NAGASAKI'S OTHER VICTIMS
Soloman, Norman
Nagasaki's other victims The growing radiation toll among GIs who helped clean up Norman Solomon The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki are beginning to take their toll among the...
...One of the pioneers of Manhattan Project research which provided plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Dr...
...Since radiation is known to produce mutations in all cells, it is reasonable that constant low levels of radiation exposure simply hasten the process of change which leads to aging," wrote Sheldon Novick in The Careless Atom...
...for many thousands more, radiation-induced cancers and other diseases were to follow...
...Harold Donle, now residing in Walla Walla, Washington, was also a Marine in the atomic blast area of Nagasaki in the fall of 1945...
...Battle-weary members of Company C, Second Pioneer Battalion, Second Marine Division, bunkered there for a few weeks and worked in the midst of the A-bomb explosion area...
...For these men, now in their fifties, degenerative diseases came early in their lives...
...Both Brackett and Ralph Clapp of Hood River, Oregon, have obtained affidavits from other men documenting the onset of their severe breathing ills within weeks after leaving Nagasaki...
...Although it would have been logical to keep track of the subsequent health of U.S...
...Moreover, I specifically asked him this question several times because it seemed so unlikely to me...
...Mrs...
...People live in the city today," says Franklin R. Stan-derfer, who is in charge of technical operations at Hanford for the U.S...
...Irradiated veterans can avail themselves of free "representation" from such VA-designated organizations as the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the American Legion...
...At the Veterans Administration, only a few hours before I learned about the existence of more than fifty claims for benefits based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki radiation exposure, Board of Veterans Appeals chief member Irving Kleinfeld said "we probably know a couple of cases" of VA claims in that category...
...he now lives in Oak Lawn, Illinois, and is battling Hodgkin's disease...
...Recent studies, such as the thirteen-million-person Tri-State Survey, indicate that low-level radiation exposure makes the human body more susceptible — earlier on — to insidious diseases usually associated with advanced aging...
...John W. Gofman, former associate director of the Lawrence Liver-more Radiation Laboratory...
...veterans of Nagasaki are starting to be heard...
...The truth, however, is quite different...
...It's not a pleasant feeling...
...Of the second bomb, the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki," wrote historian Ronald W. Clark, "it is difficult not to believe that the accusing stare of history will regard it as the greatest moral blunder of the war...
...Nuclear industry proponents are quick to point to initial exhaustive studies of those Japanese who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atomic bombs fell...
...Some researchers estimate recessive damage to be 1,000 times as frequent as visible damage...
...From his Richland, Washington, office adorned with an oil painting of roses in a vase, Stan-derfer oversees Hanford's production of plutonium, some of which is now scheduled for such first-strike nuclear weapons systems as Trident submarines and cruise missiles...
...Hodge, Good, Quigley, Gender, and Crews suffered severe lung ailments, at times requiring surgery and in all cases causing chronic breathing problems beginning decades ago...
...There is often wistfulness, at times infused with anger, as these men talk about their health troubles...
...The Hiroshima bomb was fueled with enriched uranium, the Nagasaki bomb with plutonium...
...Our investigation has shown that other rare bone marrow diseases also occurred among veterans who cleaned up in the Nagasaki blast core area...
...I contacted Drogin for his reaction, and received the following reply: "Al Rayford unequivocally told me Clifford Helms was the first and only vet to claim disability based on exposure at Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...forces arrived there...
...Nagasaki's other victims The growing radiation toll among GIs who helped clean up Norman Solomon The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki are beginning to take their toll among the American soldiers who helped clean up those ravaged Japanese cities at the end of World War II...
...We've had none for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb," replied VA spokesperson Stratton Appleman...
...In a modern world accustomed to swiftly tabulated data, it has been traditional to draw solace from apparent lack of genetic damage among the bomb survivors' offspring...
