HIGH TECH TUESDAY
Global Radiation
By Dewey Davis-Thompson
Editor's note: I borrowed heavily from an original article by Cat Lazaroff over at Environmental News Service.
"Nuclear weapons states owe an honest accounting, treatment and compensation to the victims of the nuclear age," says Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). Furthermore, the victims of nuclear war and research are not just in Nevada and Japan, but all over the world.
Close studies by IEER reveal that nuclear weapons testing exposed millions of people around the globe to radioactive fallout, and may have led to fatal cancer in 15,000 people. The sobering report suggests that 80,000 people who were in the USA at any time between 1951 and 2000 will contract cancer as a result of fallout from atmospheric testing.
Global radiation from U.S. tests in the Marshall Islands and Johnston Atoll in the Pacific region, Soviet tests in Semipalatinsk - now in Kazakhstan - Novaya Zemlya, Russia, and British tests on Christmas Island were also examined in this report. "Hot spots due to testing in Nevada occurred as far away as New York and Maine. Hot spots from U.S. Pacific area testing and also Soviet testing were scattered across the globe."
New maps show fallout, radiation dose and fallout patterns by county. These fallout areas demonstrate where excess cancers could occur because of the radiation.
In the 1950s the US government informed photographic film producers of expected fallout patterns so they could protect their film supply, but did nothing to inform milk producers so that they could protect a vital component of the food supply.
"A 1997 report indicates that some farm children, those who drank goat's milk in the 1950s in high fallout areas, were as severely exposed as the worst exposed children after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. Such exposure creates a high probability of a variety of illnesses," said Dr. Makhijani. "Yet the government did nothing to inform the people in these affected areas."
For most people, the major exposure route was the ingestion of cows' milk contaminated as the result of iodine-131 deposited on pasture grasses. But there are other exposure routes such as contaminated air, vegetables, eggs and various dairy products.
People drinking goat's milk may have a higher risk of fallout related cancers. The researchers learned that goats' milk concentrates radioactive iodine-131 more than cows' milk. "It is estimated that at that time about 20,000 individuals in the U.S. population consumed goats' milk," the report notes. "Thyroid doses to those individuals could have been 10 to 20 times greater than those to other residents of the same county who were the same age and sex and drank the same amount of cows' milk."
There are hot spots thousands of miles from tests sites and the new definition of "downwinder" should include all of them, say some researchers
"The new fallout maps and radiation dose estimates show that nuclear weapons states not only harmed their own people but also people in other countries," added Dr. Makhijani. "U.S., Soviet, and other testing likely created hot spots in Canada and Scandinavia, for instance. There may have been hot spots in many other countries all over the world."
"It is high time for the United Nations to create a Global Truth Commission that would examine in detail comparable to the U.S government studies the harm that has been inflicted upon the people of the world by nuclear weapons production and testing," concluded Dr. Makhijani.
For more information and a peek at the new maps, follow the links on the left.
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