Dying for Atomic Secrets

[Jenny Lake]

In an effort to weave a whole cloth out of the various threads surrounding the Nuclear Power issues --patent and trade rights, espionnage, weapons superiority, and "nuclear diplomacy", I started this thread to post summaries on these themes.

Other threads in the forum working these issues are:
Prescott Bush, Atomic Energy Comm. chair
Fathers of the Bomb
Dante Alighieri Society

and....
please help-- add previous thread names that you know about. Maybe we can cobble together a good timeline here.

[Jenny Lake]

The dangers of radiation from X-rays in 1896, when Roentgen's discovery took-off like wildfire, began accruing within the first weeks of January! It was not uncommon to get an X-ray for 20 or 30 minutes, and X-rays themselves became The Treatment. Estimates have suggested that millions of people were given treatments of thousands of Rads per treatment. Edison's glassblower, who handled cathode-ray tubes is a famous case in point. It took him 6 years to die from advancing cancer and included the amputation of both of his arms.

Below is a clip from the website of Dr. Albert Schatz who was denied his due credit for the discovery of streptomycin. His lab supervisor at Rutgers U. in New Jersey, Selman Waksman, took sole credit and received a Nobel Prize. Schatz went to live and work in Chile where he did important  work uncovering the true hazards of fluoride, which shows a "paradoxical" dose effect --the lower the dose, the more deadly the effects. This phenomena was confirmed in 1972 by a Canadian, Abram Petkau, working at the Whiteshell Nuclear facility. Radiation exhibits this exact effect as do the other "halogens" (5 unstable elements that bond naturally to metals and create salts-- fluorine, chlorine, iodine, bromine, and the radioactive number 5 halogen, astatine). Fluorine is the most reactive halogen, binding most easily but having the most unstable of molecular bonds. These compound salts have been among the most useful chemicals in industry.  


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from http://www.fluoridation.com/schatz.htm
The fluoridators have also ignored the history of what Schubert and Lapp called "radioactive poisons" that were used therapeutically for over half a century with disastrous results." 42 Following the therapeutic use of radon drinking water in 1903 and 1904, first radium salts and then Thorotrast (a commercial product which contained a radioactive isotope and became popular in 1929) continued to be used well into the 1960s. In 1913, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that "the value of [radon] is unquestionably established." Over 80% of 1038 patients with a variety of ailments, recalcitrant to other treatments, "were considered ... by 20 foreign doctors ... to have been improved by the use of radium emanation." Radium was also injected into mental patients to treat psychoses and other mental problems.

In 1916, an article in the journal Radium declared that "Radium had absolutely no toxic effects, it being accepted as harmoniously by the human system as is sunlight by the plant." Radium therapy was listed in the New and Non-official Remedies of the American Medical Association until 1932.42 In 1936, Percy Brown, M.D., who died from overexposure to X-rays, published his book American Martyrs to Science through the Roentgen Rays.43 This book presented the biographies of professionals who died from the effects of X-rays.

In the 1950s, articles in medical journals recommended Thorotrast treatment for children. In 1953, a Denver company was marketing a contraceptive jelly containing radium.42 In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, hundreds if not thousands of military personnel and civilians were given radium treatments to prevent and cure colds, hearing loss and other ear ailments, and adenoid problems. The victims attributed head and neck cancers, miscarriages, and thyroid and other problems to the radium treatment.44


Fluoridation déja vu
For half a century, promoters of low-level fluoridation and low-level radiation have denied repeated and continuous warnings about the dangers they both pose.
In 1957, Schubert and Lapp pointed out that "One of the strangest aspects of the attitude toward radiation poisoning is that as late as 1924 — nearly twenty-five years after the discovery of radium — no one seemed to understand that when radioactive substances were taken into the body they emitted radiations just as damaging as those produced by an X-ray machine. This seems incomprehensible in view of the fact that it was well known by then that all kinds of radiation — whether X-rays, alpha rays, beta rays, or gamma rays — damage tissues." 42

Actually, many people not only understood but warned about the dangers of radiation. Schubert and Lapp themselves comment on numerous reports of injury and death, caused by radiation, which continuously appeared in newspapers and in medical and scientific journals. But the so-called experts ignored these reports while people died, in some cases agonizing deaths.

