Government Response - The Disaster America's Experience Atomic Radiation Killing Our Own - Part 1 Section 4
Beginning in the late 1970s, the federal government publicly solicited toll-free phone calls from former GIs who were directly involved in A-bomb tests between 1946 and 1962. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki veterans were intentionally excluded from the scope of the telephone data-gathering program. At the Defense Department two of the project's top officials each admitted personally responding to about half a dozen such calls or letters.[45]
"We were able to reassure them that they didn't get any significant exposure,"[46] said Lieutenant Colonel Bill McGee at the Defense Nuclear Agency (ironically acronymed DNA), a branch of the Pentagon devoted to governmental assessments of atomic weapons impacts. McGee and other DNA officers would not tell us how many contacts regarding Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup their agency received.
At the Veterans Administration headquarters a few blocks from the White House, in January 1979 we inquired about claims for service-connected benefits based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki residual radiation exposure. VA Board of Veterans Appeals chief member Irving Kleinfeld said that "we probably know of a couple of cases" of VA claims in that category. Kleinfeld added he seriously doubted any other VA official would know anything more about it.[47]
In the VA's central public-relations office the story was about the same. When asked whether any claims based on Hiroshima or Nagasaki residual radiation exposure had ever been filed with the VA, public-information official Stratton Appleman replied: "We've had none for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb."[48]
The VA's public-relations machinery was apparently telling other curious journalists much the same thing. In North Carolina, on January 21, 1979, The Charlotte Observer published an article about area resident Clifford Helms, fifty-four, a Navy Seabee veteran with paralysis and kidney trouble who had recently filed for VA benefits linked to his cleanup assignment at Nagasaki. The Observer article, written by staff reporter Bob Drogin, stated that "Helms is the first veteran to claim disability based on exposure to radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, according to Al Rayford, a Veterans Administration spokesman in Washington."[49]
Rayford later denied ever contending that Helms's claim was the only one due to Hiroshima or Nagasaki radiation.[50] Informed of the denial, Drogin responded with a written statement: "Al Rayford unequivocally told me Clifford Helms was the first and only vet to claim disability based on exposure at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My notes are clear on this. Moreover, I specifically asked him this question several times because it seemed so unlikely to me."[51]
We also called second-level VA officials, some of whose names had appeared in Lyman Quigley's bulky claim file. The trail led to Robert C. Macomber, chief of the Veterans Administration rating-policy staff, a career VA employee who said he had never been asked such a question before by a reporter. As a matter of fact, Macomber said, he happened to have more than two dozen Hiroshima-Nagasaki claims right next to him in his office.[52]
For several hours over the phone Macomber patiently went through the files, omitting only claimant names, identification numbers, and addresses to protect confidentiality. Macomber estimated that approximately fifty such Hiroshima and Nagasaki residual radiation claims had been filed with the VA nationwide, with about twenty of those still at regional VA offices and not yet forwarded to headquarters for appeal. All those claims, he said, had been turned down.[53] James (Jack) McDaniel volunteered for the Marine Corps when World War II broke out--then a tall athletic young man barely in his twenties. A few years later he was among about two hundred Marines quartered in a bombed-out waterfront hotel near the Nagasaki blast center. (As far as they could tell when they met thirty-three and a half years later, for a few days Sheridan Clapp had been in the same semidemolished hotel on the waterfront.) Like the rest of the U.S. troops assigned to cleanup there, he did not receive any precautionary instructions, radiation monitors, or protective gear.[54]
When discharge came in southern California, just about the only thing on McDaniel's mind was getting back to his wife a thousand miles north. He found employment as a diesel mechanic in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, remaining on the Weyerhaeuser Corporation job for more than twenty years in southwestern Washington. He enjoyed much about his life, working in lush forests and appreciating wonders of nature in the countryside around his home near the small town of Toutle.
But as time passed, McDaniel's health deteriorated drastically. In 1975 doctors diagnosed Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, an extremely rare cancer of bone marrow involving overproduction of blood protein.[55]
"I don't know if I'll be able to work the next four years to retirement. I'm going downhill fast," McDaniel said in early 1979. He spoke wistfully of the past--"I had the consistency of a horse, I was strong"--and of the government he had trusted for so long: "They don't want to admit they were wrong to send us in there without any warning, without any preparation, without any protection."[56]
McDaniel had recently applied, unsuccessfully, for Veterans Administration benefits based on his stint in Nagasaki;[57] the main concerns he expressed had to do with the future financial security of his wife. In the opinion of McDaniel's hematologist, Dr. Richard B. Dobrow of Vancouver, "the question of [VA] compensation will probably be answered politically, not medically."[58]
Despite intense pain accompanying his chemotherapy, McDaniel traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak at a press conference in June 1979. At the Commodore Hotel, near the Capitol, in the morning he met other press conference participants. Among them were two people who understood, as few Americans could, what he was going through: Virginia Ralph, whose ex-Marine husband, Harold Joseph Ralph, had died in 1978 from multiple myeloma, a brutal form of bone-marrow cancer;[59] and Harry A. Coppola, a former Marine also suffering from multiple myeloma. Coppola, McDaniel, and Mrs. Ralph's husband had all been in the core bombed area of Nagasaki in late September 1945.
