Word: aec
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...postwar U.S. nuclear power program; of a heart attack; in New York City. A onetime public utilities lawyer, Lilienthal sold electricity cheaper than competing private firms, made TVA the nation's biggest power producer within a decade after its 1933 creation, and was equally aggressive at the AEC. One Senator accused him of running the TVA like "a Führer," and opponents used the fact that his parents came from what is now Communist Czechoslovakia to cast doubt on his loyalty. When under fire, Lilienthal, a college boxer, liked to recall a bout he had with...
...dawn along the Potomac River. James R. Schlesinger, ex-Secretary of Energy, former Secretary of Defense, former CIA chief, former AEC chairman, stands beside the marshes in a golden silence as old as earth. Mallards rise into the sun. Indigo buntings flit in the trees and goldfinches play below. Says Schlesinger with rare emotion, "Look, a long-billed marsh wren." He raises his binoculars, studies the scene for long seconds, breathing cool morning air, humbled by the beauty before him in a way that his old adversaries in power never succeeded in humbling...
...October 1952, to simulate actual combat conditions, the Pentagon was asking to raise the permissible level of ionizing radiation that soldiers could receive from the AEC limit of 3.9 roentgens over 13 weeks to 3 roentgens of "prompt whole-body nuclear radiation"-that is, the exposure during the explosion-"plus an additional 3 roentgens in post-detonation maneuvering." Again the AEC agreed...
...AEC was developing "clean" atomic bombs, which produced very little fallout. But citing the military's desire for some degree of off-site radiation for troop-training purposes, the AEC agreed not to limit such fallout...
Testifying before the subcommittee, former AEC Commissioner Eugene Zuckert tried to defend these troubling actions. Said he: "The balance was allowed to tip to the military. They knew the implications. I don't think it was our responsibility to override them." Kennedy himself acknowledged that the tests were staged at the height of the cold war and before many of the effects of radiation were known...