In mid-November 1993, after six years of research, 42-year old Eileen Welsome produced a gripping series of articles examining the life and death of five people — a railroad porter, a house painter, a carpenter, a politician and a homemaker — used as human guinea pigs by the US Department of Energy. Appearing in the Albuquerque Tribune, a newspaper in sparsely populated New Mexico with a 35,000 circulation, the articles sparked interest in the experiments among major national newspapers.
On December 7, 1993, Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary ordered her department to open the classified files of the projects using human beings as guinea pigs it had conducted since the war. She was unaware of the enormity of the program and the legacy of despair it had left behind. She ordered 32 million secret documents to be reviewed for their release to the public and pledged to compensate the victims. She thought she was alluding to about only 800 people, mostly mentally retarded or terminally ill, but her department got 10,000 calls in the first week.
‘As you may know, the Department [of Energy] is committed to making as much radiation research information as possible available to the public. To this end, a major project has been initiated, Department wide, to identify relevant documents.’ So wrote Dennis B. Diggins, Chief of Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts Branch (DOE) to me, enclosing an index listing the programs and projects involving human testing. The index itself runs to 150 pages!
Studies of the effect of plutonium on humans dating back to 1942 were conducted by the DOE on children as well as adults. Talbot, Newton and Warner wrote their report of findings after injecting two healthy men with plutonium; Toohey, Cacic, Oldham and Larsen used intravenous injection of plutonium to study the concentration of plutonium in the hair;(1) and after administering plutonium to their victims, Moss and Gauter tried to study the ‘additional short-term plutonium urinary excretion’.(2) Others exposed their victims directly to plutonium(3); and still other scientists, after intoxicating their victims with radioactive material, conducted autopsies to study the plutonium concentration in the tissue.(4) All these tests had the support and funding of the DOE.
They used hospital patients
In some instances their victims were chosen from hospital patients. Between 1953 and 1957 William Sweet and his associates at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, injected at least 11 terminally ill cancer patients with uranium-235. According to the Albuquerque Tribune, at least six of the patients were not about to die and had been diagnosed wrongly. Furthermore, two were suffering from conditions disrupting the metabolic pathways the investigators were examining.
Albert Stevens, a house painter from Healsburg, California, was believed to be suffering from terminal stomach cancer. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with what was described later as ‘many times the so-called lethal textbook dose’ of plutonium. On May 18 a biopsy showed that he suffered from an ulcer and not cancer. In July 1947, Elmer Allen, an African-American railroad porter was believed to be suffering from bone cancer. According to records, he was perhaps the last victim to be injected with plutonium.
A report dated 29 April 1946 describes how the Navy injected two hospital patients with a radioactive substance to determine a technique for measuring the rate at which human blood and organs would rid themselves of radioactive material. Over a period of weeks in 1945, blood, faeces and urine samples indicated the speed of discharge. By placing a Geiger counter in the vicinity of the liver, gall bladder, thyroid and brain, the researchers tried to discover a crude estimate of how much of the chemical had lodged in these places.
They used pregnant women
In another series of experiments during the 1940s, pregnant women were given cocktails of radioactive material in order to study their effects on the fetus. The Department of Health conducted tests which involved feeding more than 800 pregnant women a ‘cocktail’ laced with radioactive iron isotope in order to chart how it is absorbed in the body. The tests were conducted at Vanderbilt University’s free prenatal clinic in Nashville, funded partly by the Tennessee Department of Health. In March 1951 a report in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology details the iron absorption in pregnant women — but fails to mention monitoring the long-term effects of radiation on pregnant women or their children. Vanderbilt officials conceded that they don’t know if the women were told of the possible effects of radiation or even if they knew they were being given radioactive pills. All the records were destroyed in 1970. (A follow-up study published in 1969 in the American Journal of Epidemiology concluded that three children born to women who took the pills during these tests probably died.)
