Ядролық қару сынақтарының денсаулыққа зияны зерттеушісі Эрнест Стернгласс

Ernest Joachim Sternglass (24 September 1923 – 12 February 2015) was a professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He is an American physicist and author, best known for his controversial research on the health risks of low level radiation from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and from nuclear power plants.

Both of his parents were physicians. When Ernest was fourteen, the Sternglass family left Germany in 1938 to avoid the Nazi regime. He completed high school at the age of sixteen, then entered Cornell, registering for an engineering program. Financial difficulties encountered by his family forced him to leave school for a year. By the time he returned to Cornell, the U. S. had entered World War II. Sternglass volunteered for the navy. He was about to ship out when the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. After the war Sternglass married.

In the early 1960s Sternglass became aware of the work of Alice Stewart. Stewart was head of the department of preventive medicine of Oxford University, responsible for a pioneering study on the effects of low level radiation in England. Stewart had discovered that a small amount of radiation to an unborn child could double the child's chances for leukemia and cancer. In the 1960s, Sternglass studied the effect of nuclear fallout on infants and children. He claimed not only an increase in leukemia and cancer, but a significant increase in infant mortality. In 1963 he published the paper "Cancer: Relation of Prenatal Radiation to Development of the Disease in Childhood" in the journal Science. In 1963, Sternglass testified before the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy regarding the level of strontium 90 found in children as part of the Baby Tooth Survey. The result of bomb test fallout, strontium 90, was associated with increased childhood leukemia. His studies played a role in the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed by President John F. Kennedy. In 1969, Sternglass reached the conclusion that 400,000 infants had died because of medical problems caused by fallout—chiefly lowered resistance to disease and reductions in birth weight. In an article in Esquire, he claimed that the fallout from the nuclear explosions of an Anti ballistic missile (ABM) system would kill all children in the U. S. (This claim was distorted by Dixy Lee Ray in 1989, asserting that Sternglass had said this of all nuclear weapons testing, in an op ed in which she also dismissed anthropogenic global warming as "the current scare".) Freeman Dyson, taking up the debate over ABM systems in the pages of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, disagreed with Sternglass, although he admitted
The evidence is not sufficient to prove Sternglass is right [but] the essential point is that Sternglass may be right. The margin of uncertainty in the effects of world wide fallout is so large that we have no justification for dismissing Sternglass's numbers as fantastic." In 1971, Sternglass claimed that infant mortality rates increased in communities living in close proximity to nuclear industrial facilities. His study included several nuclear power plants and a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. He claimed that when setting allowable limits for nuclear industrial emissions "the AEC grossly misjudged the sensitivity of the fetus." In 1974, Sternglass identified elevated levels of radiation and increased cancer and infant mortality incidence in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. This prompted a scientific review initiated by Pennsylvania governor, Milton Shapp. The review concluded that "it was impossible to rule out the fact that there may have been a relationship between environmental radiation exposure from the Shippingport operation and an increased death rate in the population." In 1979, Sternglass began extending his analyses of fallout effects to embrace behavioral disorders, including academic deficits seen in high school students. Later he was to blame radioactivity for higher crime rates and higher AIDS mortality.

Sternglass also wrote the book Before the Big Bang: the Origins of the Universe, in which he offers an argument for the Lemaître theory of the primeval atom. He offers technical data showing the plausibility of an original super massive relativistic electron positron pair. This particle contained the entire mass of the universe and through a series of 270 divisions created everything that now exists. If true, this would help ameliorate some of the problems with the current models, namely inflation and black hole singularities. E. J. Sternglass, Relativistic Electron Pair Systems and the Structure of Neutral Mesons, Physical Reviews, 123, 391 (1961). E. J. Sternglass, A Model for the Early Universe and the Connection between Gravitation and the Quantum Nature of Matter, Lettere al Nuovo Cimento, 41, 203 (1984).