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Issue 60
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April 2020
ISOLATE OR ELSE Nuclear War emergency plans to be deployed for Coronavirus crisis
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FISSIONLINE Isolation is the only way… WE MUST isolate before the fallout from this dreadful new disease seeps into every corner of our lives. We understand the arguments by the experts about ‘managing’ the problem, but it is becoming clear that the only way to deal with this new plague is to lockdown our lives until it is purged. China, where it all started, took this drastic measure and it looks as though it might have worked. Not since the apocalyptic warnings of nuclear annihilation of the 1950s has this country, and indeed the world, seemed so imperilled. Governments all over the world are now scrabbling to mitigate the effects of Corvid-19, including, as we reveal today, dusting off obscure Cold War laws, which we thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Scientists, we are told are also working flat out to find a cure, but even the most optimistic estimates say it won’t be ready for at least a year. If they fail the dread prospect of modernday tumbrils collecting the dead for mass burials, as happened during the Medieval Black Death, will become a real possibility.
fissionline@gmail.com.
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UK on Nuclear War footing for Coronavirus pandemic NUCLEAR WAR emergency laws are being used to combat the coronavirus crisis. A secret email has already been sent to local councils about plans to send mobile morgues across the country. The story,
leaked to The Sun newspaper, said local authorities had been emailed about the extra capacity for 15,000 bodies to help manage “peaks in demand”. The move mirrors a law called the Civil Defence (Burial) Regulations, introduced by the Government at the height of the Cold War in preparation for a possible nuclear attack. The
Civil Defence exercise circa 1951: Preparing body for burial
ominous sounding edict, quietly released to the statute books in the 1950s, includes gruesome recommendations like the digging of mass graves in advance so the demands on heavy machinery in the form of trench diggers could be evened out across the country. Calculations suggested burial for between 5,000 to 7,000 corpses per acre might be possible in this
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way, depending on water lines and the nature of the topsoil. A stacking system for coffins was to be used with the coffin on the top not to be less than three or four feet below the surface.
Officials demonstrate how to operate a reusable collapsible coffin: Edinburgh, c. 1951
To cover shortages of materials, officials designed three types of substitutes for normal coffins, at least two of which wouldn’t be out of place in a fairground horror show. The first was a design with a hinged bottom which could be lowered into the grave and the body released by opening the hinges with a cord, thus allowing the entire coffin to be used over and over again. Second on the list of possibilities came a coffin with a detachable bottom or tray designed to be left with the body; the rest of the coffin then brought up for reuse. The third option was that coffins were to be made of strong fabric, but not reusable. According to an official: “The material would need to be impermeable and a 3rd and 4th handle and cord provided to overcome the lack of rigidity for carrying and lowering.” Local authorities were to be provided with supplies of the coffins for
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Demonstration of a reusable collapsible coffin by Scottish Office officials in 1951
Ready for the next: Collapsible coffin is returned to storage after demonstration.
storage. Officials pointed out that the problem with the “prop” coffins was that the public would be outraged by the loss of dignity for loved ones. Nevertheless, it was felt they were valid alternatives for local authorities to consider and use in dealing with the dead. Macabre measures are already being used in Iran where aerial photographs suggest mass graveyards are being dug to cope with demand. The photos appear to show a cemetery in the holy city of Qom being expanded after the outbreak began there in mid-February. Experts say there are signs that the new 300ft trenches were dug for many virus victims who have died in the city. And experts fear mass burials will become commonplace as the deadly virus hits Africa and the rest of the world. In the recent leaked memo to councils, heavy duty clinical waste bags and containers are also among the list of products for bulk storage. The confidential memo came as the Government advised the public there is "no need" for stockpiling. 'Red Control' — the emergencies division in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — compiled a list of personal protective equipment considered as part of the "stockpiling exercise".The email — branded "high importance" — went out across the country to forums which bring local authorities together with police and health services.As well as body bags and clinical waste bags, the stockpile list includes aprons, eye protectors, face masks, test kits and solutions. Under the Government's reasonable worst case scenario, four in five Brits will get coronavirus. And at least 500,000 Brits could die from the outbreak.
