The Plutonium Files (80 page)

Most of the men who wrote the memos and reports, delivered their opinions behind closed doors, are dead. The committees and boards they once served on are defunct and forgotten. Even the buildings where they once met have been razed. Still, there is an invisible but nonetheless real thread connecting that past to our present and even our future. These scientists helped to shape the policies that have affected the health of thousands of Americans. Indeed, we are still reaping the consequences.

Scientists at the National Cancer Institute in late 1997 estimated that bomb tests conducted in Nevada during the 1950s may cause 10,000 to 75,000
¹⁰
extra thyroid cancers. Seventy percent of the cancers, or as many as 52,500 malignancies, have yet to be diagnosed. Three-fourths of the cancers are expected to develop in people who were younger than five at the time of the exposure. These current and future cancer patients are the baby boomers who guzzled milk from the cows that grazed on the contaminated fields that Stafford Warren warned about in his 1947 speech at Yale University. “There were few, if any, Americans in the contiguous forty-eight states at the time that were not exposed to some level of fallout,” Dr.
¹¹
Richard D. Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute, said in 1997.

The NCI’s fallout study, which took fourteen years to complete, does not take into account the vast amounts of radioiodine released from tests at the Pacific Proving Ground or the radioiodine released into the atmosphere by nuclear tests conducted by other countries. Nor do the results address the health effects caused by long-lived isotopes of cesium, strontium, plutonium, and carbon, which were released during the blasts and found their way into the bodies of the people living on the planet. All of the baby boomers, a few retired weapons scientists said with an almost macabre cheeriness, have a few atoms of plutonium in their bones.

The documents go far in demystifying some of the most secretive aspects of the weapons program. With the unveiling comes understanding and perhaps a basis for communication. President Clinton said he hoped the massive release of records would help rebuild the public’s trust in the government. But trust occurs when behavior is consistent and honest over a long period of time. The track record of openness is short. The pitfalls ahead are many. Unnecessary secrets and vast distances still exist between the people inside and outside the fences.

I am indebted to the many people who enabled me to write this book. It seemed that whenever I hit a rough spot—whether it was in the research, the writing, or the editing phase—someone appeared and extended a helping hand. In particular, I want to thank the relatives of the deceased people who were unwittingly used in these experiments, as well as those subjects who are still living, who so generously gave of their time, recounting painful moments in their lives and providing me with invaluable documents and photographs.

One of the people whom I will never be able to repay is William Jay Brady, who became my unofficial scientific advisor for the project. Having worked at the Nevada Test Site since 1952, Jay not only possesses a firsthand knowledge of many of the events and scientists described in this book but also has a brilliant scientific mind and an almost photographic memory. He read the manuscript twice and spent many hours tutoring me in physics, mathematics, and radiation biology. Other scientists who helped were Bill Bartlett, John Gofman, Darrell Fisher, George Voelz, William Moss, Roland Finston, John Cobb, and Arthur Upton.

My heartfelt thanks also go to Mary Diecker, an indefatigable researcher who appeared at my house week after week with her arms laden with books and scientific reports. Many of the extraordinary details described in this book were uncovered by Mary during her many trips to the library. I also received research assistance from Albert Lukban, Lily Wound, Lorlei Metke, and Richard Halsey.

Countless government officials went out of their way to help me. Among the most helpful were employees in the Department of Energy, the very agency that had been so uncooperative when I began this project
twelve years ago. I owe a very large thank-you to the DOE’s Lori Azim, a lovely and efficient young woman who sent me dozens of documents. I also am grateful to Martha DeMarre, Jeff Gordon, and former staffer Cynthia Ashley at the DOE’s Coordination and Information Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the rapidity with which they responded to my requests for documents. Evie Self, a declassification official at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., worked a minor miracle when she managed to get the accident report of Jimmy Robinson declassified by both the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. The report had languished in Washington for more than two years and was in danger of being lost until she stepped in. Other government employees who helped were Diana Joy Leute, Ellyn Weiss, Bob Alvarez, Jim Solit, Rick Ray, Pam Bonee, Cheri Abdelnour, and Col. Claud Bailey.

Staffers from President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments were of tremendous assistance. In particular, I want to thank Dan Guttman, the committee’s executive director, with whom I had many lively discussions. Dan literally opened the committee’s doors to me, allowing me to copy hundreds of documents before they were boxed up and shipped to the National Archives. Lanny Keller, Trad Hughes, Gil Whittemore, Patrick Fitzgerald, Gregg Herken, James David, Patricia Perentesis, Jon Harkness, Kristin Crotty, Stephen Klaidman, Gary Stern, Gail Javitt, and Ronald Neuman were also helpful.

Loretta Garrison, formerly an attorney with the Baker & Hostetler law firm, was instrumental in getting many important documents on the plutonium experiment released under the Freedom of Information Act. Loretta and her husband, David, also opened their home to me on my many research trips to Washington, putting me up in their spare bedroom and supplying me with maps, subway passes, and umbrellas as I negotiated my way through Washington’s archives and reading rooms. James Houpt, another attorney with the Baker & Hostetler firm, helped keep my original notes and documents on the Cecil Kelley case from being subpoenaed by Los Alamos.

