Cancer, Genetics, and Fallout
In the autumn of 1955 AEC Chairman Strauss was caught suppressing a scientific paper by Hermann Muller on
the genetic effects of radiation. In 1927 Muller had been the first to discover that exposure of plants and animals to
X rays causes an increase in genetic mutations. Twenty years later he received the Nobel prize for his work in
genetics.
Muller’s 1955 paper assessed the worldwide fallout exposure to people’s gonads and the genetic damage this
could cause. He submitted it for presentation at the first United Nations meeting on "peaceful uses of the atom,"
scheduled for Geneva later that year. In May the AEC accepted Muller’s abstract. When he tried to submit his full
paper in July, the renowned geneticist was told that it had been taken out of the program by the U.N. because of
"space limitations."
Two months later The Washington Post revealed that the AEC, not the U.N. had excised Muller’s paper. Then
the AEC admitted to blocking the paper because Muller had mentioned the Hiroshima bombing, a subject "definitely
inadmissible" at a conference about the "peaceful" uses of atomic energy. As AEC chairman, Strauss apologized for
the "regrettable snafu" and promised to publish Muller’s paper in printed proceedings of the event. A few weeks
afterward, Strauss stated on the TV show Face the Nation that "some irresponsible statements that had been made on
the subject were liquidated in the course of the conference."95
The Muller incident so enraged George Beadle, president of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, that he wrote a lengthy editorial in Science magazine titled "Liquidating Unpopular Opinion."96 Prior to
publication of his essay, Beadle sent a draft to Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American. After reading both the
draft and the final version, which had been toned down, Piel wrote back remarking on "what skulking deceit and
dishonesty had been involved in Admiral Strauss’ handling of the matter."97
Beadle’s Science editorial asserted that "Chairman Strauss has consistently maintained that fallout from tests of
nuclear weapons have been so low that they could not bring harm to human beings. Muller has repeatedly presented
reasons for believing such complacency to be unjustified . . . could it be that Muller’s persistence in disagreeing with
the chairman of the Commission was a factor in barring his report?"98
By the late summer of 1956 the issue of fallout was being covered on nation-wide television at the Democratic
National Convention. The Democratic Party was campaigning to halt H-bomb tests. Presidential candidate Adlai
Stevenson, relying on the information of AEC critics, cited the genetic and strontium 90 hazards from tests. Nuclear
testing advocates Edward Teller and Ernest O. Lawrence responded with a joint statement depicting radioactive
fallout as "insignificant."99
Institutional differences over dangers of fallout became quite clear during the election. On one side was the AEC
and its scientists, such as Commissioner Willard Libby, Shields Warren, John Bugher, Teller, and Lawrence. The
other side included several prominent scientists from the California Institute of Technology—Linus Pauling, E. B.
Lewis, A. H. Sturtevant, and George Beadle. Although Stevenson lost the election, his campaign provided a national
forum for the fallout debate.
Another event in 1956 also had major impact. British physician Alice Stewart found the first firm evidence that
low-level radiation causes cancer in human beings. "At the time," Dr. Stewart told us, "radiologists considered lowlevel
radiation to be in the range of fifty to one hundred rems. We were able to demonstrate that the flicker from one
X-ray photograph to a fetus could initiate a cancer. This was a tiny fraction of the amount considered safe."100
Stewart’s findings were received with disbelief by radiologists and the international nuclear industry. If she was
correct, then physicians were causing cancer among children—and the nuclear industry was doing the same.
In 1958 Stewart and her colleagues at England’s Oxford University published their classic paper on effects of
fetal X rays, now one of the most often cited studies in the world.101 Stewart found that X rays during the first three
months of pregnancy increased the risk of cancer by ten times. With each X ray taken, there would be an increase in
the cancer risk.
In June 1957 Linus Pauling estimated in a Foreign Policy Bulletin article that ten thousand persons had died or
were dying from leukemia because of nuclear tests.102 A month earlier Pauling’s colleague E. B. Lewis had
published a more detailed analysis in Science.103 Using four sets of data, Lewis showed that there was no safe level
of exposure; leukemia incidence seemed to be directly proportionate to the amount of the radiation dose. These
articles documented the absence of any "safe" dose of radiation. And the pair of C.I.T. scientists also broke new
ground by estimating the number of deaths from strontium 90 fallout.
