Thank you very much, happy birthday, Carl Morgan. We understood it was your birthday. Happy birthday Dr. Morgan. Thank you.

I have to correct Dr. Caldicott on one thing. You haven’t found a solution to the nuclear waste problem until—there’s one technological piece remaining in that solution—gourmet solution of yours. You’ve got to find a way to stop the other end. This stuff is messy.

OK I ah, I come from a medical family, although I’m not a physician. I’ve worked a lot with physicians that work with [IPP and W?] and we wrote a bunch of books together. I’m going to give these to Helen Caldecott at the end of this talk. Um, I guess I wound up working with doctors because, I don’t know, my father was a doctor and my mother was a doctor, my sister’s a doctor, her husband is a doctor. My mother wanted me to be a doctor. But, I guess I was the rebel in the family. I eventually wound up doing my doctorate in something ah, sounds like I’m a doctor, because it was plasma physics, but has nothing to do with blood plasma at all. Ah, anyway I did plasma physics as applied to controlled nuclear fusion, which is how I wound up in this business.

We wrote this book, ah, with [IPP&W?]—use it as a hard pillow—it’s a cure for insomnia and has some information in ah, about the global effects of nuclear weapons production. We found ah, there are five classes of affected populations. Very large numbers of workers, millions of workers, soldiers and other personnel who attended on atomic weapons testing, especially atmospheric testing, there are the neighbors of the nuclear weapons plants and test sites, and these neighbors turned out to be, some of them quite far because some of them live in what are called "hot spots." Recently the National Cancer Institute released a study that showed what many of us understood, from more preliminary data and more fragmentary data, to be clear already—that there were hot spots thousands and thousands of miles away from the test sites.

And then there’s the population of the world which will continue to be exposed for uncounted generations. The most persistent radionuclide that will deliver doses to future generations will be carbon 14. Ah, which is a half life of 5,730 years. And ah, it’s not only plutonium that’s ah, winds up in you, but—and me—but, Carbon 14, and that, of course winds up as organically bound carbon in all of our food.

A lot of it began with the Trinity test, July 16^th 1945. Shortly after the Trinity test, Colonel Stafford Warren who was ah, Chief Radiological Officer of the Manhattan Project did a survey. He found hot spots after that survey. He used I—I think, almost exactly that term. He drew a map. He sent a memo to Groves—General Groves who headed the Manhattan Project, ah, ah, on July 21^st, saying that he had found extensive contamination. He had found fallout very far. Ninety miles, if I remember the memo properly. He had found extremely hot spots 20 miles away from the site, and there was a store and a house there--they did not the people there or evacuate them, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was an early sign.

Moreover, there was a very clear recommendation in this memo. Do not test within 150 miles of human habitation. That was the recommendation. Well, that recommendation was flagrantly ignored. Yesterday, ah, Kerry read you some things about how the testing was done and what the radiological objectives were. I want to read you from a memorandum ah, that was written in preparing—in selecting a test site in the United States. Some—anybody here from North Carolina. I know there are people here from North Carolina, I met them there recently. You know there was supposed to be maybe in your state—they thought—oh, you don’t?—they thought the radiologically best site was in North Carolina because the prevailing winds would blow the fallout over the Atlantic Ocean, but you’re lucky because the coastal property was privately held and they did not want to go through the hassle of acquiring it.

They located the test site in Nevada knowing it would rain fallout over the whole country because of prevailing westerly winds. Here’s one of the benefits they thought they might have and what they might have to do in order to successfully carry out the testing program. They thought people are true—his—people have a "hysterical or alarmist complex" about radiation. Here’s what needed to be done: "Alleviation of their fears would be a matter of re-education over a long period of time." This is the joint chiefs of staff, not the Soviet Politburo—"re-education over a long period of time, until the public will accept the possibility of an atomic explosion within a hundred or so miles of their homes." Now that’s a little bit closer than what Stafford Warren said: "Do not conduct testing within a hundred and fifty miles of human habitation." This—this memo is written in 1948—three years after the [war’s end?]

OK. Now, atmospheric testing and some underground testing, some of which resulted in huge [vents?] of radioactivity. In the United States, the last huge vent was in December 1970. A lot of the Soviet wen—vents, ah, ah—there were huge vents from Soviet testing and of course, atmospheric testing continued until 1980 when China stopped.

Now, yesterday you heard a diverse amount of opinions about low level radiation. The radiation from –global radiation –radioactivity—radioactive dose from fallout is a few millirem. You heard that’s that little sliver. We heard that it’s much less than natural background radiation. I’ve also heard this a number of times. Now, I have a philosophical problem with this kind of analogy, and I request my friends in the health physics community to stop using this analogy. It’s not correct. It’s not morally correct.

