One more OCD question

"In 1975 the scores in the nationwide Scholastic Aptitude Tests had dropped by the largest amount in two decades. While there had been a more or less steady decline in both the verbal and the mathematical scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than 2 or 3 points, the average verbal scores had suddenly dropped 10 points in a single year. By far the greatest drop (in SAT scores) between 1974 and 1976 had indeed occurred in the state with the highest levels of radio-iodine in the milk, namely Utah, and the smallest drop was recorded for the midwestern state of Ohio, largely to the south of the drifting clouds of fallout that had passed over Minnesota, Michigan, New York, southern Ontario Province in Canada and northern New England. The magnitude of the effect was difficult to believe, but here in the letter from the College Board were the hard numbers: Utah had dropped 26 points and Ohio only 2.

There was just no way that such an enormous difference in the sudden drop could be explained solely by socio-economic factors, differences in the quality of teachers, school curricula, television viewing, amount of cigarette smoking, drug use, alcohol consumption, or other gradually changing physical factors in the environment such as air pollution or pesticides.

In fact, if smoking, alcohol, and drug taking during pregnancy had been a factor, Utah, with its large Mormon population, should have declined less and not more than Ohio and New York. But it was the other way around: The population with lower cigarette consumption, alcohol, and drug problems during pregnancy had the greater decline in Scholastic Aptitude scores by many times the normal statistical fluctuation of 2 to 3 points.

Nor could differences in the genetic factors of the two populations be blamed: They were both predominantly white, and in fact the Mormons had originally come from the East and Midwest. Besides, genetic or inherited factors would lead to long-term differences, not the sudden changes that had taken place. Tragically, it now appears that we had unwittingly carried out an experiment with ourselves as guinea pigs on a worldwide scale. This discovery made me more determined than ever to do everything in my power to make sure that the terribly costly lesson would be learned before mankind would make further and perhaps more irreversible mistakes with fallout from nuclear war or nuclear reactor accidents, in which the radioactivity equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs might suddenly be released over vast areas the size of entire states or nations.

But as we pointed out at the Psychological Association meeting, there was also reason for hope in the data for individual states. First of all, the test scores in Utah rebounded partially by 9 points the following year, when the nuclear test ban apparently showed its effect for the children conceived eighteen years earlier. At least some of the damage was not permanent, presumably because it affected the fetal thyroid more than the mother's, and the iodine was gone from the milk within a matter of a few months after the bomb tests ended, although damage from strontium 90 and its daughter product, yttrium 90, to the pituitary gland would continue for many years, since it had accumulated in the bones of young women for decades.

Also, it was encouraging that the average level of performance on the tests had been so much higher in Utah than in any of the three other states for which we had the data. Although California, New York, and Ohio all showed scores in 1974 that were above the U.S. average of 440, down 38 points from the maximum of 478 in 1963, Utah had by far the highest score, namely 532, compared with 459 for Ohio, 454 for New York, and 450 for California.

Thus, it appeared that given the kind of quality school system that the people of Utah had established, together with the good diet, the low amount of smoking, drug use, and alcohol consumption during pregnancy, it was possible to attain a much higher degree of performance on this type of achievement test. The potential for raising the school performance of our children in the future was therefore clearly immense if we could only learn to use our vast productive capability to provide better diets, better schools, and better prenatal care as the Mormons had been able to do. Instead we were investing more and more of our national income in gigantic nuclear reactors for both military and civilian purposes that were filling the air and drinking water with invisible radioactive poisons, destroying the most important resource of our nation, the physical and mental health of our children.

Furthermore, this high intellectual performance was achieved in Utah despite serious local pollution problems from copper smelters, large coal-burning plants, and as many automobiles per capita as anywhere else in the United States. (Neither copper smelters, coal plants, nor automobiles produce strontium 90 or iodine 131.) It was obviously not necessary to return to a primitive, nonindustrial society for people to have capable children or to live a long, healthy, and useful life. For not only did the people of Utah have children with test scores that were far above the average of the rest of the United States, but they also had among the lowest rates of heart disease and cancer in the entire nation.

