Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963

Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary announced on December 7, 1993 that the nuclear establishment had conducted radiation experiments on humans since the 1940s. It was a stunning admission - the first time that the head of a nuclear weapons agency had stood before the people it was pledged to protect to admit the awful truth that it had experimented on them. "The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany," she told Newsweek.² Similar thoughts undoubtedly crossed the minds of millions, who wondered how the citizens of a country with democratic checks and balances could have been used as unwitting guinea pigs.

It was soon apparent that other agencies, beyond the Department of Energy, had been involved in human radiation experiments.³ For example, the Department of Defense deliberately released radionuclides into the air from 1948 to 1952 in order to design and test radiation weapons.⁴ Such weapons, discussed as far back as the Manhattan Project, are designed to create temporarily high radiation fields to kill or debilitate enemy soldiers. Secretary O'Leary, in effect, opened a Pandora's box of U.S. radiation testing on humans.

Purposes of the Experiments

The accompanying table on pages 4 and 5 shows a list of many of the human radiation experiments categorized according to the five goals of the funding agencies. Some experiments may have had more than one purpose; for example, some involving external exposure to sick people were purportedly to treat cancers. The objectives of the experiments will not be entirely known until we have more documentation.

Nameless Subjects

This is not a new story, despite the impression that recent, intense media coverage conveys. In 1986, Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts released a report called "American Nuclear Guinea Pigs," documenting many of the radiation experiments on U.S. citizens and calling for further investigation.⁵ Yet at the time, the Department of Energy denied that anything unethical had been done, and the report went largely unnoticed.

There are several reasons why the experiments have generated a public outcry in 1993-94 and did not in 1986. First, the Department of Energy is slowly trying to redefine itself according to post Cold War reality, thanks in large part to Secretary O'Leary. Second, the 1986 Markey report released information about nameless human subjects. It took a reporter from the Albuquerque Tribune - Eileen Welsome - uncovering the identities of some of the subjects for the public to listen. Somehow the thought of "Cal-3" being injected with plutonium was less offensive to the public than "Elmer Allen," a down-on-his-luck railroad porter being injected in his injured leg, in which he was told he had bone cancer; his leg was then amputated.

A Question of Ethics

The names of the experimenters are also integral to understanding and redressing the experiments. As more information about the experiments comes to light, disturbing ethical questions also arise. Many of the experimenters are still alive and most are now scrambling to defend their actions. A number are joined by sympathetic colleagues. One physics professor recently claimed in a letter to the Boston Globe that "our real danger is not from gamma radiation...but from the pandering to fear and ignorance of gullible journalists and ambitious politicians."⁶ However, scientists defending the experimenters are finding slippery footing on the moral high ground.

Many of the human experimenters now claim that not enough was known about radiation to recognize that it might harm the subjects of the experiments. While it is true that risk estimates of exposure to low levels of radiation have increased over the decades, the dangers of radiation exposure were well known during the era of the experimentation, which extended into the early 1970s.⁷ In the late 1950s, radiation standards for workers were set at 5 rem per year, the same as they are today.

Even the dangers from lower levels of radiation - comparable to downwind fallout from atmospheric testing - were well recognized. For instance, Colonel Stafford L. Warren, chief of radiological safety, studied the widespread fallout produced by the very first nuclear weapons test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945 and recommended that no tests be conducted within 150 miles of human habitation.⁸

Despite the experimenters' protestations that the doses were low and therefore not dangerous, many of the experiments were designed to induce harm. Among these was the irradiation of the testicles of prisoners. The irradiation levels ranged up to 600 rads, known even during the Manhattan Project to be very dangerous. Another example was the injection of uranium salts into subjects at the University of Rochester in 1946 and 1947 at levels that would produce injury to the kidneys.⁹

Finally, many of the experiments are especially upsetting because of the type of human subjects chosen to receive the radiation. In case after case, the subjects were in a compromised or powerless position. For example, some subjects were prisoners, others poor, pregnant, children, elderly, people of color, or believed to be mentally retarded. Some were soldiers or military personnel who felt they had to follow orders. In many cases, no informed consent was given, or the subjects did not even know they had been exposed to radiation.

