The Final Report of the President's Advisory Committee is now available in The Human Radiation Experiments, published in 1996 by Oxford Press. Although the Committee studied the experiments in depth, there was no attempt to assess the damage done to individuals. In many cases, the names and records of the patients were no longer available, nor was there any easy way to identify how many experiments had been conducted, where they took place, and which government agencies sponsored them. The Department of Health and Human Services, the primary government sponsor of research, had long since discarded files on experiments performed decades ago.
The Committee discovered "the records of much of the nation's recent history had been irretrievably lost or simply could not be located" and "only the barest description remained" for the majority of the experiments. The Department of Energy also claimed all the pertinent records of its predecessor, the AEC, had been destroyed during the 1970s, but in some cases as late as 1989. All CIA records are classified. When records of the top secret MKULTRA program (in which unwitting subjects were experimented upon with a variety of mind-altering drugs) were requested, the CIA explained that all pertinent records had been destroyed during the 1970s when the program became a national scandal.
Keeping Government Secrets
The Committee made clear that its story could not have been told if the government did not keep some records that were eventually retrieved and made public. However, federal records management law also provides for the routine destruction of older records. Thus, in the great majority of cases the loss or destruction of requested documents was a function of normal record-keeping practices.
The Committee was dismayed to report: "At the same time, however, the records that recorded the destruction of documents, including secret documents, have themselves been lost or destroyed. Thus, the circumstances of destruction (and indeed, whether documents were destroyed or simply lost) is often hard to ascertain.
In the Committee's judgment the AEC had repeatedly deceived the public by denying it had engaged in human experimentation, and by issuing cover stories to cover-up secret investigations, and by deliberately supplying incomplete information to people who participated in government-sponsored biomedical research. It was clear than once government information was "born secret" it often remained that way.
The Committee concludes: "The government has the power to create and keep secrets of immense importance to us all." Yet, without documents how can historians and other researchers uncover the truth about the government's clandestine activities? Where is the 'smoking gun' when secret records are systematically shredded or reported as 'lost'? We now know that many people were damaged during the government's Cold War period of secrets and lies. But how can we uncover the medical and scientific secrets that remain hidden in the still classified documents from 1974 up to the present?
In the absence of medical records and follow-up, the ultimate fate of individuals who willingly or unwillingly "volunteered" for these experiments is not known. The Committee simply did not have the time or the resources to review individual files and histories. In many instances only fragmentary information survives about these experiments; whether people were harmed in these experiments could not be ascertained.
Current Secret Biomedical Experimentation
The U.S. has the world's largest arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. However, few people are aware of the covert biowarfare experiments conducted by various government agencies, particularly the military and the CIA. For example, in August 1977 the CIA admitted to no less than 149 subprojects, including experiments to determine the effects of different drugs on human behavior; work on lie-detectors, hypnosis, and electric shock; and the surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials. Forty-four colleges and universities were involved, along with fifteen research foundations, twelve hospitals or clinics, and three penal institutions. In the infamous MKULTRA mind-altering experiments, the victims were lured to hotel rooms for sexual encounters with prostitutes and were then drugged and monitored by CIA agents. Military biowarfare attacks against unsuspecting Americans in the 1950s and 60s are a documented reality. The most notorious was a six-day U.S. military bioattack on San Francisco in which clouds of potentially harmful bacteria were sprayed over the city. Twelve people developed pneumonia due to these infectious microbes, and one elderly man died from the bioattack.
In other secret attacks, bacteria were sprayed into New York City subway tunnels; into crowds at a Washington, D.C. airport; and onto highways in Pennsylvania. Biowarfare testing also took place in military bases in Virginia, in Key West, Florida, and off the coasts of California and Hawaii. For 50 years the shameful details of the government's radiation experiments were kept secret from the public. In The Plutonium Files, Eileen Welsome notes the ethical horror that resulted from the melding of military and medical agendas during the Cold War. She credits the atomic bomb project's public relations machine for downplaying the fallout controversy, the illnesses of the atomic veterans, and the diseases of the downwinders. The government propagandists simply placed the blame on sudden wind shifts, misinformed scientists, the overactive imagination of aging soldiers, and even Communist propagandists.
Welsome concludes, "The web of deception and denial looks in retrospect like a vast conspiracy, but in actuality it was simply a reflection of the shared attitudes and beliefs of the scientists and the bureaucrats who were inducted into the weapons program at a time of national urgency and never abandoned their belief that nuclear war was imminent." She worries if what we have learned from the thousands of radiation experiment documents made public over the last several years will be remembered. Like the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes against humanity, the radiation experiments should never be forgotten. In reviewing Welsome's book for the Los Angeles Times (January 2, 2000), Thomas Powers asks: "If the government lied about the danger of nuclear testing, can we trust them to tell us the truth about acid rain, global warming or the safety of deep storage for nuclear waste?"
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