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prof: okay,let me start in. this lecture is about nationalsecurity, and it's about the conflictthat's involved during the twentieth century betweennational security and environmental quality and humanhealth. so i want to explore that,because so much money in the world is spent on nationalsecurity, and it has the potential toinvade individual rights, to diminish personal freedom,to diminish privacy.
at the same time,it has the potential to concentrate power and authorityamong elites, political elites,wealthy elites, technical elites,so that it's threatening to democratic participation andpolicy making in a variety of ways. and as we move through thecourse, you'll find that secrecy is notjust an issue that we need to figure out how to manage betterin the public sector relative to
classified information,and this is the topic of today's session. but it's also a critical issuein the private sector. the growing use of confidentialbusiness information, the growing obscurity ofproduct ingredients as globalized markets causeproducts and services to cross national borders without anyclear identity about components or potential effects. so national security andenvironmental quality.
i want you to think about thiscase and other cases that we deal with as a problem ofmanaging intelligence. i'm not meaning to imply thatother people are not intelligent,i'm meaning to hopefully get you to think about the idea of alegal system that would produce a public that was literate andcapable of understanding the quality of the environmentaround them, what's threatening and what'snot, so that potentially they could manage their exposure tochemicals,
they could manage the effect ofhuman behavior on a variety of environmental issues,such as endangered species. so the purpose for the title ofmy book that i'm having you read, you poor things,is the idea of thinking about the origin of knowledge. you know, where do we get theinformation? where do we get the data? where do we get the knowledge? who produces it?
and what we'll see today isthat knowledge about the environmental effects ofnational security are produced predominately by the defensedepartment. they control sites,they control the technology in weaponry and weapon deliverysystems, making it extremely difficultfor the public to understand really what the dangers mightbe. where does the knowledge flow? is it intelligible?
is it understood? the distinction between is itintelligible and is it understood is really critical. it involves literacy,it involves educational background, technicalcompetence. and who owns it? this is really a key questionfor law. you can think about this interms of it being an intellectual property rightquestion.
should the public own it? should the government be ableto keep the knowledge from the public? should the private sector beallowed to own it, and should they be allowed tokeep knowledge from the public? so think about it as a problemof understanding production and flow of knowledge. because environmental qualityis always going to be elusive until we create a public thatreally is far more intelligent,
so to speak,understanding, than it currently is. so what are the purposes ofsecrecy? i'm kind of fascinated by thegrowing classification of information in the publicsector. so that in u.s. history, never before has thegovernment been classifying more information than it is today. you know, at the same time,there's a very interesting
cultural change that we'rewitnessing in your generation related to facebook. i mean, i have never seen ageneration be so interested in revealing secrets or informationabout themselves as your generation is. so it's a disconnect in a waybetween government policy and what's going on in socialcircles among younger generations. how do terror and warfaredepend upon secrecy?
when does secrecy threatennational security? when is secrecy necessary fornational security? and how is it related toindividual rights? these are key questions that ihope you'll keep in mind as we move through this lecture today. there are common scripts inenvironmental history, no matter whether or not youconsider this case or the case of endangered species,the case of managing water quality,managing sustainable
agriculture. who knew about the problem? who knew about contaminants inthis case? when did they know? when did they inform the public? and what did they do about theproblem? these are critical questions,and secrecy is a central component of all of them. so that the history that i wantto go through today is really
one that is very brief. it only spans the periodbetween 1944 and 1963. so in this period,the atomic weapons, the first atomic weapons weredesigned and tested, the first one at los alamos innew mexico in 1945, followed by two uses of atomicweapons, the only two aggressive uses inworld history. one on hiroshima and the otheron nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousandsof people and resulting in
injuries and death,inheritable mutations that have affected generations ofjapanese. so this compressed period isreally quite striking. now, why in the world would webe talking about this issue, which seems so old now,it's part of the cold war, in a class on currentenvironmental law and policy? well, i'll tell you a bit of astory. in 2003, i was in the beineckerare book library. and i don't know if you havevisited the beinecke library,
but it really is a remarkableplace. it's got a wonderful,rich store of information, especially on the americanwest. but i found out just by surfingthe net that they also have all of rachel carson's originalresearch material. now, rachel carson wrote"silent spring" and "the sea aroundus" and a number of other books,and is rather famous in environmental history,particularly for her work
trying to get the public to wakeup about the dangers of pesticides,especially related to wildlife because she was a wildlifebiologist working for the fish and wildlife service. well it turns out that all ofher original research materials, including about 120 boxes ofmaterial, are stored in the basement of beinecke library. so going through those,as i was trying to understand the history of pesticides,i found one file that was on
nuclear weapons testing. and that file was incrediblydense. and as she conducted herresearch, by the way, it's very different than whatwe do today when our research is almost all electronic. she would hand copy material,there were no copy machines that she had access to at thatpoint in time. and then she would write notes,little side notes interpreting it as she went along.