The AEC countered Lewis in a later article in Science by Austin Brues, the commission’s director of Biology and
Medicine. Brues argued that the evidence wasn’t strong enough to support Pauling or Lewis, calling their approach
one of "superficial simplicity." Instead, Brues insisted, facts corroborated the existence of a "threshold" dose of
radiation, below which no biological damage would occur.104
The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy hearings in 1957 proved to be a watershed in the fallout debate. Dr.
Ralph Lapp cut short a trip to Japan to appear before the committee. His opening presentation pointed to "reckless
and non-substantiated statements" made by the AEC.105 He called attention to claims by the AEC’s New York
Health and Safety Lab chief Merrill Eisenbud, who had announced that "the total fallout to date from all tests would
have to be multiplied by a million to produce visible deleterious effects in areas close to the explosion itself."106
Eisenbud took the stand in his defense, putting qualifications on his earlier statement. Eisenbud claimed to have
been "talking about the immediate gamma radiation from the fallout which occurs in the eastern United States within
a matter of a day or so after detonation in Nevada." He then accused Lapp of taking his statement "out of
context."107
Lapp quickly responded from the audience by multiplying the amounts of radiation exposure calculated by
Eisenbud to be present in the Troy/Albany area after the Simon bomb test in 1953 by a million times. It amounted to
an average exposure of ten thousand roentgens. Stunned by this calculation, Senator Clinton Anderson asked if such
a dose "would kill everybody in sight." Eisenbud, red-faced, answered with a meek "Yes."108
In 1958 the U.S. tested sixty-four weapons aboveground, the Soviet Union twenty-four, and Britain five. This
was the highest rate since the first tests began.109 After two and a half years a U.N. study by eighty-seven scientists
confirmed allegations by critics of A-tests.110
Meanwhile strontium 90 levels in milk were rising dramatically, according to the AEC’s own data. The northern
Great Plains—particularly the Red River Valley dividing North Dakota and Minnesota—were fast becoming the
most strontium-90-contaminated area in North America. Strontium 90 in the region’s milk supply was far in excess
of the AEC’s own safe limit for human consumption.111
Reacting to the stepped-up nuclear testing, the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP) recommended
doubling the "maximum permissible body burden" of strontium 90.112 Other test advocates like Edward Teller began
to contend publicly that radiation from fallout "might be slightly beneficial or have no effect at all."113
During this period Dr. Karl Z. Morgan attended an NCRP meeting where Teller gave a speech about fallout. "To
my amazement, and certainly to the amazement of others, Ed [Teller] was claiming that since naturally occurring
radiation played a part in the evolutionary process, the increase in fallout would simply speed up the evolution."114
Was Teller speculating that fallout would weed out the weak in the society to enhance the development of a
superrace?
Linus Pauling was the first to sound the alarm concerning the dangers of carbon 14. This radioactive form of
carbon exists in nature and is easily absorbed by plants and people. But the incremental increase of carbon 14 from
test fallout concerned Pauling.115 By 1958 he estimated that carbon 14 from "the bomb tests . . . will ultimately
produce about one million seriously defective children and about two million embryonic and neonatal deaths, and
will cause many millions of people to suffer from minor heredity defects."116
Pauling and others realized that it was not enough to exchange scientific papers with the AEC in order to stop the
continuing radioactive fallout from testing. The circle of scientists necessary to alert the people of the U.S. and the
world had to become much larger.
