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of the Atom

My wife is a registered rep. She leaves her industry magazines in the…um, the reading room. Great writing, excellent perspective. I especially liked, "…people went on pretending that there was never a risk in the first place."

Heck Bill, this risk is just another of the big invisible gorillas seated in all our living rooms these days. Since it's impossible to live WITH them all, we have to make them mostly invisible in order to live at all. I know, yours is the risk business. It's your readers' job to help us glimpse the gorillas and size 'em up too, I guess. Whenever one of those gorillas jumps out of the statistical weeds and becomes visible, it's I-told-you-so time. When high-echelon PR kicks in to prevent otherwise justifiable panic, it's they're-lying-to-you time. I was curious how people would order their lives if done according to some rational expected-value calculation. I communicated for a while with those Harvard Risk Analysis folks and I learned a really useful word: Dread. That's how we order things. According to how much we dread them at the time. Is it a "scare tactic" to tell a child why not to reach for pot handles on the stove? Stand in the street? Take drugs? How about "Most things around you, even the air, have become deadly. Invisible rays will slowly kill you. Run."

I'm curious how TMI would have affected those farmers had there been today's 24-hr news cycle. TMI would have been howled into the ears of everyone day and night, pro and con, scientific and fanatical. All of it. Simultaneously. Those hapless farmers would have learned the difference between a Roentgen and Rad, understood ionization and contamination. But would they dread it? Enough to relocate? Or would they bid it be seated in the living room with all those other gorillas? Your article implies it was offered the seat. Due to ignorance. I can understand. I doubt they were offered the simplicity of that three-letter word, RUN, because it would look like panic, seem extreme. (Did anyone skip the esoteric scientific reasons, grab the baby, leave the milk behind, run far away, and start over?)

David Allburn, CEO,

National Fingerprint Inc.

Thanks for writing, David. A friend of mine in the Department of Energy has been writing about the effects of TMI for weeks now, and the evidence to be found is disheartening, to say the least. Turns out the county I grew up in has had elevated levels of thyroid cancer ever since 1979. Hmm. Is there a causal link there? Hard to say. But I certainly dread one.