...Clinging to the official position announced in late September 1945, as occupation troops entered Nagasaki, current Veterans Administration memoranda offer a standard line: "It has been previously established that the rapid decay of radiation from the atomic bomb detonation...
...The tremendous symbolic significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly guides the Government's attitude toward veterans who were involved in cleaning up at the nuclear blast centers there...
...Clapp asked during an interview...
...McDaniel, now fifty-eight, says, "I don't know if I'll be able to work the next four years to retirement...
...Daddy told me they were Marines and lots of them were college students...
...The VA records of claims based on Nagasaki radiation exposure also document deaths from such radiation-linked illnesses as Hodgkin's disease, granulocytic leukemia, and oat-cell carcinoma of the lung...
...The veterans, or their widows, say their trust in America was complete...
...You're drinking water and all that, why hell it's all contaminated...
...Much of the city was in ruins...
...military inspection team arrived in Hiroshima and a few days later went on to Nagasaki — under orders "to check on the effects of the bomb, including the usual and unusual and particularly the radioactivity on target and elsewhere," in the words of an American general in charge of the mission...
...But our Government should have acted with more foresight and clarity in telling the world and Japan what the bomb meant...
...Rayford assured me he had absolutely no idea how many such claims had been filed with the VA...
...he and another Marine with the same symptoms in the MP machinegunners squad were quickly removed from the city, put on a ship for the States, and immediately discharged two days after arriving at Oceanside, California...
...dences of cancers of the stomach, ovary, breast, bowel, lung, bone, and thyroid doubled among Japan's bomb survivors," notes radiation researcher Dr...
...Clapp saw combat in Okinawa, but it is Nagasaki's legacy which preoccupies him...
...Some have filed with the Veterans Administration for service-connected benefits while others haven't bothered to attempt what at best would be a long shot...
...In late September 1945, about 150 Marines were moved into a partially destroyed schoolhouse up a hill from the atomic blast center in Nagasaki...
...All concerned should feel a deep satisfaction at the success of the operations," Brigadier General R.F...
...He looked around the noisy hospital wing and responded to his own question: "It must be all the big money behind nuclear...
...Asked about veterans stationed there in the months immediately following the atomic bombings, Government officials display a reflexive presumption that surely those bombings must now be a dead issue, that our minds already have circumscribed all the effects...
...And information on how troops on the "winning side" of nuclear warfare were affected could help discredit consideration of possible uses for "tactical" nuclear weapons...
...servicemen sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blast areas, the Government has always preferred its assumption that residual radiation levels were insignificant by the time occupying forces arrived...
...Coppola remembers becoming "nauseous as hell" two weeks after arriving in Nagasaki...
...Truth about the veterans could have a sobering effect on the lingering myth that nuclear war can be won...
...We weren't given any instructions whatsoever...
...Responding to a letter from a claimant who was involved in Nagasaki cleanup, radiation-effect researcher Dr...
...With his strength ebbing noticeably in the first few months of 1979, Hodge filed with the VA this spring for service-connected benefits based on radiation exposure in Nagasaki...
...The idea of a "threshold" (below which theoretically no harm would take place) has proven to be inaccurate...
...There is an additional consideration: Revelations about damaged health of veterans who were stationed in Nagasaki for cleanup operations "could have significant effects on the standards that we use today for low-level radiation," says Richard Pollock, director of the Critical Mass Energy Project...
...Many report that medical specialists have expressed puzzlement about their illnesses...
...Air Force during the Vietnam war...
...servicemen cleaning up in Nagasaki, the Government's responses that they received small amounts of radiation "are only self-serving non-answers," says Dr...
...Later that day, I interviewed the chief of the VA rating policy staff, Robert C. Macomber, who disclosed that the total number of Hiroshima/Nagasaki-cleanup claims exceeds fifty...
...Constant intestinal attacks, often within a few months after leaving Nagasaki, became long-term realities of life for Hodge, Zotter, Quigley, Gender, and Crews...
