HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
Radiation experiments on troops carried out in controlled conditions is one thing. But the secret world of nuclear weapons has an even more awful second agenda; evidence of long-standing sinister secrets buried deep in official archives that will never be opened to public consumption. Horrifying eyewitness testimonies, impossible to dismiss, tell of obscene experiments on crippled human beings plucked from asylums and psychiatric wards, and placed alongside animal test subjects near ground zero for the purposes of scientific experimentation.
Stories began to emerge of atrocities in the Australian outback in the early 1980s during British nuclear tests. Four test participants alleged that mentally handicapped people were deliberately brought close to atomic explosions for a series of experiments.
One of the Australian servicemen stated under oath: “The handicapped people were brought to One Tree, where one of the bombs was to be detonated in Maralinga, for the first of the Buffalo series of tests. One lot came into the rail sidings at Watson, another lot were brought in by air. They were kept in a special area off the main road. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them: the unearthly babble that mental patients make. After the test you couldn’t hear them anymore.”
The claims made in a Royal Commission hearing couldn’t be substantiated at the time, but compelling confirmation came 16 years later, in June 2001, when a pilot confessed to an academic that he flew severely disabled people from institutions in Britain to the Australian desert.
According to the pilot the patients were deliberately exposed to radioactive fall-out at Maralinga in the 1950s. They did not return home and are assumed to have died. The pilot related his story to Dr Robert Jackson, a respected Australian academic at Edith Cowan University in Perth. The conversation took place after Dr Jackson gave a presentation to staff during which he mentioned the allegations about radiation experiments. The man told him: “That was true. I was one of the pilots, and we didn’t fly them out again.”
Dr Jackson closely questioned the man, who had become a disabled care worker, and had no doubt he was telling the truth. He said: “I was quite convinced. The man said there was no doubt the people were used as guinea pigs. They had multiple disabilities, both physical and mental. His story is quite credible when you consider the prevailing view at the time about mentally handicapped people. A lot of people believed they were a sub-human and deserved to be euthanized.”
Dr Jackson said he had also heard another shocking account of handicapped people being used for experiments at the Monte Bello islands when the two A-bombs were detonated in 1956.
At least two men with Downs’ syndrome were allegedly taken ashore with scientists and placed in a bunker near ground zero. The academic admitted he had no corroborative evidence to support these claims, but at least one independent eyewitness, under oath, recounted a disturbing incident he was involved with at the two tests, code-named Mosaic.
Bernard Perkins was a radio operator on the scientific vessel Narvik when the second device, equivalent to eight Hiroshima bombs, was detonated. It sent a radioactive cloud over the mainland.
Perkins was busy all day sending dispatches from air crew who flew through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. Later the ship moved closer inshore ready to pick up scientists who had been left in bunkers on the islands.
Rumours swept the ship that the fireball from the explosion finished very close to one of the bunkers. Another rumour was that there were several “retards” with the scientists.
Mr Perkins recalled in a statement: “I saw with my own eyes the scientists being brought back to the ship. I stood on the upper deck watching it with another man whose name I cannot now remember. A motor boat came toward us. There were two men with protective clothing on, and five or six others all of whom had blankets wrapped around them looking as though they were in shock. They were brought to the ship’s side and came up the gangplank and had to be helped aboard. Nobody saw them again. I believe they were taken from the ship at night. To the best of my recollection they were wearing sandals, khaki shirts, stockings and shorts with no headgear.”
Were these the “retards”, the handicapped people, Dr Jackson had been told about? Fantastic as it may seem, similar allegations began to emerge from America.
Bob Carter was an ex-serviceman who took part in an exercise which included the explosion of a 74 kiloton atomic bomb in the Nevada desert in 1957. He described how, when moving into the ground zero area as part of manoeuvres after the explosion, he saw human test subjects handcuffed behind fenced enclosures. When he told his superiors, Carter claims he was given an unpleasant drug treatment and after a prolonged period in an isolated ward was then brought before a military panel and told to repeat his ‘bizarre’ story. By then Carter had learned to remain silent.
Other disturbing stories were soon to follow. A news organization in Santa Fe reported interviews with three former servicemen who were present during a 1955 series of tests known as Teapot. These men were members of the 232nd Signal Support Company and had positioned themselves far forward of other troops and occupied a slit trench near ground zero. Their job was to position and bury field telephone lines to establish how battlefield communications would function in a nuclear war. The three men camped overnight but were woken at about 2am by a truck which passed their position and stopped a hundred yards ahead.
A 19-yr-old G.I. called Jim O’Connor said that he watched as people, in civilian clothing, were placed in above ground (not dug-out), Korean War-style trenches. Later the remainder of the 232nd joined O’Connor in his trench, which was 3,500 yards from ground zero, to experience the explosion which had the destructive power of three Hiroshima bombs.
But two hours before the detonation one of the main cables to the main camp at Desert Rock malfunctioned and O’Connor and two others went out to investigate. One of the men went forward to the bomb tower and returned looking shaken. He told his buddies he’d seen a ‘bunch of weirdoes’ close to the tower-mounted bomb, tethered alongside dogs and sheep. Close by was an unconnected plastic covered terminal box and a remote-control camera positioned about 60 yards away, its lens pointing toward the bunker’s centre.
O’Connor never really thought about the story until after the detonation when he was required to brave the radioactive dust storm to make his way to a field telephone 1,000 yards ahead. As he rounded a sandbank wall which sheltered a trench and a bench, he made a terrifying discovery. He is quoted as saying: “A guy had crawled behind the bunker, his face full of blood from his nose and mouth.”
The corporal claimed that wires were attached to the man. He recalled: “I smelled burning flesh. I knew the smell all too well. In Korea, the South Koreans disposed of their dead by burning them in barrels. As in the case of Bob Carter, O’Connor soon learned not to talk about what he had seen after he was taken to a base where he was shown an endless stream of propaganda films; ten straight days of how the bomb hurts “them◦— not us.”
He said: “The movies started with quick flashes of Mickey Mouse, Tojo, Donald Duck, Hitler, someone’s mother, then Hiroshima…” But when he asked about the writhing man he had seen near ground zero, he was ignored. Surprisingly candid, or deliberately vague, the chief spokesman of the US Defence Nuclear Agency told the newspaper: “We can neither confirm nor deny Mr O’Connor’s allegations.”
Stories like this abounded among the 250,000 American servicemen who took part in nuclear weapon tests. And although they were often dismissed as “paranoid ramblings”, the US government didn’t seem to have any qualms about using their civilian population for the dubious purposes of scientific experimentation.