The
Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
by Eileen Welsome
One of the Best of the Year
This books exhausts you with the horrors
that the US government did to it's own people. I was horrified by the arrogance
of the holier than thou scientists who decided which people where expendable
for the glory of nuclear energy. These scientists are no better than Hitler
and what he did in his experiment trials. Shame on these scientist and
all scientists who still practice with this attitude. I have no problem
with you finding cures but if you want to use humans, use yourself or your
own kids, don't use ours. Ms. Welsome deserves many awards for this remarkable
book. - James (Mcd77@aol.com), October 28, 1999
U.S. Skeletons Exhumed
The research is thorough and the facts accurate
as Eileen Welsome unearths the secrets of United States Government sponsored
human medical experimentation. Doctors had no regard for ethics when they
injected, fed, and otherwise exposed unwitting men, women, and children
various known and suspected highly toxic substances. The family of CAL-3
(Elmer Allen), who was INJECTED with PLUTONIUM and whose left LEG was AMPUTATED
and taken to 'radiological research,' is grateful to Ms. Welsome for lifting
the cover of this deep dark secret. The truth, buried for too long by the
scientific community and our United States Government, is now on display.
- A reader from Italy, Texas, October 27, 1999
Reviews
Amazon.com
As World War II reached its climax, the
U.S. push to create an atomic bomb spawned an industry the size of General
Motors almost overnight. But a little-understood human dilemma quickly
arose: How was all the radiation involved in building and testing the bomb
going to affect the countless researchers, soldiers, and civilians exposed
to it? Government scientists scrambled to find out, fearing cancer outbreaks
and worse, but in their urgency conducted classified experiments that bordered
on the horrific: MIT researchers fed radioactive oatmeal to residents of
a state boys' school outside Boston; prisoners in Washington and Oregon
were subjected to crippling blasts of direct radiation; and patients with
terminal illnesses (or so it was hoped) were secretly injected with large
doses of plutonium - survivors were surreptitiously monitored for years
afterward.
It was these plutonium guinea pigs
that set journalist Eileen
Welsome on her decade-long search to expose this grisly chapter of
America's atomic age, a feat that would earn her the Pulitzer Prize. In
the impressively thorough and compelling Plutonium Files, Welsome
recounts her work with a reporter's gift for description, characterizing
early radiation researchers as "a curious blend of spook, scientist, and
soldier," tirelessly interviewing survivors and their families, and providing
social and political context for a complex and far-reaching scandal. Perhaps
most damning is that not only did these cold-war experiments violate everything
from the Hippocratic Oath to the Nuremberg Code, Welsome reveals, they
were often ill-conceived, inconclusive, and repetitive - "they were not
just immoral science, they were bad science." --Paul Hughes
From Booklist, August 19, 1999
Journalist Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize
in 1994 for her exposé of the secret experiments conducted by the
"bomb doctors" of Los Alamos, who injected 18 patients with plutonium without
their knowledge or consent during the cold war. Some died soon after. Others
lived for decades in pain and ill health, which they passed on to their
descendants in the form of birth defects. Welsome's aggressive research
and courageous reporting coincided with the release of classified documentation
of thousands of other cases involving the deliberate yet clandestine exposure
of civilians, prison inmates, and military personnel to high levels of
radiation. As a result, President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments was established, but its shocking disclosures and
the subsequent public outcry flashed by too quickly and inconsequentially
to take root in our national consciousness. So now, in this reportorial
tour de force, Welsome presents the entire harrowing story of the catastrophic
consequences of the atomic weapons establishment's almost unimaginable
hubris and immorality. As skilled in rendering science comprehensible as
she is in articulating the ethical issues involved, Welsome is also an
accomplished profiler. Her portraits of medical officers who were so desperate
to understand how radiation and plutonium affected the body they broke
the Hippocratic oath as well as every other law of decency are chilling,
and her dramatic and compassionate depictions of the mothers, children,
and blue-collar workers these monsters tortured - people who were, for
the most part, poor, uneducated, and sick - are unforgettable, the fabric,
one would think, of nightmares, and every bit of it true. Welsome has compiled
a staggering and invaluable chronicle of the most ghoulish and appalling
aspects of the creation of the atom bomb, an undertaking that has put every
human being at risk, and with which we have yet to even begin to come to
terms. Donna Seaman - Copyright© 1999, American Library Association.
All rights reserved
From Kirkus
Reviews
A fierce exposé of governmental duplicity
and dangerous science. A decade ago Welsome, a reporter for the Albuquerque
Tribune, happened upon a reference in an air force report to a nuclear
waste pile that contained the carcasses of several animals that had been
used in testing the effects of radiation. The report hinted that animals
were not the only subjects. Intrigued, Welsome began to sift through a
mountain of official documents, discovering that, from 1945 to 1947, 18
unsuspecting civiliansmen, women, and even children scattered in quiet
hospital wards across the country had been injected with plutonium to test
the effects of radioactive materials on the human body. Such testing formed
part of a federal program that employed, in the words of a government film
narrator, every angle and every gadget we can to find out what really happens
when an atomic bomb kicks out fiercely at the world around it. In a tour
de force of investigative reporting, Welsome tracked down some of these
subjects; and she weaves their stories into a larger narrative, one that
tells the story of US government Cold War medical experimentation as a
whole. Much of this testing, it appears, was unnecessary after all, the
government had thousands of preexisting subjects, the Japanese victims
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of it, Welsome suggests, was done at the
behest of US atomic scientists at Los Alamos, N.M., who were worried about
their own health. Those physicists, as scientist Arthur Compton wrote,
knew what had happened to the early experimenters with radioactive materials.
Not many of them had lived very long. Neither did many of those 18 victims,
and neither did thousands of soldiers and civilians exposed to atomic-bomb
blasts in the deserts of the Southwest, all in the name of delivering the
world from Communism. The literature on the official crimes of the Cold
War era is large and growing. Welsomes stunning book adds much to that
literature, and it makes for sobering reading. -- Copyright ©1999,
Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
When the vast wartime factories of the Manhattan
Project began producing plutonium in quantities never before seen on earth,
scientists working on the top-secret bomb-building program grew apprehensive.
Fearful that plutonium might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and
desperate to learn more about what it could do to the human body, the Manhattan
Project's medical doctors embarked upon an experiment in which eighteen
unsuspecting patients in hospital wards throughout the country were secretly
injected with the cancer-causing substance. Most of these patients would
go to their graves without ever knowing what had been done to them.
Now, in The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome reveals for the first time the breadth
of the extraordinary fifty-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections,
as well as the deceitful nature of thousands of other experiments conducted
on American citizens in the postwar years.
Welsome's remarkable investigation spans
the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents
and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American
history. She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young
woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup
and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck,
one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled
in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude
Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental
radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win
a nuclear war.
Welsome also tells the stories of the scientists
themselves, many of whom learned the ways of secrecy on the Manhattan Project.
Among them are Stafford Warren, a grand figure whose bravado masked a cunning
intelligence; Joseph Hamilton, who felt he was immune to the dangers of
radiation only to suffer later from a fatal leukemia; and physician Louis
Hempelmann, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the plan to inject
humans with potentially carcinogenic doses of plutonium. Hidden discussions
of fifty years past are reconstructed here, wherein trusted government
officials debated the ethical and legal implications of the experiments,
demolishing forever the argument that these studies took place in a less
enlightened era.
Powered by her groundbreaking reportage and
singular narrative gifts, Eileen Welsome has created a work of profound
humanity as well as major historical significance.
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