ATOMIC SHADOWS
  • Home
  • Who's Your Daddy?
    • Cryptography - Cyphers, Codes and Characters >
      • Enigma, Bombe & Beyond
      • Code Breakers
    • The Chief's Service Log >
      • Joint Task Forces Served
      • Results. Note Excuses.
      • Ship Assignments - 1939-1960
    • WWII Airwave Romance
  • Naval Gazing
    • Pacific Proving Grounds
    • USS Estes - 1952-1961 - PPG >
      • USS CURTIS Veteran's Notes
    • 1946 - OP Crossroads
    • 1948 - OP Sandstone
    • 1949-1951 - AEC Oak Ridge - Atomic Prep
    • 1951 - OP Greenhouse
    • 1952 - OP IVY
    • 1954 - OP Castle-Bravo
    • 1954 - OP Wigwam
    • 1954 - OP Passage to Freedom - N. Vietnam
    • 1955 - OP Pull Out - Tachen Islands Evacuation
    • 1956 -OP Redwing
    • 1958 - OP Hardtack
    • Hunters Point Rad Labs
    • Treasure Island Naval Base
    • Navy Terms, Slang & Trivia
  • Fallout
    • Bases & Rad Labs
    • Development of the H-Bomb
    • Physically Compromised >
      • Medical Notes & Documents
    • Known Effects of Ionized Radiation Exposure
  • Strange Attractors
    • Rare Photos - Tinian Island with Shutterbuggy
    • Gen. Paul Tibbets - 90th Birthday Celebration
    • Rare Photos - Lost Squadron
    • Fallout Shelters - Then & Now >
      • The Atomic Era
    • Modern Art as a Cold War Weapon of the CIA
    • UFOs & Nukes at the Pacific Proving Grounds >
      • UFOs at PPG
  • Links
    • Atomic Vet Medical Awareness for Healthcare Providers >
      • Atomic Vet's Offspring Study
      • National Nuclear Security Admin.-DOE
      • To the Widows and Children
      • To General Public & Healthcare Workers
    • Cold War Remnant: Cancer for Baby Boomers
    • RECA - Radiation Exposure Compensation Act >
      • Relevant Records List - Defense Threat Reduction Agency
    • Atomic Veteran Pioneers >
      • Veteran Stories
      • Honoring Cold War Veterans
    • Broadcasts, Bios & Documentaries
“…taking first one side and then the other
and making quite a conversation of it altogether.”
  ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

COLD WAR REMNANT  Cancer for Baby Boomers

WALTER SHAPIRO  -  Senior Correspondent - Politics Daily

Even with a half-century's hindsight, the U.S. government's willingness to risk the health of the nation's children seems somewhere between unfathomable and unconscionable.

Between 1951 and 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated more than 100 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere over its Nevada Test Site, just 65 miles from Las Vegas. The radioactive fallout menaced not only the ranchers and the miners unlucky enough to live in that remote area of southern Nevada, but -- as a new study unveiled Tuesday demonstrated -- untold millions of unsuspecting Americans as well.The winds carried Strontium-90, Iodine-129 and other lethal particles across a broad swath of the country. Infants who were bottle-fed, which was then considered the modern approach, were particularly vulnerable to the Strontium-90 that ended up in cows' milk.

In 1961, as John Kennedy was poised to resume atmospheric testing after a two-year moratorium, he met with White House science adviser Jerome Wiesner in the Oval Office one rainy day. The president wondered how fallout reached the earth. Wiesner explained that it was washed out of the clouds by rain. "You mean," Kennedy asked, "it's in the rain out there?" As Wiesner tells it, the president then "looked out the window, looked very sad and didn't say a word for several minutes." Nonetheless JFK, fearful that the Soviet Union might score a nuclear breakthrough, authorized a new round of above-ground testing before negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

With Nov. 9, 2009 marking the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall, Cold War retrospectives are again in season. But the grim legacy of nuclear testing is apt to be lost amid the memories of Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, the Berlin airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Ronald Reagan's famed exhortation at the Brandenburg Gate. The mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert seem so long ago, so devoid of any real-world consequences.

But a study released Tuesday documents the enhanced cancer risk that Baby Boomers face because of these long-ago atmospheric tests. Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano analyzed the lingering radiation in infant teeth (donated long ago by the parents of baby boys born in the St. Louis area between 1959 and 1961) and compared the results to contemporary cancer data from the subjects. "What we found out was shocking," Mangano said. "Persons who had died of cancer had more than double the Strontium-90 in their (baby) teeth than did healthy persons." The original variance in Strontium-90 levels among individuals, he explained, was caused by seemingly small factors such as how much milk expectant mothers drank, diet and the source of the municipal water supply.