so going through this,i realized that all of her work on pesticides where she wonderedwhat happened to them once they were released. where they went,how did they make their way into the soil? why were wildlife,the canaries in the mine in a sense, what were the wildlifetelling us about human hazards and human risk? and what was wrong with currentlaw and policy that would allow
that kind of release andnon-accountability on the part of the private sector? so she learned that way ofthinking, that narrative logic,she learned that, not by studying pesticides,by looking at the history of the atomic energy commission inthe 1950s and how they came to understand radionuclides andwhat happened to them and the kind of threat they posed towater quality, to air quality,how they got into wildlife,
how they got into human tissue. so this is a story of today. so the idea that the success inany of these cases is dependent upon very high quality scienceis a very important idea. and remember what i said theother day, that perhaps ninety-fivepercent of the science in the field of environmental scienceis conducted in the private sector,it never sees the light of day. well in this case,this is probably the best
example of state science at anenormous scale. the atomic energy commissionhad an unlimited budget, they had unlimited authority,and they had unlimited capacity to tell a story about danger andthe importance of pursuing atomic weapons development inorder to protect national security. so this time span just givesyou the number of tests per year between 1945,or actually, the number of explosions,1945 and 1962.
in 1963, president kennedyworked with the soviets to pass the limited test ban treaty. and since that time,atmospheric testing has been severely limited. known nuclear tests worldwidebetween '45 and '96, roughly about 2,000,maybe about 2,400. after 1963, the majority oftests, or the number of tests actually went up. but most of them wentunderground.
so underground testing isallowed, and we'll see later on in the lecture that there havebeen certain parts of the world, it's been agreed among nationsthat have this nuclear capacity to avoid testing. so outer space is now offlimits. testing in the south pacific isnow off limits because it was the site of many highly intensetests of hydrogen bombs. and also, testing on the polesis restricted by international agreement.
so this was a very limitedperiod of time, and many people don'tunderstand where these tests were conducted. some in the south atlantic,some in mississippi, some in japan,new mexico, the pacific ocean, the nevada test site,johnson island, christmas island,eniwetok and bikini, which are part of the marshallislands in the pacific. i'll be speaking more aboutthis and show you some film
clips on next tuesday when wereconvene. one interesting aspect of thishistory was the behavior of klaus fuchs,who was a theoretical scientist working at los alamos on thedevelopment of the first weapon, the first atomic bomb,during what is known as the manhattan project. and he had access to top-secretmaterial. a very highly skilledphysicist, and he passed most of what he knew on to the sovietsin the late 1940s.
