The next victim is decency

A well qualified student has been denied admission to graduate school because in the eyes of most members of a student admission committee he had a repugnant characteristic: He was an engineer at a nuclear power plant. An antinuclear, but decent member of the committee described the incident in the Detroit News (Op-Ed page, 5/21/80); he had to publish it under a pseudonym, for whistleblowers are admired nowadays only if they blow their whistles on the side of the witch hunters.

Other such occurrences have been reported. Many more, presumably, remain unknown.

The hysteria fanned by the social engineers through an ignorant and vicious press now seems to have gone beyond damaging the country's health and economy; it is beginning to damage plain human decency.

Typical for the artificially fanned hysteria are the allegations about rising infant mortality and hyperthyroidism among children round the Three Mile Island plant.

Figures released by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Health in May show that infant mortality within 10 miles of TMI is lower than the state average. There was not a single case of hyperthyroidism in the county in which TMI is located; and the cases in adjacent counties have been declared entirely unrelated to the accident by scientists from several government agencies and scientific institutions.

But the fault lies not simply with Sternglass; it lies with a press that goes out of its way to ignore the mass of studies by the A.M.A., the F.D.A., the radiological protection bodies, and scientific institutions; it lies with the reporters who sidestep the most elementary issues of simple consistency and common sense. Instead, they bilk their readers by the sick nonsense concocted by the Sternglasses and Caldicotts.

A typical case is a recent special issue of the Canadian journal Harrowsmith, replete with a full-page color photograph of a skull and other such scares on slick paper. The main article starts with Sternglass expressing himself in the area of his expertise: "Those bastards! They're lying through their teeth!"

And the publisher of this edifying journal devotes a couple of pages to the glorification of his associate editor for glorifying Sternglass, upholding the shining example of one Dr. J. Leaser ("whose medical practice is conducted just 2.3 miles from Three Mile Island"), a former lecturer at a medical college, who explains his tactics against the nuclear supporters (a majority among his profession): "...you don't go in there with a lot of scientific facts and documents and research, because you are dealing with a bunch of people who are on the lunatic fringe. What I said to my students was that you have to get out there on the other lunatic fringe; you really have to jump up and down, froth at the mouth."

But the physicians, scientists, and engineers who merely murmur their disapproval of the brainwashers are not entirely innocent, either.

It is time they stood up and vigorously defended public health and human decency from the hysteria fanned by the likes of Sternglass and Caldicott, and from the slick magazines giving publicity to their concoctions.

* The Radiation Bogey, Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306; $2.

** A.P. Hull and F.J. Shore, Sternglass: A Case History; Report BNL 16613 (1972).