In the case of fluoridation, the so-called experts also have also ignored repeated warnings about the toxicity of fluoridation while people have been harmed and in some cases killed. For information about the political, economic and social syndrome of low-level fluoridation pathology, read Joel Griffiths' Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy.2

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In addition to Schatz, John Gofman has written extensively about the dangers of radiation. I think of it as the Bottom Line. Before the big Bombs --in the 1930s-- the madmen of science were devising schemes to make "dirty" weapons. In that same decade, X-ray research was forecasting the VERY SAME illnesses that are prevalent today, including a warning that 4 generations and more beyond irradiation events, offspring become too damaged to reproduce and the species falls into decline. Fathers of the bombs understood this, except for the few who refused to see. When JFK went to visit the Lawrence Livermore Lab, director Edward Teller thought to correct his perception of "misinformation" on radiation hazards and tell the President about it's potential benefits-- Kennedy brought him up short and said, "Dr. Teller, if you're going to tell me radiation is good for me, you will fail."

[Jenny Lake]

On March 26, 1938, Ettore Majorana disappeared from a ferry ship on a routine crossing from Sicily to Naples. Majorana is one of Italy's most revered scientists and he was young and just beginning his ascent at the time he vanished. As a member of the physics team of Enrico Fermi, Majorana suggested the necessary techniques for causing fission. Fermi later said that Majorana was a rare genius on a par with Galileo and Newton.

Majorana's priest and family swore he would never commit suicide, devout Catholic that he was, but as a European physicist in the 1930s, his beliefs were in a distinct minority among "freethinking" humanists. Majorana traversed the academic circuit of other young physicists in the 20s and 30s, studying in Berlin and Munich, perhaps Amsterdam and Copenhagen, rubbing shoulders with Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, et. al.

Because of Majorana's contributions, Enrico Fermi published papers and patents that brought him into the heart of the physics community and later to the U.S. to participate in the Manhattan Project. While stumped over top-secret problems at UChicago, Fermi would say how he wished that Ettore was there. Ettore may have visited America in 1935 along with the rest of the Italian team who stayed in New York City as the guests of fellow physicist Gabriello Giannini. That summer of 1935, Fermi was at the University of Michigan while Giannini was looking for buyers for Fermi's patents but it's possible that Majorana never came along on the trip.

Gabriello Giannini's father was one of the founders of the Dante Alighieri Society --the New York area branch having an office across the Hudson from Manhattan-- in Jersey City near the site of Liberty State Park, once an industrial zone for the railroads with a railhead at the Black Tom Island terminal. Black Tom Island was blown up on July 31 1916 (and followed by a massive outbreak of polio). It's not known by me if Torquado Giannini had any role in this event, though the Black Tom yard was a staging site for all the coal to be sent across ( or under) the Hudson. If by tunnel, the passages were built by Hudson and Manhattan Tunnel Co., run by Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law and Sec of Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo.

The Italian nationalists behind the Dante Alighieri Society were the same cut as the fascists of the inter-war years. At the time of Majorana's disappearance in Italy, the industrial and academic institutions were headed by a cartel including Guiseppe Volpi di Misurata as a leader. Fermi was greatly supported by Volpi and had two benefactors from the regime, Guglielmo Marconi and Orso Corbino. By 1937, Marconi and Corbino were dead --Marconi died quite suddenly from an infection. The younger Giannini in New York had struck a very favorable deal with Philips Fabriken in Amsterdam but was having small luck in the U.S. or so it appears. Eventually, Giannini won defense contracts with Lockheed during the war and looks like he kept his office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

What's interesting about Ettore Majorana's disappearance is that no one has ever come forward with evidence. Speculation prevails. The team of physicists were all departing for various locales or in the process of it by the mid-30s. Both Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre had substantial connections to the socialist Jewish revolutionaries that had control of the national government by WWI. Fermi married Laura Capon, daughter of Admiral Augusto Capon who became the chief of Italy's Naval Intelligence in 1931, and Segre, likewise was the nephew of Admiral Guido Segre (and I believe grandnephew to General Roberto Segre).

More of this story to come, when I get to it, in Fathers of the Bomb.