Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The Plutonium Files (33 page)
There are a large number of papers which do not violate security, but do cause considerable concern to the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch and may well compromise the public prestige and best interests of the Commission.
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Papers referring to levels of soil and water contamination surrounding Atomic Energy Commission installations, idle speculation on the future genetic effects of radiation and papers dealing with potential process hazards to employees are definitely prejudicial to the best interests of the government. Every such release is reflected in an increase in insurance claims, increased difficulty in labor relations and adverse public sentiment. Following consultation with the Atomic Energy Commission Insurance Branch, the following declassification criteria appears desirable. If specific locations or activities of the Atomic Energy Commission and/or its contractors are closely associated with statements and information
which would invite or tend to encourage claims against the Atomic Energy Commission or its contractors, such portions of articles to be published should be reworded or deleted.
Three scientific papers on the plutonium injections had been completed at the time of the advisor’s warnings: The Chicago scientists had written a 1946 report describing the injections and postmortem analyses of injectees Arthur Hubbard and Una Macke. The Berkeley group had written the 1946 “Man and Rat” paper describing the injection of house painter Albert Stevens. And Samuel Bassett and Wright Langham were putting together the collaborative report on the Los Alamos—Rochester injection program, which would be published in 1950. The paper describing the plutonium injections of Macke and Hubbard, which had been declassified and then reclassified “restricted,” was one of the first articles to set off the AEC alarm bells. An AEC declassification official, C. L. Marshall, warned that the distribution of the report could have dire consequences for the fledgling commission. (Marshall is the same official who blocked the release of Hamilton’s “Man and Rat” paper on grounds that it might adversely affect the national interest.) Marshall’s memo proves conclusively that AEC officials covered up the experiment because of fear of lawsuits and adverse publicity:
This document appears to be the most dangerous since it describes experiments performed on human subjects, including the actual injection of the metal, plutonium, into the body.
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The locations of these experiments are given and the results, even to the autopsy findings in two cases. It is unlikely that these tests were made without the consent of the subjects, but no statement is made to that effect and the coldly scientific manner in which the results are tabulated and discussed would have a very poor effect on the general public. Unless, of course, the legal aspects were covered by the necessary documents, the experimenters and the employing agencies, including the U.S., have been laid open to a devastating lawsuit which would, through its attendant publicity, have far reaching results.
The declassification officer’s opinion was seconded by Birchard Brundage, an Army major in Oak Ridge who went on to work with Stafford Warren at UCLA. “It would be unwise to release the paper,” he agreed, “primarily because of medical legal aspects in the use of plutonium
in human beings.”
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Brundage added that Warren felt that since plutonium was not available for offsite work, it was not “essential” to distribute the paper. Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s successor, had doubts about the wisdom of completing the Los Alamos report on the injections because of the “attitude taken by the AEC in regard to this type of research.”
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And Andrew Dowdy, the supervisor of the University of Rochester’s Manhattan Annex, requested on February 18, 1947, that the report not be declassified for general distribution outside the AEC without Rochester’s foreknowledge. “I make this suggestion because of possible unfavorable public relations and in an attempt to protect Dr. Bassett from any possible legal entanglements,” he stated.
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But some of the experimenters were eager to have their work published, and a dispute, only vaguely discernible from the exchange of memos, arose between the bureaucrats and the scientists. The AEC on April 17 then issued a blanket order:
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.
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Documents covering such work field should be classified “secret.” Further work in this field in the future has been prohibited by the General Manager. It is understood that three documents in this field have been submitted for declassification and are now classified “restricted.” It is desired that these documents be reclassified “secret” and that a check be made to insure that no distribution has inadvertently been made to the Department of Commerce, or other off-Project personnel or agencies.
It’s not clear what three documents the AEC memo was referring to, but undoubtedly one was the Arthur Hubbard—Una Macke paper written by the Chicago group, and a second may have dealt with the uranium injections administered at Rochester. An additional item in the memo further confirms that the AEC knew the plutonium experiment was of no medical benefit and clearly distinguishes between such experiments and studies that might help patients: “These instructions,” the memo added, “do not pertain to documents regarding clinical or therapeutic uses of radioisotopes and similar materials beneficial to human disorders and diseases.”
S
HIELDS
W
ARREN:
“P
ATRIOTIC
E
NOUGH TO
L
IE
”
While bureaucrats within the Atomic Energy Commission were putting together new rules for future human experiments and trying to bury the evidence of old ones, Shields Warren, who had been part of the first Navy inspection team to go to Japan shortly after the bombings, returned to that country for another look. His mission this time was to help set up a study of the surviving bombing victims and their descendants. Japan was rebuilding itself when Warren arrived in the spring of 1947. Freshly cut lumber was being brought into the cities. New buildings were going up, their sides covered with corrugated iron or flattened tin cans. The roads had been greatly improved. “People more alert, many smiling, look fat and well-fed.
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Striking change,” he wrote.
Warren worked with a “compulsive zeal,” a colleague recalled, snacking on “cranberries in any form and crackers.”
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He visited hospitals and doctors in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, occasionally examining patients who were still suffering from injuries received during the bombings. Many still had low blood counts and keloids, ugly overgrowths of scar tissue that occurred following thermal burns. Warren examined fifty-seven people. Some underwent sternal bone marrow biopsies, a procedure in which a small core of marrow is removed from the thin bone of the breast. During one biopsy, a needle broke and had to be extracted with pliers. When the patient shunned a second biopsy, Warren noted in his diary, “Stoicism of the Japanese not too marked.”
