will die of a lung cancer. You don’t know you’ve breathed it into your lungs. You can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, and you can’t see it. Nor can I, as a doctor, determine that you’ve got plutonium in your lungs. When a cancer develops, I can’t say that cancer was made by plutonium. It doesn’t have a little flag saying, ‘Hey; I was made by plutonium.’ And you’ll feel healthy for 15 to 20 to 30 years while you’re carrying around that plutonium in your lung, till one day you get a lung cancer. It’s a very insidious thing. We have to teach people that it takes a long time to get the cancer. If I die of a lung cancer produced by plutonium, and I’m cremated, the smoke goes out the chimney with the plutonium, to be breathed into somebody else’s lungs — ad infinitum for half a million years.”
Only in recent years are we beginning to see that doses of radioactivity once thought to be “safe” are not safe — indeed, that there is no safe dose of radiation.
Plutonium, she goes on, is also absorbed from the lungs “into the blood stream where it is carried to the liver, to produce a very malignant liver cancer, to bone, where like strontium-90 it causes osteogenic sarcoma and leukemia, and it is selectively taken up from circulation by the testes and ovaries where, because of its incredible gene changing properties, it may cause an increased incidence of deformed and diseased babies, both now and in future generations. Plutonium also crosses the placenta, from the mother’s blood into the blood of the fetus, where it may kill a cell responsible for development of part of an organ, e.g. heart, brain, etc., causing gross deformities to occur in the developing fetus. This mechanism for production of fetal deformities is called teratogenesis and is different from the deformities caused by genetic mutation in the egg or sperm because although the basic gene structure of the cells of the fetus is normal, an important cell in the developing fetus has been killed leading to a localized deformity, similar to the action of the drug thalidomide.”
Says Dr. Caldicott: “Nuclear power poses the greatest public health hazard the world has ever encountered because of the inevitable contamination of the biosphere with plutonium and radioactive wastes. Cessation of all forms of nuclear power is the ultimate form of preventive medicine.”
What about genetic damage?
At all dose levels radioactivity injures genes. The only reason it is not of prime concern in those people who suffer high and mid-range radiation doses is that they are not likely to go on and reproduce — indeed not likely to survive at all.
Drs. Gofman and Tamplin explain genetic damage. “Genes are the units of information within the chromosome. Radiation can produce a chemical alteration in a part of a single gene, so that the gene functions abnormally thereafter, providing the cell with false direction. When such cells divide, the altered gene may be reproduced in the descendant cells.”
Once, scientists thought that under a given “threshold” of radiation, life would not be damaged.
But even the U.S. government eventually was admitting it just was not so. A 1966 Atomic Energy Commission pamphlet by Isaac Asimov (a main AEC nuclear power writer) and Theodosius Dobzhansky, entitled “The Genetic Effects of Radiation,” concedes:
It is generally believed that the straight line continues all the way down without deviation to very low radiation absorptions. This means there is no “threshold” for the mutational effect of radiation. No matter how small a dosage of radiation the gonads receive, this will be reflected in a proportionately increased likelihood of mutated sex cells with effects that will show up in succeeding generations.
Suppose only one cell out of a million is damaged. If so, a damaged sex cell will, on the average, take part in one out of every million fertilizations. And when it is used, it will not matter that there are 999,999 perfectly good sex cells that might have been used — it was the damaged cell that was used. That is why there is no threshold in the genetic effect of radiation and why there is no “safe” amount of radiation insofar as genetic effects are concerned. However small the quantity of radiation absorbed, mankind must be prepared to pay the price in a corresponding increase of the genetic load.
Nobel Award-winning geneticist Dr. Joshua Lederberg has warned that present radiation standards allow for a ten per cent increase in the mutation rate — which could spell disaster, he feels, for the human species. Said the AEC in a 1968 report: “A 10% increase in mutation rate, whatever it might mean in personal suffering and public expense, is not likely to threaten the human race with extinction. . . . [It] is bearable if we can convince ourselves that the alternatives of abandoning radiation technology altogether will cause still greater suffering. If the number of those affected is increased, there would come a crucial point, or threshold, where the slack could no longer be taken up (by those not affected). The genetic load might increase to the point where the species as a whole would generate and fade toward extinction — a sort of ‘racial radiation sickness.’ ”
What about the government’s allowable levels of radiation exposure?
Say Drs. Gofman and Tamplin, “all the evidence, both from experimental animals and from humans” shows “that even the smallest quantities of ionizing radiation produce harm, both to this generation of humans and future generations. Furthermore, it appears that progressively greater harm accrues in direct proportion to the amount of radiation received by the various body tissues and organs. . . . Nuclear electricity generation has been developed under the false illusion that there exists some safe amount of radiation. . . . Obviously any engineering development proceeding under an illusion of a wide margin of safety is fraught with serious danger. What is more, the false illusion of a safe amount of radiation has pervaded all the highest circles concerned with the development and promotion of nuclear electric power. The Congress, the nuclear manufacturing industry, and the electric utility industry have all been led to believe that some safe amount of radiation does indeed exist. They were hoping to develop this industry with exposures below the limit — a limit we now know is anything but safe.”