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Secret documents reveal Iranian plans to build Nuclear weapons SENSATIONAL documents spirited out of Iran in late 2018 confirm that Iran has decided to manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test. The large haul includes some 55,000 pages of documents, CDs, photos and videos. The documents had been secretly stored by Iranian officials in a warehouse outside of Tehran. International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) officials confirmed in interviews that they are continuing to dig through the records and that they have confronted Iranian officials about several alleged research programmes and facilities that were previously unknown. The documents show how Iranian nuclear researchers worked
in tandem to try to solve several complex technical challenges in building a weapon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made public many of the key revelations and documents in the Iran nuclear archive. He said that Iran’s nuclear weapon programme made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of
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foreign scientists, and access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what plan, if any, Iran has had with respect to nuclear weapons in the nearly 16 years since Iran’s government
ordered a halt to most of the program in late 2003. Research reveals that Iranian scientists had been searching for some time for a secret location for their weapons programme. They found the right spot in the remote Lut desert, a Mars-like dead zone regarded as one of the hottest and driest places on Earth. Conditions in this stretch of salty desert are so extreme that almost no animal or plant can survive there. But it was ideally suited for what Iran wanted – an underground chamber for the country’s first nuclear detonation. Photos and measurements were taken and then stashed away, to await the time when a bomb was nearly ready for testing.The tunnel was never constructed, but 17 years later the images and surveys still exist, part of a recently unearthed trove of secret Iranian nuclear documents. The records, now being studied in major Western capitals, are drawing fresh attention as weapons experts seek to answer a suddenly timely question: how quickly could Iran build a nuclear bomb if it decided to do so? In recent weeks the UN nuclear watchdog reported that Iran is accelerating its production of enriched uranium amid rising tensions over the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The growing stockpile potentially gives Tehran a crucial ingredient for a future bomb – fissile uranium. And the long-hidden papers, stolen from Iran two years ago by Israeli spies, are offering new insight into how far Iran has already come in acquiring other critical components needed to build a nuclear weapon.
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German scientists had the knowledge. So why didn’t Hitler get The Bomb first?
IN THE capital of the German third Reich the results of a simple chemical experiment showed for the first time that the atom could be split, unleashing immense power. In the following months as Europe braced itself for war the Wehrmacht started a research programme to develop nuclear weapons. The Germans were the first to start work on the atom bomb. Why wasn’t Hitler the first to use it? Seven years later Berlin was a ruin and Germany’s top nuclear scientists were rounded up and interned in an English country house outside Cambridge called Farm Hall. The fate of Hitler’s bomb remained a mystery. These men alone knew what had really happened to German nuclear research during those turbulent war years. Among them was Otto Hahn. He was the chemist who carried out that simple laboratory experiment in 1938. He was soon to be awarded the Nobel prize for discovering nuclear fission. Werner Heisenberg was the German scientist in charge of the nuclear project for much of the war. In 1932 he had received the Nobel Prize for his famous uncertainty principle. As the scientists may have suspected, their internment had a clandestine purpose: Allied intelligence were eavesdropping on their guests. Were they willing tools of
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the Nazis who had worked to give Hitler nuclear weapons and who might now sell their expertise to the Russians; or where they simply scientists who had been engaged in academic research of no military significance? Some weeks earlier Allied intelligence had tracked down the centre of Nazi nuclear research. The German scientists had secretly moved their project from Berlin to a small town in Southern Germany. There beneath a church in a cliff was a disused beer cellar where the Americans found a nuclear reactor, an experiment on the brink of criticality: when cubes of uranium were immersed in heavy water a chain reaction would begin and a storm of neutrons would sweep through the reactor. Slowly the uranium would be transformed into plutonium, the raw material of atomic bombs. Fear of what the Nazis would do with nuclear weapons had spurred the Allies into the biggest crash research programme in history. While Heisenberg and his colleagues languished at Farm Hall, its result a bomb called Little Boy was aboard the Enola Gay on its way to Hiroshima. But had that fear been justified? 