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20 Radioactive Dangers We All Face |
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Watchdogging Radiation Cover-ups
...Did you fall for the 'We don't know what caused your cancer ' line?
In April 2010, Paul Langley put his book 'The Black Mist and its Aftermath - Oral Histories by Lallie Lennon,' into the public domain. Below, we have copied in full-text his foreword; below that is the entire book in pdf format. Please return to our Australia page for more.
Foreword by Paul Langley
The story of Lallie Lennon has been public since 1981, when Lallie spoke, on film, of the ordeal she and her family had been through. The family was engulfed by a portion of the fallout cloud created by the 1953 Totem 1 atomic bomb, detonated about 180 kilometres south west of their location, Mintabie, where they were looking for opals.
In the years since, she has continued to wonder how it was that the skin eruptions she suffers, at first constantly, now more or less cyclically, were caused. Her son Bruce has the same affliction. The two young daughters she had at the time were sheltered under a canvas tent slung over a tree. Lallie and Bruce were out in the open, engulfed by the fallout cloud which snaked through the trees.
The suffering has been great. It felt like being "rolled in a fire" and first broke out about two weeks after the Black Mist rolled through their camp.
Doctors looked at Lallies' skin and attempted to treat her condition. When asked, doctors could not or would not give Lallie a diagnosis. That changed in the 1980s, when a doctor in Adelaide did give her his opinion of what Lallie suffered from. This was more than 30 years after the event which Lallie believes caused her suffering. She didn't suffer the affliction prior to the 1953 event. It first erupted about two weeks after contact with the Black Mist.
Beta radiation burn is a common outcome of contact with nuclear fallout. It has been reported since August 1945 in victims of nuclear weapons. From Japan to the Pacific, including the USA, it is an outward affliction suffered by many officially recognised victims from contact with Beta emitting particles. Fission products in nuclear clouds are generally Beta emitting particles.
In Australia, it is a condition that has been ignored in regard to Australian victims.
In this paper I focus on Beta Radiation Burn, Local Radiation Injury, caused by contact with beta emitting fission products. It is a well known condition. A wealth of information exists describing it detail. The signs of Beta Burn occur about fortnight after exposure. It is a painful condition which m ay become permanent and cyclic. It may affect skin pigment.
Lallie wishes that as many people as possible know her story. I have done my best to take Lallie's story and compare it with the civil and military records. Records that describe nuclear fallout, what it is and what it does. How it behaves and how it leaves its victims.
My training for doing this is basic. During my military service, undertaken in the early 1970s, I was trained as a radiological safety corporal. In that military workplace, which repaired and calibrated radiation detectors, my role was that of a technical clerk. I was trained to monitor the workplace for alpha radiation, caused by the decay of radium into radon and hence into other radioactive decay products. I was trained to use a scintillator based detector for this. I daily charged up and issued personal dosimeters and subsequently read the recorded exposure readings. I received basic radiation safety training. It was nothing exceptional, nothing that could not be taught in High School. My workplace was safe. It was a properly managed facility where the radiation readings I took inside the building were lower than the usual readings obtained outside. Neither were cause of any concern at that time. I was merely trained to consider radiation because radioisotopes, used to test radiation detectors, were present at that now old and closed workplace.
Lallie and many other people exposed to the Black Mist were not as lucky as I. At the time of their exposure they had no training in understanding ionising radiation, no means known to them to measure it, no understanding that their possessions and clothing would trap and contain the radioactive particles. No-one met them and advised them after the incident. There was no official effort to use the then known principles of Radiological Safety and Health Physics to measure their exposure nor was there any effort to minimise the impact of it after the event.
This paper will be submitted to the South Australian Government, the Australian Government, the British Government, the European Parliament and to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
I believe Lallie deserves an urgent diagnosis of her long standing condition. A diagnosis made within the context of and in compliance with IAEA guidelines regarding the diagnosis and treatment of Local Radiation Injury - skin contact with Beta emitting substances. Beta Burn to Skin. The diagnosis should be made by suitable Health Physics professionals who are independent from Government influence.
There are two editions of this paper. One for Governments and the IAEA. One for general readership. This is because the Government/IAEA text contains two photographs of ground level nuclear clouds: one photographed 100 miles from its tower shot point at the Nevada Proving Grounds, Mercury Nevada. The other was photographed at about 80 miles from that place. These photographs are precious. Copyright permission was sought from a publisher. However, individuals own the photographs. I have chosen thus to provide the 2 photographs only as evidence to Australian politicians and the IAEA. These two photographs are deleted in the public edition of this paper. I urge the general reader to consult the original books in which the photographs appear. These American "Grey Mists" (Nevada Proving Ground soil is a much lighter colour than the soil type found at Emu Field, the place where Totem 1 and 2 were detonated in 1953) represent to many Americans a similar profound sorrow and mark the same process of official denial and battle by victims as experienced in Australia. Both photographs were taken in 1953.
This paper is my best effort. I remain focussed on External Hazard due to skin dose. This enables me to concentrate my report on one factor in as a precise manner as possible. Lallie and her family, as well as many others, suffered and described, as untrained people, the same signs and symptoms as those which describe Acute Radiation Syndrome. Radiation Sickness. I make no apologies for my focus. I leave it to others skilled in the understanding of the culture, language and meanings of Australia's First Nation to further examine this paper. The information presented here must be explained in the light of a full understanding of Aboriginal culture and with further descriptions of the full range of symptoms and effects suffered by many Aboriginal Australians impacted by the British Nuclear Tests in Australia. Beta Burn due to external contact is but one of these. I am moving one step at a time, as carefully as a I can, as I have done since I first heard and saw Lallie in film.
I am grateful to Lallie for talking with me and for giving me permission to continue to walk along the songline, a songline which is, as I attempt to show, technically correct, in a most sophisticated manner, when compared with the texts prepared for people who are trained to fight nuclear war. In October 1953 there was a "Friendly Fire" incident. I do not know how many others there were. The impacts are officially denied still.
I thank Michele Madigan for her endless patience as she acted as the interface between two worlds. My own and Lallie's. I ask the reader, if my world is too remote, too hard to understand, just read Lallie's words. They are sufficient and always have been. To those in power who hold the evidence, they are a proof and an indictment.
Paul Langley
February 2010
Port Willunga
South Australia
The Black Mist and its Aftermath - Oral Histories by Lallie Lennon
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'The
greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that
the only
victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.'
- Forgotten
Guinea Pigs Report, 1980
In 1986, the U.S. Dept. of Energy used the cover of the Chernobyl fallout cloud over the United States to release huge amounts of radiation into the air from a failed underground Nevada nuclear test. It was called Mighty Oak.
learn more on our global fallout page
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