Over the Top in Under the Radar

By Jill Chapin

January 1, 2009

Ellen Leopold does a masterful job of showing us how our government’s Cold War mentality played a sinister role regarding radiation therapies in the treatment of cancer. Her book, Under the Radar, often reads like ghoulish science fiction gone amok – except that it all really happened. She takes us through a labyrinth of government agencies, none of which sought to protect us from the deadly effects of radiation.

Leopold walks us through the decision-making process of how byproducts of the bombs we dropped on Japan were later used in peace time as training tools for the government to test how much radiation a human body can safely tolerate. This was in the guise of cancer treatment using cobalt radiotherapy, and without the knowledge or consent of the patient. These can only be called what they were – secret radiation experiments. Bone-chilling and Orwellian, she shows us how those treatments were more military than medical.

Even allowing for the fifties mind set of the very real threat of a nuclear attack during the Cold War era, our government felt disturbingly justified in dismissing individual protections in the name of national security. After the war, atomic materials passed from military to civilian control. New marketing would soon alter their association with destruction and repackage them as disease fighters.

The potential economic value of radioactive isotopes such as cobalt was used by the pharmaceutical world and medical technology to promote as a cancer cure. This was tricky; our government would have to spin radioactive fallout from being viewed as dangerous, to radioactive cobalt which was promoted as a health procedure.

Using radiation before thorough evidence of its safety and effectiveness endures to this day. Despite informed consents and multiple layers of clinical trials, we still have new drugs and therapies that are put into the market before their long-term consequences fully present themselves. And Leopold reveals an eerie silence from the medical profession regarding the known link between these radiation treatments and cancer.

It is appalling that experiments went on in the forties and fifties without patient knowledge, and that they are still going on today in the guise of clinical trials. Although informed consent sets them apart from the secret experiments of the past, participating doctors are still ethically challenged if they don’t admit to their patients that the goal of these trials is not to benefit an individual patient but to test their safety and efficacy for the benefit of future patients.

The government’s eventual accusation that individuals were responsible for their cancers due to lifestyle choices was used to distract the public from powerful corporate interests such as the chemical industry who basically made carcinogens for a living. This was a diversionary tactic with cancer prevention foisted onto the shoulders of consumers. Yet how can individuals avoid food laced with pesticides and hormones, and how do we cleanse the air before we inhale?

What we didn’t know was that as radiation therapy increased after the Cold War, the cumulative exposure to medical radiation was far greater than that accruing from all other forms of nuclear energy. A recent study from the National Council of Radiation Protection reported that while CT scans account for just 12 % of the total number of nuclear medicine exams, they deliver nearly half of the estimated collective dose of radiation exposure in the United States. Yet as Leopold says, there is no advocate recommending that we keep a running tally of our exposures, like a history of our vaccinations. Some day we will wonder how we still allowed our bodies to be assaulted with radiation and chemotherapy. Although they were unwitting guinea pigs in the fifties who were not told of the horrific dangers, what is our excuse now?

Leopold shows that cancer actually became a by-product of atomic weaponry. As you read Under the Radar, you will come to realize that our government was, and still is, pro-actively engaged in failing to protect us from radiation harm, and that the fallout from the fallout continues to invade our bodies.

Rachel Carson wrote, “It is one of the ironies of our time that while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.”

Jill Chapin

Jill Chapin has been a guest writer and columnist in several Los Angeles area papers for over fifteen years. She has written a bilingual parenting book titled, "If You Have Kids, Then Be a Parent!" and a children's book entitled, "My Magic Bubble."

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