For articles on the use of human guinea-pigs during the nuclear weapons tests in Australia, click here (separate file).

When Ebb Cade, a black 53-year-old cement worker, had a car accident in Tennessee in March 1945, he received more than he bargained for when he was taken to the nearby Manhattan Project Army Hospital for treatment. He was injected with plutonium to see what would be the effect on the human body of the new radioactive element created by, and essential to, the production of nuclear weapons.

Cade was not informed of the health risks nor was his consent sought as a test subject. Cabe's case, and those of the 17 other plutonium injectees in the experiment, exhibit all the elements that mark the history of state experiments on humans in the US: exploitation of vulnerable groups, exposure to health risks, official secrecy and decades of cover-up.

For Jonathan Moreno, who wrote this meticulously documented book, the parallels to the human experimentation of the Nazi doctors whom the US had prosecuted after the war, are too close for ethical comfort. Moreno, a member of a committee that investigated human radiation experiments and advised US President Bill Clinton, has compiled a damning record of government-sponsored nuclear, biological and chemical research on unsuspecting US citizens.

The research was justified by the political, military and medical establishments as essential to “national security”. Patriotism was often invoked to elicit “volunteers” for the dangerous experiments. However, most “volunteers” were coerced, manipulated, misinformed, lied to or simply taken advantage of. Consent, if sought, was not fully informed.

The warm inner-glow felt by some boys with an intellectual disability who were institutionalised in Massachusetts in the 1940s and 1950s was not the glow of patriotism but a result of being fed breakfast cereals laced with radioactive tracers to study the passage of nutrients. They weren't so much assisting with the “national security” task of “facing down the Soviets” as helping Quaker Oats Company steal an advertising march on their rivals.
The boys, experimented on in radiation-nutrition studies sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and their parents were lied to about the risks of leukemia. They were pathetically grateful, in a harsh institution, for any rewards for participating in the experiments, like being taken out to a baseball game. They were easy to manipulate and exploit.

Whole populations were unwitting subjects in hundreds of test releases of radioactive substances from Utah to Alaska. “Innocuous” biological organisms were also released, from the countryside to urban subway systems, which were anything but innocuous to people with suppressed immune systems. There could be no “informed consent”, even in theory, from whole populations.

Patients with terminal cancers were sitting ducks for radiation experiments, including total body irradiation, because they were desperate for a magic bullet, even though the experiments were not aimed at helping them at all. Premature death, nausea and vomiting were the only outcomes for the 263 patients experimented on by the US Air Force from 1951-56 to test exposure levels for their proposed nuclear-powered aircraft.

Prisoners were also susceptible “volunteer” material. With prison wages around 25 cents a day, the inducement of $25 for testicle irradiation in AEC-funded experiments was hard to resist for the inmates of Oregon and Washington state penitentiaries from 1963-73. The military experiments were to determine the effects of radiation on production of testosterone and muscle function. Prisoners who “volunteered” for gonorrhoea and malaria experiments in the 1940s were offered $100. Prisoners were led to believe that participation would count as “good time” towards parole. Life prisoners proved particularly attractive as subjects for radiation studies because they “remained in one place for observation”, as a military-funded University of California professor enthused.

Military personnel were also a “captive” experimental population. Sixty-thousand service personnel were used in chemical experiments. More than 6000 soldiers were used in research on chemical agents designed to incapacitate.

Thousands of sailors sat in gas chambers filled with mustard gas until they passed out. The US Army's Chemical Warfare Service also conducted field tests in 1944 on soldiers, sometimes without protective masks, who received a cocktail of mustard gas, tear gas and phosgene to test the effects of the chemicals on the soldiers' combat performance.

During nearly two decades of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada and at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, troops were placed as close as six kilometres from the blast. Aircrews flew through atomic clouds. If anyone showed reluctance, they were “gently” reminded of where they stood in the military hierarchy.

The Australian military behaved like their allied peers. In Cairns, more than 800 Australian soldiers with war disabilities which restricted them to home duties took part in malaria and other medical experiments, including blood loss, decompression and hypothermia. In a chilling irony, these soldiers included German Jewish refugees who had enlisted in the Australian army to fight fascism.

The Jewish refugee-soldiers might have expected better than to be subjects of experiments that were ethically similar to those of the Nazis.