...More than fifty claims for benefits — based on residual radiation exposure during cleanup duties at Hiroshima or Nagasaki — have been filed with the VA, almost all within the past two years...
...a sad legacy of nuclear brutality is still unraveling for Japanese victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts...
...Manhattan Project metallurgist Cyril Smith told journalist Lamont two decades later...
...Sam Scione served as a Marine MP at Nagasaki's blast center...
...radiation exposure was not monitored...
...After waiting a few days, I called VA headquarters, asked for the public relations section, and started from scratch...
...They came along in jeeps," says Kayano Nagai, who was four years old at the time of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki...
...Clapp is afflicted with a life-threatening lack of blood coagulant "Factor 8" — a condition so rare that no more than 100 cases have been reported worldwide in the past three decades, according to his hematologist, Dr...
...Macroglobulinemia is even more unusual, but it developed in one of the men in the group...
...Scientists had already detonated a plutonium A-bomb atop a tower at Alamogordo, New Mexico, three weeks earlier...
...The Veterans Administration has several procedural advantages in defending itself against radiation exposure claims...
...each of those men also experienced persistent problems with their legs...
...Helen Caldicott...
...He speaks wistfully of the past — "I had the constitution of a horse, I was strong" — and of the Government he says he once trusted: "They don't want to admit they were wrong to send us in there without any warning, without any preparation, without any protection...
...They have been injured not only by physical suffering but also by the realization that vested interests have had a great deal to gain from public ignorance of their circumstances...
...Informed of investigative findings about veterans exposed to Nagasaki radiation, Dr...
...Other radioactive isotopes left by an atomic bomb include Carbon-14, a "bone-seeking" form of radioactivity remaining highly toxic for thousands of years, and Cesium-137 — which has a half-life of thirty years and is absorbed by muscles and gonads...
...The Government has more reason than ever to fear the public's understanding of what has happened to U.S...
...The same admission is now surfacing with respect to southern Utah civilians in the paths of fallout from atomic testing...
...The bulldozer actually would stir up the dust with the radiation particles, so your conditions of exposure were unique in addition to the contamination of the water...
...The second atomic bombing, which struck Nagasaki, was what especially troubled them...
...It's kind of ironic to go through a war like that with no scratches, hell in a half-acre, and then wind up like this," says Ralph Clapp from his hospital bed...
...veterans of the Nagasaki cleanup, who are now almost all in their fifties...
...N.S...
...I think, really and truly, the American public needs to be told...
...Karen Steingart, Michael Alexander, Glenna Hayes, and Melissa R. Harbert...
...I did what I thought was right...
...I ain't got much money, and I can't afford to go to doctors," comments Hodge, who for the past thirty-three years has lived in the small town of Sparta in the eastern Tennessee mountains...
...Farrell reported about the Nagasaki bombing in a memorandum to Major General Leslie R. Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project...
...Ralph Clapp, bedridden and tired, reminisced: "Before I was in Nagasaki, I had a friend who said I was more like a gazelle than a human being...
...Ralph intends to continue fighting the VA for service-connected benefits...
...We had no idea what we were going to see...
...soldiers who went into A-bombed Japanese cities and were exposed to supposedly "negligible" atomic radiation levels...
...unpleasant answers by not exploring the questions...
...We walked into Nagasaki unprepared," remembers Lyman E. Quigley, fifty-seven, who retired as a Portland taxi driver in 1973 because of steadily worsening chronic illnesses he attributes to his six weeks as a Marine bulldozer operator in Nagasaki's post-bomb rubble...
...One is the VA regulation that "the services of a recognized attorney are subject to a maximum fee limitation of $10...
...The Government, while not initiating any of the needed research itself, has rebuffed attempts by the veterans or journalists to gain access to such information...
...Yet two multiple myeloma cases among the 1,000 ex-Marines have now been confirmed (with the health histories of more than 90 per cent still unknown...
