
The Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns [pdf] - stablemap
https://www.keithameyers.com/s/MeyersFalloutMortalityWebsite.pdf
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michaelbuckbee
From the paper's conclusion:

"The empirical results of this paper suggest that nuclear testing contributed
to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in the United States between 1951
and 1972. The social costs of these deaths range between $473 billion to over
$6.1 trillion dollars in 2016$. These losses dwarf the $2 billion in payments
the Federal Government has made to domestic victims of nuclear testing through
the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and are substantial relative to the
financial cost of the United States’ nuclear weapons program. It is likely
that the values of both the testing moratorium enacted in 1958 and the Partial
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty are understated. These political compromises likely
saved hundreds of thousands of additional lives at a minimum."

~~~
bhouston
Hhow premature? How many years lost of life?

~~~
pjvandehaar
The paper doesn't explore life-years, but perhaps it would be possible to look
at the distribution of ages at death?

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beebmam
Nuclear weapons, like chemical and biological, should be abolished and never
be legal again.

It's quite absurd to me that nuclear weapons are legal to possess, but not
legal to use, even in self defense of a nuclear attack. [1] What a
contradiction that is.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice_advisory_opinion_on_the_Legality_of_the_Threat_or_Use_of_Nuclear_Weapons#The_legality_of_the_possession_of_nuclear_weapons)

~~~
johndevor
Nuclear weapons are the only things that stop countries from going to war.
They're why we don't have world wars any more. I think that's a big plus for
nukes!

~~~
iamnotlarry
Nuclear weapons are the reason Russia can invade Ukraine without consequence.
And annex Crimea, and attack Georgia.

They are the reason that Turkey can shoot down Russian fighters without Russia
attacking Turkey.

They are the reason USA can invade Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. without being
counter-attacked by others.

Because of nuclear weapons, we can have dozens of "wars" all the time where
nobody has the courage to stop the 10Ks of deaths in each one because we're
terrified of millions of deaths.

I don't know how you can say it stops countries from going to war. The largest
nuclear powers are in a constant state of war, daring anyone to stop them.

~~~
TeMPOraL
10M deaths not inflicted through nuclear exchange is still better than 10M
deaths that happened, from conventional exchange in a war that starts from one
party retaliating after a shot down plane.

Current situation sucks, but I'm not convinced removing nukes from the
equation would improve it.

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ageofwant
For 10M to die, 10M need to show up when the invitations to please attend the
war appear in their mailboxes. I, for one, will decline. I'd rather spend my
time watching the highlights on TV, between the cricket of course. Should
things go bad for "my" side, I'd go camping until it all blows over. Nuclear
war is going to ruin my fishing, and probably my weekend - that won't do.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You're assuming you'll be the attacking side.

Compare with a story of a real country not so long ago. A large power invented
a false reason to start a war, and then suddenly the country gets bombed all
across the territory, and few days later there are shock troops in the
capital. Total death toll of citizens of this country is, to date, around
0.55M [0].

Were you living there, I'm not sure you'd have time, or capacity, to "go
camping until it all blows over".

Now this situation - and a bunch of similar ones in recent years - only
reinforces the perception that if you don't have nuclear weapons, or don't
have very close friends with some, you risk being abused or outright invaded
by the larger players. It's actually no surprise NK is so aggressive in their
nuclear program.

\--

[0] - I'm counting the 0.37M of those who opposed the invasion and 0.18M who
switched sides.

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nateburke
I remember reading a post on HN a while back that alluded to this effect in
the context of Kodak film, packed in corn husks from the Midwest, being ruined
during the shipping process on account of fallout on the corn husks
prematurely exposing the film. This paper claims a lot—I cant wait to dig in.

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roenxi
I write this with a fairly pro-nuclear-energy bias.

Is it even possible to reliably measure this? Sure, the statistical test says
'significant', but the number of potential confounding geographic variables
must be enormous. How can this study have possibly ruled out other pollutants,
economic conditions, or suchlike correlating with how weapons test sites are
chosen?

It seems very plausible that nuclear weapons testing caused pollution, but it
also seems plausible that the weapons were being tested in areas that were
wilting. I don't know, but I am very cautious about using this data to
conclude what specific effect radiation pollution has. The 'Robustness'
section looks fairly cursory.

~~~
johnny99
I, too, am pro-nuclear-energy, but that's quite a bit different from being in
favor of testing bombs. The kind of nuclear power that does not blow up is
much safer.

~~~
ifdefdebug
The kind of nuclear power that does not blow up has not yet been invented,
sorry.

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frankydp
I assume this paper is specifically referring to the effects of Strontium-90.
While this is a monster paper and I did not read it in its entirety, I am
confused by how they statistically separated its effects from surface test
originated radionuclides. Also, the effects of Strontium-90 are pretty well
known, so just going off mortality seems iffy at best. It would be very
challenging to separate that causality out because of the significantly higher
radionuclide creation for surface burst.

Keep in mind "fallout" from an atmospheric test is very different than a
surface test. Mostly in that it is not fallout in the traditional/popular
definition, but radionuclide creation of air and h2o irradiation and not
particulates at the same scale as a surface burst. That is important because
half-lifes. Most(99%) of the radionuclides from an atmospheric burst are
gone(halved) in 8 days.

Also interesting is that Chernobyl is estimated to have introduced 5% of the
global Strontium-90 population.

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peter303
My boomer bones are radioactive - strontium 90. We'll be a dating keystone for
future paleoantropologists.

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tpowell
I just watched this on Amazon Prime—it was better than I thought it would be.
They restored a lot of old footage.
[https://www.amazon.com/Bomb/dp/B013HOZG36](https://www.amazon.com/Bomb/dp/B013HOZG36)

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Spooky23
It would be interesting to read the secret research no doubt done to estimate
impact of nuclear exchanges. Hopefully it is released someday.

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QAPereo
Which exposure model is being used here? LNT? Hormesis? Threshold?

~~~
jostmey
I don't think that's how the author arrived at his conclusions. I think he
directly analyzed mortality vs fallout

~~~
QAPereo
Cancers occur naturally so you need an exposure model to give you an idea of
what to expect, and then compare that to the background of normal cancer. Even
assuming that he checked mortality records which I assume he must have, he
still had to apply statistical filter to make it meaningful.

~~~
Gibbon1
Reading the paper, he specifically doesn't care about cause of death, just
excess.

Interesting tidbits. Most discussion about dangers of radiation is about
cancer. But some stuff I've heard centered around Chernobyl is other types of
mortality increase.

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YeGoblynQueenne
That's a very long paper that I'd like to read a bit more carefully. Is there
a shroter version, or a summary, somewhere?

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afomi
Walter and Lao Russell write about the threats of exposed nuclear waste in the
book, Atomic Suicide, in 1957.

