Datelines
DATELINES SPACED OUT SAN FRANCISCO The ad appeared in the classified pages of several Bay Area newspapers. "World peace with security can be achieved," it announced, promising a variety of paid...
...The prospect of completing the plant at all will draw immediate opposition...
...The Japanese have always discriminated against the Koreans...
...It helped set up the American Industrial Health Council (AIHC), which was chaired initially by Dow's right-wing President, Paul Oreffice...
...The scheme was labeled "controversial and inherently dangerous" by none other than ,SACO itself...
...The Japanese occupied Korea for thirty-eight years, and during World War II pressed many of its citizens into service to replace Japanese conscripts...
...Please don't forget your aged father, and please, don't sit back and observe...
...Many became citizens of the North, hoping to return home when the partitioned Korea was reunited, and some opted for Soviet citizenship, abandoning all hope of ever going home...
...The Seoul government defers to the Japanese because of their "historical responsibility...
...Before they die, glioblastoma patients often go insane...
...But the Koreans, left out of the Soviet-American agreement, were left behind...
...Cort Engelken THE CRIME OF CHILEAN DOCTORS VALPARAISO In Chile, it may be a crime for doctors to treat the victims of torture inflicted by the military government...
...In some radiation categories, not one processor was able to get all measurements within 30 per cent of the correct doses...
...I hope that you can make the world understand your desire to help the many people like your father...
...1980—twice the rate in the non-Union Carbide population...
...It is far easier to justify new wars when the continuing costs of the old ones can be brushed off lightly as cobwebs— when nations forget that all wars produce generations worth of responsibilities to the human instruments of yesterday's policies...
...This will be the only reason for my life...
...Yet as their appeals fade to a whisper, the war looms larger in the lives of these veterans picking their way through the psychological minefields of old age...
...Sue Reinert PETROCHEMICAL PERIL TEXAS CITY The Houston Gulf Coast, which includes Texas City, Galveston, Port Arthur, Beaumont, and Freeport, is one of the fastest growing and most prosperous areas in the country...
...Dow, meanwhile, has balked at the investigations, first denying a NIOSH team access to company records, then releasing memoranda describing its own studies, which found "nothing . . . indicating that the number of deaths due to brain cancer in the total work population is above the expected norm for the population of that size...
...I was sure that I could go back and see my wife and children in Korea...
...To save them and other Chileans from future imprisonment, torture, and even death, Fine, an official of Physicians for Social Responsibility who recently visited the three doctors, is asking for letters and telegrams of protest to be sent to the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C...
...It is believed that SACO is still operating on initial seed money of less than $35,000...
...The Barnwell Plant was built on land purchased from the Savannah River Plant...
...Kent has also helped launch the non-profit Delta Vee Corporation, which raises funds for a spacecraft rendezvous with Halley's Comet in 1986...
...An August 1980 report from the University of Michigan said processors think NRC certification could help (defend against lawsuits stemming partly from "a nationwide hysteria concerning biological effects of ionizing radiation" and that performance tests "would have some advertising value to them...
...Ironically, dosimeter processors see one major advantage to them in all this: increased credibility...
...Dennis said in one interview last year that she didn't know whether the errors reported in the study indicated a danger to workers...
...The unwillingness of every administration since Warren Harding's to pay up has implications that go well beyond the affected veterans...
...A major demonstration is expected there in late summer...
...Some of the labs failed to detect exposures as high as 600 rads—a severe accident dose...
...So when four representatives of Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Wiederaufbereitung von Kernbrennstof-fen, known as DWK, toured the plant and proposed a deal, the owners declined...
...Finally, SACO board member Stan Kent is a space systems scientist at Lockheed...
...In 1932, more than 20,000 veterans marched on Washington, demanding immediate payment of the bonus and winning instead the wrath of General Douglas MacArthur...
...We must continue to fight it...
...We lived as if we were in hell...
...By the late 1950s, many of the forgotten vets had retired on fixed incomes that were quickly savaged by inflation...
...A separate, copyrighted document described the solutions: Nuclear war would be averted by lacing the upper atmosphere with a network of internationally controlled laser and other "killer-ray" weapons...
...The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1952 deprived the Koreans of any claim to Japanese citizenship and of any hope of being included under the 1946 agreement...
