Over the years, there have been speculations of several medical experiments being conducted on humans during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. According to a recent report by the Daily Mail, the U.S. government conducted radioactive experiments on its own citizens without their knowledge or consent.
The revelation came through some declassified files showing that between 1945 and 1947, experts and doctors secretly administered plutonium to some Americans. It was reportedly part of an experiment to understand how the radioactive particles move through and affect the human body.
The shocking details first emerged back in 1995 under the administration of former President Bill Clinton. At that time, the Department of Energy declassified documents of secret experiments that were conducted to understand radiation risks to workers who were building nuclear bombs.
Nazis were noobs confronted to American leaders.
Directly from “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War”, a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome.
An history of United States government-engineered radiation experiments on poor, powerless citizens. pic.twitter.com/3wsQYfFRtQ
— Francesco Esposito (@FrancescoEsp33) July 13, 2023
According to those documents, one of the first victims of this secret experiment was Ebb Cade. The African American man worked as a cement worker and was secretly dosed with plutonium in a hospital following his injury in a car accident in 1945.
He was taken to Oak Ridge Army Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a fractured right kneecap, right forearm and left femur. A small amount of plutonium was injected into his left arm at the hospital.
The documents stated that he was taken out of the hospital “to avoid leakage.” However, Joseph Howland, assistant chief of medical research at Oak Ridge, stated, “I injected a five-microcurie dose of plutonium into a human and studied his clinical experience. (I objected, but in the Army, an order is an order.)”
Experts believe the dose was at least five times larger than what a human body could absorb without harmful effects, and at least 80 times larger than what an average person absorbed in one year.
Cade died at 63, just eight years after he was injected with the radioactive particles.
However, he was not the only victim. The declassified files reveal about 4,000 government-sponsored human radiation experiments were conducted within the World War II and the Cold War timeline.
These experiments involved administering a small dose of radioactive tracers to adults for medical research purposes. While it was harmless in most cases, there were also some riskier experiments. According to the files, at times, children were exposed to radioisotopes, while some prisoners were also forced to take part in harmful experiments.
THE PLUTONIUM FILES pic.twitter.com/k0VmV7ZZyi
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These studies also included observing soldiers’ reactions to atomic blasts, as well as monitoring fallout on uranium miners, which even resulted in sickness and deaths. The documents have shown that residents in the Marshall Islands also became part of these experiments unknowingly.
Long-term health damage also occurred as a result of these radiation exposures. Most of the time, these experiments prioritized secrecy over medical ethics, which sparked deep concerns among Americans.
Eileen Welsome, a Pulitzer-winning author, wrote in her book The Plutonium Files, “One minute I was reading about beagle dogs that had been injected with large amounts of plutonium and had subsequently developed radiation sickness and tumors. Suddenly there was this reference to a human experiment. I wondered if the people had experienced the same agonizing deaths as the animals.”
