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The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War Paperback – October 10, 2000
In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting Americans with radioactive plutonium. In this shocking exposé, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome reveals the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens with silvery radioactive metal circulating in their veins. Spanning the 1930s to the 1990s, filled with hundreds of newly declassified documents and firsthand interviews, The Plutonium Files traces the behind-the-scenes story of an extraordinary fifty-year cover-up. It illuminates a shadowy chapter in this country's history and gives eloquent voice to the men and women who paid for our atomic energy discoveries with their health--and sometimes their lives.
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Print length592 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherDelta
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Publication dateOctober 10, 2000
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Dimensions6.25 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
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ISBN-100385319541
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ISBN-13978-0385319546
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Editorial Reviews
Review
-- Publishers Weekly
"There should have been--and should now be--hundreds of other reporters out there doing what [Welsome] has so brilliantly done here."
-- Newsday
"A remarkable tale... Welsome doesn't merely report [the] facts. She brings the characters to life, and re-creates settings, dialogue and events."
-- The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Compelling...[Welsome's] portraits of leading officials are vivid and subtle, wonderfully capturing [their] deep moral ambivalence."
-- Los Angeles Times
"[An] expansive and valuable account...engrossing."
-- The New York Times Book Review
From the Inside Flap
In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting Americans with radioactive plutonium. In this shocking exposé, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome reveals the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced th
From the Back Cover
-- Publishers Weekly
"There should have been--and should now be--hundreds of other reporters out there doing what [Welsome] has so brilliantly done here."
-- Newsday
"A remarkable tale... Welsome doesn't merely report [the] facts. She brings the characters to life, and re-creates settings, dialogue and events."
-- The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Compelling...[Welsome's] portraits of leading officials are vivid and subtle, wonderfully capturing [their] deep moral ambivalence."
-- Los Angeles Times
"[An] expansive and valuable account...engrossing."
-- The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The accident occurred on August 1, 1944, a morning like any other in Los Alamos: hot, dry, the sky an indigo bowl over the sprawl of wooden buildings and barbed-wire fences that constituted the core of the Manhattan Project. At seven thousand feet, the New Mexico air smelled of sun, pines, a trace of frost. Occasionally the scent of dust spiraled up from the desert, where temperatures hovered around 100 degrees.
In twelve months, two atomic bombs would be dropped on Japan, and the secret work being carried out in the wooden buildings would be revealed to the world. On the morning of the accident, the atomic bomb had progressed far beyond mathematical theories but was still an unproven weapon. Plutonium, a silvery metal discovered about four years earlier, was one of the key elements that would transform the theories into a fireball.
In Room D-119, a cheerful young chemist named Don Mastick was standing over a sink chatting with his laboratory partner, Arthur Wahl, a chemist not much older than himself and one of the four scientists from the University of California at Berkeley who had discovered plutonium. Mastick was just twenty-three years old, a "bushy-tailed kid," as he would later describe himself, with short blond hair and an alert, friendly face. He had been one of Berkeley's most promising chemistry graduates and was just about to enlist in the Navy when J. Robert Oppenheimer approached him and asked if he would like to join the scientific team being assembled in Los Alamos, the most secret site in the vast network of laboratories and factories established to build the bomb.
Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist, was already a legend on the Berkeley campus, and Mastick was thrilled at the idea of working with him. When he arrived in Los Alamos in the spring of 1943, Oppenheimer had designated him the lab's ultra microchemist. Working with amounts of plutonium that were too small to be seen with the naked eye, he studied the chemical reactions of the new material under a microscope. His glass test tubes were no bigger than sewing needles and his measuring instruments looked like a child's toys. Even his laboratory was small: a claustrophobic box at the end of a hallway, ten feet wide and twelve feet long.
In Mastick's hand that day was a small vial containing ten milligrams of plutonium--an amount so small it would have fit on the head of a pin. But it was far more plutonium than Los Alamos had had to work with only a year before. In fact, the radioactive material was still so scarce that a special crew had been assembled whose only job was to recover the material from accidents and completed experiments and then repurify it through chemical processes so it could be used again. The crew developed a flow chart to help separate plutonium from every other element in the Periodic Table. "They were prepared to tear up the floor and extract the plutonium, if necessary. They would even dissolve a bicycle. I mean, plutonium [was] so valuable that they went to great extremes to recover everything," physician Louis Hempelmann recalled decades later.
