The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

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  The Japanese are not the only ones who have demanded that no more thermonuclear bombs be tested. Their views have been echoed by some highly articulate authorities in the United States as well as by various qualified critics in other countries. One of the latter—Dr. Frederick Soddy, a British winner of a Nobel Prize for studies in the chemistry of radioactive substances and the origin and nature of isotopes—has warned of the dangers of “fouling the air with radioactivity.” In particular, much concern has been expressed over the hereditary effects of increased radioactivity on the genes of the human race. Estimating that seventy-five hydrogen bombs exploded at intervals over a period of thirty years will double the natural amount of radiation in the world, Joseph Rotblat, Professor of Physics at the Medical College of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in London, has written, “Rough as this estimate may be, it certainly shows that we are sailing much closer to the wind than many of us thought.… It is no longer a question of two nations, or groups of nations, devastating each other, but of all the future generations of all nations, who will forever pay, through disease, malformation, and mental disability, for our folly.”

  In this country, the Federation of American Scientists has urged that the United Nations “obtain and evaluate scientific opinion on the biological and genetic effects of radiation on human beings,” and last April, Senator Frederick G. Payne, of Maine, introduced a resolution calling on the President to instruct our chief delegate to the United Nations to propose such a study. Apparently, the President did so, for at the tenth-anniversary meeting of the U.N. in San Francisco three weeks ago, Henry Cabot Lodge suggested that all member nations pool their research on fallout to allay “unjustified fears.” The National Academy of Sciences, this country’s most distinguished scientific body, has, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, embarked on an exhaustive survey of the problem. Dr. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist at the California Institute of Technology, noting that radioactive rains have fallen in Japan and Germany as a result of the tests, has suggested that these may have started “a new cycle” of leukemia. And Dr. James R. Arnold, an associate professor at the Institute for Nuclear Studies of the University of Chicago, has come forward with the proposal that in the future the A.E.C. conduct all its thermonuclear tests within the continental limits of the United States. “It may be objected that the number of casualties would very likely be increased,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last November. “This is true, but they would be American citizens. A nation which feels itself in danger has some right to ask certain of its citizens to run special risks on behalf of all. This is the principle behind compulsory military service. Even though the Japanese are our allies and the Marshallese our wards, we have no such right with them, in a world which holds to the idea of national sovereignty. Americans who were hurt would doubtless be properly indemnified. All the same, the taxpayer would benefit greatly, since the lowering of costs of the test operation would pay for any probable casualty list many times over.”

  In the face of all this outcry, the A.E.C., which possesses more information about fallout than any other agency—or individual—steadfastly maintains that the tests have not got out of hand. The Commission contends that in the ten years since this country started testing nuclear weapons—to be followed presently, of course, by the Soviet Union and Great Britain—not more than one-tenth of a roentgen has been added to the amount of radiation normally absorbed by each individual in the United States. This is the equivalent of what a patient is subjected to in a single chest X-ray, and as for its genetic effects, it is only one one-hundredth of the normal radiation to which most men and women have always been exposed up to and through their reproductive lifetimes. “Most of the categorical predictions of adverse genetic effects are about as reasonable as claiming that meteors from outer space are a major threat to highway safety,” Dr. John C. Bugher, Director of the A.E.C.’s Division of Biology and Medicine, assured me.