On April 23, 1957, Nobel peace prize winner Albert Schweitzer made a radio speech that inspired Pauling to take
a first important step in recruiting scientists of the world. Schweitzer concluded his speech by saying that "the end of
further experiments with atom bombs would be like early sunrays of hope longed for by suffering humanity."117
AEC Commissioner Willard Libby responded with the standard AEC line: "Exposures from fallout are very much
smaller than those which would be required to produce observable effects in the population."118
Three weeks after Schweitzer’s speech Pauling addressed an audience at Washington University in St. Louis, the
headquarters of the Committee for Nuclear Information—an active antitesting organization recently cofounded by
Dr. Barry Commoner. That afternoon Pauling sat down with Commoner and Edward Condon of the committee and
told them of his idea for a petition campaign to enlist American scientists in opposition to nuclear testing. With their
help Pauling drafted "An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World," urging that
"an international agreement to stop testing of nuclear bombs be made now."119
"Each nuclear test spreads the added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world," read the
petition. "Each added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and
causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm such as to lead to an increase in the number of seriously defective
children that will be born in future generations . . ."120 Within two weeks the signatures of two thousand American
scientists were collected and released in the midst of the 1957 hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
President Eisenhower, in a press conference shortly after Pauling publicized his appeal, implied that the scientists’
petition was the work of an "organization" that didn’t necessarily have the best interests of the nation in mind. When
later asked to clarify his statement, Eisenhower backed off and replied, "I said that there does seem to be an
organization behind it. I didn’t say a wicked organization."121
Two days later Pauling told a reporter that "I would like to see signatures of thousands of Russian scientists, of
scientists of all countries of the world to this appeal." The response was an immediate outpouring of signatures from
scientists all over the globe. By January 1958 Pauling had collected 11,021 signatures from 50 nations—including
216 from the Soviet Union, 701 from Britain, and 1,161 from Japan.122 Pauling personally delivered the petition to
the United Nations secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, on January 15, 1958. By the end of the year the U.S. and
the Soviet Union agreed to a voluntary moratorium on testing—a move to enhance negotiations for a test ban treaty.
Attacks against Pauling and his so-called "organization" intensified. Syndicated columnist Fulton Lewis, Jr.,
estimated that such a petition drive would have cost $100,000, and he demanded to know who had funded the
campaign.123
The Nobel prize winner was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. According to Pauling,
"the cost of gathering the 7,500 signatures of scientists outside the U.S. amounted to about $250.00 . . . for
stationery, postage and secretarial help. . . . My wife and I have expended altogether about $600 on the appeal and
petition."124 Pauling’s "organization" consisted of his wife and a circle of friends.
Congress was unable to prove that Pauling’s petition was a Communist conspiracy. But Pauling’s detractors in
the government assured that he would no longer receive a penny of federal money for his research. More than two
decades later Pauling had received no federal government funds for his work. However in 1962 Pauling received a
second Nobel prize—this one the peace prize for his efforts to end nuclear testing.
Antibomb protests during the late fifties included small-scale sit-ins at missile bases, and refusals to participate in
New York City air-raid drills. The most dramatic civil disobedience against nuclear explosions occurred as activists
attempted to steer their ships into the Marshall Islands test zones. In 1958 four pacifists in a thirty-foot ketch—
christened the Golden Rule—tried to set sail from Hawaii for Eniwetok; they were arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard.
A similar expedition the same year, by the crew of the Phoenix, sailed toward the Bikini testing area; U.S.
authorities halted that demonstration as well.125
Other tactics against the nuclear tests took hold, widening the pressure campaign participation beyond scientific
experts and pacifists. Less than a year after its founding in November 1957, the National Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy (SANE) had enlisted 130 chapters and twenty-five thousand members in opposition to the tests.126
With public mistrust of the AEC deepening, near the end of his presidency Dwight Eisenhower created the
Federal Radiation Council to "advise the president with respect to radiation matters." Although appearing to
represent public-health interests, the FRC was dominated by advocates of nuclear testing. Two out of six members
were from the AEC and Department of Defense. The council’s director, Paul Tompkins, came directly from the
nuclear weapons program. One of the first acts of the council was to increase the amount of sanctioned strontium 90
exposures from testing by six times.127
On September 1, 1961, during the height of tensions over Berlin, the voluntary moratorium on testing was broken
by the Soviet Union. The U.S. followed suit by resuming atomic tests later that month. During the next year the two
countries conducted the most intense series of aboveground tests in history.128 In 1962 more than one hundred
nuclear weapons exploded and sent radiation into the atmosphere. By the summer of 1962, iodine 131 in milk across
the United States was reaching dangerous levels.
