The Plutonium Files
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome. It is a history of United States government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning series Welsome wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune.[1][2]
Overview
The experiments began in 1945, when
From 1945 to 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium by Manhattan project doctors. Ebb Cade was an unwilling participant in medical experiments that involved injection of 4.7 micrograms of Plutonium on April 10, 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.[4][5] This experiment was under the supervision of Harold Hodge.[6] Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission continued into the 1970s. The Plutonium Files chronicles the lives of the subjects of the secret program by naming each person involved and discussing the ethical and medical research conducted in secret by the scientists and doctors. Albert Stevens, the man who survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human, four-year-old Simeon Shaw sent from Australia to the U.S. for treatment, and Elmer Allen are some of the notable subjects of the Manhattan Project program led by Dr. Joseph Gilbert Hamilton.
Subjects
The following table lists subjects of the experiments by their subject names.:[7]
Patient number and biographical information at time of injection | Date injected | Date of death | Survival time | Age at death | Cause of death | Weight of injected Pu-239 (mg) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
HP-12, 55-year-old man | 1945 | 1953 | 8 years | 63 | Heart failure | 4.7 |
CHI-1, 68-year-old man | 1945 | 1945 | 5 months | 68 | Cancer of chin, lungs | 6.5 |
CAL-1, 58-year-old man | 1945 | 1966 | 20.7 years | 79 | Heart disease | 0.75 + 0.2 (Pu-238) |
HP-1, 67-year-old man | 1945 | 1960 | 14.2 years | 81 | Bronchopneumonia | 4.6 |
HP-2, 48-year-old man | 1945 | 1948 | 2.4 years | 50 | Brain disease | 5.1 |
HP-3, 48-year-old woman | 1945 | 1983 | 37.2 years | 85 | Acute cardiac arrest | 4.9 |
HP-4, 18-year-old woman | 1945 | 1947 | 1.4 years | 20 | Cushing's syndrome | 4.9 |
HP-5, 56-year-old man | 1945 | 1946 | 5 months | 57 | Bronchopneumonia | 5.1 |
CHI-2, 56-year-old woman | 1945 | 1946 | 17 days | 56 | Breast cancer | 94.9 |
CHI-3, Young adult male | 1945 | 1946 | 6 months | Unknown | Likely Hodgin's Disease | 94.9 |
HP-6, 44-year-old man | 1946 | 1984 | 38 years | 82 | Natural death | 5.3 |
HP-7, 59-year-old woman | 1946 | 1946 | 9 months | 60 | Pulmonary failure | 6.3 |
HP-11, 69-year-old man | 1946 | 1946 | 6 days | 69 | Bronchopneumonia | 6.5 |
HP-8, 41-year-old woman | 1946 | 1975 | 29.7 years | 71 | Unknown | 6.5 |
HP-9, 64-year-old man | 1946 | 1947 | 1.2 years | 65 | Bronchopneumonia | 6.3 |
CAL-2, 4-year, 10-month old boy | 1946 | 1947 | 8 months | 5 | Bone cancer | 2.7 + radio-cerium and yttrium |
HP-10, 52-year-old man | 1946 | 1957 | 10.9 years | 63 | Heart disease | 6.1 |
CAL-3, 36-year-old man | 1947 | 1991 | 44 years | 80 | Respiratory failure | .006 (Pu-238) |
In Nashville, pregnant women were given radioactive mixtures. In Cincinnati, some 200 patients were irradiated over a period of 15 years. In Chicago, 102 people received injections of strontium and caesium solutions. In Massachusetts, 73 children were fed
In the book these stories are interwoven with details of more well-known radiation experiments and accidents. These include accounts of U.S. soldiers deliberately exposed to nuclear bomb blasts, families who lived downwind from atomic tests, radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands and the Japanese Lucky Dragon trawler caught in the fallout from the Castle Bravo test in 1954.[3]
Lucky Dragon Crew and their effect on the historical narrative:
The intersection of the Cold War and popular culture is illuminated through Kimmy Yam’s analysis of the Godzilla franchise in her NBC News article, “‘Godzilla was a metaphor for Hiroshima, and Hollywood whitewashed it.’”[8] Yam draws attention to how America's commercialization of Godzilla modifies the anti-nuclear stance of Japan's 1954 Gojira, originally inspired by the “accidental” radiation exposure to the Lucky Dragon Crew. American adaptations of the movie completely remove any connection to American nuclear-weapons testing, with “an estimated 20 minutes of the original Japanese film, predominantly the politically charged portions, [being] cut out of the American version.” This new narrative, which transforms a murderous ape into a hero, retells the story of death and positions nuclear technology as a tool that protects lives; thereby taking attention away from the nefarious actions perpetuated by the U.S. government.
Government Involvement:
The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President
In their report, the committee explicitly states their decision to focus on "representative case studies reflecting eight different categories of experiments," a choice that suggests an orchestrated effort to shape the public perception of the experiments without presenting the full scope of individual experiences.[9] Furthermore, claims that confirmed “the federal government[s] sponsor[ing] of several thousand human radiation experiments” were followed by the implication that these atrocities were committed out of a greater obligation.[10] The statement, “in the great majority of cases, the experiments were conducted to advance biomedical science” is a direct example of discrete indoctrination by use of dialogism.[11] By opting for a controlled narrative, this report raises questions about the extent to which the historical record has been influenced by the very entities responsible for the experiments.
Jonathan D. Moreno was a senior staff member of the committee. He wrote the 1999 book Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, which covers some of the same ground as The Plutonium Files.[12]
See also
- Acres of Skin
- Experimentation on prisoners
- Ruth Faden
- Harold Hodge
- Plutopia
- Unethical human experimentation in the United States
References
- .
- ^ Book Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 76, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp. 637–638.
- ^ The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 1999, 55(6): 58–61.
- ^ Moss, William, and Roger Eckhardt. (1995). "The human plutonium injection experiments." Los Alamos Science. 23: 177-233.
- ^ DOE Openness (June 1998). Human Radiation Experiments: ACHRE Report. "Chapter 5: The Manhattan district Experiments: the first injection". Washington, D.C. Superintendent of Documents US Government Printing Office.
- ^ AEC no. UR-38, 1948 Quarterly Technical Report
- ^ "Human Plutonium Injection Experiments". large.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2023-12-21.
- ^ "'Godzilla' was a metaphor for Hiroshima, and Hollywood whitewashed it". NBC News. 2020-08-07. Retrieved 2023-12-21.
- ^ Executive summary and guide to final report: Advisory committee on human radiation experiments (Report). USDOE Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health, Washington, DC (United States). 1995-01-01.
- ^ Executive summary and guide to final report: Advisory committee on human radiation experiments (Report). USDOE Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health, Washington, DC (United States). 1995-01-01.
- ^ Executive summary and guide to final report: Advisory committee on human radiation experiments (Report). USDOE Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health, Washington, DC (United States). 1995-01-01.
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