75 years on it’s a question historians are still arguing about. British politicians, scientists in America, engineers, industrialists, no-one could argue with the idea that if nuclear weapons were possible, and if the Germans are working on them, we had to get them first. Otto Hahn was the first of the scientists at Farm Hall to hear about Hiroshima. Allied intelligence hoped that the news would provoke a revealing discussion. But apart from a few brief extracts leaked by American sources, the British government kept the recordings secret for nearly 50 years. But in 1992 the transcripts were finally released. They reveal the emotional reaction of a group of men who had been working hard on nuclear research and simply couldn’t understand how the Americans had got there first. But amid their confusion and disbelief there was frustratingly little hard evidence about why the German bomb project eventually failed. One character who seems strangely absent in all the navel-gazing was: the Fuhrer himself. He was excluded from the decision making process by bureaucrats who had to decide whether to spend scarce resources on nuclear research or rocket research. They chose the latter and as a result Hitler hardly heard anything at all about the atomic bomb; the bureaucrats made sure of that. The Farm Hall tapes reveal that when one official was told to tell someone at a higher level in the government about the nuclear research, he said, please don’t do it, because if Hitler heard that nuclear weapons were possible, he would say six months and they must be there. And this was just not feasible. But try telling that to Hitler! So the Germans did not try to make nuclear weapons, but ironically recent research has shown the Germans spent more money on their rocket programme than the Americans spent on the Manhattan Project. So Hitler could have had The Bomb after all, with unimaginable consequences for the rest of the world.
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Pentagon spends $40million in contracts on research to build mobile nuclear reactors THE Pentagon has awarded contracts to three companies that will be tasked with building small, mobile nuclear reactors that will generate power for American troops stationed at home and abroad. The Department of Defense picked three firms - BWX Technologies of Virginia; Westinghouse Government Services of Washington, DC; and X-energy of Maryland - to design a small nuclear micro-reactor that can be forward deployed with US forces abroad. The Pentagon wants to pick a prototype that can generate in the 1-5megawatt range. If the technology is perfected, it would enable the Pentagon to deliver energy to soldiers in remote locations without having to bear the burden of using costly infrastructure The deployment of small, mobile nuclear reactors would enable [military] units to carry a nearly endless clean power supply, enabling expansion and sustainment of operations for extended periods of time anywhere on the planet. “The United States risks ceding nuclear energy technology leadership to Russia and China,”said Pentagon Director Jay Dryer.”By retaking technological leadership, the United States will be able to supply the most innovative advanced nuclear energy technologies. He added: “One advantage of using micro-reactors is that military bases that are hooked up to the civilian energy grid could continue to generate power if the grid is compromised.” Critics say that the mobile reactors could pose a safety risk especially if radioactive fuel is brought into battlefield conditions.
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Penney Planned ‘Death By Thunder’
Britain’s premier atom bomb scientist, Lord William Penney, has been linked to a sinister US plan to use radioactive fallout from thunderstorms as a military weapon. Declassified documents put Penney at the centre of a small group of elite scientists who proposed using downpours caused by nuclear bombs to irradiate populated areas. The plan has chilling parallels to Penney’s biggest bomb test which caused a storm that deluged hundreds of troops on Christmas Island. Many later died of leukaemia and other radiation-linked cancers. The cold- blooded project was first considered by the seven-man target committee of Los Alamos scientists who decided Japanese cities would be bombed in 1945. At the time, Penney played the pivotal role of deciding what height the “gadget” should be exploded for optimum damage. He sent a chill down the spines of the assembled scientists as he explained how more people could be killed by drawing them into the blast area.
