Extract from ATOMIC DOCTORS: Managing Radiation and the Radiation Narrative

Extract from ATOMIC DOCTORS

by  James L. Nolan, Jr. | Harvard University Pres

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248632 

 

Chapter 6

Managing Radiation and the Radiation Narrative

From the first, the hazards of radioactivity were hopelessly obscured in a flurry of vague, optimistic, and downright misleading pronouncements.

—Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light

After touching down at Hamilton Army Air Force Base in San Francisco, James F. Nolan boarded a train for an overnight trip to Los Angeles. There he was reunited with his wife and two children, from whom he had been absent for more than three months. In Los Angeles, the family prepared for their return trip to Los Alamos. After a week’s stay with the Reynoldses, they traveled by car back to Los Alamos. Resituated in their army-issued Sundt apartment by the end of October, the next few months would be a busy and chaotic time for Nolan. With the war over, many features of the once-secret Site Y were now in a state of flux. Nolan was asked to take over from Louis Hempelmann as head of the Health Group in the Los Alamos lab. Since February 1945, before his time overseas, Nolan had been serving as the alternative group leader to Hempelmann, with most of his responsibilities dedicated to setting up the safety and evacuation procedures at the Trinity Site.

As the new leader of the Health Group, Nolan would, like Hempelmann before him, serve in this role as a civilian. Therefore, after returning from Japan, he began the process of securing a discharge from the army, something he was evidently keen to achieve. Though he was highly commended for his military service—in the fall of 1945 he was awarded both a Legion of Merit citation and a Bronze Service Star—he was nevertheless eager to get out of the military.¹ As his daughter, Lynne, recalls, “He couldn’t wait to get out of the army.”²

Second, Nolan would work with Stafford Warren to prepare a report on their findings for Leslie Groves, who was scheduled to testify before Congress in the next month. After staying in Los Alamos for less than three weeks, Nolan again boarded a train destined for Oak Ridge. It had been five months since his last trip, when he had traveled to warn Groves about potential fallout from the Trinity test. This time, he was in Oak Ridge to prepare a report on fallout and the other effects of the bombs that they had discovered in Japan. After a week in Tennessee, Nolan then journeyed to New York and finally to Washington, DC. He and Warren were in Washington during Groves’s two days of testimony (November 28 and 29) before the Special Committee on Atomic Energy. On the day before his first day of testimony, Warren supplied Groves with a completed preliminary report of their findings.

Presenting the Joint Commission’s Findings

In preparation for his testimony, Groves had read the preliminary report supplied to him by Warren, along with a draft of Father John Siemes’s translated testimony, which Warren included for “its value as background material and its narrative interest.”³ While presenting his opening remarks—which focused primarily on the structural damage caused by the bombs—Groves was interrupted by Vermont senator Warren Austin, who asked whether the general could report on the presence of any radioactive residue in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Groves responded without the slightest equivocation, “Yes, sir: and there is none. That is a very positive ‘none.’ ”⁴

Minutes later, Senator Richard Russell from Georgia asked Groves to elaborate on this point, to which the general responded, “There was no radioactivity damage done to any human being excepting at the time that the bomb actually went off, and that is an instantaneous damage.” In other words, there was no residual radiation (“none”), and any injuries caused by radiation were from the initial detonation of the bombs; and “the number of casualties from that [was] relatively small,” Groves added. So exceptional were these limited cases, he testified further, that it “would take an accident for a man, the average person, within the range of the bomb to be killed by radioactive effects.” In the rare (or accidental) instances in which people did die from radiation alone, Groves argued, “I understand it from the doctors” that they did so “without undue suffering.” Invoking the purported authority of his physicians’ expertise, he then shockingly added, “In fact, they [that is, the doctors] say it is a very pleasant way to die.”⁵

Eileen Welsome does not overstate matters when she characterizes Groves’s testimony here as “patently untrue.”⁶ In fact, though he summoned the authority of his Manhattan Project doctors, as did Thomas Farrell two months earlier in Tokyo, Groves’s statement was not even commensurate with the material supplied to him by Warren—even though the report itself appears to have been constructed in such a manner as to be as favorable as possible to Groves’s preferred narrative. A close reading of the document, however, shows that the preliminary findings of the Manhattan Project doctors did not, in substance, support Groves’s testimony.

