In 1987 a U.S. Congressman discovered official documents which described grotesque experiments on civilians. In an address to Congress, Representative Edward Markey said his evidence proved that hundreds of Americans were used as nuclear guinea pigs during 30 years of ‘Nazi-like’ experiments. He said a total of 695 civilians were deliberately contaminated to discover the effects of nuclear radiation.
The experiments, which took place from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, included feeding people milk from irradiated cows and contaminated fish from rivers near discharges from nuclear plants. Hospital patients were deliberately fed radioactive materials, and nuclear waste was placed on patients’ hands to see what effect it had on them. In another bizarre experiment 131 prisoners had their testes repeatedly x-rayed to determine the effects on human fertility.
Mr Markey told Congress: “These experiments and others shock the conscience of the nation. They raise one major, horrifying question: did the intense desire to know the consequences of radioactive exposure after the dawn of the atomic age lead American scientists to mimic the kind of demented human experiments conducted by the Nazis?”
In 1994 President Clinton assembled a committee of experts in medicine, ethics and law, to investigate just how far the US Government had been prepared to carry out radiation experiments on human beings. The committee found there occurred thousands of examples, as well as hundreds of cases of deliberate releases of radiation.
America’s record of the use of human beings as radiation test subjects has clear parallels with Britain. The Dr Strangelove-type activities show how readily both governments were prepared to use both servicemen and the civilians in their quest for nuclear knowledge.
Karl Morgan, the founder of Health Physics, the discipline which approaches questions of radioactive dose and effects has revealed how both governments shared information on the effects of radiation on the body.
He said they consulted on a daily basis with members of both military and medical establishments. “As the cold war heated up the pressures to keep your mouth shut increased,” he said. “A lot of people in the scientific establishment were told that it was unpatriotic and somewhat treasonous to publicly indicate that large numbers of people may be put at risk as a result of these activities.”
British scientists unashamedly embraced this philosophy. A raft of declassified documents relating to large-scale experiments on humans was uncovered at the Public Records Office.
One of them referred to an incident in 1953 when scientists at the Windscale nuclear plant in Cumbria deliberately released thyroid cancer-inducing radioactive iodine 131 into the atmosphere with the specific objective of measuring the uptake of the deadly material in the surrounding population.
Under pressure the plant’s chief medical officer, Dr Geoffrey Schofield admitted in a statement to the West Cumbrian Health Authority: “It is true that the radioactive release in 1953 was not an accident. It was a deliberate discharge as part of the operations during early nuclear reprocessing under the military program at a time when Britain was preparing its first atomic bombs. There was a need for secrecy as a matter of national security and information about the discharge has only recently been released.”
Since this admission the Ministry of Defence has tried to downgrade its significance and importance. Experts connected with the nuclear industry have gone on record to state that the emission was so small as to make it negligible. These placatory statements were made in the face of further discoveries that children and animals near the plant had been poisoned with iodine in the weeks following the “controlled emission.”
But these assurances were exposed as yet another cold war lie when a document referring to the incident came to light. In plain and unambiguous language, the scientist responsible for the deliberate discharge admitted: “With regard to the discharges from Windscale, the intention has been to discharge substantial amounts of radioactivity as part of a deliberate scientific experiment, and the aims of the experiment would have been defeated if the level of actual discharge had been kept to a minimum.” (emphasis added).
Other documents revealed examples of more clandestine activities on human beings including an admission that dozens of people drank, inhaled or were injected with radioactive isotopes as part of a series of secret experiments carried out by the nuclear industry in the 1960s.
The tests, exposing humans to radioactive caesium, iodine, strontium and uranium, were carried out on so-called “volunteers.” One proposal even envisaged injecting plutonium into elderly people to help assess contamination risks.
A report marked “confidential” said 10 volunteers from Harwell in Oxfordshire drank a liquid containing caesium-132 and caesium-134 in November 1962. Two volunteers from Windscale also ingested strontium 90 to investigate "uptake by the gut". A further 18 volunteers at Harwell in 1964 breathed in a vapour of methyl iodide-132 to test its retention in the thyroid gland. If anyone became ill as a result, the memo said, they would be able to sue for damages, though the risk was dismissed as "negligible".
Yet another memo discussed the "ethical problems" of feeding radioactively contaminated whelks from near Sellafield (formerly Windscale) to children. A memo from 1962 referred to grotesque US experiments in which elderly and sick hospital patients were injected with plutonium. The memo, from scientists at Harwell, suggested carrying out similar experiments in the UK, mentioning old people as potential candidates.
One bizarre document disclosed that in 1972, 21 Punjabi women in Coventry, many of whom did not speak English, were secretly involved in tests using radioactive iodine. The women had gone to their doctor with ailments that ranged from arthritic knees to migraine. They ended up as part of a nutrition experiment which involved eating radioactive chapattis delivered to their door.
This immoral use of civilians in nuclear experiments exposes an alarming willingness by the authorities to use human beings in questionable activities under the guise of cold war expediency.
The existence of these experiments was a closely guarded secret for decades as governments and their scientific stooges scrambled to keep up with the latest advances in nuclear know-how. And there is evidence that in order to keep a lid on these nefarious activities, governments and commercial interests would stop at nothing, even murder.
DIRTY TRICKS
In 1974 union activist Karen Silkwood, aged 28, was investigating serious health risks in the nuclear fuels production plant in Oklahoma where she worked. At the time she was in the process of exposing a cover-up at the company after her home was mysteriously contaminated with plutonium.
Later, while taking incriminating documents to an investigative reporter, Silkwood was killed when her car drove into a ditch.
The circumstances became the subject of enormous speculation after a sleep-inducing drug was found in her body, along with traces of plutonium. There was also evidence of mysterious dents in the rear of her car suggesting she may have been deliberately shunted off the road.
Since then, her story has achieved worldwide fame as the subject of many books, magazine and newspaper articles, and even a major motion picture. The story spawned a spate of allegations from nuclear activists who believed they were being spied upon and even ‘terminated’ by the evil forces of the pro-nuclear lobby.
As the conspiracy theories swept like wildfire across the political landscape, it wasn’t long before it ignited Britain’s very own Silkwood legend in the unlikely form of grandmother and rose-grower Hilda Murrell.