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The sickening plan to use the atomic bomb to deliberately contaminate people far from the blast area was drawn up by Los Alamos physicist Joseph Hirschfelder who calculated that given the right conditions rising hot air from a nuclear explosion would create a thunderstorm. A memorandum with the ominous title ‘STRATEGIC POSSIBILITIES ARISING IF A THUNDER- STORM IS INDUCED BY GADGET EXPLOSION’ was sent to J.R. Oppenheimer just before the world’s first atomic blast in April 1945. The memo, which also bore Penney’s name, explained that it would be feasible for the bomb to produce a thunderstorm which would poison wide areas, up to
100km away, untouched by the explosion. The memo continues: “Because of the high potential temperature of the hot air, the active material and fission products would surely rise to heights of 10,000 feet in three minutes before the thunderhead would develop. With even a light wind the major portion of the active materials would be carried away from the area of blast damage (for a 15 mile an hour wind, one mile in four minutes) and the products would rain down on an area which has not been severely damaged by the blast. I do not believe that there would be any lessening of the blast damage if we delivered the gadget in weather conditions favourable for the formation of the thunderstorm (conditional instability, humidity above 60%) and therefore the radiation effects might cause considerable damage in addition to the blast damage ordinarily considered.” It is not recorded what Oppenheimer’s reaction was, but the details contained in Hirshchfelder’s memo match perfectly the detonation of Penney’s biggest H- bomb, codenamed Grapple Y, over Christmas Island on April 28, 1958. Officially the three-megaton device was exploded harmlessly in the atmosphere with minimum fallout and no threat to thousands of troops stationed on the island. But eyewitness accounts tell how servicemen were caught in a huge rainstorm soon after the blast. Their claims were dismissed by successive British government, but new evidence proves the men were telling the truth. Documents released under Freedom of Information laws reveal that Grapple Y not only “caused a thunderstorm” but it was exploded when the wind was blowing toward the camps where the troops were
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mustered. Calculations of the speed of the fallout and when it would reach the camps were also made. Grapple Y fulfills all the criteria envisaged by Hirschfelder 13 years earlier. Penney’s bomb was exploded in the middle of the rainy season on Christmas Island which runs from February to the end of May. During this time the atmosphere is almost invariably saturated with moisture...just the sort of conditions a nuclear explosion would need to create the cumulonimbus clouds necessary for a thunderstorm. Added to that, on the day in question the bomb drop was delayed by more than an hour because of torrential rain. So why was it exploded at that time? The accepted wisdom is it was fired in haste because Britain was worried about a possible test ban treaty. But the UK had already demonstrated it could build a working H-bomb by exploding a similar, but slightly smaller device code- named Grapple X six months earlier. The then prime Minister Harold MacMillian acknowledged this in his diary when he said American cooperation (which he called the ‘great prize’) had ‘been secured’ following the Grapple X explosion. Besides Penney went on to explode a series of four more nuclear devices codename Grapple Z, that continued until the end of the year. So firing Grapple Y in a hurry to beat a test ban treaty doesn’t make sense. It is possible of course that Grapple Y may simply have been a desire by the Government to demonstrate to the world its nuclear muscle. But the fact it was fired in the middle of the rainy season suggests there was a more sinister motive. Britain exploded 21 nuclear weapons into the atmosphere during the 1950s and it is well documented that ‘volunteer’ servicemen were put in danger to see how they would react to the explosions. It is entirely possible therefore that Penney and his military planners decided to test Hirschfelder’s rainout theories. And there must have been enormous satisfaction in the outcome, for every component of the Hirschfelder blueprint was fulfilled: The blast did cause a thunderstorm; fallout did descend on populated areas; scientists were able to measure exactly how far the fallout spread and how long it would take to reach the ground. So the experiment was a huge success...except of course for the thousands of luckless servicemen, most of whom were known as “lilywhites” be-cause they had only just arrived on the island. Many paid the ultimate price. It is a fact that nearly half of all the reported injuries of nuclear servicemen have been made by veterans who witnessed the Grapple Y explosion. This bomb may have been Britain’s biggest, and Penney’s crowning achievement. But it may also have spelled death and immeasurable suffering to untold numbers of men and their descendants.
