"The Wrong Stuff: Nukes in Space" is a preliminary examination of some of the historical and institutional forces which have successfully kept the lid on the full extent of the deployment of nuclear power and materials in the United States space program. Karl Grossman is a journalism professor at the State University of New York who has spent several years working to expose the social and environmental costs and risks of nuclear materials in space. This essay has been excerpted from his new book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to our Planet, published last year by Common Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
© 1997
Those involved in atomic power began manipulating the media at the birth of the technology—with the rationale, at the time, that war necessitated deception.
In 1945 the Manhattan Project, getting ready to test and deploy the atomic bombs it had built, hired New York Times reporter William L. Laurence as a public relations consultant. Laurence remained on the Times' payroll.1 The Times managing editor had "approached" Laurence that spring and said, "I have a letter here from General Leslie R. Groves. He wants to see you," according to a history of nuclear technology, Time Bomb. Laurence "met with General Groves," the head of the Manhattan Project, and thereafter "went ‘on loan'" working out of the laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico (now Los Alamos National Laboratory) where the earliest bombs were built.2
A first major assignment for Laurence: figuring out how to mislead the press—and public—when the first atomic bomb test, code-named Trinity, took place at the government's Alamogordo bombing range in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were unsure what would happen. "Anything might go wrong. They had gambled three years and two billion taxpayers' dollars on the project; the time had come to see if it would work," related Time Bomb. "Would the bomb produce a mighty explosion or a fizzle?"3
"Safety was a second concern," according to City of Fire, a history of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. "What if radioactive dust drifted over nearby towns?" An army major was "stationed north of the test area with 160 enlisted men on horses and in jeeps [and] instructed to evacuate ranches and towns at the last moment if necessary."4
In any case, the press and public were not to know what was happening. They were to be kept in the dark—as a matter of wartime censorship. The test was scheduled for the middle of the night. The bomb would likely light up the night sky.
Laurence prepared "four different press releases" based on a lie to keep the story of the first atomic explosion out of the press, notes Nukespeak.5 The release would claim that an ammunition dump explosion had occurred. Laurence's four press releases only differed "on the size of the explosion they described"6
The Manhattan Project sent an intelligence officer, Phil Belcher, to the Associated Press office in Albuquerque with the press release, recounts City of Fire.7
The atomic bomb was exploded. When the fireball rose and the desert was bathed in eerie, blinding white light with an ominous mushroom cloud billowing, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, was struck, he later recalled, by the words of the sacred Hindu book, the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death. The shatterer of worlds."8
The light of the explosion was seen all over the southwest. "The first flash of light was seen in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City and El Paso," notes City of Fire. "Windows had been broken in nearby buildings and had been rattled in Silver City and Gallup. A rancher sleeping near Alamogordo was awakened suddenly with what seemed like a plane crashing in his yard...A forest ranger in Silver City reported an earthquake to the Associated Press.... The Associated Press office in Albuquerque soon had a number of queries and reports on a strange explosion in southern New Mexico."9
It was then that Belcher gave the AP the "news release," says City of Fire.10 The AP obediently moved this phony account written by newsman William Laurence;
Alamogordo, July 16—The Commanding Office of the Alamogordo Army Air Base made the following statement today: "Several inquiries have been received concerning a heavy explosion which occurred on the Alamogordo Base reservation this morning.
"A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded.
"There was no loss of life or injury to anyone, and the property damage outside of the explosives magazine itself was negligible.
"Weather conditions affecting the content of the gas shells exploded by the blast made it desirable for the Army to evacuate temporarily a few civilians from their homes."
"New Mexico newspapers ran the story in different versions, and the story appeared in a number of radio shows," notes City of Fire. "No further word was issued by the Alamogordo Base."
The first atomic bomb was detonated in a blast stirring cities and towns through the southwest of the U.S., and there was no difficulty in "managing" the news about it.
That has continued in the story of nuclear technology to the present day. Behind the management of information to minimize the dangers, health impacts and cost of nuclear technology has been an army of public relations practitioners—often using deceptive information in the tradition of Laurence's press release, although no longer is there a war going on for which to rationalize the cover-up.
