Atomic Deserts: A Survey of Some of the World's Radioactive No-Go Zones

Atomic Deserts

A Survey of Some of the World's Radioactive No-Go Zones

By Michail Hengstenberg, Gesche Sager and Philine Gebhardt

 

 The Soviet nuclear testing site in present-day Kazakhstan is just one of many places in the world that remain dangerously radioactive to this day.

Everyone knows about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and, now, Fukushima. But what about Semipalatinsk, Palomares and Kyshtym? The world is full of nuclear disaster zones -- showing just how dangerous the technology really is.

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Wednesday, Mar. 28, 1979. In the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the nightmare scenario of nuclear physicists was about to unfold. At four in the morning, employees in the control room noticed the failure of a pump in the reactor's water cooling loop. When a bypass valve failed to trip, water stopped flowing to steam generators, resulting in an emergency reactor shutdown. But the reactor continued to generate so-called decay heat. A relief valve opened automatically but then failed to close, allowing coolant to flow out at a rate of one ton per minute. The control panel erroneously indicated that the cooling system was functioning normally, meaning technicians initially failed to recognize the problem.

By 6 a.m., the top of the reactor core was no longer covered in cooling water -- and the fuel rods began to melt. At the last moment, a technician noticed the problem and closed the relief valve. A full-scale meltdown was only barely averted.

Still, the series of events had a devastating effect: Not only was radioactivity released into the atmosphere, but contaminated coolant escaped into the nearby river. Cancer rates in the local population later rose dramatically. In addition, large parts of the reactor and the power plant site were contaminated. The clean-up operation in Harrisburg took 14 years and cost more than $1 billion. And the reactor ruins are radioactive to this day.

The case is instructive. It was the result of tiny construction errors and a small dose of human error. And now, as the world watches on in horror as the catastrophe in Fukushima continues to unfold, the debate on the safety of nuclear power has been reignited. The area around Fukushima will likely remain contaminated for decades, if not centuries. And many are once again wondering if the returns from nuclear technology justifies the risks. How can anything be considered under control which can so quickly mutate into an apocalypse?

Sadly, though, disasters like Three Mile Island and Fukushima are not as rare as one would hope. There have been plenty of atomic accidents resulting in significant radioactive leaks, spills and explosions. And the Chernobly Exclusion Zone, for all the attention it gets, is far from the only nuclear no-go area on the planet. A look at some of the worst incidents is enough to demonstrate just how high the price of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons truly is.

A New Age Dawns

Image - Corbis

On Jul. 16, 1945, at 05:29:45 local time, the atomic era began as the first ever nuclear bomb, called "The Gadget", was detonated at the White Sands missile testing grounds in New Mexico. A similar device exploded over Nagasaki just a few weeks later. Beforehand, some of those involved in the test expressed fears that the explosion might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet -- or completely incinerate New Mexico. But despite these concerns, the 18 kiloton bomb was detonated, creating a twelve-kilometer high mushroom cloud and a blast heard 320 kilometers away. Sand at the site of the explosion turned into green, radioactive glass -- also called Trinitit.

'Now I Am Become Death'

Corbis

The scientific director of the project, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said later the explosion had reminded him of a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In 1952, the bomb crater was filled in and most of the Trinitit removed. More than 60 years after the "Trinity" test, radiation at the site is still 10 times higher than normal. The site was declared a historic monument in 1965 and can be visited -- but only on two days a year.

Uninhabitable to This Day

 Corbis

The worst nuclear accident the world has so far seen occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Chernoybl power plant near the town of Pripyat, in what was then the USSR (now Ukraine). The testing of a new voltage regulator led to an explosion in reactor 4 which destroyed the roof, exposing the melting core and hurling radiation into the air.

The Soviet authorities tried to cover up the incident for as long as possible. On the morning after the explosion, area residents were requested to stay indoors and to keep their windows closed. One day later, all 50,000 residents of Pripyat were evacuated. They were told they would be able to return home after three days, but they were never allowed back.

It was weeks before the full extent of the disaster became known outside of the Soviet Union as radioactivity reached large parts of Europe. An exclusion zone was set up prohibiting entry into an area 30 kilometers on all sides of the stricken reactor. Some say that as many as 110,000 people lost their lives with hundreds of thousands more still suffering from the effects of the radiation, but other estimates are much lower. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in 2006 that fewer than 50 people died from initial exposure to radiation from the reactor. At the scene of the accident, radiation exposure is still 700 times higher than permissible levels, and Pripyat remains uninhabitable.

The Radioactive Dilemma

 DPA

Above ground, Germany has not yet suffered a nuclear disaster, despite numerous incidents in German nuclear power plants. Underground, however, is a different story: Electricity has been produced from nuclear fission in Germany for more than 60 years -- but there is no final repository for the resulting waste. Since the 1960s, much of the waste has ended up at the Asse storage facility (pictured), a salt mine which was to protect the radioactive garbage for the next 100,000 years.

But just 40 years later, massive problems with the site have become apparent. Despite assurances to the contrary, 12,000 liters of water are leaking into the site each day, rusting the drums and resulting in a release of radioactivity. As yet, there is no proposal for what to do with the resulting sludge nor is there a plan in place for solving the Asse problem. Many of the waste drums were simply piled up, instead of neatly stacked. It is impossible to get close enough to begin a clean up program.