Now, let me tell you, God--it’s a—it’s a different kind of thing. God gave you life. And you—and part of that deal is you’re going to die. I’m going to die. It’s very painful so you may [dutily?] put it that God gave you life and God is going to kill you one day. That’s the deal. We accept it. We didn’t ask for it, but we’re here. All right. Suppose your neighbor came up to you and said, God is going to kill you one day, let me punch you in the nose, it’s a much smaller dose. You would want them to be locked up. They never asked their neighbors.

I’ve known people—many people who live downwind from these facilities. some of them have said, "if they’d told me it was to fight the commies I might have said yes, but they didn’t ask me. They didn’t ask me whether I wanted this risk." And of course, we haven’t asked the children. We haven’t asked the generations for thousands and thousands of years what they might think and I’ll have a little bit to say about that at the end of the talk.

The other thing I hear them say is you’ve got [Potassium 40?] in your bodies and the vice president of U.S. ecology that wants a site—what [Diane Berry?] will call the dump—I—I defer to the nuclear industry and call the "low level waste facility" and sometimes I call it a dump. He said in a debate I had with him that the dose that you would get from the Ward Valley Low Level Waste Dump would be sort of what you might get from sleeping next to someone from the Potassium 40 in their bodies.

Now, I—I have to admit that I do sleep next to someone and that I’m fully aware than I’m getting a small dose from sleeping next to her depending on how close I might sleep to her. And she’s fully aware that I’m irradiating her although she’s threatened to buy a kind sized bed. Now, I think the nuclear industry hasn’t done its cost benefit calculations properly, because I have never known anybody to have any fun by sleeping next to a dump.

Now—more seriously, Dr. Morgan presented a study that David Albright and did on atomic veterans at Operation Crossroads to the House Committee on Veteran’s Affairs in 1983. These veterans were told that their internal doses were insignificant. Some of them came to me and said please interpret the document from the site—among them were Dr. Morgan’s surveys and others. When I looked at them, I found that there was no way anybody could honestly calculate the doses. I found that there were—the radiological conditions were such that it was likely that some sailors—there were 42,000 of them out there—the entire Pacific fleet was out there with a big show, lots of press releases. The U.S. was talking nuclear disarmament at the same time in the UN.

I found that there was no way in which anybody could now accurately calculate internal doses especially from plutonium, because there was no way to measure alpha emitters in the field. The official studies were simply wrong. You can’t calculate those internal doses for that population given the data that we have. That’s part of my message to the scientific community, including many of the people that I heard yesterday. I didn’t hear them all—I came a little late. So, forgive me for that, but there are lots of situations in which you have to say, I don’t know. And lots of situations in which you have to actually look at the raw data and you will find that the ah, manufactured data, the tapes, the official estimates of releases—generally the work over the last ten years including that done at my institute has shown that the official data are s—on the—on what was released from nuclear weapons production, simply lo—wrong.

Let me give you an example of a site that we’ve studied a great deal. This is the [Furnald?] uranium processing site near Cincinnati. The top number 200,000 pounds was the first estimate made of releases from this facility. The, ah, CDC, I believe didn’t like that so they changed it to 300,000 pounds later that year and that continued ‘til ’87. There was a law suite filed by Lisa Crawford who found, and, ah, other people in the vicinity who found that her well had been contaminated with uranium. The uranium had been measured in 1981. No one had told her she and her small son and her husband had been drinking this contaminated water for many years and found out only when she asked, "has anybody tested my well," and they said, yes, it is contaminated with uranium considerably above background --don’t remember the number.

We did the expert studies on this lawsuit. We—they would not give us all the documents. We had very few of the documents, but it was clear that the release estimates were wrong. We found fabricated data, we found bad algebra, and I’ll show you and example of that. We found every conceivable kind of problem you can find in environmental monitoring: instruments that had not been calibrated for 30 years since the time they’d been installed; air pollution control equipment that failed repeatedly from the time the plant began operation for decades.

All right. Eventually this Centers for Disease Control spent millions and millions and millions of dollars and confirmed that what we had found was correct and the actual releases of uranium were much higher—at least twice, possibly more—than what was officially calculated.

Here’s and example of the algebra that was done. This was the biggest problem in release estimates. The ah, the little bars, the light bars are how the Furnald […?…] materials production center calculated releases. They had one equation with two unknowns, Michio, and they simply assumed that one of the unknowns was the way they wanted. They plugged it in backward so that when the scrubbers were working worse and worse, their estimates of releases became less and less. So, the dark blue are the actual releases given—the variation in efficiency of scrubbers. When the scrubbers failed you’ll get higher releases. In the Furnald estimates, when the scrubbers failed you got 0 releases. That was the level of algebra which was being done.

