The Plutonium Files (74 page)

Between meetings, the members exchanged copious e-mail messages. For Faden, a handsome woman with curly, dark hair, chairing the meetings was exhausting work: ten minute breaks, hour lunches, then back to the table for more debate. “Totally draining,” she said after one of the marathon sessions.
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“You have to be vigilant every single minute. This must be what it feels like if you’re a good judge or a good trial attorney.”

Faden almost always lived up to her Solomon-like duties. She was courteous to the witnesses and solicitous of her colleagues. But there was an edgy quality to her and she could be extremely abrupt. One of her most important tasks was to keep the committee—a group of congenial, high-powered professionals such as herself—from becoming splintered as it worked in a fishbowl of public scrutiny for eighteen months. The committee’s recommendations would carry more weight if a unanimous report was delivered to President Clinton. Dissenting opinions, which were not infrequent on ethics panels, would weaken the report’s impact.

Although the committee’s job was to analyze the unethical radiation experiments that had taken place during the Cold War, some of the members seemed uncomfortable when the victims actually appeared before them. The committee members had little knowledge of the nuclear weapons complex or its history, and they were understandably confused when the speakers began talking about atmospheric test series with names like Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, and Upshot-Knothole. Oftentimes an embarrassing silence followed the testimony. Faden usually instructed the speakers to leave their records with the staff. Implicit in
the instructions was the promise that the cases would be investigated. But hundreds of thousands of records were already flowing in, and some of the documents, which often had taken the witnesses years to collect, were forwarded without much scrutiny to the National Archives when the committee was disbanded eighteen months later.

By train, plane, and automobile, in buses and carpools, the witnesses traveled what were often thousands of miles to speak at hearings in Washington, D.C., or at outreach meetings in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Spokane, Sante Fe, and Knoxville. Eager to maintain its neutrality, the Advisory Committee gave the speakers no funds for travel expenses, no money for hotels, no petty cash for copying fees. But that policy did not deter these people. Many had been waiting years to tell their stories of deception and betrayal. Their testimony demonstrated in a dramatic way the breadth of the experimentation program and the deep distrust many Americans felt toward the nuclear weapons complex.

Some witnesses broke down in tears as they paced the hallway before the meetings. Others cried as they unwrapped family photographs and propped them up at witness tables so the world could see that the mother, father, grandparent who was irradiated was a human being and not a laboratory animal. In halting and unpolished voices, they gave witness to outlandish and bizarre Cold War events that one committee member later described as “surrealistic.”

The meetings drew dozens of residents who lived downwind of Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, who testified that they, too, had been exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation and were unwitting guinea pigs in America’s Cold War.
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Uranium miners recounted the extraordinary lung cancer epidemic that struck their villages after they began digging the ore from mines on the Colorado Plateau. Representatives from Inupiat villages of the North Slope of Alaska told of an experiment in which eighty-four Eskimos, seventeen Indians, and nineteen whites were
given iodine-131. Marshall Islands residents, often accompanied by interpreters, noted the vast increase in illness and disease following years of atmospheric testing on their tropical atolls.
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“The only thing we knew is what we were observing and that the children that were born were like animals and they weren’t children at all,” said a Ms. Matayoshi through an interpreter.
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The first “outreach” meeting was held from October 11 to 13, 1994, in San Francisco, a block or so from Union Square. In a booming voice, atomic veteran Israel Torres described the July morning in 1957 when Shot Hood rocked his trench. Hood was a seventy-four-kiloton bomb, more than three times the size of the weapon dropped on Nagasaki and the largest ever detonated at the Nevada Test Site. “I was thrown from wall to wall in the trench.
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It felt like a giant vacuum was trying to suck me out, but I fought the suction,” he remembered.