so he was tried and convictedof espionage in britain in the 1950s, and he served nine yearsout of a fourteen-year sentence. this is fascinating to me. think about the nature of thesanction here. so that the soviets gainedtheir understanding of how the u.s. produced nuclear weapons andgained an understanding of what our strategy was,how we were testing it, how we were monitoring theeffects,
what the intensity of theradiation was. and the man serves only nineyears in prison. the lesson is kind of curious. most secrets have very shortlives, and the more valuable they are, the more limited istheir life. so i think about the idea ofcreating a secret as creating a property right. and so it creates a propertyright and its value is dependent on many aspects of itscharacter, and we'll explore
that as we move through. the power of explosions on thebikini atoll in the south pacific is something to takenote of. next tuesday,we'll come back to this story, where the bikini islanders wereremoved from their island through negotiation and the useof eminent domain. and then the u.s. proceeded to test abouttwenty-five, twenty-six different nuclearweapons,
including the bravo test in1954 that i'll show you a clip of,which was one of the largest bombs ever exploded by the u.s. in the atmosphere. the atomic energy commissioncreated what they called project gabriel that evolved to becalled project sunshine--that lasted between 1949 and 1961. so project sunshine becamefamous, and it was the collection of scientists in thegovernment working with the
atomic energy commission basedpredominately at the university of chicago and columbiauniversity, the lamont laboratories. so scientists were givenvirtually unlimited funds to conduct research that would helpthe atomic energy commission understand the power of theirdifferent weapons. and there were some 200different types of nuclear weapons eventually that weredesigned. and some so large that they hadto redesign aircraft in order to
handle the weight,and others so small that they could be tactically carried in asuitcase and be used under field conditions that were verydifficult. different delivery mechanisms,delivery by aircraft, delivery by missile,delivery by artillery, delivery by suitcase,so that a variety of different types of bombs of differentstrengths were designed for different types of warfare. so the sunshine scientistsreally ramped up in the early
1950s. and what's interesting is theway that they thought about environmental science. they wondered what happened tothe radionuclides. where do they go when a bombexplodes, what happens? well, dust particles get blownup into the atmosphere. if you drop a bomb in shallowwater, it will take the material onthe bottom of the water and will take the fish and it willbasically blow everything up and
the coral up into theatmosphere. it will also kill any birdsthat are in close proximity. so every test has a story aboutbirds raining from the sky, on fire. it will also cause a pattern ofmovement in the atmosphere that depends very much upon climateand wind conditions. and the power of the bombdetermines how high up into the atmosphere the particles get. so dozens and dozens ofdifferent nuclides were created,
some of which had never beenrecognized before. so trying to figure this out,one of the first things they did was they set up a monitoringsystem. that made sense. if you want to figure out wheresomething is going, you set up a monitoring system. in this case,it was rather simplistic, around the nevada test sitenorth of las vegas, about sixty-five miles.
and people used to cluster ontops of the casinos and the hotels in the evening to watchthe bombs explode, or get up really early in themorning to watch the bombs explode,highly visible, given the clear climate. so they set up their monitorsand they presumed that they had captured the dispersal ofradiation. and then they began to getreports. reports came in from differentparts of the country,
some in north dakota frompeople that were mining for uranium that had carried geigercounters. and one miner was telling astory where he was eating dinner at his campfire with his geigercounter that he forgot to turn off. and the geiger counter startedto spit back at him, <
it must be out of tune,it must be detecting something that is not there." so he took it in to have itserviced and found out that it was actually in great tune,didn't need to be recalibrated. he went back to his site and ithappened again. so he realized gradually thatsomething was going on in the atmosphere. it wasn't measuring anything inthe mine or in nearby rock because it normally in thatplace would be silent.
he was picking up radionuclidesthat were raining down in north dakota. polaroid became important inthe process of understanding the distribution,polaroid film company, because its film was found tobe exposed when it arrived at doctors' offices and hospitalsin different parts of the world. and at that point in time,they used to put the polaroid film, the eight-and-a-half byeleven sheets, into boxes.
and then they would pack theboxes, you know, not with these styrofoamkernels that we use today that will never go away. but instead,they used to pack it with cornhusks. so gradually,they figured it out because they could see in some cases theimage of the cornhusk on top of the film matching directly. so what was happening?
