Refereed by CBS

"I have heard Carl Sagan speak on the 'Nuclear Winter' at the Air Academy, and now I have just finished reading your rebuttal," writes Mr. R. Bradley of Colorado Springs (where the Gazette Telegraph reprinted some of last month's issue). "You make a seemingly strong case, but what really bothers me is this: Sagan has published his findings in refereed articles in reputable scientific journals basing his conclusions on seemingly sound scientific evidence; on the other hand, you dispute his findings in the popular press, drawing on analogies and data that support your case, but which have not been subject to the same editorial scrutiny Sagan's material has."

Dear Mr. Bradley: My remarks replied to Sagan's lengthy piece published in the national Sunday supplement Parade of 10/30/83, but I will not hide behind technicalities: the same type of pseudoscience has now also been published in Science by Sagan and others (including the dean of American Lysenkos, Paul Ehrlich), with footnotes, references, tables and the other trappings designed to give it the air of an honest scientific paper.

Scrutiny? The members of the Washington conference were self-appointed without the usual public invitations. Long before publication in Science, their scary-tale was refereed by the referees that count: the scholars of ABC, CBS, NBC, UPI, and of the national tabloids.

You probably regard Science as a reputable scientific journal. So do I, when it publishes a report on interplanetary dust particles. But on nuclear weapons, nuclear power, radiation, acid rain, Yellow Rain, defense, and other subjects that have been dragged from the laboratories to the tabloids, its reports are blatantly biased by selection and omission.

The Ehrlich & Co piece just published in Science ends with the "scientific" conclusion that "the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded." (Can you exclude the possibility that Ehrlich secretly worships green thumbtacks?) As I had predicted, the Sagan & Co piece disputes the past experience with volcanos as "inappropriate;" it does so on tenuous "may" and "could" guesses supported by two footnotes, one of which refers to a paper that has not even been published, but is co-authored by an authority qualified to judge Sagan's hunches: Carl Sagan.

Science has repeatedly implied that there is a "split" in the scientific community on radiation hazards, giving more weight to single and rare mavericks than to the unanimous conclusion of a National Sciences Committee. It has consistently censored the rarely disputed fact that nuclear power is healthier and safer than any other source of electricity. It has written about plutonium toxicity, but joined the mass media in censoring Prof. Bernard Cohen's offer to inhale, on TV, 1,000 particles of plutonium of any size that can be suspended in air, or to eat as much plutonium as any prominent critic will eat caffeine.

Prof. Cohen's case also answers your suggestion to write refereed papers. The Science Citation Index, which records scientific papers, lists (1975-82) 7 papers by Sternglass (most of which were unrefereed speeches at meetings), 3 by Helen Caldicott (none of which, I trust, could possibly have been refereed by any serious scientist), and 98 by Cohen, most of them refereed and published in the scientific literature.

You have probably heard of Sternglass and Caldicott, but not of Cohen. He is being silenced and censored, not by the government, but by the media moguls whose mouths pay tribute to the freedom of the press even as their hands strangle it.

That is why the defense of science must find its own voice and cannot be at the mercy of the charlatans and demagogues who are subverting it.

The more so when the deeper issue at stake is not a scientific one: whether nuclear war is invited by weakness and can be prevented by strength.