And you know, five and a half trillion dollars were spent on the production of nuclear weapons and associated system in this country and that was the level of mathematics that was being done to attend to the welfare of the neighbors.

How about the workers? You heard from Dr. Wenzell yesterday that there were not many people with high doses. I think [Nyosh?] should revise its opinion because you have simply read external dose data. Moreover, you have not taken into account what Toni Mazaki said yesterday: "I challenge the scientific community to take into account in their studies, or at least--as Steve Wing told me privately yesterday, and I hope he won’t mind my quoting it from this podium—"exhibit a little humility." Because there’s a lot we do not know, those film badges have been destroyed specially from the fifties. We did expert studies in the worker lawsuit at Furnald also. They were told they were not over-exposed, their doses were—were low, all based on film badge data, a lot of which was of very poor quality, including things like workers throwing their film badges in the box and things like that.

We cal—we calculated internal doses to workers based on urine data. This is known to be a highly uncertain science, but we could do it because there was a period from 1968 onwards from which there was both lung counting data and urine data so it was possible to count—calibrate the urine data with more accurate and direct lung measurements for certain numbers of workers, so then we could go back--because the production processes did not change, we could go back and re-calculate the urine—the doses from ur—this is the percentage of workers who were overexposed in any given years: all workers, including office workers and managers, in any given years, according to then prevailing standards, not today’s standards. 15 rem dose to the lung.

In 1955 almost 90% of the workers had a uranium lung burden exceeding the—what would give them a committed dose of 15 rem. None of these facts have been taken into account in the studies that you heard about yesterday, to the best of my knowledge. All these st—most of these studies assume that internal and external doses are proportional to each other. There’s no technical foundation so far as I know because the dose records of workers do not contain internal dose information. We pushed the department of energy for many years and last year they admitted that for 500,000 to 600,000—that’s all of them—until 1989, the internal dose information had not—internal burden information had not been converted into dose for any worker in the weapons complex and moreover that in the private sector, internal burden information had not been converted into dose for any workers until the period 1991 through 1994.

I challenge the health of this community. I’m not a biologist, but please, you have to get to the real world. What was h—what is happening in these studies is not part of the real world. It ignores hot spots and we found out what the cancer institute found when they took into account hot spots. It ignores internal dose data, it assumes that the official calculations are correct, it assumes that film badges are properly worn. What is the need to do science like that? It might be better not to do science like that than to pursue it.

We also heard about Russia yesterday. In this book, the longest chapter—it’s actually—you need hernia insurance if you’re going to use this book extensively. The—the longest chapter is on Russia. We looked at Russian data extensively. We looked at it in English and we looked at it in Russian, too. Now, I don’t know Russian, but I have colleagues who do, and there are IPP& W doctors who do, and we work with Russian colleagues also. We found the quality of health data in Russia to be abominably bad. We found evidence that they were covering up health problems and not follo—following up workers who might—and residents who might be affected. I do not believe that the kinds of findings that have come out of Department of Energy sponsored studies on workers and resident populations are credible. First of all, they have nearly zero public participation on the other side. We know, because we go over there and talk to the public. This newsletter which you see in English is also distributed in Russian in 3,000 copies, by our Russian friends.

Uranium miners were the worst affected from routine pollution. We don’t know the extent of the casualties, but possibly tens of thousands of lung cancer deaths associated with uranium mining in the weapons era, not only in the weapons states, but also in non weapons states, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Namibia, [N…?] Congo, Australia, Canada. NO assessment of damages or repairs has been done in these places.

The other horrid part has been reactors and reprocessing plants. […?…] there was some ah, confusion yesterday about how fission products wind up in uranium. Allow me to correct. Ah, allow me to clarify this point. Fission product wind up in uranium from the operation of reprocessing plants when you take irradiated material from reactors and separate the plutonium and uranium and fission products—you don’t do a 100% good job in any chemical process. Ah, Technetium 99 and some Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 wind up in the fission products.

Now, there was a huge blowup of a waste tank in [Chelyab?] in ’65 and the Southern Urals in 1957. They covered—tried to cover it up for a long time, but were not successful. Finally, 1989 they admitted it. Contaminated 15,000 square kilometers of land, over 30 villages and towns were razes, evacuated. There’s still one village there [Moslimova?] where there are lots of affected people and that village has not been evacuated.

