My mother global nuclear weapons testing Final Edition

• Published in: The Ottawa citizen (1986)
• Main Author: May, Elizabeth
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ottawa, Ont Postmedia Network Inc 30.04.2006
• Subjects: Cousins, Norman
• ISSN: 0839-3222

Mushroom clouds were routine when I was a toddler. We didn't see them in Connecticut where I grew up. They were in Los Alamos, New Mexico -- a long, long way away. We had to test nuclear bombs in the atmosphere because it was the Cold War. You were better "dead than red." If the cost was a bit of radiation ... well, only a commie would complain about that. But still the strontium-90 from the nuclear blasts, ionizing radiation with a mind-numbingly long half- life, fell back down to those amber waves of grain. The cows ate the strontium-90 in the grass. The cows' milk had radioactive nuclides. So the U.S. government's Atomic Energy Commission dutifully tested the milk from cows on the way to market. They reported the radioactive materials on the side of the milk carton as "Sunshine Units." The sun, after all, radiates energy. It's good for you. How much better then to have your own little suns radiating from within? My mother started worrying. At first, she didn't think about trying to stop nuclear weapons testing. At first she wanted advice about how to protect her baby from the radiation. She started calling scientists at the university. One told her not to buy fresh milk. Buy powdered milk instead, as it has had more time for the radiation to dissipate. One told her that he wasn't really sure it worked, but he was grinding up calcium tablets and adding them to anything he could get his kids to eat: ice cream, powdered milk, cakes. Since strontium-90 mimics calcium in the human body, it gets routed to bones and teeth, where leukemia can start in the bone marrow. His theory was that by maxing out the absorptive calcium capacity of his children's bones, there would be no room for the poisonous calcium look-alikes. I still remember the chalky taste of ice cream loaded with real calcium to ward off the radioactive fallout. Before I turned eight, nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere had been banned. I had watched as my mother spoke to 100,000 people from the plinth of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square at the closing rally of the Aldermaston March; as she went on a six-day hunger strike in front of the Soviet Mission to the UN in Manhattan to protest Soviet bomb tests; and came to know the famous, great and infamous. She loved Connecticut's liberal Republican senator, Prescott Bush (George W.'s grandfather from a much deeper end of the gene pool), had been the subject of Vice-President Nixon's flirtatious charm (she used to swear that he was very charming if you like that "what's a pretty girl like you worrying your head about nuclear weapons? Let me take you lovely ladies out for a drink" sort of line), and came to be friends of the likes of Bertrand Russell, Linus Pauling and Hubert Humphrey (who held me on his lap through much of that press conference), as well as hundreds of other average, everyday folks who banded together with the goal of changing the world.