The Doomsday Spin : Tales of radioation tests seem to prove every citizen’s worst nightmare about government.

The revelation could not have been more shocking: In 1945, Eda Charlton, a seamstress who checked into a Rochester, N.Y., hospital for routine care, was, without her knowledge, injected with plutonium as part of a secret Manhattan Project program to test the effects of radiation on human beings. By the time she died in 1983, at age 85, Charlton had never been told the truth. Her children only recently learned the full details, when disclosures of secret tests of radioactivity on unsuspecting citizens became a leading news event.

Since any medical test performed without informed consent is an abomination, government mistreatment of Charlton was an outrage; as were radiation tests staged, the Department of Energy admitted last month, on an estimated 800 additional Americans during the 1940s and 1950s with no meaningful approval from the subjects. Public anger about government duplicity and violation of rights is amply justified.

But to maximize the instant-doomsday spin, the current controversy is skipping over an inconvenient little complication: Hardly any actual harm was done, because the exposures involved were to extremely low levels of radiation. What’s really going on in the radiation testing controversy? Consider several aspects.

After the story broke, the Washington Post, reflecting the conventional wisdom, declared plutonium to be so dangerous that “human contact with even one particle is guaranteed to cause cancer.” Yet, Charlton was injected with far more and lived an additional four decades--some 30 years longer than statistical expectancy for a white woman of her birth year. And when she died, it was due to a heart attack--not cancer.

News reports focus on the violation of Charlton’s rights and the scary facts of the experiment--without mentioning the dose was incredibly tiny. Charlton received one-third of a microcurie of plutonium. A microcurie is millionth of a curie: One-third of a microcurie is far less radiation than caused by the new low-dose X-ray machines.

A common assertion in instant-doomsday literature is that plutonium has an almost mystical hyper-toxicity. No one doubts plutonium is extremely dangerous. But if what the Charlton case shows is that plutonium is just another dangerous substance that must be controlled, this would be terrible news to instant-doomsday orthodoxy.

Similarly, many commentators now suggest that shocking horrors occurred when radiation was released in the 1940s and 1950s from the federal nuclear-bomb production plant at Hanford, Wash., a facility that had minimal environmental safeguards in the Cold War years, and, though now closed, still suffers from ecological blunders during its cleanup. Hanford releases are now regularly described in news accounts as “hundreds of times worse than Three Mile Island.”

This is true--but it tells more about the smallness of the Three Mile Island release than anything else. Average exposure downwind of Three Mile Island was about 10 millirems--or about 3% of the average annual background level of 360 millirems that Americans receive from natural sources.

Researchers have been studying the workers and 270,000 downwind residents of Hanford for seven years and, so far, have found “no firm evidence that any of the releases harmed human health,” the technical journal, Science, reported last week.

The English researcher Alice Stewart, a leading authority on radiation, has studied Hanford workers from the Cold War years--workers being far more directly exposed than residents downwind. Stewart found they have, so far, experienced slightly less cancer than typical for Washington state. To my knowledge, none of the many news accounts about Hanford have mentioned Stewart’s work.

These new radiation stories resonate because the government has a history of lying about early Cold War atomic abuses. Federal officials have long denied the truth about severe health damage suffered in the 1940s and 1950s by uranium miners, mainly Navajo Indians, who worked under subhuman conditions; officials lied for years about the harm suffered by people living downwind of 1950s open-air nuclear tests and by soldiers deliberately exposed to fallout from atomic tests.

This history of federal lies about radiation abuses during the 1950s inclines commentators and the public to assume the worst about any new disclosure. Such an assumption is wise, for federal credibility on atomic matters is low to nonexistent.

The Department of Energy has been claiming for years that the awful truth about the 1950s is finally out. This promise keeps turning out to be false. In 1986, the DOE declassified information about the infamous Green Run at Hanford, a test where radiation was emitted to track its distribution downwind. At that time, the DOE said the last abuses of the 1950s had finally been made public. Three years later, however, the DOE, under new Secretary James D. Watkins, began to admit to many more unreported 1950s radiation leaks. Today, the new energy secretary, Hazel R. O’Leary, swears the last awful details are public. Who believes her? No one.

This scandal also resonates because a significant number of Americans exhibit an almost clinical paranoia in believing themselves victims of secret government tests--the same way people regard fluoride in drinking water as a conspiracy. Supermarket tabloids and right-wing call-in shows thrive on claims that people have suffered horrible, unsubstantiated abuses at the hands of evil government agents, usually from an agency far more secret than the CIA. Now comes word that 800 people were actual victims of secret government tests: What great news for the paranoia industry!

Perhaps more to the point, in the United States one person in four develops cancer. This means there are millions of Americans who might wonder if their cancers were caused by evil government tests--or might prefer to believe they were, rather than blame themselves for the lifestyles choices (mainly cigarette smoking, high-fat diets and lack of exercise) that medical researchers now believe account for around 80% of cancers.

