NH #542: New York Times Lies of Omission on A-Bomb Radiation Dangers – Why We Still Don’t Understand: News Zero, Beverly Deepe Keever

Libbe HaLevy

00:00:01

Nuclear gaslighting. Part of the problem, those who oppose nuclear have had to deal with is convincing the public, including reporters that radiation from nuclear sources, poses a genuine threat to human life and health. The proof is out there, but it’s consistently ignored or distorted by pro nuclear interests. So they can keep getting away with what they get away with, which is more and more and more weapons, reactors waste, but then a former Vietnam war correspondent who spent more than 10 years researching the impact of nuclear testing on the south Pacific islands discovers what appears to be the intentional emissions of radiation facts from virtually all articles on the bomb published by our newspaper of record, the New York times and among the hidden impacts of radiation. She discovers from this test, she learns and tells you

Beverly Deepe Keever

00:01:00

One of the most devastating pieces of information later on was the British medical journal. How the deaths of newborn babies and stillborn the death rate had been going down, down, down until the fifties, when you had much better care and sanitation for the newborn. And then with the nuclear testing, there’s a hump up more newborn deaths. And this was a factor that the women in the Pacific islands were saying, but nobody was paid attention to them.

Libbe HaLevy

00:01:35

And there’s so much more so when Beverly deep Keever who wrote the landmark book news zero, the New York times, and the balm tells you what she learned and puts it in the context of what we have been led not to learn. You realize how the powers that be would much rather none of us realizes that the whole world, every last one of us has been forced into that seat that we all share.

Announcer

00:02:06

Claire hot seat. What are those people thinking, Claire? Hotsy what have those boys been braking clear? Hotsy the Cari Ms. Sinking our time to act is shrinking, but nuclear Hotsy, it’s the bomb.

Libbe HaLevy

00:02:37

Welcome to nuclear hot seat, the weekly international news magazine, keeping you up to date on all things, nuclear from a different perspective. My name is Leebee Halevi. I’m the producer and host as well as a survivor of the nuclear accident at three mile island from just one mile away. So I know what can happen when those nuclear so-called experts get it wrong. This week, a powerful look at the history of how we have all been manipulated away from understanding the true dangers of nuclear radiation and the bomb. I talk at lunch with Beverly deep Keever author of the book news zero, the New York times and the bomb. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most important books you can ever read on how the world has been gaslit into thinking that radiation is not a danger. So everything nuclear is a okay.

Libbe HaLevy

00:03:37

We will also have nuclear news from around the world. And more honest, nuclear information than was used as the basis for the build back better bill, all of it coming up in just a few moments today is Tuesday, November 9th, 2021. And here is this week’s nuclear news from a different perspective. Some good international news Greenland is preparing legislation to ban uranium exploration and mining. The country’s newly formed government is proposing to ban mining at uranium mines and cease development of the neon field. Mine. If extracted the projects, uranium reserves are believed to adversely affect the country’s environment. The new bill would also include the option to ban the exploration of other radioactive minerals, such as Thorin. There’s a film on this by Lees author, Gina and Joshua Portway called Connor suit Kayvon field. We will have a link up to the film and also the nuclear hot seat interview with Lisa auto Gina from the international uranium film festival, that will be on our website, nuclear hot seat.com under this episode, number 5 42, and Norway’s largest pension fund said on Thursday, November 4th, that it has divested from 14 companies involved in producing nuclear missiles and other weapons, Oslo based K LP, which manages more than $35.4 billion in assets set.

Libbe HaLevy

00:05:07

It made the decision after reviewing companies that may violate its guidelines on weapons. KLP is head of responsible investments. Kieron Aziz said, companies do not need to produce the actual weapon components themselves. It is sufficient that they contribute in other ways and said that these weapons by their nature violate fundamental humanitarian principles don’t bank on the bomb strikes again in the U S tribes, indigenous groups, conservation organizations file a petition to strengthen federal mining rules and groups fire back at the Fed’s move to dismiss plutonium pit lawsuit. We’ll have details on both of these stories on next week’s program. Here’s this week’s featured interview. You know how sometimes you read a book and it changes worldview even your life. For me, that’s the book news zero, the New York times and the bomb since reading it about seven years ago, not a day has passed without it being part of my life, the inspiration for, and cornerstone source for a play that I have been writing.

