The following article is a book review of The Plutonium Files, by Eileen Welsome (Dial Press, 580 pp.). It goes into detail about the exploitation of U.S. citizens in medical experiments, without their consent. If ever there was evidence that the Federal republic is a police state operated according to proto-fascist methods, it's in this article. Horrified Americans recoil when told about the atrocities engaged in by the Nazi doctor Mengele, but the horrors committed under the aegis of the Federal republic of the United States by its white-coated doctors are equally as unacceptable. The fact that these atrocities have been committed in the name of the American people permanently dishonors them, making it impossible for a nation with as large a heart as America, to accept a form of government that is, at its root, heartless.

THE PLUTONIUM FILES

America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

By Eileen Welsome.
Review by Thomas Powers.

Of all the lies uttered by mendacious public servants during a century notorious for official deceit, perhaps none registers colder or more deliberate than the claim by Gen. Leslie Groves in a Senate hearing in November 1945 that radioactive poisoning can bring death "rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die." Which doctors, exactly, could have delivered this cheering news to the general who ran the Manhattan Project, created the atomic bomb and ended the war with Japan by destroying two cities and killing plus or minus 150,000 Japanese, mostly civilians?

Not Dr. Stafford Warren and Dr. Shields Warren (unrelated), who both went to Japan at Groves' behest to study the effects of radiation and recorded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki a devil's textbook of horrors - burns, bloody diarrhea, an inability of the bone marrow to continue making blood cells, a stripping of the epithelial layer of the gastrointestinal tract leading to dehydration and runaway internal infection and other equally ghastly conditions. Nor could the general have concluded that radiation afforded a "pleasant" death had he listened to the doctors who attended Harry Daghlian, a Los Alamos technician who stopped a runaway chain reaction with his hand during a nuclear experiment a week after the Japanese surrender. Soon afterward, he felt a "tingling sensation" in his hand, "tingling" being an oddly benign word to describe the terrible chain reaction set off within his body. Mercifully he lapsed into a coma, and within three weeks he died. (Oddly enough, at the height of the controversy over the development of nuclear power, proponents of nuclear power were going across the country swearing that no one had ever died from radiation! WFI Editor) A government check for $10,000 was given to Daghlian's family in exchange for release forms signed on the day he died that absolved the government of any responsibility for his death.

Clearly it was disingenuous for anyone connected to the Manhattan Project to pretend that radiation was not dangerous. Even before the atomic bomb was developed, scientists had considered using radiation as a weapon of war. J. Robert Oppenheimer told his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi in May 1943 that he didn't think it worth pursuing radiological warfare "unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men." Radiological weapons, as it turned out, were hard to deliver while bombs were easy and just as lethal. Most of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were from the blast and its heat, but thousands more died of radiation poisoning - a fact fully anticipated by bomb makers at Los Alamos.

So why did the general lie when he testified before the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy? The general lied because he feared that an impressionable public would oppose the creation of nuclear bombs once it grasped the horrors of the bomb's destructive effects and realized that we had crossed from the permissible to the impermissible in war. Groves did not want Americans to feel guilty about the manner of the victory over Japan, and he did not want them to reject in disgust a weapon of unprecedented power and utility. At the same time it is only fair to say that neither Groves nor Stafford Warren, who presided seriatim as chief doctor for the Manhattan Project, and Shields Warren, who served on the Atomic Energy Commission, really knew how dangerous various forms of radiation could be. Furthermore, they did not know how much radiation constituted a danger - the so-called "tolerance dose." To credit them, however, they did set out before the end of the war to learn all they could about the effects of radiation on the human body, through the usual methods of scientific inquiry: conducting experiments.

