A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (23 page)

7. NOTE: the IG Survey of MKULTRA was handed to xxxxxxxx after the meeting for his use in redrafting the charter.

[Initials]

J. S. Earman
Inspector General

JSE:cm

Part II contains research and documentation of additional experiments that may have already touched your lives. I felt it imperative that I include a narrative of the experiments performed on our Servicemen and women, prisoners, and patients in our hospitals. Many of these people will never know why they suffer a variety of debilitating diseases without this knowledge. In some cases surviving relatives of those who died as a result of these experiments may at last be able to understand what happened to their loved ones. In still other cases, offspring who have been born with birth defects, may find some answers.

Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments said:

“That based on interviews, some tentative conclusions may be drawn regarding the ethical milieu of medical research in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. In the absence of an established code of conduct, other influences guided investigator behavior. Some perhaps caught up in the excitement of research or the desire to advance their career, used patients as subjects of investigation without their knowledge or consent. Others relied on the power and prestige of their position to convince subjects to participate even when benefit was questionable or nonexistent, and even in the absence of complete information.”
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How many of you had to pay the price for this type of thinking?

Radiation Experiments:

Most people occasionally stumble over the truth, but pick themselves up and continue on as if nothing had ever happened.

Winston Churchill

On February 10, 1995,the
New York Times
reported that “about 9,000 Americans including children and newborns were used in 154 human radiation tests” sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, with additional tests being conducted by other governmental agencies. Subsequent reports released since that time suggest that the experiments and their impacts on humans was far greater than originally indicated.

In military studies of total body irradiation from 1951 to 1972, approximately 500 people with cancer were exposed to radiation over their entire bodies. According to Eileen Welsome in
The Plutonium Files
, some patients received large single blasts of radiation, while others were exposed to repeated, low dosages. Records indicate that the radiation caused excruciating pain and led to the premature deaths of a number of patients.
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Welsome worked tirelessly for five years to obtain information on these experiments through Freedom of Information files.

Internal Manhattan Project memoranda indicate that high-level policy makers knew of the potential danger to human subjects in radiation experiments as early as 1944. A number of what were considered to be overriding concerns, including a fear that scientists in the former Soviet Union were conducting similar experiments, resulted
in a decision to proceed on a secret basis despite the dangers to the human subjects.
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In response to the 1995 report by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), the White House released a report detailing the Clinton Administration’s planned actions with recommendations and their implementation by the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group (IWG).
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This report detailed the steps the US Government would take to finally “right the wrongs of the past inflicted on unknowing citizens.” The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was charged with investigating these experiments and determining how scientific and ethical standards were observed in these activities, and was given access to the records of all relevant federal agencies. Unfortunately, in many cases they did not “Right the Wrongs of the Past.”

Deliberate Releases of Radiated Materials

The Advisory Committee’s research acknowledges that government-sponsored experiments involving the exposure of human subjects to potentially dangerous levels of radiation were far more common than had been believed. Between 1948 and 1952, they included at least 13 deliberate releases of radiated materials into the atmosphere near populated areas to study fallout patterns and the rate of radioactive decay of atmospherically released particles. Initial reports also indicate that, while high-level officials were aware of the dangers and the ethical considerations involved, there was a consistent lack of effective regulation governing administration of the tests.

What the Advisory Committee does not mention is that there was global fallout from over 500 tests in the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere between 1952-63. 150MT of fission yield. Most of these tests were carried out at sites far from the U.S., primarily in the south Pacific at Bikini and
Enewetok or in the Soviet Union. Most of the yield was from multi-megaton thermonuclear tests where 80% of the debris was injected into the stratosphere and 20% injected into the troposphere.
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Between 1952 and 1962 atmospheric tests were conducted in Nevada and the Pacific. Los Alamos scientists fired Bravo during March 1954. The blast size and amount of radioactive fallout were far greater than planned. Bravo fallout contaminated 7,000 square miles, some of it with very high radiation. Fallout descended upon the military and scientific taskforce conducting the test series, Marshallese islanders, and the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon.
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In San Diego in 1955 during Operation Wigwam, a thirty-kiloton bomb was exploded underwater off the coast. During Operation Argus three bombs were detonated above the South Atlantic Ocean. Some 35 nuclear devices
were detonated at and near the test site, as well as in Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico, and Mississippi as part of the Plowshare Program.
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Human Research at the Bomb Tests
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In 1946 the United States conducted Operation Crossroads, the first peacetime nuclear weapons tests before an audience of worldwide press and visiting dignitaries at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands.

Beginning with the 1946 Bikini tests, experiments with living things became a staple of bomb tests. At Operation Crossroads animals were penned on the decks of target ships to study the effects of radiation. In the 1948 Sandstone series at the Marshall Islands Eniwetok Atoll, seeds, grains, and fungi were added.

