EDITORIAL PAGE
by HAROLD EVANS
Editorial Director of US.News & World Report
'LET'S FACE IT, WE GOOFED'
N obody can escape Chernobyl. Even as Mik-
hail Gorbachev made his lamentably late
public statement 18 days after the disaster, his
radioactive rain was falling on the United States.
Low levels of the dangerous iodine 131 were turn-
ing up in milk in Western states.
The findings were accompanied, as usual, by
official statements that there is nothing to worry
about. But there is. There may be no cause for
immediate alarm, but there is durable cause for
skepticism because the history of radiation is a
history of assurances falsified by time. Chernobyl
will yield some benefit if it forces everyone to
confront that issue squarely and, of course, sober-
ly. Gorbachev was disingenuous when
he denied that the Soviets had delayed
warning their neighbors, but unhappily
he was able to find refuge in criticism of
sensationalism in the Western media.
Headlines such as the New York Post's
"15,000 Buried in Mass Grave" are not
merely wild; they divert attention from
the more insidious issue of the effects of
radiation over long periods.
The mortal words on the subject of
the risks from fallout were uttered not
by Gorbachev but by Dr. Bill Burr,
deputy director at the Energy Research and Devel-
opment Administration's division of biomedical
and environmental research in June, 1977: "Let's
face it, the U.S. goofed." Dr. Burr was comment-
ing on the prevalence of thyroid cancer in natives
of the Marshall Islands 23 years after the U.S.
bomb tests. The theory when we set off the bombs
was that islanders received only low-level radiation
so that a detailed follow-up was not necessary.
It was wrong. That was not an aberration. From
Hiroshima on, most of the statements on radiation,
mainly by physicists on corporate and government
grants, have been proven blindly optimistic. We
were told no one was at risk from small doses of
radiation below a certain safety "threshold." In
1980, an expert panel of the National Academy of
Sciences confirmed wha.t the biologists had long
been saying: There is no such threshold. Every
increment of radiation increases the risk of a cancer
or of genetic damage for succeeding generations.
Clearly, some risks have to be taken for the
70
benefit of medical diagnosis, but the concept of
the threshold was less concerned with X-rays than
with calming public anxiety about involuntary
radiation from weapons fallout and nuclear power
and resisting compensation claims from Army
veterans, power-plant workers and the citizen vic-
tims living downwind of the Nevada test site. And
despite the effective rebuttal of the threshold, we
are even now fed pablum about "acceptable" lev-
els of radiation. Acceptable to whom?
The answer is that they are acceptable to suc-
cessive bureaucracies in all the nuclear powers
that have fought hard to keep the truth from the
people. The Department of Energy cut off a long-
term research contract with Dr.
Thomas Mancuso of the University of
Pittsburgh when in 1975 he started
coming up with findings linking can-
cer deaths at the government's Han-
ford, Wash., plant with exposure to
low-level radiation. Dr. Robert Pen-
dleton of the University of Utah was
cut off when he began to finger high
radiation from underground testing in
1974. Crucial medical records were
destroyed at Oak Ridge, Tenn. And
only last month, the Department of
Energy tried to conceal yet another release of
radiation from the Nevada test site.
That this nuclear testing is obnoxious and un-
necessary, as I believe, is a proposition that some
would debate. But who can defend the absurdity
that most of the money for radiation-health-ef-
fects research comes from the Department of En-
ergy, which has a vested interest in nuclear power
and weapons testing? And why should military
nuclear stations escape the scrutiny of the already
limp Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
Einstein warned that we had unleashed a malev-
olent genie. Would that it could be speedily bottled
up again. By the end of this century, all the peoples
of the world may be exposed to twice the level of
radiation from natural sources. Between 1971 and
1984, there were 151 significant nuclear-safety
incidents in 14 countries. We cannot afford any
more accidents. We ought not to tolerate the spe-
cious glosses on our predicament. They are noth-
I ing less than a betrayal of mankind. •
U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT, May 26 , 1986