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DISCLAIMER
.
The following is a staff memorandum or other working
document prepared for the members of the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments. It should not be construed as representing
the final conclusions of fact or interpretation of the issues. All
staff memoranda are subject to revision based on further information
and analysis. For conclusions and recommendations of the Advisory
Committee, readers are advised to consult the Final Report to be
published in 1995. |
MEMORANDUM
TO: Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments
FROM: Advisory Committee Staff
DATE: April 5, 1995
RE: Post-World War II Recruitment of German Scientists - Project
Paperclip
The Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at
Brooks Air
Force Base in Texas conducted dozens of human radiation experiments
during the Cold War, among them flash-blindness studies in connection
with atomic weapons tests, and data-gathering for total-body
irradiation studies conducted in Houston. (These have been the
subject of prior briefing books.) Because of the extensive postwar
recruiting of German scientists for the SAM and other U.S. defense
installations, and in light of the central importance of the
Nuremberg prosecutions to the Advisory Committee’s work, members of
the staff have collected documentary evidence about Project
Paperclip from the National Archives and Department of Defense
records. (The departments of Justice and Defense, as well as the
Archives staff, have provided substantial assistance in this
effort.)
The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included
many related to aviation research. These were mainly high-altitude
exposure studies, oxygen deprivation experiments, and cold studies
related to air-sea rescue operations. This information about air
crew hazards was important to both sides, and, of course, continued
to be important to military organizations in the Cold War.
Background of Project Paperclip
Project Paperclip was a postwar and Cold War operation carried out
by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA).1 [Operation
Paperclip’s code name was said to have originated because scientific
recruits’ papers were paperclipped with regular immigration forms.
The JIOA was a special intelligence office reporting to the Director
of Intelligence in the War Department, comparable to the
intelligence chief of today’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.] Paperclip
had
two aims:
At least
1,600 scientists and their dependents were recruited and brought to
the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through
the early 1970s. The most famous of these was Wernher von Braun.
1
In recent years, it has been alleged that many of these individuals
were brought to the United States in violation of American
government policy not to permit the entrance of "ardent Nazis" into
the country, that many were security risks, and that at least some
were implicated in Holocaust-related activities.
The secondary literature on
Paperclip includes Linda Hunt,
Secret
Agenda (1991) and Tom Bowers,
The Paperclip Conspiracy (1989). The
following is drawn from these sources and material retrieved from
the National Archives and DOD files.
Nuremberg and Postwar Recruitment of Scientists
At the time of its inception,
Paperclip was a matter of controversy
in the War Department, as demonstrated by a November 27,1946
memorandum from General Groves, director of the Manhattan Project,
relating to the bringing to the United States of the eminent
physicist Otto Hahn.
Groves wrote that the
Manhattan Project
does not desire to utilize the services of foreign scientists in the
United States, either directly with the Project or with any
affiliated organization. This has consistently been my views. (sic)
I should like to make it clear, however, that I see no objection to
bringing to the United States such carefully screened physicists as
would contribute materially to the welfare of the United States and
would remain permanently in the United States as naturalized
citizens. I strongly recommend against foreign physicists coming in
contact with our atomic energy program in any way. If they are
allowed to see or discuss the work of the Project the security of
our information would get out of control. (Attachment 1)
Biomedical Scientists at American Facilities
A number of military research sites recruited Paperclip scientists
with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology and ophthalmology.
These institutions included the SAM, where radiation experiments
were conducted, and other military sites, particularly the Edgewood
Arsenal of the Army’s Chemical Corps.
2
The portfolio of experiments at the
SAM was one that would
particularly benefit from the Paperclip recruits. Experiments there
included total-body irradiation, space medicine and bed-rest studies,
and flash-blindness studies. Herbert Gerstner,2 [The Committee has no
documents at this time indicating that Dr. Gerstner engaged in human
experimentation in Germany.] a principal investigator in TBI
experiments at the SAM, was acting director of the Institute of
Physiology at the University of Leipzig; he became a radiobiologist
at the SAM. (Attachment 2)
The Air Force Surgeon General and
SAM officials welcomed the
Paperclip scientists. In March 1951, the school’s Commandant,
O.O.
Benson Jr., wrote to the Surgeon General to seek more
first-class scientists and highly qualified technologists from
Germany. The first group of Paperclip personnel contained a number
of scientists that have proved to be of real value to the Air Force.
