The Rockefeller Foundation and its allies decided to argue that radiation produced genetic damage and that damage was unrepairable. Radiation damage just keeps building up. Therefore, the harm was proportional to the total dose, regardless of how rapidly or slowly that dose was incurred. This is like saying taking 365 tablets of aspirin at once is the same as taking 1 tablet per day for 365 days. This no repair hypothesis is called the Linear No Threshold model or LNT.

If LNT is correct, then the Banners could aggregate the tiny increases in dose rate due to test fallout over hemispherical populations and over decades to argue that Bomb testing was invisibly killing millions of people worldwide. The Foundation expertly (and unscrupulously) promoted LNT with all its resources.