The Plutonium Files (53 page)

In an extraordinarily candid transcript of the meeting, which was not made public until 1995, General Cooney argued that the experiments needed to go forward in order to give line officers more information about what would happen to soldiers during an atomic attack. “I think
the one big problem that we have and the one becoming more acute and the one which I feel we do not have the answer for, is the reaction of a soldier to ionizing radiation.
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I believe it is becoming more acute because I think that the use of the weapon as a tactical weapon has now gone beyond the realm of possibility and into the realm of probability.”

Beneath the courtly civility of the military, there was a growing sense of frustration over Warren’s intransigence. The AEC, an exasperated Cooney said, didn’t have to grapple with the tough issues facing the military. “I think it is just until the bomb goes off. When the bomb goes off, then the problem exists, and it doesn’t exist now to the Commission. They are not faced with this problem.”

It was not easy to be a man of conviction, or a man of science, in 1950; Joseph McCarthy was making charges in the Senate that the AEC had ignored the Communist leanings of many scientists, and earlier that spring Klaus Fuchs had been arrested. The year 1950 was a “skittish time,” Warren recalled in an interview shortly before his death.
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“Some thought World War III was on the way.”

Cooney, the veteran of two test series at the Pacific Proving Ground, pressed on with his argument, pointing out that if an A-bomb “is used tactically on a corps or on a division, and if we have, say, 5,000 troops who have received 100 R radiation, the Commander is going to want to know from me, ‘Is it all right for me to reassemble these men and take them into combat?’ I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Cooney proposed doing an experiment that was similar to the one outlined by Robert Stone—only his proposal apparently would include military volunteers also. He suggested that 200 volunteers be exposed to varying amounts of whole-body radiation, beginning with 25 roentgens and going up to 150 roentgens. “I feel that we can get volunteers both officer and enlisted to take up to as much as 100 R and 150 R, whole body radiation,” he said.

Cooney compared the proposed TBI experiments to the human experiments performed by Walter Reed, the turn-of-the century researcher who discovered that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. There were significant differences, though, between Reed’s human experiments and the one Cooney was proposing; for one, soldiers were dying from yellow fever when Reed did his experiments, but no soldier had yet died from an overexposure to radiation. “Personally I see no difference in subjecting men to this than I do to any other type of experimentation that has ever been carried on,” Cooney argued. “Walter Reed killed some people. It was certainly the end result that was very wonderful.”

None of the arguments raised by Cooney, not even the possibility that the United States was on the brink of a nuclear war, could persuade Warren that the TBI experiments were necessary. Warren re-emphasized that the medical establishment had already gathered a large amount of animal data as well as human data from the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. “Actually, we have got the results of an enormous experiment. We have the experiment involving over 200,000 people in the Nagasaki and Hiroshima areas, and I think that those results are real. I was there, and I saw the people when they got sick,” he said.

Since humans varied greatly in their response to radiation, Warren continued, it would be impossible to obtain accurate results without undertaking a huge study. “I don’t see how it is possible to have an answer that means anything, over and above what we already have in our animal data and our scattered human data, without going to tens of thousands of individuals,” he said. “That at once puts in the question of, ‘Is such a thing practicable?’ If we were considering things in the Kremlin, undoubtedly it would be practicable. I doubt that it is practicable here.”

Warren, who had managed to keep the plutonium injections and other controversial human studies conducted by the Manhattan Project doctors from becoming public, again stated his vigorous opposition to human experiments. “I would not be quite honest in saying what I am saying,” he confessed, “if I were not to add that personally I am very much opposed to human experimentation when it isn’t for the good of the individual concerned and when there is any other way of solving the problem.”

Cooney conceded that a small experiment with 200 volunteers would not prove anything statistically but argued the results of such an experiment would give his military leaders a degree of comfort. “Generals are hard people to deal with, and if I tell a general that ‘Your men might get sick with 50 R,’ or ‘They might not get sick until they get 150 R’ that is a very unsatisfactory answer for him, and he will not accept it. I don’t think that we are interested in pushing this thing to the point of finding lethality but I do believe if we had two hundred cases whereby we could say that these men did or did not get sick up to 150 R, it would certainly be a great help to us.”

“I wonder if it would really be a help if it came to the final analysis,” mused Warren. “I can think in terms of times when even if everybody on a ship was seasick, you would still have to keep that ship operating.”

Warren was an intimidating opponent, eloquent and imposing, and
filled with what many colleagues viewed as a maddening self-righteousness. Sensing a deadlock approaching, Admiral Greaves stepped in to smooth the waters and lend support to his fellow officer. “I am very glad that this question of human experimentation has come up in the open so quickly and so frankly,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “I certainly agree with everything you have said, Dr. Warren, and I appreciate that the idea of human experimentation within this country is certainly repugnant.” In fact, Greaves had said much the same thing himself during the Committee on Medical Sciences meeting some months before.

Nevertheless, he continued, “We have a problem to answer, the same thing that General Cooney says. We are going to have it [the problem of radioactive materials] if we have this type of submarine that we are talking about. The Air Force is going to have it if we get that kind of stuff in their planes.… I think our position in this matter of human experimentation is the same as everybody else. We don’t want to do it if we can get out of doing it, but if that is the only way we can get the answer, that certainly is going to be more economical in the long run to take a few chances now and perhaps not lose a battle or even worse than that … lose a war.”