Since the Mormon customs discouraged smoking, they did not experience the large synergistic multiplying factor for lung cancer that smokers experienced when the radioactive fallout arrived. Just as the uranium miners who did not smoke were better off than their coworkers who did, the Mormons were able to clear out of their lungs the fine radioactive dust particles more rapidly than those whose lung clearance was slowed down by the nicotine in cigarette smoke. Thus, their religious customs resulted in much lower amounts of both man-made and natural radioactivity staying in their lungs or entering their bloodstream, reducing greatly the risk of low-level exposure leading to rises in lung cancer, heart ailments, and other chronic diseases.

Both Bell and I were surprised by how well our rather startling hypothesis was received by the large number of psychologists who came prepared to question our theory. In the ensuing discussion, questions were raised as to whether a change in the mix of the students taking the tests might not explain a good portion of the long decline in test scores. That is, could the decline in scores be explained by the increase of students from lower-income homes who in the past would not have thought of going to college? This was indeed likely to be the case in the early years, according to some of the studies published by the Wirtz Commission, but it could not explain either the sudden sharp drop followed by a halt in the late 1970s, when the total number of students taking the tests was actually declining. Nor could an increase in the number of less well-prepared students explain the recent wholesale decline in the number of students who could score above 600 or 700 out of the possible maximum of 800 points in these tests.

It was, in fact, the extremely sharp decline in the number of very high-scoring students that presented the greatest potential problem for a society increasingly dependent on verbal and mathematical skills to run the computers, design the automated machines for the factories and farms of the future, administer an increasingly high-technology society, and operate the sophisticated electronic weapons of a modern army. Instead of 189,300 students who had been able to score above 600 in the verbal test among those born in 1952-53, there were suddenly only 110,300 for the birth years of 1957-58, a drop of 42 percent. And an even greater drop occurred for the top students on whom our society would depend for much of its new ideas, creativity, and leadership skills in the arts, the sciences, and engineering, namely those who were able to score over 700. In this category, the numbers were cut by more than half, from a high point of 33,200 born before the Nevada tests began in 1949-50 to a low of only 14,800 for those born in 1957-58, the years of the heaviest fallout from our weapons testing.

It was only too evident that if the radioactivity in the environment led to early infant mortality, childhood cancer, thyroid damage, and underweight births, then also the learning ability of the surviving children might never develop its full potential.

And it would be the steady decline in the ability to read and reason and not so much the rising cancer rates in old age that would be the real seed for the self-destruction of a modern technological society. The children that could not read or cope with mathematics and science would drop out of school and become permanently unemployable. And these young people would feel increasingly resentful toward those whom they blamed for their failure: their teachers, their parents, and their political leaders. Even worse, they would blame themselves and suffer from low self-esteem.

Many of the unemployed and discouraged young people would drift into crime, vastly raising the level of violence and fear in the cities. Not knowing what caused their problems, they would increasingly resort to drugs and alcohol to overcome their sense of failure and hopelessness, raising the rate of juvenile suicide and crime still further.

Not being aware of the subtle thyroid damage with its resultant lethargy, parents would blame the teachers, and teachers would blame the parents for the increasing loss of interest, discipline, reading ability, and general motivation of the students. Vast sums of money would be spent in efforts to help the slow learners and the many handicapped students suddenly flooding the schools, draining the resources of society at the very time when there would not be enough highly skilled, resourceful, and inventive young people produced to improve the teaching and raise the productivity of factories, businesses, and farms. At the same time, the cost of health care would spiral as more and more developed early chronic disabilities, a situation that would lead to increasing absenteeism from offices, schools, and factories, and thus further reduce the output of goods and services while expectations continued to rise.

As productivity dropped while the need for costly special education and disability payments rose, the vast amount of borrowing that government would have to do to provide for the rapidly growing number of unemployed, handicapped, and sick would drive up the rate of inflation more and more. To keep ahead of the inflation, as well as to dampen its flames, the banks would have to raise their interest rates so as not to lose money by lending. Industrial machinery could not be modernized because borrowing the money would become too costly. The factories and farms would fall still further behind in their ability to meet the growing demand for manufactured goods and food, further adding to the pressures of inflation.