Unrelenting Bombardment

 Corbis

During the Cold War's nuclear arms race, a total of 119 atomic devices were detonated at the Nevada Proving Grounds, northwest of Las Vegas. This image is from a test in 1953. After 1962, more than a thousand nuclear tests were conducted underground. The site -- about the size of Germany's Saarland region -- was finally decommissioned in 1992.

A Deadly Legacy

 Getty Images

The lion's share of the plutonium used for the US nuclear arsenal during the Cold War came from the Hanford plant on the Columbia River in the US state of Washington. The plutonium used in the first atomic bomb test in July 1945 came from Hanford as did the material used in "Fat Man," the bomb which destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

Fifty-two buildings at Hanford remain contaminated to this day, and 240 square miles are uninhabitable due to the radioactivity that has seeped into the soil and ground water: uranium, cesium, strontium, plutonium and other deadly radio-nuclides. Altogether, more than 204,000 cubic meters of highly radioactive waste remain on site -- two-thirds of the total for the entire US. In one area, discharges of more than 216 million liters of radioactive, liquid waste and cooling water have flowed out of leaky tanks. More than 100,000 spent fuel rods -- 2,300 tons of them -- still sit in leaky basins close to the Columbia River.

The plant is also notorious for the so-called "Green Run" -- the deliberate release of a highly radioactive cloud from the T-plant, the world's largest plutonium factory at the time. The radiation was almost 1,000 times worse than that released during the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the worst nuclear accident in American history. Fallout from the experiment drifted all the way to California. People wondered why they suddenly got sick. Studies would eventually show that some babies at Hanford were radiated twice as much as the children of Chernobyl.

A Nuclear No Man's Land

 

Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, now known as Semey, was host to the main nuclear test site of the former Soviet Union. Some 506 nuclear tests were carried out there during the Cold War. Since the closure of the site, the United States has invested more than $600 million (€420 million) in cleaning up the contaminated 18,500 square kilometers (7,142 square miles). The US has also invested $100 million (€70 million) in trying to better secure the site -- there are fears terrorists could obtain radioactive material there in order to build so-called dirty bombs.

The Kazakh government had hoped to make the site available for agricultural use once again. But some areas are still so contaminated with plutonium that they have to be covered with huge, two-meter thick steel plates to contain the radiation.

Unfathomable Destruction

 AP

On Aug. 6, 1945, the US bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Within seconds, much of the city was destroyed and 90 percent of the people in a half-kilometer (0.3 mile) radius were killed. Many others died in the aftermath of the bomb. By 1946, it is estimated that between 90,000 and 166,000 people had died from the immediate after-effects.

Long-Term Effects

 DPA

In later years, countless people died from the effects of radiation. Its full magnitude is still being studied.

The Irradiated Buddha

 REUTERS

On May 18, 1974, a new member joined the global nuclear family. In the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, near the border with Pakistan, and with expertise gained from a Canadian-built reactor, the first Indian atomic bomb -- called "Smiling Buddha" -- was detonated 107 meters below the ground. India insisted the explosion was for "peaceful" purposes.

In 1998, the site was used for five additional atomic weapons tests. It is unknown whether any radiation leaked to the surface -- officials have claimed that none was detected. To date, India has still not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but has pledged never to strike first with nuclear weapons.

Underground Time Bomb

 AP

East Germany stored its radioactive waste at a facility at Morsleben, in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Angela Merkel, then the environment minister, allowed considerable amounts of radioactive waste from the affluent West to be dumped in the Morsleben salt deposits -- despite the concerns of the Federal Authority for Radiation Protection and the opposition of local politicians. Because the facility is now classed as severely structurally damaged, it must be stabilized at great cost -- some €2 billion is needed for permanent closure.

The First Big Accident

 AP

The first large nuclear power plant accident -- and the largest until Chernobyl -- took place at Windscale, now Sellafield, in October 1957. There, by the Irish Sea, the British had hurriedly built two atomic reactors after World War II for power production and to make weapons-grade plutonium.

The speed of construction carried a great cost. In 1955, 251 workers were exposed to radiation during repair work. Then, on Oct. 10 1957, a reactor core began to burn. In an attempt to extinguish the fire, a radioactive cloud was released, followed by a second one the next day. The radiation reached as far as Switzerland. The fires were only brought under control after two days.

The authorities attempted to cover up the accident, initially saying only that there had been an incident, but that the workers involved had been able to scrub away the radiation with soap and water. The only warning was that cow's milk in a radius of 200 miles from the reactor should not be consumed. In reality, the population surrounding the reactor received radiation doses 10 times higher than that seen as permissible for a lifetime.

According to official figures, 33 people were killed by the after-effects of the disaster, with more than 200 diagnosed with thyroid cancer. To this day, 15 tons of damage fuel rods are still stored on site as is radioactive ash and mud, leftover from the fire. The reactor is now to be dismantled using a robot built exclusively for the project. In all, it is set to cost some 500 million pounds.

The Desert Rats

 AFP

France was also determined not to get left behind in the nuclear arms race. The first French atomic bomb was called "Gerboise Bleue," named after a desert rodent, and was detonated on the morning of Feb. 13, 1960 in the Reggane district of Algeria, then a French colony. At 70 kilotons, it was bigger than the first nuclear tests of the UK, USSR and USA combined. Three more bombs were exploded soon thereafter. France moved its testing grounds to remote areas of the South Pacific after Algeria gained its independence in 1962.

