FUKUSHIMA: Fifty-seven-year-old lie

     Radiation can't hurt you. That's a 57-year old lie. 
     In my post His Scribe: Growing up in Hiroshima - 2, I describe how our Atomic Energy Commission hired my father and other scientists and doctors to research radiation in Hiroshima. But I'm not sure I posted what happened afterward. 
     Three years later Dad submitted his results: The growth and development program of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission: Analysis of observations on maturation, body build and posture taken in 1951-54 on 4,800 Hiroshima children by Earle L. Reynolds. Ph.D. It was a three-inch thick hardback book of facts, backed by statistics and graphs, indicating that radiation stunts growth, compromises immune systems, and causes cancer--in children, which were his specialty, leukemia and thyroid cancers. 

     By the time Dad submitted these findings, the Atomic Energy Commission was trying to calm American apprehensions about radiation because it was now promoting an extensive series of atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. Talk about conflict of interests! The very agency which commissioned the study of the possible dangers of radiation suppressed the facts about those dangers for 4-5 years, until our testing program was over. 

      Then they must have released the study because two researchers after that time refer to it. 

     Originally, the study was designed to be longitudinal. The same children were supposed to be studied periodically as they grew up, married, and had children of their own. But the AEC discontinued the research (on the first population in human history exposed to radiation!) as "unimportant." It has been left up to non-government-funded, non-political scientists like those at http://radiation.org/ to discover that some lethal effects of radiation do not appear until ten years or more after exposure (read any book on the little girl who made the paper crane a symbol of hope, Sadako Sasaki--exposed to the Hiroshima bomb at two, developed her first symptoms at 12 and died that same year) and that babies born to radiation-exposed parents can have horrific, even lethal birth defects (see the foremost documentary on the effects of radiation, The Battle of Chernobyl.) 
     Our son and daughter-in-love are trying to get pregnant. I am already worrying about the health of our grandchild.