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)  

Light of the World Offers No Apologies to Polynesia

As French president Francois Hollande visited Tahiti this week and implicitly thanked Polynesians for their sacrifices in giving France nuclear “dissuasion,” one could see the persistence of outdated Cold War obsessions with deterrence, as well as Charles de Gaulle’s lasting influence on French policy. De Gaulle was famous for grandiose hyperbole like this example from 1963 which he uttered at the dawn of France’s nuclear age:

"France’s authority is moral… Our country is different than others because of its disinterested and universal vocation… France has an eternal role. That is why it benefits from an immense credit. Because France was a pioneer of American independence, of the abolition of slavery, of the rights of people to dispose of their own fate. Because it is the champion of nations’ independence against all hegemonies. Everyone realizes that France is the light of the world, it’s genius is to enlighten the universe." [1]

Hollande made a compromise statement that recognized that the health and environmental consequences were more than previously admitted, but there was no apology, no remorse and no questioning about the decisions of the past. There were only vague promises about recognizing the suffering, bringing more justice to the compensation process, and “turning the page,” whatever that was supposed to mean.

Non, je ne regrette rien.

An excerpt from news wire copy is below, followed by comments by Bruno Barrillot, a researcher and author who has covered the issue for the last thirty years.

_____

Stéphane de Sakutin, “Hollande acknowledges 'consequences' of nuclear tests on Polynesia trip,” AFP and France24, February 23, 2016,
http://www.france24.com/en/20160222-hollande-address-nuclear-test-victims-polynesia-trip

Compensation for the victims of three decades of French nuclear tests was a focus of President François Hollande's visit to French Polynesia on Monday… the focus of the visit was very much on the victims of 193 nuclear tests carried out by France between 1966 and 1996 on the atolls Mururoa and Fangataufa.

The French president acknowledged Monday in Papeete that the nuclear tests conducted in French Polynesia had affected the environment and the health of the islands. "I recognize that the nuclear tests conducted between 1966 and 1996 in French Polynesia had an environmental impact, and caused health consequences," he said. Hollande said he wanted to “turn the page” on nuclear tests, while hailing Polynesia’s crucial role in developing France’s nuclear capabilities. Without its overseas territories, “France would not now have nuclear weapons and the power of dissuasion,” he said, using the French expression for nuclear deterrence.

Hollande also announced a review of the application process for compensating the victims of the tests. Only around 20 people have received compensation for the spread of cancers allegedly linked to the tests from among some 1,000 plaintiffs.

France’s “nuclear debt” owed to Polynesia, dubbed the “Chirac Billion” (in Francs, now worth around €150 million), is an annual payment to the islands that has been reduced year after year, and which Polynesians want to be made permanent.

_____

Mr. President, more must be done!
A translated excerpt of: Bruno Barrillot, « Monsieur le Président, il faut aller plus loin ! » Observatoire des armements, 2016/02/23, http://www.obsarm.org/spip.php?article268

The leaders of France have still not understood that this discourse about clean tests is based on repeated lies by those how were responsible for the nuclear tests. These lies have been refuted today by hundreds of documents that had been classified as state secrets...

The vague announcement about modifying the Morin Law [on compensation for nuclear test victims] risks putting the victims through more endless procedures before the Committee for Compensation, and in other tribunals. We must ask if there will be a true concerted effort to work with the victims’ groups to elaborate what this new decree should take account of and who will be on the Committee for Compensation—which hasn’t really changed its methods for reviewing cases since it became independent from the Ministry of Defense...

The Observatoire des armaments proposes that the various announcements by the president of the republic should allow for the true involvement of all parties concerned, including of course the groups which, in Polynesia and France, have been vigorously mobilized for many years. Time is of the essence! The victims are disappearing and getting discouraged because of having waited for so long! Polynesians, thanks to the very recent exemplary action by Association 193, are growing more and more aware of the consequences of the nuclear history on their lives, their health and their environment.