Libbe HaLevy

00:06:18

Thus, I am honored and thrilled to introduce you to both the book and the woman who wrote it. Beverly deep Keever is an American journalist, Vietnam war, corresponded author, and professor emerita of journalism and communications at the university of Hawaii. After 29 years of researching and teaching there, what she reveals to us from 10 years of extensive research into the New York times and the bomb at the Dawn of the atomic age reveals the source of so many of the problems we face today in warning people about nuclear radiation, dangers, and why nuclear must never be considered green energy. This is one of the most important and influential books I’ve ever read. And that’s why I was delighted to speak with Beverly deep Keever on Thursday, November 4th, 2021, Beverly deep Keever. It is such an honor to have you on nuclear hot seat is my guest this week.

Beverly Deepe Keever

00:07:21

I am delighted to be here and thank you for your interest in this continuingly, crucial topic.

Libbe HaLevy

00:07:29

Start out with a little bit about you so people can understand who they’re hearing from you were a reporter and did some very hardcore war. What is your background as a reporter?

Beverly Deepe Keever

00:07:42

I was hired at the university of Hawaii to teach journalism based on my professional credentials, which were a master’s degree from Columbia university, school of journalism and seven years of reporting in the Vietnam war. But I did not have a doctorate, a PhD, the gold standard for academia. And without that I realized I buy the apartment underscored. You’re just a second class citizen with no future. So I did the study to do a PhD, but you have to do a dissertation. And so the crunch was my dissertation. I wanted to do something on journalism. I want to do it on the Pacific. I was in Hawaii. And what bigger topic than the nuclear testing,

Libbe HaLevy

00:08:39

Did you do any reporting on nuclear issues while you were reporting from Vietnam?

Beverly Deepe Keever

00:08:45

No, go. I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I was stunned to find out much, much later that general Westmoreland had actually advocate using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. But of course, that didn’t go anywhere. Thank goodness we’d have been very polarized for sure, but no, I hadn’t followed the nuclear issue very much at all because a lot of this happened while I was just in college and journalism school, but you know, you didn’t pay that much attention. You didn’t know that much about it. That was basically the story. The American public didn’t know very much about what was going on in the Pacific with the nuclear testing. So anyhow, this dissertation is supposed to take seven years or you’re getting kicked out, but I got extensions. It took me 10 years that I finally finally did it. Now. I could only do it on the New York times because it’s the only newspaper that had a decent index.

Beverly Deepe Keever

00:09:53

The New York times prided itself on being the newspaper of record for the whole world. And they published every year, a very thick volume of their indexed articles. So I could go to that index. So I pulled the articles for, of course the nuclear tests. And then I pulled article on plutonium and so on. So I was just a wash in these articles, but I didn’t know how many tests there were finally in the government documents room. I came across this little micro fish. I don’t know if people even know microfish and here in 1994, the department of energy had released for the first time, a complete list of all of the tests throughout the country included the Pacific islands and their tonnage, the location, the kind of tests as a yield. So on the basis of that, I could see there were 86 nuclear tests in Anna.

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:11:06

We talk bikini and Johnston eight halls and the surrounding Pacific islands. So then I could just backtrack had the New York times covered this and had they covered it. Yeah. I could pull the articles that they did cover and see the ones that they had not covered. What these tests showed is that the nuclear tests were just a fraction of the thousand 1,500 tests throughout the world that the U S had done, but they were 84% of the yield, which meant they were the most powerful ones, the unpredictable ones too unsafe to try on the 48 contiguous states. So they were getting the brunt of the explosive force. And of course the experiments. So what does did show though, was these weapons in just the Pacific islands and the waters accounted for 8,588 bombs that were being tested in 16 years, just to the Pacific islands. So that was 8,000 bombs. That’s equivalent about one and a half Hiroshima bombs per day for 16 years in the Pacific. And nobody knew anything about to speak of,

Libbe HaLevy

01:12:41

As you were coming across this information, were you aware of who the writers were or were you impressed by what the times was doing, or did you have thoughts about maybe they weren’t doing a complete job about it? What was your process at the time of considering these articles?

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:13:00

One summer I had spent just reviewing the history of the New York times based on the available literature and a lot of books that had been written about them. And by reading New York times, people and the New York times was a usual ahead of their time that they developed specialized reporting by science and by military, this was before the war, but in the thirties. And so they had specialized reporters because they were very interested in the international aspect. And of course in science. So Lawrence was, the name came up all the time and there was a lot written about Roy just as what a great reporter he was and how spatially was everything.

