The Fallout Debate
As the spring 1955 nuclear test series continued, a heated controversy arose. Alarmed by increasing radiation in
their home state, two scientists from the University of Colorado Medical Center went public. "For the first time in
the history of the Nevada tests, the upsurge in radioactivity measured here within a matter of hours has become
appreciable," said Dr. Ray R. Lanier, director of the university’s radiology department. University biophysics
department head Dr. Theodore Puck joined with Lanier in the public statement issued March 12.79
Colorado’s governor Edwin C. Johnson immediately asserted that the two scientists "should be arrested," adding:
"This is a phony report. It will only alarm people. Someone has a screw loose someplace and I intend to find out
about it."80 He termed their statements "part of an organized . . . fright campaign."81
Meanwhile AEC media aides phoned Denver news outlets with a statement that the "trenchant reading in
Colorado had absolutely no significance for public health."82
While insisting that "it is not our desire to alarm the public needlessly," Dr. Lanier said, "we feel it is our duty" to
sound a warning. Drs. Lanier and Puck particularly infuriated the nuclear testing establishment when they publicly
stressed that gamma-ray readings (and X-ray comparisons) did not provide the full health-hazard picture. Said Dr.
Puck: "The trouble with airborne radioactive dust is that we breathe it into the lungs, where it may lodge in direct
contact with living tissue." Thus, he explained, internal exposure from alpha or beta particles was "very different
from having it lodge on skin or clothing where it can be brushed or washed off."83
The two Colorado scientists had dared to puncture the popularized myth that Geiger counter readings told the
whole radiation danger story; that myth was based on the unspoken supposition that people would not breathe. Dr.
Lanier also pointed out the absence of any "safe minimum below which danger to individuals or their unborn
descendants disappears. Or at least we do not know what it is."84
At the same time, more than a few scientists, particularly those not on government payrolls, were voicing
intensified concern about cumulative fallout effects. Dr. M. Stanley Livingston, chairman of the Federation of
American Scientists and a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, supported the embattled
Colorado scientists in a television interview. Livingston said scientists were growing apprehensive "that we may
soon reach a level of radiation in the atmosphere which would be dangerous genetically to the future of the race."85
But within the AEC the cold war made it very difficult for scientists to question the testing program.
Oppenheimer’s banishment had set a powerful example. "There developed what I consider to be a strange
psychological frame of mind," Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, director of the Oak Ridge Health Physics Lab during that era,
reflected in 1980. "It became unpatriotic and perhaps unscientific to suggest that atomic weapons testing might cause
deaths throughout the world from fallout." Morgan found many of his AEC colleagues holding "onto untenable and
extremely shallow arguments . . . comparisons with medical and natural background exposures as if they were
harmless."86
The press gave only limited coverage to scientists who challenged the wisdom of atomic testing. Those
complaining about radioactivity were routinely accused of ignorance, hysteria, or involvement in Communist
manipulations.
The Los Angeles Examiner published a March 1955 column by International News Service writer Jack Lotto,
headlining it "ON YOUR GUARD: REDS LAUNCH ‘SCARE DRIVE’ AGAINST U.S. ATOMIC TESTS." "A big
Communist fear campaign to force Washington to stop all American atomic hydrogen bomb tests erupted this past
week," Lotto reported. He repeated the persistent argument that during the past ten years the radiation dose from the
testing "has been about the same as the exposure from one chest x-ray."87
In a U.S. News & World Report article called "The Facts About A-Bomb Fallout," AEC Commissioner Willard
Libby cited "evidence" from AEC research which implied that bomb fallout would "not likely be at all dangerous."88
Although the article did not explicitly claim to represent the AEC view, many scientists believed it had been
approved in advance by the AEC.
That article caused a flurry of written protests from prominent scientists. Linus Pauling, a 1954 Nobel prize
winner in chemistry, complained vigorously to Commissioner Libby.89 Another Nobel laureate, geneticist Hermann
Muller wrote to the AEC, saying that he was "shocked" by the article.90 Bruce Wallace, of the Cold Spring Harbor
Biological Laboratory, was "dismayed" that the AEC had misinterpreted his work in the magazine piece.91 Dr. Curt
Stern, of the University of California in Berkeley, warned the AEC that the article would only serve to increase
distrust of AEC credibility.92
Major newspapers echoed the AEC’s argument in the debate. One source of unequivocal disclaimers was
nationally syndicated commentator David Lawrence. "Evidence of a world-wide propaganda is accumulating. Many
persons are innocently being duped by it and some well-meaning scientists and other persons are playing the
Communist game unwittingly by exaggerating the importance of radioactive substances known as ‘fallout,’"
Lawrence wrote in spring 1955. "The truth is there isn’t the slightest proof of any kind that the ‘fallout’ as a result of
tests in Nevada has ever affected any human being anywhere outside the testing ground itself."93
"The Nevada tests are being conducted for a humanitarian purpose—to determine the best ways to help civilian
defense—and not to develop stronger weapons of war," Lawrence contended authoritatively in another column.
"The big bombs are not tested in this country, but in ocean areas far away from this continent. The Communist
drive, however, is to stop all tests, and many persons are being duped by the campaign into thinking all the tests held
in Nevada are injurious and will hurt future generations. There isn’t a word of truth in that propaganda."94
But profound issues of long-term atomic fallout effects could not be so easily dismissed.
79. Los Angeles Examiner, March 13, 1955; Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1955.
80. Los Angeles Examiner, March 13, 1955.
81. Albuquerque Journal, March 22, 1955.
82. Los Angeles Examiner, March 13, 1955.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Albuquerque Journal, March 14, 1955.
86. Karl Z. Morgan, "History of Developments in Nuclear Safety and the Development of International Standards," unpublished article submitted to Energy
Department’s Office of Consumer Affairs, December 1980, p. 2.
87. Los Angeles Examiner, March 24, 1955.
88. US News & World Report, March 25, 1955, pp. 21-26.
89. Linus Pauling to Willard Libby, March 30, 1955, Historian’s Office, U.S. Department of Energy.
90. Hermann Muller to E. Green, March 29, 1955, A. H. Sturtevant Papers, California Institute of Technology, AHS-CIT, Archives Box 11, Folder 3.
91. Bruce Wallace to Hermann Muller, April 5, 1955, AHS-CIT, Archives Box 11,. Folder 3.
92. Curt Stern to John Bugher, March 28, 1955, GWB/BDR-CIT, Archives Box 96, Folder 1.
93. Washington Post, March 1955.
94. Chicago Daily News, March 25, 1955.