Humans Used for Radiation Experiments: A Shameful Chapter in US History
CityWatch Vol 11 Issue 36
Pub: May 3, 2013
Written by John LaForge
EXPOSE REVISITED - This year marks the 20th anniversary of the declassification of top-secret studies, the “Human Radiation Experiments,” done over a period of 30 years, in which the US conducted radiation experiments on as many as 20,000 vulnerable US citizens.
Victims included civilians, prison inmates, federal workers, hospital patients, pregnant women, infants, developmentally disabled children and military personnel — most of them powerless, poor, sick, elderly or terminally ill. Eileen Welsome’s 1999 exposé The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War details “the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of men, women, and even children to nameless specimens.”
The program employed industry and academic scientists who used their hapless patients or wards to see the immediate and short-term effects of radioactive contamination — with everything from plutonium to radioactive arsenic. The human subjects were mostly poisoned without their knowledge or consent.
An April 17, 1947 memo by Col OG Haywood of the Army Corps of Engineers, reported by The Washington Post on Dec. 16, 1994, explained why the studies were classified: “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits.”
In one Vanderbilt University study, 829 pregnant women were unknowingly fed radioactive iron. In another, 188 children were given radioactive iron-laced lemonade. Detailed by a 1986 report of the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, from 1963 to 1971, 67 inmates in Oregon and 64 prisoners in Washington had their testicles targeted with X-rays to see what doses made them sterile.
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