...VA national headquarters records show that a claim was filed in March 1968 on behalf of another veteran who also died from myelofibrosis — and who had arrived at the Nagasaki atomic blast center on September 23, 1945, and remained there five weeks...
...When the Government solicited toll-free phone calls in 1977 and 1978 from veterans who were directly involved in A-bomb tests, the Federal research program also received some communications regarding veterans who had been stationed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fall of 1945, and who later developed severe illnesses...
...Recently, residents near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant were told their radiation exposure was negligible, too...
...Government did not monitor the radiation doses those soldiers were receiving, although officials still say they are sure the levels were safe...
...the scientific consensus is that no level of radiation exposure is safe...
...The Army's official history Old before their time Their health miseries are not as dramatic as blood disorders, and a correlation is much more difficult to prove because their diseases are often ordinary-sounding...
...The immediate deaths, numbering into hundeds of thousands as a result of the atomic bombings, were followed by more suffering from delayed effects of nuclear warfare...
...S. officials are not eager to talk...
...For the past four years he has been suffering from Waldenstrom's macroglobulin-emia, a rare cancer of bone marrow involving overproduction of blood protein...
...Why...
...The information available on these seven men does not supply additional proof of unusually high incidences of any disease...
...Rayford flatly denied ever contending that Helms's claim was the only one based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki...
...In recent months, I have spoken with six of the men who quartered together in that Nagasaki schoolhouse more than thirty-three years ago: Junior Hodge (Sparta, Tennessee...
...Now fifty-four years old, he reports severe lung troubles, worsening stomach attacks, testicle problems, and jarring "bone pain...
...I'm not surprised with what you've found, in light of what has been found out since 1945 on the general reluctance of the Government and the nuclear industry to reveal any of the true facts of the dangers of radiation, nuclear power, fallout, long-term effects, and so forth...
...Approximately five years after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, an epidemic of leukemia occurred that within ten years reached a level of incidence thirty times higher among the survivors than among the nonexposed population...
...I called Rayford at the VA public relations central office, and asked if the article accurately represented his statement...
...Two officials involved in that data-gathering program say they recall responding to about half a dozen such calls or letters...
...Takashi Nagai reported, "The radioactivity did not vanish completely...
...Compared to the devastation today's superpowers are capable of inflicting on the world's cities, those bombings were trifling...
...veterans of Nagasaki cleanup, Dr...
...He mentions that one of his testes is enlarged, while the other, with a small growth on it, has almost disappeared...
...On January 21, 1979, The Charlotte Observer published an article about North Carolina resident Clifford Helms, fifty-four, a victim of paralysis and kidney trouble...
...Those claims have included many confirmed cases of leukemia, other unusual blood diseases, and bone marrow cancers...
...therefore there will be a buildup of chronic diseases which would have occurred much later," explains Dr...
...Another impediment is the VA's failure to recog'Voices...
...In the past, the early effects of high-dose radiation exposure in Hiroshima and Nagasaki formed the basis for official U.S...
...When doctors found that Marine veteran Lyle Wohlfeil's bone marrow was being destroyed by myelofibrosis, "they kept asking him if he was ever connected with radiation," recalls his widow, who has remarried and lives in LaGrange, Illinois...
...Were any claims based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki radiation exposure ever filed with the VA...
...Thomas F. Mancuso said, "I would ask for the proof that the soil was not contaminated and that the level of radiation was of no consequence...
...They were all very nice and they had very good manners, and whenever we said 'Haro,' they gave us chocolate and chewing gum...
...Helms had recently filed for VA benefits based on the fact that as a Navy Seabee he was assigned to cleanup duties at Nagasaki's atomic blast center...
...We were just kind of cleaning up in Nagasaki, one thing or another...
...Some informal VA memos, being used to evaluate Nagasaki-based claims, go so far as to assert, astonishingly, that "radioactivity decayed very fast and was all gone within five weeks of the blast" in Nagasaki...