...The group split into factions supporting the two sides...
...Last year DWK's plans to build a large reprocessing facility in Germany were scrapped after a month-long occupation by anti-nuclear forces...
...But America soon forgot...
...The petrochemical industry has one important product in addition to plastics, synthetic fibers, and fertilizer: cancer...
...A telephone call to the number listed produced in the mail a few days later an information packet for job- and peace-seekers...
...But Union Carbide officials tend to minimize both the cancer threat and their employes' response to it...
...But after six years, Japan still insists that the islanders, as Koreans, have no right to sue in civil court...
...The survivors returned home scarred by the world's first taste of modern warfare, but still believing in their cause...
...Another DOE spokesperson insists, "The next move is up to the Germans...
...SACO board member Dr...
...During their imprisonment, the three physicians—Manuel Almeyda, Pedro Castillo Castillo, and Patricio Arroyo—have been kept in solitary confinement, much of the time with their eyes taped shut...
...Pyo Chi Ha is one of them...
...SACO's apparent second-in-command after Largman, Edward V.B...
...Two of the individuals who sit on its board of directors are employed by Lockheed Missiles and Space Company...
...We were very proud," says George Fowler, past National Commander of the Veterans of World War I, Inc., a group formed in 1957 to win fair benefits for the former soldiers...
...into it...
...The NRC has not mentioned workers' health in its announcements about the study...
...The sky would be the limit...
...How did Pyo come to be on Sakhalin, separated from his wife and children...
...The Wall Street Journal has editorialized against it for financial reasons...
...The Strategic Arms Control Organization is a non-profit non-governmental organization formed in 1980," the material proclaimed...
...No single word can describe who and what they are: the ones left behind and forgotten in the relief and euphoria following the war...
...Its present owners, Allied General Nuclear Services, say they are so wary of Government policy reversals—President Jimmy Carter stopped construction of the plant in 1977—that they "aren't going to put another cent...
...The charges of terrorism were later dropped, but charges of "illicit association" and formation of a "socialist party cell" are still pending...
...it is not on any of the main trade routes...
...It is focused on international power imbalances posed by the development of new weapons systems and technologies...
...Currently, the Germans ship their spent fuel rods to France's La Hague reprocessing facility...
...In addition, the doctors gave medical attention to hunger strikers protesting the disappearance of their relatives...
...We committed to do nothing, and there is nothing to do...
...The plant they are eyeing, the Barnwell Nuclear Fuel Plant, is in limbo right now...
...But although it has questioned whether the test faithfully represents everyday practices in processors' laboratories, it does admit that "a significant percentage of personnel dosimetry processors may not be performing with an appropriate degree of accuracy...
...Dow Chemical's largest U.S...
...Many people have urged P.yo's lawyers to wait for the "natural solution"—the deaths of all the aging Koreans on Sakhalin...
...the possibility of shipping spent fuel to it from overseas will bring even more...
...Islanders supporting North Korea have also subjected them to harassment...
...Sakhalin is still more or less nowhere...
...Union Carbide has been relatively cooperative with the NIOSH investigators, who plan to finish an additional study late this summer...
...When we were too exhausted to work, we were beaten in the mines and then brought before the bosses and severely beaten again...
...But he is better known among space enthusiasts as chairman of the Viking Fund, a group that solicits public contributions to keep NASA's Viking probe of Mars going despite Congressional budget cutbacks...
...The cities are fast becoming the center of the nation's petrochemical industry...
...He was the victim first of war, then of governmental neglect...
...And the standard itself has also been disputed...
...The Carter Administration opposed it for fear of weapons proliferation...
...And in March, ten thousand demonstrators convened at another location when a secret DWK study proposing a smaller plant for that site was leaked...
...The number of cancer deaths has grown 32 per cent over the last ten years, while the state's population has grown 18 per cent—and the Houston Gulf Coast's cancer rate is approaching epidemic proportions...
...There has certainly been no panic on the part of our employes," said plant manager Damon Engel...
...Stearns said the group's budget is modest and has come so far from small donations...
...Taylor G. Moore III THE CASTAWAYS SAKHALIN In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin Island, in the sea of Okhotsk north of Japan—an island of bitter winters, cold and rainy summers, and coal mines, where czarist authorities then sent their most dangerous criminals...