The weaker and less gifted ones have been culled to a considerable
extent. The second group reporting here in 1949 were, in general,
less competent than the original paperclip personnel, and culling
process will again be in order. (Attachment 3)
General Benson’s adjutant solicited resumes from a
Paperclip
prospect list, including a number of radiation biology and physics
specialists. The qualifications of a few scientists were said to be
known, so curricula vitae were waived. The adjutant wrote, also in
March 1951:
"In order to systematically benefit from this program
this headquarters believes that the employment of competent
personnel who fit into our research program is a most important
consideration."
(Attachment 4)
The Head-Hunting Competition with the Soviet Union
Official U.S. government policy was to avoid recruitment of "ardent
Nazis." Many of the Paperclip scientists were members of Nazi
organizations of one sort of another. The documentary record
indicates, however, that many claimed inactive status or membership
that was a formality, according to files in the National Archives.
The director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, Navy
Captain Bosquet N. Wev, bluntly put the case for recruitment in a
April 27,1948 memo to the Pentagon’s Director of Intelligence:
"Security investigations conducted by the military have disclosed
the fact that the majority of German scientists were members of
either the Nazi Party or one or more of its affiliates. These
investigations disclose further that with a very few exceptions,
such membership was due to exigencies which influenced the lives of
every citizen of Germany at that time."
Wev was critical of
over-scrupulous investigations by the Department of Justice
and other agencies as
3
reflecting security concerns no longer relevant with the defeat of
Germany, and "biased considerations" about the nature of his
recruits’ fascist allegiances. (Attachment 5)
The possibility of scientists being won to the Soviet side in the
Cold War was, according to Captain Wev, the highest consideration.
In a March 1948 letter to the State Department, Wev assessed the
prevailing view in the government:
"[R]esponsible officials ... have
expressed opinions to the effect that, in so far as German
scientists are concerned, Nazism no longer should be a serious
consideration from a viewpoint of national security when the far
greater threat of Communism is now jeopardizing the entire world. I
strongly concur in this opinion and consider it a most sound and
practical view, which must certainly be taken if we are to face the
situation confronting us with even an iota of realism. To continue
to treat Nazi affiliations as significant considerations has been
aptly phrased as 'beating a dead Nazi horse.’"
(Attachment 6)
In his April 27,1948 report to his superiors, he again cited the
Soviet threat:
In light of the situation existing in Europe today, it is
conceivable that continued delay and opposition to the immigration
of these scientists could result in their eventually falling into
the hands of the Russians who would then gain the valuable
information and ability possessed by these men. Such an eventuality
could have a most serious and adverse affect on the national
security of the United States.
(Attachment 5)
Hubertus Strughold and the SAM
Perhaps the most prominent of the
Paperclip physicians was Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine" and for whom the
Aeromedical Library at the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine was
named in 1977. During the war, he was director of the Luftwaffe’s aeromedical institute; a
Strughold staff member was acquitted at
Nuremberg on the grounds that the physician’s Dachau laboratory was
not the site of nefarious experiments.
Strughold had a long career at the
SAM, including the recruitment of
other Paperclip scientists in Germany. His background was the
subject of public controversy in the United States. He denied
involvement with Nazi experiments and told reporters in this country
that his life had been in danger from the Nazis. A citizen for 30
years before his death in 1986, his many honors included an
Americanism Award from the Daughters of the American Revolution.
4
An April 1947 intelligence report on
Strughold stated:
"[H]is
successful career under Hitler would seem to indicate that he must
be in full accord with Nazism."
(Attachment 7)
However, Strughold’s
colleagues in Germany and those with whom he had worked briefly in
the United States on fellowships described him as politically
indifferent or anti-Nazi.
In his application to reside in this country, he declared:
Further, the United States is the only country of liberty which is
able to maintain this liberty and the thousand-year-old culture and
western civilization, and it is my intention to support the United
States in this task, which is in danger now, with all my scientific
abilities and experience.
(Attachment 8)
In a 1952 civil service form, Strughold was asked if he had ever
been a member of a fascist organization. His answer: "Not in my
opinion." His references therein included the Surgeon General of the
Air Force, the director of research at the Lovelace Foundation in
New Mexico, and a colleague from the Mayo Clinic. (Attachment 9)
In September 1948, Strughold was granted a security certificate from
the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency director, Captain Wev, who
in the previous March had written to the Department of State
protesting the difficulty of completing immigration procedures for
Paperclip recruits.
Follow-up Research
The staff believes this trail should be followed with more research
before conclusions can be drawn about the Paperclip scientists and
human radiation experiments. That the standard for immigration was
"not an ardent Nazi" is troubling; in Strughold’s case,
investigators had specifically questioned his credentials for "denazification."
