frustration on President Kennedy, who
ap-peared to be sincere in wanting
disarma-ment. When the radiation guidelines for
iodine” were exceeded in some localities
in 1962 and when the Secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare, instead of
institut-ing any protective action, explained that
the guidelines had never been intended to
apply to fallout from the testing, the
lame-ness of the excuse, the ineffectuality and
the appearance of knuckling under to the
Defense Department and the Atomic
Ener-gy Commission, all stirred the indignation
of people in the peace movement. I shared
in that indignation.
I, myself, believe that, until there is proof that low level radiation is harmless, there should be continual research, guidelines,
and the establishment and promulgation of
explicit plans of action for government
officials, physicians, the dairy industry-and
perhaps other food processors-and the
public, in case fallout increases markedly again.
REFERENCES
1. Schwebel, M.: Nuclear cold war: Student
opin-ions and professional responsibility. In
Be-havioral Science and Human Survival. Palo
Alto, California: Science and Behavior Books, pp. 210-224, 1965.
2. Allerhand, M. E.: Children’s reactions to societal crises: Cold war crisis. Amer. J. Orthopsychi-at., 35:124, 1965.
3. Escalona, S. K.: Children and the threat of
nuclear war. Child Study Association in
co-operation with NIMH, 1962.
DISCUSSION
DR. BRADLEY: While I agree with Dr.
Spock on the importance of determining
the presence or absence of anxiety on the
part of children to fallout, communism,
atomic war, and the like, my clinical
experi-ences do not support his. For the past 7
years this experience has been largely in the field of the private practice of child
psychi-atry, most of the patients coming from the
middle and upper classes. About two thirds
of my patients have been adolescents, with
whom I have had sustained contacts and
who have talked very freely with me,
al-though many of them cannot communicate
well with their parents. They have come to
me for specific problems, and, while I have led their conversations in discussion of the specific problems rather than in
generali-ties, the contact has been good enough so
that, if they were concerned about fallout,
communism, and atomic war, it is quite
likely that they would have mentioned it.
With one or two notable exceptions, no
children have mentioned such anxiety.
This difference between my own
obser-vations, and those quoted by Dr. Spock
may be partially on a regional basis. Tilere has been no widespread or widely
dissemi-nated publicity about fallout in the
Port-land area, and the news media have
report-ed facts regarding fallout, communism, and
atomic war quite factually, without
“play-ing them up.” I have had continued contact
with many teachers, school principals, and
school social workers, who are involved
with the children I see in the office, and
none of them have mentioned any anxiety
on the part of the children regarding these matters.
I can think of only two notable
excep-tions to the generalities I have just
men-tioned. One was the case of a 10-year-old
girl whom I had been seeing for some time
and who talked freely. At the time of the
Cuban crisis she rather casually mentioned
that her father was planning to move the
family away from Portland so they would
not be in a center of population if there
should be an atomic attack. Another was
the instance of a 13-year-old, rather
unusu-al, paranoid boy who confused fact and
fantasy and was much preoccupied with a
desire for power on his own part. For the
first 3 months, in which I saw him twice a
week, he often mentioned war with Russia
in terms of “wiping out the Russians,” with-out any realistic concern about possible
re-prisals. As time has gone on, he has
emerged from this preoccupation, showing
such as his relationships with other children and the like.
Dr. Spock mentioned that Schwebel
“rea-sons” that children who do not discuss
con-cern about nuclear perils must be doing so
by restricting their perceptions and
sup-pressing their feelings, both of which
char-acteristics are considered harmful to
per-sonality development. I think this
conclu-sion is open to question and may reflect the attitude of the observer rather than that of the children with whom he was concerned.
With the two exceptions noted, the
chil-dren with whom I have talked have been
primarily concerned with immediate
situa-tions, such as relationships with their par-ents, their siblings, their peers, the question
of academic accomplishment, and similar
problems. They have tended to confine
their remarks to such subjects.
I think that children’s opinions and
anxi-eties about national and community
haz-ards largely reflect the attitudes to which
they are exposed by their parents and the
news media in the region in which they
live. I would agree with Dr. Spock that
children of all periods of history have been
exposed to threatening situations, the
ma-jority of which in the past have been more
immediate and less overwhelming than
those of atomic fallout or atomic attack. I
would add that there is little specific
infor-mation available that the children were
overwhelmed by anxiety in those situations.
