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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 14, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The fallout and casualties of anti-communist madness

By Deirdre Griswold

Yet another scandal has surfaced involving the federal government, the scientific establishment and the military.

Somewhere between 10,000 and 75,000 people in the United States today may have thyroid cancer caused by atomic testing. Most of these cases have yet to be diagnosed. The government has known about it for years but has done nothing.

And it's all because of the fanatical anti-communism in this country during the 1950s.

The figures come from the National Cancer Institute. They are based on a report on radioactive fallout from 90 U.S. nuclear tests in Nevada. The dangerous levels of fallout throughout the country in the 1950s and 1960s are just now becoming publicly known.

Way back in 1982, Congress ordered the NCI to prepare a report on the health effects of the Nevada tests. Fifteen years later, that report has still not been released. According to Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, a draft was circulated three years ago but no action was taken.

Harkin has reason to be concerned. His own cancerous thyroid was removed in 1980.

New York Times reporter Matthew L. Wald broke the story on July 29, and then wrote a follow-up on Aug. 2. Wald had learned about several NCI draft reports that have been circulating within the government since 1994.

He wrote that the NCI finally talked to reporters Aug. 1 in a conference call, but that the information provided by its director, Dr. Richard D. Klausner, was a "modified" version of what was in the internal reports.

For example, earlier drafts said children in the path of the fallout had received 10 times the average dose of radioactive iodine. On Aug. 1, officials said that fallout exposed them to three to seven times the average.

Radioactive iodine is a fairly short-lived byproduct of splitting the atom. It drifts downwind of an atomic explosion, settling on grass, which can then be eaten by cows and goats. For a limited time, their milk is a vehicle for passing the iodine on to humans.

After being eaten, the iodine is concentrated in the thyroid gland. Children are most susceptible to this form of radiation contamination because they consume the most milk per body weight.

About 10 percent of thyroid cancers are fatal.

1952: COLD-WAR MADNESS EXPLODES

The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II to test the political fallout of this incredibly powerful weapon in the post-war world. The death toll was staggering.

It included not only the hundreds of thousands who died from the blasts but tens of thousands more who succumbed later to radiation poisoning.

The strategists in Washington and on Wall Street thought their monopoly on the super-weapon would insure not only their military hegemony but their political and economic domination of the world.

But the war had so weakened most of the other imperialist countries in Europe and Japan that the oppressed masses in Asia, Africa and the Middle East were encouraged to struggle for real independence. In China, Korea and Vietnam, liberation movements led by communists defeated pro- imperialist puppet governments. They formed an anti- imperialist world bloc together with the USSR and the Eastern European regimes.

By 1952 hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were engaged in a war to keep Korea in the capitalist orbit. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was hunting down communists and progressives in the United States. The CIA was trying to subvert the countries breaking free of colonialism.

The U.S. imperialist ruling class had thought that, as the winners in World War II, they could just walk into these countries and take them over for exploitation. Now they were fuming at the new relationship developing among the USSR, China and the Third World.

In that year of Cold-War madness, the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb, beginning a five-year period of intense nuclear testing.

A map in the July 29 Times showed that in over half the United States--in a belt stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Lakes--children born on April 1, 1952, would absorb dangerous amounts of radioactive iodine from milk over the next five years. Their total estimated level of iodine-131 thyroid contamination ranged from 10 to 95 rads, the highest being in areas of the Northwest and the Rocky Mountains directly down wind of the test sites.

The average adult level in the whole country during this period was two rads.

The government has been sitting on this information for at least three years. How many people born in the 1950s are now developing thyroid cancer? How many of them even have the health insurance to find out?

This is a time of budget cuts, remember. Supposedly to trim the huge government debt. Most of which comes from the enormous Pentagon spending for the Cold War.

So, many people with thyroid cancer--thanks to the Pentagon--may not get timely treatment for it. Thanks to the Pentagon.

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