Deceit in the System

Clearly, many of the experimenters were not concerned with the health or well-being of their subjects. This lack of concern for the U.S. public was mirrored in the nuclear establishment that employed them.

By 1947, spreading fallout on enemy territory was considered potentially a major part of atomic warfare. A special board was formed to explore the use of "radioactive mists" generated after an underwater nuclear explosion as a means to create terror among civilians in enemy countries. Ironically, the same terror of radioactive mists afflicted U.S. citizens living downwind of test sites (down-winders), who were exposed to fallout from atmospheric testing. But instead of conducting their testing program in conformity with the recommendation of the chief of radiological safety, the nuclear establishment waged a campaign to convince the people of the United States that fallout from testing was not harmful. One document deemed it "a matter of reeducation" to convince the U.S. public to "accept the possibility of an atomic explosion within a matter of a hundred or so miles of their homes."¹⁰

The legal maneuvering of the nuclear establishment also reveals a general lack of concern for the public. The fear of liability so haunted the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment that contractors to the AEC demanded and got complete immunity from liability, even for gross negligence or violation of contract. Concern about liability seems to have carried over to the human experiments. For instance, Dr. Charles Edington wrote the following when he approved the irradiation of the testicles of prisoners in Washington and Oregon State prisons in from 1963 to 1971:

"All of our mammalian work has been carried out to get a better idea of radiation effects on germ cells and spermatogenesis, etc., with the hope of extrapolating the results to man. This proposal is a direct attack on our problem. I'm for support at the requested level as long as we are not liable. "I wonder about the possible carcinogenic effects of such treatments."¹¹

The Road From Here

There are a number of ways the DOE and the Clinton administration can respond to outcry over the experiments. Stepping back from full disclosure by all the institutions involved, both public and private, is not one of them. It is too late for that. But they could choose to treat the experiments as a narrow matter, resolved by releasing a minimum of documentation and by treating and compensating a few hundred or a few thousand victims. In doing so they would let an historic opportunity slip by.

First, the scope of the inquiry needs to include atomic veterans, downwinders and workers who were exposed to radiation and other dangers from weapons production and testing. Second, scientific issues as well as ethical ones are involved. The quality of the science that the DOE and its contractors did on health and environmental issues has often been poor and sometimes appalling. Even after clear evidence of fabricated data and shocking mistakes of basic math have been exposed, neither the DOE nor its contractors have analyzed the nature of the underlying problems that have led to the poor work.

The Clinton administration should use this occasion to open a sorely needed national debate on science, ethics, environmental protection and clean-up, and nuclear weapons. There are at least six dimensions to such a debate:

1. The causes of the poor quality of much of the science involving health and environmental issues within the nuclear weapons complex and its impact on the prospects for clean-up, waste management, and protection of workers and off-site populations.

2. The ethics of using science and technology to produce weapons of mass destruction.

3. The ethics of building, threatening to use, and actually using such weapons.

4. The effects upon universities and other institutions of research and learning resulting from secrecy and dependence on military contracting.

5. The ways in which scientific inquiry and technological innovation impose risks upon populations and the environment, and the nature of the democratic processes necessary for informed consent. Such a debate must include cases where there may be uncertainty about the dimensions of the risk, and who bears the burden of proof in case of suspected injury or ecological damage - those doing and financing the experiments or those upon whom the risk is imposed.

6. The subjective aspects of the scientists' role in these human experiments must be re-examined. In most cases the health of the subjects was not of enduring or substantial interest to the researchers or to their colleagues in the professions of radiology, radiobiology, and health physics who knew about these experiments and used their results. Normally, the interplay between the needs and desires of scientists and their observations is hidden. But it is dramatically transparent in the conduct of these human experiments. It should become a part of the historic debate on science and policy occasioned by them.

Secretary O'Leary has already taken the highly unusual step of asking ethicists to assist her department in the process of evaluating the human experiments, releasing the information, and doing justice to the victims. It would be fitting if such a wide-ranging fundamental enquiry were to be vigorously advocated by the DOE.