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Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered decades of "dark medicine" and later wrote The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (1999). Plutonium, a key ingredient in the atomic bomb, is the most toxic substance known to man. Some of the 4,000 secret studies that took place in this country included monitoring of poisoned workers in bomb factories, citizens injected with plutonium with no chance of medical benefit, special needs children fed "radioactive" cereal, and over 800 pregnant women unknowingly fed "radioactive" iron. At least eighteen men, woman and children were experimentally injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947, most going to their graves without knowing what had been done to them. Resultant cancer data and radioactive body parts were forwarded to Los Alamos.President Clinton's 1995 declassification of human experimentation files confirmed that the U.S. Army Manhattan Project, the top-secret World War II machine that built the atomic bomb, engaged in human radiation experiments that remained classified for over half a century. The Manhattan Project became the civilian-run Atomic Energy Commission in 1947. Welsome writes that AEC research advanced nuclear medicine, but the aim of the military industrial complex was to establish occupational standards for defense industry workers exposed to highly toxic chemicals and radiation, and to help the Army, Navy and Air Force fight more effectively on the nuclear battlefield.With over-all responsibility for making the atomic bomb, General Leslie R. Groves explained that in 1943, "The most urgent problem was to determine the toxicity of the materials we were using: primarily, uranium and plutonium compounds; the related heavy elements, such as radium, polonium and thorium; and certain accessory process materials, such as fluorine and beryllium. This required the study of the manner in which the materials might be introduced into the body, whether by ingestion, inhalation, skin absorption or in other ways."During World War I, the U.S. War Department considered using "tetraethyl lead" as deadly nerve gas. After The Plutonium Files had been published, it was revealed that Medical Director of the Ethyl Corp., Robert A. Kehoe, M.D., principal defender of keeping highly toxic "tetraethyl lead" in gasoline, had joined forces with the AEC in 1946. This was an ideal arrangement because radioactive material, like lead from gasoline, was becoming a component in the bones of exposed U.S. citizens. Once lead (also strontium 90 from atomic testing) enters the bloodstream, the body mistakes it for calcium and incorporates it into bone and soft tissue. When Robert Kehoe investigated toxic workplace hazards - lead, benzene and fluoride - used to manufacture leaded gasoline, health data was passed on to those who owned the factories, but not to those who worked inside them. Kehoe collaborated with the AEC in order to protect defense contractors from worker injury lawsuits.General Groves considered the potential of personal injury lawsuits as the most serious threat to the nuclear program. A secret AEC document, dated April 17, 1947, warned young radiologists, "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such field work should be classified 'Secret.'"Alluding to medical experiments conducted in the Nazi concentration camps, an editorial writer for the AMA wrote in 1946, "the medical profession in the United States would rally behind any enlisted officer who refused to conduct an unethical human experiment, even if ordered to do so by the 'highest political leaders.'" In the U.S. military today, it is emphasized that medical officers are "physicians first" - following the Hippocratic Oath - and "officers second" - meeting military needs. (NEJM September 11, 2008)There is no evidence of American GIs being subjected to Nazi Germany's chemical or radioactive weapons during World War II; toxic exposure occurred back home in medical labs, U.S. bomb factories and uranium mines. During the Cold War, defense contractors systematically denied that working with the most hazardous materials ever known had made any workers sick enough to become a compensable occupational disease.In the early days of the Cold War, Eileen Welsome reminds the reader that "twenty-three medical doctors, including Hitler's personal physician, went on trial for assorted crimes involving murder and torture performed in the name of medical science." Nevertheless, as a result of Operation Paperclip, doctors from Nazi Germany were recruited by the AEC to work in the USA. One senior American scientist described the AEC radiation experiments as having "a little of the Buchenwald touch."In one of the most important books of the past century, The Plutonium Files emphasizes that AEC scientists deliberately "downplayed the amount of radioactive pollution emanating from the bomb factories and the health risks of fallout, reasoning that a few extra leukemias, bone cancers, or genetic mutations were an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect in the struggle against communism."