well, the radionuclides wereintersecting a cloud, they were raining down,in this case in the midwestern part of the united states,where the box had been packed. and the cornhusks were exposingthe film, because they had absorbed the radionuclides. so they realized gradually thattheir donut 200 miles in diameter around las vegas wascompletely inappropriate to capture the scale of thisproblem. this is a very important lessonin environmental science and
environmental policy. it's like the analogy of thedrunk leaning on a light post looking for his car keys. why is he looking under thelight post? that's because that's where thelight is. so that there are many,many different stories about the failure of environmentalscience and the ineffectiveness of environmental law that flowfrom this problem of misunderstanding the need for avery sensitive sampling design.
in this case,the stokes test in 1957 put radionuclides into theatmosphere, but they started moving at different directionsat different altitudes. ooh, there's an interestingidea, that's novel. no one thought about thatbefore. so here, the dashed line at thebottom is moving at 30,000 feet, and it just nicks the southeastside of idaho. whereas the dust at 10,000 feetshoots all the way up to montana.
then it arcs up over southerncanada, comes back over the great lakes. then you see that arc of thedashed line coming right down across lake champlain on the newyork-vermont border, the massachusetts-new yorkborder, and then the connecticut border. well that's pretty interesting. another test that they followedcreated dust clouds that again were driven by weather patterns.
and you see in this case thatat 30,000 feet, one swirled around texas forabout a week. another one swooped all the wayat 20,000 feet down into florida,and probably would have been detected if they had rainstormsin florida at the time of the dust cloud that got there,that would have been detectable in oranges,in orange juice, and in orange oils. so that crops were beingthreatened and exposed in a
variety of different ways thatwere being driven by weather patterns. and we all know that eventoday, it's hard to predict what the weather's going to be withinthirty-six hours in many parts of the country. so that the state of weatherforecasting back at this time was quite primitive. so that basically told thesescientists, and then again, i can just imagine what theywere doing, sitting across the
table looking at each other. how are we going to manage this? what's going to happen if thepublic understands this? how are we going to maintainour political support for the weapons testing program so thatwe can keep on building these weapons to contain the sovietsor to strike fear into their hearts? following their policy ofdeterrence, the bigger the bomb,the less likely we are to be
attacked by other nations thatwould understand that an attack would be simply suicide. well, here is a chart,which is an amalgamation of different bomb blasts and thepathways that they took, and the darkest areas are areasthat received the highest doses of radiation. and these nuclides havehalf-lives that vary between roughly three to four weeks upto forty, fifty, a hundred years.
so that if you went to thecenter of the country in iowa and you took tests of the soil,you could still detect many of these radionuclides in the soil. and they are transferable fromsoil to crops and up to fruits. so that this patchiness andfallout was eventually recognized by the atomic energycommission in the mid-1950s. and gradually,once this information was declassified in the early 1990s,and the only reason i'm telling you this story is because mostof this knowledge was eventually
declassified. i couldn't be here,which is kind of an interesting thought,i couldn't be here right now telling you this story had thedeclassification process not occurred under the clintonadministration. once they realized that theatomic energy commission had kept all this information fromthe public, when they really had nonational security logic to do so.
so here is a map of the unitedstates constructed by the national cancer institute in thelate 1990s, that took the dose estimatesthat they got from the soils, because they could backcalculate the concentrations from existing concentrations,knowing the decay rate of different nuclides. and they developed this map ofexpected doses. and then the cancer institutestarted asking questions, because they understood thedose-response relationship for
radiation and these nuclides isreally pretty clear. this not like you have to drink10,000 cans of diet soda to absorb enough saccharine toelevate your cancer risk a little bit. this is a science that evolvedin the 1950s largely because of the importance to the militarythat understood the dose-response relationship quiteclearly. but understanding adose-response relationship, meaning, let's see,the best way to explain
dose-response relationship ifit's not familiar to you, especially for collegestudents, is to think about a six-pack of beer. so you get a six-pack of beer,you have one beer. you might feel a little bit ofit. you have two beers withinfifteen minutes. i know you'd never do that. you have three beers withintwenty minutes. you have six beers within anhour so that the effect that you
feel,the effect on your body, depends upon the dose and theconcentration that you're actually circulating in yoursystem. so they understood thisrelationship with great clarity with respect to theseradionuclides, so that the cancer estimatesreally are quite robust. one interesting thing is thatif you look at the pattern of testing that really,it peaked in the late 1950s so that you see this isradionuclides in rainwater.