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, watchdogs of PR practitioners as editors of the magazine PR Watch,11 are among those who have explored the story of public relations and nuclear technology. It is the subject of a chapter ("Spinning the Atom") in their book Toxic Sludge is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. They describe the "public relations campaign to transform the image of nuclear technology" that was launched with President Eisenhower's 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech at the United Nations.12 As is typically the case with public relations in nuclear technology "image and reality were worlds apart."13
They provide numerous examples, including how Metropolitan Edison handled the PR when its Three Mile Island plant suffered a near-meltdown, starting with Met Ed's chief spokesman Don Curry announcing on "the first day of the crisis [that] ‘there have been no recordings of any significant levels of radiation, and none are expected outside the plant.'"14
Stauber and Rampton tell of the still-continuing effort by the Department of Energy and nuclear industry through the American Nuclear Energy Council to have Yucca Mountain in Nevada become a nuclear waste repository. They quote from a plan the council called its "Nevada Initiative" which called for a blanket of TV ads to provide "air cover" for the push, local reporters to be "hired" to present the "industry's side of the story." DOE scientists would act as a "scientific truth response team.... With our ‘campaign committee' of Nevada political insiders, our strategic response teams, the advertising program, and the polls that will provide us with a road map along the way, we believe that as each move is made, one or more of the targeted adversaries will begin to surface, move our way, fight us and then, eventually dialogue with the industry. It is through this strategic game of chess that the campaign will ultimately prevail and move to checkmate anti-nuclear forces in Nevada."15
They quote David Lilienthal, after he resigned as AEC chairman, complaining about the "many instances of the way in which public relations techniques—the not-so-hidden persuader—have been used to promote the appropriation of funds for the peaceful Atom."16
Nukespeak also closely examines the public relations push behind nuclear technology declaring that "the history of nuclear development has been profoundly shaped by the manipulation of information through official secrecy and extensive public-relations campaigns. Nukespeak and the use of information-management techniques have consistently distorted the debate over nuclear weapons and nuclear power."17 Nukespeak, too, is chock full of examples.
Daniel Ford, former executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, in his book, Cult of the Atom: The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission, writes about the PR efforts by the U.S. government in the 1950s and 60s:
A public-relations effort on behalf of nuclear power was not merely an incidental activity of the [Atomic Energy] Commission. It was a fundamental part of what AEC officials, at the highest level, saw as the agency's mission. Chairman [Lewis] Strauss was mindful of the results of opinion surveys that showed that postwar enthusiasm for nuclear power had faded and that public support for the peaceful uses of atomic energy was relatively weak. The Commission knew that it would have to work systematically to win public support for a large nuclear industry, and to lessen public fear of the hazards. Strauss concluded that the national press—and science writers, in particular—provided the AEC's "critical contact with the public," as he termed it, and that the media would have to serve as the conduit for the AEC's atomic power boosterism. In a speech before the National Association of Science Writers in September 1954, Strauss set out the themes that the AEC wanted the media to present to the public. Electric power from the atom, he said, could be available, according to the AEC's experts, in "from five to fifteen years...It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."18
"Strauss invited the science writers to ‘work together' with the AEC and its scientists to educate the public about the atom and its promise. From the laudatory articles on nuclear energy that appeared over the next two decades—and the rarity of any critical coverage of the potential hazards—it is evident that the national media responded to the chairman's invitation as he had intended," observed Ford. "With unquestioning support from the media, and unqualified endorsement by Congress and the administration, the advocates of a large nuclear power program proceeded, unchallenged, with their ambitious enterprise."19
In my book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power, I reproduced the DOE "Public Information Plan" to push nuclear power by the Reagan administration during the 1980s. The plan called for, among other things, the DOE assistant secretary for nuclear energy "to meet with selected editorial boards" of newspapers, to prepare "articles about nuclear energy" or have "other qualified officials" write them and place them in publications including the New York Times, Reader's Digest and Time. Various government departments would be utilized. "Defense and State could assert the effect on national security... The Department of Commerce, Labor, and Treasury, as well as OMB [Office of Management and Budget], could speak to the economic advantages. The Surgeon General and the President's Science Advisor might commission blue ribbon scientific panels to certify the negligible radiation effect of nuclear power reactors. The Departments of the Interior might comment on the several environmental advantages of nuclear power."20
Moreover, many of the reporters covering nuclear technology—starting with Laurence—became cheerleaders for the technology, just like the reporters who cover the space beat have become uncritical space program boosters.
Laurence is a model for this. The only journalist allowed to witness the Alamogordo atomic bomb test, two months later, after A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he wrote about the Alamogordo event in glowing terms in the New York Times. "The hills said ‘yes' and the mountains chimed in ‘yes,'" the newsman waxed poetic. "It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky had joined in one mighty affirmative answer. Atomic energy—yes."21
(Laurence tried hard to get on the Enola Gay for its atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He wasn't permitted to do that but was allowed to witness the bombing of Nagasaki from an observer plane—the only journalist to be present for the A-bomb attack on Japan.)