An Ill-Advised Test

 DPA

It was only in 2010, the 50th anniversary of that first French test, that the French paper Le Parisien published secret papers from the French Defense Ministry revealing that 300 soldiers were purposefully exposed to radiation during the last test to see what effect it would have on the human body. Most of the soldiers were later diagnosed with cancer, and the survivors still suffer from the effects of the radiation. The scandal prompted the French government to provide €10 million in compensation for those affected by the 210 nuclear bomb tests it has carried out.

A report completed by the IAEA in 2005 at the request of the Algerian government found that no further measures were necessary to clean up the Sahara testing grounds. Radiation levels, the report found, were very weak. But Algerian victims' groups complain that France never carried out a decontamination program They say that cancer rates in the region are high and that children are often born with abnormalities.

Mushroom Clouds in the South Pacific

 AFP

In the 1960s, France moved all of its nuclear testing to the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls and ultimately conducted 41 atmospheric tests and 147 underground tests at the site. Testing at the site was the periodic target of official protest, most notably by the New Zealand government, which sent ships to the atoll in the 1970s to protest for a nuclear free pacific. The site was abandoned as a nuclear test area in 1996, but is still guarded by French forces. There is concern that underwater cracks discovered in the atoll may ultimately allow under ground radiation to escape.

France wasn't the only country to test nuclear devices in the South Pacific. The US detonated 23 nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll, starting in 1946. One of the blasts contaminated 23 crew members of a Japanese fishing boat, an event which angered Japan and provided the inspiration for the 1954 film "Godzilla." Some 200 inhabitants of the islands were relocated, but several were returned in the 1960s once the US declared the islands safe for habitation. They were, however, removed once again when failed pregnancies and birth deffects began to mount. Fish caught in the atoll's lagoon are still not safe to eat.

The US also conducted nuclear tests at Enewetak Atoll. The photo above shows a Hydrogen bomb blast on Enewetak Atoll in 1952.

Dangerous Negligence

 

In 1997, highly toxic uranium escaped from around 2,000 barrels of nuclear waste at the Tokai atomic power plant in Japan after rainwater seeped into the shafts where they were stored, causing them to rust. As early as 1982, the authorities had told the firm responsible to fix the problem.

In March of 1997, 35 workers were contaminated with radiation at a nuclear reprocessing facility nearby, at the time, the worst nuclear accident in Japan's history. Just two years later at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, 80 workers were contaminated and two died in an accident.

Hydrogen Drama in Spain

DPA

On Jan. 17, 1966, an American B-52 bomber and a tanker plane collided over the Spanish coast near Almeria during a refueling maneuver. The bomber, which had been on a routine patrol flight, was carrying four hydrogen bombs. Three fell to the ground near the Andalusian village of Palomares where it required an eight-week clean up operation by US forces to remove several thousand tons of contaminated soil and take it to the US for storage. The photo shows barrels containing the radioactive earth. The fourth bomb was recovered intact from the bottom of the ocean on April 7 that year.

Forty-five years later, the Palomares region still faces aftereffects of the accident. The Spanish government in Madrid has recently promised that cleaning up remaining contamination was a priority and a US team of experts was dispatched to help advise the effort. An estimated half a kilogram of plutonium is believed to still be in the soil.

Harrisburg Horror

 AP

In March 1979, the area around Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was contaminated with radioactivity. Technicians released irradiated gas and water into the environment in order to prevent a full reactor meltdown. The clean-up operation of the surrounding area lasted 12 years and cost around €1 billion.

The Unknown Catastrophe

DPA

One of the worst nuclear accidents took place on Sep. 29, 1957, but was only made public years later. On that day, a tank containing 80 tons of highly-radioactive liquid waste exploded at the Mayak plutonium plant in the southern Urals, 15 kilometers east of the Russian city of Kyshtym. The blast produced a radioactive cloud that was about 300 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide, and which traveled northeast. The radiation did not reach Europe, but was at the same level of that released during the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. About 15,000 people who lived in the area were evacuated, and the houses located in a 25-kilometer zone surrounding the location were destroyed. No one was allowed to go back. The plutonium production at the plant, which also delivered the material for the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb, was not discontinued.

It wasn't until the 1970s that information about the catastrophe leaked to the West. The Soviet regime first admitted it in 1989. The number of deaths and details of the long-term effects remain unknown. The 150-square-kilometer area over which the radioactive cloud dispersed remains closed off to this day and entry is forbidden.

From http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,756369,00.html

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Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb

Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb

Fluoride was the key chemical in atomic bomb production

by Chris Bryson & Joel Griffiths

Some fifty years after the United States began adding fluoride to public water supplies to reduce cavities in children's teeth, declassified government documents are shedding new light on the roots of that still-controversial public health measure, revealing a surprising connection between fluoride and the dawning of the nuclear age.

Today, two thirds of U.S. public drinking water is fluoridated. Many municipalities still resist the practice, disbelieving the government's assurances of safety.

Since the days of World War II, when this nation prevailed by building the world's first atomic bomb, U.S. public health leaders have maintained that low doses of fluoride are safe for people, and good for children's teeth.

That safety verdict should now be re-examined in the light of hundreds of once-secret WWII documents obtained by Griffiths and Bryson --including declassified papers of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military group that built the atomic bomb.