Radiological munitions
Dr. Joseph G. Hamilton, a neurologist at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco, and his colleague Dr. Robert S. Stone, continuously encouraged the Atomic Energy Authority, the DOE’s predecessor, to use radioactive material on humans. In April 1946 Hamilton injected plutonium into a boy with terminal bone cancer, and, despite the Army’s advice in December to immediately stop this work, sent the Army a secret report on radiological warfare. In it he described how radioactive material could be used as a weapon of destruction, either on targeted individuals or communities as a whole. ‘The inhalation of 10 millicuries of the unseparated fission product mixture is estimated to be a mimimum lethal dose for the average adult human. It is presumed that lethal injury will arise in the main through pulmonary damage rather than bone marrow destruction. The oral ingestion of at last 100 millcuries of such a mixture would be required to produce lethal injury.'(5) To eliminate an entire community Hamilton suggested: ‘One of the principal strategic uses of fission products will probably be against the civilian population of large cities. It can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population.'(6)
Hamilton made a number of proposals for the elimination of large populations, among them ‘fission product aerosols to subject urban populations to fission production poisoning by inhalation.'(7) In 1949, the Army conducted the first of six tests of radiological munitions at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, as part of the ‘pilot experiments on a fairly large scale’ of Hamilton’s aerosol idea. (Hamilton chaired the panel of experts who advised the Army on the tests.) In 1950 he wrote to the Atomic Energy Commission about the possibility of finding healthy human volunteers to inhale near-lethal doses of radioactive aerosols, admitting that his experiments have ‘a little of the Buchenwald touch’. He considered the ‘contamination of a very small reservoir by a large amount of [radio]active material’ but concluded that ‘the effectiveness of such a procedure would not warrant the use of the large amount of material required.'(8) He suggested that such programs should be carried out by the Chemical Warfare Service with the collaboration of other interested branches of the army and navy.
Despite Hamilton and Stone’s Mengelism, in 1964 Dr Stone was awarded the AEC’s citation for ‘inspired effective and pioneering leadership’. (Hamilton died in 1957 of a rare form of leukaemia, almost certainly caused by exposure to radiation, at the age of 49.)
The DOE involved other Department of Defence components in its research, and shared their findings with the Department of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and even NASA and the Veterans Administration. Each of these departments had, and still have, keen military interest in what they term Radiological Warfare (RW).(9)
They used school children
An Atomic Energy Commission document discovered by Sandra Marlow, lists more than 100 sites in the Bay state, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Waltham’s Fernald State School and several Boston hospitals, where human tests were conducted. The tests conducted on the children in Fenrald School in Waltham MA are particularly alarming. In 1947 17 retarded teenagers at the school were given radioactive contaminated meals in order to trace the amount of radioactive iron absorbed in the body. Between 1954 and 1956 scientists affiliated with MIT Radioactive Centre fed radio-tagged milk to 32 mentally retarded children at the school. (Team leader Robert Harris believed that such experiments would best succeed if the subjects were in a confined location and under medical supervision.) Austin LaRocque and Charles Dyer, both former students at the Fernald State School, told a panel headed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Edward Merkey that at that time they could not read or write and the researchers failed to obtain the full consent of them or their guardians.
From December 1962 to April 1963, Harvard researchers, sponsored by the US Public Health Service, fed radioactive iodide to 760 mentally retarded children, some as young as 1 year old, at the Wrentham State School. (It is unclear how much radioactive substance was given to them or whether any of their parents or guardians were informed.) The tests were to determine the ‘minimal effective doses’ required to suppress thyroid. Such tests had only one purpose: they would aid in the development of counter-measures against fall-out from a nuclear bomb explosion.