Seated in the hotel lobby, McDaniel reached into a manila envelope and pulled out photos he had kept of Nagasaki's devastation, taken where he was billeted; Virginia Ralph pulled out her husband's photos of the Nagasaki rubble where he had been stationed. They were virtually identical pictures, taken from what looked like the same spot.[60]
Virginia Ralph, who had lost her husband in a protracted and terribly devastating death, sat next to Harry Coppola, who had the same disease's terminal agonies to look forward to in the near future. Alongside them, Jack McDaniel was losing ground to a deadly cancer of the same family of blood cells in his marrow. Atomic legacies were emerging in people's very bones.
Mrs. Ralph was accompanied by her twenty-one-year-old son Mike. Sorrows of losing a husband and father, in such a terribly painful way, were still fresh after nearly a year since Harold Joseph Ralph's death. For Virginia Ralph, a farm wife forced into the workaday world of secretarial chores in Streator, Illinois, to provide for her children, the runaround from federal agencies was infuriating. Along with the government's blanket policy of turning down all claims for U.S. veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleanup, she found it particularly galling that their own government never bothered to do any systematic study on the health of those veterans--and would not even admit that such a study was appropriate. "Actually, no one cared," Mrs. Ralph charged. "And now, the U.S. Government is stonewalling." She reflected on her husband's inexorable, anguishing drift toward death at age fifty-four: "The last two years are better forgotten. The last ten days of his life were a nightmare for all of us. I would do anything in my power to spare another family what we have experienced."[61]
She and her son, Mrs. Ralph later recalled, "were saddened by the news that two more veterans had been found who are also suffering from bone-marrow cancer, but we were so happy to meet these two grand fellows, Jack McDaniel and Harry Coppola. Knowing very well how this illness affected my husband's strength and how this illness plays tricks on human beings, I was amazed at their bravery. I was so thankful to have them with us."[62]
Slowly the group walked across the mall area on the west side of the Capitol dome, to the Rayburn House Office Building. Cosponsored by The Progressive magazine and Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D), the press conference took place in the ornate grandeur of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee room. "Far be it from me to bad-mouth my country, or the military. I still love it like I did when I joined the Marines," said McDaniel. "I can't understand in my hillbilly mind why I get a flat no. I want to know why we receive no assistance from our Government. Why no help?"[63]
Virginia Ralph found that her journey to Washington for the press conference in early June 1979 rekindled a flame of optimism. "For two-and-a-half years previous to the Washington trip," she remarked later that summer, "replies from our U.S. Government and the VA to all of my correspondence left me with the feeling of someone who has had his hands tied behind his back with his face pushed up against a brick wall. The trip to Washington offered hope! My hands are unleashed and the wall is beginning to crumble. In view of all we know, the U.S. Government cannot shun its responsibilities much longer."[64]
But the reconciliation Virginia Ralph hoped for was not to be. Until the summer of 1979 federal agencies had never faced any widespread publicity raised about the U.S. veterans who went into the postbomb wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Washington press conference gave unprecedented visibility to the issue, and some federal officials began to devote more time and resources toward responding.
In late July 1979 at the Pentagon the Associated Press interviewed Defense Nuclear Agency Lieutenant Colonel Bax Mowery, and reported that the agency "has been trying to identify the estimated 250,000 servicemen exposed to radiation in the A-bomb tests and the two bomb blasts in Japan."[65] It was the first published report that the U.S. Government was expressing any interest in learning more about the American soldiers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cleanup.
But such statements were not to be confused with a substantial change in practices and attitudes. "These guys are getting old enough so that they're just getting sick from being on the good old earth," a November 1979 issue of Newsweek quoted a Defense Nuclear Agency officer as saying about U.S. veterans of Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup. "Somebody has convinced them to blame it on radiation."[66] At the Veterans Administration and White House, officials responded to questions from journalists with the refrain that there was no reason to be concerned.
The intensifying media coverage included editorials in a number of newspapers criticizing government handling of the issue. The San Jose Mercury editors lamented the lack of forthright federal action;[67] the St Louis Post-Dispatch went further--running a series of editorials lambasting the government's conduct with increasing venom: "Either the Veterans Administration has difficulty understanding statistics or it is engaging in some callous stonewalling on the deaths and disabilities suffered by servicemen who were sent into Nagasaki and Hiroshima for cleanup operations. . . . Rather than admit it was wrong, and possibly heighten public doubts about its nuclear policies, the Government has chosen to dodge responsibility and ignore the suffering."[68]
Under the headline "Old or Dead Before Their Time," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorialized that "grim new evidence comes to us no thanks to the U.S. Government, which, for a third of a century, has swept aside, ignored and apparently suppressed information on the long-lasting effects of radiation exposure. . . . One would have thought that the Government would have kept records on the health of these veterans. Such has not been the case. For the past 33 years, the Government has asserted that radiation levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe during the cleanup. This seems a shabby artifice."