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Soon after he returned to the United States, Albert Baird Hastings and Alan Gregg, both members of the AEC’s Medical Board of Review, the panel that had been convened briefly in 1947 to help the commission chart its new research program, approached Warren with a job offer. Was
he interested in becoming the interim director of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine? This was not the first time Warren had been approached to do work for America’s nuclear establishment. When the United States entered World War II, Shields Warren was a reserve officer in the Navy. In early 1943 Stafford Warren paid him a visit. He “told me that I had exactly the skills that he needed for a project that he was involved with but couldn’t tell me anything about it and would I leave the Navy and take this on? Well, I told him that I thought I was being useful where I was and didn’t feel that while the war was on I could move around like a free agent and so I did not come into early contact with the Manhattan Project.”
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In 1947, however, the time was right. “There were so many opportunities and such fine people to work with in this new Atomic Energy set-up that it was one of those challenging things I couldn’t pass up,” he said in an interview which was filmed in 1974 and later converted to videotape.
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Warren was a pathologist at that time with the New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston, a position he maintained on a part-time basis during his AEC years. He commuted from Boston to Washington, D.C., lugging back and forth a fat briefcase filled with documents. At the age of forty-nine, the expressive face of his youth had been winnowed down by the years: the full lips thinned and pressed against words that sometimes came haltingly, the eyes inscrutable behind spectacles, and lines of fatigue coursing down his cheeks. He could function efficiently on five hours of sleep but confessed that as he grew older, he had been forced to lengthen his usual rest to six or six and one-half hours a night. He worked six days a week, as he would continue to do until his seventies, and spoke in a slow deliberate voice in order to camouflage what one colleague described as a “gentle stammer.”
Warren was the ideal man to head up the AEC’s biomedical programs.
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He was a highly regarded scientist who had already made several important discoveries related to cancer. Early in his career, he had discovered that cancerous cells might be transported through the body by the lymphatic system, a finding that led to the practice of removing lymph nodes near cancerous tissue.
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He was also an expert on the effects of radiation on the human body. But even more important, he had the sophistication to navigate Washington’s political waters.
Warren was probably the most influential biomedical scientist in AEC history and one of the enigmas of the Cold War. From 1947 to 1952 he helped the commission cobble together a vast network of national laboratories, universities, and hospitals that would investigate every
imaginable effect of radiation over the next three decades. The research was part of the AEC’s dual mandate under the 1946 Atomic Energy Act to both promote atomic energy and protect the public from its harmful effects. Through grants, fellowships, contracts, construction projects, and the funding of huge machines, the AEC created a new industry and became one of the largest sponsors of scientific research in the United States.
Warren arrived at the AEC when the nuclear weapons program was in its infancy. Only five atomic bombs had been exploded—one at Trinity, two in Japan, and two at Crossroads. By the time he left in June of 1952, the arms race with the Soviet Union was well under way and the atmospheric testing program had become part of American life. Policy decisions Warren and other postwar researchers made during those years have affected the health of generations of Americans. For the atomic veterans and residents who lived downwind of the test site and the weapons plants, those decisions would have tragic consequences and spawn a bitter debate that continues to this day.
After overcoming his initial doubts, Warren supported the first atomic bomb test in Nevada, in 1951, during which dangerous amounts of fallout were released and people living downwind were put at risk. The “ominous” implications of inhaling alpha particles from fallout, which had been brought to Warren’s attention by Joseph Hamilton in 1949, were glossed over and the food chain dangers ignored.
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Warren also participated in the debates over the placement of troops in Nevada. He repeatedly protested the reckless, short-sighted plans of the armed forces, only to capitulate or be overruled by his superiors. In time, volunteer soldiers would find themselves crouching in trenches one mile from Ground Zero, and specially trained pilots would be directed to fly straight into the hot, gaseous heart of thermonuclear clouds.
During the highly emotional fallout controversy that began in the mid-1950s, Warren aligned himself with such passionate advocates of the testing program as Edward Teller and Nobel laureate Willard Libby. He agreed with the no-danger chorus of scientists who claimed that the biological risks from fission products were negligible.
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He also took the position, which has since been largely rejected by the scientific community, that there exists a threshold dose of radiation below which no damage will occur.
Records show that Warren routinely suppressed information that might provoke lawsuits or harm the AEC’s public image, and dealt brutally with outsiders. Yet documents declassified in 1994 and 1995 also
reveal a courageous scientist who spoke out in secret meetings against proposed human radiation experiments. One of his most heroic battles centered around the ill-fated plan supported by Robert Stone and others to expose prisoners serving life sentences to total-body irradiation, a process that undoubtedly would have led to the shortening of the subjects’ lives and the possible development of cancer. Warren’s admirers viewed him with a deferential awe; his enemies saw an opportunist who shifted with the political wind. “He was a god to me,” recalled fellow pathologist Clarence Lushbaugh, who worked at both Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.
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“I considered him a saint,” said retired Air Force Colonel John Pickering.
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“I was never quite sure what he was up to,” remembered physicist Howard Andrews.
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“I shouldn’t say that, but I never really quite trusted this man. I worked with him, and we wrote a couple of papers together having to do with frogs and oysters and things of that sort. But as far as things that went on in some fields, I thought he was a little slippery.”
San Antonio physician Herman Wigodsky said he didn’t think Warren “was too swift.” And retired physiologist Nello Pace said Warren was “kind of a turkey, full of himself—not like Stafford.
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Stafford was just wonderful. But Shields was very old-fashioned in his attitude that some M.D.s have: ‘Only M.D.s and God can touch people.” ’