...The Observer article, written by staff reporter Bob Drogin, stated, "Helms is the first veteran to claim disability based on exposure to radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, according to Al Rayford, a Veterans Administration spokesman in Washington...
...The diseases occurred quite excessively in proportion to the total number of U.S...
...He died last year at the age of fifty-four, a victim of multiple myeloma bone marrow cancer...
...Persistent poor health has caused financial hardships for many U.S...
...Voices of U.S...
...For more than thirty-three years, the Government has not bothered to do any systematic study on the health of these veterans...
...We were just a bunch of guinea pigs...
...They rushed us right through," Coppola says...
...Defense Nuclear Agency...
...In providing a definite answer to that question, the Nagasaki plutonium bomb turned the city's population into subjects for a large-scale experiment...
...Wohlfeil, who had been in the 1945 Nagasaki cleanup and later became a real estate dealer, sueThe accusing stare of history Less than a week after the August 9, 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese Government surrendered...
...And the U.S...
...On September 8, 1945, a U.S...
...Even after a recent flood of veterans' claims for service-connected benefits based on Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiation exposure, the VA has sought to avoid Norman Solomon, a free-lance writer based in Portland, Oregon, has written frequently for The Progressive and other publications on nuclear topics...
...Sometimes I wake up at night feeling the plutonium metal in my hands — metal that I personally helped fabricate for the bomb — and realize that it killed hundreds of thousands of people...
...In 1965, Harry Truman broke his public silence on the decisions to order atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Chandler said, "I'm disturbed about the information...
...We were amazed, shocked — and yet stupefied...
...A dazed Japanese hierarchy had little time to assess the atomic flash that killed 100,000 in Hiroshima...
...occupying troops began disembarking in Nagasaki harbor...
...N.S...
...cumbed to myelofibrosis in 1968, at the age of fifty-four...
...Clearly, U.S...
...In addition, macroglobulinemia — an even rarer disease — is quite similar to multiple myeloma in that it is a cancer of the same family of cells...
...Government cover-up that has already spanned more than a third of a century...
...Richard B. Dobrow, the hematologist treating McDaniel's bone marrow cancer, "the question of [VA1 compensation will probably be answered politically, not medically...
...Nagai wrote those words thirty years ago, when far less was known about the biological damage "slight" gamma radiation could do...
...Having heard VA officials discount the possibility that Nagasaki's residual radiation could have been harmful, neither Wohlfeil nor his widow ever filed with the VA for service-connected benefits...
...McDaniel has worked for more than twenty years as a Weyerhaeuser Company mechanic in southwestern Washington state...
...Utilities with nuclear power investments — seeking to offer assurances about the transitory effects of nuclear disasters — at times try to evoke images of idyllic urban life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as though the suffering from the atomic bombings ended long ago...
...Starting fifteen years after the explosions, the inci'U...
...Kayano's mother and about 80,000 other Nagasaki residents were dead from the atomic bombing...
...The last two years are better forgotten," says his widow, who works as a secretary in Streator, Illinois...
...it'd have to be...
...Federal officials have begun to admit tacitly that some GIs exposed to immediate short-range fallout from U.S...
...The inspectors concluded that radioactivity had diminished to harmless levels, both in Hiroshima, where the "Little Boy" bomb had used enriched uranium, and in Nagasaki, where the "Fat Man" bomb was fueled with plutonium...
...John Zotter (Pittsburgh...
...In addition, I learned that another Marine stationed with them, Floyd Crews, died at age fifty in 1972...
...For many that trust is now in shambles...
...Now fifty-four, he is disabled, living on social security in Warwick, Rhode Island...
...I would do anything in my power to spare another family what we have experienced...
...Philip Leschina (Berwyn, Illinois...
...While under continual attack from the nuclear industry and, more subtly, from the Federal Government policymakers, recent studies have correlated administratively "permissible" low-dose exposure and increases of cancers...
