Fluoridation by Fiat: Fait Accompli in Manhattan Project Secrecy

Lee Taylor is a former pro-fluoride activist and a resident of Bellingham. He has written three books, “Pend Oreille Profiles,” “A History of Hydroelectricity: Columbia River Valley Power” and “Everychild’s Christmas.”

Part 2

Editor’s note: This article is part two of a three-part series concerning the history of fluoride in this country, how the fluoride paradigm shifted from poison to panacea, and how this paradigm shift can be demythologized.

Our journey tracing the history of fluoride begins at a point in American history as early as 1850 when smokestacks from the iron and copper industries were belching toxic fluoride on both sides of the Atlantic, poisoning and killing crops, livestock and people.1 As medical libraries began accumulating information regarding the toxic hazards and disastrous impact of fluoride on the environment and affected populations, fluoride dependent industries in Germany, England and the U.S. became increasingly apprehensive concerning the impending possibility of costly lawsuits and stiff government regulations.

In 1933, when the world’s first major air pollution disaster struck Belgium’s Meuse Valley, several thousand people became violently ill and 60 died. Kau Roholm, the world’s leading authority on fluoride hazards, placed the blame on fluoride.2 As European and U.S. consumers relished the benefits of the Industrial Revolution and the increased standard of living that it delivered, both they and the environment were beginning to experience the painful toxic realities in its wake. They wanted to dance, but they didn’t want to pay the fiddler. They rushed to consume the wonders of industrial production but they were feeding their appetites in a fluoride trough. This created a major dilemma from which there would be no escape.

The fluoride story continued to deepen with the 1943 Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge National Laboratory of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As was noted in last month’s article, fluoride was a key chemical in the production of the atomic bomb, the device developed by the Manhattan Project. Fluoride poisoning of the environment increased rapidly and secretly during the war years.

Nuclear physics and international politics furnished the historical context for the Manhattan Project. Beginning in 1911, a consortium of brilliant physicists introduced the atomic era. From quantum mechanics of the 1920s through 1932, when the discoveries of James Chadwick, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton precipitated the first splitting of the atom, to 1933, when Hungarian Leo Szilard experimented with nuclear chain reaction, to 1934, when Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie and Enrico Fermi discovered that artificial radioactivity could be induced through the bombardment of uranium with neutrons, the dawn of nuclear fission was truly an international enterprise.

In 1938, four Germans confirmed the arrival of nuclear fission through the splitting of a uranium nucleus following the absorption of a neutron, predicating a neutron-driven chain reaction releasing large amounts of energy.

Major political changes in Europe coincided with rapid developments in science as Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933, precipitating a Semitic purge in Germany and an exodus of Jewish physicists to the United States and the United Kingdom. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, World War II began, causing grave concern on the part of these exiled physicists. What might Germany do with nuclear technology?

Exiled scientists on both sides of the Atlantic feared the production of German nuclear weapons, but it was Britain who did the first feasibility study of nuclear weapons. In February 1940, two German Jewish physicist refugees in England made the first theoretically sound critical mass calculation, inspiring the formation of the MAUD Committee, “a code name chosen from the first name of one member’s nanny….” From April 1940 to July 1941, this committee worked out the basic principles of both fission bomb design and uranium enrichment by gaseous diffusion.

Meanwhile, Hungarian physicist refugees in the U.S. Manhattan Project, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, fearing German development of nuclear weapons, persuaded world famous physicist refugee, Albert Einstein, to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this danger in an August 2, 1939, letter, drafted by Leo Szilard.

President Roosevelt responded by creating an ad hoc Uranium Committee, which conducted research in 1939 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, coming under the aegis of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940. The National Defense Research Committee was placed under the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941.

On December 2, 1942, Italian physicist refugee from Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, Nobel Prize winner and world’s leading expert on neutrons, Enrico Fermi, created the first experimental chain reactor on a squash court beneath Chicago’s stadium. During that same year the Office of Scientific Research and Development was transferred under the auspices of the U.S. Army and identified as the Manhattan Project, the inauguration of an all-out effort to build the world’s first nuclear bomb.

The 1942 Manhattan Project, originally based in Manhattan, New York, was established in 1943 as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Manhattan Project was developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, at a cost of $2 billion, from a 60,000-acre valley in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The project employed over 130,000 people. Its single and well-defined mission: the production and separation of uranium and plutonium to produce the first U.S. nuclear weapon.

The toxic impact of fluoride from the Manhattan Project might never have been discovered by the general public without the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Freedom of Information Act was enacted in 1966 and amended in 1974 and 1986. FOIA impacted all formerly classified federal government documents, establishing “a presumption that records in the possession of agencies and departments of the executive branch of the U.S. Government are accessible to the people.” With the adoption of the FOIA, the burden of proof shifted from the individual to the government and the ‘need to know’ standard was replaced with the ‘right to know’ doctrine…Thousands of post-World War II government documents which were formerly classified as Top Secret, Secret or Confidential have been declassified under the mandatory provisions of these regulations.