and then there was an agreementnot to test for a period of two years. and you see that the rainwaterlevels declined. it's in the rainwater. hmm, that's interesting. if it's in the rainwater,what does that mean for fish? what does it mean for rivers? what does it mean for parts ofthe west that experience high levels of snowpack?
well, it means that snowpack,for example, jackson, wyoming a couple yearsago. jackson hole,wyoming received more than 600 inches of snow in one year. and in a matter of about amonth in the period between april and late may,you get basically warmer weather melting all the snow. so in this period of time youget this rush, you get this pulse ofradioactive water that moves
into a stream. and lo and behold,where could you test that? well, you could test that inthe supermarket. where? in what supermarket? in the salmon in supermarkets,the trout in the supermarket. buying trout in the supermarket. you could find these levelsincreasing in the columbia river that goes by the hanford uraniumenrichment plant,
plutonium enrichment plant inthe state of washington. so the water levels,concentrations were going up because the rainwaterconcentrations were going up, and the fish concentrationswere going up. and also, people that weredrinking water out of wells that were fed underground by theaquifer from the hanford area, they were also being exposed. the per capita dose wascalculated as well, and you see the dip betweenjanuary of 1960 and late 1962
during the agreed cessation oftesting. so this information was reallyquite robust. so project sunshine basicallypieced together this idea that these nuclides were in globalcirculation, they were contaminating everyaspect of our environment, and they were making their wayinto humans, and particularly they wereconcerned about strontium-90, because if you have a diet thatis low in calcium, your body's going to absorbmore strontium-90 into your
bone. also, if you have a diet that'slow in iodine, your thyroid is going to absorbmore iodine-131 than it normally would. so understanding thisrelationship between calcium and strontium-90 is very important,because it eventually led to calcium enrichment of breads,of milk. so the fortification programreally had its origination in recommendations by the atomicenergy commission.
so the public thought,oh, we're just getting more minerals in our diet. well, that must be a goodthing, the nutritionists must be arguing that this makes a lot ofsense. but in reality,what was going on was that the atomic energy commission wasanxiously wringing its hands recognizing that they've got tofigure out how to lower the dose being experienced in thepopulation. the population had no idea whatwas going on.
so project sunshine scientists,they eventually obtained 15,000 bodies,dead bodies, trying to understand thedistribution of these nuclides throughout the world. bodies from new york,san francisco, houston, japan,india, south africa. why from other nations? well, predominately becausethey were worried about other nations coming back and tellingthe united states that we were
contaminating not only theirfood supplies, which was going to harm theirability to trade products internationally,processed foods, water, just about any kind ofcrop you could think of, as well as animals. so that gradually over theperiod between 1955 and 1960, the atomic energy commissiongrew to really understand the global distributional patternand how people in certain areas of latin america and tropicalareas were really experiencing
quite high levels of fallout. why would that be? in tropical rainforests,they experience intense rainfall. so that the rain was so highthat it would concentrate the nuclides in some of the tropicalforest areas. so permission to take the bodyparts was never sought or obtained. family members were neverconsulted.
bones were cleaned and packagedin formalin. and then they were crushed andanalyzed by laboratory technicians at columbia andother prestigious u.s. academic institutions. and sometimes the bones werepooled together. gradually they decided thatthey were going to look for geographic variability and theywere going to look for age-related variability. because they were finding thatkids, for some reason,
were absorbing more of theradionuclides, especially strontium,than adults were. so why would that be? was it something about theirdiet? was there something about theirphysiology? well, it had to do with theirrate of growth of bone. so kids are growing mostrapidly at what point in their lives? well, from time of conceptionroughly until the time of
thirteen. but different organ systems anddifferent functions in the body mature at different rates. so stature, for example,is quite linear, although you get this reallyserious growth curve in utero. and then it goes up gradually,gradually, and then more steeply during the early teenageyears. so you could figure out theconcentrations that were correlated with these periods ofrapid growth and development.
