BOOKS:ATOMIC VETERANS

...For more than a decade, Sternglass has argued that even moderate amounts of radiation—from bomb tests and the routine operation of reactors—cause dramatic increases in infant mortality rates and in the rates of childhood disorders such as leukemia...

...We hear disturbing testimony from one of these veterans, William Hodsden, whose case illustrates how the Veterans Administration has resisted medical claims based on radiation exposure...

...Freeman provides excellent notes, background information, and a chronology of events in the history of nuclear power...

...When he complained about faulty control rods in the Ohio reactor he was helping to build, the contractor promptly fired him...

...It's not any scientific basis...

...From every link in the nuclear chain, radiation escapes—from mines and mine tailings, from trucks and trains, enrichment plants, reactors, bomb tests, and wastes...

...The Pentagon deliberately exposed several hundred thousand soldiers and civilians to radiation during bomb tests in the 1950s...

...If the American people knew the truth about radiation there would be no nuclear issue," writes Leslie Freeman in her preface to Nuclear Witnesses...

...You know," he says, "over a time you begin to realize that the basis for setting the exposure limit—a lot of it—is what is necessary to get the job done...

...Sixteen of those interviews are published here...

...After years of study, John Gof-man, a medical researcher who directed the health physics division in the Lawrence Livermore weapons lab, realized that "the entire nuclear program was based on a fraud—namely, that there was a 'safe' amount of radiation, a permissible dose that wouldn't hurt anybody...

...We should be grateful to them for raising their voices, and to Leslie Freeman and her publisher for letting us hear them...

...Scott Sanders (Scott Sanders, a novelist and essayist, is a professor of English at Indiana University...

...Ernest Sternglass, a physicist specializing in the effects of radiation and one of the most outspoken critics of the nuclear establishment, has also constantly met official obstruction and unofficial intimidation...

...To find out truths which industry apologists never admit, she spoke with twenty-four people who have viewed the nuclear business from the inside, and who have become alarmed by what they saw...

...According to Gofman, "Licensing a nuclear power plant is . . . licensing random premeditated murder...

...If there is even a chance that he is right—and a number of distinguished scientists have been persuaded by his work—then only power-hungry madmen would take the nuclear gamble...

...In her efforts to secure compensation for the victims, Peshla-kai has encountered resistance at every turn...

...A disproportionately large number of these "atomic veterans" are now suffering cancer or have already died from it...

...Moved by reason and confidence, they have risked jobs, professional status, even physical safety to warn us...

...His narrative is one of the most compelling in Nuclear Witnesses...

...Tom Martin, a millwright, relates a similar story...

...For almost four decades, Navajo people have worked in the uranium mines of New Mexico...

...When mathematician Rosalie Bertell published her studies linking low-level radiation exposure to leukemia and premature aging, both industry and government tried to suppress her work, and then they tried to discredit her professionally...

...A welder named Richard Ostrowski was suspended from his union and denied all further jobs because he refused to work in radioactive areas of the Indian Point installation...

...Dale Briden-baugh, an engineer who was in charge of trouble-shooting for General Electric reactors around the world, eventually quit because he was convinced the corporation put profits ahead of safety...

...Once the plants are operating, dissenters fare no better...

...But for most of the book she lets her witnesses speak for themselves, and their words vividly confirm what Nobel Laureate George Wald has called "the endless pattern of public deception that surrounds the entire nuclear enterprise...

...Even without major accidents or war, this poison leaks into air and water and soil, into fish and milk, into our own bodies...

...Since 1945, when scientists began monitoring survivors in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evidence of the dangers of radiation has been steadily accumulating...

...Kerr-McGee, Exxon, Standard Oil, and the other uranium giants despoiled her people's land, left seventy million tons of radioactive tailings spread across the countryside, poisoned a generation of Navajos, and then refused to admit any responsibility...

...Meanwhile, we all live in the perilous structure they have erected...

...Even those workers and members of the public who receive less than the Federally approved minimum dose of radiation are not safe, we learn from several other interviewees...

...It took courage for each of them to speak out...

...As that facade crumbles, the architecture of weapons will be revealed for the suicidal structure that it is...

...The military-industrial complex," Sternglass says, "could not sell nuclear energy if the public knew that the use of nuclear weapons would destroy the very thing we are trying to protect, the very thing that in the past we have asked soldiers to go out into the field and give their lives for—namely, the survival of their way of life, of their children, and their children's children...

...Sternglass is not surprised by the attacks that have been launched against him, or against the other nuclear critics...

...When he and a colleague tried to publicize their findings, their research funds were cut, they were forced out of their positions at Lawrence Livermore, and the Atomic Energy Commission attempted to censor their papers...

...This corporate behavior has taught Peshlakai that "if you really like money and you like power, you aren't going to stop at anything...

...More recently, he has argued that such radiation exposure, because of its effect on the thyroid gland in the fetus, may have led to significant retardation in brain development in the whole generation of children born since the 1950s...

...We're the records of the future," says Pires: In his body and in the bodies of other nuclear workers, the radioactive calculus is working toward a grim conclusion...

...Efforts have been made to silence all the people who tell their stories in Nuclear Witnesses...

...John Everett, a carpenter who worked on the Shoreham nuclear plant, tells about the shoddy construction he observed, and about losing his job and his union position because of his protests...

...A pipefitter named James Pires, overexposed to radiation in a Boston Edison plant, was laid off immediately following the incident, and could find no further work because of this exposure...

...So officials from government and industry have attempted to suppress each new piece of evidence linking radiation to cancer, each critique of reactor safety, each protest against the stockpiling of fuels and bombs...

...At the same time, corporate and military investments in the nuclear gamble have also steadily increased...

...Health officials estimate that one-sixth of these miners will die of lung cancer...

...Freeman includes statements from one of the afflicted miners, from two widows of lung-cancer victims, and from Elsie Peshla-kai, a Navajo organizer...

...Like the builders of a tottering skyscraper, the nuclear architects denounce anyone who points out cracks in the foundation...

...Civilian nuclear power has always been a facade on the tower of nuclear weapons...