W. Sterling Cole
Republican Representative from New York, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. His request of 22 October 1953 to Chairman Lewis L. Strauss produced this report.
Status of Project Gabriel report, study of the probable effects, with particular reference to the inhabitants of affected regions, from the use of nuclear weapons in warfare
1953-11-12 · 5 source pages
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Publisher annotations
Commentary by The Declassified Collection, separate from the original source.
Source PDF page 1 · 2 notes
US DOE Archives box stamp
The box at head right records where the paper was found: record group DOE Historian, Collection 1132, Box 3363, Folder 24. The date stamp reads 12 November 1953.
Source PDF page 2 · 2 notes
Division of Biology and Medicine
The Commission division that prepared the report, under John C. Bugher. Paragraph 3 divides Gabriel into three phases; paragraph 4 lists the programmes it was funding.
The monitoring network
About 100 fallout monitoring stations inside the United States and 70 outside it. The UCLA Atomic Energy Project's environmental studies are dated to the Trinity site, 1947.
Source PDF page 3 · 2 notes
Where the name Sunshine comes from
Paragraph 8 dates the code name to the RAND conference of July 1953 and defines it as the part of Project Gabriel that samples strontium-90 directly.
How the samples were obtained
Paragraph 9 gives the collecting arrangements: soil and milk through the Department of Agriculture, human material through arrangements with hospitals and physicians.
Source PDF page 4 · 2 notes
The three assay groups
Willard F. Libby at the University of Chicago, J. Laurence Kulp at Columbia and the Commission's New York Operations Office ran the strontium-90 assays.
Some forty detonations
Paragraph 10a states that the strontium-90 already in people comes from about forty detonations, and that no single detonation's share can be worked out.
Source PDF page 5 · 2 notes
Nicholas M. Smith Jr.
Physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who made the first long-range Gabriel study for the Commission in 1949. His revised November 1951 estimate is quoted here.
Measures to reduce uptake
Paragraph 13 lists what might be done if the hazard proved real: turning affected land over to crops that take up less strontium, or liming the soil.