The dark history of the long research effort that followed is one of the two great secrets tightly held by the powers that be in the American bomb-making community; the other is how to ignite hydrogen in a hydrogen bomb. Fifty years after the experiments began, our knowledge of their fact and their extent has been greatly expanded by Eileen Welsome, a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico. In 1987, Welsome discovered a reference in an Air Force report on the disposal of radioactive animal carcasses. A public information officer at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque gave her a stack of documents and, on one, Welsome's "eye fell on a footnote describing a human plutonium experiment." But it took her a decade to expand this footnote into "The Plutonium Files," Welsome's effort to explain how these experiments were conceived, justified, conducted, financed and concealed.

When scientists started studying the lethal effects of radiation, they focused their attention on the element plutonium. Glen Seaborg, who discovered plutonium, said, "It is fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts." What initially surprised scientists at Los Alamos who were using plutonium in the construction of the atomic bomb was how quickly, despite discreet handling of the material, it showed up in the laboratory's waste water. In addition, early tests of lab workers' feces and urine revealed plutonium contamination in levels that were "just frightfully high." Obviously, it was pernicious stuff. Laboratory experiments proved their worse suspicions: Plutonium injected into rats migrated to their bones; breathed in as an aerosol it lodged in the alveoli of the rats' lungs. But how did plutonium behave in humans? What was the "tolerance dose" and how could it be reliably measured?

To answer these questions, 18 human subjects - all of them under medical care but none of them informed of what was being done to them - were injected with plutonium. (Americans injected with plutonium, by Americans. WFI Editor) These experiments were conducted between April 1945, a month before the end of the war in Europe, and July 1947 - at a time when no one believed that plutonium promised medical benefit. In the files about these experiments obtained by Welsome under the Freedom of Information Act, all reference to the identity of subjects and doctors had been deleted in order to protect the privacy of the participants. (Deleting the identities of the principals served more to obscure the Federal government's role in the experiments, rather than protect any of the participants; the day when the government should have protected the individuals, having long since passed, since the day when they allowed those Americans to be used like lab rats. WFI Editor) Someone failed, however, to delete a reference to Italy, Texas, the hometown of a subject known as CAL-3. When Welsome called the City Hall, the woman who answered the phone recognized CAL-3 from the bare facts. "You're looking for Elmer Allen," she said. "But he died a year ago. Do you want his wife's number?"

Eventually, by patient detective work, Welsome identified all but one of the 18 patients in the plutonium experiments and uncovered numerous other efforts to study the effects of radiation on human subjects. The research began just as the world was learning about experiments conducted by Nazi doctors during World War II, and although the so-called Nuremburg code prohibited such abuses, it only made American authorities more cautious and secretive. The phrase "informed consent" was coined in 1947 by Carroll Wilson, general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, but no effort was made to put the concept into practice. A 1953 set of guidelines for conducting human experiments, prepared for the secretary of defense was never circulated among officials below the level of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Among the subjects whom Welsome cites, none of them informed in any meaningful sense: 829 expectant mothers given "cocktails" of radioactive isotopes of iron between 1945 and 1947 by a prenatal clinic at the Vanderbilt University Hospital. 74 boys at the Fernald State School near Boston, a kind of cross between a reformatory and a hospital for disabled youths, who were fed radioactive iron and calcium mixed into milk and oatmeal between 1946 and 1953. "You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," one of them remembered. 131 men in the Oregon and Washington state prison systems whose testicles were exposed to as much as 600 rads of ionizing radiation between 1963 and 1971. At the conclusion of the experiments, each man was paid $100 to undergo a vasectomy. 90 cancer patients, most of them black, who were exposed in the Cincinnati General Hospital to levels of total body irradiation so high that the exposure alone may have killed 19 of them. Thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen exposed to radiation during above-ground atomic testing to assure Congress, the public and the Pentagon that the bomb could "safely" be used in war.

