National Affairs: Fallout in Los Angeles

Over a three-day period last week. Los Angeles' health officer, Dr. George Uhl. wondered and worried as his Geiger counters showed a steady rise in the atmosphere's radioactivity level. At midweek a brisk high-altitude wind, blowing from Nevada, brought radioactivity from a test shot above normal safety levels, sent Health Officer Uhl round to see Los Angeles' Mayor Norris Poulson. Poulson phoned the AEC in Washington, finally got through to AECommissioner Willard Libby, was assured that 1) the fallout level was not dangerous at all; 2) the Nevada test series was almost complete.

Newspapers got wind of what was up, and the storm was on. CALL SECRET MEET AS FALLOUT PERILS L.A.. cried Hearst's Los Angeles Herald & Express. ATOM FALLOUT RISE HERE SETS OFF PANIC. cried the Chandler Mirror-News.Switchboards lit up as anxious residents phoned city officials, newspaper offices. TV studios. Scientists passed out the word. "No danger to anyone.'' said U.C.L.A.'s Nuclear Medicine Expert Dr. Thomas Hennessey. "I don't think the public's mind should be relieved." said U.S.C.'s Biochemistry Professor Dr. Paul Saltman. And when AEC said later that it hoped to conduct one more test shot in Nevada the next night, weather permitting, Mayor Poulson blew up: "We don't like to be talked to like children! If they shoot that, last shot, there will be repercussions!" AEC called off that, last shot because of weather conditions—high winds.

Upshot of Los Angeles' worrisome week was that the city's 6,000.000. to hear AEC tell it. had been exposed in six hours to roughly the amount of radioactivity that they would normally receive from the atmosphere in 24 hours. Radioactively speaking, L.A. had thus lived two days in one. But the L.A. radioactivity reading was possibly the highest radioactivity level ever recorded in the continental U.S. outside the test grounds. The miracle of it was that, with all the scare headlines, radio and TV broadcasts, the citizenry had taken it as calmly as it had.