25 July 1968

Dear Petie,

The family is excited about the possibility of your coming in August + even young Linus thinks he will coordinate a visit with your being here.

The Daddy is working very hard on the revision of this book. I wish he had not agreed to revise it. He says we will make $100,000 from it but we need other things more than money at this point.

Linda and Crellin have also made inquiries as to your plans. We’ll have to have one family get-together here at least.

We have rented the same house in La Jolla for next winter. I am trying to get good people to take care of this ranch for us. I want a better person than we had last winter. I hope we can find a good couple.

I am making bread today. We are going to have pastrami with fresh bread for supper.

We have a graduate student and his wife living in the cabin this summer. The graduate student doesn’t work very hard + the paper is getting a little disgusted with him. I hope we can be in less of a tool here than at Christmas time when you are here and have some low key meals and times on the beach.

Love

Mam

25 July 1968

Mr. William Hart

Yliopistonk. 4A28

Jyvaskyla, Finland

Dear Mr. Hart:

The question that you ask in your letter, about how many children have been killed by atomic warfare or atomic testing from 1945 through 1967, is a hard one to answer. A difficulty is that the calculation can be made only on a statistical basis. A child who dies of leukemia, for example, may have leukemia caused by radioactive fallout, or may have leukemia caused by some other source of high-energy radiation or some other cause.

In my Nobel peace prize lecture, which I gave in Oslo on 11 December 1963, I stated that I estimated that 100,000 viable children would be born with gross physical or mental defects caused by fission products and 1,500,000 more, if the human race survives, with gross defects caused by carbon 14 from the bomb tests. In addition, I said, about ten times as many embryonic, neonatal, and childhood deaths are expected—about one million caused by the fission products and fifteen million by carbon 14. I also estimated that about two million human beings alive at that time would die 10 or 15 years earlier than if the nuclear tests had not been made, as a result of leukemia, bone cancer, and other diseases caused by the radioactive material from the bomb tests.

The total number of people affected in these ways, roughly twenty million, refers to a large number of generations. Moreover, I included embryonic deaths in the total.

I also mentioned that about five percent of the fission-product effect and 0.3 percent of the carbon-14 effect might appear in the first generation; that is, about ten thousand viable children with gross physical or mental defects and one hundred thousand embryonic, neonatal, and childhood deaths. In addition there would be some children who would die in the first generation because of leukemia and other diseases.

I now conclude that, as a rough estimate, I would give the number 100,000 as the number of children killed by atomic testing from 1945 through 1967. This is a very rough estimate: the true number might be only half as great, or twice as great.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

LP:jj