Fluoride was the key chemical in atomic bomb production, according to the documents. Massive quantities of fluoride-- millions of tons-- were essential for the manufacture of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. One of the most toxic chemicals known, fluoride rapidly emerged as the leading chemical health hazard of the U.S atomic bomb program--both for workers and for nearby communities, the documents reveal.

Other revelations include:

* Much of the original proof that fluoride is safe for humans in low doses was generated by A-bomb program scientists, who had been secretly ordered to provide "evidence useful in litigation" against defense contractors for fluoride injury to citizens. The first lawsuits against the U.S. A-bomb program were not over radiation, but over fluoride damage, the documents show.

* Human studies were required. Bomb program researchers played a leading role in the design and implementation of the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoridating public drinking water--conducted in Newburgh, New York from 1945 to 1956. Then, in a classified operation code-named "Program F," they secretly gathered and analyzed blood and tissue samples from Newburgh citizens, with the cooperation of State Health Department personnel.

* The original secret version--obtained by these reporters--of a 1948 study published by Program F scientists in the Journal of the American Dental Association shows that evidence of adverse health effects from fluoride was censored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) --considered the most powerful of Cold War agencies-- for reasons of national security.

* The bomb program's fluoride safety studies were conducted at the University of Rochester, site of one of the most notorious human radiation experiments of the Cold War, in which unsuspecting hospital patients were injected with toxic doses of radioactive plutonium. The fluoride studies were conducted with the same ethical mind-set, in which "national security" was paramount.

* The U.S. government's conflict of interest--and its motive to prove fluoride "safe" -- has not until now been made clear to the general public in the furious debate over water fluoridation since the 1950's, nor to civilian researchers and health professionals, or journalists.

The declassified documents resonate with a growing body of scientific evidence, and a chorus of questions, about the health effects of fluoride in the environment.

Human exposure to fluoride has mushroomed since World War II, due not only to fluoridated water and toothpaste, but to environmental pollution by major industries from aluminum to pesticides: fluoride is a critical industrial chemical.

The impact can be seen, literally, in the smiles of our children. Large numbers of U.S. young people--up to 80 percent in some cities--now have dental fluorosis, the first visible sign of excessive fluoride exposure, according to the U.S. National Research Council. (The signs are whitish flecks or spots, particularly on the front teeth, or dark spots or stripes in more severe cases.)

Less-known to the public is that fluoride also accumulates in bones --"The teeth are windows to what's happening in the bones," explains Paul Connett, Professor of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University (N.Y.). In recent years, pediatric bone specialists have expressed alarm about an increase in stress fractures among U.S. young people. Connett and other scientists are concerned that fluoride --linked to bone damage by studies since the 1930's-- may be a contributing factor. The declassified documents add urgency: much of the original proof that low-dose fluoride is safe for children's bones came from U.S. bomb program scientists, according to this investigation.

Now, researchers who have reviewed these declassified documents fear that Cold War national security considerations may have prevented objective scientific evaluation of vital public health questions concerning fluoride.

"Information was buried," concludes Dr. Phyllis Mullenix, former head of toxicology at Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, and now a critic of fluoridation. Animal studies Mullenix and co-workers conducted at Forsyth in the early 1990's indicated that fluoride was a powerful central nervous system (CNS) toxin, and might adversely affect human brain functioning, even at low doses. (New epidemiological evidence from China adds support, showing a correlation between low-dose fluoride exposure and diminished I.Q. in children.) Mullenix's results were published in 1995, in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal.

During her investigation, Mullenix was astonished to discover there had been virtually no previous U.S. studies of fluoride's effects on the human brain. Then, her application for a grant to continue her CNS research was turned down by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), where an NIH panel, she says, flatly told her that "fluoride does not have central nervous system effects."

Declassified documents of the U.S. atomic-bomb program indicate otherwise. An April 29, 1944 Manhattan Project memo reports: "Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect.... It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor."

The memo --stamped "secret"-- is addressed to the head of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section, Colonel Stafford Warren. Colonel Warren is asked to approve a program of animal research on CNS effects: "Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure...This is important not only to protect a given individual, but also to prevent a confused workman from injuring others by improperly performing his duties."

On the same day, Colonel Warren approved the CNS research program. This was in 1944, at the height of the Second World War and the nation's race to build the world's first atomic bomb. For research on fluoride's CNS effects to be approved at such a momentous time, the supporting evidence set forth in the proposal forwarded along with the memo must have been persuasive.

The proposal, however, is missing from the files of the U.S. National Archives. "If you find the memos, but the document they refer to is missing, its probably still classified," said Charles Reeves, chief librarian at the Atlanta branch of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, where the memos were found. Similarly, no results of the Manhattan Project's fluoride CNS research could be found in the files.

After reviewing the memos, Mullenix declared herself "flabbergasted." She went on, "How could I be told by NIH that fluoride has no central nervous system effects when these documents were sitting there all the time?" She reasons that the Manhattan Project did do fluoride CNS studies --"that kind of warning, that fluoride workers might be a danger to the bomb program by improperly performing their duties--I can't imagine that would be ignored"-- but that the results were buried because they might create a difficult legal and public relations problem for the government.

The author of the 1944 CNS research proposal was Dr. Harold C. Hodge, at the time chief of fluoride toxicology studies for the University of Rochester division of the Manhattan Project. Nearly fifty years later at the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, Dr. Mullenix was introduced to a gently ambling elderly man brought in to serve as a consultant on her CNS research--Harold C. Hodge. By then Hodge had achieved status emeritus as a world authority on fluoride safety. "But even though he was supposed to be helping me," says Mullenix, "he never once mentioned the CNS work he had done for the Manhattan Project."

