Radiation Risk and Ethics

The psychosomatic disorder observed in the 15 million people in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia who were affected by the April 1986 Chernobyl accident are probably the accident's most important effect on public health. These disorders could not be attributed to the ionizing radiation, but were assumed to be linked to the popular belief that any amount of man-made radiation—even minuscule, close to zero doses—can cause harm, an assumption that gained wide currency when it was accepted in the 1950s, arbitrarily, as the basis for regulations on radiation and nuclear safety.