With over-all responsibility for making the atomic bomb during World War II, General Leslie R. Groves, head of the U.S. Army Manhattan Project, explained that in 1943, "The most urgent problem was to determine the toxicity of the materials we were using: primarily, uranium and plutonium compounds; the related heavy elements, such as radium, polonium and thorium; and certain accessory process materials, such as fluorine and beryllium. This required the study of the manner in which the materials might be introduced into the body, whether by ingestion, inhalation, skin absorption or in other ways." Beryllium scars the lungs and fluorine attacks the bones. Uranium hexafluoride (UF6) is a compound used in the uranium enrichment process that produces fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
The Manhattan Project became the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) 1 January 1947. General Groves worried that worker injury lawsuits would compromise atomic bomb secrecy during World War II. After the war, the AEC worried that lawsuits would jeopardize continued development of nuclear weapons. A secret AEC document, dated 17 April 1947, warned young doctors, "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such field work should be classified 'Secret.'"
A 1948 classified document from the AEC’s Insurance Branch states, “We can see the possibility of a shattering effect on the morale of the employees if they became aware that there was substantial reason to question the standards of safety under which they are working. In the hands of labor unions the result of this study would add substance to demands for extra-hazardous pay….[K]nowledge of the results of this study might increase the number of claims of occupational injury due to radiation and place a powerful weapon in the hands of plaintiff’s attorney.”
“Like miners’ canaries,” says David Michaels, “workers in the chemical industry are often the first line of exposure to environmental toxins.” During the Cold War, AEC lawyers repeatedly rejected claims of workers who became poisoned as a result of nuclear radiation and exposure to deadly uranium, plutonium, and fluorine. “There is no danger. Therefore you are not sick. Now go back to work!” Michaels explains: “As for the workers in the weapons project, protection from the highest levels of radiation exposure was the primary focus of the government’s concern. Many of the workers were not told the names or hazardous nature of the other materials with which they worked; if they were told, they were prohibited from sharing this information with their spouses and physicians. (To this day, many workers are still not told this information.) If they subsequently became ill, that was just too bad. First the Atomic Energy Commission and then DOE [Department of Energy], hand in hand with their private-sector contractors, systematically denied that working with some of the most hazardous materials ever known had made any workers sick. This was an utterly indefensible position, but boundless resources were expended on its behalf.”
The Department of Defense “faced many of the same problems DOE faced - civilian workers who had been exposed to beryllium, radiation, nerve gas, rocket fuel, munitions, and asbestos - and had never addressed any of them.” The Department of Justice had always been successful in shielding the government from liability in worker injury claims.
Dr. Michaels, an epidemiologist, writes that lead is “the mother of all industrial poisons” - a neural toxin particularly devastating to the health of children! “The metal is a potent toxin that affects the brain, the kidney, blood, bones, sperm, everything, and it is especially toxic in rapidly growing bodies–that is, infants and young children.”
In the 1960s, Herbert Needleman, M.D., a courageous pediatrician at Temple University, discovered a direct correlation between lowered IQ and increased lead content of baby teeth collected from children in North Philadelphia. He got the idea from the 1950s, when strontium 90, a by-product of atomic testing in Utah, became a component in the teeth and skeletons of baby boomers across the USA. AEC researchers harvested organs of plutonium workers and secretly gathered bones of children worldwide to measure radioactive fallout. Dr. Needleman's evidence-based research in the 1960s indicated that "leaded" gasoline exhaust poisoned babies both inside and outside the womb.