At the same time, the smaller supply of capable and creative young people needed to fill the jobs as engineers, scientists, doctors, nurses, computer specialists, teachers, managers, and officers for the increasingly sophisticated factories, offices, schools, hospitals, and military services would drive up salaries, adding still more fuel to the inflationary fires. More and more plants would be forced to shut down because they could not compete with more modern factories in other countries whose young workers were more productive because these countries were not in the direct path of the fresh fallout from Nevada and therefore less heavily exposed to short-lived iodine. Also a greater fraction of the reduced supply of talented and inventive young people would be absorbed in the unproductive tasks of developing ever more complex and costly nuclear-weapons systems and reactors, thus further weakening the economic situation of the nation as it was forced to import ever larger amounts of civilian goods and machinery from other countries.

As I thought about this scenario, I wondered how much of this had already begun to happen, as juvenile crime and suicide suddenly doubled and tripled in the mid-1970s among the children born in the late 1950s all over the U.S. and in northern industrial countries, where the fresh fallout had come down most heavily. The end of weapons testing in Nevada had led to a halt in the decline of intellectual ability among those tested eighteen years later, especially those born well after 1963, when bomb testing ended. There were now fewer children born blind and deaf showing up in the statistics, and there were fewer leukemia cases, brain tumors, and suicides among children and adolescents. Fewer crimes were being committed by young people under 18 years old than during the mid-1970s, when the intellectual achievement scores had dropped most rapidly, although the latest crime statistics showed a second large jump in 1979, corresponding to the second series of heavy atmospheric bomb tests 17 to 18 years earlier in 1961-1962.

There were now also fewer who were born immature, underweight, and thus dying of chronic and infectious diseases, except near the growing number of nuclear reactors that started operating in the early 1970s.

There was to be yet another development that strongly supported the hypothesis that fallout had unanticipated effects on mental development of the young. Just six months after the meeting of the American Psychological Association in New York where we had presented our findings, another scientific meeting took place in Baltimore devoted to the biological effects of ionizing radiation. At this meeting, Dr. Charlotte Silverman of the Bureau of Radiological Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services presented a paper entitled "Mental Function Following Scalp X-Irradiation for Tinea Capitatis in Childhood," a condition more commonly known as ringworm of the scalp.

Dr. Silverman summarized the results of studies of two groups of children treated by means of X-rays, a method no longer used. One group of 2,215 children was followed at New York University Medical Center, and another group of 10,842 children at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel was followed over a period of 20 to 25 years, together with matched groups of non-irradiated controls. Aside from an increase in the number of brain and thyroid tumors, there was also an excess of nervous, mental and behavioral problems in the irradiated groups. As Dr. Silverman reported, "The New York investigators found a higher incidence of treated psychiatric disorders among the irradiated which persisted during an observation time of about 30 years."

For the Israeli group as originally reported by Drs. B. Modan and E. Ron at the Sixth International Congress of Radiation Research in Tokyo earlier that year, Dr. Silverman summarized the results as follows:

Several measures of brain function, mental ability and scholastic achievement demonstrate that the irradiated children suffered impairment. These findings are consistent with and extend previous findings of suggestive brain damage from radiation.

The doses to the thyroids of the children were listed as having been in the range of 6 to 9 rads, well below the doses of 10 to 60 rads received by the children of Utah from the fallout of the Nevada tests reported by Dr. C. W. Mays at the August 1963 Congressional Hearings for the children of Utah in 1962, or the 5 to 40 rads estimated by Dr. Eric Reiss for the children of the Troy-Albany area where heavy rainouts in distant areas had first been discovered.

Since the thyroid doses to the more sensitive developing fetus are generally 10 to 20 times as great as for the young infant, it was therefore not surprising that effects on brain function, mental ability and scholastic achievement should be observable for the children born in Utah and other areas subjected to bomb fallout during the years of nuclear weapons testing.

Shortly after the Baltimore meeting, the College Board sent me the SAT scores for 45 out of the 50 states up to the most recent testing period of 1978-79, 17 years after the second nuclear weapons series of tests in 1962. It was clear that this more detailed data would provide a crucial test of our prediction that there should be another sharp drop in the scores associated with the series of Nevada bomb tests, and that the greatest declines should again be observed for the western United States downwind from Nevada.

After going through the table, I saw that the answer was quickly apparent. Among all the states listed, Utah again showed the sharpest decline in the entire United States, 11 points in a single year. The declines diminished with distance away from Utah across the northern United States until they reached 5 points in New York, 3 points in Connecticut and only 1 point in Rhode Island."

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp16.html

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