Fallout in New York State
By 1963 an atmospheric nuclear test ban was in final stages of negotiation between the United States, the Soviet
Union, and Great Britain. Carrying through promises of the 1960 campaign, President John Kennedy had made it
respectable for people to question fallout from testing.
In a July 1963 speech televised to the nation Kennedy urged Senate ratification of the test ban treaty: "The
number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their
lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural hazards, but this is not a natural health
hazard—and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or malformation of one baby—who may be
born long after we are gone—should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics
towards which we can be indifferent."40
On August 20, 1963, Edward Teller testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in opposition to the
test ban treaty. "From the present levels of worldwide fallout, there is no danger," he said. "The real danger is that
you will frighten mothers from giving milk to their babies. By that, probably more damage has been done than by
anything else concerning this matter."41
Across the Capitol, at a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy hearing, University of Utah scientists Robert
Pendleton and Charles Mays presented evidence that because of the 1962 tests approximately a quarter-million
young children in Utah may have been exposed to average thyroid doses of 4.4 rads. Their analysis had compelled
the state of Utah to dump several thousand gallons of milk—which contained radioactive iodine levels eight times
above the official Federal Radiation Council guidelines. Dr. Mays estimated that as a result of the Harry test in 1953,
seven hundred infants in St. George received radiation doses to their thyroids 136 to 500 times higher than existing
permissible levels.42 Those doses could cause death, genetic mutation, brain damage, and hypothyroidism among
other diseases.
Underscoring this point, witness Eric Reiss, cofounder of the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information, added
that "in the period 1951-62, a number of local populations, especially Nevada, Idaho, and Utah . . . have been
exposed to fallout so intense as to represent a medically unacceptable hazard to children who may drink fresh locally
produced milk."43
On the next day a University of Pittsburgh Medical School professor of radiology, Dr. Ernest Sternglass,
presented testimony. His work evoked the greatest amount of concern from the Joint Committee. In a 1963 paper in
Science magazine,44 Sternglass had calculated that the latest two years of nuclear testing fallout exposed everybody
living in the Northern Hemisphere to a radiation dose of two hundred to four hundred millirads, roughly equivalent
to a pelvic X ray. Citing Dr. Alice Stewart’s findings of a 50 percent increase in childhood cancer risks from fetal X
rays,45 Sternglass estimated that there would be an additional eight hundred childhood cancer deaths in the U.S. from
the 1961-1962 tests alone.
Sternglass had applied those estimates to the Troy/Albany area in upstate New York—where average radiation
doses went as high as a few thousand millirads as a result of fallout from the 1953 Simon test in Nevada. Sternglass
calculated a doubling in child cancer risks for the residents of Troy/Albany.46
Sternglass submitted his findings on fallout effects to Science magazine for publication. In its early days, Science
had strongly questioned the atomic establishment. In 1955 the magazine vigorously attacked Lewis Strauss for
scientific suppression and had published E. B. Lewis’s papers opposing the "threshold" concept of radiation safety.
But now the editorship of Science had passed to Philip Abelson, a physicist deeply involved in the government’s
nuclear program from the Manhattan Project on. Abelson also served on the AEC’s General Advisory Committee
and on its Project Plowshare Committee, which was promoting "peaceful" uses of nuclear explosives. Not
surprisingly, Abelson rejected Sternglass’s article on fallout contending that "there is really no evidence of the
functional relationship between the number of X-rays taken and cancer mortality."47
Sternglass soon resubmitted his paper with comments from Dr. Russell Morgan, one of America’s foremost
experts on X rays and the effects of low-level radiation. Morgan praised Sternglass’s paper and voiced support for
Alice Stewart’s findings of definite links between X rays and cancer—findings which by then had been confirmed by
Dr. Brian MacMahon of Harvard. Within a month after resubmission, Science was forced to accept Sternglass’s
paper.