The US military, having condemned the Nazi doctors as monsters at the post-war Nuremberg trials, promptly proceeded to import some of the worst offenders to contribute to their own programs. The top secret Operation Paper Clip, by-passing immigration clearances, brought to the US 1600 Nazi scientists compromised by their research activities.

Werner von Braun, rocket scientist and SS officer, was the most infamous but the other recruits included medical scientists who had experimented on concentration camp victims. Japanese army doctors with experience of biological warfare experiments on Chinese civilians and US and Australian POWs were given immunity from war crimes prosecution and brought to the US.

Despite the US military having an ethical code of conduct for human experimentation, few experimenters knew about it (because it was, conveniently, classified “Top Secret”) or cared about it. The CIA did not even bother with the pretence of ethical protocols.

While two wags spiked a bar-room singer's cocktail with LSD in 1958 to observe the effect, the CIA's chemical division had even greater sport with its MKULTRA project to test LSD and other mind-control drugs (such as mescaline) through grants to psychiatrists for human experiments. The psychological and physical distress, and death, from heavy doses of hallucinogens was a small price to pay for “national security”.

Prisoners, children, the sick, people with an intellectual disability and other “sub-humans” with lesser human rights were common victims in the Nazis' medical experiments. The parallels were a public relations worry for the US state and, with social attitudes rapidly changing in the 1960s and trust in the US government plummeting, military-medical human experimentation was caught up in the tide of reform.

It is now illegal to experiment on children. Widespread use of prisoners ended in the mid-1970s. Some compensation is being paid. The US Army claims it engages in testing only for defence purposes. However, as Moreno correctly points out, the line between defensive and offensive research is a fine one and is regularly crossed.

Less perceptively, Moreno sees the reduction in human experimentation abuses as a “tribute to the American system”. The tribute, however, is to the victims, the investigative journalists, political activists and ordinary citizens who stood up against the state and created a social climate where Nazi-like abuses are not tolerated. A tribute to the capitalist “American system”, it is not. If the US state had not been found out, the abuses would still be happening on the same scale.

Moreno also justifies human experimentation as legitimate if “genuinely” in the “national interest” to defend democracy (the US) against evil-doers (Iraq and other official enemies). Such a faulty premise opens a gigantic loophole for human testing for the new weapons, such as electro-magnetic radiation and “gene warfare”, feared by Moreno.

Capitalism (what Moreno hails as “our democracy”) is the problem. The aggressive quest for profits is the prime cause of military, and commercial, abuses of human subjects in medical experiments.

A compendium of state-sponsored experiments carried out on unwitting human subjects, Undue Risk chronicles the history of unethical medical experimentation in the United States from World War II to the present. Jonathan Moreno, a professor of bio medical ethics at the University of Virginia, is an excellent candidate to tell this story. In 1994, Moreno was appointed senior staff member of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, the special committee set up by President Bill Clinton in response to Eileen Welsome's investigation of government radiation experiments during the Cold War.

Though this book covers some of the same terrain as Welsome's Plutonium Files, Moreno includes chemical and biological warfare experiments in his investigation. He also surveys the grim history of human experimentation in several other countries, including the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Japan, South Africa, and Iraq.

Most of the cases recounted in the book—including the Manhattan Project's plutonium injections, army "field tests" of bacteriological agents in U.S. cities, and the CIA's LSD experiments— are well known. Moreno, how ever, uses these cases to explore the evolution of U.S. government policies regulating human experiments. Based on personal interviews, previous investigations, and government documents made available to him as a member of the advisory committee, Moreno presents a behind-the-scenes look at the government's struggle with medical ethics and its often half-hearted attempt to impose guidelines on human experimentation.

A central theme of the book is the clash between the government's need to undertake human experiments for national security purposes and the moral dilemmas such experiments present. Moreno writes, "A paradox of human experiments is that they often must be done to learn about the dangers of some agents, in spite of the general ethical obligation not to expose people to harm."

However, many government agencies that undertook medical-military experiments during and after World War II not only ignored the ethical subtleties of their experiments, but failed to implement the cardinal rule of human experimentation—that subjects volunteer for an experiment after being informed of its nature and risks.

Moreno places much of the blame for this failure on the government's inability to implement rigid policies governing human experiments. An example of this is the ethics policy established by Defense Secretary Charles Wilson in 1953. The policy, which was based heavily on the Nuremberg Code, was intended to govern human experiments undertaken by the various branches of the Defense Department.