Libbe HaLevy

01:13:55

And to be clear, this is William L. Lawrence. The last name is spelled with the U, not the other William Lawrence from the New York times whose last name was spelled with a w

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:14:04

That’s, right. They call them atomic bill, which he loved

Libbe HaLevy

01:14:09

Not until much later after the bomb and after they knew about his involvement with the Manhattan project.

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:14:16

That’s right. So basically once I had the data with those tests, I found that in your new times reported only 56% of the tests in the Pacific because they were following the government lead. And the interesting thing about even the 56%, they did cover nine of those tests were from Japanese scientists in Tokyo. In other words, the bombs were so powerful, like an earthquake that they could detect them all over the world, but the Japanese scientists were taking note of it and announcing it. So the Japanese were actually another thing, some of these bombs. Now, the other interesting thing is the Americans and the free world and the service men working on this, the Pacific Islanders were all kept in the dark because of nuclear secrecy. They always said national security, of course, except from the Russians, the big enemy, because they had toddlers right outside the danger zone that were east dropping on all of the tests. So the Russians knew what we were doing, but our own people did that. That was pretty discerning.

Libbe HaLevy

01:15:36

At what point did you become aware of William L. Lawrence as someone who is a factor in the information flow about things atomic, meaning nuclear, especially in the earliest days when we were first finding out about this after the bombs were dropped in Japan?

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:15:56

Well, they made a lot of to do about how Lawrence was out of the office out of the times office and picked by the Manhattan project director to tell the story of the development of the bomb for the American people. So they were very proud that they had somebody doing this for them. So we knew that Roy was for this period. You later said 119 days working behind the atomic curtain. And he was able to travel to Oak Ridge, to Hanford, where they were making plutonium, describe all of this. And the times had him write a 10 part series. The Manhattan project, general Grove wanted that released, but it was written for the army, but the times ran it play by play of how all of this was developed and the times released it. And they gave it free to all of the other papers of the country.

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:17:07

And they published it as a little booklet for school children and for adult readers. So here it was what they call the best propaganda that doesn’t look like propaganda. We knew it was written for the Manhattan project and for general groves and the RB, but the times passed it off as news, which was because Lawrence had inside information and access to these places where the mom was being developed. They were developing the plutonium, the scientists, and so on. However, and the point of the book is still of endearing importance of the world. He never mentioned radiation and radioactivity, which is the defining feature that sets it apart from conventional weapons. That’s kind of the thrust of the book and the people who were bearing the brunt of all of this, where the Pacific Islanders, this is where the plutonium laced moms were all tested. And the Pacific island reserves were significant. For another reason, it allowed the us to shift from the delivery system from conventional bombers to missile development. So the nuclear warheads could Dell be delivered by missiles and they are being tested by missiles. Now, still,

Libbe HaLevy

01:18:39

I have an enduring fascination with points of origin. In other words, if things are this way now, how did they get to be that way? And in examining the information flow about all things nuclear and Datomic all roads lead back to this one, man, and the writing that he did, first of all, what’s wrong as a journalist, as someone who was a professional journalist on the front lines in Vietnam, you were actually a war correspondent. What does it mean for a reporter who is writing under byline to actually be in the pay and the employ of an entity that has a larger interest in this case, the war department, the U S government, the Manhattan project,

Beverly Deepe Keever

01:19:24

The code of ethics for journalists at the time today. But back then also explicitly says, no second employment. The most important thing is service to the public. That is your duty. I mean, unless you don’t do that, the whole point of being a prepress doesn’t really mean much. It’s like worse than prostitution. You’re selling, not yourself, but your soul, your whole reason for being the press is to tell the truth, to inform and educate the people. What they choose to do with it is up to them, but they’ve got to have the raw material to work with. So the point is, if they didn’t know about these 8,000 Hiroshima type bombs going off in the Pacific islands, which was one and a half bomb per day for 16 years, they were completely blanked out a dark hole, black hole in their knowledge of how devastating the radiation and the radioactivity, or I know you can’t see it, but one of the most devastating pieces of information later on was the British medical journal.

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:20:48

How the deaths of newborn babies and stillborn, the death rate had been going down, down, down until the fifties, when you had much better care and sanitation for the newborn. And then with the nuclear testing, there’s a hump up more newborn deaths. And this was a factor that the women in the Pacific islands were saying, but nobody was paid attention to them. They were having tremendous miscarriages of it looked like they say a bunch of grapes, you know, and the ones that were born were disfigured physically and mentally disabled. So it had a profound effect. And this started to roll over into the atmosphere. I mean, the tests that were going on in the Pacific radiation, rich San Francisco within a week, but the sixties, everyone on the earth had been touched by radiation and re-do activity in some way. Now they didn’t all injusted and to get sick from it, it was kind of absorbed into their bones. So this is a bark that all of us now have of their topic age.