“The documents show that the first U.S. lawsuits levied against the atomic weapons program were over fluoride poisoning, not radiation damage. The documents reveal that the U.S. government secretly ordered atomic bomb scientists to create ‘evidence useful in litigation’ against defense contractors who were being accused of injuring citizens with fluoride…Fluoride was the top chemical hazard of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, not only for workers, but for those living in nearby communities.3

It’s essential to any informed translation or interpretation of both classified and declassified government documents to understand that the conspicuous absence of the referencing of “fluoride” in these documents plays a major role in an understanding of the fundamental and pervasive nature of the intentional cover-up and deception therein.

It is of crucial significance, in this “government sin of omission,” to remember that the U.S. government was and still is selling fluoride to the American public, not as the most toxic industrial chemical compound on the planet, but as a dental panacea, under the aegis of national security. “The August 1948 Journal of the American Dental Association shows that evidence of adverse health effects from fluoride was censored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—considered the most powerful of Cold War agencies—for reasons of ‘national security.’” 4

Prior to the 1966 FOIA and its subsequent amendments, and during the original fluoride paradigm shift of the early 1940s from poison to panacea, public outcry against the toxic impact of industrial waste fluoride had been intentionally ignored by industry, federal public health departments/agencies and the federal government itself.

The public relations campaign of all three, selling fluoride to the American public as a panacea, had been a smashing success despite the conspicuous lack of any scientific base for its public safety. Since fluoride was the key chemical in atomic bomb production, it’s essential to understand the content of these declassified documents and how this relates to demythologizing of the fluoride panacea.

This information, which we will subsequently explore, with the assistance of massive Cold War nuclear age research, placed at our disposal by the USA Today, and authors Joel Griffiths and Chris Bryson, is quite substantial. “The material in Declassified Documents Reference System originated primarily in the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and various components of the Department of Defense, but it also includes documents from the White House, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation…The documents range from telegrams, correspondence and field reports to background studies and detailed minutes of cabinet-level meetings ….[and] consists of documents declassified between 1972 and 1975, more than 9,600 documents [and] beginning in 1 975,…approximately 3,000 to 4,000 documents a year.” 5

It was the toxic exposure of the environment, animals and humans to fluoride by both private government-sponsored companies prior to and following 1942, and government-owned facilities after that date, which generated escalating government liabilities exposed in recently declassified government documents.

This cover-up by the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission and related entities, of extensive toxic exposure inherent in government-sponsored missions, provided the content of a USA Today September 6, 2000, three-part front page series on the toxic fluoride legacy: “USA Today reviewed 100,000 pages of government records, many recently declassified and never before subject to public review, to assess the scope and impact of nuclear weapons work done at private facilities in the l940s and ‘50s. Reporters visited former contracting sites and archives in 10 states and interviewed scores of former employees, people living near the sites and government officials.” 6

During the 1940s and ‘50s, the U.S. government secretly hired more than 200 private companies to process huge volumes of nuclear weapons material, “leaving a legacy of poisoned workers and contaminated communities that lingers to this day.” This record of hundreds of private companies under government contract, prior to the huge, government-owned nuclear weapons plants of Manhattan Project vintage, has been largely ignored.

“Most of the contracting sites were in the industrial belt: through New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, around the Great Lakes and down the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. They were in big cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. And they were in small communities, such as Lockport, N.Y., Carnegie, Pa., and Joliet, Ill…

“At least a third of them handled hundreds, thousands or even millions of pounds of radioactive and toxic material, often without the equipment or knowledge to protect the health and safety of workers or nearby communities. From mom-and-pop machine shops to big-name chemical firms, private manufacturing facilities across the nation were quietly converted to the risky business of handling tons of uranium, thorium, polonium, beryllium and other radioactive and toxic substances…

“Dozens of communities were contaminated, their air, ground and water fouled by toxic and radioactive waste…Federal officials knew of severe hazards to the companies’ employees and surrounding neighborhoods, but reports detailing the problems were classified and locked away.” 7

Because the American public was kept in the dark about the dangers of fluoride and, instead, falsely educated by industry and government about the dental wonders of the chemical, fluoride now flourishes in our country. “Fluoride emissions from the production of iron, steel, aluminum, copper, lead and zinc; phosphates (essential for the manufacture of all agricultural fertilizers); plastics; gasoline; brick, cement, glass, ceramics, and the multitudinous other products made from clay; coal-burning electrical power plants; and uranium processing” 8 continue to contaminate our nation’s air and water.

“Fluoride is so muscular a chemical that it has become a lifeblood of modern industry, pumped hotly each day through innumerable factories, refineries and mills. Fluoride is used to produce high-octane gasoline; to smelt such key metals as aluminum, steel and beryllium; to enrich uranium; to make computer circuit boards, pesticides, ski wax, refrigerant gases, Teflon plastics, carpet, waterproof clothing, etched glass, bricks and ceramics, and numerous drugs, such as Prozac and Cipro. 9

“By the Environmental Protection Agency’s last estimate, at least 155,000 tons a year are released into the air by U.S. industrial plants. Emissions into lakes, rivers and oceans have been estimated to be as high as 500,000 tons a year.” 10

And the beat goes on. We refuse to sacrifice what fluoride brings, oblivious to the sobering truth that it is not biodegradable, that it is accumulative and irreversible in its toxic impact on our environment, the food chain and in our bodies. §

Next Month: We’ll become better acquainted with the primary players in the paradigm shift from poison to panacea, exploring the bizarre world of politico-industrial science fiction and how we might best influence our political and public health leaders toward a more healthy future without fluoride.