With scientists like Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov warning about hazards of bomb fallout, and with the government issuing repeated denials, a moral crisis was imminent for Gofman. Soon after he took over the lab, an official at Livermore asked him to help suppress publication of the work of AEC scientist Harold Knapp, who concluded that doses of radioactive iodine from bomb tests in Utah were much higher than the AEC had publicly admitted. Despite the warning that "we can't afford to have him publish that evidence," Gofman reviewed Knapp's analysis with his staff, and found it accurate. Refusing to yield to political heat, Gofman urged publication of the data, which the AEC reluctantly allowed.
Nuclear tensions eased after the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, signed by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, banned atmospheric nuclear tests. But the treaty did not mean the end of the battle over fallout's harm. In 1969 University of Pittsburgh physicist Ernest Sternglass startled many when he published an article in Esquire magazine showing that for the first time in the twentieth century, the steady rate of decline in US infant death rates had halted as bombs were tested in the atmosphere. Sternglass calculated that 400,000 additional American infants died in the 1950s and early '60s, and suggested that fallout was the cause.
The AEC called on Gofman and his colleague Arthur Tamplin to debunk the article. Although Gofman later acknowledged that "Sternglass may have been right," the two estimated that excess infant deaths were about 4,000, not 400,000. But even that wasn't enough for AEC officials, who told them to publish only a critique with no estimates. They ignored the AEC and published the paper using the 4,000 figure.
By now, Gofman had built a reputation for being an obstacle to the AEC party line, but he had yet to be disciplined. A more cautious person might have stopped insisting that nuclear power was harming people, to preserve his professional status. But that wasn't John Gofman. Just months after the Sternglass controversy, he turned to radiation routinely emitted by nuclear power reactors, the darlings of the nuclear industry, heralded as a "peaceful" use of the atom.
In late 1969 Gofman and Tamplin were among the first scientists to oppose nuclear power in a paper asserting that even low-dose radiation harmed humans. "I realized that the entire nuclear power program was based on a fraud--namely that there was a 'safe' amount of radiation, a permissible dose that wouldn't hurt anybody," recalled Gofman. The duo calculated a worst-case scenario in which 32,000 additional Americans would die of cancer each year if everybody received the permissible AEC dose from reactors.
Nuclear tensions eased after the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, signed by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, banned atmospheric nuclear tests. But the treaty did not mean the end of the battle over fallout's harm. In 1969 University of Pittsburgh physicist Ernest Sternglass startled many when he published an article in Esquire magazine showing that for the first time in the twentieth century, the steady rate of decline in US infant death rates had halted as bombs were tested in the atmosphere. Sternglass calculated that 400,000 additional American infants died in the 1950s and early '60s, and suggested that fallout was the cause.
The AEC called on Gofman and his colleague Arthur Tamplin to debunk the article. Although Gofman later acknowledged that "Sternglass may have been right," the two estimated that excess infant deaths were about 4,000, not 400,000. But even that wasn't enough for AEC officials, who told them to publish only a critique with no estimates. They ignored the AEC and published the paper using the 4,000 figure.
By now, Gofman had built a reputation for being an obstacle to the AEC party line, but he had yet to be disciplined. A more cautious person might have stopped insisting that nuclear power was harming people, to preserve his professional status. But that wasn't John Gofman. Just months after the Sternglass controversy, he turned to radiation routinely emitted by nuclear power reactors, the darlings of the nuclear industry, heralded as a "peaceful" use of the atom.
In late 1969 Gofman and Tamplin were among the first scientists to oppose nuclear power in a paper asserting that even low-dose radiation harmed humans. "I realized that the entire nuclear power program was based on a fraud--namely that there was a 'safe' amount of radiation, a permissible dose that wouldn't hurt anybody," recalled Gofman. The duo calculated a worst-case scenario in which 32,000 additional Americans would die of cancer each year if everybody received the permissible AEC dose from reactors.
No comments:
Post a Comment