Defoliation

By Peter Stoler

THE PENDULUM AND THE TOXIC CLOUD by Thomas Whiteside

Yale University; 205 pages

$15 hardcover, $4.95 paperback

As the reception of The China Syndrome makes clear, America's newest nightmare concerns an apocalypse of nuclear accidents. But many of the same audiences seem blissfully unconcerned about chemical accidents, even though some compounds may retain their toxic strength longer than radioactive trash. Worse, many people are willing to live with large amounts of one of these chemicals, a compound called 2,3,7,8 tetrachlo-rodibenzo-p-dioxin, also known as dioxin. The attitude may prove suicidal. A common contaminant of several widely used herbicides, dioxin is so deadly that a few ounces could poison whole communities.

The U.S. Government, which still allows sprays to be used on rangelands and rice fields, is ambivalent about dioxin. Thomas Whiteside, a British-born journalist who writes regularly in The New Yorker, is not. Whiteside's early articles on dioxin started a move that led, back in 1970, to a ban on the practice of spraying herbicides containing the substance on the jungles of Viet Nam. His newest book may help to create a climate for domestic restrictions. Such action seems appropriate. Everything that is known about dioxin, associated with skin eruptions, liver damage, cancers, mental problems, miscarriages and birth defects, suggests that it may be even better at killing animals and people than at killing weeds.

As The Pendulum and the Toxic Cloud documents, not enough action has yet been taken: "The regulatory process that is supposed to govern the use of the herbicide can be described as almost stalled, having been impeded by disagreement among scientists, by the determination of the chemical manufacturing industry to continue production and sale of the herbicide, by bureaucratic backing and filling . . . and by the Government's own indecisiveness." Nor has there been much concern about the 1976 catastrophe that ruined the Italian town of Seveso, or about discovery of the poison in a chemical soup found in a landfill near Niagara Falls, N.Y. -- and in the bodies of nearby residents.

The Pendulum does not create a soothing rhythm in the mind; it sounds with the terrible urgency of a time bomb. The explosion is near, says Whiteside, the message is clear. The U.S. has already seen what dioxin has done to Viet Nam. There is no earthly reason for Americans to keep bringing the war home.

--Peter Stoler

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