The attitude of the children with whom I
have had contact may be too complacent
about threats of atomic fallout, particularly as contrasted with the opinions of thought-ful adults who are more aware of the situa-tion. I would also stress the fact that
anxi-ety regarding fallout may be affected by
regional attitudes. I can see little to be
gained by stimulating children’s anxiety
about atomic fallout, even though the
threat is a very actual one. My own
obser-vation would be that anxiety about this
particular matter is not necessarily
nation-wide and universal among children or that
at the present time such concerns pose a
threat to children’s mental health in the ma-jority of cases. I am grateful to Dr. Spock
for presenting his point of view, his
experi-ences, and his citations from others, even
though they do not coincide with my point
of view or my experience.
MR. BAcri: Dr. Spock covered several
sa-lient points in his paper. He said that
thou-sands of school children were emotionally
disturbed over radioactive fallout and the
danger of nuclear attack; that people, gen-erally, are reduced to a sense of
helpless-ness about escaping or controlling these
problems; and that cold war anxieties could
impair personalities in the future to the
point where Americans won’t be able to
think positively and realistically in helping to solve world problems.
To put his message in a nutshell, he
made it clear that radioactive fallout now, and for the future, is endangering our
envi-ronment, ourselves, and our children.
Is public concern and psychologic
reac-tion true or false?
I, along with millions of my fellow Amer-icans, am confused over radioactive fallout and its consequences; not in a nuclear war,
because we know from the Hiroshima
expe-rience that the danger would be
cata-strophic, but in peacetime.
Let’s look at some random facts leading
to this confusion, and then see if there is
any solution.
Over the past few years, The Reader’s Di-ge.s’t, which is read by millions of people in 14 languages, carried four different articles relating to radioactive fallout. In essence,
all of the articles told readers, and from
good authority, that there were many
dan-gerous misconceptions about fallout; that
there is nothing new about man’s exposure to radioactivity; that, since nuclear tests are vital to national security, the Kremlin has
sought to magnify the danger out of all
proportion to reality; and that worldwide
fallout is not worth worrying about.
Just recently a storm of words has been
brewing between the United States and
Russia over the right of the American
mili-tary to send nuclear-armed jet bombers
over Europe. Russia has charged that the
crash of a B-52 bomber on the coast of
SUPPLEMENT
bomb detonator. This caused radioactive
fallout, the Kremlin said. However, the
United States said initially that the charge
was simply Russian propaganda.
But, 3 days later, the U.S. State Depart-ment said that, while there was no nuclear
explosion, radioactive material was
scat-tered in the crash. This followed a
state-ment by the Spanish Government that 2,000
persons had been exposed to some
radia-tion but that none had received a
danger-ous dose. At the same time, the Pentagon
said the Atomic Energy Commission would
bring hundreds of tons of tile contaminated Spanish soil at the crash site to the United States for disposal.
In England, just recently, the
state-owned British Broadcasting Industry spent
$28,000 making a television film, called The
War Game. The film starkly depicts a
nu-clear attack; and the result, it locked British
television in a big controversy. The
argu-ments involve the military, the civilian
pop-ulation, the movie industry, and even
Par-liament.
The “antis” say the public has the right to
know what nuclear war might mean and
that the film demonstrates that the free
world’s nuclear deterrent must be retained.
A Labor member of Parliament said, “. .
the people have a right to some idea of
what nuclear war might entail.” The Daily
Expreas said the film is “so super horrific that it could not possibly be shown on tele-vision.”
Is it any wonder, from these few
exam-pies, that public opinion relative to
world-wide radioactive fallout is in a confused, chaotic mess?
Fallout, a by-product of our entry into
the era of nuclear energy, is a most difficult
problem. However, in our democracy
so-lution to the problem cannot be decided by
scientists alone, nor should it be left to mili-tary leaders. In our political system we rely, and this is important, on public opinion for
guidance. Yet, public opinion on the great
nuclear questions remains largely
unin-formed. To present the public the raw
ma-terials from which this opinion can be
forged is both the privilege and duty of the
scientist. For, in our world of complex
knowledge and growing technology,
scien-tists have not one but two essential duties:
first, the traditional duty of seeking the
truth; second, the duty to communicate to
all who need it the knowledge gained in
their search. The fallout problem highlights
these two aspects of their function.
Public awareness of the dangers of
ra-dioactive fallout and civil defense needs
has been stifled by unreasonable
restric-tions on information relating to the effects
of nuclear weapons; newspaper publishers
call it a policy of “managing” the news.
Al-though great stocks of new weapons have
been developed by the military and the
Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, little information about their effects has been made available to the public or to civil de-fense workers and planners at state and local levels.