So where did these teeth come from? In the late 1950s, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis collected teeth from about 300,000 children and chemically analyzed them to demonstrate the prevalence of nuclear fallout. Even though it contributed to public support for the Test Ban Treaty, the Washington University study had been all but forgotten. But in 2001 a biology professor at the university discovered 85,000 left-over teeth in tiny manila envelopes that had never been used in this Cold War research.

The 53-year-old Mangano, the executive director of the small anti-nuclear Radiation and Public Health Project, saw the potential to use these teeth to conduct a longitudinal study measuring the life-long effects from atmospheric testing. For reasons of simplicity and consistency, he initially limited himself to boys born during a two-year moratorium in testing (so only lingering fallout was measured) who had not been breast-fed. "This is the pay dirt right here," he said excitedly Tuesday. "All the 50 years of collecting teeth, discussing bombs tests and all, this is the payoff. The difference is statistically significant." Mangano's paper, which is slated to posted Wednesday on his organization's Web site, has been submitted to an academic journal where it will be subjected to peer review.

Accompanied by model and anti-nuclear activist Christie Brinkley, Mangano had planned to unveil his study at a Washington press conference in the Rayburn House Office Building. There was only one small public relations problem: I was the only reporter who showed up. So in between discussing cancer and Strontium-90, I found myself in the midst of a where-did-we-go-wrong therapy session featuring an earnest epidemiologist and an articulate and committed spokesmodel, whose bitter divorce has been tabloid fodder for weeks. "We'll have to do something celebrity heavy in Manhattan," Brinkley declared. "That's the only way to get media these days."

Mangano and Brinkley view this research as a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear power. What fascinates me, however, is that 50 years ago, the angry scientists and the ban-the-bomb protesters were right – nuclear testing was dangerous for children and other living things. "Maybe at the beginning of bomb testing, people weren't sure how much this would spread across the globe," Mangano said. "But by the mid-1950s, after dozens of bombs had been tested, they noticed the radiation levels going up and up in the milk and the water. They knew that this was trouble."

American history is littered with examples of the government and powerful corporations callously jeopardizing the health and even the lives of the poor, the downtrodden and racial and ethnic minorities. But nuclear testing illustrates a much different lesson: we all share the same Earth. The rain that carried the radiation fell on the progeny of politicians and generals as well as the children of farm laborers and ditch-diggers. There was as much Strontium-90 in the milk fed to infants in wealthy suburbs as in the milk on sale in bodegas across the street from housing projects.

At the height of the late 1950s battle over atmospheric testing, super-hawk physicist Edward Teller scoffed at complaints that nuclear fallout was a danger worth contemplating. As Teller wrote, "The living organism is so complicated and the intertwining of cause and effect is so intricate that we may never know the biological effect of so small a cause as worldwide radiation." Radiation was never a "small" factor. And if Mangano's new study survives academic scrutiny, we may finally begin to understand the biological effects of those mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert.
Picture

It's a mix and match medical crap shoot
for most of us
2nd Generation Exposure Victims.

The following are generally recognized as a result of radiation exposure or the offspring of an Atomic Vet.

Random Sampling of
638 Atomic Vets

A questionnaire circulated by the National Assn. of Atomic Veterans solicited 638 respondents.  
- 20% were fathers of children 
   with birth defects

- 17% reported stillbirths
- 5% recorded premature births 
- 4% said they were sterile 
Picture
RECA: 
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act

Links to necessary forms and websites to beging the process.
Picture
©2020 Victoria Moore
All rights reserved.


Copyright Notice
Privacy Policy

Disclaimer

About the Author


My Fathers repeated radiation exposures compromised his health and mine, altered my DNA, and since as a result I can't reproduce, thankfully the suffering from this will stop with me.  Chief Moore was still classified above Top Secret and under Q-Clearance during his entire lifetime.  As a result, we were isolated and insulated while we fought his exotic cancers as a military guinea pig for 20+ years, from 1969 to 1989 at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital.  It has altered our lives in ways no one saw coming.   Add the consequences of another 25+ years after his death and to still be learning about who he really was is inspiring.  
​

Our family has suffered the impact, like so many others effected by the US Government's atomic, nuclear and thermonuclear and human experiments in the Pacific Proving Grounds.   The story continues, so I might as well tell it while the fight goes on for the government to acknowledge the health crisis they caused for 2nd Gens and provide some mechanism for screening and healthcare services from military or VA medical professionals who are informed of our compromised state of health.

Contact

childrenofatomicveterans@gmail.com​
Picture