Inevitably some of the radioactive molecules seeped out into the laboratory, spread by a starched sleeve, the scuff of boots, even the dust that blew in from the desert. Nervous and preoccupied with their efforts to construct a workable bomb, Oppenheimer and his colleagues viewed the spreading contamination with consternation. Their concerns were twofold: They didn't want to lose any material, and they were just beginning to understand its potential hazards. Joseph Kennedy, another member of the Berkeley team who had discovered plutonium, acknowledged that it was "not pleasant" to think that unaccounted-for plutonium was floating around the lab. On the day of this particular accident--which would be the most serious of any thus far--it was not the lost plutonium that would be the problem. It was the plutonium in Mastick's vial.
A purplish-color liquid that gave off an eerie, animallike warmth when concentrated in larger amounts, the plutonium in the vial had undergone an unanticipated transformation overnight. Some of the liquid had been converted into gas and was pushing against the walls of the bottle. Other molecules were tunneling into the sides of the glass itself.
Unaware of the small bomb he was holding, Mastick snapped the slender neck of the vial. It made a small, popping sound in the quiet laboratory. Instantly the material spewed out of the bottle and onto the wall in front of him. Some of the solution ricocheted back into his mouth, flooding his lips and tongue with a metallic taste.
Not overly alarmed, Mastick replaced the vial in its wooden container. Then he trotted across the hard-packed ground of the technical area to knock on the door of Dr. Hempelmann's first-aid station. He had just swallowed a significant amount of the world's supply of plutonium. "I could taste the acid so I knew perfectly well I had a little bit of plutonium in my mouth," he said in an interview in 1995.
Louis Hempelmann's office was just a few minutes' walk from D Building, where Mastick worked. With its "deluge shower baths" and clothes-changing rooms, D Building was one of the most elaborately ventilated and costly structures at Los Alamos. Except for the forest of metal pipes protruding from the roof, it looked no different from the other green clapboard structures in the technical area.
Hempelmann was the medical doctor in charge of protecting technical personnel on the bomb project from "unusual hazards," and he reported directly to J. Robert Oppenheimer. With his long, narrow face and wide jaw, Hempelmann wasn't handsome, but there was something refined and pleasing about his appearance. He was the son and grandson of doctors and a fine physician in his own right, although he was known to grow queasy at the sight of blood. ("Louie did his first sternal puncture on me and he almost fainted. He's one of those doctors that can't stand the sight of blood--he should have been a psychologist or something," said Harold Agnew, one in a line of laboratory directors who succeeded Oppenheimer.)
Taking great pains to keep his long face expressionless, Hempelmann listened to Mastick's account of what had happened and then left the room for a moment in order to make a frantic phone call to Colonel Stafford Warren, the affable medical director of the Manhattan Project. Hempelmann often turned to Warren, who was nearly two decades older, for advice and reassurance. In his late forties when he was commissioned as an Army colonel, Warren was a big man, well over six feet tall, who exuded a breezy confidence. Unlike many of the scientists on the bomb project, who refused to join the armed forces and chafed under military control, Warren loved being in the Army. He liked the rough feel of his starched uniform, the silver eagles on his collar, the .45 revolver tucked in a holster on his belt.
Speaking on a secure telephone line from his office at the Manhattan Project's headquarters in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Warren tried to calm Hempelmann down. He thought about the accident for a moment and then suggested that the young doctor try using a mouthwash and expectorant to remove the plutonium from the chemist's mouth. Hempelmann hung up and hurried back to the examining room where he prepared two mixtures. The first was a sodium citrate solution that would chemically combine with the plutonium in Mastick's mouth to form a soluble liquid; the second was a bicarbonate rinse that would render the material insoluble again.