The policy was not well-received within the national security establishment. Moreno writes, "Medical and military critics in the Pentagon were opposed to any written policy that threatened to restrict human experiments for national security needs." As it turned out, the critics' concerns were not warranted because the policy was ignored. During the years that Wilson's ethics policy remained the official Defense Department code, the military undertook hundreds of experiments that clearly violated its fundamental tenets.

According to Moreno, part of the problem with Wilson's policy—and with other policies that came later— was that it was shrouded in secrecy. Possibly because of its references to "the sensitive subject of unconventional warfare," the policy had a "top secret" designation that prevented it from being properly disseminated among the many agencies involved in human experimentation. He writes, "Critics asked how it was expected that scientists, including many university professors on contracts whose careers depended on publishing [the results of their experiments], could be guided by a top-secret document!"

Another problem with Wilson's policy was that it failed to adequately address ethical issues. Moreno explains, "[The policy made clear] that there had to be subject consent but [it was] vague about how much risk people could be asked to accept in the name of national security research."

One Defense Department agency, the army's Chemical Corps, had a particularly difficult time resolving this ethical dilemma. Because of a perceived need for improved protection against aerosolized microbes, in 1955 the corps' advisory board recommended that "tests on human subjects with biological agents be given a high priority." The recommendation provoked widespread debate in the corps about how to determine what level of risk was appropriate in the experiment. One lieutenant colonel asked, "How can we develop and standardize [biological] and [chemical] agents when higher authority requires human dose-response data, yet these agents are considered by medical authorities to be too dangerous for human experimentation?"

Despite the shortcomings of the Wilson policy, it is clear that much of the fault for the government's abysmal record on human experimentation rests with the individuals who supported, organized, and undertook the experiments. But Moreno, who excoriates the "exploitation [of human subjects] in the name of national defense," often fails to stress the importance of individual responsibility. Instead, he frequently chooses to focus blame on policy. But should educated doctors and military officers need written regulations to know that dangerous experiments on unwitting subjects violate these subjects' human rights and should not be undertaken—regardless of their potential national security value?

Moreno presents a convincing case for the importance of strong policies. Human experiments, he argues, will be necessary "as long as the nation's security is threatened by novel weapons of war." A carefully crafted and widely promoted policy to guide researchers is the best assurance we can have that those charged with protecting us do not violate fundamental rights in the name of national security.

Moreno closes his narrative with an appeal: "In a dangerous world, let those who would protect us not add to the sources of undue risk."

[ Michael Flynn is assistant editor of the Bulletin. ]

From April 1945 to July 1947, 18 men, women, and children were injected with plutonium by doctors working with the Manhattan Project. None of the subjects was told what was being done, and none gave informed consent. They were chosen because the doctors believed them to be mortally ill, although many lived for years, even decades, with the plutonium working its damage in their system.

The experiments were covered up for 40 years: When they became public, the government apologized but not a single doctor or hospital was publicly blamed. The plutonium injections ended after 27 months, having achieved little.

But other experiments, for the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), continued into the 1970s. In Nashville, scientists at Vanderbilt University gave pregnant women radioactive cocktails. Prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their testicles radiated with neutrons. At the University of Cincinnati, nearly 200 patients were irradiated over a 15-year period. In Massachusetts, 74 boys at a Dickensian state school for unwanted or homeless boys were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron or calcium. The University of Chicago, one of the three sites for the plutonium injections, also fed solutions of strontium and cesium to 102 subjects with the assistance of Argonne National Laboratory. Again, no one told the victims what was going on, nor did anyone ask their consent.

The purpose of the experiments was to judge the effect of radioactivity on the human body. When they began, the Manhattan Project was close to exploding the first atomic bomb. Employees at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos worked with radioactive materials, yet no one knew the long-term effects of radiation on healthy people or on their genes and reproductive capacities. Experiments on animals were inconclusive and unsatisfactory. To protect the health of atomic workers, it was decided to begin human experiments.

In pursuit of this goal, many American doctors violated not only the Hippocratic Oath but the Nuremberg Code, American Medical Association guidelines, and U.S. government regulations. Crimes were committed and, in the end, damages paid, mostly to survivors. As late as 1985, body parts were being severed from cadavers, usually without the knowledge of the next of kin, for shipment to Los Alamos where they were analyzed for plutonium content. More than 15,000 human bodies were raided for this project, which was called Operation Sunshine. At a 1954 conference in Washington D.C., Willard Libby, winner of the Nobel Prize, lamented the shortage of bodies of persons, especially children, who had been exposed to radioactivity. "If anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching," Libby said, "they will really be serving their country."

