Word: fallout
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...world. He presented impressive evidence that a dose of radiation stretched over a long period produces more mutation in mammals than the same dose concentrated in a short period. Since nearly all mutations are harmful to unborn generations, this finding makes even moderate amounts of long-lived radioactive fallout seem like a serious threat to man's future...
Fortunately, caribou are still plentiful near Anaktuvuk Pass, and no one is going hungry. But contemporary civilization is closing in with deadly effect. Radioactive fallout from Russian and U.S. nuclear tests has dangerously poisoned the Nunamiuts' barren homeland. Fallout there has been no thicker than in many other parts of the world, but it has concentrated ominously in the bodies of the Eskimos. A report made for the Atomic Energy Commission by General Electric scientists showed that in the summer of 1962, the inhabitants of Anaktuvuk Pass had an average "whole body burden" of 421 nanocuries*of caesium...
...with dangerous logic. The caribou's winter food is largely lichens, a primitive plant that has no roots but gets its moisture and nutrients entirely from the air. Its spongy tissues soak up the scant Arctic rain like blotting paper and retain a large part of it. The fallout that is carried down by the rain is retained too. Instead of mixing harmlessly with the soil, it goes into the stomachs of caribou and becomes part of their bones and flesh. When Eskimos eat the caribou, they get the radioactive skimmings of many acres of lichen-covered ground...
...plan to use nuclear explosives to blast a spacious harbor in the Alaskan coast. The side effects, he said, would harm the Eskimos even more. Although he was fired from the university, he continued to make all the noise he could about the danger of feeding more fallout into the Eskimo food chain. The AEC's present management now watches the Eskimos carefully and measures their body burden as it creeps ever higher...
...many a modern city dweller who lives under a pall of smog, smokes incessantly, worries about fallout and sprays his flowers with pesticides, possible causes of cancer seem to close in on all sides. "It pleases many to think of cancer as a necessary concomitant of civilization," says Scottish Physician C. S, Muir, "a penalty to be paid for the abandonment of the rustic simplicity of a bygone age, a toll to be exacted for the convenience of the automobile and the pleasures of the cigarette." Even doctors dream of some remote part of Africa or Asia, "where, removed from...