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Still other authorities, notably the glibly hysterical Dr. Helen Caldicott, maintain that because it took several days to set up all the radiation monitors surrounding the plant, we had no idea how much radiation was released during the first days. This typical and ignorant oversimplification ignores the fact that a survey of photographic film exposed for sale in Middletown during the accident shows that the maximum dose anyone away from the plant site could have gotten was less than five millirems—about what one would have gotten from a jet trip between New York and California. (How much less we do not know, but the total exposure was insufficient to fog the film, the threshhold being five millirem.)

There were also wondrous tales, dutifully chronicled by such scientific journals as the Village Voice, of monstrous births, fallow cows, and the like. These took on an interesting gloss in the light of the experience of an acquaintance of mine who teaches at nearby Pennsylvania State University: a decade ago he had received a grant to study weather modification. He had, in the event, confined his activities to the speculations of the laboratory. He had never done anything about changing the weather. Yet the purpose of his grant had become known, and twenty years later he was still being followed around by angry farmers testifying to the various havocs his unnatural practices had wreaked upon their animals and vegetables.

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Still other authorities, notably the glibly hysterical Dr. Helen Caldicott, maintain that because it took several days to set up all the radiation monitors surrounding the plant, we had no idea how much radiation was released during the first days. This typical and ignorant oversimplification ignores the fact that a survey of photographic film exposed for sale in Middletown during the accident shows that the maximum dose anyone away from the plant site could have gotten was less than five millirems—about what one would have gotten from a jet trip between New York and California. (How much less we do not know, but the total exposure was insufficient to fog the film, the threshhold being five millirem.)

There were also wondrous tales, dutifully chronicled by such scientific journals as the Village Voice, of monstrous births, fallow cows, and the like. These took on an interesting gloss in the light of the experience of an acquaintance of mine who teaches at nearby Pennsylvania State University: a decade ago he had received a grant to study weather modification. He had, in the event, confined his activities to the speculations of the laboratory. He had never done anything about changing the weather. Yet the purpose of his grant had become known, and twenty years later he was still being followed around by angry farmers testifying to the various havocs his unnatural practices had wreaked upon their animals and vegetables.