"Mortal danger: forbidden to set foot here," read the police signs around the Haanschoten family's modest little house in the Netherlands town of Putten (pop. 12,000), south of the Zuider Zee. To enforce the order, barbed wire was strung around three sides of the house and its yard, and police mounted 24-hour guard. A team of radiation experts worked with a scintillation counter over every square foot of the grounds. The counter registered 60 times the normal (background) radioactivity. Technicians, looking like spacemen in white rubber suits with protective masks and gloves, used long-handled shovels to put radioactive matter away in...
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