Text obituary

[ROBBARISH@AOL.COM]

Radsafers:



I'm sorry that I didn't realize that registration was required to see the 

obituary. Although registration is free, I have reproduced the piece here.

Rob Barish

robbarish@aol.com



WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist who was involved in atomic 

weapons from the earliest days of the Manhattan Project, was a prominent figure 

in the cold-war debate about civil defense and continued to speak out about 

the health effects of radiation into the 1990's, died Tuesday in Alexandria, 

Va. He was 87. 



The cause was pneumonia after routine surgery, his family said.

In December 1942, when Enrico Fermi was preparing the first demonstration of 

a human-made nuclear chain reaction in a squash court under the stands at 

Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Dr. Lapp was studying cosmic rays with 

equipment housed in the stadium's press box. He later wrote that he was lugging 

a Geiger counter down from the box and "soon found myself inside the stands 

amid other white-jacketed men,'' who were working with the nuclear reactor. 

His son Dr. Christopher W. Lapp said Dr. Lapp had told the family that he 

sneaked into the room, introduced himself as a physicist and was soon put to work.

After the war, Dr. Lapp was hired by the Manhattan Project's successor 

agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, and became assistant director at its Argonne 

National Laboratory, the nuclear research laboratory operated for the 

government by the University of Chicago. He left the government in 1950 and became a 

private consultant on nuclear issues. 

In that capacity he wrote more than 20 books and numerous magazine articles, 

many on the theme that while nuclear war was a profound threat, the dangers of 

radiation were often overstated.

In an article for Consumer Reports in January 1962, he wrote that "the 

missing link in civil defense is confidence that survival is possible'' and noted 

that even in the bombing of Hiroshima, the survival rate at the Central 

Telephone Office, a quarter-mile from ground zero, was 97 percent.

In the matter-of-fact, practical tone characteristic of discussions of 

nuclear war at the time, he gave an outline of how to build a bomb shelter, 

discussed how radiation levels would drop quickly in the days after a blast, and 

added, "If you go to the trouble of building a fallout shelter, then with somewhat 

more effort and expense you can beef up the shelter and build in a margin of 

blast protection.''

But Dr. Lapp also warned of the growing power of atomic weapons and the 

hazards of fallout. While advocating preparations for nuclear war, he was also a 

vigorous proponent of the ban on atmospheric nuclear tests.

In 1950, he told Life magazine that "we must be prepared to lose 10-15 

million people in the first day of the superblitz.'' In The New Republic he wrote 

about the possibility that the Soviet Union would interpret improvements in 

American missiles as an effort to develop a first-strike capability and thus 

prompt an acceleration of the arms race. 

"In a real sense we are all sacrificed on the bloody altar of a tyrannical 

technology,'' he wrote. 

Into his late 70's, he remained an active promoter of the idea that the 

hazards of radiation were misunderstood and overstated. In 1990, when a government 

study said that some airline crews got more radiation than nuclear power plant 

workers, because of their exposure to radiation from the sun and stars at 

high altitude, he wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times that both 

were insubstantial. 

"Clearly, occupational exposure and airline exposure to radiation are very 

minor hazards,'' he wrote. "The risks for nuclear workers are overregulated.'' 

Ralph Eugene Lapp was born in Buffalo on Aug. 24, 1917. He graduated from 

Canisius College in Buffalo and received his doctorate at the University of 

Chicago. 

Besides his son Christopher, of Alexandria, he is survived by his wife of 48 

years, Jeannette, and another son, Nicholas, of New York