Tom Smith’s testimony before the Interagency Working Group left little else to be said. “I’m an atomic veteran. I’ve been to 17 shots in Eniwetok and I would like to be a little bit self-serving. I have suffered from so many maladies that you could not write them all down. I have to go to the computer to figure them out. I’ve had 25 major operations and I mean major. The Veterans Department or the VA says that I did not get enough radiation to cause any of this. There is no history in my family of diabetes. There is no history in my family of degenerative disk disease. There’s no history in my family of liver disease. There is no history in my family for anything that I have. I have a picture here I showed the Colonel earlier. This is one of three underwater shots. We were so close we received damage to our ship. However, we were not close enough to be radiated? And I would like the panel to see it and anyone else who would be interested in taking a look at it. It’s an official copy of an Air Force photograph. This ship in the foreground is a liberty ship and was used as a target ship. It had been used at numerous tests. It was alongside my ship for repairs and for equipment to be put on. After this particular shot it was too hot to use as a test ship any longer; so what we had to do is go down into the ship and cut holes in the bulkheads between the sections, so the water would equalize when we sank it. And then they talk about dose reconstruction. How can you do dose reconstruction when people were everywhere? When Orville Kelly died he was stationed on Jap 10 Island.
^lx
Jap 10 Island was right next to Eniwetok Island and after Orville was stationed there, they made it an R&R station. That’s where we went to go swimming, drink beer, and play around; and that was the station that Orville Kelly received his total dose and he died of multiple myeloma.”

Included in a 1994 report
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is a study on the “Attenuation of 1.2 Mev gamma radiation by Soviet and U.S. Army Chemical and Biological Defense Command.” The report states, “From a presently undetermined date until 1953, researchers in the Ordnance Corps at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD and the Army Chemical & Biological Defense Command, MD, studied the shielding capability of certain Soviet and U.S. military vehicles and U.S. rail equipment against gamma radiation, as well as decontamination procedures. Active duty military personnel participated in the study. The contamination was produced by placing 800 cobalt-60 pellets, 1/8 of an inch in diameter and 1/8th of an inch long contained in steel capsules two feet apart, over an area 160 feet in length and twenty feet wide. Dosage rates at selected sitting positions were measured with live troops riding over contamination in certain vehicles. Results of the research are undetermined to date.

Military personnel exposed to radiation in a 1957 detonation of the atomic bomb in Nevada were pilots and soldiers in front row trenches. This experiment was code-named “Hood,” and those involved were told they would be guilty of treason if they talked about this project. After the test some men in the platoon found cages and fenced enclosures, which contained animals burned almost beyond recognition. Robert Carter and Israel Torres were just two of several men present during the tests who saw humans in handcuffs chained to fences. The soldiers who spoke of seeing the burned and shackled remains of humans in a stockade with barbed wire on top of it after the nuclear explosion were submitted to psychiatric “deprogramming.” Afterwards they were told if they repeated the story they would be thrown out of the Corps.

One soldier, Robert Carter, who continued to speak about this was locked up and told the only way he could leave was to go through a reverse brainwashing type procedure. He recalls them using what he thought was needles in the top of his head trying to break him down so he would not reveal what he had seen.
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This sounds quite similar to the stereotaxic procedures used on me.

Years later many of these men developed cancer and died from the deadly radiation. Imagine the emotional impact on these soldiers from not only being a part of this horrendous explosion and then suffering physical ailments from their proximity to the test, but being forced to keep silent about the human guinea pigs who died while being held captive. What crime could these people possibly have committed to be murdered in this way? Who could have been that expendable?

Nuclear fallout from these tests conducted in our atmosphere in the Fifties covered all 50 states due to wind dust and rain clouds.
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Eileen Welsome reported that no comprehensive epidemiological study had ever been done of the atomic veterans.
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In 1997 scientists at the National Cancer Institute estimated that bomb tests conducted in Nevada during the fifties might cause 10,000 to 75,000 extra thyroid cancers. Seventy percent of the cancers have yet to be diagnosed, as three-fourths are expected to develop in people who were younger than five at the time of their exposure.
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In 1949, the Atomic Energy Committee and the Department of Defense began to coordinate the planning of the biomedical experiments and tests and set up a Biomedical Test Planning and Screening Committee to review proposals. Presumably, the human experiments at bomb tests should have been filtered through this or some other review process designated to consider experiments. Yet, in only one case, the flashblindness experiments did this happen.

In a January 1952 letter to Shields Warren, Los Alamos’s Thomas Shipman complained that the committee was limited to reviewing proposals from civilian groups and not the military: “[I]f, “he wrote, the “AEC can not exercise a measure of control in this matter, they might better withdraw from the picture completely and permit the military to continue on its own sweet way without the somewhat ludicrous spectacle of an impotent committee’s snapping its heels like a puppy dog.” In retrospect, Shipman wrote to Warren’s successor in June 1956, the military’s refusal to participate “reduced that committee to impotence.”

Whatever its effectiveness, in 1952 the biomedical research screening group did consider at least one of the military’s flashblindness experiments. Flashblindness the temporary loss of vision from exposure to the flash was a serious problem for all the armed services, but particularly for the Air Force. Pilots flying hundreds of miles an hour in combat could not afford to lose concentration and vision even temporarily.

The flashblindness experiments began at the 1951 Operation Buster-Jangle, the series that included Desert Rock I, with the testing of subjects who “orbited at an altitude of 15,000 feet in an Air Force C-54 approximately 9 miles from the atomic detonation.” The test subjects were exposed to three detonations during the operation, after which changes in their visual acuity were measured. Although these experiments were conducted at bomb tests that potentially exposed the subjects to ionizing radiation, the purpose of the experiment was to measure the thermal effects of the visible light flash, not the effects of ionizing radiation.