This work in progress has been compiled by Mary Elynne Tappero,
mtap706180@aol.com, tapperom@lanepowell.com
 
"It is not a normal situation when the people who are in charge of the fate of a whole civilization lie quite openly to the whole world."
Vladimir Chernousenko, CIS. Physicist, scientific co-ordinator of the clean-up in Chernobyl.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/WorldUraniumHearing/Chernousenko.html

"The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil... therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big."
Adolph Hitler

“Uranium-238 is not stable but breaks down into two parts. This process of breaking down is called decay. The decay of uranium-238 produces a small part called "alpha" radiation and a large part called the decay product. The breakdown of uranium-238 to its decay products happens very slowly. In fact, it takes about 4.5 billion years for one-half of the uranium-238 to break down (4.5 billion years is the half-life of uranium-238). Thorium, the decay product of uranium, is also not stable, and it continues to decay until stable lead is formed [before there are some radioactive lead isotopes]. During the decay processes, the parent uranium-238, its decay products, and their subsequent decay products release a series of new elements and radiation, including such elements as radium and radon, alpha and beta particles, and gamma radiation. Alpha particles cannot pass through human skin, whereas, gamma radiation passes through  more easily.”
Public Health Statement from Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/phs9029.html

“Alpha particles are probably the most potent and destructive agent known to science.”
Harrison Martland, Forensic Pathologist referring to the deaths of radium dial-painters.

p. 27, Killing our Own

By the middle of 1980 the Department of the Navy was sending out a new batch of letters designed to soothe veterans of Hiroshima or Nagasaki who had contacted a wide range of federal agencies with their concerns.  “The Department of Defense and the U.S. Government continue to be deeply interested in the welfare of veterans and determined to insure that issues such as these are fully investigated, with wide dissemination of the results,” Navy Captain J.R. Buckley wrote.  Furthermore, Captain Buckley informed veterans receiving his letter, “It is reassuring to note that the likelihood of exposure to any radiation was quite low, that there was no possibility of any occupation force member having received a significant dose, and there is no cause whatsoever for concern over an increased risk of adverse health effects.”

Throughout, the well-publicized 1980 “fact sheet” from the Pentagon strove to assert that scientific research had found insignificant levels of residual radiation at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Thus, the official story went, troops were ordered into an area where no threat to health existed.
. . .
Left unacknowledged were the lethal qualities of minute alpha particles capable of lodging in human bone marrow, lungs, and other organs.  The Defense Nuclear Agency preferred to focus attention on gamma – external – radiation doses left in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, while parenthetically claiming that plutonium and other forms of alpha-particle radiation were virtually nonexistent.  It was not a bad assumption – if those veterans hadn’t been breathing.  [A Tokyo University professor and secretary general of the ten-thousand-member Japanese Scientists Association, who conducted a detailed study of the issue, said the DNA estimate of radiation dose was not accurate.  Anzai was concerned with alpha-radioactivity intake:  “Though, by my calculations, the external exposure would have been relatively small, the internal radiation dose received by the bone marrow of these men could have been exceedingly high.  This was due to plutonium deposited in the water and soil of Nagasaki.”]

But support for the [National Association of Atomic Veterans] cause came in the form of a rebuttal from Dr. Edward Martell, a former fallout analyst for the Air Force and Atomic Energy Commission.  Testifying at a citizens hearing in Washington on April 12, 1980, he said:  “The best way of deceiving all of you about the effects of radiation is to talk about the effects of one kind of radiation when you’re measuring the other.”  A scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research based in Colorado, Martell stated that internally absorbed alpha and beta particles are intentionally ignored by government authorities.

With public mistrust over the AEC deepening near the end of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower created the Federal Radiation Council to “advise the president with respect to radiation matters.”  Although appearing to represent public health interests, the FRC was dominated by advocates of nuclear testing. Two out of six members were from the AEC and Department of Defense.  The council’s director, Paul Tompkins, came directly from the nuclear weapons program.  One of the first acts of the council was to increase the amount of sanctioned strontium-90 exposures from testing by six times.
. . .
As fallout quantities approached “safe” governmental limits, the AEC looked to the Federal Radiation Council for help.  By December 1962, the Council announced that the U.S. Government’s radiation guidelines didn’t apply to fallout – in essence, giving the AEC a blank check to contaminate the earth as it deemed necessary.  “I-131 doses from weapons testing conducted through 1962 have not caused undue risk to health,” the council contended.  Two years later the panel secretly raised its guidelines for radioactive iodine by a factor of twenty, to accommodate “underground” nuclear tests.

In retrospect, there is chilling irony in the atomic bomb’s – and the nuclear industry’s – origin.  Stopping Nazi barbarism provided the initial rationale for the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.  At the Nuremberg trial, some Nazi scientists and other functionaries were charged with grotesque experiments on humans; the Nuremberg judges rejected excuses and rationalizations.

But since then, in the United States, “we have already accepted the policy of experimentation on involuntary human subjects,” concluded Dr. John W. Gofman, a pioneer in radiation research who co-discovered the fissionability of uranium 233 and helped isolate the world’s first milligram of plutonium.