On February 2 I wrote a letter to the
Atomic Energy Commission in Washington,
asking for “a 100-word statement on the
present policy of the Commission”
re-garding the problem of radioactive fallout
in peacetime. When I left Chicago on
March 5, a month after I wrote the letter, I
hadn’t even received an acknowledgment.
The public needs facts; it needs up to
date information, and the time is now!
But who should bear the responsibility for public disquiet about radioactivity, the
Atomic Energy Commission and/or
scien-tist or the mass media, newspaper,
maga-zines, radio and television?
Before you can find the answer to that
question, the first need is to review policies
and open the channels of communication
from Washington to all the various publics, legislators, politicians, writers, journalists, jurists, and other opinion makers.
This is a big challenge because it is not just a matter of presenting scientific facts in
terms which ordinary people can
under-stand, but of overtaking a vast buildup of
misapprehension, misunderstanding, and
mistrust.
Americans must have clear-cut
informa-tion, technical information, if they are
to be done about nuclear testing, hazards, civil defense, and disarmament. Scientific
information, said one scientist
(
Dr. BarryCommoner of St. Louis
) ,
must arise fromthe interaction of facts, ideas, and
interpre-tation among the entire community of
scientists and cannot he limited to
govern-ment groups without running the risk of
overlooking facts and ideas.
“The scientific aspects of the problem of
determining acceptable levels of radiation from fallout and other sources requires the
development of an informed public opinion
on the balance between tile risks and
benefits associated with each
radiation-pro-ducing activity,” he said.
In the forefront of this great challenge of helping to mold public opinion is the
news-paper publisher and his specialist, the
science writer, whose guiding motto is, “Let there be light.”
Give today’s well trained newspaper
science writer the unvarnished, bald, and
whole truth about the dangers of radioac-tive fallout-if scientists agree they
exist-and public opinion will find the right
course. But, remember that the dedicated
science writer will seldom be happy as a
mouthpiece for authority. He is more likely
to think that the proper function of the
press in our society is to reveal and to criti-cize; to stimulate and shock.
Accurate information and complete
infor-mation are a prime necessity for the
citi-zens of a republic in the successful conduct of their functions as citizens. Truth is patri-otism in a republic; falsehood is treason.
In the words of William Randolph
Hearst, “When free discussion is denied,
hardening of arteries of democracy has set
in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and tile death of the republic is at hand.”
DR. KORSCH: Let me generalize a little on
some of the points of Dr. Spock on the role
of anxiety in health behavior. There have
been some studies done on what makes
people take action on threats to their
health. It has been documented that the
likelihood of someone’s taking appropriate
action about health is proportionate to how keenly they feel this threat, how much this
motivation outweigils other motivations,
i.e., comfort, monetary gain, etc. The idea
of comparing threats of polio and fallout
makes good sense. \Ve use anxiety and
threat a great deal in making people take
health action. I ilave often been amazed
how some of the health nurses in well baby
clinics motivate people to get immunized. I
have listened to their arguments, which are
quite startling. For example, “You don’t
want to be a cripple do you?” “Who will
take care of you if you are a cripple?” I think, when you are sure of your cause,
that anxiety is a very good motivation to
make people take appropriate health
mea-sures. Some physicians and educators
over-use it, but, in the case of polio for
in-stance, we are probably justified in using
anxiety as a constructive force.
DR. CHwIcK: There is an interesting
relationship on this between the discussions
today and a recent committee meeting
which I attended in which the problem was
how to carry out continuing education of
physicians, how to distribute information
that they need in their practice. The
prob-lem is just that-how do you do it? How do
you inform physicians about new
develop-ments in medicine?
Obviously, this group was not interested in withholding information from physicians.
Q
uite the contrary, it was keenly interestedin getting the information across. We find
that the public or the profession seems not to have complete and adequate information about fallout, the dangers of radioactivity,
etc. There is a tendency to believe there is
a withholding of these facts. This is why the information is not widely known. I wonder
honestly whether this is the problem. This
seems to assume it is very simple to get
in-formation across on dangers of radioactivi-ty, if only we were willing to do so. Many
persons and groups, on the other hand, are
concerned by the fact it is extremely
difficult to get medical information across
Somehow there is an inconsistency here.
I would be delighted to document some
of tile many publications put out by the
government on the dangers of radioactivity. I really wonder whether this lack of full un-derstanding is really a reflection of the fact that this is a difficult subject and a difficult idea to get across even with tile honest de-sire on the part of government bureaucrats to do so.