Many records used in this book came from the private collections of individuals. One of the most generous was Harold Bibeau, a subject in Carl Heller’s testicular irradiation experiment, who sent me the bulk of the documents used in the chapter on the prisoner experiments. Other people who opened their personal files included Pat Broudy, Stewart Udall, Katie Kelley, Jackie Kittrell, Doris Baker, Martha Stephens, Sandra
Marlow, Peter J. Thompson, Venlo Wolfsohn, Langdon Harrison, and Ubaldo Arizmendi.

Doe West, who chaired the Massachusetts task force that investigated the radiation experiments at the Fernald state school, spent hours tracking down photographs for me. I also received help from numerous professional archivists and librarians, including Margaret Moseley, a librarian in Newport News; Loretta Hefner, formerly with Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Roger Mead, the archivist at Los Alamos; Terry Fehner, a historian at DOE headquarters in Germantown, Maryland; Sandy Smith, at the National Archives; and Valerie Komor, at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Scott Ware, the editor of the
Albuquerque Tribune,
gave me permission to use many of the documents and photographs from the original series. Colleagues Dennis Domrzalski, Ed Asher, Dan Vukelich, and Bob Benz were a great help, as were reporters in other cities, including Cory-don Ireland, Tim Bonfield, Karen Dorn Steele, Mary Manning, and Keith Rogers. Countless other individuals provided assistance, including Ray Poore, Oscar Rosen, Robert Campbell, Don Arbitblit, William Burleson, R. Joseph Parker, E. Cooper Brown, Thomas Fisher, David Egilman, Cliff Honicker, Kitty Alvarez, John Abbotts, James P. Cooney Jr., Meta Heller, John Daniel, Madonna Daniel, Don Byers, James Brascoe, Jeff Petroculley, Ray Heslin, and David Hilgemann.

I am also indebted also to Jim Bettinger, the deputy director of the John S. Knight Fellowship Program at Stanford University, who took time out of his busy schedule to plow throught the first draft of my manuscript, offering many intelligent suggestions for the revisions and much-needed encouragement. Luis Tovar and Diane Edwards also read the first draft, gently pointing out the rough spots that needed to be smoothed.

I cannot begin to express my thanks to my dear friend, Loydean Thomas, who listened patiently to my ordeals over the years. I also owe a special thanks to my next-door neighbor, Dena Daniel, now eighty-four, who cruised the airwaves, capturing on tape anything that might be related to the project and leaving it on my doorstep each evening.

I am also indebted to my literary agent, Lisa Bankoff, for her unwavering support, as well as to the people at The Dial Press who saw this book through to publication. I have an abiding gratitude to my two wonderful editors, Beth Rashbaum and Susan Kamil. With a ruthless pen and gentle heart, Beth took a grocery bag’s worth of manuscript pages and turned them into this book. Susan guided the project through all its
twists and turns. Her commitment was constant, her enthusiasm unflagging, her advice inspiring. I also want to thank Zoe Rice, for her incalculable assistance and unfailing courtesy; Random House’s Bill Adams, for his superb legal review; Virginia Norey, Brian Mulligan, and Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, who worked on everything from the jacket to the interior design of the book; Susan Schwartz, publishing manager, and Johanna Tani, chief copy editor, who shepherded the book through the production process; and copy editor Debra Manette, who culled out more errors than I believed were possible. Those that remain are my own.

And finally to my husband, Jim, I owe my deepest gratitude. He has always believed in this book. More than anything else, it was his love and confidence that carried me through the years. He read the manuscript at least four times, offered many invaluable suggestions, and endured years of endless discussion about the people and events described here. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Jim, I might not have completed the journey.

Two of the major sources used in this book consist of government documents and oral histories. Many of these documents can be obtained from the National Archives, the Department of Energy’s reading rooms, or at the DOE’s Coordination and Information Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, a repository that contains a vast amount of material related to the nuclear weapons testing program and the human radiation experiments. But the simplest way to retrieve these records is through the Internet. Complete and fully searchable texts of more than 250,000 documents from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and other federal agencies can be found at
http://hrex.dis.anl.gov
. Other bibliographic information can be found by going to
www.doe.gov
. and clicking on OpenNet.

In addition to being interviewed by me, a number of the scientists mentioned in this book were also interviewed by historians and/or government officials. For simplicity’s sake, I have grouped all of those interviews as oral histories. They can be divided into three groups: those done by academic historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; oral histories conducted between 1978 and 1982 by J. Newell Stannard, a scientist who wrote a monumental, three-volume work for the DOE entitled
Radioactivity and Health;
and oral histories taken in 1994 and 1995 by staffers from the Department of Energy or the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Complete transcripts of many of these interviews are also available on the Internet.