[In assembling the material in this section, we are indebted to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. You may find more information here. We further wish to acknowledge Dr. Arjun Makhijani whose research on the subject helped us to create this part of the toolkit. His publications include: Radioactive Heaven and Earth (1991), Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (1992), and Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (1995) was published by MIT Press.
The immediate effects of radiation include the following: central nervous system dysfunction ● nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea ● destruction of the body’s capacity to produce new blood cells, resulting in uncontrolled bleeding and life-threatening infections.
Long after a nuclear explosion, radioactivity will be dispersed in the area close to ground zero and, depending on weather and winds, further away. This is called radioactive fallout, and it comes in three different categories: local, regional, or global fallout.
In local fallout, the radioactive doses can be directly lethal to exposed humans. The thermal radiation leads to immediate burns on bare skin. In Nagasaki, it was estimated that 95 percent of all victims suffered from burns. In Hiroshima, the corresponding number was 60 percent.
The particles destined to become regional fallout go directly into the troposphere (the layer of air closest to the earth) after the explosion and then fall down during the span of some weeks. This fall-out can lead to an increase in the number of cancer cases and genetic damage. People eating food, drinking water, and breathing contaminated air suffer the effects of the fallout.
Radioactive materials spread over large areas; small particles and gases may travel around the world. At an explosion, some radioactive particles rise into the stratosphere where they spread around the earth. From the stratosphere, these radioactive particles slowly fall or rain down in the months or even years afterward, as global fallout.
The risk of developing leukemia increases if exposed to radiation at a young age. With by far the highest risks occurring among women exposed as young children. Since rapidly changing cellular tissue is especially sensitive to radiation, the fetus is particularly vulnerable. Exposure of fetuses to radiation is shown to increase the risk of childhood cancer.
The National Resources Defense Council estimated the total yield of all nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1980 at 510 megatons (Mt). Atmospheric tests alone accounted for an equivalent of over 29,000 Hiroshima size bombs. A 1991 study by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) estimated that the radiation from atmospheric testing could lead to 2.4 million cancer deaths.
After two nuclear tests (Shot Harry and Shot Nancy in 1953), 1,420 lambing ewes and 2,970 lambs in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona died of severe radiation injuries. Cows would eat grass on which iodine-131, an intensely radioactive fission product, had been deposited. The iodine-131 would concentrate in the milk. In 1997, when the National Cancer Institute, acting under congressional directive, assessed milk contamination, it found that fallout from the tests would eventually cause between 11,000 and 212,000 thyroid cancers. The cancer risk fell primarily to those who had been children, with girls being twice at risk than boys. Growing children, who believed that they were leading healthy farm lives by drinking fresh milk, got the highest I-131 doses (Arms Control Association).
From the 1940s into the 1970s, more than 23,000 people were subjected to radiation experiments, many without their informed consent. These experiments were administered by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Department of Veterans Affairs for purposes including determining the biology of radiation intakes, developing radiation weapons, and determining radiation’s effects on military personnel performance on the battlefield.
One experiment involved feeding oatmeal with radioactive trace elements to more than 100 boys at a Massachusetts school for mentally disabled and abandoned children. Others included testicular irradiation experiments on prisoners to determine what doses induce sterility and experiments on pregnant women. During the Cold War, more than half a million weapons-complex workers in the United States were exposed to radioactivity and chemicals in the course of their work.
The range of estimates of cancer deaths resulting from testing fallout, using the official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cancer risk coefficients, is between about 200,000 to more than half a million. Even today, people who live along the Savannah River and use its water downstream of the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons materials plant, are drinking water contaminated with tritium, which is radioactive hydrogen.
Castle Bravo marked the largest nuclear device detonated by the United States in 1954, in an attempt to test high-yield nuclear weapons. Miscalculations about the device resulted in the largest U.S. nuclear contamination accident, occurring in Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. As a result of this miscalculation, nuclear fallout rained down on the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands. On the other hand, over the 12 years of bombing, some 8 billion curies of I-131 were released into the atmosphere above the Marshall Islands: 42 times greater than the 150 million curies released as a result of the testing in Nevada, 150 times greater than the 40 million curies released as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site, in northeastern Kazakhstan, was the Soviet equivalent of the U.S. Nevada Test Site; 88 atmospheric tests and 30 surface tests were conducted there from 1949 through 1962. Mr. Berik was born with birth defects after his pregnant mother was exposed to radiation from a nuclear test blast conducted by the Soviet Union in the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. He is blind and has had several operations to reduce the swelling in his face.
Copyright © 2021 Reverse the Trend: Save Our People, Save Our Planet. All Rights Reserved