Elements of Controversy – The Atomic Energy Commission & Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947–1974: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-1974 - Hardcover

Hacker, Barton C

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520083237 ISBN 13: 9780520083233

Publisher: University of California Press, 1994

Synopsis

Unforgettable congressional hearings in 1978 revealed that fallout from American nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s had overexposed hundreds of soldiers and other citizens to radiation. Faith in governmental integrity was shaken, and many people have assumed that such overexposure caused great damage. Yet important questions remain - the most controversial being: did the radiation overexposure in fact cause the cancers and birth defects for which it has been blamed? "Elements of Controversy" is the result of a decade of research in AEC documentary records and the full clinical and epidemiological literature on radiation effects. More concerned with uncovering the historical story than with assigning blame, the book concludes that every precaution was taken by the AEC to avoid harming test participants or bystanders. And, it points out, the biomedical literature suggests that these precautions worked. Yet top officials in Washington - for whom the success of nuclear weapons was of overriding importance - had asserted that testing involved no risks at all. Discrepancies between unverifiable government claims and the revelations that some actual risk was present explain the origins and angry persistence of the controversies, Hacker argues. The Department of Energy delayed publication of Hacker's study for five years, and while his controversial book is sure to draw objections from both sides of the radiation-hazard debates, it should provide a much-needed guide to understanding their polemics.

About this title

About the Author

Barton C. Hacker is Laboratory Historian at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and author of The Dragon's Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942-1946 (California, 1987).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520083237
• ISBN 13: 9780520083233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 638