They ask: “How, under such circumstances, is it even conceivable that so many important industrial and governmental leaders were so totally and seriously misled, misled to the point of launching a multibillion dollar industry based upon a dangerously false premise?”
They point to the Atomic Energy Commission, “with the impossible dual role of promoter of atomic energy and protector of the public from radiation” having “historically suffered from false optimism.”
And it took a while — that five to forty year latency period — before the widespread effects of radiation became obvious. Still, those involved in the nuclear establishment put their wishful thinking and self-interest ahead of this evidence. They still do.
Scientists have been blowing the whistle as the years have gone by and the effects of radioactivity on people became apparent.
A pivotal study was made in 1958 by Dr. Alice Stewart of Oxford University.
Dr. Stewart concluded that children whose mothers received very small amounts of radiation through X-rays during pregnancy, amounts not thought dangerous, had twice the risk of developing leukemia before the age of ten than those whose mothers had not. Subsequent studies have confirmed her findings.
Congressman Chet Holifield (who later became chairman of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy) declared in the 1950’s:
“I believe from our hearings that the AEC approach to the hazards from bomb test fallout seems to add up to a party line — ‘play it down.’ As custodian of official information, the AEC has an urgent responsibility to communicate the facts to the public. Yet time after time there has been a long delay in issuance of the facts, and often times the facts have to be dragged out of the agency by the Congress. Certainly it took our investigation to enable some of the Commission’s own experts to break through the party line on fallout.”
Study after study has shown the direct link between radioactivity in any amount and death and cancer. The nuclear establishment ignores these studies, still tries to play them down and discredit the whistle-blowers.
In the 1960’s, Dr. Ernest Sternglass, professor of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh, made numerous studies and found correlations between low-level radiation and mortality and cancer. In response, the AEC assigned Drs. Gofman and Tamplin, top scientists at the AEC’s Livermore Radiation Laboratory, to review and, the AEC hoped, to discredit Dr. Sternglass’ work.
They, in turn, came away after extensive study with the conclusion that radioactivity is a far greater threat to life than had been thought. “We were assigned to evaluate the hazards of atomic radiation by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1963,” they write in Poisoned Power. “It was our job to assess the cost in human disease and death for all sorts of proposed and on-going nuclear energy programs, including nuclear electricity. . . . Our work showed that previous estimates . . . were ten to twenty times too low. The new evidence, on radiation-induced human cancer-plus-leukemia, from Japan, from Great Britain and from Nova Scotia, were now all telling us one story — radiation is a greater factor for cancer-leukemia than had been previously realized.”
In 1972, the National Academy of Sciences set up the Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation to look into the findings of Drs. Gofman and Tamplin that the AEC’s “allowable exposure” standards for radiation would mean 32,000 additional cases of fatal cancer and leukemia yearly in America.
The committee, supporting their findings, declared that the AEC radiation limit would cause a “most likely” increased annual number of deaths by 5,000 to 7,000 persons, possibly as many as 15,000. And these figures did not take into account the effect of radiation on fetuses. But the AEC moved against Drs. Gofman and Tamplin, forcing them to resign from Livermore.
Again and again the government has dealt with such studies by punishing their authors.
Dr. Thomas Mancuso of the University of Pittsburgh was assigned by the AEC to study the “biological effects, if any, of low level ionizing radiation among workers employed in atomic energy facilities” and to determine why 3,520 people who worked at the government’s Hanford nuclear facility between 1944 and 1972 had died. Dr. Mancuso found the cancer mortality rate among Hanford workers, workers who had received amounts of radiation well within the acceptable level, substantially higher than that of the general population.
Dr. Mancuso subsequently had his funding cut, and the government moved to transfer all the data in the research project to a facility under its control at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Another instance: Dr. Irwin D.J. Bross of the Roswell Park Memorial Institute, a cancer research facility run by the New York State Department of Health, lost his funding from the National Cancer Institute under similar circumstances. His study demonstrated the correlation of cancer with low-level radiation through X-rays in a group of 13 million people. Again radiation levels far lower than expected to cause damage were leading to cancer.
“What happened to me is only important as a clearcut example of how federal science agencies operate,” Dr. Bross later explained. “What really matters is the effect of ‘Big Science’ practices on science and on the public health. The cut-off of funding denies the public the truth about the hazards of low-level radiation which the public has every right to know.”
