Revision 1
March 19, 1998
by Radiation, Science, and Health, Inc.,
Edited by J. Muckerheide

1.2.5
Weapons and Facility Releases

1.2.5.1
Military Observers

"A National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine [IOM] study of approximately 40,000 US servicemen who participated in nuclear bomb tests in 1946 has found that these ‘atomic veterans’ had a significantly higher mortality rate than a comparable group of servicemen not involved in the tests. But, there was no significant increase in mortality due to all cancers or leukaemia, suggesting that the measured increase in mortality was not due to radiation exposure.

"In all, more than 210,000 US servicemen participated in 235 Cold War detonations that may have exposed them to excess radiation. In the IOM study, the death certificates and other records of 40,000 servicemen who participated in Operation Crossroads, a nuclear bomb exercise at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, were examined. In this exercise, two nuclear weapons were detonated near US warships to judge their potential effects on naval fleets. Although no servicemen were aboard during the blasts, they did reboard the ships shortly after detonations at which time some of them may have been exposed to radioactivity.

"In the study, the researchers compared the mortality rates for all causes, all cancers, and leukaemia of the Operation Crossroads veterans with a control group of servicemen of similar age, rank, and unit who had served during the same time period but who had not been at the Bikini Atoll blasts.

"For those servicemen who had participated in Operation Crossroads the all-cause mortality was significantly higher than in controls (RR= 1.046, 95% CI 1.020–1.074, p<0.001) but the relative risk of death from cancer was not significantly increased in the ‘atomic veterans’ compared with controls (RR=1.014, 95% CI 0.96–1.068, p=0.26). Although the leukaemia mortality rate was higher among the Crossroads’ veterans (RR=1.020, 95% CI 0.75–1.39), again the increase was not statistically significant (p=0.90).

‘These findings do not support the hypothesis that exposure to ionizing radiation was the cause of increase mortality among Crossroads’ participants’, the researchers conclude."