tom d. friedman wrote:
the u.s. govt was pretty careless in exposing troops to these tests. an ugly footnote.... when howard hughes had shot the movie ghengis khan with john wayne, it was shot in a previous nuclear test area, hughes ignored this fact, & i believe covered it up to the movie cast. naturally hughes was nowhere near the set, & john wayne succumbed to cancer in 1976.
You mean "The Conqueror". Hughes was more paranoid about the nuke tests than average folks, nutjob that he was. He even went so far as to phone his political connections to ask them to stop the tests, since they tended to wake him up in the morning (we can't have that now, can we?) From imdb.com;
Quote:
Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes provided the financial backing for this film and later paid an extra $12 million (estimated) for every existing print of it from a sense of guilt - it was he who paid for the shipping of 60 tons of radioactive dirt to Hollywood for retakes (see above). He kept a jealous hold on the film, not even allowing it to be seen on television, for 17 years until 1974, when Paramount managed to secure the rights to reissue it.
91 of 220 members of the cast and crew later developed cancer. Not all of those can be directly attributed to the fallout on the set ("I'd walk a mile for a camel!") but there's more than enough to prove a connection.
Check the rates for thyroid cancer in Idaho and Montana, where most of the fallout ended up. Shocking to say the least. Thyroid cancer is an easy one to attribute to radioactive materials (hence the use of Iodine as a treatment for exposure). But at the same time you have to temper that result against the fact that, for the most part, the people in charge didn't know the full extent of what was happening until much later on.
_________________
Phil K.
Yankee Air MuseumSystems Admin / Ramp Crew / Professional Photo Ruiner
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