The report, for example, did not say there was no residual radiation. Rather, it indicated that though “the intensity of radiation is quite low, it is measurable with the very sensitive instruments used.” Warren even conceded that, in some cases, the acceptable tolerance dose “is exceeded slightly,” and in reference to radioactive fallout, he cited, without refutation, Japanese data showing “evidence that patients in Nagasaki as far away as 4 kilometers did show effects of radiation.” Moreover, rather than radiation casualties being “relatively small,” as Groves testified, Warren reported that of the “approximately 4000 patients admitted to hospitals, 1300 or 33% showed effects of radiation and of this number approximately one-half died.”⁷

In the report, Warren once again noted the limitations of the group’s measuring instruments. He admitted that his group, in the end, only measured the effects of gamma rays. Attempts were made to measure alpha and beta particles, but these were not calibrated because of “technical difficulties and inaccuracy in evaluating the readings.” Most significantly, no measurements were made (or reported) of neutron activity. Warren wrote, “The additional role that neutrons may have played in the production of these symptoms can not be evaluated from the data.”⁸ This was a significant omission, because, as David Bradley, a physician who would work with Warren and Nolan in the Marshall Islands after the war, explained, “it is likely that most of the damage done specifically at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done by neutrons.”⁹ In a later interview after the war, Warren admitted to the significance of this omission: “Not too much was known about the effect of neutrons except we knew that they were destructive. We had a hard time measuring them.”¹⁰

Recall that what the doctors accepted as a maximum permissible dose of radiation exposure in 1945 would eventually be seen as far too high. While the doctors regarded one-tenth of a roentgen as a safe maximum tolerable dose of radiation at the time, Nolan acknowledged, “no one knew really how much radiation a human could stand.” While planning for the Trinity test, Los Alamos scientists negotiated with Nolan to accept a higher limit, finally settling on five roentgens, which, less than twenty years later, would be regarded as eight hundred times higher than the accepted standard.¹¹

During his testimony before the Senate subcommittee, Groves also selectively and strategically used Siemes’s written account to support his arguments concerning the effects of radiation. He read directly from it: “It was also noised about that the ruins of the city emitted deadly rays and that many workers who went there to aid in the clearing died, and that the central district would be uninhabitable for some time to come. I have my doubts as to whether such talk is true, and myself and others who worked in the ruined areas for some hours shortly after the explosion suffered no such ill effects.”¹² Groves, however, skipped over sections of the document that would have heavily qualified, if not directly contradicted, his constructed narrative. While Siemes may have been somewhat skeptical about the effects of residual radiation, he did observe the severe consequences of initial radiation. He knew, for example, of several cases in which individuals “who did not have external burns died later.” He also observed, “There seems to be some truth in the statement that the radiation had some effect on the blood.” Specifically, his colleague Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, who did not suffer burns, remained very weak and was found by an attending physician at the time to have leukopenia.

Though Siemes was, in the summer and early fall of 1945, inclined to attribute his fellow priest’s frailty to his “generally weakened and malnourished condition,” John Hersey’s more long-term view, put forth in a later edition of Hiroshima, found that Kleinsorge’s health struggles, including leukopenia, would persist for years. The ailing Jesuit priest returned regularly to the hospital for treatment, sometimes for prolonged stays, and struggled for the rest of his life with many of the common symptoms of radiation sickness.

It should also be noted that Warren’s report offered no empirical support whatsoever for Groves’s assertions about no “undue suffering” and the “very pleasant” dying process of fatal radiation injury. In fact, Warren’s report is full of references to such unpleasant radiation-induced symptoms as fever, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, petechiae, “epilation, severe ulcerative lesions of the mouth and throat[,] … rapid and extreme emaciation[,] … destruction of the bone marrow and the lymphatics, ulcerative lesions of the colon and rectum,” and so on.¹³