For, while many specifics of the testing scandal are new, much else is not. Information about the Green Run experiment was declassified in 1986. The recently quoted memorandum warning top government officials that radiation medical tests suggest a “touch of Buchenwald” was declassified in 1974. Some radiation tests currently being revealed as shocking new disclosures were even reported in open medical literature during the 1950s--though with identifying details deleted. References to the tests can be found in textbooks of radiological medicine. These tests formed the basis of radiological medicine. Of course, most people don’t know that, since who, except bleary-eyed med students, ever opens a radiology textbook?

Some commentators have attempted limited defenses of these tests, by noting that 1950s politics were driven by Cold War fears in which many sacrifices for nuclear knowledge seemed justified. And, at any rate, in the 1950s no one really knew whether radiation was dangerous, and research standards of the time were far loose than today.

Now, the point about ignorance of radiation in the 1950s is true. For example, in the late 1940s, it was common for shoes stores to blast children’s feet with far stronger X-rays than today used in chest X-rays, in a gimmicky search for the “scientific fit.” This practice stopped only after a public campaign against it lead by a then-obscure pediatric surgeon named C. Everett Koop.

Through the mid-1950s it was common for obstetricians, especially in England, to blast pregnant women’s wombs with X-rays far stronger than the worst exposure in the current radiation testing controversy, to view the developing fetus. (Harmless sonogram viewing of the fetus had yet to be developed.) This practice, which today seems insane--given that X-rays were shined on the fetus during early cell division, the phase most vulnerable to mutation--was stopped only after a campaign lead by Alice Stewart.

But the rationale that standards of consent were more relaxed is a whitewash. The standards were just as strong in the 1950s as today. The reason researchers were sneaking around about the radiation tests is that they knew the subjects would never give consent if fully informed. This violation of patients’ right represents a genuine outrage, undimmed by any notion of changing ethics.

To emphasize the mad-scientist spin, accounts suggest people were exposed to radiation in the 1950s to make them sick. In the case of prison inmates, whose testicles were irradiated to induce sterility, this is true and an ethical outrage.

But in other cases, the radiation was used not to induce sickness but as a tracer in a test of something else. For example, the children at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., who, without parents’ true consent, received breakfast cereal that was slightly radioactive were being studied to see how the body absorbs nutrients. Using radiation as a tracer is an entirely respectable form of research or therapy: exactly what a barium scan is, for instance.

That many of the 1950s tests involved radiation being used as a tracer is being downplayed. Because in tracer experiments, only minute doses are used; doomsayers would rather that go unmentioned.

For years, a large team of federal researchers has been engaged in something called the Hanford Dose Reconstruction Study, trying to estimate how much radioactivity was released. The study’s authors now believe that, from 1944-47--the peak period for Hanford leaks--about 685,000 curies of radiation were released. The Three Mile Island leak was about 17 curies. Yet it may be that Hanford workers are not especially sick.

The most basic reason for this counterintuitive outcome is that most of the radiation, like most radiation in bomb-test fallout, did not result in exposure. Though nuclear wastes have half-lives thousands of years long, the most common form of radioactivity in fallout and Hanford leaks was iodine 131--with a half-life of eight days. If washed out of the air by rain, iodine 131 can be quite dangerous. If carried away on the winds, it soon cools to harmlessness. Most of the Hanford leaks, like most nuclear-test fallout, was carried away rather than washed down onto the innocent.

There were tragic and horrible exceptions. Some people who lived immediately downwind, particularly children who played outside because their parents were not warned, suffered horrible deaths at young ages. But the majority of “downwinders” were only mildly exposed.

Another reason the Hanford leaks may have done less harm than expected is the emerging scientific understanding that all mammal bodies possess some genetic resistance to radiation. After all, human beings evolved in an environment constantly exposed to natural radiation from the sun and from mild natural radioactivity in some ores and some forms of soil.

Here’s a paradox: The natural background radiation in Denver, Colo., is about 50% higher than in most U.S. cities, because Colorado has mildly radioactive soil and the thinner air of the mile-high city allows in more solar and cosmic radiation. Yet, Denver also has a notably lower rate of cancer than other cities.

Oddities such as this have caused some researchers, prominently Rosalyn Yalow, to suspect that small exposures to radiation may be slightly beneficial. Yallow won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for her part in the development of the radioimmunoassay--the basic test by which radioactive harm to the body is measured.

The important message of the unauthorized 1950s radiation tests is that even liberal democratic governments sometimes cheerfully ignore the rights of citizens. No warning of the danger of casual government abuse of civilians can ever be exaggerated.

By contrast, the instant-doomsday aspects of the scandal appear largely hyperbole. For years, the environmental community has advanced the notion that even small amounts of radiation represent a mystical mega-danger, of which society ought to live in utter dread. Why do they so vehemently warn against what is, at worst, a speculative threat? Because nuclear-power plants cannot explode but can emit tiny amounts of radiation. Continuing public dread of even tiny levels of radiation is the enviros’ main argument against nuclear power--which has many problems but which, on ecological grounds, may actually be good for society. (No greenhouse gases, no air pollution, no strip mining or oil spills.)

Now, as the radiation-testing abuses and radiation leaks of the 1950s continue to be disclosed and assessed, and the health damage caused continues to appear nowhere near as bad as projected, the 1950s scandals may become an argument that low levels of radiation are far less worrisome than once assumed.