Atomics: Fallout in the Food Chain

The Eskimo village of Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska’s desolate Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle has a post office, a school and an airplane landing strip. But for all its modern trimmings, Anaktuvuk is barely out of the Stone Age. Its 15 families (averaging five children and 12 dogs each) are remnants of the nomadic Nunamiuts. Their lives are devoted to hunting the Arctic caribou, which supplies 90% of their food as well as most of their clothing. Merely to stay alive, one Nunamiut family must kill 90 caribou a year.

Fortunately, caribou are still plentiful near Anaktuvuk Pass, and no one is going hungry. But contemporary civilization is closing in with deadly effect. Radioactive fallout from Russian and U.S. nuclear tests has dangerously poisoned the Nunamiuts’ barren homeland. Fallout there has been no thicker than in many other parts of the world, but it has concentrated ominously in the bodies of the Eskimos. A report made for the Atomic Energy Commission by General Electric scientists showed that in the summer of 1962, the inhabitants of Anaktuvuk Pass had an average “whole body burden” of 421 nanocuries*of caesium 137, one of the most harmful constituents of fallout. This is nearly 100 times the burden of fallout picked up by people in what Alaskans call “the lower states.”

In July, AEC Official H. M. Parker reported an average body-burden increase of 50% in a year. One Eskimo’s count increased by 112%; the highest burden measured was 1230 nanocuries. This is more than one-third of the maximum permissible amount (3,000 nanocuries) established by the International Committee on Radiation Protection.

Radioactive Skimmings. University of Alaska Zoologist William O. Pruitt, an authority on caribou, gave the beasts a thorough going over and found that their flesh contained an unusual amount of caesium 137. After that, the story unfolded with dangerous logic. The caribou’s winter food is largely lichens, a primitive plant that has no roots but gets its moisture and nutrients entirely from the air. Its spongy tissues soak up the scant Arctic rain like blotting paper and retain a large part of it. The fallout that is carried down by the rain is retained too. Instead of mixing harmlessly with the soil, it goes into the stomachs of caribou and becomes part of their bones and flesh. When Eskimos eat the caribou, they get the radioactive skimmings of many acres of lichen-covered ground.

Once he made his discovery, Dr. Pruitt began a loud vocal opposition to the AEC’s Project Chariot, which was a plan to use nuclear explosives to blast a spacious harbor in the Alaskan coast. The side effects, he said, would harm the Eskimos even more. Although he was fired from the university, he continued to make all the noise he could about the danger of feeding more fallout into the Eskimo food chain. The AEC’s present management now watches the Eskimos carefully and measures their body burden as it creeps ever higher.

Higher & Higher. It would be helpful, indeed, if the Nunamiuts could change their diet, but in the bleak Brooks Range there is almost nothing but caribou to eat, and any kind of agriculture is impossible. The Eskimos could be fed on handouts of white men’s food, which would destroy their self-sufficiency and probably their health, or they could be moved elsewhere. They do not relish either prospect. Says Simon Paneak, head of the village council: “We only know how to live here.” Though he remains close kin to Stone Age man, he understands the problems of radiation only too well. “It keeps getting higher and higher, and we just don’t know what to do.”

So far, the Nunamiut Eskimos have shown no symptoms of the serious illnesses that can come from too much radiation, but no scientist can be confident that such symptoms will not appear. In the future, though, if the U.S. and Russia stick to their recently signed agreement to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere, the contaminated lichens of northern Alaska will gradually lose their dangerous radioactivity. The body burdens of the caribou will fall little by little. Eventually the people of Anaktuvuk Pass will be no more radioactive than any other Americans.

*Thirty-seven atomic disintegrations per second, or one-billionth of a curie.