Word: fallouts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...having air patrols over their territory, the Russian scientists at first balked at the idea of using planes, insisted that collection must wait until the debris could be gathered on the ground. Eventually, the scientists agreed on the right to use both methods. Debris is no help in measuring fallout caused by explosions in space. ¶ Electromagnetic radiation. Control posts, equipped with photocells and low-frequency radio receivers could pick up the X rays and ultraviolet rays that turn into light and radio waves after an explosion. They could even pick up the light pulses resulting from a blast...
...sources of the radioactivity that batters man, fallout from nuclear weapons testing is the least. At current levels, it is less than 5% of radiation from natural sources. But this is small comfort: the total of all radiation, largely from rocks, body chemicals, cosmic rays and X rays, may already be at a dangerous level. So warned a 15-country United Nations scientific committee last week, after studying world radiation for 2½ years. Shunning politics, the experts voted against urging a ban on nuclear tests. As top scientists, they voiced a sobering opinion: "Even the smallest amounts of radiation...
Body Damage. The U.N. scientists pinpointed the added significance of nuclear fallout. They found least long-range danger from that which swirls through the troposphere (the part of the atmosphere that goes seven to eleven miles up) for several months before falling. At most, its short-lived isotopes raise annual external marrow and gonad dosage by .0005 rem. But the higher stratosphere (beyond eleven miles) is a reservoir of long-lived isotopes that fall for many years. Chief dangers...
What will be the effects? In terms of direct physical effects, the answer bristles with unknowns. Assuming that the world population is 3 billion, U.N. scientists said they believe that current nuclear-bomb fallout accounts for between 400 and 2,000 leukemia cases a year (total: 150,000), as compared to 15,000 from natural radiation. Science is not yet sure how much radiation is needed to produce leukemia. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimates the threshold as 40 rem. If this is true, and if all bomb tests stop this year, said the U.N. report, then the ultimate...
...this fallout reading, the committee was praised as "thoroughgoing" by the AEC, which maintains that bomb tests are not critically dangerous. Praise flowed also from such AEC critics as New Mexico's Senator Clinton P. Anderson, vice chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who took the same report to mean that the AEC has "no place to go, no place to hide." The U.N. committee's own summation of the significance: "The knowledge that man's actions can impair his genetic inheritance . . . clearly emphasizes the responsibilities of the present generation...