He would continue his verbal euphoria about nuclear technology for years afterwards. "Laurence's reports were the backbone of the writing, reporting, filming, and editing that constituted a yea-saying to nuclear energy throughout three decades," notes Time Bomb.22
As Laurence wrote in a 1948 article for Woman's Home Companion, with nuclear energy humanity has "a chance to enter into a new Eden...abolishing disease and poverty, anxiety and fear." We might "learn to control weather and heredity...find the key to the riddles of old age." There would be "better, finer and more nourishing plants, better, cheaper and more abundant fertilizer; better and richer soils, farms, and gardens; better and finer clothing and homes; better men and women." Nuclear plants would pump water and turn the world's desert's into "blooming gardens," turn swamps and jungles into "vast new lands flowing with milk and honey." Summing up this "turning point in the history of civilization," he claimed: "Such power plants could, in short, make the dream of the earth as a Promised Land come true in time for many of us already born to see and enjoy it."23
Not only Times-man Laurence but the New York Times itself, as the U.S. "paper of record," is an important example of media handling—or mishandling—of nuclear power. With nuclear technology, as on other issues, the Times has been a model for the U.S. media.
Among those following Laurence's pro-nuclear bent at the Times was Roger Starr, a principal writer of hundreds of Times' editorials and essays under his own byline promoting nuclear power. He stressed in an interview with me in 1989 that the stance was fully accepted by others at the top at the Times. Between editors "and the publisher there is not a bit of disagreement" on the nuclear issue, Starr declared.24
It shows. On the tenth anniversary of Three Mile Island, then Times editorial page editor, Leslie Gelb, chose to publish only one op-ed on the nuclear plant accident: "Three Mile Island: The Good News." Thomas Pigford's piece contended the accident caused no ill health effects except for "the fright and trauma stemming from technical errors and public announcement" and was really "a positive development" because it prompted better nuclear utility management, which "means America's nuclear option can be stronger."25
Along with media boosterism of nuclear technology, suppression of critical stories of nuclear technology has been occurring at the Times (and much of the rest of U.S. media). When Times reporters have wanted to investigate nuclear issues, they've met stiff resistance. Frances Cerra resigned from the Times after editors killed a story she had written about the Long Island Lighting Company facing "financial demise" because of its Shoreham nuclear plant project. A Times editor told her that publishing the piece "could adversely affect LILCO's financial well-being," said Cerra. "He further told me that I—at the time covering Long Island for the paper—should in the future consider LILCO out of my beat. When I told him that this was unacceptable, I was punished by being removed from Long Island coverage to dangle, uncomfortably, without portfolio and anything of substance to work on."26
Alden Whitman, a Times journalist for twenty-five years, said that "there certainly was never any effort made to do" in-depth or investigative reporting on nuclear power. Why? "I think there is stupidity involved," said Whitman, and further "the Times does regard itself as part of the establishment...They get very nervous when they attack industry. Certainly when they attack industry that is as heavily involved in finance and the banks as nuclear power, they would get very uptight. They don't want to attack the status quo."27
Anna Mayo speaks of having "built a full-time career on covering nuclear horror stories that the New York Times neglected." The long-time former Village Voice reporter notes that the Times has reporters "who are interested in this issue, and well able to report it..and have all the resources of the Times," but end up getting "reined in" or "put on other assignments." The story of the Times and nuclear power, says Mayo, is one of "constant cronyism, collusion and singleness of purpose" between the publication and those in government and industry who have been pushing nuclear power.28
Meanwhile, on the business side, a coming together of media and nuclear interests has been going on. On the board of directors of the New York Times is George B. Munroe, retired chairman and chief executive officer of Phelps Dodge Corporation which, during his tenure, was deeply involved in uranium mining, and George Shinn, retired chairman of the First Boston Corporation, an investor in nuclear utilities. Board member Marian S. Heiskell, meanwhile, sister of former Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. has been a long-time member of the board of Consolidated Edison, the New York utility with nuclear interests.
The business links of the Times to the nuclear industry pale in comparison to those of CBS, owned by Westinghouse, and NBC, owned by GE. (For decades before their network takeovers, both companies had run smaller, nevertheless substantial, chains of radio and TV stations.)
