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A group of scientists, military officials and government bureaucrats signed an informal pact with the Devil. The contract became public in August 1945, when US bombers nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since then, no other nation has used a nuclear weapon, but thousands of radiation-emitting tests have occurred and nuclear energy plants mushroomed, with promises of cheap, safe and clean power. Over the decades, however, “the nuclear industry” has faced repeated cost over-runs, and serious “accidents.” Thousands died at the Chernobyl power plant ( Ukraine ) and a near catastrophe occurred at the Three Mile Island ( Pennsylvania ) facility. Air Force planes dropped H bombs in the ocean off the Spanish coast and innumerable leaks, fires and “mishaps” occurred routinely at military and civilian nuclear installations.
In 1980, Jack Willis and I produced “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang” for public television. Our documentary showed government officials and nuclear mavens colluding to obfuscate their failure to keep their “cheap, safe and clean” promise. In 1977, Jacobs, a reporter (and non-smoker) covered the nuclear issue since the 1950s. He developed lung cancer, his doctors speculated, after he had inhaled a plutonium particle while covering US government atomic tests. He also looked skeptically at US claims of benign radiation levels near the Nevada test site.
In a 1957 story, Jacobs reported his Geiger Counter jumping scale in a “safe” area. In his story, (The Reporter) he revealed the lies told by Atomic Energy Commission spokesmen about actual levels of radiation. Jacobs had surreptitiously acquired from a Public Health office in Las Vegas a classified document revealing AEC knowledge that so-called low level radiation constituted serious health hazards. Indeed, from later de-classified internal memos, Jacobs discovered the AEC had classified the health report not to keep it from Soviet officials, who knew about radiation’s perils, but to keep the US public sedated so people wouldn’t think about choosing between nuclear tests and getting cancer.
In 1977, Willis and I returned with Jacobs to the “down wind” area he had investigated twenty years earlier. In southern Utah , Jacobs found those he had previously interviewed were dead or had cancer. In St. George , Utah , directly in line of the fall-out path from Nevada nuclear tests, he found a near epidemic of cancer and a public that had endured years of nuclear nervousness.