Da. SrNGrrt: I was intrigued at the time
Dr. Langmuir spoke about some problems
of polio, where he mentioned he could find
one case in five million of polio. One
won-ders about the attitude toward low
mci-dence events associated with radioactive fallout episodes in time, if not in causation. I think Dr. Chadwick put it rather neatly. It
so happens if one wants to read about
ra-dioactive fallout, he ends up with books
called the effects of atomic weapons that
weigh a lot and are hard to digest; and,
tiley are very tedious reading as
govern-ment writing is probably about as turgid a
thing as has been developed. I don’t think
there is any simple approach to the
prob-lem. It is very difficult for a paranoid
ra-diologist to understand why I should be
any more paranoid about fallout than polio
viruses.
DR. LEROY: Dr. Saenger’s comment on
turgidity is exceeded only in the scientific
journals at times.
DR. LANGMUm: I don’t believe that Dr.
Saenger and I are too far apart in most of
the views expressed in the last 2 days. I
would like to correct a few points of fact.
During the early days of the polio vaccine
campaign, some 19 meningomyoceles were
found in Atlanta by pure chance over some
months. Until we were satisfied it wasn’t
tied to polio vaccine, we feltit was reason-able to classify it; because, if it had been misrepresented in the press, one can rarely resolve the controversy no matter how
hon-est or forthright you are. After there is a
controversy one is in trouble.
DR. SAENGER: How is this different from
tile Utah situation then?
DR. LANGMUHI: In an attempt to
estab-lish the source of this small cluster of
me-ningomyoceles, which was unique by the
way, we checked in Miami, we checked in
Rochester, we checked Ithaca, and we
checked in Minnesota where Type II
vac-cine had been given where presumably it
would have resulted in some phenomena.
We were unable to support it. We then
published it quite promptly in the Journal
0/: the American Medical Associatkm. I
question if we should have made a news
release of it. If one is going to press, Dr. Thompson, a definitive story is a prerequi-site because one is never able to correct the impression given in news releases later.
It is not just government officials who
cause trouble, but also consultants to the
government. Presumably while consulting
they are part of the government. Many of
you may recall the committee meeting on
September 15, 1962, when the polio
ques-tion was to be resolved and the difficulty the committee had in reaching its decision.
Every hour the newspaper reporters, the
radio, and the television announced that
the Surgeon General’s Committee was still
out. The report expected at 3:00 P.M. on a
Saturday afternoon was delayed until 9:00
P.M. that evening. Then, the Surgeon
Gen-era! issued a very carefully prepared
state-ment, that in my judgement was an
authen-tic, clear appraisal of the situation. It
mdi-cated there was an association of cases
greater than expected by chance in adults
following Type III vaccine and
recom-mended that the vaccine not be given to
adults. The Surgeon General then issued a
documented account of 10 pages which was
mailed to every physician in the country
within 4 or 5 days. Dr. Sabin happened to
be on the Queen Mary at the time, and they
say there has never been such a telephone
bill in all of the travels of the Cunard
Lines. The Committee met twice again to
consider this statement. One-third held
strongly that it was an honest and fair statement. Finally, a qualified, utterly
the drug houses proceeded with a mass
pro-gram saying this is safe, because the
Com-mittee says it is safe when the Committee
really didn’t say so. This confusion took 2
years to dissolve.
DR. PETERSON: In regard to the point Dr.
Chadwick made, and my comments are not
intended to impugn the motives of people
in various government agencies, one of the
questions being asked in this discussion
concerns the operation of the political
insti-tutions that are responsible for information
related to decisions on public policy.
In-deed, government publications and articles
containing information gathered by
scien-tists in public agencies are available, but
the information and its interpretation is
often presented to the public by members
of the government agencies who do it in
such a manner as to suggest command of
complete understanding about the scientific issues involved. Since we have incomplete
knowledge and can have only limited
inter-pretation, some press releases as well as
formal documents set the stage for contro-versy which surely can confuse the
citizen-ry. Perhaps less confusion would be
gener-ated if frank statements of our ignorance
were substituted for misleading
reassur-ances.
I think to answer the question in regard to the social effect of fallout one must ex-amine the present function of government,
scientists, and citizen. This examination is
most timely. Public information when it is
disseminated must state clearly what we
know and what we don’t know.