As she waited to speak at the San Francisco meeting, Darcy Thrall, born and raised five miles from the Hanford plutonium complex in Washington state, fingered a mysterious dog tag that she had been given by scientists when she was in the second grade.
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One day, she told the panel, a man came into her classroom in Richland, Washington, and escorted her to a room where some bottles and cups were sitting on a table. She was given a white substance to drink and then taken outside to a waiting van. Inside the van were men and women in white uniforms. She was instructed to lie on her back and was sent through a noisy, tube-shaped machine. Afterward, she was given a log book in which her parents were to write down everything she ate and drank. Her family grew their own vegetables, raised their own cattle, and ate fish from the Columbia River. Several weeks later the scientists returned to her second-grade classroom and sent her through the machine again. She was given the dog tag and instructed to wear it at all times. The tag is engraved with her name and address and has the initials “R-P” in the left-hand corner and “S” in the right corner.

Although the significance of the dog tag is unknown and it is unclear what Thrall drank, documents show that scientists working at Hanford regularly monitored school children to determine what kind of radionuclides were in their bodies. Researchers were particularly interested in families such as Thrall’s because they would have absorbed larger amounts of radionuclides than someone who purchased “store-bought” food. The van that Thrall was taken to was undoubtedly one of the two mobile whole-body counters operated by Batelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory. The children were often given comic books to read
while they waited to be measured. “None of the more than 3,000 children measured in the mobile whole-body counter to date,” wrote a scientist sometime after 1967, “have had body burdens of radionuclides outside the range anticipated on the basis of our known environmental conditions.”
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When Darcy Thrall went public with her story in 1994, she received many threats, and one of her pets was killed at her home in Washington state. “I had a great, huge, old, old turkey.
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And one morning I woke up and when the sun came up I could see steam rising in the pasture. And I went out there and found my turkey, and he had been stabbed over and over again so far I could put my hand this deep in his chest. He was still alive.” Thrall was afraid for her daughter and her other animals and asked the committee to help her. “It’s something that happened. I don’t know any, any big secrets, or anything.”

At the Cincinnati meeting held October 21, family members remembered the tears and vomit of loved ones who underwent total-body irradiation. “I believe my father was in the wrong place at the right time,” Katherine Hagar observed.
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Hagar’s father, Joseph Mitchell, Patient No. 51, was scheduled for surgery for lung cancer. Instead he was given 150 rads of total-body radiation and died seventy-four days later. Doris Baker spoke lovingly of her great-grandmother, Gertrude Newell, Patient No. 20, who was exposed to 200 rads of total body radiation. “Will someone please tell me why our government let this happen?” she pleaded.
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Other witnesses who worked at nearby weapons plants also spoke at the Cincinnati meeting. Owen Thompson, who said he was “just a dumb hillbilly, big and strong,” was assigned to a special team that buried radioactive wastes at night while guards with machine guns stood by.
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The waste was brought by hay wagons to the dump site, and giant bulldozers used in strip mining plowed the material into the ground. “I did my country wrong,” Thompson confessed.
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Gene Branham, a union representative and longtime worker at a uranium production facility outside Cincinnati, talked about the network set up by the government to snatch the body parts of deceased workers before they were embalmed.
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The body snatching got so bad, he said, union members often set up vigils to make sure that the DOE didn’t grab the corpse before it was buried.

A frigid wind blew through downtown Spokane on November 21 as dozens of residents who once lived on or near Hanford piled into a chilly meeting room. Nodding in the direction of the highly contaminated complex 130 miles away, they described immune system diseases, thyroid
disorders, cancer, allergies, and reproductive problems that they believed were caused by radioactive emissions. Gertie Hanson, who grew up in northern Idaho about 140 miles from Hanford, did an informal survey of young girls who graduated from high school in the early 1950s.
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Twenty-nine percent of the forty-nine women who responded to her survey had suffered miscarriages in their early childbearing years, she said.

