Nothing new about nuke danger
Nothing new about nuke danger
The press has been acting like nuclear exposure was a new thing. Like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were the only two times the public was exposed to nuclear radiation.
I remember as a child in school going outside to collect rain samples to test for radiation for several days after each above ground nuclear bomb test the US conducted. I remember seeing pictures of soldiers lined up in rows at different distances from the bomb explosion to see how the radiation affected them.
I remember reading how the families of the uranium miners received millions of dollars from us taxpayers after the miners died from radiation exposure. I remember watching a documentary about Semey, a city in the USSR that was left exposed to radiation without any notice before each Russian nuclear bomb test. The officials simply sent a special team of doctors to the town to investigate how the radiation affected the people. I remember seeing jars of fetuses in the town’s hospital with all kinds of genetic malformations including one fetus that had a large tail.
Then there was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was bad that 20,000 children died instantly, but hundreds of thousands of people died later from the radiation. My father was in the U.S. Army at the time and his company was forced to march through the blast area. He was given an exam each year for the rest of his life to see how the radiation exposure affected him.
So why are the reporters pretending that the public has never had much exposure to nuclear radiation? Why do they act like we don’t know what it can do to living things?
Don Rowinsky, Youngstown