Libbe HaLevy

02:22:10

Why do you think that people did not know about or understand radiation radio activity? Do you think that was planned? Was it accidental? And going back to the beginning when Lawrence, who is the only person with really inside information was writing for the times, and he did not mention radiation or radio activity, do you think that was an intentional omission on his part? Was that a blind spot? Was he under orders? What is your best take on how this omission happened?

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:22:49

I have no way of knowing, except it was more than just William Lawrence that hid this fact. For example, there are two recent articles in the New York times that just go into this a little bit. And what makes this interview so timely is that these times articles just published in August this year. Both of them happen to mention my book. They were written in August nights. That’s the anniversary by the way. But one, and this kind of illustrates your point when article carried the headline, the black reporter who exposed a lie about the atomic bomb. And it goes a little bit into the Dar reporter called Charles Loeb, whose papers, the black newspapers recurring his articles all over. But he, he was in horror Hiroshima shortly after the bomb. And he said radiation had killed or injured. So many of the residents there, and that was a propaganda line that the American government wanted to cover up.

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:24:07

And he was there before the centers and propagandists got there. And he reported that it quotes my articles since the time sought to ignore this topic of radiation at Hiroshima altogether, Beverly Keever a professor of journalism analyze the coverage of Hiroshima and reported that out of 132 articles. She examined. She could find only one that mentioned radiation. So they were discussing the effects of the bomb in Hiroshima. They were hiding the radiation and the impact on the residents. What the times didn’t say is that that one article I did found was actually a denial by Robert Oppenheimer of a story that had said the radioactivity was going to persist in Hiroshima for 70 years. And the war department and groves called on Oppenheimer to smash down that report. Well, the times hadn’t published the original report about the radiation and activity in Hiroshima, but they published Oppenheimer’s denial of it.

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:25:22

The other article is also very interesting that the times article did not point out there was another very important reporter who got to Hiroshima before the propagandists and the American sensors got there named Wilford Burchette. And he wrote an article for the London daily express. I was also a stringer for that paper in Vietnam. He wrote an article a month after it was Shima called the atomic plague. I write this as a warning to the world and he wrote about the effects of the radiation on the people and how they got sick. Even the doctors, it says the doctors fault as they work. And they all fear this, this radiation. So the times could have also mentioned there were other reporters that countered the us government, but they didn’t. There was another article that same day it was written by the current science writer of the times is talks about Joanne says double pay standard of working for the army and getting paid for the times at the same time.

Libbe HaLevy

02:26:45

Actually, if we’re talking about Lawrence, I did the research in general, Leslie groves ahead of the Manhattan project in his biography. And they had set it up so that it looked like the times was paying Lawrence on an ongoing basis, but the money was provided by the army, by the Manhattan project.

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:27:05

That’s news to me. Anyhow, the second article was based on a book called restricted data. I’m just saying that one, the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, but Alex welder Stein, a nuclear historian, the time says over the years, reporters clashed vigorously on Mr. Lawrence’s atomic reporting. Beverly D Keever a war correspondent in Vietnam who later taught journalism, denounced the quote double pay arrange, but print the times and the federal government as a brazen conflict of interest. So it was very clear that this was a conflict with the ethics of journalism. That article also quotes a book that’s going to be coming out in April by a fellow named Vincent Kiernan who’s Dean at Catholic university and a former reporter. He says that Lauren supplemented his pay also besides the Manhattan project of writing for the us surgeon general and later on for Robert Moses, who plan New York city.

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:28:27

And the thing I looked at in particular, thanks to the index was plutonium. Now, the interesting thing about peritoneal is all the scientists knew the half-life of plutonium. It was an established fact that was, could not be classified secret or anything to do with national security. And it had such a long half-life. It has the half-life of 24,000 years, which means that half of it, the case is that like the time. And then that remaining half takes another 24,000 and then the next one, and next, in other words, a half, a million years of radioactive existence. So it could have just dropped in that little fact, hardcore fact, no implication for national security at every story that mentioned plutonium. And the first per bomb was Nagasaki. So Nagasaki and all of the Pacific island tests or petroleum laced bombs. So this was sometimes mentioned in the articles.

