Revelation: I am the alpha, the beta and the gamma

Revelation: I am the alpha, the beta and the gamma--

the basics of "health physics" that the nuclear industry would rather you not know about

Stage 1: Ignore. Deflect. Distract. Do not acknowledge.

Stage 2: Deny. Explain. Rationalize. Justify.

Skillful politicians and lawyers know that the art of public relations is to employ Stage 1 tactics so well that Stage 2 tactics will never be needed. If one is forced to use Stage 2 tactics, one is on his heels, on the defensive and headed for a fall. Representatives of the civilian and military nuclear programs have always tried to use Stage 1 tactics to keep public attention off of what matters. Whenever there has been a nuclear accident, or whenever the effects of nuclear bomb tests have had to be discussed, official discourse has always focused on external gamma radiation.

This started with the first studies done on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it continued throughout the period of nuclear weapons testing. Gamma dose rates were measured with Geiger counters and cumulative dose badges, but there was no official interest in gathering information on alpha and beta particles deposited in the environment or absorbed in living tissue. Even though this flaw in the methodology has been pointed out repeatedly, every time a new incident occurs, the nuclear industry resorts to Stage 1 tactics of public relations. Questions about beta particles will be deflected or ignored.

Thus Fukushima prefecture in 2011 got hundreds of radiation monitoring posts, all set two meters above ground, to measure the gamma dose, and children got their “glass badges” to measure their cumulative gamma dose. All the while there was no talk about alpha and beta particles, internal contamination, or the chemical toxicity (aside from the radiological toxicity) of the nuclear industry garbage that was now in the environment where people have to live.

To illustrate the long history of these deflection and denial tactics, the rest of this article discusses two documentaries that were produced by regional television channels in the United Kingdom in 1990-91. Both films can be viewed online at the links given. The text below consists of transcripts of segments that highlight the main themes and conclusions of these reports.

The Truth of Christmas Island relates what was revealed then about the consequences of ignoring beta particle contamination among the veterans of Britain’s nuclear tests. Children of the Bomb reveals a secondary consequence of this neglect: the lasting effect on the gene pool of the human species. One would think that such damning revelations would have led all nations to shut down their nuclear industries, but instead these reports caused no great political upheaval. It is just interesting to note now that the official reaction to such research findings was not to say, “Yes, but we think the death, suffering and damage to the gene pool were, are and will be the price we have to pay for our security.” The strategy still in place is to ignore, deflect, distract and not acknowledge.

Gamma radiation data was broadcast on Japanese weather reports during 2011.

1. The Truth of Christmas Island

Ross Wilson (director) Paul Murricane (producer), Dispatches: The Truth of Christmas Island, Scottish Television Productions, 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc3_GRMHdlU

32:24~

NARRATOR: They [the British Ministry of Defense] measured only gamma radiation which came from the bomb blasts, the other form of radiation from beta particles suspended in the fallout and causing longer term exposure was not measured.

DR. KARL MORGAN (US health physics advisor to the British military, participant in the earlier US Bikini Islands nuclear tests): The beta could have been predominant in this fallout and yet the meters which measured only gamma radiation might have shown nothing at all.

NARRATOR: Karl Morgan was a lone voice warning of the dangers of beta radiation. What he found suggests that the New Zealand Navy personnel on ships were in the greatest danger.

DR. KARL MORGAN: Years before the British tests when we were testing the weapons at Bikini, Dr. Colonel Stafford Warren was in charge of the health effects there, and there again our military did not measure the beta dose, and so I insisted on making measurements. Finally, I was loaned a group of servicemen. We went out in the small boats, boarded the target ships, went to the islands and other places, and we found on average the beta dose was about five times the gamma dose, and on some materials, like boat rust and paint and so on, the beta dose was as much as 600 times the gamma dose. So if our instruments, our film badges, were only measuring the gamma dose, that was all that went on the record. It could be that this poor guy received 600 hundred times this dose of beta radiation.

DR. JOHN LARGE (independent nuclear consultant): If the servicemen did receive high doses—and that’s not just external doses—that’s internal doses which they carry around with them for the rest of their lives, then the damage has been done.

DR. KARL MORGAN: Looking at the particles that might be rained out… Just one of these particles could contain enough strontium 90, cesium 137 or plutonium to be the source of a malignancy that would show up maybe 10, 20, 30, 50 years later.

NARRATOR: In May 1990, the Community Health Department at Wellington School of Medicine in New Zealand published an exhaustive study into the health into the health of the New Zealand personnel [who participated in the Christmas Island nuclear tests]. By following up on 528 men who had taken part in the tests, they found five and half times the expected rate of leukemia. Their conclusion: some leukemias and possibly some other hematological cancers may have resulted from participation in this program. This confirms a previous study carried out in Britain by the National Radiological Protection Board [NRPB] into a much larger sample of British servicemen two years previously.

DR. TOM SORAHAN (Birmingham University): Well, the NRPB report in fact found a statistically significant difference in leukemia and multiple myeloma between the test participants and the control group. In the participants there were 28 deaths from leukemia and multiple myeloma; whereas in the comparison group there were only 6. This was a very significant finding.