They used entire communities
At times entire communities were the unwitting subjects of these experiments. In response to my request concerning the programs, projects and tests using humans with the aim of turning radioactive fallout into a weapon, the DOE’s Albuquerque Field Operation Office informed me that, ‘Los Alamos conducted the RaLa [Radioactive Lanthanum] open-air experiments from 1944 through 1961. The purpose of the program was to test weapon designs using conventional high explosives. Often referred to as hydrodynamics tests or simply hydrotests, the RaLa experiments were critical to designing and developing nuclear weapons.'(10) By the end of 1946, 71 RaLa experiments had been being conducted in Bayo Canyon. In 1950 the Air Force Cambridge Laboratory, using a B-17 bomber, conducted four atmospheric tracking tests of radioactive emissions in New Mexico. Sensors were used to measure the concentration of radioactive material in the clouds as well as the radiological activity in the atmosphere. Communities living in the area were not informed of the tests. According to the DOE’s document, it would have taken at least two weeks before the radioactivity would have died down in the atmosphere. Many records pertaining to this particular program, including those generated by other Department of Defense organs as part of their coooperation with DOE, remain classified.
They used prisoners…..
In another series of experiments, civilians as well as military personnel were exposed to body radiation tests. Between 1963 and 1976 Carl Heller of the University of Oregon and Pacific Northwest Foundation exposed the testicles of 67 prisoners at Oregon State prison to ionizing radiation. Similar experiments were conducted by C. Alvin Paulsen (Heller’s protege) of the University of Washington, on the testicles of 64 inmates at Washington State prison between 1963 and 1970 in order to test the effects of radiation on fertility.
…..and veterans
According to documents the US government carried out radiation experiments in at last 33 Veterans hospitals during the Cold War. Ironically, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, ‘the purpose of the experiments was to determine the effects of radiation on military [personnel] and to aid in diagnoses and treatment of some patients.’ The VA eventually acknowledged in December 1993 that military patients in at last 14 facilities were victims of these experiments.
Reynolds Electrical and Engineering, a long time contractor to the Department of Energy, was ordered to provide their records for review and declassification. After denying any knowledge about ‘any human experimentation at the NTS [Nevada Test Site]’ with the exception of ‘instances in which the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would spray their field in Area 15 with tritium’, D. L . Fraser, the General Manager in his letter of December 7, 1993, to Bruce Church, Assistant Manager for Environment, Safety, Security and Health of the Nevada Operations Office of the DOE, finally conceded that ‘In the area of human experimentation, several types of studies were found which merit discussion.'(11)
Fraser attached several categories of records with his letter. Attachment 2 included documents on plutonium and uranium studies, funded by the DOE with no direct participation by the Nevada Test Site. Attachment 3 included study reports funded by the DOE, conducted by the University of Chicago and the Argone Cancer Research Hospital on samples of fall-out from 4500 feet east of the detonations of the Small Boy Event (nuclear test).(12)
Attachment 4 was of particular interest, relating to Special Military Projects. ‘These were psychological studies which occurred at the Nevada Test Site.’ The reports such as ‘Relation between Information Gain and Attitude Change’: a study of participants in Exercise Desert Rock V (A-bomb program) by Berton Wingrad, March 1954. These included studies conducted on several occasions during which military participants apparently volunteered to view a detonation at certain distances from ground zero. On one occasion during the Upshot-Knothole series of nuclear tests in 1953, the military subjects were told to stand only 2000 yards from ground zero. In another experiment during Operation Blumbbob in 1957, five subjects were stationed directly below the point of detonation of the high altitude JOHN Event (nuclear test).
Oscar Rosen of Salem, commander of the National Association of Atomic Veterans, estimates that 450,000 to 500,000 military personnel were exposed to radiation at nuclear tests. In addition, hundreds of thousands of civilians were within 50 miles of nuclear tests in Nevada or intentional radiation releases at Hanford Reservation in Washington and Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.
Another two interesting pieces were included in attachment 7. The first was a memorandum by Dr Charles L. Dunham, dated May 13, 1966, titled ‘Use of Human Volunteers in Biomedical Research’; the second was a letter from Lloyd Bruton to the AEC, dated March 26, 1953, in which he offers himself to be used as a ‘human guinea pig’. Attachment 8 also included the Stanford Research Institute’s involvement in human testing under the title ‘Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures’.
