Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Geneticist E. B. Lewis, also of Caltech, proves in Science that leukemia (a cancer-like blood disease) is indeed caused by radiation. He uses statistics covering Japanese atom-bomb victims and three types of Americans exposed to large amounts of X rays. Strontium 90, he believes, will have the same effect. He figures that if its concentration in U.S. bones ever rises to one-tenth of what the AEC considers the "maximum permissible concentration," leukemia in the U.S. will increase...
...Geneticist Curt Stern, onetime member of the ABC's biological advisory commit tee, says of his colleagues: "Every one of them thinks that damage is being done." Dr. Stern thinks that Libby should stick to his own field (physics and chemis try). About the statements by physicists that bomb tests are safe, Dr. Stern says: "These statements are not based on scientific principle." Starting with Dr. Libby's own statement that fallout has increased back ground radiation by only 0.7% to 3%, Dr. Stern estimates that even this slight increase will cause a minimum of 180,000 genetic...
...general, the physicists are less alarmed than the biologists are. Says Director Samuel K. Allison of the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute: "Unless the rate of [bomb] testing is greatly stepped up, there is little or no danger to the general public. But if every nation gets into testing, the situation could be extremely serious." He favors an international limit on the power of bombs that may be tested...
Britain is just starting the tests that will make it the third member (with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) of the Big Bomb League. Perhaps for this reason few British scientists have joined the widespread popular clamor against the tests. Viscount Cherwell, Churchill's wartime scientific adviser, is vehement against "hysterical people" who would sacrifice "a deterrent which would probably save us from a war costing millions of lives" on the ground "that our tests might harm the health of a completely negligible part of the human race." British medical authorities are not so sure. The authoritative medical journal...
...east and west, are especially emphatic. They believe that fission products now in the stratosphere may be dangerous already and will surely become so unless the testing is stopped. Says Physicist Mitsuo Taketani of Rikkyo University: "The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are not testing now. They are conducting nuclear bomb and weapons maneuvers. The whole population of the world is being used as guinea pigs. When the effects of radiation show up in statistics, it will be too late...