Past Watch - Know Them By Their Tactics

So it turns out that above ground nuclear testing of the Cold War is directly linked to increased cancer in Baby Boomers. A discovery of 85,000 baby teeth donated for a St. Louis study back in the 50's has provided the means, measuring them for the fallout element, Strontium 90, and correlating that to the lifetime cancer rates of those children. The suprise is not in the findings that, yes, the fallout traveled east and contaminated the food chain especially for formula fed babies - air to grass to cow to formula - and that higher Strontium 90 meant more cancer and death for those children in adulthood. The shock is in the way radiation dangers were ignored at the time, sidelined by the establishment and lobbied against in the media. You don't have to imagine the arguments. All you have to do is take the global warming deniers, change a few words here and there, and voilà. Same dog, new bone.

As Walter Shapiro writes in his column Cold War Remnant: Cancer for Baby Boomers:

What fascinates me, however, is that 50 years ago, the angry scientists and the ban-the-bomb protesters were right – nuclear testing was dangerous for children and other living things. "Maybe at the beginning of bomb testing, people weren't sure how much this would spread across the globe," Mangano said. "But by the mid-1950s, after dozens of bombs had been tested, they noticed the radiation levels going up and up in the milk and the water. They knew that this was trouble."

Yet there were still scientists who scoffed, scientists who had a political agenda. So you get someone as respected as Edward Teller scoffing at the suggesting that nuclear testing could have long-term effects. "The living organism is so complicated and the intertwining of cause and effect is so intricate that we may never know the biological effect of so small a cause as worldwide radiation." He was a physicist, not a biologist, but he was eminent, so people touted his views about the effects of radiation on living organisms the same way they now tout a once-eminent hurricane expert about current global warming evidence. The same superior dismissal, the same reasonable sneer, the same lemming road to death and loss of quality of life for all.

Statistics are abstract but let us not forget that real people suffered and continue to suffer along with their families. The powers that be knew it. They hid behind a few outliers who gave them cover by injecting specious, partisan doubt into the conversation. They poisoned us, themselves, and now like Pilate, wash their hands. That was then, this is now.

Well, my political views were formed then and confirmed by now. Patterns of rhetoric in relation to reality, patterns of action and effect in the public sphere, patterns of integrity and hypocrisy in politics and its coverage in the media. What shocks me is that the same discredited arguments against past efforts to rectify evils are being used today, even as the followers of that rhetoric enjoy and defend their right to enjoy the benefits they (or their doppelgangers) opposed in the past.