Lead poisoning was perpetuated in the USA for decades by Robert A. Kehoe, Medical Director of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. Dr. Kehoe, the ultimate “mercenary scientist,” gave "scientific cover" for Ethyl, becoming the principal defender of keeping "highly profitable" lead in gasoline, which contributed to the poisoning of millions of American children from 1928 until TEL or tetraethyl lead was outlawed in 1986. Industry-owned research facilities conducted lead studies, usually with pro-lead results. Collaboration with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was an ideal arrangement because radioactive material, like lead in tetraethyl gasoline, was becoming a component in the bones of exposed U.S. citizens. Kehoe’s research was carefully crafted to benefit industrial sponsors - Ethyl, DuPont, Standard Oil, Pennsalt, etc. - not the health of U.S. citizens. “Thousands of tons of lead were inevitably deposited in the nation’s air, soil, and water!”
Formerly with the Manhattan Project, Clair Patterson, a geochemist at Caltech, analyzed core drillings of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, indicating a direct link between the use of tetraethyl lead gasoline and its presence in the polar ice cap. In Polar Regions, atmospheric dust is picked up in snowflakes and as it reaches earth, the ice layer is preserved for thousands of years. Each deposit is an intact record of what was in the air when the snow came down, accumulating “like pages in a book.” With assistance from a U.S. Army Research Group, Patterson measured less lead in the deeper core of older ice indicating concentrations in the environment had increased 350 percent between 1930 and 1965. Dr. Patterson then analyzed two-thousand-year-old Peruvian skeletons and found there was almost no lead in their bones; Americans in the 1970s had three thousand times more lead in their bodies than prehistoric Peruvians.
Lead poisoning of children resulting in brain damage and death represents one of the most hideous public health disasters in America. “How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health” is well illustrated by the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation’s use of fraudulent science. Incredibly, under oath in 1966, Dr. Robert A. Kehoe told Congress that he and his colleagues at the Kettering Laboratory in Cincinnati, Ohio "had been looking for 30 years for evidence of bad effects from leaded gasoline in the general population and had found none." Kehoe argued that lead is "normal" in the human body and even recommended, for the sake of progress, elevating the lead level in gasoline. There was, he said, "not the slightest evidence" of harm from airborne lead, and claimed that leaded gasoline posed no risk at all to public health.
On a personal note, my father survived the Normandy invasion, but not the practice of medicine after World War II. In a 1947 x-ray report, Lt. J. Russell Davey, Jr., MC, USNR, a 29-year-old radiologist, inadvertently exposed a secret AEC study conducted by Robert A. Kehoe, M.D., monitoring workers exposed to hydrogen fluoride (HF) at the Pennsylvania Salt Company in Easton, PA. HF was manufactured by Pennsalt as an essential component in the separation process that produced uranium hexafluoride for the atomic bomb. Dr. Kehoe and the AEC were determined that exposed Pennsalt workers did not learn that HF was invading their soft tissue and bones. However, a radiologist’s x-ray film provides visual evidence of poisoning and its effect on the skeletal system. “All of the films show osteosclerosis previously described and considered to be as a result of fluoride poisoning…Very truly yours, J. Russell Davey, M.D." Guided by the Hippocratic Oath, Dr. Davey sent x-ray results directly to the Pennsalt plant in Easton, PA rather than the Kettering Laboratory in Ohio, where interpretations were routinely adjusted in order to protect the U.S. nuclear weapons industry from potential lawsuits. The AEC preemptively took the medico-legal position that “fluoride poisoning” rarely occurs in the United States. If plaintiffs were successful with their suits, the U.S. government would be contractually required to reimburse corporate bomb factories. Described by outraged AEC contractors as “the offending radiologist,” Dr. Davey died suddenly in 1948 of undetermined causes.
David Michaels should be commended for giving a voice to a generation of poisoned children, downwinders, atomic veterans, uranium miners, and the many U.S. workers poisoned in our weapons factories. In the Clinton administration, he served as Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health in the Department of Energy (DOE), the chief safety officer for the nation’s nuclear weapons facilities. Dr. Michaels was the architect of the historic initiative that “made peace with the past,” compensating U.S. nuclear weapons workers for illnesses developed while making or testing atomic weapons.
ISBN-13:
978-0195300673
ISBN-10:
019530067X
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