War irradiating other civilians

[Sukotto]

Besides the fair peoples of those cities that suffered nuclear war,
other people around the globe as well as its own citizens have suffered
from the radiation of the US government. Perhaps not the same as being
atomized, but the general disregard for...is astonishingly disgusting.
And we thought only the Soviet Union conducted experiments on
their own people.
William Blum writes in the
new intro to his book "Killing Hope U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/KillingHope_page.html



"The people of Utah and Nevada who lived downwind from the nuclear test sites don't have too much to show from the cold war except clusters of cancer; after 87 open-air tests more fallout had settled on St. George in Utah than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... and the hapless islanders of Micronesia who were terribly deceived about the H-test fallout; the Interior Department told the people of Bikini that they could return to their homes -- provided they ate no home-grown food until the late 21st century ... and the soldiers who were forced to watch the tests from too close; and the uranium miners whose lungs inhaled radon gas; and the people who lived too close to the wrong nuclear reactors, Chernobyl in slow motion; and the unknowing guinea pigs of all the radiation experiments, injected with plutonium, uranium, radium, and other nice things .."


Blum also documents this in his other book
"Rogue Nation A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"
I first remember reading about Bikini island as a kid
in a national geographic magazine while waiting at a doctors office.
Terrible.

 

[lexico]

It is absolutely apalling how far "some" of the scientists, medical doctors, people in the the military, and those in the government would go experimenting on humans in the name of scientific research, cooperative spirit, winning a decisive war, or service of the public.

I suggest those directly involved be injected the accumulative amount of radioactive isotopes into their bodily system as a reward for their selfless service; only then will these vile acts of crimes against human dignity will cease. Hammurabi was right on this one; an eye for an eye.

Wikipedia on Human radiation experiments

Since the discovery of ionizing radiation, a number of human radiation experiments have been performed to understand the effects of ionizing radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body. Early pioneers did not appreciate the danger of such experiments and quite casually exposed experimenters and subjects to such radiation. In recent years, the danger is well-understood and experiments are carefully designed with close attention to medical ethics and safety for everyone involved. However, there have been a number of experiments that may constitute unethical human experimentation.

Plutonium experiments

After the end of World War II, doctors working on the Manhattan Project realized that little was known about the behaviour of radioactive substances in the body. They began a program to study these effects. This involved injecting solutions of plutonium into patients thought to be terminally ill, without the consent or even the knowledge of those patients.

The episode is now considered to be a disgraceful breach of medical ethics, but no detailed investigation has been performed, and no one has been punished.

Operation Sunshine

Early in the Cold War, researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia attempted to determine just how much nuclear fallout would be required to make the Earth uninhabitable. They realized that atmospheric nuclear testing had provided them an opportunity to investigate this. Such tests had dispersed radioactive contamination worldwide, and examination of human bodies could reveal how readily it was taken up and hence how much damage it was caused. Of particular interest was strontium-90 in the bones. Infants were the primary focus, as they would have had a full opportunity to absorb the new contaminants.

As a result of this conclusion, researchers began a program to collect human bodies and bones from all over the world, with a particular focus on infants. The bones were cremated and the ashes analyzed for radioisotopes. This project was kept secret primarily because it would be a public relations disaster; as a result parents and family were not told what was being done with the body parts of their relatives.

Project Sunshine and the Slippery Slope in Retention of Organs at Post-mortem: Report on Strontium-90 Research
The nuclear bodysnatchers

Recently declassified documents are shedding light on how the US and UK nuclear establishments obtained human bones, particularly from dead babies and children, in the 1950's and 1960's in order to study the effects of fallout from nuclear weapons tests. The experiments formed part of the notorious "Project Sunshine" (see WISE News Communique 413: "In Brief"), a secret US program to test the long-term effects of radiation.

Grave injustices (page removed)
"A Little of the Buchenwald Touch": America's Secret Radiation Experiments (access restricted)

Markowitz, Gerald E. ""A Little Touch of Buchenwald": America's Secret Radiation Experiments"
Reviews in American History - Volume 28, Number 4, December 2000, pp. 601-606
The Johns Hopkins University Press

Excerpt

As historians evaluate the impact of the Cold War and the rise of the national security state on American society, they will certainly need to pause and consider the significance of a series of human radiation experiments that were conducted on thousands of United States' citizens during and after World War II. Coming at a time when the victorious Allied powers were putting Nazi leaders on trial for crimes against humanity, and at a time when American leaders were trumpeting the glories of individualism and free choice over the evils of unfettered state power and mindless conformity in the Communist world, these experiments raise fundamental questions about American ideology and policy in the postwar era.

The Plutonium Files is based on a series of Pulitzer Prize investigative reports that Eileen Welsome wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune in 1993. The book takes its name from an experiment conducted from 1945 until 1947 in which 18 patients were injected with plutonium, almost all of them with 5 micrograms, (2 were injected with 94.91 micrograms) at a time when the "tolerance dose" of plutonium was listed as 1 microgram. The author painstakingly recreates this and many other experiments on people with radioactive substances, and analyzes the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) "vast network of national laboratories, universities, and hospitals that would investigate every imaginable effect of radiation over the next three decades" (p. 198). The book is also notable for its identification of the victims and its effort to understand what they went through. While historians might have hoped for more context for this story, the author does a stunning job of laying bare the government's role in sponsoring these experiments, including its mostly successful effort to keep them secret from the American public as well as from the patients themselves. [End Page 601]

In the course of America's massive endeavor to defeat the Axis powers and...