As fallout quantities approached "safe" governmental limits, the AEC looked to the Federal Radiation Council for
help. By September 1962 the council announced that the U.S. Government’s radiation guidelines didn’t apply to
fallout129—in essence, giving the AEC a blank check to contaminate the earth as it deemed necessary. "I-131 doses
from weapons testing conducted through 1962 have not caused undue risk to health," the council contended.130 Two
years later the panel secretly raised its guidelines for radioactive iodine by a factor of twenty, to accommodate
"underground" nuclear tests.131
The Federal Radiation Council’s director, Paul Tompkins, justified the increase by claiming "we had to take our
choice between that much iodine or a predictable level of malnutrition from pricing the milk off the market. We
made the choice . . ."132
In St. Louis, where fallout readings were very high during the 1962 tests, the Committee for Nuclear Information
vocally denounced the persisting nuclear blasts. In an effort to blunt the criticisms the AEC transported a group of
children from St. Louis to New York and measured them for radioactive iodine. The AEC’s Merrill Eisenbud
reported that "tests completed at the New York University Medical Center indicate that the amount of radioactive
iodine entering the thyroid glands of children has not approached the danger level."133 Eisenbud did not mention that
iodine 131 has an eight-day half-life. By the time the children reached New York and were analyzed, almost all of
the radioactivity had decayed—with the damage already done in the meantime.
In 1960, fifteen years after the first nuclear testing, the AEC had finally established a Fallout Studies Branch.
Harold Knapp was working in the AEC general manager’s office at the time. Asked to join the Fallout Studies
Branch in 1962, Knapp’s first task was to review the AEC’s rebuttal to a series of criticisms by Ralph Lapp. Knapp
found that the rejoinder, written by the prestigious General Advisory Committee of the AEC, "didn’t answer
anything" and was a "wholly inadequate response."134 Particularly, Knapp found that the issue of radioactive "hot
spots" raised by Lapp deserved further exploration.
AEC officials were continuing to assume uniform distribution of fallout—a woefully inaccurate assumption,
ignoring variations in fallout patterns, owing to weather conditions and other factors. "For three months I held them
off on a daily basis," while working to come up with a better response, Knapp recollected in a 1981 interview.135 He
found evidence that agreed with Lapp’s claims about hot spots. The paper, sent to the Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy, elicited praise for its candor.
Knapp decided to make a systematic and detailed analysis of the problem of fallout by first looking at radioactive
iodine. To his surprise "no systematic approach to the study of fallout had been done before." The monitoring data
were "spotty," and evidently there was no real consistent approach to the collection of radiation samples.
"They had inadequate measuring techniques. It takes four days for the radioiodine to build up to a maximum in
milk. Within two weeks everything is gone. Either they would analyze the sample too soon or wait too long."136
In examining milk data for the 1953 tests, Knapp discovered, "by pot luck someone was measuring the right thing
at the right time" for St. George, Utah. Knapp estimated that during the 1950s the dose to the thyroid from iodine
131 in cow’s milk was ten times the Federal Radiation Council standards.137
Knapp’s report was sent upstairs to Charles Dunham, director of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine. It
was immediately classified.138 Dunham sent the paper to Gordon Dunning, AEC deputy director for operational
safety, who suggested that a special AEC committee, composed of "qualified scientists with specialized
backgrounds,"139 be established to comment on the report.
Four of five reviewers favorably commented on Knapp’s paper and urged its release. The only unfavorable
review came from the Nevada Test Site’s off-site radiological safety officer, Oliver R. Placak.140 Over Dunning’s
objections, the AEC assistant general manager for research, Spoford English, reluctantly okayed release of the Knapp
report.
The basic point of Knapp’s research was that after more than ten years of atomic weapons testing at the Nevada
site, the AEC had never actually bothered to methodically assess the impact of fallout on people living nearby. The
Knapp report, issued in early 1963, warned that "At the Nevada Test Site, over 1,000 kilotons equivalent of Iodine-
131 were released before we obtained any reliable data on Iodine-131 in milk in off-site communities following
deposition from specific shots." The amount was more than five thousand times as much as had been released at a
1957 accident at the British reactor at Windscale, which caused a national emergency to be declared because of milk
contamination.141
The broad outlines of the fallout disaster came into focus even while atmospheric nuclear testing persisted. Two
decades later Robert Minogue, research director for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told us: "High AEC
officials knew very well the biological effects of low-level radiation in the 1950s. They can’t use ignorance as an
excuse."142 But, as grim evidence mounted, the nuclear policymakers tried to keep the truth from the public.
