The Plutonium Files Read Free Page A

produce something good for humankind, possibly even a cure for cancer. Radioisotopes produced in the Manhattan Project’s nuclear reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were shipped to qualified scientists throughout the world. Over the years the “radioisotope distribution program,” which began partially as a public relations ploy to show thatthe bomb builders were willing to share information with civilian outsiders, grew by leaps and bounds.
    Some radioisotope research conducted by civilian scientists contributed to a better understanding of how the human body works and to the development of new diagnostic tools to detect cancer and other diseases. But many studies were repetitive, poorly conceived, and frequently the subjects did not know what they were being given. Like the plutonium experiment, which was flawed in design and led to some erroneous conclusions, they were not just immoral science, they were bad science.
    The Army, Navy, and Air Force also funded numerous experiments designed to help them learn more about how to fight effectively on the nuclear battlefield. What were the effects of shock, blast, and radiation on ships, planes, tanks, and, most critically, men? Were there efficient ways to decontaminate men and machinery? As the narrator of one recently declassified film about the testing program explained in 1952, “We’re trying every angle and every gadget we can to find out what really happens when an atomic bomb kicks out fiercely at the world around it.” 8
    Radiation experiments on soldiers began in 1951, the year atomic bomb tests began in Nevada. They continued until 1962, when above-ground tests were halted. Military troops were used in psychological tests, decontamination experiments, flashblindness studies, research involving flights through radioactive clouds, and studies aimed at measuring radioisotopes in their body fluids.
    Many of the military experiments also were repetitive and poorly planned. Thomas Shipman, the Los Alamos scientist who guided the lab’s health division through much of the Cold War, complained in 1952 that some of the armed forces’ studies appeared to be the “same old chestnuts being pulled out of the fire again and again.” 9 Five years later Shipman was still complaining about the military’s haphazard involvement. “From past experience we know all too well that everybody wants to get into the act. 10 And all too frequently we find within [the] military establishment anxious souls who have had no opportunity to familiarize themselves with what has already been done.”
    The researchers were a curious blend of spook, scientist, and soldier. Many were physicians who swore by the Hippocratic Oath, yet were willing to administer to their unwitting patients everything from radioactive arsenic to radioactive zinc. Those who were motivated by patriotism, especially scientists who had seen the ravages of two world wars, firmly believed the development and testing of nuclear weapons was essentialto maintaining the security of the United States. Shrewd and sophisticated, they were preoccupied with public relations and obsessed with the fear that someone would file a lawsuit against the Manhattan Project or its successors for some imagined illness arising from radiation exposure. Negative publicity and lawsuits, they worried, would jeopardize the nuclear weapons program.
    They downplayed the amount of radioactive pollution emanating from the bomb factories and the health risks of fallout, reasoning that a few extra leukemias, bone cancers, or genetic mutations were an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect in the struggle against communism. “People have got to learn to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout,” said Willard Libby, a chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for developing the radiocarbon dating technique. 11
    When I returned to Italy, Texas, in August of 1997, ten years had elapsed since I found the footnote describing the