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High cancer risk in US naval personnel serving in nuclear powered ships
The Fukushima reactor explosions in March 2011 released significant quantities of radioactive particles and gases into the atmosphere. The weather conditions at the time ensured that a major fraction of these releases was blown out to the east of Japan, and during this period a number of US ships including the Nimitz class nuclear- powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, were sufficiently close to Fukushima to have received contamination. In the following years, personnel aboard the vessel, and other vessels engaged in the Operation Tomodachi (friendship), developed cancer and other serious health conditions, and some of these alleged that radiation exposures from the fallout which had been recorded after the reactor explosions were to blame for their illnesses. By 2014, a court case was underway in California and the issue of the sailors’ cancers had achieved global media attention.
By Dr Chris Busby
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In order to examine the assertions of the prosecution and the concerns of the crew, the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) carried out an analysis of the likely radiation doses received by the Tomodachi personnel from this fallout, but also made a study of cancer in the 4843 USS Ronald Reagan sailors and a matched control group of 65,269 individuals who were on US naval ships of the same type as the USS Ronald Reagan but not deployed near Fukushima and therefore not exposed to the fallout from that event. These data are of value to those who are concerned that the current radiation risk model may be unsafe for predicting or explaining the health effects of internal radiation exposures. The radiation risk model (hereafter the Risk Model) underpins legislation to limit exposures to workers and members of the public. It is based largely upon quantifying exposure through a concept termed Absorbed Dose and predicting the effects through the life span study (LSS) of a selected Japanese population exposed to the A-Bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Its earliest articulation was developed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) in the 1950s and the essential method has not changed since then. There have been many studies made of workers at nuclear energy sites and also weapons production facilities. Doses are generally listed (if at all) on external radiation film badge data. Internal exposures are difficult to quantify, and have largely been neglected, except in the case of some Uranium plant worker studies. Of note, and perhaps relevant here, the studies of workers at weapon production facilities suggests increased risk of cancer associated with internal exposures to Uranium and Plutonium. In these studies, the location of the nuclear workers relative to the source of contamination or exposure is never given, and so those physically close to a contamination source or a nuclear reactor are mixed in with those who work at a distance or in the open, thus diluting any possible effect. A nuclear-powered ship or submarine, on the other hand, is an ideal place to examine the health effects of internal exposures. Naval nuclear reactors necessarily are small and relatively unshielded to save weight and thus have less effective containment than shore based installations. They also are fuelled with enriched Uranium containing a larger than usual fraction of U-235. There will be fission products and activation products emitted, including Plutonium-238/239, also Tritium H-3 which is a very difficult nuclide to contain. Co-60, a gamma emitter will be neutroninduced in steel near the reactors. Ships (by necessity, to be watertight) are enclosed and relatively small compared with a nuclear site. A ship or a submarine may therefore be seen as a metal box containing the reactor(s) and thus any releases from them might concentrate in the space in the box, unlike a land based nuclear power station where there is freedom for total dispersion. A literature search has not revealed any published studies of cancer specifically in personnel aboard any nuclear-powered vessel although a large 2008 study of nuclear shipyard workers
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found a significant excess risk of cancers. For this reason, it was of interest to examine the cancer risk in the control population of 65,269 individuals relative to the national population. Method and materials Dose estimates for the USS Reagan were provided only for the net dose received from the Fukushima fallout, background doses having been subtracted. No data on background doses which were subtracted was made available either for the USS Ronald Reagan or for the control group. The method of assessing the excess doses in the USS Ronald Reagan was referred to in the report, but has since been removed from the website. Maximum Dose from the Fukushima fallout was given as 0.08mSv (8mrem) [2]. It is possible to scope the background doses on US nuclear ships from a 2012 report of the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program [13]. This states that the mean dose to personnel on nuclear ships is 0.08mSv (8mrem). The maximum annual dose to any individual on a nuclear ship is limited by the law (10CFR20) and since 1992 depends upon whether they are registered as radiation workers or not. If radiation workers their maximum annual dose is 50mSv and if not, it is 1mSv [14]. Data on cancer in both the USS Ronald Reagan and the control group by 5-year age group and both sexes combined was obtained. Since it is clear that the group
