When the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima 50 years ago this August, 100,000 people were killed from the blast. An additional 200,000 people worldwide have died since then due to the release of radioactive waste from nuclear test explosions, according to the estimates of SF State Professor Harold Shapiro.
Shapiro is the executive director of the largest international study ever done on the human cost of nuclear fallout. The project, called RADTEST (Radioactivity From Nuclear Test Explosions), was adopted as an official project of SCOPE (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) in April l993.
The study is a collaborative effort involving Kazakhstan, formerly a republic of the Soviet Union, and the five countries that acknowledge having nuclear weapons -- The United States, Britain, China, France and Russia. It will focus on test sites in the United States and the former Soviet Union, where about 80 percent of the nuclear test explosions were conducted between l945 and l980.
The work is expected to end in l997 and will be performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy under a contract with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with partial support from SF State.
"The human cost goes beyond the nuclear weapons test exposure," Shapiro said.
Shapiro has taught at SF State since l967 and has made a career out of studying nuclear related issues and radiation effects since he graduated from college. For the past ll years, Shapiro has been a nuclear safety consultant at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which along with its sister laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, was the main developer of America's nuclear weapons.
Shapiro, who has used much of his sabbatical this academic year working on the project, will be returning in the fall to teach the NEXA course called The Ascent of Man. Modeled on the acclaimed public television series and book by Jacob Bronowski, it traces the ascent of man through the development of science, a concept called into question by the very existence of nuclear weapons testing.
"The irony of science is, it cuts both ways," Shapiro said, reflecting on the course he teaches and the work he does. "Clearly science is not enough for the ascent of man. "What is missing is a love of humanity and an appreciation of the special quality and uniqueness of human beings, he said.
But while science alone can't take the credit for nuclear capability, it can't take the blame for nuclear destruction either, according to Shapiro.
"All aspects of human culture are connected together," Shapiro said. "All have to share the fate and the credit and the blame for what happened."
Saying "we learn from all of our tragedies," Shapiro credited the ending of the Cold War and the encouraging atmosphere in China for increasing collaborations with the rest of the world's scientific and technical communities, and with making RADTEST possible.While Shapiro and the other members of the RADTEST program are comprehending the human effects of nuclear fallout, the villagers in and around the Semipalatinsk test site area of Kazakhstan are experiencing it.
Calling the Semipalatinsk site the "most egregious situation that we have examined so far," Shapiro said about 2 million to 3 million people lived in the exposed regions during the testing period.
The site of 470 nuclear explosions, Shapiro said 130 atmospheric tests and another 25 successful near-ground bursts were conducted at Semipalatinsk during the 40 years it was used for nuclear weapons testing.
But, said Shapiro, "the very first explosion accounts for what we call over 80 percent of the collective dose of the radiation from the fallout."
A plutonium bomb, very similar in size to the uranium bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima, was set off here in a tower 30 meters high on Aug. 29, l949.
The bomb that burst on the ground at Semipalatinsk had more power than 22,000 tons of TNT, 2,000 more than the bomb that burst in the air over Hiroshima in l945.
Shapiro estimates that 400 to 500 people died from fatal cancers in the regional villages which ranged from 50 to 600 kilometers away from the isolated test site.
"But it's not a good number," Shapiro said. "It doesn't tell the whole story. We don't know how many children died from leukemia or thyroid cancers. There are no solid numbers."
Shapiro said the lack of records and autopsies, destruction of records by authorities, and the poor level of public health prevented the full human loss from being calculated.
The people in the region were not told about the tests until l99l, the same year the site was shutdown. On Dec. 8, 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist and was replaced by a federation made up of ll of its former republics. Two years later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree making citizens affected by the nuclear tests carried out at the Semipalatinsk site eligible for compensation. According to Shapiro, the biggest benefit of RADTEST is to help Russian scientists develop a method to provide compensation and health care to the victims.
Another benefit of the program is determining standards for future radiation fallout, Shapiro said.
"It doesn't seem like we need a bomb to do what Hiroshima did ever again," said SF State senior Ian Mulhauser. "It should have been a wake-up call to humanity."
Mulhauser is president of Global Head, an organization that studies the role of nuclear war on identity. He will read a paper called "The Final Picture" at the Second Annual Humanities Symposium on April 22 in the new Humanities Building.
Shapiro, who travels all over the world examining sites where nuclear explosions have occurred, said he does the work he does because he believes "we should all bear the responsibility for our fellow human beings, and we should all do it in our own way using our own special field of knowledge."
There is a bumper sticker-sized sign on the bulletin board next to Shapiro's office door.
"Nuclear war will never determine who is right, only who is left," it says.