This is a horrifying story and it is told with quiet rage by Eileen Welsome, a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her reporting on the plutonium experiments. News of these and other experiments had leaked out earlier, but they received little public attention. Welsome's achievement was to pierce the closed files and classified records that were part of the medical cover-up of the experiments. It is not possible to read The Plutonium Files without mounting fury, as Welsome tells of the violation of human bodies and spirits by scientists in whom this nation places its trust. Her book is a powerful indictment of an important part of the Manhattan Project and a warning of the evil that supposedly high-minded people can do when convinced of their own superiority and devoted to a goal that blinds them to simple humanity.

Through some inspired sleuthing, Welsome gives real names and faces to subjects who were known to officialdom only as chi-2 or hp-8. Chi-2 was Una Macke, the second Chicago subject, a cancer sufferer who died soon after the injection. Hp-8, which stands for Human Product-8, was Janet Stadt, a scleroderma victim who received 1,000 rems of radiation during her lifetime. ("My mother," her son later told government investigators, "went in for scleroderma, which is a skin disorder, and a duodenal ulcer, and somehow she got pushed over into this lab where these monsters were.")

Welsome melds the story of these experiments with the better-known cases of U.S. servicemen deliberately exposed to atomic bomb blasts, Utah ranch families who lived downwind from nuclear tests, Marshall Islanders exposed to radiation, and the luckless Japanese fishermen aboard the Lucky Dragon, the trawler caught in the fallout from the giant U.S. hydrogen bomb test in 1954. These stories are included because they reveal the same arrogance, willful ignorance, and total disregard for human lives that underlay the plutonium experiments.
The doctors and scientists knew that radioactive materials were dangerous—"potentially extremely poisonous," as Arthur Compton said in 1944. They didn't know how dangerous they were, and they were determined to find out, and so, as Welsome writes, "they violated a fundamental right that belongs to all competent adults: the right to control one's own body."

There is documentary evidence that Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists approved the experiments (although Welsome found no signs that Gen. Leslie Groves, who told Congress in 1945 that radiation sickness is "a pleasant way to die," ever knew about them.)

The government covered up the plutonium experiments until 1993 when then-Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, spurred by Welsome's stories, reversed this policy. President Bill Clinton then ordered federal agencies to open any records dealing with the plutonium experiments or any other human radiation experiments. The resulting investigation, undertaken by the president's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, turned up much of the information on other experiments that is included in this book.

Most of the subjects, Welsome writes, "were the poor, the powerless, and the sick—the very people who count most on the government to protect them." Clarence Lushbaugh, a collaborator on the radiation project, told the author that the director of the project in Cincinnati, Eugene Saenger, picked his subjects from the "slums" because "these persons don't have any money and they're black and they're poorly washed. These persons were available in the University of Cincinnati to Dr. Saenger. . . . I did review what he was doing, and I thought it was actually well done." Welsome adds that, in Cincinnati, 62 percent of the subjects were African-American.

So was the very first plutonium recipient, a construction worker named Ebb Cade, who was injured in a traffic accident on his way to work at Oak Ridge and ended up in the army hospital there. Scientists had decided to begin the plutonium experiments and Cade—there is no other way to put it—happened to be handy. A month after Cade was injected in 1945, Wright Langham, a Los Alamos chemist who was a driving force behind the experiments, told a meeting of Manhattan Project doctors in Chicago that "the subject was an elderly male whose age and general health was such that there is little or no possibility that the injection can have any effect on the normal course of his life." Cade, in fact, was 55 and, apart from partial blindness caused by a cataract, reasonably healthy. He died eight years later of a heart attack.

The third subject, a house painter named Albert Stevens, was chosen to be injected at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco because he had terminal cancer. But the diagnosis was wrong and Stevens lived another 21 years. For the next two decades, scientists collected Stevens's urine and stool samples to check the amount of plutonium in his system. He knew he was part of an experiment, but assumed it was part of his treatment for his arrested cancer. Incredibly, Stevens lived out his life unaware that he did not have cancer and had never had it.
This medical deception is of a piece with the story of one of the University of Rochester patients, Eda Schultz Charlton, a 49-year-old woman who went to the university hospital with minor ailments. As Welsome writes, "[Charlton] was not terminally ill, she was not even chronically ill, she may not have even been seriously ill." But she was injected with plutonium, according to government documents. Her 314 pages of medical records at the hospital, however, do not mention anything about plutonium. Over the years, she suffered from depression, fatigue, arthritis, nausea, spasms, and other illnesses that may or may not have been caused by the plutonium. She finally died in 1983, 37 years after the injections.

