The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and the WHO (World Health Organization) are two agencies of the UN. The IAEA is an agency for the development and sponsorship of the utilization of atomic energy as an energy resource, while the WHO is an agency for the protection of the physical, mental and social health of individuals all over the world. In the Fifties and the Sixties, when the program “Atoms for Peace” was launched, the serious health risks and environmental dangers were generally unknown to the general public, but not to the WHO. In a report by the WHO in 1965 (among the writers of the report was the Nobel Prize winner J.M. Miller) is written: “The genetic patrimony is the most precious possession of mankind. It determines the life of our descendants, the healthy and harmonious development of future generations. In our capacity as experts we affirm that the health of future generations is threatened by the growing development of the atomic industry and by the sources of radiation…We hold that the new mutations that will appear in human beings will be ominous for them and for their descendants.”

For this reason in 1959 the IAEA managed to make the WHO sign an agreement (law WHA12.40 of 05-28-1959) in which the silence concerning the effects of radiation on human health was extended worldwide. In practice the agreement prevents the WHO from publishing data or studies that could damage the image of the IAEA. In the years that followed this agreement the nuclear incidents that occurred one after another (the worst of them being those of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island) demonstrated, besides the risks of nuclear power on the health of the public, the real reason that this law was passed. The deplorable nature of this agreement permitted, a mere four months after the meltdown at Chernobyl (on 08-28-86) the then general director of the IAEA, Hans Blix, to affirm: “The world could tolerate a nuclear accident as serious as Chernobyl every year.” In 1995 the IAEA, on the basis of this law, blocked the records of the proceedings of the conference of the WHO in Geneva on the incident at Chernobyl. The studies of this conference demonstrated the remarkable increase of tumours and of various other pathologies among the liquidators as well as in the general population stricken by Chernobyl, and Dr. Martin Griffiths of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs at the UN stated that the truth had not been told to the population involved.

In subsequent years the studies conducted by the WHO on Chernobyl revised considerably and inexorably the 1995 report up until the presentation in Vienna on September 7, 2005 of the study realized by the Chernobyl Forum, which consisted of the IAEA, the WHO and other organizations of the UN, in collaboration with the governments of Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine. The report was entitled “The Legacy of Chernobyl: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impact”. This study maintained that the nuclear incident at Chernobyl, in these twenty years, had only caused the death of 50 people among the firemen and operators of the power plant in the days immediately following the catastrophe, 200 cases of cancer from acute irradiation and 4000 cases of thyroid cancer of which only nine were fatal. The total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl might reach 4000, at most. Furthermore it denies any increase in the various pathologies of the population affected, and where an increase exists, it is not to be attributed to the radiation but to the poverty and psychological stress that these people are subjected to because of the “persistent myth of the presence of radiation that determines a paralysing fear and fatalism in the population affected”. As to the environmental contamination, it goes on to affirm that the levels of radiation, in most of the land contaminated by Chernobyl, have returned within normal levels, with the exception of specific zones around the power plant, and can again be inhabited. The last “scientific” conclusion of this study, since according to the results obtained the Chernobyl problem no longer exists, is that the governments of Belarus, the Ukraine and Russia should reduce the budget destined for compensation for the victims and the liquidation of the damages and the consequences of the incident.

The most evident contradictions of the agreement signed between the IAEA and the WHO, and consequently of their scientific reports, consist in the subversion of the very purpose of the WHO which is that of furnishing all of the information, advice and assistance in the field of health, and in the conflict of interest intimately bound up with its same function of the IAEA, given that an agency for the development and sponsorship of nuclear power certainly can’t tell the truth, which is that their “product” seriously and irremediably damages health and the environment.

In the literature hundreds and hundreds of scientific studies (1-236) exist realized by independent scientists and institutions that demonstrate the contrary of that which the joint IAEA and WHO studies affirm, but that which disproves these studies most of all, above all the last report that came out September 7, 2005, is unfortunately the evidence of the reality that, no matter how hard they try to conceal it, no one will ever succeed in cancelling.

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