...About 7,000 people, Pyo among them, insisted on their right to be repatriated to their homeland, which did not exist in the eyes of the Soviet Union...
...The Germans then went to the Department of Energy, to whom the owners want to sell the plant...
...It is doubtful that Japan would tolerate the arrival of 7,000 more Koreans from Sakhalin...
...Lea Zeldin DATELINES FORGOTTEN YETS WASHINGTON They call themselves the "forgotten veterans," a phrase that echoes eerily down the corridors of history...
...But Linda Rudolph of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, which represents about 20,000 radiation workers, says the errors mean workers may actually be exposed to more radiation than Federal rules allow...
...In 1918, the soldiers who had earned a dollar a day in the trenches were given $65 apiece (if uninjured) and discharged into a civilian world on the brink of postwar recession...
...A little-noticed study released last year indicates certain laboratories that calculate worker exposures are making substantial errors...
...Amoco and Union Carbide are in Texas City...
...And to Congress and the public, the veterans' demands are hard to distinguish from the despair of all elderly poor, or from the demands of veterans' groups...
...The way to avoid the war is to avoid being on the weaker side...
...When I think of the life we could have had together, I almost go out of my mind...
...The processors' measurements varied widely, with some more than 90 per cent above or below the actual dose...
...Only in the last three years has the link between the petrochemical industry and cancer begun to be confirmed...
...Old age, poor health, and old-fashioned patriotism have all muted the voice of the pension lobbyists...
...Stearns, has held several management-engineering positions at Lockheed since 1954...
...Texaco and Gulf Oil have huge refineries in Beaumont and Port Arthur...
...The Korean War further complicated the problem...
...In 1917, they embarked on a crusade to "make the world safe for democracy...
...Radiation doses are determined by a processor who measures the effects of the reaction: the opacity of the film badges or the light emitted by the TLDs...
...But a pension of that size would cost at least $400 million per year, in addition to the $1 billion already slated annually to cover VA hospital services, disability payments, and present pensions for World War I vets...
...Today, 43,000 forgotten people live on the island...
...Other factors prohibit repatriation—the kind of things governments do not like to mention...
...Peter Vajk (pronounced "vike"), a senior associate with Science Applications, a Bay Area consulting firm, was a senior theoretical physicist from 1968 to 1976 at the Livermore National Lab, where he developed computer codes to simulate underground nuclear weapons explosions for-research and testing...
...While at Livermore, SACO literature says, Vajk published "an extensive study of the socioeconomic implications of a space industrialization program beginning in the 1980s...
...Chekhov observed the "unspeakable squalor and degradation" for three months and then took ship for Ceylon, where he wrote: "I have been in Heaven, which is Ceylon, and I have been in Hell, which is Sakhalin...
...While there is no way the United States and the Soviet Union would defer to SACO's own arms buildup, just imagine the money to be made by aerospace suppliers if a third force—an "international" force—joined the superpowers in outer space...
...From December 1946 to December 1948, almost 250,000 Japanese were repatriated from Sakhalin, which was now Soviet territory...
...thousands more were permanently disabled...
...If the islanders were Koreans, to which Korea did they belong...
...The region's growth is based on oil...
...Three civilian doctors are now awaiting military trial in the public prison at Valparaiso, near the capital of Santiago...
...Some 100,000 lost their lives...
...It is not...
...Oil equipment plants abound...
...By the time the Soviet Union took complete control of the island in 1946, the Korean laborers had become an integral part of the economy, helping produce six million tons of coal a year in its mines...
...But reprocessing has many enemies in this country...
...I was overcome with joy...
...otherwise it remains unmentioned...
...Texas now has one of the nation's highest cancer rates...
...The longer the employe has been around, the less they are worried, because they believe in the credibility of the company...
...But interviews with employes and their relatives revealed considerable concern...
...They talked with Energy Secretary James B. Edwards's right-hand man, Ben Rusche, who termed the plan "intriguing," "interesting," and one which "deserves consideration...
...More recently, he managed a study of the military implications of a solar-powered satellite program, which included research on directed energy weapons (lasers, particle beams, microwaves, and others...