  The A.E.C. considers the amounts of radioiodine and radiostrontium that have fallen in this country insignificant insofar as their immediate effect upon the population is concerned. In view of the fact that these elements, absorbed in the soil, may become part of plant tissues that are either eaten by human beings or eaten by grazing animals that, in turn, provide food for man, the Commission, by means of roving teams and experimental farms, carries on a series of year-round checkups on the radioactivity in many localities all over the nation. Radioiodine has been found in the thyroids of cattle and sheep grazing near the Nevada Proving Ground; the thyroids of living human beings cannot be tested for small amounts of radioiodine, but urine analyses of persons living in the same area have indicated that they have been less severely affected than the livestock, showing only a minute fraction of the amount of radioiodine that would cause damage. As for radiostrontium, Dr. Bugher estimates that the amount now present in the United States would have to be multiplied by a million before an increase in the frequency of bone cancer would be perceptible. On the other hand, Dr. Bugher revealed some months ago in an address before the seventh annual Industrial Health Conference, held in Houston, Texas, that laboratory experiments conducted on animals have demonstrated that one of the possible effects of overexposure to radiation is a shortening of life expectancy. “This phenomenon does not result from any specific cause of death but apparently from a general acceleration of the aging process,” he said, adding wryly that human beings have yet to experience the distinction between a condition that does not cause death but shortens life.

  However sound the A.E.C.’s position may be, the commissioners are finding it hard to win quite a number of worried citizens over to it. “One of our big difficulties is a popular tendency to confuse close-in fallout with distant fallout,” an A.E.C. radiation expert told me. “When people in the United States read about the hundreds of roentgens that hit those Japanese fishermen, they think it’s sheer luck the same thing hasn’t happened to them, and figure maybe the next shot will be their turn.”

  Another thing that handicaps the A.E.C. in its efforts to present its case is the fact that the very word “radiation” evokes dread in the public mind. “On wet days, we get anxious phone calls from men and women who want to know if the rain is bringing fallout down on them,” a man in the A.E.C.’s New York office told me. “That’s a perfectly rational question, but then they suddenly break down completely—crying and carrying on about what’s going to become of the world.” It may be, he suggested, that radiation’s bad name goes all the way back to the famous case of the girls who, working in a New Jersey factory during the First World War, painted watch dials with radium, tipping their brushes with their tongues, and years later began dying, one by one, from overexposure.

  The big point the A.E.C. is trying to put across is that it’s the cumulative exposure that counts, and not the mere presence of radiation. Air, water, and soil emit radiation under normal conditions; so do the cosmic rays that are constantly assaulting the earth from outer space. For that matter, man himself is radioactive, since his body contains potassium 40, carbon 14, and radium 226—all radioactive isotopes. “The world is radioactive,” Commissioner Libby stated in an address he delivered last December at the Conference of Mayors, in Washington. “It always has been and always will be.” And Merril Eisenbud, Director of the A.E.C.’s Health and Safety Laboratory, points out that since the very beginning of life, radioactivity has been one of the principal factors in the furtherance of evolution, causing changes, or mutations, in the genes of living organisms and so bringing man to his present stage of development, whatever one’s opinion of that stage may be. “Without radioactivity, we’d have less to think about today,” Eisenbud told me—a statement with which even the Commission’s harshest critics would hardly quarrel. “Without it, perhaps we’d all still be slime in the primeval swamp.”

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  But in these times, as the A.E.C. knows all too well, the subject of mutations is a tou
chy one. Many people find it much easier to contemplate—in theory, at least—the possible destruction of the world while they themselves are still inhabiting it than to reflect that their descendants, centuries hence, may inherit genes that were impaired by the current tests. There are sound scientific reasons for apprehension over radiation’s effect on genes. Radiation, the A.E.C. believes, causes from 10 to 20 percent of all mutations, and about 99 percent of all mutations result either in prenatal death or in sterility or some other functional disability; what the public knows as “monsters” and scientists call “lethal mutants” are nearly always stillborn. In those rare instances where mutations are beneficial to an organism, the law of natural selection dictates that the new form survive at the expense of weaklings or the parent form. In any society, the frequency of mutations depends largely on the total amount of radiation that its members’ reproductive organs are subjected to before parenthood, and not on the intensity of exposure on any particular occasion. Dr. E. L. Green, the A.E.C.’s geneticist, starting with the premise that for every billion genes (about one hundred thousand people) five thousand mutations turn up, estimates that exposure to the extra tenth of a roentgen introduced by the nuclear tests will mean an additional ten to twenty mutations among each hundred thousand of the population. The field of genetics is still a mass of unsolved riddles, but the authorities are generally agreed that if and when the tenth-of-a-roentgen mutations start showing up, it will be difficult to single them out as the direct results of nuclear explosions.

