Letters to the Editor

We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that letters be kept under 500 words.

To the Editor:

J. Samuel Walker, in his review of Enola Gay and the Court of History, (JMH, 69 [January 2005]: 277-78) says kind things about my exposition of the falsity of Paul Nitze's U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and about the moral judgments relevant to the bombing of Japan, then inserts the knife and twists it. I am a hypocrite. I charge the anti-Truman writers with accepting received "truths" without going to the primary evidence and consulting the best authorities, but commit the same offense myself in my brief discussion of the credibility of the Atomic Energy Commission. I "relied heavily on a conversation with the scientist whose research was at the center of the controversy."

Now I agree with Hannah Arendt that hypocrisy is the the only vice that "is rotten to the core." I therefore reviewed my research into the AEC, and my "reliance" on the testimony of Thomas Mancuso. For forty-three years I taught at the University of Pittsburgh. The Graduate School of Public Health at Pitt, as Walker well knows, was a center of epidemiological studies of radiation damage to living things. In its lecture halls, the great wars of opinion about the existence of a threshold for radiation damage were fought out. I watched them all. Some of the participants, like Ernest Sternglass, were loose cannons. But Thomas Mancuso, Alice M. Stewart, George W. Kneale, Edward P. Radford, these were giants, and the memory of their discourse is with me yet. For awhile, the massive resources of the AEC ground them down, but come Three Mile Island, they recovered the access to records from Hanford and elsewhere that AEC had denied them. My dependence on Mancuso? I accept his statement (as does every other student of the AEC wars) that the agency took away his access to Hanford records because they did not like his conclusions. In an area that is inherently controversial, I only say, "Mancuso was straight, the AEC was mendacious."

I followed the contemptible record of the AEC through the massive lying of AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss about Bravo test and the irradiation of the tuna trawler Lucky Dragon; through the fraud and subornation of perjury in defending against the damage suits brought because of the Nevada test range. Granted, I do not review all this evidence in my book on Enola Gay. The hypocrisy charge, even on a peripheral matter, stings enough that I will now do that.

Robert P. Newman

Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Walker responds:

Professor Newman is wrong to suggest that the conclusions of the experts he cites are the final word on the hazards of low-level radiation. Many other eminent and honorable researchers advanced quite different views, and the subject remains a source of intense controversy. His discussions of the debate over low-level exposure in his book and in his letter disregard the ambiguity of a complex issue and the uncertainty that has long predominated among professionals in the field of radiation protection.

Samuel J. Walker

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Washington, D.C.