Mastick swished the solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into a beaker. The first mouthful contained almost one-half microgram of plutonium. A microgram of plutonium, which is a millionth of a gram, was considered in 1945 to be the maximum amount of plutonium that could be retained in the human body without causing harm. Eleven more times at fifteen-minute intervals Mastick swished the two solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into the beaker.
After the accident, Mastick's breath was so hot that he could stand six feet away and blow the needles on the radiation monitors off scale. His urine contained detectable plutonium for many years. In one of several interviews Mastick said that he was undoubtedly still excreting "a few atoms" of plutonium but had suffered no ill effects.
When the mouth washings finally were finished, Hempelmann ordered the young man to lie down on a cot. Then he pumped out his stomach several times. Carefully he transferred the stomach liquids into a tall beaker. The plutonium would have to be chemically separated from the organic matter in Mastick's stomach and mouth so it could be reused in future experiments. No scientist at the lab had ever undertaken such a task.
Hempelmann gave the young chemist a couple of breakfast waffles for his empty stomach and some Sippy alkaline powders to be taken during the day. Then he turned and handed him the four-liter beaker of murky liquid.
Go, he said, retrieve the plutonium.
Mastick returned to his lab with the beaker and opened his textbooks. It took a "little rapid-fire research," as he put it, to figure out how to separate the plutonium from the organic matter. But he didn't flinch from the task, despite the ordeal he had just been through. "Since I was the plutonium chemist at that point, I was the logical choice to recover it." From Mastick's perspective, the mood in which all these events took place was calm, deliberate, and "almost humorous." But other people did not feel nearly so relaxed about what had occurred.
The day after the accident, Hempelmann sat down and wrote Stafford Warren a thank-you note. "I was sorry to bother you but was anxious to have your help and moral support. In retrospect, I think that the chances of the fellow's having swallowed a dangerous amount of material are slight." Hempelmann told Warren that he...
Product details
- Publisher : Delta; 1st edition (October 10, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 592 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385319541
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385319546
- Item Weight : 1.5 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,694,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #43,697 in Military History (Books)
- #61,233 in United States History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Why should I tell you the story? Read for yourself the shocking data that Eileen worked years to bring to light. Her documentation is awesome. Her research is air tight. If you're looking for the style of a real journalist, look no further. If you want history, unvarnished, you have found it. I purchased a copy from Amazon here to give to another colleague who had a friend who had been injected with the nasal radiation as a child. It will be both horrifying to find out what had happened to her, but also a relief to find out that she's not all alone.
In fact, if you read between the lines... or just read the research documentation at the back, you'll find out that we're all part of the Files... we're all a case study in exposure. Speaking of case studies... here's another primer in your learning about 20th Century and it's "cold" war... Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing Read Richard Miller's account and you'll be well rounded with these two books under your belt. Not enough? Need more atomic history about US? Try this one... Some places won't seem to be so friendly to live in after it: The Day We Bombed Utah . . . Here's one more: We Almost Lost Detroit .... Well, I think that's enough for today. Class dismissed.
Thank you for the book. A great read!
All the best to you.
Vala in Tasmania..
Members of the armed forces were also subjected to various forms of radiation via fall out from the testing of bombs, pilots and their crews were also exposed to high doses of radiation while collecting samples of the mushroom clouds.
Then there were experiments performed on prisoners, children living in institutions, and pregnant moms and unborn children. All of these experiments were conducted without offering enough information for the human "guinea pigs" to make an informed consent. Some were never even told about their exposure.
The book also covers Hazel O'Leary's attempt to pull back the curtains on this matter. The author does her best to make the science and jargon of radio-isotopes understandable for those of us who have not studied radiation biology. I would recommend this book to anyone who is curious about the Manhattan Project and it's legacy.
Top reviews from other countries
I would urge anybody with any interest in medicine, atomic energy, weapon development, history and care for humanity to read it.
The question it leaves me with is how many experiments are being conducted at the present time on us?
F. J. Fox MB ChB
思いや表現のトーンが伝わってきてとてもよかったです。
本自体も古書にしては非常にきれいで、新品同様でした。
手に入れることが出来てとても満足しています。