so gradually,these secrets started to leak out. and the u.s. began to study fallout data. and once the soviets haddeveloped their own capacity to make and test nuclear weapons,the atomic energy commission had this great argument. well, there are nuclides in ourfood supply and in our bodies, it's not our fault.
well, we take someresponsibility, but it's the soviets' fault. the soviets were actuallytesting these weapons up in siberia. and the siberian radionuclidestended to come down across alaska and across canada andinto the western and midwestern part of the u.s.,so in threads that are similar to the ones that i showed youfrom the nevada test site. so the u.s.
was trying to at this pointdesperately maintain public support for continued testing,in part because they were wondering well,what would happen if we did have a nuclear war? where would the nuclides go? and what would our capacity torespond be? so these were legitimatenational security concerns that they were exploring. began to release some of itsinformation at the same time
that states started their owntesting programs. so just like you findvariability in air pollution today from motor vehicles,depending upon climate and where vehicle use is mostintense, you find in this case statesbeing worried about specific patterns of concentration in thecrops that they grow. vermont cheese,for example, or midwestern grains or cattlegrazed in the western u.s. so minnesota,vermont, and other states felt
like they were environmentalhotspots, and that their corporationswere being hindered, their capacity to tradenationally and internationally was being diminished. the u.s. finally started an open test ofmilk for radioactivity in 1957, twelve years after theexplosions began. and linus pauling,who won the nobel prize for his work on nutrition,particularly related to vitamin
c, came out with his conclusionthat the body really discriminates against strontiumand favors calcium uptake if the calcium levels were high enough. that prompted the addition ofthe calcium, as i was saying, to milk, bread,and animal feeds, as well as fertilizers. so this is quite curious. the surgeon general for the u.s. denied that the fallout hazardswere serious in the new york
times in 1959. so there was really quite anopen public debate in the late '50s, in part that surroundedeisenhower's campaign to become president again in 1956. and his competitor was his vicepresident, adlai stevenson. so stevenson basically brokethe news that the atomic energy commission had been hiding thisinformation from the public. and in his last-minute campaigneffort, he claimed that there weregenetic hazards to future
generations,risk of bone cancer, and the inability to conductmedical investigations. now, this is interesting. so that there is exposure thatis universal, everybody's exposed becauseeverybody eats. that means that you reallydon't have any opportunity for a scientific control group that isunexposed to figure out what the long-term health effects mightbe. thirteen yale scientists,including arthur galston of the
biology department,who passed away just a few years ago,signed a statement endorsing the views of stevenson. stevenson lost,eisenhower became president again. and what was interesting aboutit is that transcripts from his conferences, his nationalsecurity team, had been released in the late1990s as well. and eisenhower eventually gotto the point where he was
telling his staff that thelevels of radionuclides in the milk supply,the buildup especially in children's bones,was unacceptable, and something was going to haveto happen. and that prompted him to bemore aggressive in trying to negotiate with the soviets tocreate some sort of a treaty that would reduce atmospherictesting. so i'm going to jump ahead hereso i don't run out of time. the atomic energy commissionalso was found to have withheld
data recognizing that there werethese spikes in the new york cities' milk supplies,data that was collected just prior to the election that theyunderstood posed a problem. they held that until weeksafter the election. so it's kind of curious thatmilk became the standard for trying to figure out where thechemicals went, especially powdered buttermilk,because in its dehydrated form, it was easy to send around thecountry. and this chart i think is alsointeresting, because remember
that the limited test ban treatyof 1963 really stopped the testing cold. and what you see is a gradualdecline in worldwide fallout, represented by strontium-90 andcesium-137 in milk. so you see this gradual declinebecause of the residency time in the atmosphere,so that these chemicals don't all wash out like quickly afterthe explosions. they go into global circulation. and there was great debate atthe time about the amount of
time that they stayed in theatmosphere. and the atomic energycommission was arguing, don't worry about it. they're going to stay in theatmosphere for a long period of time. why would they use that logic? well, they wanted the radiationto dissipate so that by the time the nuclides got down to theground that they wouldn't pose such an intense radiationthreat.