Pat Hoover, in a written statement, recalled that when she was about thirteen or fourteen men clad in white coats would visit her physical education class or her health class. “We assumed that these were doctors.
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Now looking back, I have no idea if they were doctors, chemists or workers from the Hanford plant with no medical background; but they came in looking like doctors, stood behind us and felt our throats with their hands.” Many teenage girls had odd fingernails with horizontal ridges, she said, and were given a chemical supplied by Pacific Northwest Laboratory that would “fix” the problem. (The “doctors” were probably palpating the girls’ necks for thyroid nodules; the ridged fingernails could be a sign of hypothyroidism, or underactive thyroid, which can be caused by radiation exposure.)

Brenda Weaver lived for most of her life seven miles from Hanford in an area known as Death Mile. Her family, she said, always seemed sick with “something weird.” Weaver was put on thyroid medication at the age of twelve and had an ovary removed at age fourteen. Her brother was taken to the hospital when his eyes began bleeding. In the early 1960s, the sheep on her father’s farm were born with missing legs, missing body parts, and missing eyes. Her daughter, Jamie, was born in 1965 without eyes. “She has eyelashes and eyelids and tear ducts, but no eyes.
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It makes life difficult, it’s hard to be blind.”

Weaver said she believes wholeheartedly her daughter’s birth defect and those in the sheep were caused by the radioactive emissions from Hanford. “We were irradiated, used as guinea pigs by our government. I could hardly believe it, but I do remember, as a kid, men in white coats with Geiger counters coming to the farm. They were out in the fields taking parts of dead animals, food. The weather balloons would come over onto our property,” she said. “We thought that this meant that our government was taking care of us, and if there was anything going on at Hanford, surely they would tell us, right?”

In Hanford’s early years, scientists intensively studied the animal and plant life surrounding the nuclear complex, often posing as cowboys or ropers or agricultural agents. Accompanied by two Manhattan Project security officers, a scientist named Karl Herde pretended he was an
animal husbandry specialist in 1946 when he measured radioactive-iodine in the thyroids of farm animals. “I was successful in placing the probe of the instrument directly over the thyroid at times when the owner’s attention was focused on the next animal or some concocted distraction,” he later wrote.
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“At that time the revelation of a regional iodine-131 problem would have had a tremendous public relations impact and furthermore the presence of other nuclides (some known but some not recognized or identified) was of possible National Defense significance.”

The Spokane meeting drew speakers with other kinds of stories to tell. Kathy Jacobovitch said her father worked on the three “hot” Navy ships hauled back from the Pacific Proving Ground and died of advanced lung cancer. Jacobovitch, who was asked by her mother to look into her father’s radiation exposure after his death, learned from military records that her father was exposed to 135 hours of radiation. “I noticed that while my dad was coming home ‘hot,’ mom was pregnant with me.”
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Jacobovitch has been diagnosed with lupus disease, an autoimmune disorder she believes is related to the exposure she received in the womb.

Harold Bibeau, who participated in the testicular irradiation experiments at the Oregon State Penitentiary, read an excerpt from Carl Heller’s deposition in which the doctor admitted under oath he didn’t fully disclose the cancer risk to the convicts because he didn’t want to frighten them. Dr. Heller “must have taken Personal Ethics 101 at the University of Buchenwald,” Bibeau said, referring to the infamous Nazi death camp.
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In Sante Fe, New Mexico, several inches of powdery snow covered the roof of the brown adobe building where one of the Advisory Committee’s last outreach meetings was held on January 30, 1995. Scattered through the audience were atomic veterans, uranium miners, Native Alaskans, the son and grandson of two of the plutonium patients, the wives of several former Utah convicts, and scientists who worked down the road at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Bill Holmes, the grandson of Albert Stevens, the first California patient injected with plutonium, strongly condemned the scientists who performed the experiment: “The people who did this to my grandfather had only to ask themselves how they would feel if they were in his place.
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Any code of ethics or scientific experiment involving humans must, it seems to me, begin and end with that very simple question.”