Both are deeply involved in determining content at their media holdings: GE's buy-out of NBC in 1986 and Westinghouse's acquisition of CBS in 1995 were no mere business decisions. "I think all the networks can do a better job of providing a more objective and balanced perspective," said Michael Jordan, the nuclear engineer who is the chair and chief executive of Westinghouse and personally arranged the $5.4 billion all-cash deal for Westinghouse to take over CBS.28 Jordan has also said that he wants Westinghouse to "fully exploit all potential synergies among our business units."29
Westinghouse, the world's biggest manufacturer of nuclear plants and other nuclear equipment, has a record of stopping at nothing to push nuclear power. In 1988, the Philippines filed a $2.2 billion suit against Westinghouse accusing the company of bribing associates of the Marcos regime to build a nuclear plant "on the side of a volcano, beside an earthquake fault, on the Bataan peninsula," reported the New York Times.31
Westinghouse, the Number 3 U.S. nuclear weapons contractor, doing $3 billion-plus a year in nuclear weapons work, also runs the nuclear facilities for the U.S. government, including its Savannah River, Fernald and W.I.P.P. nuclear operations.
GE has been a corporate outlaw virtually since its creation. GE and its officials have a long record of fraud and financial and environmental violations. One of its big activities has been corrupting public officials. Just consider the 1990s. An investigative article by Sam Husseini on GE in Extra! noted that in 1990 GE was convicted of defrauding the U.S. Department of Defense for overcharging the Army for a battlefield computer system. In 1992 it pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering and corrupt business practices in the U.S. in connection with a sale of military jet engines to Israel. In 1992, anti-trust charges were brought against GE for working with the DeBeers diamond cartel to rig prices. Indeed, a "February 1994 report by the Project on Government Oversight found that GE had 16 instances of fraudulent activity against the government since 1990—the most of any company listed," noted the article titled "Felons On The Air: Does GE's Ownership of NBC Violate the Law?"32
GE and Westinghouse are companies that the media should be monitoring- not companies that should be owners of media. Indeed, the Federal Communications Commission, from the time it was created in 1934, has claimed it wants only "stewards of the community interest" to control the U.S. airwaves. Nevertheless, GE and Westinghouse are today giant of U.S. media and growing nationally and globally. After taking over CBS in 1995, Westinghouse, in a $3.9 billion deal, bought up the Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, a network of 83 radio stations. GE's NBC has been endeavoring to broadcast worldwide and move aggressively into cable TV with new networks, including the 24-hour all-news channel MSNBC, the 24-hour mainly talk-show channel CNBC and joint ownership in other cable TV channels.
If you work for GE's NBC or Westinghouse's CBS, you get the message quickly about what you are not supposed to report on. When an Emmy Award-winning report done at a Chicago station on substandard bolts used in nuclear plants—including those built by GE—was to go network and appear on the Today show on GE's NBC, Today cut all reference to the substandard bolts.33
Under such circumstances, one cannot expect to learn much about nuclear power in space on NBC or CBS. And don't hold your breath for the rest of mainstream U.S. media to report on the issue either.
Thus, between the media failure to do critical reporting on the U.S. space program and its dysfunction on nuclear technology, year after year, the matter of nuclear power in space has ended up on the Project Censored list.
There are a few, a very few, media exceptions to this pattern. The St. Petersburg Times, for example, one of the distinct minority of independently-owned newspapers remaining in the U.S., stood virtually alone in editorializing against the Galileo plutonium-fueled flight. It noted that "NASA speculates" that the plutonium particles dispersed in an accident "could be gathered up safely." But then why, asked the newspaper34
if the Galileo is so safe, has the Florida Department of Health and Human Services assigned crews of radiation experts to the four-country region most likely to be affected by launch difficulties? Why have these crews already gathered data on existing radiation for comparison with reading they plan to take after the launch? Why is Joel Reynolds, the space center's safety chief, entertaining plans for "emergency management" exercises? Despite the fancy euphemism, these plans sound distressingly familiar to baby-boomers trained in Cold War-era "civil defense" drills. "If we record high (radiation) doses leaving the space center, the state will recommend that people go inside their homes and turn off their air conditioners until the cloud passes," Reynolds says optimistically. As for the 100,000 who might gather outside to observe the shuttle take-off, "We'd never get them out of here," he admits.35
"The space agency may be ready to risk innocent lives in the name of science, and as a step toward developing the technology for the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative. There is no reason for Floridians to accept that risk as their own," declared the St. Petersburg Times in the 1989 editorial titled "Plutonium-238: A Risky Number."36