now, that's kind of aninteresting story. so environmentalists and publichealth advocates were arguing, no, you don't understand thispattern of deposition. it's often more quickly that itreaches the ground concentrated in the higher intensity ofradiation. so that this story played outover the 1970s and 1980s until gradually, you find 1995 itreally leveling off to what it is today. curiously, you see the spike incesium-137 in 1987,1986,
1987. anybody have any idea what thatmight be? student: chernobyl. prof: chernobyl. chernobyl released morecesium-137 to the atmosphere after the explosion,where the dome of the building blew off and there was a firethat was uncontainable for a period of weeks. it spewed more radiation intothe atmosphere in the form of
cesium-137 than many of theearlier atmospheric weapons tests did. so i began by telling you thatunder conditions of secrecy, the people that hold power overthe secret have great narrative advantage. they not only control thesearch for the data, they control its interpretationand they control the story that's told to the generalpublic. and a couple of elements ofthis story are kind of fun to
think about,because we'll see these same narratives evolve forpesticides, for plastics,for a variety of different environmental problems. is the problem human induced oris it more important to worry about natural sources? natural sources of radiation,hmm. so you see these comparisonsbetween the dose that you would get by having a glass of milk orhaving the diet of a child,
a comparison between that andnumber of flights that you would take across the united states. and you probably know that youget a measurable dose of radiation when you're up inaircraft. so this comparison betweenhuman-induced exposure compared to natural exposure,another good example of that would be radon. and in connecticut,we have a problem with radon gas,which is radioactive,
being emitted especially fromthe kind of rock that we have here,and particularly along the coastline heading east down herealong the long island sound. and my basement in my house,for example, we had a radon problem whereradon gas was not just measurable, it was really quitehigh. so we had to figure out how toremediate that. you dig a hole in your basementfloor, you put a little fan and a pipe in, and you get rid ofit.
if you don't do that,then you risk exposing your family to radon,which is a very well-known carcinogen. the estimates of deaths fromradon exposure in the united states are actually quite high. you know, 40,000 to 50,000people per year are believed to get lung cancer as a result ofradon exposure. so that the comparison ofnatural sources of radiation to human-induced sources related tonational security protection,
there is some legitimacy tothat and you have to be very careful about it. also, the idea of relative risk. well, why are we worrying aboutradiation when we should be worrying about other kinds ofrisks? we'll see that with respect topesticides, where you find,say, the car manufacturers concerned about the emissiontechnology requirements under the clean air act for tailpipeemissions.
and they point to othersources, other critical sources of human exposure to airpollutants, such as power plants or incinerators. so this idea of risk comparisonreally was well honed in the 1940s and 1950s by the atomicenergy commission. in that case,the concern was to express the risk relative tomisunderstanding the implications of nuclear war andnot being able to protect the public from excessive patternsof exposure.
that played out by the way in avariety of pretty unusual ways so that many people in the 1950sbuilt fallout shelters in their backyard. my neighbors did it,my family never had the means to do it. but my neighbors had theseconcrete buildings that they built underground. they looked a lot likebasements. and they would store water andfood and they would practice air
drills, where they would rundown into the basement. and this was especiallyimportant during the cuban missile crisis,where we came the closest that we ever have to nuclear war. so the idea of how long do youhave to stay in the shelter to protect yourself? well, you wouldn't know thatunless you had done these atmospheric tests and youunderstood how the concentrations diminished over acertain period of time.