...Said the former President: "I could not worry about what history would say about my personal morality...
...Brackett says a panel of doctors at the Radiological Center in Louisville had considered radiation treatment but rejected that option on the grounds that his radiation exposure in Nagasaki may have been the cause of the skin cancer in the first place...
...In recent years, while treating patients with blood disorders in Portland, he has made it a point to stay informed about current research on effects of the atomic bombings...
...Assisting him in the research for this article were Dr...
...And a pronounced pattern of unusual, chronic weeping skin sores or ulcerations has been suffered by Hodge, Zotter, Good, Quigley, and Gender...
...since the mid-1960s he has been suffering from polycythemia, an excess of red blood cells found in one out of every 250,000 Americans per year...
...Peckarsky continue to contend that six weeks after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki "whole body gamma radiation exposure (if any) would have been negligible," the VA has not presented claimants with any specific radiation measurements in support of its contention...
...Veterans who were there cannot prove any precise levels of radiation exposure, because no such records exist — the U.S...
...Stationed near Ralph in Nagasaki was Harry Coppola, a twenty-five-year-old Marine assigned to guard duty at the atomic blast center...
...The Government has refused to release names of any of the claimants...
...Government radiation standards...
...You could feel this after seeing the crater at Trinity...
...The existence of two cases of multiple myeloma is an incidence rate at least four times that expected in the general population...
...But some of the scientists who had built the bomb did not agree...
...nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1962 developed leukemia at elevated rates as a result...
...veterans who were stationed within about a mile of the Nagasaki atomic blast center in the fall of 1945, as well as a number of widows whose husbands were there...
...I feel the U.S...
...Asked for a response to the blood-related diseases discovered among U.S...
...As a Marine in Nagasaki, he — like the rest of the U.S...
...Other guys there were waiting for weeks to get discharged — they asked me, 'Who do you know, a Congressman?' " Coppola's impression was that "they wanted to get rid of me fast...
...Yet it is a truth only now emerging that as the public's horror of those nuclear bombings has faded over the years, it has grown steadily more vivid for families like the Ralphs, the Clapps, the McDaniels, the Coppolas...
...Scione recalls that when he returned from Japan, "I experienced large blotches on my head and practically all my hair fell off...
...Officials refuse to disclose how many such contacts the Government received while processing communications it had sought in connection with the 1946-1962 atomic bomb testing...
...The bomb would have been equally effective without using people as victims...
...The second bomb fell only seventy-two hours later...
...To Dr...
...We went in there green as grass...
...generally eliminated all hazards by the time U.S...
...Medical incidence figures show statistical expectation that between one-quarter and one-half of a case of multiple myeloma would have occurred in a group of that size and age...
...It wasn't a pretty world and it is always easy to enjoy another man's bad conscience...
...All we knew was the war was over, and some kind of bomb had been dropped...
...It's been a characteristic story we've heard from the Government on radiation — they defend and hide what's going on," Chandler continued...
...He has also had chronic trouble with his legs...
...states that "in all the areas examined, ground contamination with radioactive materials was found to be below the hazardous limits...
...Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, later said of the use of the atomic bombs: "I do not have the feeling that it was done right...
...Karen Steingart, a Portland physician researching radiation effects...
...The proof and evidence of how well the survey was done is important in any evaluation of that area...
...It will take 24,000 years for half of Plutonium's deadly alpha radiation to decay...
...Concern with forcing a Japanese surrender may not have been the primary reason for the attack on the two cities...
...Herman Brackett of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, was diagnosed with multiple skin cancer years ago, re-quiring painful skin grafts...
...With a view toward postwar power relations, the United States was interested in demonstrating its nuclear capability to the Soviet Union...
...Most attorneys won't give you the time of day for $10, let alone take a radiation claim," widow Virginia Ralph remarks angrily...
