Radiation

...Sternglass believes that nuclear weapons and nuclear power may be just such a source of continuous damage to the mental potential of our country...

...In this readable book, Sternglass is careful to define terms and clarify methods for the lay person, and he also appends references for the concerned who wish to pursue a particular issue...

...The nation could survive," says Sternglass, "if there were a few more infants that died shortly after or before birth...

...Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, would have us add two more dangers to Wald's list...

...Sternglass argues eloquently for both the duty and the right...

...Sternglass's efforts to obtain data from the New York State Health Department on leukemia deaths in the Albany-Troy area in the years following a 1953 rain-out of radiation from a Nevada test were met by refusals...

...its proper functioning is vital to the developing fetus and infant...

...Such claims deserve to be discussed and tested...

...plutonium-239, a by-product of reactor operation and a vital component of nuclear weapons, and highly radioactive, as yet unmanageable, wastes...

...Sternglass also documents an increase in fetal and infant deaths following TMI, although the Pennsylvania Health Department has refused to release official figures...

...He shows that high-megaton nuclear tests (and thus high levels of fallout) in the 1950s are mirrored by declines in scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the standard college admission exam) eighteen years later when the irradiated babies grew up to take the test...

...The ABC and NBC networks felt pressure to cancel Sternglass's scheduled appearances on the Today show and Good Morning America...

...Many who survived infancy were doomed to die five to eight years later as leukemia destroyed their bodies...

...Second, the threat to freedom of public and scientific debate, and the discrediting of public officials, due to governmental secrecy or outright misinformation in nuclear matters...

...This thesis is borne out by data showing a dramatic increase in the number of hypothyroid (low thyroid activity) babies born downwind from Three Mile Island after the 1979 accident in which large amounts of radioactive iodine were released...

...An entire international symposium at Hanford, Washington, in 1969 on the effects of radiation on developing mammals was blacked out by the media, as were numerous press releases and press conferences after Three Mile Island...

...The exchange of scientific information as well as public awareness and debate have been sacrificed for ends increasingly dangerous to all of us...

...Instead, the official response of the Atomic Energy Commission/Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been to discount or suppress these findings...

...The French philosopher Jean Rostand said, "The duty to survive gives us the right to know...

...Attempts were made to censor the publication of his work in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Science, and The New York Times...

...In his introduction to Secret Fallout by Ernest Sternglass, Nobel Laureate George Wald suggests that nuclear power poses three dangers: reactor accidents...

...vital statistics, Sternglass discovered that periods of high levels of radioactive fallout were consistently followed by rises in infant and fetal mortality...

...It became clear that babies—many babies-were dying because of their exposure in utero or in the early months of life to radiation from the bomb tests...

...But more vital to the survival of humanity are the babies who are damaged but do not die...

...Sternglass believes that the Government seeks to manipulate public views of the nuclear question in order to protect the interests of the military and of the nuclear industry (which provides the plutonium necessary for the continuous production of bombs, but is increasingly superfluous to the energy needs of the country...

...But no nation could survive in the long run if it continuously damaged the mental ability of its newborn children...

...His article suggesting that this effect should be studied was at first soundly rejected by Science magazine, which published it only after urgent support came from concerned scientists such as Barry Commoner and Russell Morgan...

...Alice Stewart concluded from her study of 1,299 childhood cancer deaths that the radiation dose from diagnostic x-rays, only slightly greater than background radiation from cosmic rays and other natural sources, could produce a significant increase in childhood cancer when given during pregnancy...

...Radioactive iodine is a short-lived but potent component of fallout...

...In the early 1960s, Sternglass began to wonder if Stewart's findings implied that children exposed to radioactive fallout from the massive series of bomb tests in this and other countries might be more vulnerable to leukemia...

...Sternglass's experiences and his data should be required reading for all groups that oppose nuclear plants or nuclear weapons...

...However, State Health Department officials appealed to these secret data when they sought to discredit Sternglass's hypothesis...

...Studying U.S...

...In the immature thyroid, 1-31 accumulates at ten to 100 times the level in exposed adults...

...Sternglass suggests that they may exhibit a whole range of subtly retarded mental developments...

...First, the threat of damage to the mental ability of newborn children...

...Ruth Sanders (Ruth Sanders, a free-lance writer, has been studying environmental and physiological causes of learning problems in children...

...It could even survive if there were many more adults who would die of cancer or heart disease at age seventy rather than at eighty...

...Sternglass speculates that damage to the thyroid due to such concentrations of 1-31 might cause a technically full-term baby to be born with lungs and other organs so immature that the baby cannot cope with the normal stresses and infections of the perinatal period, and is more likely to succumb to respiratory illnesses...

...Public officials seeking to protect their jobs or their image, such as the NRC officials who misinformed us about Three Mile Island, distort or destroy the truth...

...In 1958, British physician Dr...

...1-31 concentrates in the thyroid gland, which controls through its production of hormones the rate of growth of the body and brain...