so the idea of relative riskalso deserves merit. this is also an interestingtime when the first environmentalists had formedtheir organizations back in the 1940s and 1950s. they tended to be medicaldoctors, the very first environmentalists. and one of the interest groupsthat you recognize today is consumers union that producesconsumer reports magazine,it compares product quality and
often environmental or healthclaims of products. so consumers union was veryactive in collecting milk, in this case from forty-eightcities around the world. no one talked about human milk,and i found this to be quite fascinating. so for the entire decade,no one spoke about oh, well, if it's getting intocow's milk, why isn't it getting into human milk? if it's getting into humanmilk, what's the capacity to be
transferring these radionuclidesacross generations via breast feeding? well in part,i think it was a shyness, a reluctance to talk aboutbreastfeeding in public, which was common at the time. but it was clearly an issuethat the atomic energy commission had recognized. and i found a document,it was a document that was declassified that was producedin 1952 that demonstrated quite
clearly that the atomic energycommission had made the connection like that. it's in cow's milk,it's going to be in human milk. we know that these compoundsare capable of causing mutations in genes and some of thosemutations are inheritable, they can be transferred acrossgenerations, in addition to the fact thatwe're exposing the next generation via breast milk,in addition to infant formula in milk and other parts of asmall child or an infant's food
supply. also, the group sane becamefamous at this point in time, a group that was politicallyactive to protect pregnant women. and this history is the firsthistory in the twentieth century where children's health became alogic for a stronger set of regulations and rules relativeto emitting something that could be thought of as dangerous tothe atmosphere. so gradually,by the end of the decade,
the atomic energy commissionrecognized that strontium-90 accumulated in soils,it accumulated in foods, it accumulated in kids. they knew how to calculate whatthe cancer risk was because they understood the dose-responserelationship. so they were basically sittingon a gold mine of knowledge that they had kept from the public asbest they could during this period of time. so here's a list of sixty yearsof experimentation with nuclear
weapons, forty-three years,forty-five years of negotiation. and you see the antarctictreaty, the agreement not to conduct the testing in theantarctic. this is common heritage for allof mankind, so to speak. you see the hotline agreement. before a nuclear war wasinitiated, there was an agreement to call up the sovietsand try a last-minute attempt at the limited test ban treatythat i just described,
the outer space treaty,the seabed treaty, it's not legal to conductexperiments in the seabed. so that common property aroundthe world is now protected by international treaty. however, the united states istesting at a rate that has never been less. the testing,however, the majority of it is underground. and i'll show you a clip nextweek of some underground tests
that created earthquakes indifferent parts of the world, particularly in alaska. and we also see a very curiouseffect where these former testing sites were eventuallytranslated into fish and wildlife reserves. so that's another interestingthing to try to explain. and i'm going to close todaywith one more thought for you. this entire story unfoldedbetween 1945 and 1963. the environmental protectionagency was created in 1970 and
the safe drinking water act wascreated in 1976. so there was absolutely noprotection, there was no monitoring of public watersupplies through this entire the clean air act was not inexistence, so that there was no protection against theradionuclides as air pollutants or air contaminants. and finally,in 1976, the environmental protection agency set anacceptable radioactivity limit for drinking water of 1millisievert,
or that can be translated into0.1 rem per year. how about radionuclides in food? one would think that thishistory would provide a very good logic for establishinglimits for radionuclides in food. but as the chernobyl event in1986 unfolded, we realized that we were notalone in not having any sort of limits for radionuclides infood. neither did any of the europeanunion nations,
so trade was completelydisrupted, tens of billions of dollars of food was lostfollowing the chernobyl event because italy had one standardfor acceptable contamination, whereas germany had another. all the nations had differentstandards. but just keep this in mind,that the united states still has no maximum permissiblelimits. the take-away point here,simply when secrecy is combined with the absence ofenvironmental and health
surveillance,the public opinion and politics favor the development ofhazardous technologies. in this case,this knowledge was controlled by elites and then releasedselectively to an unknowing public in an attempt toencourage them to favor continued atomic weaponstesting.