...Marines stationed within about a mile of the Nagasaki atomic blast center area at the end of September 1945 — at most one thousand Marines, according to the accounts of individually interviewed men who were there at the time...
...While some of those veterans now face imminent death, many express hope that time is also running out for a U.S...
...These findings are suggestive of an association with radiation exposure...
...Almost thirty-four years later, officials at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation — where plutonium for the bomb was made — give short shrift to questions about long-term impacts of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki...
...A civil service employe, he was forced to retire early because of chronic fatigue...
...Several of the men speak of feeling run down by the time they reached middle age — as though they were much older than their chronological years...
...I'm very concerned...
...Marines who participated in Nagasaki cleanup operations later fell victim to an extraordinarily high incidence of bone marrow cancers and blood disorders...
...Rosalie Bertell, a biostatisti-cian who worked on studies of the Tri-State data...
...Actually, no one cared," charges Virginia A. Ralph, whose husband Harold was a Marine stationed in Nagasaki for weeks of cleanup duties beginning September 23, 1945...
...Dobrow comments, with professional caution, "It would appear that there perhaps is an increased number of hematologic malignancies or bone marrow problems than might otherwise be expected...
...Willard Good (Toledo, Ohio...
...Bone marrow — where blood is produced — has been classified as extremely sensitive to radiation by the International Commission on Radiation Protection...
...Brackett subsequently began a perpetual battle with pleurisy...
...Among the seven former Marines, Leschina seems to have experienced the best health, although damage to his testicles requiring surgery was discovered in 1960...
...But in every part of the United States there are Marine Corps veterans convinced that their participation in cleanup at Nagasaki's nuclear blast center has caused chronic ailments, burdening their lives with decades of medical bills, lost wages, and excruciating pain...
...Government is stonewalling," she says...
...For a third of a century the Government has maintained that the GIs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered no biological harm from radiation...
...Those interviewed have worked as mechanics, loggers, clerks, realtors, construction workers, truckers, farmers, taxi drivers...
...The Nagasaki atomic bomb exploded with plutonium, known to lodge in human lungs and other internal soft tissue...
...In mid-September the War Department announced that scientists had ascertained the residual radiation in Nagasaki was nothing to be concerned about...
...About three years ago Good, now fifty-six, went on early retirement from his job as a shipping clerk in Toledo, Ohio...
...Scott Goodnight of the Oregon Health Sciences Center...
...But now there is indisputable evidence that U.S...
...There was considerable scientific curiosity about whether the "Fat Man" bomb made with the remaining plutonium available at that time could be successfully exploded in mid-air...
...Like Ralph, more than thirty years later Coppola was diagnosed as suffering from multiple myeloma...
...Lyman Quigley and William Gender (both of Portland, Oregon...
...Although recent memoranda by VA Compensation Director J.C...
...Joe Ratcliff of Waskom, Texas, says, "I had a lot of skin problems after I got out with a rash...
...Government is doing all it can to keep them and other Americans from knowing it...
...Yet the Government refuses to concede even the possibility that exposure to residual low-level radiation in Hiroshima or Nagasaki has caused veterans to suffer from bone marrow cancers and blood disorders...
...I made the only decision I ever knew how to make...
...Out of the more than fifty claims acknowledged by the VA to be based on radiation exposure during cleanup at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, none have been granted...
...There was also the desire to "justify" the Manhattan Project's wartime expenditure of $2 billion, and a curiosity to know just what the Bomb would do...
...Gofman believes "it is imperative now to seek out whether or not an excess of rare cancers has occurred in this small group of individuals...
...Clapp has been in many hospitals to receive oxygen for a respiratory problem growing still worse, in addition to treatment for an extremely rare blood disorder...
...Among the seven, some strikingly similar ailments have occurred...
...Jack McDaniel of Toutle, Washington, speaks of skin sores which leave purple scars, similar to those reported by other Nagasaki veterans...