Dr. Bross notes: “A generation ago some persons considered 1,000 rems to be perfectly safe because, while there might be some immediate ill effects, the persons exposed didn’t drop dead on the spot. Since then, the so-called safe level has dropped and dropped and dropped. For a while it was 500, then 200, then 100, then 50, then 20, 15, now 5 (for nuclear workers) and hopefully, in the near future, one-half rem. What is most striking about the shrinking margin of safety is that, wherever the level was, the health physicists and radiologists and other supposed experts insisted that this was absolutely safe. How do they know? They read it in some book or in an AEC publication or they heard it in medical school. In other words, the people who supposedly deal directly with radiation are getting their information from secondary or tertiary sources. In contrast, I am speaking from the basic data on low-level radiation exposures to human beings.”
What other basic data exists linking nuclear radiation with disease?
Dr. Thomas Najarian’s research into the deaths of 1,722 people who serviced nuclear submarines at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire offers still more evidence of low-level radiation dangers.
Dr. Najarian concluded that these workers, who had radiation doses not over the supposedly “safe” limit, had six times the rate of cancers of the U.S. population.
Additional important studies include:
- The work of Dr. Carl Johnson of the Colorado Department of Health showing higher cancer rates among 500,000 people living downwind of the U.S. government’s Rocky Flats nuclear installation near Denver. Dr. Johnson found a 140 per cent higher testicular cancer rate in men, sixty per cent higher throat and liver cancer, and forty per cent higher leukemia, lung and colon cancer than the national rate.
- Numerous studies showing up to five times the normal rate of lung cancer among Navajos who mine for uranium. Dr. Joseph Wagoner, director of epidemiological research for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, declares “far too many Navajos have needlessly died” of lung cancer.
- Research by Dr. Samuel Milham of the Washington Public Health Service showing an abnormal rate of cancer fatalities (twenty-five per cent) among workers at the Hanford nuclear facility.
- Research by Dr. Rosalie Bertell of Roswell Memorial, connecting radiation with accelerated rates of aging. She has calculated that one rem exposure is “equivalent to one year of natural aging.”
“We greatly underestimated the biological hazard of small amounts of radioactivity in the environment,” says Dr. Sternglass, by thinking “there might be a safe threshold dose below which essentially no observable health effects would exist.” The underestimation, he says, is “anywhere from 100 to one thousand-fold especially for the developing infant in utero, so that the existing cost-benefit calculations are no longer valid.”
But the government’s policy does not change. Instead it has adopted a concept of “as low as practicable” radioactive emissions. It admits the medical effects of radioactivity (though still underestimating them significantly) and puts a price-tag of $1,000 per “man-rem” — equivalent either to one person receiving one rem of radiation or 1,000 people each receiving .001 rem (one millirem) — as part of a “cost-benefit” ratio for nuclear power.
What can be done about radioactive contamination in the body?
The effects of radiation are cumulative and irreversible. Once someone has been exposed to radiation there is nothing that can mitigate its effects. As noted earlier, the U.S. has begun stockpiling potassium iodide pills to be used in the wake of a nuclear plant accident. These would put stable iodine into the body and, the theory is, block the radioactive iodine. However, there are many more fission products than radioactive iodine, and potassium iodide has serious side effects.
“I am one of those scientists who find it very difficult to see how the human race is to get itself much past the year 2000 unless it makes a drastic change in the way it is going about things,” says Nobel Award-winning biologist, Dr. George Wald. “If you were to read in the newspapers tomorrow that astronomers had a shocking piece of information for us, they had just found another star is going to collide with the sun and that would be curtains, we’d have eight months more to go and, finished — why — heavens above! You could put on your best clothes and go dancing in the streets — that’s cosmic, that’s fate. You could go out with dignity. But the thought of a self-extermination of the human race, bringing along with it much of the rest of life on this planet — for what? . . . It is so trivial, it’s so ghastly ignoble as to be, I think, intolerable, altogether unacceptable.”
The effects of radiation are cumulative and irreversible. Once someone has been exposed to radiation there is nothing that can mitigate its effects.
“I call this a lethal society,” says Dr. Wald who calls for “the closing down of all nuclear power plants tomorrow.”
He warns: “Time is very short and unless we can take our lives into our own hands, unless we can repossess our country, unless we can begin to have our government work for us, disaster lies ahead.”
Says Dr. Caldicott: “In view of the threat that nuclear technology poses to the ecosphere, we must acknowledge that Homo sapiens has reached an evolutionary turning point. Thousands of tons of radioactive materials, released by nuclear explosions and reactor spills, are now dispersed through the environment. Nonbiodegradable, and some potent virtually forever, these toxic nuclear materials will continue to accumulate, and eventually their effects on the biosphere and on human beings will be grave: many people will begin to develop and die of cancer; or their reproductive genes will mutate, resulting in an increased incidence of congenitally deformed and diseased offspring — not just in the next generation, but for the rest of time. An all-out nuclear war would kill millions of people and accelerate these biological hazards among the survivors: the earth would be poisoned and laid waste, rendered uninhabitable for aeons.”
© Copyright Karl Grossman