_____

Comments

I think Mr. Barrillot knows but didn’t point out at this time that there is a fundamental flaw in the recent statement by President Hollande. It comes with a recognition of the “impacts” of the nuclear tests, but not with an admission that the whole pursuit of nuclear weapons was a crime and a tragic error for France, and for every other nation that has possessed them. When he said that without its overseas territories, France would not now have nuclear weapons and the power of dissuasion, he said it as if thanking Polynesians and Algerians (not to mention the affected French military and civilian personnel) for their sacrifices for a great cause. If this were not the case, and he thought the pursuit of nuclear weapons had been a grave error, his statement would have sounded like blaming the overseas territories for enabling France to go down this evil road.

As is the case in America, one has to turn to late night comedy shows to find intelligent analysis and correspondents who will ask uncomfortable questions. Le Petit Journal covered the state visit to Polynesia, and interviewed members of the group Association 193 to ask them what they thought of the president’s statement. One said it was not what they had expected.They wanted an apology. Another said the lack of an apology was “disgusting” and “they take us for fools.” 

No apology? "Disgusting. They take us for fools." From Le Petit Journal, 2016/02/23

The correspondent was granted an interview with Hollande, and he asked directly if it was time to apologize and admit that it was a mistake to test nuclear weapons. Hollande repeated that it was time to “recognize the effects” and seek a more just compensation, but then he answered the question straight: "No. The nuclear tests are a historical fact. It happened. It had to happen. That’s how we got the nuclear deterrent." (translation and paraphrase). So, this candid official line is that some unfortunate things happened, we’ll deal with the consequences, but the lives lost were worth it. It was all for the best in the best of all possible worlds... Voltaire would be outraged.

Regrets? An error? "No. The nuclear tests are a historical fact.
It happened. It had to happen. That’s how we got the nuclear deterrent."
From Le Petit Journal, 2016/02/23

Every president since de Gaulle has stuck with the fantasy that nuclear deterrence (or dissuasion) has somehow saved France from being destroyed by nuclear weapons, or allowed it to achieve a status from which it worked magic on international relations. Every other nuclear nation persists in the same illogical conclusion, that they survived because of deterrence. They do take us for fools because they expect we will not notice that one could never prove the reason that nuclear war didn’t happen. We can look around at France’s neighboring countries and see that they have not been attacked by nuclear or conventional weapons. We can also look back on de Gaulle’s grand plan to break the deadlock of the Cold War and see that it really had little influence on the way a new world order emerged in the 1980s. Or we could ask Rwandans about the outcome of French and Anglo-American rivalries in central Africa in the 1990s.

If France wanted to try once again to claim high ground on the world stage, there is a way it could do something really brilliant for humanity. France possesses only a few hundred nuclear weapons (compared to the thousands in the US and Russian arsenals), and it is in a unique position to make the first major step toward disarmament. The US and Russia can’t do it now because they have lost too much trust, and they fear the consequences of destabilizing the status quo. But France would risk nothing by dismantling its nuclear weapons. It needs them as much as Spain, Germany and Italy need their own nukes; that is, not at all. It stands only to gain, first by ridding itself of the expense of the weapons, second by ridding itself of the danger they pose, and third by gaining the moral stature that de Gaulle hallucinated about. It would be an unprecedented step because France would be the first of “the group of five” (the five nations of the UN Security Council, who all possess nuclear arsenals) to forsake the possession of nuclear weapons. It would be the courageous example of unilateral disarmament that many have called for over the years. Everyone would realize that France had lived up to de Gaulle’s view of his nation: France truly would be “the light of the world,” possessing “a genius to enlighten the universe.” Or was that light just the flash of the Canopus H-bomb exploding over the Fangataufa atoll?

Canopus, 1968/08/24

Note

[1] Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, vol. 1. (Fayard, 1994-2000). Meeting of February 13, 1963, p. 283. In Garret Joseph Martin’s General de Gaulle’s Cold War: Challenging American Hegemony 1963-68 (Berghan Books, 2013) p. 193.