Secret Fallout

Secret Fallout
by Dr Ernest Sternglass

This book should be read by anyone who wants humanity to have a future.

Dr Sternglass is a pillar of humanity who has worked tirelessly since the 1960s to reveal the
Mortal Danger posed to the Human Race and this planet by Nuclear Power and nuclear
technology.

From the 1981 Introduction:

"Directly out of the business of nuclear weapons came the business of nuclear power,
heralded in our country with the slogan, Atoms for Peace. Even that innocent-sounding
slogan is part of the endless pattern of public deception that surrounds the entire nuclear
enterprise. Let me interject a present example that poses the relationship nicely. In our
country the entire hydrogen bomb enterprise—both R and D and production—is not under
the Department of Defense, but the Department of Energy. It goes, not into the Defense
budget, but the Energy budget. It is by far the largest item in that budget, consuming well
over one-third of it. The next largest item in it is nuclear power.

"Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are two sides of the same coin. Nuclear power is life
threatening in three independent ways, each in itself formidable.

"First is the threat of accident in nuclear power plants. This book tells in some detail the
story of the accident at Three Mile Island. But one didn’t have to wait for that to know that
nuclear power plants—unlike what the public has been told—are thoroughly
accident-prone. Those great realists, the American insurance companies, refused from the
beginning to insure nuclear power plants. Hence we have the Price-Anderson Act, renewed
by Congress every 10 years since 1957, which lays the bulk of the liability in the event of
nuclear accident on "the government"—i.e., on the taxpayers.

"The second life-threatening property is that every nuclear reactor now in operation
produces the artificial element plutonium-239 as by-product. This is not only, as already
said, perhaps the most toxic substance known. It is also the most convenient material from
which to make fission bombs. The "trigger quantity"—the smallest amount from which one
can make a workable atom bomb—is 2 kilograms, 4 2/5 pounds. You could carry that, and
safely, in a grocery bag. To make a Hiroshima size bomb would take 6-7 kilograms, say
about 14 pounds. You’d need a shopping bag for that. Every nation that now possesses a
nuclear reactor can, if it chooses, begin to make nuclear weapons. It is expected that
within the coming decade perhaps a dozen more nations than now possess them will
exercise this option. It should be added that plutonium provides the trigger at the core of
all hydrogen bombs, and in some also the shell.

"The third life-threatening aspect of both nuclear power and weapons involves the disposal
of nuclear wastes. No one knows what to do with them. The periodic meetings of
international experts have so far yielded no credible solution.

"In my opinion the entire nuclear enterprise, both power and weapons,
represents a wrong turn for humanity, a development that cannot be tamed, that
remains life-threatening not only in all its present manifestations, but all future
developments that have been contemplated.

"Meanwhile the public is subjected to a continuous barrage of propaganda and
misinformation designed to reconcile it to an increasingly problematical and expensive
support of both nuclear power and weapons. The weapons, ostensibly for our security, are
of course the principle source of our insecurity; and the nuclear power, that we are told we
need for energy, supplies in 1980 only about 12% of our consumption of electricity, hence
only about 2% of our total energy consumption, at a still unreckonable cost in both health
and money."

The famous Sternglass Report of 1968 on the effects of the 1953 Troy/Albany fallout on
childhood leukaemia rates put world wide attention on the matter. (See Killing our Own,
P95).

In an interview in 1992, Dr Sternglass details how since Three Mile Island, there have been
two major releases of radiation from US nuclear reactors that have been kept secret. The
Oyster Creek reactor near Atlantic City released 3 to 5 times as much radiation as
TMI, contaminating the food supplied to New York. In 1985-86, Indian Point released
as much as TMI, into the reservoirs supplying New York.

I urge you to read from P108 onwards in Secret Fallout - The Minds of the Children:

"It was shortly after reading another story in the papers about how the United States and
the Soviet Union had failed to agree once again on a treaty to halt all underground nuclear
tests that my attention was caught by an article in The New York Times about an
apparently unrelated subject. The report dealt with the fact that in 1975 the scores in
the nationwide Scholastic Aptitude Tests had dropped by the largest amount
in two decades. While there had been a more or less steady decline in both the verbal
and the mathematical scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than 2 or 3 points,
the average verbal scores had suddenly dropped 10 points in a single year. Since our son
was taking the S.A.T. tests that year, I read the article with more than casual interest.

"Suddenly the question flashed through my mind: When were these young people born or
in their mother’s womb? Most of them were 18 years old when they graduated from high
school. What was 18 taken from 1975? It was 1957, the year when the largest
amount of radioactive fallout ever measured descended on the United States
from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever detonated in Nevada. Just as in the
case of the Baneberry test, the radioactive iodines must have gone to the thyroids of the
infants in their mother’s womb, where it would retard their growth and development ever
so slightly so that it was not readily noticeable, and only when the children were tested 17
to 18 years later on a nationwide scale would it show up in a sharp drop in intellectual
performance.

"Clearly, if the effects were serious enough to lead to a rise in infant mortality and
congenital defects back in 1957, as I knew had taken place, then for every baby that died
shortly after birth, there must have been many who were minimally brain-damaged or
whose cognitive growth may not have reached its full potential.

"I remembered from the 1969 Hanford symposium that this was exactly what had
happened to the young children on the Marshall Islands after the radioactive cloud from
the "Bravo" hydrogen-bomb test in 1954 had accidentally showered the island of Rongelap,
150 miles away, with fresh fallout. As reported by Conard at that meeting, in the following
fifteen years, all the children developed thyroid disease of one form or another and showed
severe growth retardation, both in their bodies and the size of their brains.

From the 1992 interview:

DTR: On a final somewhat philosophical note in all this, you wrote in Secret Fallout how, if
the information can't get out, it's as if the immune system of a body is suppressed and it
can't adequately deal with what's going on.

EJS: That's right. So a society is bound to destroy itself if it continues to suppress this
information. And what will very likely happen is simply as follows: Since the people in
China have practically no nuclear reactors and Japan is fortunate in having no milk and
cheese in its diet, it will probably be the case in the next ten to thirty years, the east Asian
nations will, the island nations like Japan, Taiwan, the islands of Indonesia, will become
the dominant countries in the world because they won't have children who will
be crippled from birth. They will have children who will be born full, normal weight and
will have no impairment of their ability to do mathematics and computer programming
and calculation and reasoning skills.

DTR: As well as themselves to be able to produce healthy babies.

EJS: That's right. And so if you produce healthy babies, you have a good chance to advance
economically and industrially and be very highly competitive compared to countries like
Russia, and England, and the United States that have poisoned themselves and continue to
poison themselves in order to hang on to a technology that they created as a result of the
cold war".