Carol Jouzaitis’article, “Old radiation claims hit U.S. brick wall” (Jan. 10), is symptomatic of the growing “Chernobyl” mentality surrounding certain early United States nuclear testing activities.
Since Chernobyl, every unfortunate illness or symptom suffered by almost anyone in the former Soviet Union is blamed on radiation. One must distinguish between the ethical issue of informed consent and the biophysical question of how much actual risk was incurred in the particular case.
The regrettable death in 1983 of Air Force Lt. Col. William Brown is described at length in the story and the bleeding and hair loss he apparently exhibited 30 years earlier are ascribed to the fact that he was a pilot aboard instrumentation aircraft which, in one particular flight, was “in the mushroom cloud area for two and one-half hours dodging in and out all the time.”
Working under Air Force contracts with Illinois Institute of Technology, I was the civilian scientist in charge of and on board many of those radiation sampling flights in the 1950s and 1960s. The nuclear instrumentation on board our planes was highly sensitive.
On all our flights, the clouds were always allowed to disperse for a time before our aircraft approached them.
If Col. Brown was on the type of flights we conducted (and I am unaware of more intentionally dangerous ones), there is almost no likelihood that the hundreds of dose units (REMs) needed to produce his acute bleeding and hair loss “after his second test mission” could have been accumulated without similar symptoms developing in most or all of the other personnel aboard the same aircraft. Such severe radiation toxicity effects in an entire crew would seem almost impossible to conceal, if indeed it ever happened.