...plant is in Freeport...
...We marched down the plank at Hoboken and began to chant: 'We've paid our debt to Lafayette, and who in the hell do we owe yet?' We thought America would remember that we served when we were needed...
...Moreover, several families of Union Carbide workers who have died of glioblastoma are now suing the company for gross negligence...
...In a brief telephone conversation, Stearns said he is currently an environmental engineer on the Lockheed-managed, Government-funded energy research effort on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion systems...
...It would allow errors of as much as 50 per cent—perhaps more—on individual badges, so long as the average performance level for all dosimeters in a test category was satisfactory...
...It was with amazement and joy that I heard the news of our freedom on August 15, 1945...
...Despite its professed wish to appeal to a broad public audience, SACO was not eager to say...
...In 1975, a group of seventeen Japanese lawyers filed a civil suit against the government of Japan in behalf of Pyo and three others, arguing that Japan is legally responsible for the Koreans who wish to leave Sakhalin...
...Said Pyo in a letter to his son, "During my lifetime I cannot promise that I will be able to see you...
...Federal authorities were alerted, and an investigation by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health turned up eighteen glioblastoma deaths between 1965 and ATOM KRAFT BARNWELL, S.C...
...As "imperial Japanese subjects," the Koreans were forced to work in the coal mines and labor camps, much as the czar's prisoners had done fifty years earlier...
...World peace with security can be achieved," it announced, promising a variety of paid positions for public speakers, marketing specialists, fund raisers, canvassers, writers, reporters, and arms control specialists with the newly formed Strategic Arms Control Organization (SACO...
...In 1978, Congress approved a pension of $67 per month for the neediest elderly veterans of all wars...
...Rusche has so far portrayed his negotiations with the Germans as innocuous, although they have involved the State Department and Atomic Industrial Forum, as well as the Department of Energy...
...Thus, the object of semantics, Pyo waits and waits...
...The investigators also found an unusual concentration of glioblastoma among Dow Chemical workers in nearby Freeport...
...When Edwards was governor of South Carolina, Rusche, then an official with the plutonium-producing Savannah River Plant, was one of the governor's main energy contacts...
...Their worst "crime" in the eyes of the Chilean government may have been their willingness to provide medical documentation of torture to church and secular human rights organizations...
...another worked as a weapons physicist at the Lawrence Liver-more Laboratory, one of the Government's two nuclear weapons research and design labs...
...In the study, sponsored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the University of Michigan exposed 23,000 dosimeters to known amounts of radiation, then sent them off to fifty-nine processors...
...Nationally, Dow has been a leading opponent of Federal controls on occupational health...
...They had a disproportionately large number of patients who had been injured by the state...
...Glioblastoma is not only rare, it is unusually deadly: It kills its victims about four or five months after detection...
...A consortium of West German utilities is exploring new lodgings for its growing accumulation of spent nuclear fuel: The Germans would buy part of an uncompleted nuclear fuel plant in western South Carolina, then ship their own fuel rods to it for reprocessing and storage...
...They think they are Koreans, for that is where they were born, but heads of state tell them it is not so...
...In the fall of 1978, a hospital resident in Galveston became concerned when a friend who worked at Union Carbide died of glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer...
...Many soon rallied around the issue of compensation for missed economic opportunities, but in response, Congress passed the infamous "bonus" in 1924, a small life insurance policy redeemable only after twenty years...
...its proposed second-year budget of $2.2 million (which would include staffing a Washington, D.C., office) appears to be mostly wishful thinking...
...Their colonial rule over Korea was harsh, and the 600,000 Koreans living in Japan today, many brought there as forced labor during World War II, face official discrimination in education and housing...
...The devices worn by workers—film badges and thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs)—are made of materials that react to radiation...
...Many were embittered by their exclusion from the GI Bill, and Veterans of World War I was formed and began campaigning for a small pension similar to those given elderly Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans...
...James Davis Besser MISREADING RADIATION ANNARBOR The nation's 800,000 nucleaj workers may not be receiving the radiation doses they think they are...
...It is not part of the Soviet mainland...
...Francis Roe, testified before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1979 that "cancer is probably one of nature's ways of eliminating sexually effete individuals who would otherwise, in nature!s view, compete for available food resources without advantage to the species as a whole...