Beverly Deepe Keever

02:29:47

Sometimes it wasn’t, but they never mentioned, I pulled 128 articles from the 16 year period, 1945 to 62 during the nuclear testing period. And before the Americans and Soviets signed a limited test ban treaty in 62 of the 128 articles, only one mention the half-life 24,000 years, the plutonium 10% mentioned the deadliness of the radio tax acidity of plutonium. None mentioned plutonium and the Pacific nuclear weapons tests where most of it was been detonated, but it didn’t mention the use of plutonium in other countries. By this time France and England were using plutonium for nuclear power plants and for peaceful uses of Victoria. They mentioned that, but they didn’t mention the Pacific islands. And none of them mentioned the nuclear waste problem, which is another tremendous problem that we have today. Another interesting article that was not in the index, but it was written by the military special reporter Hanson Baldwin.

Beverly Deepe Keever

03:31:13

So the times it set up specialized reporting for the military and for science and Baldwin and Lawrence often worked together on some of these stories. And wild one was able to go to Richland Washington state, which was a new off growth of Hanford where petroleum was first produced for all of the bombs. And he called it the world’s largest platoon am production plant. And he describes elaborate safety precautions that take there, but not against peritoneal, but only I guess the short-lived iodine 1 31 radioactive gas, but he didn’t mention anything about precautions for Tony. Well, 37 years later, they had to close up that plant because of health concerns. It was so dangerous. And they now say it’s been called perhaps the most contaminated sites in the U S nuclear weapons complex. So early on, it was not just Lawrence. It was complicity certainly within the other editors.

Beverly Deepe Keever

03:32:30

For example, there was a very famous picture of opposite hybrid groves and, and the press tour at the Trinity site where they were all given little white booties to put on their shoes to prove to journalists that there was no radiation at the Trinity site and the times cut off the white booties in their photo. So the photo editors were complicit. However, life magazine published a photo of it and groves asked his driver to just stand up there without the white booties on and let the photographers or the journalists see that it’s safe. All right. He did that for 30 minutes and he got tremendously sick later on and he blamed it on leukemia. You blamed it on that 30 minutes stand up. Or he did in the subtlest Trinity site.

Libbe HaLevy

03:33:32

He was doing that less than two months after the Trinity explosion, which was, I believe July 16 and the Trinity press junket that you’re referring to took place on September 9th. And so it was less than two months afterwards that this man was told to stand out there with absolutely no protection. We’ll return to this week’s featured interview with Beverly deep Keever on her book news zero in just a moment. But first here’s a Shima Nagasaki preceded by the Trinity, a bomb test to New Mexico followed by years of atmospheric bomb tests in the south Pacific. That was the start of what we came to call the atomic age. But as you’re hearing from today’s guest, there is no end insight to its impact. The list of nuclear dangers and disasters now, including radiation releases from uranium mining reactors, highly radioactive waste and accidents is as endless as plutonium, which remains dangerously radioactive for 240,000 years yet, despite the known risks to health and safety, the nuclear industry perpetuates itself, making obscene amounts of money while threatening the future of the planet and of life itself.

Libbe HaLevy

03:34:56

That is why you need nuclear hot seat to help, you know, what’s going on in the nuclear world and what you can do about it. We cover not only what the industry is doing, but how it got this way. The many brave activists around the world who are fighting back and how any one of us can take action to try to stop atomic madness at nuclear hot seat. We’re dedicated to giving you the nuclear stories you can’t find in mainstream media. And we vet the information to provide context and continuity. You can trust so you can understand the full, ongoing picture, but in order to continue to do that, we need your help. That’s why the time would be right now to support us with a donation, go to nuclear, hot seat.com and click on the big red donate button to help us with a donation of any size.

Libbe HaLevy

03:35:47

And that same red button is where you can now set up a monthly donation of $5. That’s the same, have a cup of coffee and a nice tip here in the U S and don’t think that’s too small and amount to make a difference because it’s those $5 donations that sustain this show from month to month. So if you value nuclear hot seat and want to help us continue, please do what you can now and know that however much you can help you have my gratitude. Now here’s the continuation of this week’s featured interview with Beverley deep Keever author of news zero, the New York times and the bomb. Do you think that all of the reporters and the editors and all of those people were simply ignorant of the fact of radiation radioactivity, the poisoning, the dangers that would result, were they under orders? Was this their own decision? Was it the blind spot again, I’m trying to get back to how could so many in unison in lock step with each other almost by general agreement, decide to not say anything about, as you say, the defining characteristic of atomic weapons.