The "black hole" in fluoride CNS research since the days of the Manhattan Project is unacceptable to Mullenix, who refuses to abandon the issue. "There is so much fluoride exposure now, and we simply do not know what it is doing," she says. "You can't just walk away from this."

Dr. Antonio Noronha, an NIH scientific review advisor familiar with Dr. Mullenix's grant request, says her proposal was rejected by a scientific peer-review group. He terms her claim of institutional bias against fluoride CNS research "farfetched." He adds, "We strive very hard at NIH to make sure politics does not enter the picture."

Fluoride and National Security

The documentary trail begins at the height of WW2, in 1944, when a severe pollution incident occurred downwind of the E.I. du Pont du Nemours Company chemical factory in Deepwater, New Jersey. The factory was then producing millions of pounds of fluoride for the Manhattan project, the ultra-secret U.S. military program racing to produce the world's first atomic bomb.

The farms downwind in Gloucester and Salem counties were famous for their high-quality produce -- their peaches went directly to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Their tomatoes were bought up by Campbell's Soup.

But in the summer of 1943, the farmers began to report that their crops were blighted, and that "something is burning up the peach crops around here."

Poultry died after an all-night thunderstorm, they reported. Farm workers who ate the produce they had picked sometimes vomited all night and into the next day. "I remember our horses looked sick and were too stiff to work," these reporters were told by Mildred Giordano, who was a teenager at the time. Some cows were so crippled they could not stand up, and grazed by crawling on their bellies.

The account was confirmed in taped interviews, shortly before he died, with Philip Sadtler of Sadtler Laboratories of Philadelphia, one of the nation's oldest chemical consulting firms. Sadtler had personally conducted the initial investigation of the damage.

Although the farmers did not know it, the attention of the Manhattan Project and the federal government was riveted on the New Jersey incident, according to once-secret documents obtained by these reporters. After the war's end, in a secret Manhattan Project memo dated March 1, 1946, the Project's chief of fluoride toxicology studies, Harold C. Hodge, worriedly wrote to his boss Colonel Stafford L. Warren, Chief of the Medical Division, about "problems associated with the question of fluoride contamination of the atmosphere in a certain section of New Jersey. There seem to be four distinct (though related) problems," continued Hodge;

1. A question of injury of the peach crop in 1944.

2. A report of extraordinary fluoride content of vegetables grown in this area.

3. A report of abnormally high fluoride content in the blood of human individuals residing in this area.

4. A report raising the question of serious poisoning of horses and cattle in this area.

The New Jersey farmers waited until the war was over, then sued du Pont and the Manhattan Project for fluoride damage -- reportedly the first lawsuits against the U.S. A-bomb program.

Although seemingly trivial, the lawsuits shook the government, the secret documents reveal. Under the personal direction of Manhattan Project chief Major General Leslie R.Groves, secret meetings were convened in Washington, with compulsory attendance by scores of scientists and officials from the U.S War Department, the Manhattan Project, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture and Justice Departments, the U.S Army's Chemical Warfare Service and Edgewood Arsenal, the Bureau of Standards, and du Pont lawyers. Declassified memos of the meetings reveal a secret mobilization of the full forces of the government to defeat the New Jersey farmers:

These agencies "are making scientific investigations to obtain evidence which may be used to protect the interest of the Government at the trial of the suits brought by owners of peach orchards in ... New Jersey," stated Manhattan Project Lieutenant Colonel Cooper B. Rhodes, in a memo c.c.'d to General Groves.

27 August 1945

Subject: Investigation of Crop Damage at Lower Penns Neck, New Jersey
To: The Commanding General, Army Service Forces, Pentagon Building, Washington D.C.

"At the request of the Secretary of War the Department of Agriculture has agreed to cooperate in investigating complaints of crop damage attributed... to fumes from a plant operated in connection with the Manhattan Project."

Signed, L.R. Groves, Major General U.S.

"The Department of Justice is cooperating in the defense of these suits," wrote General Groves in a Feb. 28, 1946 memo to the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy.

Why the national-security emergency over a few lawsuits by New Jersey farmers? In 1946 the United States had begun full-scale production of atomic bombs. No other nation had yet tested a nuclear weapon, and the A-bomb was seen as crucial for U.S leadership of the postwar world. The New Jersey fluoride lawsuits were a serious roadblock to that strategy.

"The specter of endless lawsuits haunted the military," writes Lansing Lamont in his acclaimed book about the first atomic bomb test, "Day of Trinity."

In the case of fluoride, "If the farmers won, it would open the door to further suits, which might impede the bomb program's ability to use fluoride," said Jacqueline Kittrell, a Tennessee public interest lawyer specializing in nuclear cases, who examined the declassified fluoride documents. (Kittrell has represented plaintiffs in several human radiation experiment cases.) She added, "The reports of human injury were especially threatening, because of the potential for enormous settlements -- not to mention the PR problem."

