Recent work by Dyer and Morfill has shown that satellite measurements of the diffuse cosmic X-ray spectrum made with crystal scintillators may include errors due to radioactive spallation products formed in the detector by inner belt and cosmic ray protons.

An estimate is made of the magnitude of this source of background for the various experimental situations and it is shown that apparent features at 40 keV and 1 MeV are likely to be due to radioactive decays in the instruments. A review is made of experiments covering the range 1 keV-100 MeV in order to ascertain whether a single exponent spectrum is capable of fitting the experimental results. The astrophysical implications of such a spectrum are briefly considered.

Suggestions are made for the location and correction for background of future experiments.