The Profits in Cancer

While most antinukes have gone into the business of inviting nuclear war by freezing America's defenses after a decade of unilateral disarmament, many remain in the lucrative business of damaging public health by peddling cancer scares about nuclear power.

Public health is damaged in several ways. First, the failure of replacing present power sources by healthier and safer nuclear plants exacts a certain death toll and disease incidence. This failure is not due to economics or technical difficulties, but to the phobic fear induced by the antinuclear witch hunt.

Second, there is the waste of talent, time and treasure intended for the protection of public health, but squandered on disproving old wives' tales.

Typically, one Harvey Wasserman, a professional antinuke, is now in vogue with yet another book of absurd trash, dutifully trumpeted out by the networks. Far from comparing the risks of nuclear power with their alternatives, Wasserman simply uses invented risks; and Dr George Tokuhata, Director of Epidemiological Research in the Pennsylvania Dept. of Health is forced to put out a 23-page report refuting numerous absurdities linked to TMI, such as blaming the accident for some children's abnormalities when, in fact, they had already started to develop before it. Such abnormalities would be better understood, and possibly reduced, if scientists like Dr Tokuhata did not have to spend their time on gossip writers like Wasserman.

However, Wasserman is not the biggest culprit. While the Supreme Court holds that the First Amendment does not protect a man shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, there is no law against Wasserman raking in the cash as the elderly have their lives shortened by the emissions from coal-fired plants and children succumb to diseases that remain unconquered, partly because the time and talents of the Tokuhatas are squandered on the war waged by the Wassermans.

The bigger culprit is the one who puts a microphone in front of the man shouting "Fire!" and distributes the hoax to millions outside the theatre until they are scared out of their wits. The Wasserman-Sternglass baloney is amplified by the publishing industry, the commercial networks, and the Public Broadcasting System (the last damaging public health with taxpayers' funds).

All of them rake in the cancer profits with the greed of the (largely legendary) robber barons of the last century, when power came with money. Today, power comes with influencing peoples' thinking, and though PBS President Grossman's salary is probably higher than Dr Tokuhata's, the real power comes with his decisions to broadcast or to censor as he decrees what the millions shall know.

There are other differences. The "robber barons" did not strut about as public servants or crusaders for the First Amendment. And whatever their methods (a debatable subject), they did leave railroads, steel mills and oil fields to posterity. But what will Mr. Grossman leave?

His modest contribution to a higher disease incidence and shorter life expectancy.