Nuclear Risks
Solomon, Harvey Wasserman and Norman
Nuclear Risks KILLING OUR OWN: THE DISASTER OF AMERICA'S EXPERIENCE WITH ATOMIC RADIATION by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters Delacorte Press. 368...
...288 pp...
...Such details remind us of the excitement, the sense of grand accomplishment many of those early workers and witnesses felt...
...The earliest Americans to pay the nuclear tax were the technicians at Hanford, Washington, who produced weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, the scientists in New Mexico who constructed the first bombs, and the Marines who cleaned up radioactive debris in Nagasaki and Hiroshima...
...The list of victims is long and grows daily...
...centers for manufacturing and storing and deploying weapons...
...transport lines...
...They rely more heavily on interviews with radiation victims—from Hiroshima, the Pacific tests, the uranium mines, the Navy's nuclear submarine program—than do Wasserman and Solomon, and they also pay closer attention to the motives and reactions of the atomic pioneers...
...If we now say no to the technology they pioneered, it is not because we underestimate their work, but because gradually and painfully we have come to recognize the full price of the power they unleashed...
...Of the many studies I have read dealing with the peacetime effects of radiation and addressing the general reader, this is the most comprehensive and best documented...
...After describing the types and amounts of radioactive wastes, he surveys disposal methods already tried or proposed, ranging from burial at sea to dispersal in outer space...
...15.50...
...They survey the data and assess the conflicting arguments proposed by radiation specialists, and they also talk with veterans, farmers, miners, construction workers, and others who have paid the nuclear tax with their own flesh...
...The crew that bombed Hiroshima compared its mission to the exploits of Buck Rogers...
...nuclear waste dumps—each of these constantly leaks radiation, in large amounts and small, occasionally in well-publicized accidents such as those at Three Mile Island or Rocky Flats, more often in day-to-day operations...
...commercial and research reactors...
...Some observers feel that the most vulnerable link in the entire nuclear fuel cycle is the final one, that of disposal...
...The toll in human suffering of this Faustian bargain has been amply recorded in Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon's Killing Our Own...
...215 pp...
...Even politicians are now beginning to see that a nuclear war would have disastrous effects on all belligerents, as well as on innocent bystanders around the world...
...The Fausts scheming away in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and in laboratories and corporate suites have put us all at risk...
...Uranium mines, mills, and processing plants...
...RADWASTE: A REPORTER'S INVESTIGATION OF A GROWING NUCLEAR MENACE by Fred C. Shapiro Random House...
...After the war, some 300,000 American soldiers were deliberately exposed to radiation during bomb tests, both in the Pacific and in Nevada—not because the Pentagon was curious about health effects (few records w?re kept, and no follow-up studies were conducted), but because the generals wanted to see how troops would react under conditions of nuclear war and because the politicians wanted to demonstrate how usable the weapons were...
...Shapiro concludes his study of this dismal history by arguing that we should not go on manufacturing poisons which we do not know how to contain...
...Those who have made the Faustian bargain, and who keep on making it every day, do not want us to know what costs their quest for power has imposed on us...
...19.95...
...368 pp...
...Wasserman and Solomon include chapters on all the notoriously grave sources of radiation, such as bomb tests and reactor accidents, and also on sources less commonly treated, such as diagnostic X rays...
...but in exchange for that power he put only himself at risk...
...In each case, they reveal a pattern of unforeseen ill-effects on human health, together with steadfast denials on the part of regulatory agencies, the military, and the atomic industry that such ill-effects could ever be traced to radioactivity...
...They tell us, for example, that those who witnessed the first test blast in New Mexico "reacted as though to a religious experience...
...Yet it has not been so widely recognized that, even without a war, our lives are constantly threatened and cheapened by the manufacture, testing, and storage of nuclear weapons, and by the routine activities of the nuclear power industry...
...An excerpt from it appeared in the February 1981 issue of The Progressive...
...Since 1942, we have been accumulating radioactive wastes, some of which will remain lethal for a million years, but we still have come upon no permanent method for disposing of them...
...Aided by Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters, who direct the Radiation Health Information Project in Washington, D.C., Wasserman and Solomon have treated both the technical and human sides of the question...
...In Radwaste, journalist Fred C. Shapiro provides a non-technical account of this unsolved—and perhaps unsolvable— problem...
...Payment has included epidemic levels of cancer, premature aging, sundry diseases of blood and bone, along with increases in the frequency of birth defects, infant mortality, and genetic damage...
...11.95...
...There is also no such thing as nuclear war—only radioactive suicide...
...As a map in Killing Our Own demonstrates, and as the text shows, no matter where you live in the United States you are in a neighborhood rendered more dangerous by the nuclear enterprise...
...In Time Bomb, Corinne Browne and Robert Munroe cover almost exactly the same ground, although with less authority or detail, and arrive at the same conclusion...
...Like the nuclear advocates, like the spokesmen for megatons and the purveyors of "electricity too cheap to meter," Faust sought unlimited power...
...Just how much of a risk has become increasingly clear since 1945...
...Scott Sanders (Scott Sanders, a novelist and essayist, teaches literature at Indiana University...
...You need not live downwind from a test site to be exposed to radiation, however...
...The analogy is misleading, however, and misleading in a way that illustrates the unprecedented character of the technology...
...Like every other phase of the nuclear enterprise, "waste management" has been characterized by miscalculation, accidents, official lies, and unofficial contamination of our only home, the Earth...
...Our nation's commitment to nuclear technology has often been described as a Faustian bargain...
...Reporters described the installation at Los Alamos as "Atomland-on-Mars...
...The same tests, particularly those in Nevada, irradiated large numbers of civilians living in the broad environs of the blast sites, and spread fallout worldwide...
...Tourists flocked to Las Vegas to watch the Nevada tests close at hand...
...Even though our trial explosions have been set off underground since 1963, they still periodically vent radiation into the atmosphere...
...At the end of their grim but necessary "catalogue of radioactive disaster," Wasserman and Solomon conclude that "the vast bulk of nuclear technology is simply too dangerous for safe use...
...TIME BOMB: UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR POWER by Corinne Browne and Robert Munroe Morrow...
...There is no 'peaceful atom'—only a failed, expensive experiment that has become far too hot to handle...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