Indeed, du Pont was particularly concerned about the "possible psychologic reaction" to the New Jersey pollution incident, according to a secret 1946 Manhattan Project memo. Facing a threat from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to embargo the region's produce because of "high fluoride content," du Pont dispatched its lawyers to the FDA offices in Washington, where an agitated meeting ensued. According to a memo sent next day to General Groves, Du Pont's lawyer argued "that in view of the pending suits...any action by the Food and Drug Administration... would have a serious effect on the du Pont Company and would create a bad public relations situation." After the meeting adjourned, Manhattan Project Captain John Davies approached the FDA's Food Division chief and "impressed upon Dr. White the substantial interest which the Government had in claims which might arise as a result of action which might be taken by the Food and Drug Administration."

There was no embargo. Instead, new tests for fluoride in the New Jersey area would be conducted -- not by the Department of Agriculture -- but by the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service because "work done by the Chemical Warfare Service would carry the greatest weight as evidence if... lawsuits are started by the complainants." The memo was signed by General Groves.

Meanwhile, the public relations problem remained unresolved -- local citizens were in a panic about fluoride.

The farmer's spokesman, Willard B. Kille, was personally invited to dine with General Groves --then known as "the man who built the atomic bomb" -- at his office at the War Department on March 26, 1946. Although he had been diagnosed with fluoride poisoning by his doctor, Kille departed the luncheon convinced of the government's good faith. The next day he wrote to the general, wishing the other farmers could have been present, he said, so "they too could come away with the feeling that their interests in this particular matter were being safeguarded by men of the very highest type whose integrity they could not question."

In a subsequent secret Manhattan project memo, a broader solution to the public relations problem was suggested by chief fluoride toxicologist Harold C. Hodge. He wrote to the Medical Section chief, Col. Warren: "Would there be any use in making attempts to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of residents of Salem and Gloucester counties through lectures on F toxicology and perhaps the usefulness of F in tooth health?" Such lectures were indeed given, not only to New Jersey citizens but to the rest of the nation throughout the Cold War.

The New Jersey farmers' lawsuits were ultimately stymied by the government's refusal to reveal the key piece of information that would have settled the case --how much fluoride du Pont had vented into the atmosphere during the war. "Disclosure... would be injurious to the military security of the United States," wrote Manhattan Project Major C.A Taney, Jr. The farmers were pacified with token financial settlements, according to interviews with descendants still living in the area.

"All we knew is that du Pont released some chemical that burned up all the peach trees around here," recalls Angelo Giordano, whose father James was one of the original plaintiffs. "The trees were no good after that, so we had to give up on the peaches." Their horses and cows, too, acted stiff and walked stiff, recalls his sister Mildred. "Could any of that have been the fluoride ?" she asked. (The symptoms she detailed to the authors are cardinal signs of fluoride toxicity, according to veterinary toxicologists.)

The Giordano family, too, has been plagued by bone and joint problems, Mildred adds. Recalling the settlement received by the Giordanos, Angelo told these reporters that "my father said he got about $200."

The farmers were stonewalled in their search for information, and their complaints have long since been forgotten. But they unknowingly left their imprint on history -- their claims of injury to their health reverberated through the corridors of power in Washington, and triggered intensive secret bomb-program research on the health effects of fluoride. A secret 1945 memo from Manhattan Project Lt. Col. Rhodes to General Groves stated: "Because of complaints that animals and humans have been injured by hydrogen fluoride fumes in [the New Jersey] area, although there are no pending suits involving such claims, the University of Rochester is conducting experiments to determine the toxic effect of fluoride."

Much of the proof of fluoride's safety in low doses rests on the postwar work performed by the University of Rochester, in anticipation of lawsuits against the bomb program for human injury.

Fluoride and the Cold War

Delegating fluoride safety studies to the University of Rochester was not surprising. During WWII the federal government had become involved, for the first time, in large-scale funding of scientific research at government-owned labs and private colleges. Those early spending priorities were shaped by the nation's often-secret military needs.

The prestigious upstate New York college, in particular, had housed a key wartime division of the Manhattan Project, studying the health effects of the new "special materials," such as uranium, plutonium, beryllium and fluoride, being used to make the atomic bomb. That work continued after the war, with millions of dollars flowing from the Manhattan Project and its successor organization, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). (Indeed, the bomb left an indelible imprint on all U.S. science in the late 1940's and 50's. Up to 90% of federal funds for university research came from either the Defense Department or the AEC in this period, according to Noam Chomsky's 1996 book "The Cold War and the University.")

The University of Rochester medical school became a revolving door for senior bomb program scientists. Postwar faculty included Stafford Warren, the top medical officer of the Manhattan Project, and Harold Hodge, chief of fluoride research for the bomb program.

But this marriage of military secrecy and medical science bore deformed offspring. The University of Rochester's classified fluoride studies -- code- named Program F -- were conducted at its Atomic Energy Project (AEP), a top-secret facility funded by the AEC and housed in Strong Memorial Hospital. It was there that one of the most notorious human radiation experiments of the Cold War took place, in which unsuspecting hospital patients were injected with toxic doses of radioactive plutonium. Revelation of this experiment in a Pulitzer prize-winning account by Eileen Welsome led to a 1995 U.S. Presidential investigation, and a multimillion-dollar cash settlement for victims.

Program F was not about children's teeth. It grew directly out of litigation against the bomb program and its main purpose was to furnish scientific ammunition which the government and its nuclear contractors could use to defeat lawsuits for human injury. Program F's director was none other than Harold C. Hodge, who had led the Manhattan Project investigation of alleged human injury in the New Jersey fluoride-pollution incident.

