Cancer in Their Bones

Andrew Hull, the late senior health physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, told me almost 50 years ago, when I was reporting about high levels of radioactivity in the Peconic River, that the cause was fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests at the federal government’s Nevada test site. Many nuclear weapons were exploded, and the fallout spread widely, carried by winds, including to the east of the United States and Suffolk County.

I was exploring the situation because the York State Health Department had just issued a report saying that the Peconic River, which flows through Riverhead, had the second-highest level of radioactivity of any waterway in the state. (No. 1 was Cattaraugus Creek, near the site of the problem-plagued, now-defunct West Valley nuclear fuel recycling plant south of Buffalo.)

Several years later, when BNL filed an environmental impact statement with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as it moved to upgrade its sewage treatment plant, it admitted that radioactive materials from BNL had gone into the river. The headwaters of the Peconic are on BNL property.

What came from BNL and went into the river, BNL said, were radionuclides, including plutonium, cesium 137 and strontium 90.

The combination of the fallout from nuclear weapons testing, as Hull said, and these discharges could be seen as combining to cause the high level of radioactivity in the river.

I was thinking about this last month while reading a lengthy report online by Robert Peters, research fellow for nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the Heritage Foundation, saying, “The United States may need to restart explosive nuclear weapons testing.”

The January 15 report by Peters, titled “American Must Prepare To Test Nuclear Weapons,” stated that “the president may order the above-ground testing of a nuclear weapon … And while the United States leaving the [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty may not be optimal, and may indeed have negative downstream effects, doing so may be necessary to stave off further adversary escalation.”

There has not been a nuclear weapon tested above ground in the United States since 1962, Peters said. That was a year before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed by the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom. It prohibits nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space. It allowed underground tests, as long as they didn’t result in “radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the state under whose jurisdiction or control” a test was conducted.

“Resuming atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons would be disastrous,” Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, said last week. He cited the “lessons learned from above-ground nuclear weapons testing — the radioactive fallout that harmed many people, especially infants and children.”

Testimony by a co-founder of the Radiation and Public Health Project, the late Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a physicist, before the then-Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was instrumental in President John F. Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. (Another co-founder of the group was Dr. Jay Gould, who had a home in East Hampton.)

As President Kennedy said in 1963 in a national address: “This treaty can be a step toward freeing the world from the fears and dangers of radioactive fallout.” He said that “over the years the number and the yield of weapons tested have rapidly increased, and so have the radioactive hazards from such testing. Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe.”

Kennedy spoke of “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs” as a result.

The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page publication “Project 2025” is the “governing agenda” for the Trump administration, wrote Susan Caskie, executive editor of the magazine The Week, in its issue last week. “Many of its authors and contributors,” she noted, are now members of the administration, some appointed to “even cabinet posts.”

“Project 2025’s stance on nuclear testing: A dangerous step back” was the title of an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists this past September. It was written by Tom Armbruster, former U.S. ambassador to the Marshall Islands and earlier the U.S. Embassy in Moscow’s nuclear affairs officer.

He wrote: “On page 431, Project 2025 calls for the United States to ‘Reject ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and indicate a willingness to conduct nuclear tests in response to adversary nuclear developments if necessary. This will require that the National Nuclear Security Administration be directed to move to immediate test readiness.’”

Armbruster said, “We should be negotiating further cuts in the world’s nuclear arsenals, a prohibition of weapons in outer space, and cleanup of the ‘legacy’ test sites around the world. It would help if Russia were a responsible partner in denuclearization, but, sadly, that is not the case. We could be working together to find ways to mend the planet, rather than inflict further damage that will last for thousands of years.”

In 2022, also in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Robert Alvarez, former senior policy advisor to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and Mangano, wrote an article on radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests and the “baby tooth” study.

“How many nuclear weapons can be detonated in support of weapons development or during a war before imperiling humans from radioactive fallout?” it began. “To find the answer, independent scientists and citizens turned to baby teeth. Lots and lots of baby teeth.

“Why baby teeth? The most commonly measured isotope in these tissues — strontium 90 — is absorbed as if were calcium. This isotope lodges in human bone tissue for many years and was the principal contaminant of concern in fallout investigations.”

They wrote of how “the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information and scientists at Washington University, beginning in December 1958, began assembling the most significant collection of human samples in the atmospheric bomb test era.” A total of 320,000 baby teeth were donated.

Found, said an article in 2023 in the International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, was a 63-fold increase in strontium-90 in baby teeth from children born in the years after large-scale nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere started in 1950, then dropping in half in the five years after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 took effect.

“This saved many lives,” comments Mangano. It was written by a team that included Dr. Timothy Mousseau, biology professor at the University of South Carolina, Dr. Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry and biology at North Arizona University, and him.

Are we, if there is a return to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, to go back to the years of radioactive fallout and the resulting health impacts? And, as Kennedy stated, “children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs.”