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consisted mainly of men, the age specific rates for all cancers in men in the total US population for 2011-2016 were employed as a comparison group for analysis. Variation in the result which would have occurred if the small proportion of women rates were employed was shown to be unlikely to influence the Relative Risk. Cancer data in the United States by cancer site, sex and age group is collected by the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program of the US National Cancer Institute and published on their website [15]. The population at risk in 2011 at the start of the follow up was employed to calculate the expected numbers of cancers. The numbers in service at the end of the study period were fewer by 15,744 and even allowing for the increased age of the population the maximum number of expected cancers would be obtained by employing the starting population. This made the result conservative. The total number of expected cases of malignant cancer was calculated and this was compared to the reported number of cases to generate a Relative Risk. For interest, a similar calculation was employed with the 4843 Ronald Reagan group. It should be noted that the DTRA report stated that 76 of the Reagan personnel had vanished to follow up and so the cancer numbers reported excluded these individuals. Similarly, some 15,000 of the control group population were missing from the study at its end. Results Only data on all cancers combined were provided. There was no breakdown into specific cancer sites. There were 1199 malignant cancers expected in the control group compared with 121 expected on the basis of the national rates. The results show that, on the basis of the Navy’s own data, the cancer risk in those serving in nuclear powered ships is about 9-times the expected number based on the national population. This result is all the more of concern given that these were young people mainly aged less than 50 years and that the population should have been of the “healthy worker” class. The control group was apparently selected to be matched to the study group on the USS Ronald Reagan, and thus would have been from other nuclear-powered ships. The Reagan group also showed a high level of cancer risk, though only about 60% of that found in the control group was still 6 times the expected number. Possible reasons for this statistically significant difference will be revisited below. But the comparison with an unexposed control group was the reason for the study: to reassure the sailors and to provide evidence for the defence in any court case. And this it apparently did. The dose reconstruction, which was the main part of the report, was used to argue that no excess cancer risk in the sailors was possible, on the basis of the current radiation risk model employed by the Navy
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(and indeed the US government). This risk model is essentially that of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) [3]. Before turning to the issue of the risk model, it is necessary to first ask if the high levels of cancer in the sailors could have had any other cause apart from the link with the fact that these are nuclear powered vessels. Studies of cancer on those who serve at sea have not revealed any persuasive cause of cancers except for slight excess mesothelioma in those exposed to asbestos cladding and lung cancer in engine room personnel exposed (presumably) to oil [16]. Other possible causes of cancer may include exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation (radar, communications) classified as a possible (2b) carcinogen by the World Health Organisation, but the extremely high levels of cancer shown in this study cannot sensibly be explained by these exposures alone. On the basis of the famous Sherlock Holmes advice to Watson—when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—adage, we are left with the explanation involving exposures to radioactivity released from the nuclear reactors, or external radiation from some shipboard source, at levels that are currently deemed safe. Now, it seems very unlikely that external radiation at the mean levels published by the Navy could cause such a large excess of cancer. If that were so, then those exposed to medical and dental X-rays would be developing cancer at a rate that it is clear they are not. It follows that it must be internal exposures from some radionuclides that are causing these high risks. These internal contaminations are not detectable by the dosimeters or other devices deployed on board, and they are very difficult to measure, even if such measurements are made. What is possible here, is that these results may indicate an error in the way in which internal exposures are quantified. It suggests that (certain) internal exposures may carry a very much larger weighting factor for genotoxicity than external radiation. There are plausible biophysical reasons for such an idea. This brief communication is not the place to rehearse all the arguments that the ICRP model is unsafe for exposures to internal radioactivity from certain nuclides. This has been argued elsewhere. Briefly, the ICRP model stands on the Japanese ABomb Life Span Study (LSS), which has been shown to be unsafe for a number of reasons, especially since it did not include the rainout exposures to the black rain: Uranium particles from the weapons. A reviewer pointed out that the Nagasaki bomb was a Plutonium bomb. But the main mass of both the Japanese bombs was Uranium. The Plutonium core at Nagasaki was the fissile centre, but it was surrounded by a massive amount of Uranium as a “tamper” to reflect neutrons back