Injected !
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments During the Cold War
By Eileen Welsome
Delacorte Press, 1999
592 pages; $26.95

The book reviewed by R.C. Longworth in November/December 1999 pp. 58-61 (vol. 55, no. 06) © 1999 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

From April 1945 to July 1947, 18 men, women, and children were injected with plutonium by doctors working with the Manhattan Project. None of the subjects was told what was being done, and none gave informed consent. They were chosen because the doctors believed them to be mortally ill, although many lived for years, even decades, with the plutonium working its damage in their bodies.

The experiments were covered up for 40 years: When they became public, the government apologized but not a single doctor or hospital was publicly blamed. The plutonium injections ended after 27 months, having achieved little.

But other experiments, for the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), continued into the 1970s. In Nashville, scientists at Vanderbilt University gave pregnant women radioactive cocktails. Prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their testicles radiated with neutrons. At the University of Cincinnati, nearly 200 patients were irradiated over a 15-year period. In Massachusetts, 74 boys at a Dickensian state school for unwanted or homeless boys were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron or calcium. The University of Chicago, one of the three sites for the plutonium injections, also fed solutions of strontium and cesium to 102 subjects with the assistance of Argonne National Laboratory. Again, no one told the victims what was going on, nor did anyone ask their consent.

The purpose of the experiments was to judge the effect of radioactivity on the human body. When they began, the Manhattan Project was close to exploding the first atomic bomb. Employees at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos worked with radioactive materials, yet no one knew the long-term effects of radiation on healthy people or on their genes and reproductive capacities. Experiments on animals were inconclusive and unsatisfactory. To protect the health of atomic workers, it was decided to begin human experiments.

In pursuit of this goal, many American doctors violated not only the Hippocratic Oath but the Nuremberg Code, American Medical Association guidelines, and U.S. government regulations. Crimes were committed and, in the end, damages paid, mostly to survivors. As late as 1985, body parts were being severed from cadavers, usually without the knowledge of the next of kin, for shipment to Los Alamos where they were analyzed for plutonium content. More than 15,000 human bodies were raided for this project, which was called Operation Sunshine. At a 1954 conference in Washington D.C., Willard Libby, winner of the Nobel Prize, lamented the shortage of bodies of persons, especially children, who had been exposed to radioactivity. "If anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching," Libby said, "they will really be serving their country."

 

[ranko]

Wooooah ....Lexico has published so long an article , JT is too noisy so i turned here.

Thread Sounds terrible.

I do hope these country will receive good compensation from the nuclear bombers.

 

[lexico]

Wooooah ....Lexico has published so long an article , JT is too noisy so i turned here.

Thread Sounds terrible.

I do hope these country will receive good compensation from the nuclear bombers.

Hi, Ranko ! It's good to see you again; a man of few words whose words will get more attention for the content.

Thank you for the moral support. I just listened to a recording from the UK in the 1990's. British veterans were struggling to have the gov't live up to the alleged reponsibilities for the many occurrences of cancer, internal bleeding, and premature deaths amonst those who were involved in nuclear testing. I was shocked to learn that the UK military were very stingy to take care of veterans who served their country under dangerous, radioactive conditions on grounds that the cause & effect relationship had not been statistically established !

I have also learned that the USSR conducted many nuclear detonations in East Siberia, nearly decimating the Chukchi tribes in the Chukotka region. Although they were not directly injected with radioactive isotopes, whole populations of people were exposed to distant, yet direct radiations and fall outs also known as "black rain."

I believe most countries who conducted nuclear test on or near populations all suffer from the "unknown" dangers that some people suspect the gov'ts were trying to find out by sacrificing its guinea pigs. Btw is it legal to test radioactivity on humans with their consent when the certain dangers and possible dangers are not fully notified to the testee ? Would the doctors involved have admistered the radioactive isotopes to their family member in similar situation ? I don't think so; hence comes the moral question.

 

[den4]

weren't there reports in the US about experimentation on prisoners or the mentally challenged using various nefarious radiation experiments to see how the body reacts to such level of radiation doses?
Thought I heard it on the NPR radio several months back... :?
but what do I know?

 

[ranko]

So, there are 2 points:

1. Countries should have the power of defense , they should have shields for their countries , and generally , Nuclear Power is the biggest weapon power , so , move on to try experiment WHICH involves more radiation infect for other people ( in or out of country). It's contradictive ,and surely , it would be opposed by all the people involved , so ,it wouldn't achieve a too large scale.

2.Generally , to stop the nuclear experiment is as hard as the criminals entering paradise after death. Every country , esp. large nations would continue , that's not for flaunt , in Chinese ,there is an idiom saying : "Don't think it's an ill cat when tiger's asleep" , so , some countries are forced to shout on the world to achieve the balance.

So , nuclear exper. would never be terminated , what we should do is to relief the relationships for the countries all over the world , that's to reduce the possibility of the nuclear war.