Radioactive fallout from nuclear testing
M V Ramana
The Daily Times
Thursday, July 18, 2002
July 16 marks the 57th anniversary
of the first-ever nuclear test. Carried out in the dry desert in South
Western USA, in a place appropriately called Jornada del Muerto (the
Journey of Death), the test was intended to prove a new implosion weapon
design that had been developed in the Manhattan project.
In its
core, the weapon contained about 6 kilograms of plutonium (approximately
the size of an orange) which when exploded released an enormous amount of
energy, approximately 20,000 tonnes of TNT equivalent or 20 kilotonnes for
short. (The energy from nuclear explosions is usually measured in terms of
the equivalent amount of TNT, high-energy chemical explosive.) This
intense burst of energy produced a fireball that was literally brighter
than a thousand Suns. The extreme heat turned the sand in the desert into
green glass; dust and smoke were hurled thousands of feet into the sky to
form the world’s first mushroom cloud.
Since then, 2051 explosive
nuclear tests have been conducted all over the world. Of these, 528 have
been in the atmosphere, under water, or in space. The rest have been
underground. Of these the worst health effects were those from tests
carried out in the atmosphere, which produced large amounts of radioactive
fallout that spread widely due to winds.
Health effects were both
local and global. Local effects in regions near testing sites and, in some
cases, even hundreds of kilometers downwind of the test locations, led to
relatively large doses to the inhabitants of these areas. To mention just
one of the effects of this exposure, according to the US National Cancer
Institute about 10,000 to 75,000 Americans would be afflicted with thyroid
cancer from Iodine-131, a radioactive isotope of iodine gas, from US
atmospheric tests. Similarly, it has been estimated that about 10,000 to
40,000 inhabitants of the area adjacent to the testing site in Kazakhstan
were exposed to an average dose of 160 rads (giving rise to something like
an 8% increased risk of cancer per person). A subsection of the population
would have been irradiated with a much higher dose.
At the global
level, dissident Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov was one of the first to
calculate that atmospheric tests cause about 10,000 deaths and other
health injuries per megaton of the explosion. These deaths would occur
over thousands of years and result largely from the long-lived Carbon-14
(which has a half-life of 5730 years). Since the estimated cumulative
yield of atmospheric tests by the US, Russia, UK, France and China is
about 545 megatons, over the next few thousands of years, over 5 million
people will die from cancers induced by atmospheric testing. In addition
to these, there will be an approximately equal number of non-lethal
cancers.
International awareness of the dangers of radioactive
fallout from atmospheric tests came with the 1954 Bravo thermonuclear test
conducted by the United States. All 23 crewmembers of a Japanese fishing
boat, inappropriately named Lucky Dragon, that was fishing about a 100
miles from the test location were irradiated. Several fell sick and one
died creating international outrage.
In response, US authorities
looked for ways to justify this tragedy. Lewis Strauss, a Wall Street
banker who had been appointed head of the US Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC), suggested that the Lucky Dragon was a ‘red spy outfit’ and denied
that fallout had contaminated fish catches. When the evidence proved too
strong to deny, an AEC report suggested that there was a gain to be made.
Without the data from the contaminated islanders and fishermen, “we would
have been in ignorance of the effects of radioactive fallout and,
therefore … much more vulnerable to the dangers from fallout in the event
an enemy should resort to radiological warfare against us.” The message is
clear — “national security” interests outweighed any consequences that may
be heaped on the disempowered.
The locations where nuclear testing
has been conducted around the world have largely been areas populated by
disempowered indigenous peoples: the native Americans (formerly known as
Red Indians) in Nevada and the Pacific Islanders of the Marshall Islands
where the US conducted its tests; the Kazakh population near the
Semipalatinsk test site where the Soviet Union conducted its tests; the
Uighurs near the Lop Nur test site of China; the Aboriginal populations of
Australia where Britain conducted its tests; and so on.
Governments
conducting the nuclear tests have mostly kept local populations in the
dark about the health implications of what was going on. A 1957 US Atomic
Energy Commission pamphlet that was widely distributed in the areas
adjoining the Nevada Test site advised the locals: “your best action is
not to be worried about fallout.” Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower’s
advice to the AEC chairman was, “Keep them confused as to fission and
fusion.”
Nevertheless the severe health effects soon became
apparent even to people systematically fed misleading propaganda. Leukemia
became a household name. Communities were exposed to diseases they had
never even heard of. Various scientists started a widely heard debate
about radioactive fallout.
One of the more forward-looking
responses to this health hazard was the proposal for the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.
In a proposal dated April 8, 1954, he requested the nuclear weapon states
to negotiate: “Some sort of what may be called ‘Standstill Agreement’, in
respect at least, of these explosions, even if arrangements about the
discontinuance of production and stockpiling must await more substantial
agreements among those principally concerned.” While this proposal was not
successful, it did result in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which
prohibited all but underground nuclear tests.
Since then most
nuclear tests have been conducted underground. While nuclear
establishments the world over have tried to convince their citizens and
others that this posed no risks to their health and the environment, once
again that is not the case. But can a leopard change its spots?
M V
Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s
Program on Science and Global Security. Some of his writings can be found
at http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nuclear.html