But the most appalling part of Charlton's story is that her doctor, Christine Waterhouse, had been recruited as Charlton's primary physician by Dr. Samuel Bassett, one of the overseers of the plutonium experiment at Rochester. Apparently under Bassett's instructions, Waterhouse "cared" for Eda Charlton for 29 years without ever telling her that she had been injected with plutonium.

Welsome says that even the Rochester scientists called their program "a production line." Unknowing patients were given an average of five micrograms of plutonium, which was five times the safe limit set by Manhattan Project scientists. Eleven patients were injected at Rochester and there probably would have been more had it not been for inconveniences like Christmas. "No one seems to want to be in the hospital on that particular day," Bassett groused. "I will do what I can, however, to keep the production line going."

Three of the 11 Rochester patients, like Charlton, lived another 30 years with plutonium in their bodies. For most of those years, it was assumed that all the subjects had been terminally ill and had died quickly. It is one of the major merits of Welsome's work that she dug up the patients' names and found out what really happened to them. As a 1947 AEC document makes clear, the secrecy and cover-up were ordered because publicity "might have an adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits." Moreover, the doctors and scientists themselves knew they were doing something that, if not outright criminal, would look bad in the light of day. One assistant in the Chicago experiments, according to a classified 1946 report, was Leon Jacobson, who later became chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. Jacobson told investigators in 1974 that he was not involved in the experiment and "knew very little about it, next to nothing"—not a very convincing denial.

The plundering of body parts of radiation victims reached ghoulish proportions. Cecil Kelley, who was killed in an accident at Los Alamos, was not so much buried as distributed. Bits of his corpse went to the army, to Oak Ridge, and to other researchers around the nation. His brain was shipped out in a wide-mouthed mayonnaise jar. What was left was eventually given a military burial by the government, which also promised to pay for his children's college education. The promise was never kept.

The committee convened by President Clinton eventually issued a controversial 1995 report that blamed everyone—and, hence, no one. It found that bad things were done, but refused to condemn those who did them. "Wrongs were committed," it said, "by very decent people who were in a position to know that a specific aspect of their interactions with others should be improved."

Clinton swept aside the report's mealy-mouthed language, proclaiming that the experiments "failed both the test of our national values and the test of humanity." But nobody heard him. Two hours after his statement, the O. J. Simpson verdict was announced and the media paid little attention to the fate of the hundreds of Americans who had been used as guinea pigs by their government.

Welsome's book is a powerful attempt to give those victims their day in court. "Thousands of Americans were used as laboratory animals in radiation experiments funded by the federal government," she writes. They were not the victims of the military, nor of faceless, low-level bureaucrats who were "just doing their jobs." The experiments were threads woven uncomfortably tightly into the fabric of the Manhattan Project itself.

"The Manhattan Project veterans and their proteges controlled the information," she says. "They sat on the boards that set radiation standards, consulted at meetings where further human experimentation was discussed, investigated nuclear accidents, and served as expert witnesses in radiation injury cases."

In a sense, as Welsome notes, the verdict on the plutonium experiments was handed down 2,500 years ago by Hippocrates—"I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked"—and 52 years ago by James McHaney, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: "It is the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics and human decency that the subjects volunteer for the experiment after being informed of its nature and hazards. This is the clear dividing line between the criminal and what may be non-criminal. If the experimental subjects cannot be said to have volunteered, then the inquiry need proceed no further."

[ R. C. Longworth, a senior writer for the Chicago Tribune, is a member of the Bulletin's Board of Directors. ]

The United States exposed its forces to chemical warfare and live biological agents during Cold War military exercises in America, Canada and Britain, secret documents cleared for release to Congress reveal.

Sixteen newly declassified reports describe how chemical and biological exercises used deadly substances such as VX and sarin to test the vulnerability of forces.

William Winkenwerder, a Pentagon official, said military personnel in the tests were given protection from the toxins available at the time, though he conceded that those were primitive compared with what is available today.