The Los Angeles Times in 1988 editorialized against nuclear-powered satellites in space. "The history of nuclear reactors in orbit gives great cause for concern," it noted. "Their safety record is not good."37
While this country does not currently use nuclear power for its satellites, it is planning to orbit as many as 100 nuclear reactors as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. According to Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, director of the "Star Wars" project, without nuclear power "that's going to be a long, long lightcord that goes down to the surface of the Earth."38
The Los Angeles Times supported a proposal then being made by the Federation of American Scientists and a top Russian space scientist for a "ban on orbiting nuclear reactors...Prohibiting nuclear reactors in orbit is an idea that the United States and the Soviet Union should wholeheartedly pursue. The reentry of Cosmos 1900 will again focus the world's attention on the danger posed by radioactive material as it comes hurtling in from space. This continuing risk can be stopped by international agreement, and should be."39
Now and then, journalists will ask the hard questions of NASA (usually never reporters on the space beat, however). There is David Chandler of the Boston Globe. Or Bill Moyers, in a PBS program The Truth About Lies, in which there was a segment on NASA, lies and the Challenger tragedy. "Failure to look at the fearsome truth and the unwillingness to acknowledge the facts have been costly to our country," Moyers stated. "We've paid that cost in human life and mutual trust. Decisive moments in our recent past, unforgettable moments, reveal those pressures that drive people to deny the truth and distort reality." He interviewed those who tried to blow the whistle at NASA about shuttle problems before the Challenger disaster. "But NASA had other ideas," noted Moyers.40
And most other reporters have "other ideas" when it comes to space coverage. "NASA uses its RTGs [radioisotope thermoelectric generators] only when there is no alternative," stressed Robert C. Cowen, a space enthusiast who writes on science for the Christian Science Monitor, accepting NASA's PR line.
It is not rare to see flat-out NASA PR lies published as news, such as the constant claims that the RTG canisters won't break—belied in the official documentation—or a statement published in the Times of London in 1995 in which the NASA projection of five to seven billion people being "exposed to the fallout" from a Cassini "flyby" accident was noted. The Times, the "paper of record" for the United Kingdom, stated: "A NASA spokesman emphasized that this was the absolute worst case scenario and highly unlikely because we plan to have Cassini miss the Earth by 10,000 miles."41 In fact, as the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission clearly states, Cassini is to fly over the Earth "at an altitude of 500 km [kilometers]" or 312 miles. The NASA spokesman was off by 9,688 miles in his lie to the Times of London.42
Thus, the media treatment of the trouble-plagued Galileo flight as it arrived at Jupiter in 1995 was typical. "Jupiter Rendezvous Is A Marvel of Perfection," was the headline of John Noble Wilford's story in the New York Times. (No mention of the words plutonium or nuclear in the story, as usual.)43 The issue of nuclear power in space being chronically under-reported and a regular item on the Project Censored list has some "pretty clear components," says Mark Lowenthal of Project Censored. "The most obvious is the nature of media ownership—GE and Westinghouse," he states. Then there are the less direct ties, the "interlocking directorates" between media institutions and corporations involved in nuclear technology, members of the boards of directors of media on the boards of those corporations. Further, there is a similarity with the lack of vigilant reporting" on other areas of nuclear technology."44 The "critics of nuclear policy, those opposing the building of power plants or siting nuclear waste storage sites are on the outside. They don't have highly paid lobbyists or big advertising budgets. They don't have the ears of news producers; they don't run in similar social circles."45 Further, "there's a kind of national insecurity syndrome" when it comes to dealing with certain issues "in which the potential consequences can be very dramatic. There is a predisposition in media not to scare the public." And nuclear technology issues have "the potential to scare people. The press gravitates to stories that have a beginning, middle and end. There is no solution to the storage of nuclear waste or design flaws in nuclear plants. There is this great reluctance to alarm the public—despite the press having the job to point out serious public interest issues, serious public health issues. Nuclear issues are considered just too explosive." An examination could "create tremendous public unrest and anxiety. Noam Chomsky has written a great deal about this: how a major purpose of the press is to perpetuate the status quo and not delve into some of the realities that exist out there. Nuclear technology issues are something considered just too explosive. Although there is a big difference between fomenting public panic and having, at the least, a conversation on the issue."46 "You combine all these factors and you have a recipe for bad journalism, an abdication of press responsibility," said Lowenthal. "The press should serve as an early warning system. There is great journalism out there waiting to happen."47
APR Home Page | Subscriptions | Back Issues | Zine Reviews | Staff | Art
Ads | Links | News | Events | Search
Email Us! editors@altpr.org
Updated: 7/3/1999