Concluded the Post-Intelligencer editorial: "We believe the Government now must take responsibility for the risks of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima cleanup. The disability assistance that these veterans could gain in the few years remaining to them is a small enough amount to pay for three decades of misery and denial."[69]
On Capitol Hill, few members of Congress were willing to step forward. When Junior Hodge, for instance, sought help from his representative, Al Gore, Jr., the ex-Marine veteran of Nagasaki bulldozer assignments got no help as he lay ailing in eastern Tennessee. An aide to Congressman Gore noted that the Tennessee Valley Authority's nuclear power plants carry enormous political clout back home. "I know nuclear weapons fallout isn't exactly the same thing," the aide told us, "but it's close enough to nuclear power that we'd rather stay away from it publicly."[70]
A few members of the U.S. House of Representatives did speak out. Among them the earliest was Patricia Schroeder. In addition to appearing alongside Nagasaki cleanup veterans at press conferences, Representative Schroeder fired off a strong letter to Veterans Administration director Max Cleland on August 9, 1979.
Terming the VA's treatment of veterans who had cleaned up after the wartime atomic bombings "unconscionable," Schroeder's message to the VA top administrator was blunt: "I am shocked and appalled by your lack of responsiveness to these servicemen who, without adequate precautions or protections, unknowingly subjected themselves to high levels of radiation and are now paying the fatal price." Schroeder went on to suggest that the VA "initiate a comprehensive study" probing the health of U.S. veterans of Hiroshima-Nagasaki cleanup, along with "testing and medical examination of all surviving servicemen, who officially or unofficially, were present at the blast sites within one year after the bombing."[71]
"Now that the latency period for these bone and blood cancers and diseases has expired, we can no longer excuse the Government's gross miscalculation which has resulted in these disorders," she added. "We cannot rectify the damage that has been done. We can, however, admit our mistakes and try to make these terrible afflictions which Marines have come to bear slightly less painful."[72]
VA director Max Cleland responded to Representative Schroeder two and a half months later, in a letter dated October 29, 1979. "At the outset," Cleland replied, "I should like to assure you that there is no effort whatsoever on the part of the Veterans Administration or, so far as I am aware, on the part of any other government agency to obfuscate or withhold the truth about any untoward biological effects of exposure to nuclear radiation."[73]
In Nagasaki, he contended, "one hour after the bomb burst, the radiation present from the fallout was about 10 rads . . . By way of comparison, an x-ray examination of one's gastrointestinal tract can deliver 5 to 30 rads, depending upon the circumstances of the examination. The 10 rads appearing one hour after the burst very rapidly decreased to a fractional amount . . . Radiation levels at Hiroshima declined at a similar rate."[74]
The facile comparison to external penetrating X rays did not take into account an atom bomb's fission products, some of which inevitably give off alpha and beta radiation for years or centuries after a nuclear explosion. Even a tiny particle--lodging in lungs, bones, muscles, or other vulnerable human tissue after being inhaled or swallowed--would continue to irradiate from inside the body, with potentially deadly consequences.
Cleland continued: "The Department of Defense advises that a combined United States and Japanese team made a complete survey of the fallout radiation levels at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki from October 3 to 7, 1945, about two months after the bombings. Radiation levels were measuring up to 0.015 milliroentgen per hour from Hiroshima and 1 milliroentgen per hour for Nagasaki."[75]
It all boiled down to no reason for alarm, Cleland insisted. "I again stress that we at the VA have no desire to 'cover-up' or otherwise prejudice the good-faith claims of our veterans. We are dealing, however, with a matter of ongoing scientific inquiry, and the medical knowledge presently available simply does not support a conclusion that malignancies or other diseases which have afflicted or are afflicting veterans are causally related to their proximity to Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the nuclear explosions. Your interest in veterans' benefits is appreciated, and I hope I have allayed your concern that we at the VA are in any way reluctant to address this complex and controversial issue."[76]
A few months after expressing optimism that the government would change its tune at last, Virginia Ralph sounded sadder but wiser. "It's a great cover-up," she said. "They're afraid to admit anything, because then people who are living near nuclear reactors would worry that 30 years from now the same thing will happen."[77]
Source and Citations: https://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/#dl
KILLING OUR OWN - The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation - Harvey Wasserman & Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez & Eleanor Walters - A Delta Book 1982