It is possible that still-classified intelligence documents could
shed further light on these connections. Staff is attempting to
identify sites that may continue to hold this material. The
Department of Defense has supplied a number of documents and the
Central Intelligence Agency has been asked to search its files.
Staff has been sifting declassified files at the National Archives
and plans to inspect further classified files on this subject.
5
Paperclip
from
YouThink Website
With WWII over, the energies of the United Sates and the Soviet
Union were redirected into the cold war. But Germany was far from
forgotten. In 1946, as US military was hunting down Nazi war
criminals, a special intelligence office called the Joint
Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) instigated a plan
to recruit German scientists into American research programs. These
intellectual resources were valuable to the States- and securing
them meant that the Soviets could not.
Operation Paper Clip was born - a code name said to have originated
because an immigration form (holding the unspoken promise of
problem-free naturalization) was attached to the papers of each
scientific recruit. Under the auspices of this and similar projects
that succeeded it, lasting until the early 1970’s, at least 1600
scientists and their families were quietly brought to the USA and
given citizenship.
American government policy stated that ‘ardent Nazis’ and war
criminals were not allowed to enter the country, and the project
was, not surprisingly, the source of some controversy. Conveniently
- according to files in the National Archives - most of the Paper
Clip scientists had been affiliated to Nazi organizations as a mere
formality, and were politically inactive.
In a letter to the State Department in April 1948, the director of
JIOA, Captain Bosquet N. Wev, outlined the prevailing view of
officialdom:
‘In so far as German scientists are
concerned, Nazism no longer should be a serious consideration
from a viewpoint of national security when the far greater
threat of Communism is now jeopardizing the entire world.'
Paper Clip was considered a resounding
success. The recruits were made welcome at number of military
research sites, including the Air Force’s School of Aviation
Medicine (SAM), at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, where
radiation experiments were conducted.
According to the government’s own investigative body, the Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments:
‘Experiments at SAM included
total-body irradiation, space-medicine and bed-rest studies, and
flash blindness studies… in connection with atomic weapons tests
and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted
in Houston.’
Hubertus Strughold, who had a
laboratory at Dachau, began his US career at SAM, and is now known
as ‘the father of space medicine’. His chief subordinates at
Dachau are widely believed to have been directly involved in
‘aviation medicine’ experiments - inhumanely conducted studies of
high-altitude exposure, resistance to the cold oxygen deprivation
and the like - giving rise to repeated allegations that these
medical atrocities were sanctioned by Strughold.
Many Nazi war criminals managed to avoid prosecution for their
crimes, but some were successfully tried at Nuremberg for
experiments related to aviation research. The results of such
experiments would be extremely useful in the protection of air
crewmen.
In March 1951, General O.O. Benson Jr., the Commandant at
SAM, wrote to the Surgeon General requesting another shipment of
‘first-class scientists and highly qualified technologists from
Germany,’ since ‘the first group of Paper Clip personnel contained a
number of scientists that have proved to be a real value to the Air
Force’.
The scientific community was not the only faction to benefit form
the ‘brain drain’ at the close of WWII. Hitler’s master spy
Reinhard Gehlen became an important part of America’s
intelligence community and recruited others for a small overseas
espionage group that helped nurse the CIA into existence. Although
Gehlen promised not to recruit anyone who had been involved with the
SS or the Gestapo, according to experts Jonathan Vankin and
John Whalen,
‘he immediately broke his official
word, hiring at least six SS and Sicherheitdienst veterans. And
America’s intelligence elite looked the other way. Two of
Gehlen’s notorious post-war signings were Dr Franz Alfred Six
and Emil Augsburg, SS intelligence veterans involved in
the mass extermination of Jews. They were both fugitive war
criminals.’
The US Army’s Counter Intelligence
Corps later arrested Six. They caught up with Augsburg too - and
hired him. Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, also
assisted Gehlen for a while in his espionage work for the USA, and
even spent some time living there. As Vankin and Whalen note, in an
atmosphere of cold war paranoia US officials ‘found expedient soul
mates in Nazi scientists and SS officers they recruited. After all,
Nazi Germany’s fascists were vehemently opposed to communism, too.’
Unit 731
On 17 June 1925, still reeling from a senseless war that had
decimated a generation, most of the earth’s most powerful countries
decided they no longer wanted to live in a world of madmen. They
signed the Geneva Protocol, outlawing biological and chemical
warfare.