Dii. EISENBUD: In my lifetime there
hasn’t been any subject on which we have
made less progress than we have on this
one. I was in the Atomic Energy
Commis-sion’s employ when the matter first arose. It
was of some embarrassment to many of us
at the time because there were
unquestion-ably things that were withheld. Not
be-cause anyone was trying to conceal
any-thing, but because this gigantic machinery
of government made it impossible to get
certain information out quickly. But, as Dr. LeRoy pointed out earlier, that was quite a
few years ago. One must differentiate
be-tween need for month-to-month
informa-tion as distinguished from the need for
year-to-year information. But, most of the
criticism concerned matters which were of
a month-to-month nature. To illustrate, I
can recall in 1956, when Dr. Kulp prepared the first of his reports on strontium9#{176} in bone and sent it to Science. They sent it out in the usual review procedure. While it was
being reviewed someone apparently
de-cided that the report shouldn’t be held up
and that it should be released immediately.
Somehow a copy of the paper was turned
over to The Nation. The Nation published a
very inflammatory editorial that more or
less accused the Atomic Energy
Commis-sion of concealing information by
pub-lishing it in an obscure journal. The obscure
journal was Science which had 10 times the
circulation of The Nation. The
embarrass-ment of the Commission led to a request of
the Rockefeller Foundation and the
Nation-a! Academy of Sciences to set up an
inde-pendent review body. Warren Weaver, at
that time vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation, set up a series of committees
in the National Academy of Sciences which
issued a group of reports in 1956 or 1957.
Concurrently, our government proposed
that the United Nations set up a scientific committee on the affairs of radiation. This
Committee was established in December
1955. Its first report came out in 1958.
Thus, there were government reports, the
National Academy of Sciences reports, and
the United Nations reports. Concurrently,
the Medical Research Council in Britain
was having the same problem and they set
up a similar procedure to issue a Medical
Research Council report at about the same
time as our National Academy of Sciences
report. Within a period of 2 or 3 years,
there was a tremendous effort to digest a vast amount of information in an objective
fashion. All of these reports may have
differed in detail, but certainly not in
sub-stance. As of about 1958 the record was
holding hearings, which have been wonder-ful sources of information. I cannot imagine
how anybody in 1966 could say there is a
lack of available information on the subject. I am appalled by the suggestion.
DR. CHARLES: Although it may be true
that there is within the body of
Congres-sional hearings all the substantial research on the effects of fallout, this is not made available to the general public nor the med-ical profession. Certainly, having this mate-na! in the Congressional Record is of little
service to the general application of this
in-formation in the education of both the pub-lie and the professions. In this particular
area, then, the medical profession must
share part of the responsibility with the
Atomic Energy Commission in failing to
make this information more generally
known. We would hope at this time
through the auspices of the American
Acad-emy of Pediatrics, and perhaps the
Ameri-can Medical Association, that this defect
will be repaired.
DR. WERBOFF: I agree with Dr. Spock
that as scientists and as citizens we must
make our voices heard in the quest for
peace and for the prevention of nuclear ho-locaust. In spite of the general scientific
and medical agreement expressed here over
the past 2 days concerning the relative safe-ty of low levels of radiation exposure on
hi-ological systems, I must agree with Dr.
Spock that all the information is not yet
available and we are still dealing with pos-sible, unknown, deleterious effects of
radia-tion. However, I cannot agree with Dr.
Spock that the fear of radiation exposure is
as widespread in children and parents as he
leads us to believe. As a psychologist, I am
critical of the methodology of questionnaire
studies and their implicit results. There are
too many opportunities for arriving at
al-ready predetermined conclusions.
Addition-ally, I do not think that these fears, if they
indeed exist, persist for long periods of
time. Furthermore, it should be pointed out
that fears of the unknown “entity” such as
radiation exposure may not be realistically
derived but represent a symptom of other
emotional disturbance in the home. Parents
and children having healthy, emotional
re-lationships rarely develop these fears.
Although we accept the available data
that, within the limits of our current levels of radiation exposure, there are few
delete-rious effects on biological systems, our no
threshold, life-time tolerance concept leads
us to consider other possible effects.
Behav-ior, particularly related to psychological,
social, and sexual performance, may be one
functional adaptive system affected by
long-term
(
chronic) ,
low-dose radiationex-posure. This system may be particularly
affected when exposure occurs to the imma-ture individual in utero or in early postna-tal life. Certainly, there is insufficient data available to dispel our concerns over these possible deleterious effects.
DR. SP0cK: There is a small minority
who have become consciously concerned
about fallout and in their anxiety would
like to find out more. But the overwhelming majority would prefer to ease their underly-ing anxiety by the process of denial. I
un-derstand both points of view as I was a
denier up until 1960, and then joined the