“In the mid-fifties – when the toxicity of low-dose radiation was still uncertain – we were testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere and launching the atoms for peace program,” Gofman recalled in a 1979 statement.  “It should have been clear to me, even then, that both atmospheric bomb-testing and nuclear power constituted experimentation on involuntary human subjects, indeed on all forms of life.”

With extraordinarily blunt self-criticism, Gofman – a physicist and medical doctor, went on:  “I am on record in 1957 as not being worried yet about fallout and still being optimistic about the benefits of nuclear power.  There is no way I can justify my failure to help sound an alarm over these activities many years sooner than I did.  I feel that at least several hundred scientists trained in the biomedical aspect of atomic energy – myself definitely included – are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity through our gross negligence and irresponsibility.”  And, Gofman added, “Now that we know the hazard of low-dose radiation, the crime is not experimentation – it’s murder.”

But in early 1981, supporters of relaxed standards in the [radioactive] workplace and elsewhere were given a devastating shock.  Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee were forced to conclude that the doses received by the people of Hiroshima thirty-five years earlier had been seriously misinterpreted.  “Some of the most important data on the effects of nuclear radiation on humans may be wrong,” wrote Science magazine.  The amount of neutron radiation delivered by the bomb had been grossly overestimated, perhaps by a factor of ten.  Thus the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have suffered cancer and other radiation side effects from doses far smaller than previously believed.  That meant the radiation itself was far more deadly.  “The new findings are far more welcome,” the consultant told Science.  All the revisions were “moving in the wrong direction” because they now indicated that low doses of radiation could kill far more people than anyone had previously thought possible – the very conclusion to which Thomas Mancuso’s work had been pointing since 1977.

. . . The new data, said Dr. Arthur Upton, former Director of the National Cancer Institute, greatly strengthened the argument that there is no “safe” level of exposure to radiation.

In 1978, Dr. William Lochstet of Pennsylvania State University argued that the operation of a single uranium mine could result in 8.5 million deaths over time, and Dr. Robert O. Pohl of Cornell told the NRC that the potential health effects from mill tailings could “completely dwarf” those from the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle and add significantly to the worldwide toll of deaths and mutations.

Seo Takeshi said the data for the crucial period of March 31 to April 1 were not reliable.  In fact, he added that based on an August 1979 study by the NRC, as much as 64,000 curies of I-131 had been released, a figure 4,000 times what the public had been told, and a dose capable of endangering the health of the local population.

“The leukemia rate is high at both ends of the age scale. Very young children, whose immune system is not yet operating fully, are vulnerable to it, as are the elderly. Leukemia rate reaches a low point at age fifteen and then it gradually goes up for the rest of life. . ..

“I had been measuring the health effects of one, two, three, four, and five chest X-rays. Then I found that the federal government allows the general public to receive up to five hundred millirems per year. That is equivalent in bone marrow dose to one hundred chest X-rays per year. That really was shocking!

“Moreover, I learned that nuclear workers are allowed to receive up to five rems--which is the bone marrow equivalent of one thousand chest X-rays per year! These are the federal regulation protection standards! When you approach it from that direction, from low to high, instead of coming down to the standards from the atomic bomb casualties where people died immediately from high levels of radiation, the impact is different.

“Federal standards derive from research on high exposures in a bomb situation. Those who determined the standards reduced the exposure level to one where you didn't see anybody drop dead.[3] It looked like a "safe" amount. But it isn't.

Understanding this standard is crucial right now with respect to the Three Mile Island accident, because the NRC has declared it "not an extraordinary event." And their criterion for declaring something an "extraordinary event" is that somebody off-site, a member of the general public, received an exposure of twenty rems or more.

“That's the equivalent of four thousand chest X-rays! [4]

“There are no legal steps to protect or compensate the public until someone receives the equivalent of four thousand chest X-rays. That's an "extraordinary event." [5]

Id.

“I found that in September 1945, shortly after the bomb was dropped, the Americans set up the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that the government has kept total control of the information on radiation effects ever since. The data base is not released to the scientific community. Research papers are released, but not the key information on doses for people, which would allow independent research on health effects. . . . ”

Id.

http://www.ngwrc.org/Research/MonAug161000001999_psrbrief.htm

By the end of the time we did the survey -- we met of course with terrible opposition when we produced this fact, but we've been given now 30 years to establish what everybody now agrees to, and that is, that if single, non-repeated exposure to a small dose of ionizing radiation before you are born is sufficient to increase the risk of an early cancer death, and that the sooner this event happens after conception, the nearer you are to conception, the more dangerous it is.  Probably every childhood cancer, except the man-made ones from x-rays, could be due to background radiation. Are you going to play with that ball of fire and say it's safe? Are you going to introduce into the human race the possibility of causing not only -- shall we put it into technical terms -- adding to population loads of cancer? Are you going to be happier by adding to population loads of defective genes for future generations?

Dr. Alice Stewart, Great Britain. Medical doctor, Professor for Social Medicine, expert on low-level radiation, Alternative Nobel Prize.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/WorldUraniumHearing/AliceStewart.html