Shortly thereafter in [Celofield?]—we have two friends here from ah, from—who are neighbors of [Celofield?], Martin Forward ah, and ah, and Jeannine Alice, ah, Smith. Ah, they’re neighbors of the [Celofield?] plant—there was a fire. It was called Windscale at the time. They changed the name of the place ‘cause Windscale got such a bad name from having a reactor fire and having polluted lots of places in England and Europe. But they didn’t—this British culture really is in somewhat of a decline, I would guess, from having changed the name from Windscale to Celofield but not improved the operating practices much. Because they didn’t—you know there’s their play, which they s—he says a rose would smell as sweet. Mmm—hmm. You could apply the same thing to Windscale—uh—huh—as dirty—if you changed the name. [laughs] Now they call it Celofield and Celofield’s got a very bad name. They blame Martin Forward for it—they really should blame themselves.

OK. There’ve been other accidents. A large part of the legacy of nuclear weapons production is the radioactive wastes that are stored in high level waste tanks in the nuclear weapons states, mostly in liquid form. They are at Hanford, Savannah, Riverside, Idaho, here. These tanks generate explosive gases. They are at some risk of fires and explosions. Don’t worry, we have been told: The risk is low, the probability of fire and explosions is low. Although when I have looked at the data, I do not know how anybody can sensibly calculate a probability, because it’s even very difficult to make measurements of the composition of waste in these tanks, because it’s so dangerous to get into them, and there’s a danger of actually igniting these fires and explosions.

Now, we’ve made an enormous mess on this planet. And I’m taking responsibility for it in the sense of the invocation yesterday at dinner—in the sense that we have to act to stop the further production of weapons and waste, and we have to act to at least—we’re going to leave this mess to future generations. That’s been decided for us. During the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union were making nuclear bombs—

--and nuclear weapons materials and they assumed that both states would go on forever. But they didn’t read history in that the stability of states is much less than the half life of plutonium. Even in this country, you hear propaganda at every presidential inauguration that for 200 years there has been a smooth transfer of power with elections. And it has-- sometimes takes an immigrant from India to point out that this is not quite correct. In 1860, there was a presidential election that led directly to the Civil War.

So, there have been [hiccups?] even in this country and in that war more people died than in all the foreign wars that the United States has waged combined. So the internal stability of great states is certainly not guaranteed, the foreign policy goals of the United States and the Soviet Union moreover was to try as hard as possible to guarantee the instability of the other side and wish for the crumbling of the other side. This wish has now been granted to the United States. I have often heard from my friends, "you should be careful what you wish for, because you might get it." Now we have got it. We have got a super-power state with materials enough for ten thousands—tens of thousands of weapons and tens of thousands of weapons on the ground—about 20,000 weapons actually exist. We do not know how many materials they have produced, because they haven’t made declarations of it, and now we have to figure out what to do with it, and I assure you, there is no good answer. But I do know that what they’re proposing, which is to use this as an excuse to get billions of government dollars to perpetuate the nuclear age, using plutonium as a fuel is a horrid answer. I’m going to wind up by simply making—what is the concluding observation from the behavior of the the [powerful?]

They put on the mantle of national security and promise their people by looking them in the eye that it was to protect them, that they were to be the priesthood in Alvin Weinberg’s words. That we’re to be granted a lot of leeway, a lot of secrecy, a lot of prerogatives and they would—the people would be protected. I have found, and with the colleagues I worked on this literature, we found that it was the opposite of what doctors are supposed to do. Nuclear weapons establishments have exhibited a readiness to harm their own people. They have harmed their own people. They knew they were harming their own people. The University of California, where both Michio and I did our doctorates, is the contractor for Nuclear Weapons design testing. They wrote an editorial in their alumni magazine engineering school at Berkeley that deformed babies are being born because of testing, but we have to pay this price, because of the demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal. But I interviewed the Manhattan Project Scientists in 1995 and found that even those scientists had not investigated even the history of the Manhattan Project. I do not believe that the scientists who say that there was a demonstrated need—most of them, at least, investigated and demonstrated to themselves that there was this need, because every single Manhattan Project scientist that I interviewed, including Dr. [Seeborg?] and Hans [Veda?] with all due respect to all of them—none of them knew that Japan—Japanese forces had been targeted with a bomb as early as May, 1943, but all of them thought they were working against Germany, and that Germany had explicitly been detargeted at that very time.

This readiness to harm is extremely corrosive and the loss of trust that we have had in those who are running the world is perhaps one of the most corrosive e—effects of the health and environmental damage from nuclear weapons production. There must be an end to secrecy around the nuclear weapons establishment. There must be more involvement of the public in these decisions, and there must be an orderly way to end the nuclear weapons age and to have complete nuclear disarmament and if our leaders are too preoccupied with other things, then they should allow us to say what should be done.

Thank you.

[applause]