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into the core. The Uranium tamper was vapourised by the initial fission explosion and fell to earth in the black rain as nanoparticles. These arguments do not make the ICRP model itself wrong, since the model predicts cancer excess on the basis of the cancer excess in the Japanese LSS cohorts. But since the LSS study itself was erroneous due to the failure to include the Uranium particles in the black rain, and other reasons, it makes the ICRP prediction unsafe. There is another serious failing in the Japanese LSS study. When it became apparent by 1971 that the Not in City (NIC) low dose group were suffering high levels of cancer, this Uranium-exposed control group was abandoned in 1973. Furthermore, and of interest here in explaining the Ronald Reagan group results, many A-Bomb exposed individuals in Japan disappeared before the study groups were assembled. This biased the study from the start. And it is a general problem with nearly all the retrospective radiation cancer studies. Radiation, particularly internal alpha emitters, kill people in all kinds of ways apart from cancer. This bias in the Radium studies was pointed out in 1971 by the then Director of the UK Medical Research Council Radiation Biology Unit. Many of the Radium study individuals, the dial painters, died from non-cancer causes long before they were old enough to develop cancer . At that point, in the UK, the study of radiation and health was removed from the doctors and placed in the hands of the physicists in a new organisation, the National Radiological Protection Board, where it effectively remains. Other studies of internal radiation suffer from the same bleed-out of exposed individuals at the start of the assembly. This includes the Techa River cohort and the Nuclear Test Veterans. The reason for this digression is to address the difference between the cancer risk in the Reagan group and that in the control group. The total number of cancers in the Reagan group was 46. But 76 individuals had disappeared. The RR for the Reagan group was about 6, compared with 9 in the controls. 33% more cancers would have brought the Reagan group in line with the control group. That is 15 cancers. But 76 individuals were unaccounted for—had disappeared. This is not the first indication that cancer rates are high in those working with nuclear ships. A study in 2008 examined cancer risk in US shipyard workers, in which the authors conclude that low level exposures to gamma rays may be responsible for increased cancer rates. These risks are, again, far higher than expected on the basis of the Japanese A-Bomb studies and clearly, if real, are evidence of the failure of current protective legislation. It did not occur to the authors that the effects were due to internal contamination, since they assumed that the concept of “dose”, which they employed in their analysis, was one with a firm scientific basis.
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There are many causes of cancer. And the time lag between exposure and expression can be very long. A more accurate test of the biological effects of radiation is the rate of congenital effects in the newborn. A recent meta-analysis of the increases in congenital birth defects after the Chernobyl accident, examining separate studies by different groups in Europe and the ex-Soviet Union countries concluded that the error in the ICRP risk model for these genetic effects was greater than 1000-fold, not a small error. The increased risk of child leukemia near nuclear sites dictates a similar or greater level of error in the ICRP model. There are reasonable biological mechanistic explanations for this level of error, especially when internal exposures to Uranium are concerned. The nuclear worker studies now remain as the only possible support for arguing the safety of the ICRP model. These studies have expanded into monstrous citadels of
denial in proportion to the assaults that have taken place on the ICRP model since Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima (thyroid cancer excess). There are two illustrative studies worth discussing. The most recent one was published by the Royal Society in 2017. It displays all the data on cancer and radiation dose in one graph which has a straight line drawn through all the points and passing though the