The two most conspicuous abstentions were the ever-independent
United States and imperial Japan. Japan, in fact, was so impressed
by the fact that chemical and biological warfare was considered
dangerous enough to ban that it immediately stepped up its research.
The guiding force behind the Japanese effort was a young doctor
named Shiro Ishii. Ishii had graduated from the Department of
Medicine at Kyoto University in 1920 and gone straight into the
Japanese Imperial Army. In the late 1920s he was sent to Europe and
the United Sates for two years to study the state of Western
biological research. Soon after his return Japan invaded and
conquered Manchuria (in what is now China). Ishii and his team had a
literal theatre of operations.
In 1936 Emperor Hirohito’s seal was affixed to a document that
established Ishii’s Manchuria-based ‘Epidemic Prevention and
Water Purification Department of the Kuantung Army ’ (changed to
Unit 731 in 1941). The name was a masterpiece of hubris. In fact,
the extremely well funded ‘department’ specialized in
epidemic-causing toxins like anthrax, cholera, tetanus, botulism,
meningitis, tuberculosis and bubonic plague.
A constant supply of test victims was
provided courtesy of the occupying Japanese Army. At first they were
mostly Chinese and Russian, but once WWII began these were joined
with specimens labeled ‘American’, ‘British’, and ‘Australian’. But
the staff at Unit 731 had their own special name for the men, women
and children they vivisected, almost invariably without anesthetic.
They called them 'marutas' : logs.
The horrors of Unit 731 were unimaginable. Apart from the
physical torture suffered by captives before they were killed, there
were countless instances of emotional and mental cruelty. In one
case, a Japanese doctor vivisected an un-anaesthetized pregnant
woman whom he himself had impregnated.
One Unit 731 staffer recently tried to justify his actions:
“Of course there were experiments on
children. But probably their fathers were spies.”
The extreme de-humanization existed
outside the army as well. Civilian Japanese doctors would regularly
practice surgery techniques on healthy prisoners of war. In one
case, eight American servicemen were killed in one day on the
operating table at the anatomy department of Kyushu University. They
were taken apart bit by bit: first a lung, then a bit of liver, then
part of a brain; until finally they died.
Ishii’s primary interest was not surgery but large-scale biological
warfare. He was developing and testing diseases on his 'marutas'
with the goal of delivering a fatal does to the enemy whilst
learning to treat it in his own men. Throughout the war, Ishii
had disease-infected animals (usually fleas) dropped on Chinese
towns, where there were several outbreaks of bubonic plague as a
result.
His plans extended to the United States. In December 1944, 200
balloon bombs were sent using prevailing air currents from Japan to
the Western United States, killing seven people in Montana and
Oregon. It is likely these balloons were testing the route for
bacterial bombs.
As the war was drawing to a close, Ishii had one last bit of
insanity up his sleeve. Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night
would send plague-laden suicide bombers to San Diego, where the
plague would be released and the entire Western seaboard infected.
The date of the attack was scheduled for 22 September 1945.
The war in the Pacific ended in August 1945. The cover-up began
almost immediately. Ishii was declared dead and a mock funeral was
held in his home town. Although he and his staff had destroyed some
of the evidence against them before the end of the war, they had
plenty of information left to barter. Under the advice of scientists
from Fort Detrick, Maryland (the US Army’s own bacterial and
chemical research unit), General Douglas MacArthur radioed
Washington, recommending that Unit 731 scientists be granted
immunity in exchange for their data.
The reply from the committee for the Far East was:
“The value of Japanese BW
[Biological Warfare] data is of such importance to national
security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crime
prosecution.”
To its credit, the State Department was
against the plan, if only because it might later embarrass the
United Sates.
Not a single member of Unit 731 was prosecuted for war crimes
by the United States. The only ones to be prosecuted were twelve who
were caught by the Soviets in China: their well-documented trial in
1949 was suppressed by the United Sates and regarded as Soviet
propaganda.
In spite of articles in 1946 in both the New York Times and
the Pacific Stars and Stripes (the official newspaper of the
US Army) the government refused to admit that Americans had been the
victims of Unit 731, let alone that Ishii was cooperating with the
United States.
There were rumors throughout the 1950s that not only had Ishii
lectured at Fort Detrick, he had also gone to Korea to help the
American war effort. There was certainly some familiar-looking
evidence. According to Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen:
“On an April night in 1952 an
American F-82 fighter was spotted flying over a Chinese village
near the Inner Mongolian border. With the break of day,
residents were greeted by an infestation of more than seven
hundred voles. Of the voles who survived both the night cold and
ravaging cats, many ‘were sluggish or had fractured legs’. A
test on one dead vole showed it was infected with the plague.”