...The occurrence of three cases of these rare bone marrow diseases, in persons who were apparently exposed to Nagaski low-level radiation, is extremely alarming," says Dr...
...soldiers ordered to do cleanup duty at "ground zero'' — received no precautionary instructions or protective gear...
...are starting to be heard' nize the latency period, which can extend for several decades between radiation exposure and actual symptoms of such diseases as leukemia or bone marrow cancer...
...My notes are clear on this...
...It just heightens my concern about this method of dealing with the public — that was not only occurring then, in 1945, but is occurring now...
...However, the "straight line hypothesis" — postulating proportionally diminishing biological damage with lower radiation levels — has come under serious scientific challenge for greatly understating actual low-dose risks...
...A number of other former Marines interviewed, who were stationed elsewhere in the immediate blast center area of Nagasaki in fall 1945, speak of similar ailments...
...McDaniel is now suffering from a severe and extremely unusual bone marrow cancer...
...The ultimatum to Japan was full of pious platitudes...
...Willard Good did Marine guard duty at Nagasaki's ground zero...
...The wear and tear on a body is greater...
...Radiation's genetic effects are yet to be felt by descendants of atom bomb survivors...
...Hospitals have become all too familiar at early ages...
...Kleinfeld told me he seriously doubted any other VA official would know anything more about it...
...But most genetic injuries are recessive, showing up in future generations...
...At Los Alamos, according to journalist Lansing La-mont, "more than one scientist walked cold sober into the dark of that August night and retched...
...I'm going downhill fast...
...Still alive is William Shufflebarger, who was twenty-two years old when he was a Marine stationed just a few blocks from the devastated area of Nagasaki in late September 1945...
...The low-level radiation debate has direct bearing on the current struggle over nuclear power...
...In the United States, celebration of V-J Day was tinged with troubled consciences for some...
...In view of the absence of documented exposure levels for U.S...
...Stephen G. Chandler is an internist-hematologist who was stationed in Japan as a flight surgeon for the U.S...
...Seems like all my strength is going out of me," says Hodge, who has been living with chronic anemia for the past twenty years...
...Information submitted by those veterans or their widows was excluded from the study's research...
...James J. McDaniel and Ralph S. Clapp were among about 200 Marines quartered in a bombed-out waterfront hotel near the Nagasaki blast center...
...The last ten days of his life were a nightmare for all of us...
...However, independent investigators have contacted several dozen U.S...
...Some thirty of the claims have come from the 1,000 Marines who did duty in Nagasaki...
...A half-year later, directly under the point where the bomb went off, a slight emanation of gamma rays from far underground could still be detected...
...On September 23, U.S...
...Coppola, who now lives in Florida and is undergoing chemotherapy, recalls he was one of twelve machinegunners sent into Nagasaki about September 20 to serve as an early squad of military police...
...Marines quartered near Nagasaki's nuclear center in the fall of 1945 later suffered extremely high ratios of severe bone marrow disorders...
...The commonalities could be coincidences that would not be conspicuous if subsequent health data were available on the entire 150 or so Marines who stayed together in the same schoolbuilding...
...But most of those interviewed are convinced of a correlation, and there certainly is need for further study...
...Atomic war has already begun to poison the human future in the most profound ways possible — through irreversible genetic destruction...
...We were able to reassure them that they didn't get any significant exposure," says Lieutenant Colonel Bill McGee of the U.S...
...However, in the book We of Nagasaki, Japanese radiologist Dr...
...officials are not eager to talk about Hiroshima or Nagasaki...
...For Clapp, and for other Marines whose lives were supposedly protected by the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, life has never been the same since Nagasaki...
...Department of Energy...
...the facts could diminish enthusiasm for the proposed revival of massive fallout shelter programs in line with officially promulgated scenarios of "surviving" an atomic war...
...Instead they give us a picture that there is no danger and if there is it'll be taken care of...
Vol. 43 • July 1979 • No. 7