Contrary to the impression created by the DOE, these tests were not just carried out in the 1940s and 50s. As late as 1973 federal scientists exposed prisoners in Oregon and Washington State to increased doses of radiation to determine the risks faced by a high-radiation environment. Argus Makhijiani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland, suggests that ‘There is plenty of evidence that some of these tests were designed to give the US an offensive radiological capability.’
The continuing revelations emerging from declassified documents of the US Government’s use of human guinea pigs in radiation experiments provide a gut-wrenching illustration of how a presumably enlightened, law-abiding government can turn on its own population and sink into barbarity under the shroud of secrecy that is part of the national security state.
The subject is now being looked into by a White House task force. Despite Secretary O’Leary’s pledge to compensate the victims, in a ruling on February 23 the Supreme Court stated that even when someone’s constitutional rights are violated by the federal agencies, these agencies are not liable for any compensation. ‘If we are to recognise a direct action for damages against federal agencies, we would be creating a potentially enormous financial burden for the federal government’, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.
And did they do some of it in Britain?
‘Department of Energy’s focus on these studies is overly restrictive, if they are trying to obtain a full picture’, says Daniel Burnstein, president of the Centre for Atomic Radiation Studies.(13) The DOE also made several shipments of isotopes to other countries for research. Although it is unclear to what use they were put, AEC documents show isotopes were sent to Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, South Africa, the UK and Uraguay.
In response to my inquiry, the British Atomic Weapons Establishment denied Britain’s participation in any radiation tests using humans.(14) But the Albuquerque Operations Office of the DOE have provided evidence to the contrary. In their released index of ‘Human Studies Project Team Reports’ they list ‘United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority Research Group Report: Studies of the Toxicology of Plutonium’.(15)
This one has only just begun.
Notes
- Toohey, Cacic, Oldham and Larsen, ‘The Concentration of Plutonium in Hair Following Intravenous Injection’. Health Physics, vol 40: pp. 881-886, 1981. DOE Albuquerque Field Office Record.
- Moss and Gautter, ‘Additional Short-term Plutonium Urinary Exertion Data from the 1945-47 Plutonium Injection Studies’ in Proceedings of the Department of Energy Workshop on Radiobioassay and Internal Dosimetry, Albuquerque, New Mexico, January 20-22, 1986.
- Voltz, Stebbings, Hempelman, Haxton and Tork, ‘Studies on Persons Exposed to Plutonium’. International Atomic Energy Authority, SM-224508, 13-17 March 1978.
- Fox, Tietjen, McInroy, ‘Statistical Analysis of a Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory Study of Plutonium in US Autopsy’ Health Physics, Vol 39 pp. 877-892, 1980.
- ‘Radiological warfare(s)’: From Joseph G. Hamilton MD to Colonel K.D. Nicholas, 31 December, 1946, p. 3.
- Ibid. p. 4
- Ibid. p. 5
- Ibid. p. 5
- In their letter of February 16, 1994, the Office of the Command Judge Advocate, US Army, informed me that my request for further records on this subject (human radiation experiments) has been passed to a higher command.
- Bayo Canyon/The RaLa Program — record released to author on April 8, 1994.
- Record released to author by DOE, Washington, on March 9, 1994.
- LeRoy, Rust and Hasterlik, ‘The Consequences of Ingestion by Man of Real and Simulated Fallout’. Health Physics, Vol 12, pp. 449-473.
- ‘Records hint at US role in worldwide radiation tests,’ Nick Tate, Boston Herald, 24 January, 1994.
- Atomic Weapons Establishment, letter of 9 February, 1994 to author. AEW further informed the author that ‘We have consulted the Ministry of Defence who are the custodians of much of our early history, and they have confirmed this’ — i.e. that no radiation tests involving humans were conducted.
- It was initially held by the DOE Albuquerque Operation Office, New Mexico, and was made available on 2 March, 1994.