Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnews!military
From: fiddler@Sun.COM (Steve Hix)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Shielding Nukes
Keywords: not much help
Message-ID: <8593@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 26 Jul 89 02:22:13 GMT
References: <8530@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Lines: 28
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: fiddler@Sun.COM (Steve Hix)

In article <8530@cbnews.ATT.COM>, arf@chinet.chi.il.us (Jack Schmidling) writes:
>  
> Spencer says: 
> >Sigh.  Warheads are not reactors.   You probably wouldn't want to spend ten  
> years sleeping in the same room with them if you could avoid it, but the odds  
> that normal occupational exposure would harm you are slim. 
>  
> ARF says: 
>  
> Watches with illuminous dials are not reactors either but lots of women died  
> very horrible deaths from painting the dials.  Frankly, I wouldn't sleep with  
> a watch, much less a nuke. 

The women (and occasional man) who had the job of painting luminous watch
dial and eventually died as a result, didn't get clobbered by being near
the luminous paint, they died because they had a habit of licking the
brushes before painting on the next marker.  Getting the brush set to a
fine point that way also let them ingest the radium compounds in the paint.

Do many people working around nuclear warheads have a tendency to lick
them?

(To be more direct, the two situations are not as comparable as they might
look at first glance.)