This long but incomplete list gives a sense of the magnitude of the official effort but barely hints at the torment and injury suffered by the victims, presented in rich human detail by Welsome in a compelling narrative of what happens when science and morality are "wrapped in the flag." (It's a cop-out to blame the flag, an inanimate object, for the faults of men, especially men caught up in a political system that was designed by slavemasters to preserve the status quo. The republic is a feelingless, mechanical corporate machine. WFI Editor) Welsome's portrait of leading officials are vivid and subtle, wonderfully capturing the deep moral ambivalence of men like Shields Warren, who put the kibosh on plans to expose prisoners serving life sentences to total body irradiation but in other cases found ways to say yes or look the other way. There are few heroes in this book; one who deserves special mention is Audrey Holliday, a Washington state official who learned of the experiments on prisoners in July 1969 and vigorously protested the exploitation of "captive populations" as if "they are already destroyed as human beings."

Far more common were researchers who told Welsome or official investigators that they had lost their files, couldn't remember who gave the orders, were out of the room when injections were given, didn't know if consent had been obtained, believed subjects were "hopelessly" or "terminally" ill and insisted that all those "premature deaths" would have happened anyway. "I was appalled and shocked," said President Clinton's first Energy secretary, Hazel O'Leary, when she learned of the experiments in 1993. "It gave me an ache in my gut and heart." But the advisory committee appointed by Clinton to investigate eventually suffered a failure of nerve, in Welsome's view. Its findings, which were released in 1995, she believes were watered down, explained away, filled with excuses, muffled by evidentiary doubts and uncertainties. (The same thing happened in post-Nazi Germany. After World War II you could travel all through Germany, and never find anyone who admitted to having been in the Nazi Party. WFI Editor) No official was willing to call "premature death" a euphemism for homicide. There were no prosecutions, nobody was fired, lawsuits were mostly settled out of court, many questions were answered ambiguously.

Did the doctors learn anything remotely worth the suffering inflicted? Apparently not, because the doctors, apparently burdened by their consciences, were reluctant to follow up their experiments or publish their findings. The two main things the doctors most wanted to learn - the "tolerance dose" for radiation and how to measure the level of human exposure - remain mysteries. Most troubling, perhaps more than the experiments, is the arrogance of officials and scientists willing to lie about important matters of public safety for reasons of official convenience. In 1948, engineers at the Hanford reactor in Washington State refused to reveal dangerous levels of radiation discovered in fish and ground water "until reasonable solutions to these problems are available." Keeping the reactors going was the highest priority in this case, not the safety of the public.

A few years later, the Atomic Energy Commission, hoping to move atomic testing from the Pacific back to the American Southwest for reasons of convenience, admitted "how shockingly little" it knew about the dangers of fallout. In the end, Shields Warren decided to issue no warnings to the downwind public - to stay indoors, for example - because any recommendations at all would have made plain the one thing the commission was at greatest pains to conceal: that nuclear tests were dangerous.

If the government of the republic lied about the danger of nuclear testing, can we trust it to tell us the truth about acid rain, global warming or the safety of deep storage for nuclear waste? The answer, unmistakably suggested by Welsome's book, is no. We must answer such questions on our own.

SOURCE: Excerpted from the 2 January, 2000, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, Book Review section, from an article entitled, "Die Hard." Thomas Powers most recently authored "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb." Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

At the very time that the world was discovering the horror of Nazi Germany, American scientists were conducting medical experiments that constituted crimes against humanity. Americans fought a World War to end fascism, without realizing that fascism was virtually invented in America by the Founding Fathers. The Founders were all slaveowners, and the one protection they built right into the Constitution of 1787, the charter of the republic, was that the Federal Government would be responsible for returning fugitive slaves, seeking freedom, back to their bondage. This quintessential police function defines the republic the Founders invented, which we are saddled with, which must be abandoned if we are to guarantee to future generations the freedom our ancient heritage entitles us to. Until that time, we shall continue to hear the tales of dissolution: of police abuse, of social devolution, of corruption, of the abuse of power by presidents, congressmen and senators, who believe that their power is absolute, because it is held by the iron grip of a police state.)