In May 1928 Marie Curie, the famed discoverer of radium and double Nobel laureate, received a disturbing letter from an American journalist. It told of young women at a radium watch-dial plant in Orange, New Jersey, who were dying from necrosis of the jaw, a rare degenerative disease. The women would tip radium-laden brushes in their mouths, blithely ingesting this intensely radioactive substance--at levels more than 10,000 times those allowed under today's standards. Plant managers had told them that ingesting radium would enhance their vitality.

At the time, Madame Curie herself was paying dearly for her pioneering work. Reading the letter was not easy, as she suffered from radiation-induced cataracts and from painful radiation burns on her hands. True to form, she refused to accept that her discovery had anything to do with this tragedy and advised the women to eat calf's liver. By 1934 Curie was dead from severe bone marrow damage and America was experiencing its first industrial epidemic of radiation-induced diseases.

Madame Curie's denial of radiation dangers is emblematic of the legacy we now face as America's romance with the atom draws to a close. The once dynamic and sprawling US nuclear weapons program, which underwent spectacular growth in the past fifty years, is winding down, leaving behind a tragic health legacy that, once again, is borne by working people. In the next few weeks, Congress will decide whether to enact a federal compensation program for the 600,000 people who helped make our nuclear weapons.

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