PRELIMINARY HH 1/20/58
The paper carries no title page, no signature and no typed name. Its whole attribution is the slug at the head: the initials are Hollister's, and the date is two days before the memorandum that circulated it.
What is 'Project Sunshine'? Notes concerning basic factors and implications of one possible answer to the question
1958-01-20 · 6 source pages
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Publisher annotations
Commentary by The Declassified Collection, separate from the original source.
Source PDF page 1 · 2 notes
Strontium-90
Strontium-90 is a fission product with a half-life of about 28.8 years. Chemically it behaves like calcium, so the body lays it down in bone. It is the quantity Sunshine set out to measure.
Source PDF page 2 · 2 notes
Sunshine as a buyer of research
The paper proposes that Sunshine not run research itself but commission and direct research done elsewhere in the Division. No money would change hands; the phrase is defined two leaves further on.
Population geneticists
Estimates of inherited damage from fallout, made by population geneticists, were a live public controversy: the National Academy of Sciences had reported on them in June 1956.
Source PDF page 3 · 2 notes
The Division and the Defense Department
The paper raises whether the Division should put named staff closer to Defense Department planning on nuclear-war fallout, accepting that such a man could not tell colleagues all he learned.
Ink correction above the line
A hand struck out the typed word and wrote the correct one above the line. The same typist made the same slip, and the same hand corrected it, on the fifth leaf of this paper.
Source PDF page 4 · 2 notes
ACBM
The Advisory Committee for Biology and Medicine, created in September 1947 and dissolved in 1974, was the Division's principal outside advisory body. The paper makes it the model here.
Dropping the name Sunshine
The name had been the Commission's own since the General Advisory Committee adopted it in August 1953. Here the paper suggests folding the work into a wider hazards study and dropping it.
Source PDF page 5 · 2 notes
GAC
The General Advisory Committee was created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to advise the Commission on scientific and technical matters. It adopted the name Sunshine in August 1953.
Going to Congress for money
The paper argues that lists of projects supporting Sunshine can be drawn up at budget time without reorganising anything, and that such lists need not be mutually exclusive of each other.
Source PDF page 6 · 2 notes
JCAE
The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and abolished in 1977, was the congressional committee with jurisdiction over the Commission.
End of the paper
A typed rule of asterisks closes the paper and the rest of the leaf is blank. The numbered paragraphs run from one to ten without a gap; nothing in the six leaves is signed.