Program F's purpose is spelled out in a classified 1948 report. It reads: "To supply evidence useful in the litigation arising from an alleged loss of a fruit crop several years ago, a number of problems have been opened. Since excessive blood fluoride levels were reported in human residents of the same area, our principal effort has been devoted to describing the relationship of blood fluorides to toxic effects."

The litigation referred to, of course, and the claims of human injury were against the bomb program and its contractors. Thus, the purpose of Program F was to obtain evidence useful in litigation against the bomb program. The research was being conducted by the defendants.

The potential conflict of interest is clear. If lower dose ranges were found hazardous by Program F, it might have opened the bomb program and its contractors to lawsuits for injury to human health, as well as public outcry.

Comments lawyer Kittrell: "This and other documents indicate that the University of Rochester's fluoride research grew out of the New Jersey lawsuits and was performed in anticipation of lawsuits against the bomb program for human injury. Studies undertaken for litigation purposes by the defendants would not be considered scientifically acceptable today, " adds Kittrell, "because of their inherent bias to prove the chemical safe."

Unfortunately, much of the proof of fluoride's safety rests on the work performed by Program F Scientists at the University of Rochester. During the postwar period that university emerged as the leading academic center for establishing the safety of fluoride, as well as its effectiveness in reducing tooth decay, according to Dental School spokesperson William H. Bowen, MD. The key figure in this research, Bowen said, was Harold C. Hodge-- who also became a leading national proponent of fluoridating public drinking water. Program F's interest in water fluoridation was not just 'to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of residents,' as Hodge had earlier written. The bomb program needed human studies, as they had needed human studies for plutonium, and adding fluoride to public water supplies provided one opportunity.

The A-Bomb Program and Water Fluoridation

Bomb-program scientists played a prominent -- if unpublicized -- role in the nation's first-planned water fluoridation experiment, in Newburgh, New York. The Newburgh Demonstration Project is considered the most extensive study of the health effects of fluoridation, supplying much of the evidence that low doses are safe for children's bones, and good for their teeth.

Planning began in 1943 with the appointment of a special New York State Health Department committee to study the advisability of adding fluoride to Newburgh's drinking water. The chairman of the committee was Dr. Hodge, then chief of fluoride toxicity studies for the Manhattan Project.

Subsequent members included Henry L. Barnett, a captain in the Project's Medical section, and John W. Fertig, in 1944 with the office of Scientific Research and Development, the Pentagon group which sired the Manhattan Project. Their military affiliations were kept secret: Hodge was described as a pharmacologist, Barnett as a pediatrician. Placed in charge of the Newburgh project was David B. Ast, chief dental officer of the State Health Department. Ast had participated in a key secret wartime conference on fluoride held by the Manhattan Project, and later worked with Dr. Hodge on the Project's investigation of human injury in the New Jersey incident, according to once-secret memos.

The committee recommended that Newburgh be fluoridated. It also selected the types of medical studies to be done, and "provided expert guidance" for the duration of the experiment. The key question to be answered was: "Are there any cumulative effects -- beneficial or otherwise, on tissues and organs other than the teeth -- of long-continued ingestion of such small concentrations...?" According to the declassified documents, this was also key information sought by the bomb program, which would require long-continued exposure of workers and communities to fluoride throughout the Cold War.

In May 1945, Newburgh's water was fluoridated, and over the next ten years its residents were studied by the State Health Department. In tandem, Program F conducted its own secret studies, focusing on the amounts of fluoride Newburgh citizens retained in their blood and tissues - key information sought by the bomb program: "Possible toxic effects of fluoride were in the forefront of consideration," the advisory committee stated. Health Department personnel cooperated, shipping blood and placenta samples to the Program F team at the University of Rochester. The samples were collected by Dr. David B. Overton, the Department's chief of pediatric studies at Newburgh.

The final report of the Newburgh Demonstration Project, published in 1956 in the Journal of the American Dental Association, concluded that "small concentrations" of fluoride were safe for U.S. citizens. The biological proof -- "based on work performed ... at the University of Rochester Atomic Energy Project" -- was delivered by Dr. Hodge.

Today, news that scientists from the atomic bomb program secretly shaped and guided the Newburgh fluoridation experiment, and studied the citizen's blood and tissue samples, is greeted with incredulity.

"I'm shocked -- beyond words," said present-day Newburgh Mayor Audrey Carey, commenting on these reporters' findings. "It reminds me of the Tuskegee experiment that was done on syphilis patients down in Alabama."

As a child in the early 1950's, Mayor Carey was taken to the old firehouse on Broadway in Newburgh, which housed the Public Health Clinic. There, doctors from the Newburgh fluoridation project studied her teeth, and a peculiar fusion of two finger bones on her left hand she had been born with. Today, adds Carey, her granddaughter has white dental-fluorosis marks on her front teeth.

Mayor Carey wants answers from the government about the secret history of fluoride, and the Newburgh fluoridation experiment. "I absolutely want to pursue it," she said. "It is appalling to do any kind of experimentation and study without people's knowledge and permission."

Contacted by these reporters, the director of the Newburgh experiment, David B. Ast, says he was unaware Manhattan Project scientists were involved. "If I had known, I would have been certainly investigating why, and what the connection was," he said. Did he know that blood and placenta samples from Newburgh were being sent to bomb program researchers at the University of Rochester? "I was not aware of it," Ast replied. Did he recall participating in the Manhattan Project's secret wartime conference on fluoride in January 1944, or going to New Jersey with Dr. Hodge to investigate human injury in the du Pont case--as secret memos state? He told the reporters he had no recollection of these events.