The US government did its best to kill
the rumors. In the 1950s, it even resorted to charges of treason
against some American civilians who had dared to imply that the
government might be using technology originating from Unit 731. The
charges were thrown out for lack of evidence.
The cover-up continues. In 1987, US and British veterans of the
Manchuria campaign were told there was ‘no evidence’ for claims that
Unit 731 experimented on them. And as recently as 1989, a British
book was published in the United Sates minus one chapter freely
available in the British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand
editions. The chapter was called ‘The Korean War’.
What of the men of Unit 731? Ishii died of throat cancer at the age
of 67 in 1959. Others went on to exalted positions in post-war
Japan: Governor of Tokyo, president of the Japanese Medical
Association and head of the Japanese Olympic Committee. The leader
of the team in charge of inflicting frostbite and vivisecting went
on to a lucrative career in the frozen fish industry.
In 1975, the United Sates finally signed the Geneva Protocol.
Prison Tests
Prisons have long been a popular testing ground in America. Between
1963 and 1973 Dr Heller, an award winning medical scientist,
ran a series of experiments on inmates at the Oregon State Prison in
order to assess the effect of radiation on sperm production. Another
test involving radiation and reproduction was conducted in
Washington sate.
Prisoners in Pennsylvania were used to
test the effects of radiation on human skin. Inmates in Illinois
drank water laced with radium. Prisoners in Utah had their blood
removed, irradiated and re-injected. And the tests were not confined
to radiation. Just on example: starting in 1944, hundreds of
prisoners at Illinois Statesville Prison were given malaria in a
project designed to develop a prevention or cure for the disease
that was disabling Allied forces in the Pacific.
According to the government’s own report:
“It is difficult to overemphasize
just how common the practice [of experimenting on prisoners]
became in the United States during the post-war years.
Researchers employed prisoners as subjects in a multitude of
experiments that ranged in purpose from a desire to understand
the cause of cancer to a need to test the effects of a new
cosmetic. After the Food and Drug Administration’s restructuring
of drug-testing regulations in 1962 prisoners became almost the
exclusive subjects in non-federally funded Phase-1
pharmaceutical trials designed to test the toxicity of new
drugs. By 1972, FDA officials estimated that more than 90% of
all investigational drugs were first tested on prisoners.”
In at least one case, Upjohn and
Parke-Davis built and maintained a large Phase-1 testing facility on
the grounds of the State Prison of Southern Michigan.
Prison testing has more or less been abandoned since the late 1970s,
not so much for humanitarian reasons but because the tests were
coming under too much scrutiny. And it was becoming easier to employ
two other sources of human experimental material: students and the
poor.
The poor
The poor have a history of being subjected to government-run
experiments. Amongst the most infamous was the Tuskegee Study of
the early 1930s, in which 412 African-American sharecroppers
suffering from syphilis were identified by the US Public Health
Service but were not informed of their condition. For forty years –
even after penicillin was discovered to treat syphilis – US PHS
doctors observed the effects of the disease taking its course, from
blindness and paralysis to dementia and death.
Not that treatment was any safer. Woe betide anyone who checked into
a research hospital in the middle of the century. At various
institutions across the United Sates, Canada and the United Kingdom,
patients were injected with plutonium without their knowledge, given
radioactive ‘cocktails’ or subjected to full body radiation. In one
particularly appalling test, radioactive sodium was injected
directly into the placentas of 270 pregnant women at Hammersmith
Hospital in England. The adverse results of these experiments varied
from amputation to birth defects to death.
Radiation Testing
Early in 1963 the Atomic Energy Commission held a conference
in Fort Collins, Colorado, for scientists studying the effects of
radiation on reproduction. It was the height of the cold war and
there were questions that needed to be answered. Questions like the
one asked by scientists at an AEC meeting in Washington in 1955:
“How many bombs can we detonate
without producing a race of monsters?”
And questions like the one posed in 1949
by an Air Force colonel who enquired how safe nuclear-powered planes
would be for his airmen’s ‘family jewels’. NASA wanted to know about
the effects of solar radiation on astronauts. And the CIA wanted to
know about everything.
Dr Carl G. Heller recalled what happened:
“A given group at Fort Collins was
working on mice and another group was working on bulls, and than
they extrapolated the data from bulls and mice to man. I
commented one day to Dr [Paul] Henshaw, who was then…
with the AEC, that if they were so interested in [what would
happen to] man, why were they fussing around with mice and
beagle dogs and canaries and so on? If they wanted to know about
man, why not work on man?”