...At times, they have also been subjected to lengthy interrogations under bright lights...
...it is not one of the islands of Japan...
...The Barnwell proposal, then, would bail out the German utilities while avoiding another ugly confrontation at home...
...Dissatisfied, Veterans of World War I has been fighting since then for $150 per month exclusively for World War I vets and their widows...
...The war to save democracy continues to exact high human and economic costs...
...Over thirty years have passed without my being able to talk to you," he wrote to his wife, who lives in South Korea...
...Anti-nuclear activists have long fought it, especially in South Carolina, New York, and Illinois, where such plants have been built...
...The Soviet Union, meanwhile, has said that the Koreans can be repatriated if they apply for visas, and are recognized as Japanese nationals by the Tokyo government...
...Before that, he worked on Lockheed's laser weapons program, on a project which orbited a nuclear power unit, and at a Defense Department observatory in Hawaii...
...There they met a much more positive response...
...in another she said that there was no "imminent" danger...
...The doctor, who still prefers to remain anonymous, made some inquiries at Union Carbide and discovered several other deaths from glioblastoma...
...We were forced to work under hard conditions," Pyo recalled...
...The Koreans left behind on Sakhalin are not political prisoners being held by the Soviet state, nor are they prisoners of war, nor are they refugees...
...A number of charges ranging from terrorism to the operation of a clandestine clinic were initially lodged against them...
...Actually, the NRC has spent the last five years inching toward a rule requiring processors to meet a performance standard/But many processors took a "less than serious attitude" when the University of Michigan began testing their accuracy, according to Nancy Dennis of the NRC's office of standards development...
...Despite the hints of connubial bliss between SACO and space weapons industrialists, there is no sign that the space wars establishment has opened its coffers to SACO...
...All three doctors once worked for the bob gale Chilean government, but since the coup they have, in the words of Boston physician Jonathan Fine, "been forced into private practice...
...One New York State radiation protection official said he thought a 50 per cent error in measuring workers' radiation doses was "all things considered, a very good number...
...Sensing communist conspiracies and impending revolution, he led his troops on a rampage of the "bonus army" encampment...
...Similar results showed up at the Gulf Oil refinery in Port Arthur and the Amoco refinery in Texas City...
...I have become an old man with white hair and live for the hope of being reunited with you...
...Philip Plato of the University of Michigan, who directed the NRC-sponsored study, says he will begin another round of tests for processors—the third one—as soon as a standard is adopted, probably by this fall...
...Just who was behind the plan...
...its goals are to develop and publicize mutually agreeable solutions to these problems...
...John Judis Both the Reagan Administration and the nuclear industry want it completed, but each side wants the other to pay the bill...
...Oil company skyscrapers dot Houston's landscape...
...Still, SACO's great expectations could turn out to be well founded...
...Stephen G. Hoffius...
...We're not ready yet to begin explaining ourselves in the left-liberal press," said Ken Largman, a conservatively dressed man in his mid-thirties who acts as chairman and chief executive of SACO from its small, barely furnished offices in San Francisco...
...I grew up learning that if you want to survive, you have to be the strong kid on the block," he said...
...A closer look at SACO helps explain Largman's unwillingness to reveal much about his odd fellows' peace group...
...At Amoco, workers were also found to be seven or eight times more prone to melanoma, a rare and usually fatal form of skin cancer, than the normal population...
...It is a myth that torture is past," Fine says...
...When the time comes that the Left really understands our position, they will receive us with open arms...
...Our work in the mines was monotonous and exhausting...
...The almanac lists it as the birthplace of actor Yul Brynner...
...They remember the intensity, the sense of shared purpose, the camaraderie, and these memories of the wartime years contrast sharply to the depressing realities of being old in a society that has little use for the old...
...We were not asked to do anything," he claims...
...The Soviets regard these as stateless persons and subject them to discrimination in employment, housing, and education...
...But their contract with the French will run out in the mid-1980s, and under German law, the utilities in DWK cannot build another reactor without commitments for handling its waste...
...In Akron or Detroit, thousands of unemployed workers line up for a single job opening at a plant, but on the Gulf Coast jobs go begging...
...One AIHC representative, Dr...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
