In the rolling countryside of southwestern Ohio, the leaves have begun to turn to brilliant reds, ochers and yellows. But in the Cincinnati suburb of South Greenhills, some ten miles east of the Department of Energy’s Fernald nuclear weapons plant, Charles Zinser, 38, was preoccupied, unmindful of the glorious surroundings. Zinser recalled how beginning in 1984 he had rented a vegetable garden near the plant. He often took his two young sons along as he worked. Two years later, both were found to have cancer. Samuel, then eight, had leukemia, and Louis, two, had part of a leg amputated. Zinser contends that tests of his garden soil show it was contaminated with enriched uranium 235. And the doctor who tested his son’s amputated leg told him it contained ten times more uranium than would be expected to accumulate naturally over a lifetime. “The doctor said Louis could have eaten dirt and not got that much,” says Zinser. “He said the only way he could have got that much would have been to breathe it.” Across the country, the outrage and sense of disbelief are mounting. The nation’s production-obsessed, scandalously shortsighted nuclear weapons industry is virtually under siege by its critics. And no wonder. Operating secretively behind a screen of national security for more than four decades, the bombmakers have single-mindedly, sometimes recklessly, pursued their goal: to churn out all the warheads the military believes, perhaps prudently, are needed to maintain the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Now they are being charged with ignoring the dangers that their operation of deteriorating facilities may have inflicted on the very citizens they were supposed to protect. Ohio’s Senator John Glenn summed up the situation with ironic clarity: “We are poisoning our people in the name of national security.” Whether left unsupervised by lax Government officials or, worse yet, ordered by them to stifle their own concerns, the private contractors who ran the major U.S. weapons plants released huge quantities of radioactive particles into the air and dumped tons of potentially cancer-inducing refuse into flowing creeks and leaking pits, contaminating underground water supplies in a seepage that cannot be stopped. No one knows how many people may have been needlessly afflicted with such ailments as cancer, birth deformities and thyroid deficiencies — and no one in relevant offices seemed to care. Why? Because a legalistic, bureaucratic shuffle left no one responsible for whatever human and environmental damage was inflicted. Only recently, that attitude has begun to change. The Department of Energy in 1977 took over responsibility for the nuclear weapons network, which had long been overseen by the now defunct Atomic Energy Commission, and finally < seems bent on reform. Information about the weapons-production system has emerged that only begins to suggest the past callousness of both Government officials and private contractors. At the sprawling Hanford plutonium- processing complex in Washington State, managers once deliberately released 5,050 curies of radioactive iodine into the air. The reason: to see if they could reduce the amount of time uranium must be cooled before being processed into plutonium, presumably to increase production.