Beverly Deepe Keever

03:37:05

I don’t know. I just don’t know what was going on at that period. I think they were just not in the know, most of them didn’t have the science background. It was a completely new field that opened up and they didn’t have much basis for that. The interesting thing about the sixties, though, there were public interest groups that started to come up and lobby for more information, but I didn’t see that the press had done anything to try to counter the government secrecy. Sometimes even civil defense workers had to lobby to get information that they needed in order to protect the public in case they were ever called upon in a nuclear attack. So I just don’t know. I think that they just were not given enough information. I think the AP did some, had a science writer who did some good stories I’ve been told.

Beverly Deepe Keever

03:38:15

I didn’t see those, but there were journalists who did it, but it didn’t seem to grasp, to sink into the public’s awareness until some of the Nevada shots started to get people’s attention. And it was a while before, you know, they got alarmed about some of the effects of radio activity. For example, the farmers sheep were getting damaged and in the Trinity shot, some of the cattle were injured and the government had suits that they settled very quietly. So they were aware other people were aware of the danger, but they didn’t let those settlements become public. The public didn’t know how severe the problem was.

Libbe HaLevy

03:39:10

Back to your book. You were talking about having to write a dissertation and it took you 10 years to come up with the dissertation. And it’s my presumption that this dissertation either was or turned into the book new zero, is that correct?

Beverly Deepe Keever

03:39:29

Yes. It was almost as much trouble to get the book published as it was to write.

Libbe HaLevy

03:39:36

That was my next question. What were the challenges that you had in getting the book published?

Beverly Deepe Keever

03:39:42

I just wrote to publishers all over, you know, they have this book in writer’s digest and I went through that entry by entry and entry and everyone that looked like a possibility. I set them a perspective. Now wasn’t a very good perspective in that I didn’t have a catchy title along the line after all of this, some of my didn’t even get a rejection slip, just no answer. Some of them have replied and said, thanks, but no thanks. I came up with news zero and I came across this publisher who was not listed in writer’s digest. Common courage. I knew about this publisher because he had published a book by a very profound activists in Hawaii called native daughter. And I’d read the book. It was very, very feisty. So I knew about common choice. My first sentence says, well, if you published her nanny Kate trust book, you should publish my book.

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:40:48

He had published books by Noam, Chomsky and others, and he was very into the whole press coverage story. And he was an excellent editor. He liked to edit. And he would say with my took my dissertation, I am not your dissertation committee. And they just work that out, out that came. So I got rid of all of the theoretical stuff you had to put in a dissertation and wrote a kind of journalistic style. And I kind of went back to the times coverage of radiation. It turns out they were great fans of Madame Curie and the reported about her and her death. They was because of radioactivity. And 50 years later, her cookbooks even still were radio active. The interesting thing was in the twenties, they had radium that they paid it into watches for the GIS to use glow in the dark and the war.

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:41:58

So they, the dial Peters where these young women and then their teens, and they would put radio and it brush and dip it in the mineral and then put it on the watch. And so on in time, they got what they called radium jaw effected their jaws and they all died. Horrible deaths. And those trials were covered heavily by the times because it was in their circulation area. These three dial planning places that were in their circulation area. So they covered those. They were very sensational twelves, and the Hearst magazines and newspapers had cartoons about these ghoulish girls that have died as they worked in this place. That was kind of the prelude. That was important because they were the first victims of the radiation that were known. And they sort of alerted the government that you had to put in safety, precautious one, so to protect people, but also liability suits they were worried about. And so the most basic standards for all of the scientists working on the bomb were already in place, thanks to these dial Peter girls. So the people in the know knew how dangerous it was and how you had to take precautions, but they didn’t want it to sink out because as one of them was quoted as saying, we didn’t want to scare the American people out of their boots

Libbe HaLevy

04:43:42

Or out of their bombs.

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:43:44

Yes. I think that they would have protested much earlier. The American people had only one choice in all of this. And that was the 1956 election. When Adley Stevenson was campaigning to ban the bombs, to ban hydrogen bomb testing. And that’s when you had profound secrecy by the Eisenhower administration and those documents were classified. Not all of them were released in 94. A lot of this release much later

Libbe HaLevy

04:44:23

Back to your book. It was published by common courage press in 2004. What was the reaction or lack thereof when you got published and specifically, what was the reaction from the times

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:44:38

In writing the book, I went to the New York times and I said, why didn’t you let this happen without this coverage of Tony Liam and the Pacific Islanders and so on. And their official response was all those people are gone. They’re gone or passed on. We can’t comment as to the decision-making during that earlier period. Remember, we’re talking 50 years after the fact, the bomb said, had gone on from, in the Pacific from 46 to 62. And here I went in the next millennium there’s the response was no comment. We can’t comment. And the reaction to new zero was more news zero. I had very, very little reaction. I got no reaction.