The Pentagon is working with the Department of Veterans' Affairs to identify an estimated 5500 people believed to have participated in the tests, because it remains unclear whether all of them were fully aware of the subject of the exercises, and the risks they presented.

Congress has scheduled hearings this week to examine the documents, and the Government's responsibility to any veterans who are suffering from ill effects.

One Republican member of the House of Representatives, Christopher H. Smith, said: "At a time when our nation may be called upon to fight a war to protect Americans from chemical and biological terrorism, it is tragic to learn that four decades earlier some of America's soldiers and sailors were unwitting participants in tests using live chemical and biological toxins."

A Democrat who is one of the leaders in the fight to identify veterans who have been exposed to risk, Mike Thompson, said:

"The Department of Defence has not only subjected our own soldiers to dangerous substances, it may have put civilians it is charged with protecting at risk.

"It is appalling that 40 years have passed and this information is just now being disclosed."

-- The New York Times

Newly declassified Pentagon reports reveal that the US secretly tested chemical and biological weapons on American soil during the 1960s.  The tests included releasing deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii, according to the documents obtained on 8 October.  The US also tested nerve agents in Canada and Britain in conjunction with those countries, and tested biological and chemical weapons in at least two other states, Maryland and Florida.

Summaries of more than two dozen tests show that biological and chemical tests were much more widespread than the military has previously acknowledged.  The Pentagon released records earlier this year showing that chemical and biological agents had been sprayed on ships at sea.  Documents also revealed that the military reimbursed ranchers and agreed to stop open-air nerve agent testing at its main chemical weapons center in the Utah desert after about 6,400 sheep died when nerve gas drifted away from the test range.

However, the Pentagon has never before provided details of the Alaskan, Hawaiian, Canadian and British tests. The Defense Department formally released summaries of 28 biological and chemical weapons tests at a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee hearing on 9 October.  The documents did not say whether any civilians had been exposed to the poisons. According to the Pentagon, military personnel exposed to weapons agents would have worn protective gear, although the gas masks and suits used at the time were far less sophisticated than those in use today.

Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the Pentagon’s top health official, said that troops involved in biological weapons testing were vaccinated ahead of time.  Dr. Winkenwerder acknowledged that some service members involved in the tests may not have known all the details of these tests.  He also said some service members participating in tests using simulated chemical or biological weapons may not have been informed about the tests at all.  The head of the House Veterans Affairs panel called for further investigation of the tests.

The tests were part of Project 112, a military program in the 1960s and 70s to test chemical and biological weapons and defenses against them.  Parts of the testing program conducted on Navy ships was called Project SHAD, or Shipboard Hazard and Defense.  The US scrapped its biological weapons program in the late 1960s and agreed in a 1997 treaty to destroy all of its chemical weapons.  Some of those involved in the tests say they now suffer health problems linked to their exposure to dangerous chemicals and biological agents.

Dr. Jonathan Perlin of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) said that the Defense Department has identified about 5,000 service members involved in tests at sea and another 2,100 involved in the tests detailed on 9 October.  He said 53 veterans have filed health claims for their exposure during the tests.  The VA has sent letters to 1,400 veterans involved in the tests at sea.

(source: AP; 10 October 2002)

The symbiosis between nuclear agencies and medical institutions works both ways. There is a long history of medical practitioners and researchers giving verbal support to the development of nuclear power, weapons and so on. Thus Wagner and Ketchum (1989), nuclear medicine specialists, blow the trumpet not only for medical uses of radiation but also for nuclear power. Brodsky et al. (1995, p.813) claim that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima "seems to have saved millions of lives", talk about "environmentally clean and safe nuclear power and radioactive waste disposal", and are hostile to nuclear critics. Medical personnel and institutions sometimes strayed from the topic of radioisotope supply in submissions to the Research Reactor Review - for example the Flinders Medical Centre (1993) argued that HIFAR is an "important and prestigious" national facility, and failure to build a new reactor would result in a loss of international status which could be seen as an indicator of Australia's continued slide towards "banana republicanism" and third-world status.

In other cases the support of medical personnel and institutions is more tangible, such as through their involvement in radiation dosimetry research and regulation; this encompasses medical radiation along with many other radiation sources such as reactor emissions and uranium mining. (Stelson et al., 1995; Gofman, 1990).

