Being a check of a popular account against Dr Webb’s paper of 1949; with a note on the river, which did it, the straw, which did not, and the milk, which nobody warned.
The popular account scores three and a half out of ten and is less interesting than the truth. Nobody blackmailed anybody. A careful man noticed a spot, refused to blame the straw, followed the water, and found the atomic age in a river in Indiana. Six years later his employer’s solicitors obtained the fallout forecast. The lesson for engineers is that the forecast existed, and that a warning goes to whoever is organised enough to ask for it. The film was protected by the threat of a lawsuit. The milk had no lawyer.
Dr Julian Webb, his paper of 1949, the mills at Vincennes and Tama, the Trinity and Nevada tests, the snow at Rochester, the agreement with the Atomic Energy Commission, the Senate hearing, the National Cancer Institute’s figures and the 2025 compensation rules are real and referenced. The Department, its Fellow, the College’s war work and the trial in Chapter 8 are not. People were harmed by the fallout the paper describes; the jokes are about cardboard, distances and the College, and none is about them.