In October 1995, the US government’s
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments published its
final report. The committee had been assembled by President
Clinton after dogged investigative journalist Albuquerque
Tribune reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered evidence of
government-sponsored radiation tests on civilians.
Whilst ground-breaking and laudable, the committee’s mandate was
limited to government-funded tests between 1944 and 1974. Another
problem was that it relied on self-reporting from various government
agencies. The CIA, for example, claim they did only one tiny,
innocuous test whereas the Department of Energy admits to 435
studies involving 16,000 subjects. Regardless, the range of
admitted tests was astounding.
Given that much of this radiation testing was specifically intended
to benefit the military, the average soldier did not fare much
better than his civilian counter part. Between 1946 and 1963 over
200,00 GIs were ordered to watch nuclear bomb tests either in the
Pacific or in Nevada. One blast alone in the Marshall Islands was
more than 1000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
Sunshine
Even in death, citizens are not immune from government testing.
Project Sunshine, which started in 1955, was an international
body-snatching program that secretly removed body parts from over
9000 corpses at 17 sites around the world and sent them to US
laboratories for fallout resting. It was described by one sensitive
American scientist as “a delicate problem of public relations,
obviously”
Prisoners, rank-and-file military, the poor, pregnant women, the
dead… Who had the government scientists left out (apart from white,
middle-class males, of course)? How about children…
Tests on Children
Not surprisingly, scientists didn’t run tests on their own children;
they ran them on children in institutions and in reform schools.
During the 1950s and 60s, Willowbrook State School in New York, an
institution for the severely mentally retarded, was the site of
hepatitis testing. Each newly arrived child was systematically
infected. The rationale was that these places offered regulated
environments that were perfect for replicating lab conditions.
Oddly, even though private boarding schools also offered regulated
environments, no one ever ran experiments there.
The government’s human radiation committee looked at 21 cases of
experimentation on children involving over 800 subjects, a number
they themselves admit I just small proportion of what went on. One
of the cases they concentrated on was dietary research conducted by
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the staff of Walter E.
Fernald School. A residential institute for boys.
Former residents, some of whom ended up there simply because their
families didn’t want them any more, describe the school as being
dirty and brutal. In 1946, researchers set up a ‘science club’ at
the school, enticing boys to join with such perks as a quart of milk
a day and the occasional chance to leave the building.
In return, the boys were to eat a special ‘rich’ diet (breakfast
food ‘enriched’ with radioactive iron) and to submit to regular
blood tests. Letters to the boys’ parents implied that the testing
would improve their health. The research, along with a later
experiment at the school involving calcium, was funded by the
National Institute of Health, the Atomic energy Commission
and the Quaker Oaks Company.
The government report ends its section on ‘non-therapeutic’ tests on
children with:
“Today, fifty years after the
Fernald experiments, there are still no federal regulations
protecting institutionalized children from unfair treatment in
research involving human subjects.”
One ex-Fernald boy, Charlie Dyer,
who has fathered two daughters with severe birth defects, said
recently:
“Get to the truth fast before the
government hides everything and you can’t find nothing out.
Because that’s what the government does, putting it in boxes and
crates and hiding everything from the public.”
Reparations
In October 1995, President Clinton promised to “make
repartitions to Americans whose lives were damaged or cut short by
these [human radiation] experiments” Of course, it is up to the
government (or government-appointed private contractors) to decide
who has been ‘damaged’. So far, the vast majority of claims have not
been approved. And there are almost no follow-up studies for people
irradiated without their knowledge; so they are unlikely to even
know what it is that is killing them, let alone that they are
eligible for compensation.
The case of 4500 Utah and Nevada sheep, grazing downwind of nuclear
test sites, which died ‘mysteriously’ in 1953 shows how willingly
reparations are handed out. It took 39 years, much of it spent in
court, for the government to be forced into paying compensation. The
presiding judge, A. Sherman Christensen, made a point of
saying that the US government had lied, pressured witnesses and
manipulated the processes of the court.
And yes, the tests never ended.
Conclusion
Ultimately, nothing is inconceivable. All you have to do is look at
Nazi Germany, Many machines have been built that have been
engines of evil. Institutionalized evil. Pure Evil… You don’t have
to look too hard to imagine the horror that governments are capable
of. In the end, it’s the power of the individual that will overcome
the inherent evil of a monolith like a government run amuck. A
little healthy paranoia is good, I suppose.
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