Libbe HaLevy

04:45:32

Okay. So nothing from the times, any other big publications, anybody step in on this?

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:45:40

No, not that I was aware of.

Libbe HaLevy

04:45:43

You know, I called you, I think it was about, I don’t know, 3, 4, 5 years ago, something like that, because I was at that point using your book as the cornerstone, in my investigation of William L. Lawrence for a play, I wanted to write it, wasn’t done as an interview. It was more a conversation. So I never put it on nuclear, hot seat. But at one point I said to you, what was the reaction in the media to your book? And you said, I’ll never forget this. You said, let me put it to you this way. And all this time, you’re the first reporter who has ever contacted me. Okay. Now, is that still the case or with this growing visibility of yours? And we’ll get to the expanded availability of your book in a moment, but with you being mentioned and being referenced more frequently now, has there been any growing outreach by the media, by reporters, by people with talk shows or whatever to finding out more from you and having you as a direct source or citing the book in greater detail?

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:46:59

No, no, they haven’t. In fact, I just recently came across a devastating book. I read cover to cover, but not in one sitting. It was so hard to take. It was called poisoning the Pacific and how, not only the nuclear, but other problems had evolved between the United States and Japan. So many problems lingering from nuclear age, the waste problem is going to cost billions and they haven’t decided what they’re going to do with all of the nuclear waste that is accumulated places like South Carolina and Nevada

Libbe HaLevy

04:47:45

And every single nuclear reactor site in the country, because the waste is stored on site and they’ve got no place to put it. They keep pretending that they do or they will, but this problem has not yet been solved.

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:47:57

That’s right. And, and I must say, I think it is a factor in all of the hubbub about climate change in the sense that I think it’s now known that the oceans are going to be rising. It’s going to wipe out these little Pacific islands that are still radioactive. Bikini island will not be able to be inhabited for forever. I think, and more important to have the room night dome, where they used a crater and put in radioactive dirt and supplies and things about 300 feet wide and an eight inch crust of concrete over it. And it’s sinking and it’s cracking and it’s subject to hurricanes and it’s going to be in time covered by the rising sea waters. So all of this is going to contaminate the oceans as well as what’s going on on land. So this is a problem they haven’t, I think even addressed.

Beverly Deepe Keever

04:49:10

In fact, some of the failed nuclear plutonium tests were only 800 miles from rural at Johnston island. And the governor of Hawaii is going to the climate change conference in Glasgow to talk about how we’re going to be building wind turbines and solar par and all renewable energy in for decades. But they’re not discussing, you know, what’s going to happen with the radioactivity is all around us. So I don’t know what they’re going to do about all of that. It’s going to cost much more than an infrastructure bill that they can’t even get going in Washington. Now

Libbe HaLevy

04:49:50

I consider new zero to be one of the cornerstone books. If people are to understand why it is that we don’t know about these issues and what exactly those issues are, you’ve done a remarkable job of tracking down the information and providing footnotes for absolutely everything it’s totally vetted. So the book was published in a trade paperback version in 2004. Now there’s an e-book version available. How long has that been out there? Where can people find it? And what do you hope happens to it from point on

Beverly Deepe Keever

05:50:29

It’s been on Kindles for about a year. And I just notice I’m getting maybe 60 cents 60 cents return every month. So it’s not a bestseller now. And I don’t think it’s going to be a best seller, but I think what these other two books that are coming out about nuclear secrecy, it’s beginning to come out what the government was up to. And there, there may be more attention to it, but these new books are adding so much more information about Lawrence and about nuclear secrecy that I think they’re going to be very revealing. I just don’t know that they can do that much to roll the cat back. You know, the damage has been done. And in a way, the world is more dangerous in a nuclear sense that when you just had two super powers or even just China, you get the rogue states, you get terrorist states are miniaturizing, their nuclear weapons. So, you know, you can carry it around in a backpack in the future. Maybe, I don’t know, it’s becoming a much more terrifying moment, which they don’t want people to think about. I don’t think the politicians want to raise problems for which they have no solutions and there’s no easy, no real solution to some of this, this nuclear waste is going to be there for millennia. That’s what you’re talking about. You’re talking about grandchildren’s grandchildren and, you know, it’s hard for people to think in those terms and just trying to grapple with COVID.