The most sinister aspect of the symbiosis between medicine and nuclear programs was a series of radiation experiments carried out in the US from 1944-1974. The experiments were funded by a range of institutions including the Defence Department and the US Atomic Energy Commission. At least 31 contentious radiation experiments have come to light, affecting up to 800 people. Dozens of people, including prisoners, mental patients, children, and pregnant women, were injected with small quantities of plutonium. Some cancer patients were injected with uranium - to test the effects of uranium on tumours and/or to determine safe levels of exposure among uranium miners. Between 1961 and 1972 the military sponsored work in which at least 87 cancer patients were irradiated to test the effects of radiation on cognitive and emotional processes. Justifications given for some of the experiments referred to Cold War paranoia and overlapping notions of subjecting a few individuals to risks for the good of society as a whole. In addition to tests performed directly on individuals, a number of tests were conducted involving the deliberate release of radiation into the atmosphere. (Roberts, 1994; Rhein, 1994; Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, 1996.) Predictably, the nuclear medicine community has tried to distance itself from these experiments despite the involvement of the medical profession - thus an article on the topic in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine was titled "Not Nuclear Medicine" (Miller, 1994).

Far more widespread than military-medical experiments was the misuse of radiation (radioisotopes and x-rays) as a result of corporate and medical profiteering, tied in with ignorance about the iatrogenic effects of radiation and a willingness to use medical patients as guinea pigs for experimental procedures without informed consent. Questionable experiments carried out in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s, which have received some publicity recently, belong to this category of misuse (Bonnyman, 1994).

While nuclear medicine personnel and institutions have generally been staunch allies of all things nuclear, there has been the occasional dissent. For example in 1978, 74 doctors and scientists involved in nuclear medicine in Australia sent a petition to the federal government expressing their concern, and urging a cautious approach, to nuclear power on the grounds of waste disposal, radiation, pollution, and genetic risks. The petition was a response to attempts by the Citizens for Uranium Export to lobby doctors to support uranium mining and export. In 1993 the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War called for a boycott on Siemens medical equipment (which includes nuclear medicine equipment) because of aspects of the company's involvement in the nuclear power industry. Siemens denies the boycott is having an impact but "industry sources" say it is, particularly in Europe, according to a reporter in the Movement Against Uranium Mining's magazine The Third Opinion. (Spring, 1996.) Another falling out followed from the attempt of the Canadian Control Board to raise permissible radiation levels for workers and the public in 1983-84. All the major unions representing Canada's 200 000 radiation workers, including medical radiation workers, banded together to oppose the changes which were subsequently dropped. (Babin, 1985, p.17.) One further example is the work of a number of dissident doctors and scientists working in the field of radiation research and regulation. Little is to be made of these examples; they are rare exceptions and there is no sign that the bonds between nuclear medicine and nuclear agencies are becoming more troubled with time.

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, 1996, Final Report, <http://nattie/eh.doe.gov/systems/hrad/report.html> (Washington: US  Government Printing Office.)

Babin, Ronald, 1985, The Nuclear Power Game, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Bonnyman, John, 1994, "Use of Radiation in Medicine and Medical Research in Australia", Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Nuclear Medicine, June, pp.36-38. (Summary available from Jim Green.)

Brodsky, Allen, Kathren, Ronald L., and Willis, Charles A., 1995, "History of the Medical Uses of Radiation: Regulatory and Voluntary Standards of Protection", Health Physics, Vol.69(5), pp.783-819.

Flinders Medical Centre (Nuclear Medicine Section), 1993, Submission to the Research Reactor Review.

Gofman, John W., 1990, Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure: An Independent Analysis, San Francisco: Committee for Nuclear Responsibility.

Miller, Lantz, 1994, "Not Nuclear Medicine: The Government's Radiobiological and Other Experiments", The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, Vol.35(3), pp.9N-22N.

Rhein, Reginald, 1994, "Compensation urged for US radiation victims", British Medical Journal, Vol.308, 8 January, pp.79-80.

Roberts, John, 1994, "A little of the Buchenwald touch", British Medical Journal, Vol.308, 22 January, p.226.

Stelson, Audrey T.S., Watson, Evelyn E., and Cloutier, Roger J., 1995, "A History of Medical Internal Dosimetry", Health Physics, Vol.69(5), pp.766-782.

Wagner, Henry N., Jr., and Ketchum, Linda E., 1989, Living with Radiation: The Risk, the Promise, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.