The alpha link.

Documentary examining the health risks arising from exposure to low-level radiation from alpha rays and showing how the record of cancer deaths among Nagasaki survivors, until recently used as a means of measuring radiation safety levels, was proved to be inadequate. Professor Bryn Bridges presents the programme which includes reports on work by Dr. Eric Wright (Medical Research Council Radiology Unit) who found that alpha- rays can cause mutations in the next generation and the late Prof. Martin Gardner (Southampton University) who made the controversial finding that the sperm of men working in nuclear plants and affected by alpha rays may have been pre-conceptually responsible for leukaemia in their children. A yet more insidious form of alpha-rays is radon gas, a form of natural radiation which occurs in concentrated pockets throughout Britain and is suspected of causing leukaemia and melanoma.