Each of us has a gun. We have sworn to the Air Force that we’ll use the gun on the other officer if he fails to carry out the order. Dr. David Tauben_______________ enemy bombs. They haven’t told us how long to stay down there afterwards. Hopefully the elevator still works. But it probably won’t. It will probably be full of rubble. At the front of the capsule there is a little machine you turn by hand that generates oxygen. No one really knows whether you're going to use more oxygen than you produce by cranking the thing; it’s a hard machine to operate. At the back of the capsule is an escape hatch that goes up at an angle to the surface. It’s a three-foot corrugated steel tube, and it’s full of sand. We’re supposed to dig out the sand and throw it down the tube behind us. They leave shovels in the capsule for us. We’re supposed to dig up to the surface and walk to someplace that used to be a church on the outskirts of Great Falls. I guess it was about a month ago. I was Martin Hdffltn It came like a revelation to Martin, a young fruit farmer and student in Denzlingen near Freiberg, West Germany. The Hague Convention guarantees the protection of Cultural Goods in case of war. Sixty-eight nations have signed the agreement. Why should one limit the term, Cultural Goods? In the end, every human being is a Cultural Good. He decides to have himself registered, and writes to the UNESCO Office in Bonn: Dear Mr/Dr. Dryoff: With great joy I inferred from the brochure "Civil Defense Today” that the Hague Convention of May 14, 1954, makes it possible to keep Cultural Goods out of war by marking them with a symbol, and registering them with UNESCO. I want, herewith, to inform you that I understand myself as worthy of protection as a Cultural Good, and because of that, I will wear the Cultural Protection Symbol. Please inform the other contracting parties, and put my address down in the International Register, so the contracting parties know where I predominantly stay. Thank you for all your efforts. The Hague Convention guarantees the protection of Cultural Goods in case of war. In the end, every human being is a Cultural Good. Finally, Martin receives a reply. It begins, “Sorry that you confuse apples with pears.” It goes on to state that the office staff cannot classify Martin as an archaeological site, nor an historic monument, nor an important library. Therefore, he is not eligible to be entered in the International Register, and they cannot send him an armband with the Cultural Protection symbol. The Secretary General suggests that Martin contact another government agency, the State Department of Civil Rights. The Secretary General has to have quantities of his reply to Martin home for my three days off. Some friends were over. One of them is a geologist with more scientific background than I have. He was listening to me tell about this assignment. He was doing some calculations at the table. He looked up and said, “Did you know that the heat from a near miss would melt the top six feet of sand in your tunnel into solid glass?” The only sound is the scribbling of a ballpoint pen. Lt. Morrison is suffering from a character disorder manifested by the inability to conform to authority, obstinancy, unex- pressed hostility, and a defective attitude. There is no potential for improvement. It is unlikely that he will adapt to military life. His continued service as an officer is not appropriate. I recommend that Lt. Morrison be discharged from the Service as soon as possible. printed up as a standard form letter to answer the hundreds of requests his office is receiving from people demanding to be registered as Cultural Goods. Martin does write to the State Department of Civil Rights, and he also continues his correspondence with UNESCO. He explains to UNESCO that, according to the dictionary, human life can be included in the definition of “A moveable good which has a great meaning in the cultural heritage,” and therefore, he again requests to have himself registered. He further explains that because the human creates art, the human needs special protection. Martin points out to UNESCO that there has been an oversight. The government has not provided for human beings in the storage location for Cultural Goods, an old silver mine 400 meters underground in the Black Forest. He feels that there is a growing risk of war now that 54 American Pershings have arrived and more are on the way. So he and his friends have begun to manufacture and distribute the armbands, themselves. It’s difficult to keep up with the number of requests. The first 4,000 are gone. To the State Department of Civil Rights, Martin writes a proposal. With the investment of 132 million marks, a Cultural Goods armband could be manufactured and mailed to every citizen of the country, and the government could then save the entire budget for armament. This would be a one-time expense, and would protect all citizens from future war. Martin is still waiting for the reply, still producing armbands, and still tending his apple orchards and pear trees. In Freiburg, near the Black Forest, the tourists ask the shopkeepers, “What does the armband mean? Where can I get one?” Tonight, Dr. David Tauben, a Seattle internist, has five minutes to himself after a long day at his First Hill practice. Just enough time to make a pot of coffee before members of the study group begin to arrive at his home. The living room fills up with family physicians, a research scientist, a human biologist, a graphic artist and other people who have come to make contributions to the information pool. Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) has taken a new focus for the time being: Hanford. PSR wants the public to understand the weapons link. The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was synthesized at Hanford. Most of the plutonium contaminating the atmosphere from aboveground testing was produced at Hanford. Now, plans are being made to build a reactor there, to produce the energy to boost Star Wars missiles. PSR wants to tell the story of the little hamlet that was converted into a giant weapons generating facility. It is the intention of PSR to identify the specifics, and communicate solutions via public education. No extremist rhetoric, no political side-taking, no accusations. They want to show that there is no real incentive to continue the arms race. They want to talk to people who believe that we need new weapons, people who believe that the plutonium gap really exists. So after the announcements, {he calendar, the current events, Dr. Tauben begins the introductions of study group Physicians for Social Responsibility wants the public to understand the weapons link. The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was synthesized at Hanford. Most of the plutonium contaminating the atmosphere from aboveground testing was produced at Hanford. members who have brought reports on their subjects. “Karen called me. The particular group that she’s focusing on is a group of farmers that live in a town called Ringo. The high incidence of cancer in that small population is something that she is very concerned about. Actually, the Department of Energy was charged with the responsibility of identifying an off-site group that might have received a maximum dose, and they always chose somebody who lived south of Pasco. They never focused on the Ringo group, except after 1975, when they ‘suddenly realized’ that the group most vulnerable was this group that lived right across from the reactors who ate the fish and farmed the land. The downwinders. ” To Dr. Tauben, the therapeutic process is one where you identify the problem and then take steps to accomplish a solution. Facing a problem like Hanford alone can lead to despair, but as part of Physicians for Social Responsibility he has a platform and a constituency with credibility. Doctors are accustomed to analyz- ing data, making decisions and recommendations. "We’ve ferreted out the missing years, the dirty years. I’d been looking through old Battelle and Department of Energy documents to try to come up with an idea of off-site radiation exposures to the Tri Cities population, and to come up with a sort of profile of the doses people started receiving starting about 1950. “There were a number of years where the data was missing. Roberta called somebody she knew at Hanford Operations and the person had them, within a day, on her desk. And the data did show that those were really much dirtier years. “I’ve been working up to 1972. I’d love to have someone else, maybe a student doing research find out: —how radioactive the fish were; —how radioactive the fowl were that were killed off-site; —the radiation dose the average hunter would receive near Hanford during each year; —how much you get if you stand along the Columbia River; —how much you get if you swim; —how much if you swim and eat a white fish. ” The people in this room are aware that some of their colleagues have been discredited, blacklisted for asking too many questions and publishing unpopular findings. Dr. Carl Johnson, a respected and well-published scientist, lost his job with Jefferson County in Colorado because of his findings that the amounts of plutonium in the soil around the Rocky Flats reprocessing plant were substantially unsafe. Real estate developers put on the political pressure because of what the findings meant for their property values. Dr. Thomas Mancuso found an excessively high incidence of cancer mortality among Hanford workers. He was working for a subcontractor of the Department of Energy and when asked to publish more favorable information, he refused and was fired. “I’ve spent the last three years looking at an island population as they were exposed to nuclear fallout, evaluating them particularly regarding thyroid tumors. I’m intrigued with this incredible discrepancy of opinion between the Carl Morgans and the Goffmans, versus all the health physicians in this country who basically have come out and stated in absolute scientific terms that there are no health risks to most of these exposures. “As a physician and scientist, I’m intrigued by this, because it's not that they have different experimental situations; they’re using basically the same data sets, and coming up with opinions that are different. Somebody is very wrong. ” There is less than a month before the PSR’s Speaker Training Workshop. What needs to be done is get recent findings into thirty-minute presentations with slides and graphics. Write brief essays. Sum up the material using clear, concise statistics. Translate the Department of Energy data into English. "We’ve started having some pretty good contact with the Washington Wheat Growers’ Association, and they’ve come out against the High Level Waste Repository. The Washington State Grange Association has done the same, and the Tri Cities Metal Trades Council. ” “How about the fruit growers? Could we get a copy of Eileen's photograph, with the Zinfandel grapes and the smokestacks?” Next week Seattle PSR members will meet with Russian doctors, members of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. They will sit down to dinner and attempt to communicate their thoughts on the ultimate human loss potential. Week after next is the breakfast meeting. And there’s a weekend in Spokane with Dr. Benjamin Spock talking about growing up in the nuclear age, and Clinton St. Quarterly 29
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