But in March of 1964 the magazine printed a letter from James H. Lade of the New York State Health
Department attacking Sternglass’s findings. Lade wrote that "the cancer report files of this department reveal no
increase in the incidence of cancer or leukemia over the past 10 years in children of the Albany, Troy and
Schenectady areas—who were 15 years or younger in 1963—as compared with children of this age elsewhere in
upstate New York."48
A key phrase in Lade’s argument came when he said the Albany area’s leukemia rate appeared normal "as
compared with children of this age elsewhere in upstate New York." The entire upstate New York region had
received heavy fallout on April 26, 1953, but measurements there had been classified as secret by the AEC. "Under
these circumstances," Sternglass reasoned, "there would of course be little or no difference in leukemia rates between
Troy, Albany, Schenectady and elsewhere in upstate New York." Lade’s new information actually "showed that
beginning in the fourth to fifth years after the 1953 rainout, the yearly number of reported leukemia cases
quadrupled," according to Sternglass.49
Unable to pry loose any further data from New York State’s uncooperative health department, Ernest Sternglass
presented an update of his Troy/Albany paper to the Health Physics Society’s annual meeting, held in Denver in June
1968. Reports of Sternglass’s findings received wide publicity in the U.S. and abroad. A month after the annual
meeting R. E. Alexander, chairman of the Health Physics Society public-relations committee, sent a letter to the
society’s board members, complaining that the "publicity about the paper of E. J. Sternglass . . . was damaging to the
nuclear industry."50 Continuing his research, Sternglass began poring through U.S. vital statistics for the three upstate
counties in New York. While copying the numbers he noticed that births had increased by only about 50 percent
while leukemia cases went up by more than 300 percent. What was even more striking, fetal deaths stopped
declining while intense fallout was taking place; seven years after testing, fetal deaths resumed a downward trend.
He then began a detailed comparison of actual measured fallout levels made public by the AEC, with fetal and infant
death rates in New York State. "Each time the levels of the short lived isotopes, such as I-131 and Strontium-90,
shot up to their highest peaks, there was a sharp rise in fetal mortality within a year."51
The first large jumps in fetal deaths were "followed by a second slower rise culminating between three and five
years later," Sternglass discovered. The second peaks were especially high "probably because each of the enormous
fusion bombs . . . produced hundreds of times as much Strontium-90 . . . in order to get a ‘bigger bang for a buck,’ as
U.S. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson put it. Edward Teller and his weapons engineers had surrounded the
hydrogen bombs with cheap, abundant Uranium-238. As a result, the total explosive force could be doubled . . . but
the levels of Strontium-90 in the bones of living creatures vastly increased."52
By fall 1968 Sternglass had estimated that atmospheric nuclear testing caused the deaths of 375,000 babies—in
the United States alone—before their first birthdays between 1951 and 1966.53
Sternglass discussed his research with colleagues in the Federation of American Scientists. They agreed to hold a
public meeting in Pittsburgh on October 23, 1968. Meanwhile, Sternglass submitted copies to Science and the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Pittsburgh television reporter Stuart Brown contacted Science editor Philip Abelson for his comments on the
Sternglass paper. Contrary to the standard procedure of keeping editorial correspondence confidential, Abelson read
statements from scientific reviews of Sternglass’s paper responding to Lade on the Troy/Albany situation. Abelson
then advised Brown against using Sternglass’s findings on the air.54 A few weeks later Science returned the
Troy/Albany and infant-mortality papers with a rejection notice.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, after a review of Sternglass’s infant-mortality paper, agreed to publish it in
their April 1969 issue. Sternglass later learned from the magazine’s managing editor, Richard S. Lewis, that the
Bulletin withstood pressure "both before and after publication in the form of long distance phone calls from
Washington from individuals who claimed to be long-term Government friends of the journal." The callers informed
Lewis that publication of the Sternglass article was a "grave mistake."55
40. Ernest Sternglass, Secret Fallout, pp. 27-28.
41. U.S. Congress, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, (88th Cong., 1st sess.), August 12-27, 1963.
42. Fallout, Radiation Standards and Countermeasures, June 1963, Part 1.
43. Ibid., August 1963, Part 2.
44. Ernest J. Sternglass, "Cancer: Relation of Prenatal Radiation to Development of Disease in Childhood," Science, June 7, 1963, pp. 1102-1104.
45. Stewart, et al., "Survey of Childhood Malignancies," pp. 1495-1508.
46. Sternglass, Secret Fallout, p. 21.
47. Ibid., p. 23.
48. J. H. Lade, "More on the 1953 Fallout in Troy," Science, March 6, 1964, pp. 994-995.
49. Sternglass, Secret Fallout, p. 43.
50. Ibid., p. 52.
51. Ibid., pp. 56, 57, 63.
52. Ibid., p. 65.
53. Ibid., p. 73.
54. Ibid., p. 75.
55. Ibid., p. 97.