  According to Professor H. J. Muller, a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist, “each detrimental mutation, even though small in effect and lost to view in the jumble of a heterogeneous population, tends to continue from generation to generation and to hamper successive descendants, until at last it happens to tip the scales against one of its possessors, and that line of descent then dies out in consequence of the inherited disability.” In a speech before the National Academy of Sciences this spring, Muller condemned prominent publicists of the government, including physicians, who have claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will have no harmful effect on the future populations of those cities and, indeed, may even improve them. He also cited the A.E.C.’s favorite analogy of the chest X-ray, but he gave it a somewhat different twist; in genetics, he implied, the reproductive organs are really rather more important than the chest. Muller pointed out that the additional radiation to which Americans are being exposed because of the bomb tests must be considered in terms not of the individual but of the whole population; that is, one-tenth of a roentgen multiplied by 160,000,000, or 16,000,000 roentgens. Muller noted that this means that the United States may expect about as many mutations to result from the current nuclear tests, wherever held, as he anticipates will turn up in Hiroshima, since the 160,000 survivors in that city were exposed to an average of one hundred roentgens. In both instances, he said, the number of mutations caused by the artificial increase of radiation to date will probably someday amount to around eighty thousand—or from two and a half to five times as many as Dr. Green predicts—and in the end, several times that many lives will be adversely affected. Still, Muller went on, in view of the total number of people involved during the scores of generations in which the mutations will be occurring, it is unlikely that the population as a whole will be undermined, and he recommended that before calling for a ban on all future tests, thought be given to what the alternative damage might be if the tests were discontinued. In a way, he said, the case was similar to that of people who visit their doctors regularly for X-ray examinations as a precautionary measure against serious illness even though a Public Health Service survey has shown that every year the average person receives much more radiation from this source than from the nuclear tests. “Have we no right to expect individual sacrifices when the stakes are democracy and intellectual freedom themselves?” Muller asked rhetorically. To this, any person now alive would appear to be obliged to give a stoutly affirmative answer, but the question also, of course, raises the nagging dilemma of the propriety of attempting to speak for those who are yet to be born into a world the nature of which no one can predict.

  There are those who believe that some of the A.E.C. scientists might, if they were not restrained by loyalty to that agency, be just as vocal as their present adversaries in expressing anxiety over the dangers of fallout. However that may be, it is unlikely that the scientists on either side of the fence are enjoying their wrangling. “It’s no fun, this constantly being cast in the role of villain,” an A.E.C. man told me. “Some people apparently think that from our point of view it’s all a great big game, and that we’re just blowing up bombs for the hell of it. They seem to forget entirely that their country is mixed up in an international situation that makes these tests necessary. Is it a crime to try to hold our lead in this miserable race for superior weapons, in view of what might well happen to all of us if we should lag behind?”

  To many laymen who have come to expect scientists to be starkly objective in their approach to technical problems and whose schooling pretty much encouraged the belief that there is always only one right answer to any question concerning science, the current disagreement among the authorities is both exasperating and baffling, if not actually frightening. Part of the trouble is, of course, that in this instance the question is not purely scientific but is also a matter of ethics, statesmanship, and clairvoyance—three notoriously treacherous quagmires for theorists. Moreover, so much about the workings of genetics remains obscure that, as the A.E.C. has gently observed, “there is still a wide range for admissible opinion” on the subject, and many scientists feel that there is an equally wide range when it comes to the more immediate effects of radiation. In other words, even if there is only one right answer to any question concerning science, those who are critical of the A.E.C.’s seeming complacency feel that until more is known about the awesome mysteries involved there should be no attempt to give any answer at all. Such critics might be said to belong to the play-it-safe school of thought. And to them the A.E.C. may justifiably reply, “Yes, but which is the safe way to play it?”

