Do Your Homework-Nuclear Is Hitler Ugly

We have vile sinister monsters lying to the public, claiming nuclear is safe, boosting that no one has ever been killed for Nuclear Energy. They lie, and people around America are dying every day for Nuclear Power, being stricken with horrible cancers in the name of clean green energy. Americans need to study the history of the Nuclear Military/Commercial Fuel Cycle so that they know the ugly truth. We need to END the nuclear fuel cycle, not perpetuate it.

Human Radiation Experiments in the United States

By Arjun Makhijani and Ellen Kennedy

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and
misguided man.

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963

Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary announced on December 7, 1993 that the nuclear establishment had conducted radiation experiments on humans since the 1940s. It was a stunning admission - the first time that the head of a nuclear weapons agency had stood before the people it was pledged to protect to admit the awful truth that it had experimented on them. "The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany," she told Newsweek.² Similar thoughts undoubtedly crossed the minds of millions, who wondered how the citizens of a country with democratic checks and balances could have been used as unwitting guinea pigs.

It was soon apparent that other agencies, beyond the Department of Energy, had been involved in human radiation experiments.³ For example, the Department of Defense deliberately released radionuclides into the air from 1948 to 1952 in order to design and test radiation weapons.⁴ Such weapons, discussed as far back as the Manhattan Project, are designed to create temporarily high radiation fields to kill or debilitate enemy soldiers. Secretary O'Leary, in effect, opened a Pandora's box of U.S. radiation testing on humans.

Purposes of the Experiments

The accompanying table on pages 4 and 5 shows a list of many of the human radiation experiments categorized according to the five goals of the funding agencies. Some experiments may have had more than one purpose; for example, some involving external exposure to sick people were purportedly to treat cancers. The objectives of the experiments will not be entirely known until we have more documentation.

Nameless Subjects

This is not a new story, despite the impression that recent, intense media coverage conveys. In 1986, Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts released a report called "American Nuclear Guinea Pigs," documenting many of the radiation experiments on U.S. citizens and calling for further investigation.⁵ Yet at the time, the Department of Energy denied that anything unethical had been done, and the report went largely unnoticed.

There are several reasons why the experiments have generated a public outcry in 1993-94 and did not in 1986. First, the Department of Energy is slowly trying to redefine itself according to post Cold War reality, thanks in large part to Secretary O'Leary. Second, the 1986 Markey report released information about nameless human subjects. It took a reporter from the Albuquerque Tribune - Eileen Welsome - uncovering the identities of some of the subjects for the public to listen. Somehow the thought of "Cal-3" being injected with plutonium was less offensive to the public than "Elmer Allen," a down-on-his-luck railroad porter being injected in his injured leg, in which he was told he had bone cancer; his leg was then amputated.