95. Kopp, "Debate over Fallout Hazards," p. 412.
96. George W. Beadle, "Liquidating Unpopular Opinion," Science, October 28, 1955, p. 813.
97. Kopp, "Debate over Fallout Hazards," p. 412.
98. Beadle, "Liquidating Unpopular Opinion," p. 813.
99. New York Times, June 21, 1956.
100. Alice Stewart, interview, November 1980.
101. Alice M. Stewart, et al., "A Survey of Childhood Malignancies," British Medical Journal (1958): 1495-1508.
102. Linus Pauling, "How Dangerous Is Radioactive Fallout?" Foreign Policy Bulletin, June 15, 1957, p. 149.
103. E. B. Lewis, "Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation," Science, May 17, 1957, pp. 965-972.
104. Austin Brues, "Critique of the Linear Theory of Carcinogenesis," Science, September 26, 1958, pp. 693-699.
105. H. Peter Metzger, The Atomic Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 97-98.
106. New York Daily News, March 20, 1955.
107. Metzger, Atomic Establishment, pp. 97-98.
108. Ibid.
109. J. A. Young and R. W. Perkins, "Fallout from Nuclear Testing—A Position Paper with Recommendations to the EPA," Battelle Pacific Northwest
Laboratories, Richland, Washington, September 19, 1979, Table 1.
110. United Nations, "United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 1958 Report," New York. See also New York Times, August 11,
1958.
111. AEC, "Strontium Program Quarterly Report," New York Operations Office, February 24, 1959.
112. Metzger, Atomic Establishment, p. 99.
113. Edward Teller, "The Compelling Need for Tests," Life, February 10, 1958, pp. 64-66.
114. Karl Z. Morgan, interview, November 1980.
115. Vast amounts of carbon 14 are produced by hydrogen bombs and large nuclear reactors. A beta-emitter with a half-life of about five thousand years, carbon
14, can be incorporated into the DNA of cells, creating significant biological damage. Another of the worrisome fallout isotopes is strontium 90, which is
chemically similar to the nutrient calcium and therefore is taken up in soil, plants, and animals, as calcium is. The principal "pathway" for radioactive
strontium is the ingestion of contaminated food, particularly milk, leafy vegetables, fruit, and root vegetables. Once it enters the body, strontium eventually
lodges in the bone, particularly the growing bone tissue of children, where half of it remains for twenty-eight years. Once inside the bone tissue it emits beta
particles, which can eventually lead to such diseases as leukemia or bone-marrow cancer.
116. Linus Pauling, No More War (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), pp. 74-75.
117. Albert Schweitzer, "A Declaration of Conscience," Saturday Review, May 18, 1957, pp. 17-20.
118. Pauling, No More War, p. 169.
119. Ibid., p. 160.
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid., p. 172.
122. Ibid., pp. 173, 174-178.
123. Ibid., p. 171. (The Fulton Lewis, Jr., broadcast was on February 12, 1958.)
124. Ibid., p. 175.
125. Miller and Nowak, The Fifties, pp. 63, 80, 413.
126. Ibid., p. 413.
127. Background Material for the Development of Radiation Standards, Federal Radiation Council Report No. 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1961). (Paul Tompkins was formerly deputy director of the AEC’s Office of Radiation Standards.)
128. Young and Perkins, "Fallout from Nuclear Testing," September 19, 1979.
129. Estimates and Evaluation of Fallout in the United States from Nuclear Weapons Testing Conducted Through 1962, Federal Radiation Council Report No. 4
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963).
130. New York Times, September 18, 1962.
131. Federal Radiation Council Report No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964).
132. U.S. Congress, House and Senate Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Environmental Effects of Producing Electric Power, (91st Cong., 1st sess.), October-
November 1969, Part 1, p. 409.
133. Metzger, Atomic Establishment, p. 107.
134. Harold Knapp, interview, February 1981.
135. Ibid.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid.
138. Charles L. Dunham, "Draft Document Average and Above Average Doses to the Thyroid of Children in the United States from Radioiodine from Nuclear
Weapons Tests," AEC Memo, October 24, 1962, files of House of Representatives Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and investigations, Washington,
D.C.
139. Gordon Dunning to N. H. Woodruff, AEC Memo Re: Knapp Paper, files of House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
140. U.S. Congress, House and Senate Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Fallout, Radiation Standards and Countermeasures, (88th Cong., 1st sess.), August
1963, Part 2, pp. 914-1082.
141. Harold Knapp, "Observed Relations Between Deposition Level of Fresh Fission Products from Nevada Tests and Resulting Levels of I-131 in Fresh Milk,"
AEC Report, March 1, 1963, files of House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
142. Robert Minogue, interview, February 1981.