  A. J. Liebling

  OCTOBER 8, 1955 (ON ROCKY MARCIANO VS. ARCHIE MOORE)

  ACK IN 1922, the late Heywood Broun, who is not remembered primarily as a boxing writer, wrote a durable account of a combat between the late Benny Leonard and the late Rocky Kansas for the lightweight championship of the world. Leonard was the greatest practitioner of the era, Kansas just a rough, optimistic fellow. In the early rounds, Kansas messed Leonard about, and Broun was profoundly disturbed. A radical in politics, he was a conservative in the arts, and Kansas made him think of Gertrude Stein, les Six, and nonrepresentational painting, all of them novelties that irritated him.

  “With the opening gong, Rocky Kansas tore into Leonard,” he wrote. “He was gauche and inaccurate, but terribly persistent.” The classic verities prevailed, however. After a few rounds, during which Broun continued to yearn for a return to a culture with fixed values, he was enabled to record: “The young child of nature who was challenging for the championship dropped his guard, and Leonard hooked a powerful and entirely orthodox blow to the conventional point of the jaw. Down went Rocky Kansas. His past life flashed before him during the nine seconds in which he remained on the floor, and he wished that he had been more faithful as a child in heeding the advice of his boxing teacher. After all, the old masters did know something. There is still a kick in style, and tradition carries a nasty wallop.”

  I have often thought of Broun’s words in the three years since Rocky Marciano, the reigning heavyweight champion, scaled the fistic summits, as they say in Journal-Americanese, by beating a sly, powerful quadragenarian colored man named Jersey Joe Walcott. The current Rocky is gauche and inaccurate, but besides being persistent he is a dreadfully severe hitter with either hand. The predominative nature of this asset has been well stated by Pierce Egan, the Edward Gibbon and Sir Thomas Malory of the old London prize ring, who
was less preoccupied than Broun with ultimate implications. Writing in 1821 of a “milling cove” named Bill Neat, the Bristol Butcher, Egan said, “He possesses a requisite above all the art that teaching can achieve for any boxer; namely, one hit from his right hand, given in proper distance, can gain a victory; but three of them are positively enough to dispose of a giant.” This is true not only of Marciano’s right hand but of his left hand, too—provided he doesn’t miss the giant entirely. Egan doubted the advisability of changing Neat’s style, and he would have approved of Marciano’s. The champion has an apparently unlimited absorptive capacity for percussion (Egan would have called him an “insatiable glutton”) and inexhaustible energy (“a prime bottom fighter”). “Shifting,” or moving to the side, and “milling in retreat,” or moving back, are innovations of the late eighteenth century that Rocky’s advisers have carefully kept from his knowledge, lest they spoil his natural prehistoric style. Egan excused these tactics only in boxers of feeble constitution. I imagine Broun would have had a hard time fitting Marciano anywhere into his frame of reference.

  Archie Moore, the light-heavyweight champion of the world, who hibernates in San Diego, California, and estivates in Toledo, Ohio, is a Brounian rather than an Eganite in his thinking about style, but he naturally has to do more than think about it. Since the rise of Marciano, Moore, a cerebral and hyper-experienced light-colored pugilist who has been active since 1936, has suffered the pangs of a supreme exponent of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout. As a sequel to a favorable review I wrote of one of his infrequent New York appearances a year ago, when his fee was restricted to a measly five figures, I received a sad little note signed “The most unappreciated fighter in the world, Archie Moore.” A fellow who has as much style as Moore tends to overestimate the intellect—he develops the kind of Faustian mind that will throw itself against the problem of perpetual motion, or of how to pick horses first, second, third, and fourth in every race. Archie’s note made it plain to me that he was honing his harpoon for the White Whale.