Warren said total body irradiation shortened the lives of animals and that he expected Cooney’s planned experiment would also shorten the lives of the human subjects. “We can say, I think, with a good deal of certainty that 25 R is safe. We know that an appreciable proportion of any group of individuals will be seriously ill at 200 R, and that some will die at 200 R. We can say with a fair degree of assurance that with 100 R, other casualties such as burns will be materially complicated and the lethality of minor injuries will arise, and there is a great deal of permanent damage that is done to the organism as well as transient damage at the 100 R level.”

Warren pointed out that the fatigue and stress of battle also would radically alter how soldiers responded to radiation. But Cooney doggedly insisted that his field commanders needed to make decisions based on experimental data involving human beings.

“When I start talking about animal experimentation,” Cooney said, “as one general said to me: ‘What are we—mice or men?’ ”

“I think one of the things that is very important is that we are in part mice, and only in part men,” Warren responded.

Stone had recommended that prisoners serving life sentences be used, another idea that Warren had roundly rejected. Toward the end of the meeting, Admiral Greaves brought up the use of prisoners again.
Under Stone’s original proposal, the military would have been responsible for making arrangements for the experiments. Although the military was interested in obtaining the data, it would not look good if the armed forces were actually conducting the experiments on prisoners, Greaves said. “That type of experimental work is a little difficult for the armed forces to engage in.”

“Is this civilian prisoners, you mean?” asked Alan Gregg, an ally of Shields Warren.

“Yes,” responded the admiral.

“Doesn’t that fall in the category of cruel and unusual punishment?” Gregg asked.

“It would be on an absolutely volunteer basis, and under every safety precaution that could be built up around it. I don’t think so, and it didn’t strike me as being cruel and unusual,” Greaves responded.

“It is not very long since we got through trying Germans for doing exactly that thing,” Warren warned.

“That wasn’t voluntary when they did it, they made them do it,” Greaves responded. “I think that there are a lot of prisoners and I am given to understand that there are plenty of people in our prisons who will volunteer for that kind of work.”

“Always for a quid pro quo,” Warren responded.

Shields Warren and his civilian colleagues were successful that day in blocking the military’s efforts to conduct TBI experiments on prisoners. But it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Even as they were standing up to the military, the Air Force, unbeknownst to them, was moving forward on a study to be conducted at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
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Experiments done on sick cancer patients at Anderson were to provide the military with data on human responses to radiation.

The M.D. Anderson study was one of five postwar TBI experiments funded by the military and was the first to be set in motion. The Department of Defense stressed that the military funds paid only for data collection and not for the irradiation of the patients, but one prominent researcher admitted in 1994 that he probably would not have pursued the experiment if he had not received military funding. The five studies and their host institutions were as follows:

   • The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, from 1951 until 1956. This study involved 263 patients and was sponsored by
the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, which performed the early flashblindness studies at the Nevada Test Site.

• Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, 1952 until 1964. This study involved 112 patients and was sponsored by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project or its successor, the Defense Atomic Support Agency, the organization that coordinated the atomic maneuvers in Nevada.
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• Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City, 1954 to 1964. Sponsored by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and later the Defense Atomic Support Agency, this experiment involved 34 patients. James J. Nickson, the Met Lab physician who assisted in the TBI studies and the Chicago plutonium injections, and who also served as Allan Kline’s physician, conducted the experiment.

• U.S. Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland. Funded by the Navy, the experiment was conducted from 1960 to 1961 and involved 17 people.

• University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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This study, sponsored by Defense Atomic Support Agency, ran from 1960 to 1972 and involved 90 patients.

   (One other large TBI study was done at the small research hospital in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
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There, some 194 patients were exposed to total-body irradiation in one of the hospital’s two specially enclosed chambers between 1957 and 1974. Some of the money for this TBI study came from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.)

In the military studies alone, which spanned 1951 to 1972, approximately 500 people with cancer were exposed to radiation over their entire bodies. Some patients received large, single blasts of radiation. Others were exposed to repeated, low doses along the lines of what Robert Stone had suggested. The TBI experiments were classic examples of the dual-purpose studies pioneered by the Manhattan Project. While the patients ostensibly were irradiated for their diseases, doctors collected data for the military on the side.

The official reports on the experiments invariably claim that the exposures made the patients feel better and reduced the size of their cancers. But other records indicate that the radiation caused excruciating pain and led to the premature deaths of a number of patients.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force hoped to obtain data from the patients to predict how soldiers, sailors, and pilots would behave when they
were exposed to radiation on the nuclear battlefield. Ever mindful of the devastating radiation sickness they had witnessed in Japan, the military leaders were desperate to learn more about the effects of radiation. When did nausea and vomiting set in? How long before the effects of radiation showed up on the bone marrow? Could exposure impair intellectual and decision-making capabilities? What about the ability to perform simple motor tests? Was there some kind of medicine that could be taken beforehand that would protect the troops? What happened to soldiers exposed to small, repeated doses? The questions were never-ending, and ultimately the answers proved unsatisfactory because, as Robert Stone and his colleagues had recognized at the Carlton Hotel meeting, healthy young soldiers and sick cancer patients don’t necessarily respond in the same way to radiation.

In all five of the postwar TBI experiments, the researchers conducted extensive analyses on the blood and urine of the patients in an effort to find a “biological dosimeter”—that is, some kind of chemical marker that would reveal how much radiation a person had absorbed. In the early days at the Met Lab, Robert Stone had instructed his employees to look for a similar marker but none had been found. The military’s search for a biological dosimeter was relentless. A simple test administered on the battlefield would help doctors know who was worth saving and who was going to die. “Ever since the damaging effects of ionizing radiation in biological systems were realized,” an Air Force official wrote in 1963, “interested observers have been searching for some biochemical, histological or clinical indicator that would assess this damage in a manner closely related the magnitude of dose.”
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