Libbe HaLevy

05:52:16

Is there anything else that you would like to share at this time?

Beverly Deepe Keever

05:52:20

Thank you very much for keeping even the topic, the nuclear topic alive, and you’re doing it in a way that I think is more accessible to people with radio and podcasts. If you’re doing a play that is offering good, a new mode to get people’s attention, you make it more palatable. Maybe I don’t know what the play is going to turn out. Where’s the play going to be?

Libbe HaLevy

05:52:48

It’s going to be in my computer until I finish writing it. And I promise you that you will be among the first people to get even a rough draft copy of it. So you can see what I’ve been up to for the last so far, six and a half years in writing it, because sometimes I think that by wrapping scientific and political information in the human experience and showing what it took for in the case of my play, this one individual William L. Lawrence, to in essence, as a reporter, sell his soul for the prominence and the specialness, this legacy of nuclear where his legacy is nuclear ignorance, as opposed to information. I think that makes it a much more compelling story because it’s the story of where we crossed the line we shouldn’t cross and what it ultimately means in terms of who we are as a human being.

Beverly Deepe Keever

05:53:47

Well, I think that’s very apropos now. Now, of course, the problem is that journalism has shrunk in a sense that local news is almost invisible. So instead of bad report, we’re getting no reporting whatsoever. That’s the void that we have to fill now. And I think there are some great stories being told, but not, not well enough and maybe not the key stories. It’s hard to get people excited about nuclear waste, but it’s going to be there for thousands of thousands of years. So thank you for doing this and thank you for the play. And you’re using other mediums to get to people and this may capture more binds and they be more, more activists like you.

Libbe HaLevy

05:54:43

One can only hope. And that’s with having tremendous gratitude to those who came before us, who saw an issue such as you did and put in the years of work, it took to pull together this compelling. And in places I would say ferocious book, new zero that has my recommendation to be on the shelf and be read by every activist on this issue, every activist on the environment, and also reporters who are covering any kind of environmental beat so that they can include this information in their stories, or at least understand the context in which some of their reporting is going to have to take place. So with my gratitude to you for being just about a daily part of my life for the almost seven years that I have been writing this play, I want to thank you Beverly deep Keever for being my guest this week on nuclear hot seat.

Beverly Deepe Keever

05:55:42

It has been my honor, thank you for your good work and your interests. Best of luck to you and your play and your broadcast.

Libbe HaLevy

05:55:50

Beverly deep Keever, we’ll have a link up to her book, new zero on our website, nuclear hot seat.com. Under this episode, number 5 42, I cannot urge you strongly enough to get and read this essential resource. And for the record, the name of my plane is atomic bill and the payment due it’s about New York times science writer, William L. Lawrence, who played such an enormous role in what we don’t know about nuclear to this day. It should be in completed draft form by the end of year, and will be published in 2022, hopefully with a production soon to follow, that will make for a very happy new year

Libbe HaLevy

05:56:40

There are two great videos coming out of the cop. 26 presentations. One is on no radiation dump in the Pacific. And the other is from professor and Dr. Ian fairly on the impact of tritium in the water. We’ll have links up to both along with the link to a petition from nears nuclear information resource service, about taking nuclear subsidies and bailouts out of the build back better. Bill both will [email protected] under this episode. Number 5 42, this has been nuclear hot seat for Tuesday, November 9th, 2021. If you want to get nuclear hot seat delivered via email every week, it’s easy. Just go to nuclear hot seat.com. Look for the yellow box and sign up with your first name and an email address for a notification of the latest show. As soon as it posts, you’ll never risk missing. Another one. If you have a story, lead a hot tip, a suggestion of someone to interview, or just want to give me an attagirl, send an email to [email protected].

Libbe HaLevy

05:57:50

And if you appreciate weekly verifiable news updates about nuclear information around the world, take a moment, go to nuclear, hot seat.com. Look for that big red button. Follow the prompts. Anything you can do will help. And we will really appreciate your support. This episode of nuclear hot seat is copyright 2021 Leiby Halevi and hardest street communications, all rights reserved, but various allowed as long as proper attribution is provided. This is Leiby Halevi of hardest street communications. The heart of the art of communicating, reminding you that when it comes to nuclear, not only what you don’t know can hurt you, there’s a good chance it already has. That’s it? Your nuclear wake-up call, whatever you do do not go back to sleep because we are all in the nuclear hot seat. No,