A spokesperson for the University of Rochester Medical Center, Bob Loeb, confirmed that blood and tissue samples from Newburgh had been tested by the University's Dr. Hodge. On the ethics of secretly studying U.S citizens to obtain information useful in litigation against the A-bomb program, he said, "that's a question we cannot answer." He referred inquiries to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), successor to the Atomic Energy Commission.

A spokesperson for the DOE in Washington, Jayne Brady, confirmed that a review of DOE files indicated that a "significant reason" for fluoride experiments conducted at the University of Rochester after the war was "impending litigation between the du Pont company and residents of New Jersey areas." However, she added, "DOE has found no documents to indicate that fluoride research was done to protect the Manhattan Project or its contractors from lawsuits."

On Manhattan Project involvement in Newburgh, the spokesperson stated, "Nothing that we have suggests that the DOE or predecessor agencies -- especially the Manhattan Project -- authorized fluoride experiments to be performed on children in the 1940's."

When told that the reporters had several documents that directly tied the Manhattan Project's successor agency at the University of Rochester, the AEP, to the Newburgh experiment, the DOE spokesperson later conceded her study was confined to "the available universe" of documents. Two days later spokesperson Jayne Brady faxed a statement for clarification: "My search only involved the documents that we collected as part of our human radiation experiments project -- fluoride was not part of our research effort.

"Most significantly," the statement continued, relevant documents may be in a classified collection at the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory known as the Records Holding Task Group. "This collection consists entirely of classified documents removed from other files for the purpose of classified document accountability many years ago," and was "a rich source of documents for the human radiation experiments project," she said.

The crucial question arising from this investigation is: Were adverse health findings from Newburgh and other bomb-program fluoride studies suppressed? All AEC-funded studies had to be declassified before publication in civilian medical and dental journals. Where are the original classified versions?

The transcript of one of the major secret scientific conferences of WW2--on "fluoride metabolism"--is missing from the files of the U.S. National Archives. Participants in the conference included key figures who promoted the safety of fluoride and water fluoridation to the public after the war - Harold Hodge of the Manhattan Project, David B. Ast of the Newburgh Project, and U.S. Public Health Service dentist H.Trendley Dean, popularly known as the "father of fluoridation." "If it is missing from the files, it is probably still classified," National Archives librarians told these reporters.

A 1944 WW2 Manhattan Project classified report on water fluoridation is missing from the files of the University of Rochester Atomic Energy Project, the U.S. National Archives, and the Nuclear Repository at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The next four numerically consecutive documents are also missing, while the remainder of the "MP-1500 series" is present. "Either those documents are still classified, or they've been 'disappeared' by the government," says Clifford Honicker, Executive Director of the American Environmental Health Studies Project, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which provided key evidence in the public exposure and prosecution of U.S. human radiation experiments.

Seven pages have been cut out of a 1947 Rochester bomb-project notebook entitled "Du Pont litigation." "Most unusual," commented chief medical school archivist Chris Hoolihan.

Similarly, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by these authors over a year ago with the DOE for hundreds of classified fluoride reports have failed to dislodge any. "We're behind," explained Amy Rothrock, FOIA officer for the Department of Energy at their Oak Ridge operations.

Was information suppressed? These reporters made what appears to be the first discovery of the original classified version of a fluoride safety study by bomb program scientists. A censored version of this study was later published in the August 1948 Journal of the American Dental Association. Comparison of the secret with the published version indicates that the U.S. AEC did censor damaging information on fluoride, to the point of tragicomedy.

This was a study of the dental and physical health of workers in a factory producing fluoride for the A-bomb program, conducted by a team of dentists from the Manhattan Project.

* The secret version reports that most of the men had no teeth left. The published version reports only that the men had fewer cavities.

* The secret version says the men had to wear rubber boots because the fluoride fumes disintegrated the nails in their shoes. The published version does not mention this.

* The secret version says the fluoride may have acted similarly on the men's teeth, contributing to their toothlessness. The published version omits this statement.

The published version concludes that "the men were unusually healthy, judged from both a medical and dental point of view."

Asked for comment on the early links of the Manhattan Project to water fluoridation, Dr Harold Slavkin, Director of the National Institute for Dental Research, the U.S. agency which today funds fluoride research, said, "I wasn't aware of any input from the Atomic Energy Commission." Nevertheless, he insisted, fluoride's efficacy and safety in the prevention of dental cavities over the last fifty years is well-proved. "The motivation of a scientist is often different from the outcome, " he reflected. "I do not hold a prejudice about where the knowledge comes from."

After comparing the secret and published versions of the censored study, toxicologist Phyllis Mullenix commented, "This makes me ashamed to be a scientist." Of other Cold War-era fluoride safety studies, she asks, "Were they all done like this?"

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Archival research by Clifford Honicker

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About the authors :

Joel Griffiths is a medical writer in New York City, author of a book on radiation hazards and numerous articles for medical and popular publications. Joel can be contacted at 212-662-6695. Chris Bryson holds a Masters degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and has worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Manchester Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor and Public Television. Chris can be contacted at 212-665-3442.

From Fluoride Alert @  http://www.fluoridealert.org/wastenot414.htm

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