The Atomic West Book

A walloping expose -- sweeping and far-ranging -- of our dangerous dance with radiation, both natural and manufactured, and our inability to turn away from its alluring, death-dealing terrible invisible beauty. Radiation has been a panacea of the modern age -- harvested at the very dawn of the 20th century by a science too arrogantly certain of its powers to contain it, out of a glowing, inviting Pandora's Box; the Eve's apple of our time -- a deadly friend and foe you cannot see and cannot bribe to behave. This book fearlessly dives into a very complex, multi-faceted topic. There isn't anything on the subject that this book doesn't cover.

Because it was published in 1989 and apparently not updated since, there will be gaps for anyone wishing something newer. There have been significant developments in nuclear testing (at least in the First World) since its publication, and the rise of cell phones, computers and HDTVs are obviously not covered; neither, of course, is the world's now-worst nuclear accident, Fukushima in Japan in 2011. But that should not prevent anyone from tackling the book. Anyone who enjoys a good monster tale will find themselves rapt and shocked, and the story of radiation has its heroes and villains and unwitting players and victims who inevitably become caught up in breathless dramas not of their own making. This Frankenstein monster is real, though, and because he has a very promiscuous way of getting around, we all carry plenty of him in our bodies. This book tells how all this happened, and all the ways it has, does, and will continue to happen. Once we let it out, there is no turning back.

(The patterns that marked the development and commercialization of radiation can now be seen in the proliferation of cell phones and the continuing roll-out of genetically modified foods; the same suspect science, the same PR assurances, the same collusion between industries and governments...)

The book begins with the first scientific discoveries of radiation, and the attempts to isolate and characterize it. Scientists like Marie Curie, of course, paid for this curiosity with their lives. As the book points out, radiation risks were at first borne solely by scientists, but, once that power was loosed, sacrifice to it became borne by everyone, whether everyone liked it or not.

The horror stories in this book alone make it an unputdownable compelling read. Stories of folly and ignorance and cavalier behavior in the face of the unknown. Stories of experts who, in the end, knew practically as little as the gullible, clueless public. Radiation has been bandied about like a toy in many cases, put to insanely frivolous uses. Modern scientists often seem no more intelligent than alchemists in this scenario, and because of that a lot of incomplete or just plain wrong "science" has been cited by government and industry to pursue reckless ventures that endanger us all. Many of the standards of radiation tolerance and exposure used for most of the century by governments and industry have been largely "faith-based" extrapolations from incomplete data and unknowable variables. Author Caufield very assiduously breaks down these conundrums; her research is impeccable.

If the explanations of radiation units may seem dry at times, there's nothing prosaic about the litany of human-scale fiascos that Caulfied has compiled: the people who, in the 1920s, drank so-called "radium water" for its alleged health benefits, only to die excruciating deaths of cancer, their jaws thoroughly disintegrated; the people of the South Pacific, irradiated by Pacific atomic and hydrogen bomb tests by a military that thought it could predict how the weather would disperse it; the sailors who cruised the bomb zone, washing themselves in the irradiated waters drawn into the ships' pumps; the Brazilian scrap metal dealer who broke apart a radioactive lab X-ray machine and was so fascinated by the glowing blue powder inside that he wrapped some in paper, dropped some of it on the bus home, and gave it to family members who played with it and rubbed it on their bodies -- contaminating thousands; the deliberate dumping of tons of plutonium waste into the Irish Sea by Britain's Windscale nuclear power plant because officials were curious to see where it would go (clue: it washed back on shore, dried up and blew away and went everywhere); the town of Grand Junction, Colorado, where residents in the 1950s and '60s were encouraged to haul off the uranium tailings from a mine to supplement their concrete, leading to a town built of thousands of contaminated buildings. This is just the barest tip of the iceberg; the list goes on and on...

And, on top of that, Caufield addresses the debates over nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and more -- the cost-benefit analyses to society of the medical, military, and recreational uses of radiation, and the PR spin that has gone into up-playing its benefits while downplaying its dangers; and the often good-hearted willingness of people to, for instance, do the patriotic thing and believe that their government's promises to protect them were genuine at the very time they were being cynically used as guinea pigs.

I had taken very detailed notes on so many of the cases in this book, but to discuss them would entail a whole book in itself. As tempted as I am to explore all of that, I'm going to keep it short and simply reiterate my admiration for the book. It is an eye-opener, and it will make you wonder about all the things you do every day that put you at greater risk.

(KevinR@Ky 2016)

Postscript:
If you have never seen this, I recommend it; it is a Youtube video called, "A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto"


I won't say anymore about it. If you see it, you'll understand why I don't have to.