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point (0,0), no radiation, no cancer. The second one, and earlier but very large assemblage of nuclear workers, gives results for each cancer stratified by dose. External dose, that is—and over a very large range. Examination of this earlier study by Cardis et al 2007 reveals that the true dose response is not linear at all. Putting in the true origin for no (nuclear site) dose and placing the cancer level below the zero axis (the healthy worker effect) reveals that the real dose response is biphasic. At very low doses, the effect is very large (per unit dose). This is not at all the message sent by the Royal Society review which does not cite any of the evidence falsifying the LSS or the evidence from the post-Chernobyl birth defect data. This author wrote to the Royal Society pointing this out, but the response was that the journal would not do anything about this nor would publish anything referring to any disagreement. The current study, of the US navy controls, can be seen as strictly a nuclear worker study. But here, unlike the nuclear workers at nuclear power stations, the nuclear workers are necessarily closer to the reactors, and mostly constrained in a metal ship which also contains the individuals. What is required here is further study of cancer in US Navy nuclear powered vessels. It would be valuable to see a breakdown by cancer types, since certain types of cancer are more associated with radiation than others. Additionally, radionuclide-specific monitoring of personnel and measurement of radionuclides in the air on nuclear powered ships should provide useful data. The results here confirm the dangers of exposures to radioactivity shown by the post Chernobyl studies and the reassessment of the LSS by Wanatabe et al who compared the cancer yield of the A-Bombs to an epidemiologically sound external control population and revealed high levels of cancer in the lowest dose group. The health status of those personnel serving on nuclear ships should be re-evaluated as a matter of some urgency. Conclusion Official health data on US Navy sailors serving on nuclear powered vessels show that the rates of cancer are about 9-times the expected rates based on national data. The explanation must be that these personnel are exposed to some carcinogen. The most likely exposure is to radioactivity and/or radiation from the nuclear reactors on board the ships. This is not predicted by the current radiation risk model, but there is increasingly other persuasive published evidence that this is the case.
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Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ speech mirrored Truman’s ‘rain of ruin’ Hiroshima broadcast PRESIDENT Donald Trump famously warned North Korea that it could face “fire and fury” over its nuclear weapons programme. These words conjure up the apocalyptic warning made by President Harry S. Truman that the Japanese people faced a “rain of ruin” in July 1945, if they did not surrender. On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Truman announced the news to the nation in a press release from the White House and in a
solemn radio address. The bomb, one of the greatest scientific gambles in history, Truman said, “has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.” He described the atomic fury as “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbour. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.”
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Truman was aboard the USS Augusta returning from the Potsdam Conference in Europe when he was told that the B-29 bomber Enola Gay had dropped the world’s first atom bomb on Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 died as a direct result of the blast; 35,000 more were injured.
An additional 60,000 died by year’s end from the effects of the nuclear fallout. Truman was discouraged by Japan’s refusal to accept the demand for unconditional surrender issued at Potsdam. “It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam,” he said in a radio address regarding the bomb. “Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. “Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number that and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.”
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View From The Bunker
Come together before It’s too late… Let there be no mistake. This is the worst public health and economic crisis the world has faced, and it is the world leaders who need to get together to solve it. China, where the coronavirus outbreak began, needs to take the lead. It must cast off its cloak of secrecy and allow the world’s scientists full access to everything they know about this disease, exactly how it started, where it started and what progress they are making in producing a vaccine. The rest of the world cannot afford to wait for months to catch up with the Chinese research. Full disclosure and sharing of knowledge is the only way the world will beat this deadly plague. Surely it is not beyond the wit of world leaders to get together and come up with a coordinated response? If they don’t act fast social order will inevitably break down. Already in America they queue for guns (as if they didn’t have enough); In Britain, we fight over toilet rolls. Gutted shops with empty shelves; litter blowing like tumbleweed down eerily quiet streets. This is reality writ large. There is a sense of rising panic, of impending doom. People cower in their homes looking fearfully out of the window, or cluster round their TV’s eating junk food and shouting ineffectually at Boris. We are all prisoners of an alien menace that needs to be fought with all our might and main. The time for partisan considerations and futile point-scoring is over. The world, and that means all the world, needs to unite before it’s too late.
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