2. Children of the Bomb

Paul Dicken (director), Children of the Bomb: A Northern Eye Investigation, Tyne Tees Television (United Kingdom), 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJLkSjcIAU&feature=share

00:00~

SHEILA GRAY, secretary of the British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association:

I know of a grandchild who was born with its stomach in its lung. They saved her, but now she’s hyperactive. She’s going deaf. There are others with their feet sticking out at their knees. People with hearts on the wrong side, extra digits on their hands… asthma, leukemia in the children, you could go on forever… I know of one boy who was born—he was ten days old—and other than having webbed feet he was perfectly normal to look at. He died unexpectedly and of course we had to hold a post-mortem. Each of his organs weighed twice what they should, and he was dual-sexed inside. That was my first introduction to that. That was in 1983 when I first got involved, and since then they’ve come along with varying details. We know of a veteran’s daughter who was born with dual sex and they had to build her into a woman. We have veterans’ children—grown up, second generation. They ring me up and say, “My father was at such and such a test. I want to get married. Dare I have children?”

34:19~

JOURNALIST: What did the survey reveal about the children?

JOHN URCOTT, statistician: We had a problem. We didn’t know whether these families had joined [the BNTVA study] because they had malformed children, so we looked at the problem in another way. We looked at the children who were the first child to be conceived after the [nuclear] tests and we looked at subsequent children. And what we found was—and this is a very important result—we found that the first child to be conceived after the tests had a much greater chance of one of these illnesses than subsequent children.

NARRATOR: Last year, Professor Martin Gardener had linked radiation to leukemias in the children of Sellafield [nuclear fuel processing center] workers. His theory was that a high dosage of radiation damaged a father’s sperm. Northern Eye’s investigation suggests something even worse. The children conceived soon after their father’s return from the bomb tests may be suffering from a whole range of diseases and deformities.

JOHN URCOTT: We had this increase in congenital malformation and other genetically linked diseases in the first child after the tests, and that is very, very important. Not only is it important for the families who are worried and want to know why their children have got these genetic effects, but from a scientific point of view it advances the argument.

JOHN URCOTT: For a second expert opinion, Northern Eye took its findings to the Center for Industrial Safety and Health in London. The center does research into the health risks faced by groups of workers and their children. We asked Claire Marie Fortin to investigate the rare cancers we found among the veterans’ children, and analyze the wide range of congenital conditions found in our study.

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: There appeared to be in this data an unusually high occurrence of congenital malformations. We know that congenital malformations happen, sadly, in the general population. We know that cancer is a disease of the 20th century, and we all know someone who has died of it. So there are cases of cancer, congenital malformations, diseases, you name it, that already exist as part of the background of our lives. So what I was actually looking for was an increased occurrence of those particular events.

NARRATOR: Fortin tested our findings on congenital abnormalities to make sure they weren’t biased. Our results came from the children of 1,100 veterans. Fortin studied those results as if they had come from the children of all 27,000 veterans. This meant the number of abnormalities was diluted over twenty times. She still found the rate of most abnormalities was higher than normal.

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: I thought, “What if this had come from another occupational group?” I would have been shocked. I wouldn’t have expected that scale—that range actually of experience amongst the offspring.

JOURNALIST: What stood out in the results of the survey?

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: I think the most significant result in that survey are in fact the adrenal cancers. There were four adrenal cancers, two of which were neuroblastomas. Now they are actually quite rare amongst children, and as a result, the fact that there were four in such a small group is quite astonishing, and so I wanted to test that and see if it was really as astonishing as it seemed.

NARRATOR: Again, Fortin applied the severest test to Northern Eye’s figures, in case our sample was biased. We had found four adrenal cancers in just 2,500 children. Fortin assumed those four rare cancers had been found in a study of all the veterans’ children, 67,500 of them. This number of children was a deliberate overestimate. Even when measured in that much bigger group of children, the number of adrenal cancers was eight times higher than normal.

CLAIRE MARIE FORTIN: That’s an amazing statistic. Now, again, one has to be very careful because we don’t know if these adrenal cancers were primary cancers or secondary cancers. A lot of research has got to go into this. But just on the face of it those cancers are quite alarming. Bells should be ringing somewhere that there is a real problem here.

Further reading:

Chris Busby, “Bomb Test Veterans’ Grandchildren Suffer Health Effects,” The Ecologist, October 16, 2014.

Susie Boniface, “Nuclear Test Veterans scandal continues as children are STILL being born with medical defects three generations on, The Mirror Online, April 5, 2014.

Professor Chris Busby: “The main finding is that the grandchildren are suffering at almost the same rate as the children of veterans. In normal genetics, with each generation the effects would be less as new DNA is added to the family line. But with radiation exposure, a kind of instability is passed down – like an alarming message in a bottle passed from mother to child. It tells the child to scramble its genes randomly in all directions, so you get many children with strange deformities. The genes do it in order to evolve around the radiation. But it is terrible that women have this fear hanging over their heads because of what happened to their fathers. And yet there is no concession from the government or military that it happened at all.”

Marc Meneaud, “Mother fears her father’s deadly illness has passed to her son,” The Sunday Post, January 26, 2014.

Title alludes to:
Revelation 22:13 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." (http://biblehub.com/revelation/22-13.htm)