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Campaigner against the causes of homelessness, and St. Louis County Commissioner, Steve O’Neil of Duluth.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the Atomic Energy Commission was dousing the United States with thyroid cancer-causing iodine-131—and 300 other radio-isotopes—by exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs above ground. To protect the dirty, secretive, militarized bomb-building industry, the government chose to warn Kodak Co. about the radioactive fallout patterns, but not the general public.
    Kodak had threatened a federal lawsuit over the fallout that was fogging its bulk film shipments. The film was not packed in bubble wrap then, but in corn stalks that were sometimes fallout-contaminated. By agreeing to warn Kodak, the AEC and the bomb system avoided the public uproar—and the program’s possible cancellation—that a lawsuit would have precipitated. The settlement kept the deadliness of the fallout hidden from farmers and the rest of us, even though the government well knew that fallout endangered all the people it was supposed to defend.
    This staggering revelation was heralded on Sept. 30, 1997, in the New York Times headline “U.S. Warned Film Plants, Not Public, about Nuclear Fallout.” The article began, “Through most of the 1950s, while the Government reassured the public that there was no health threat from atmospheric nuclear tests…” The fallout’s iodine-131caused thyroid doses to virtually all 160 million people in the U.S. at the time.
    Children were especially affected and received higher doses because they generally consumed more milk than adults and because their thyroids are smaller and growing more rapidly. The “milk pathway” moves radio-iodine fallout from grass to cows to milk extremely efficiently—a fact known to the government as early as 1951. Average doses to children averaged between 6 and 14 rad, with some as high as 112 rad. Prior to 1997, the government claimed that thyroid doses to children were 15 to 70 times less.

Radioactive fallout spread to every corner of the U.S.
    My friend Steve O’Neil, who was born in 1951, has been a public-spirited political activist all of his adult life, an advocate for the homeless and a campaigner against the causes of homelessness. As a St. Louis county commissioner in his third term, Steve made headlines this month by announcing that he has been attacked by an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. Steve is not alone in his affliction: over 60,000 thyroid cancers will be spotted this year in the U.S., and tens of thousands of them have been caused by our own government.
    The National Cancer Institute disclosed in October 1997 that some 75,000 thyroid cancer cases can be expected in the U.S. from just 90, out of a total of 235, above-ground bomb tests, and 10 percent of them will be fatal.* In 1997, about 70 percent of the thyroid cancers caused by bomb test iodine-131 fallout had not yet been diagnosed.
    The 14-year NCI study also said those 90 bomb tests produced more than 100 times the radioactive iodine-131 that the government claimed. NCI estimated that the 90 tests dispersed “about 150 million curies of iodine-131 mainly in the years 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957.” The study reported that all 160 million people in the country at the time were exposed to the iodine-131 (the only isotope studied out of over 300 that were dispersed by the bomb blasts). Children under 15, like Steve O’Neil and the other Baby Boomers, were particularly at risk.
    High doses of fallout were spread nationwide. Wind patterns and local rainfall caused “hot spots” from Montana and Idaho to South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, and beyond.
    In 1962, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland, officials in Utah and Minnesota diverted possibly contaminated milk from the market when iodine levels exceeded radiation guidelines set by the Federal Radiation Council (FRC). The FRC reacted harshly to protect the bomb test program, and declared that it did “not recommend such actions.” The FRC made the deeply corrupt announcement that their own radiation guidelines should not be applied to fallout because “any possible health risk which may be associated with exposures even many times above the guide levels would not result in a detectable increase in the incidence of disease.”
    IEER scientists condemned this cover-up, writing, “Since thyroid cancers can develop many years after radiation exposure and are therefore not immediately detectable, this reassurance was highly misleading.”#

Thyroid cancers are tip of
bomb test cancer iceberg

    The NCI’s 1997 study said about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. annually, and that 1,230 would die from the disease. This estimate turns out to be gross understatement. Today the NCI reports that 60,220 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, and that 1,850 of them will be fatal.+ This thyroid cancer “balloon” is with us because the nuclear weapons complex under President Eisenhower attacked the very people it was said to be defending.
    It gets worse. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation says that iodine-131 doses comprise only two percent of the overall radiation dose from weapons testing. Ninety-eight percent of our fallout dose is from 300 other isotopes produced by the Bomb. It is not idle speculation to suggest that the cancer pandemic afflicting the people of the U.S. has been caused by our own government’s deliberately secret and viciously reckless weapons program.
* National Cancer Institute, “Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American People from Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests,” October 1997, <http://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041029070922/http://rex.nci.nih.gov/massmedia/Fallout/contents.html>
    # Pat Ortmeyer & Arjun Makhijani, “Worse Than We Knew,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov. 1997, pp. 46-50; IEER, “Let Them Drink Milk: Iodine-131 Doses from Nuclear Weapons Testing,” Science for Democratic Action, Nov. 1997, p. 11
    + National Cancer Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/thyroid
 
John LaForge works for the nuclear watchdog group Nukewatch and edits its Quarterly.