During his testimony, the senators perceived a notable defensiveness on Groves’s part in the manner in which he repeatedly denied the harmfulness of radiation exposure. After Groves falsely asserted that the limited damage from radiation took place only at the moment of explosion, the chairman of the committee, Senator Brien McMahon from Connecticut, interjected, “General, you don’t make any point of congratulations on that result, the fact that that didn’t happen, do you? If there was radioactivity, there wouldn’t be anything morally wrong with that?” McMahon was prompted to ask these questions given how often Groves and other military officials asserted the relative absence of radiation damage in Japan. “Its very reiteration,” McMahon stated, “seemed to me to indicate that there was some feeling on the part of the War Department that there was something morally wrong if it had [caused significant radiation damage].”¹⁴

Given Groves’s anxiety, apparent as early as mid-August when reports first started coming out of Japan of radiation poisoning, the senator correctly perceived a notable defensiveness on Groves’s part. In response to the senator’s questioning, Groves again stated that ongoing radioactive damage in Japan had been avoided. Then, putting forth what could only be regarded as a vague and questionable dichotomy, he added, “If it was a choice between radioactivity on a few Japanese or even a number of thousands of Japanese or a case of saving 10 times as many American lives, I would go the American way on that question without any hesitation.… There would be no feeling, as I say, on my part on anything that would have shortened this war by a single day.”¹⁵ At the time of his testimony, however, Groves was clearly aware of the harmfulness of radioactivity, even beyond its effects on “a few” or even “thousands of Japanese.” In other words, “the American way,” as such, included Americans.

The Blue Glow at the Omega Site

In addition to the descriptions of the agonizing symptoms of radiation sickness presented in Warren’s report, Groves was also fully aware of the suffering of one of his own scientists who had died from radiation exposure in an accident at Los Alamos just ten weeks before his Senate testimony. In late August, while Warren, Henry Barnett, Harry O. Whipple, and the other Manhattan Project doctors were en route to Japan, the understaffed Hempelmann was struggling to maintain safety standards at Los Alamos. During this time, Harry Daghlian, a young scientist who had studied particle physics at Purdue, was conducting an experiment popularly known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.”

The dangerous experiment, which took place in the Pajarito Canyon at the Omega Site, about three miles from the main Los Alamos lab, involved measuring criticality with a 6.19-kilogram, nickel-plated sphere of plutonium. Daghlian was working alone on the evening of August 21, 1945, though a military guard named Robert Hemmerly was also in the room, reading a newspaper with his back to the assembly. The twenty-four-year-old Daghlian was building layers of tungsten carbide bricks around the smooth sphere of subcritical plutonium. The bricks, or tamper material, had the effect of reflecting neutrons back into the plutonium. The young physicist was attempting to measure just how much tamper material was necessary to reach criticality. As Daghlian was laying the last brick in the fifth and final layer of the assembly, a monitoring device signaled a notable uptick in neutron activity. As Daghlian tried to pull the brick away, it slipped out of his hand and fell into the middle of the assembly. At that moment, an eerie blue flash filled the room, noticeably lighting up Hemmerly’s newspaper.

Daghlian removed some of the bricks from the assembly, including the one that had slipped out of his hand. As a consequence of the accident and Daghlian’s efforts to disassemble the layers of tungsten carbide, he received a harmful dose of neutrons and gamma rays. He was taken to the hospital for examination and treatment by the Los Alamos medical staff, including Hempelmann. Some thirty minutes after the accident, “he complained of numbness and tingling of the swollen hands.”¹⁶ In the days that followed, his condition worsened and his suffering increased. He experienced violent vomiting, severe diarrhea, and the blistering and shedding of skin, especially on his heavily exposed hands. In fact, the skin on Daghlian’s hands and forearms was eventually lost, progressing to the point of “actual dry gangrene” on his fingers, all of which was clinically observed and documented photographically.¹⁷ Exhibiting many of the same symptoms as the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he died twenty-five days after the accident.

Harry Daghlian’s swollen hands approximately three days after the Omega Site accident.

Hemmerly, who was about twelve feet from the assembly at the time of the accident, received a lower dose of radiation. He stayed in the hospital for two nights before being released. After a couple of months, he appeared to have recovered from his relatively mild symptoms, though later in life he would be diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukemia. Following more than a year of unsuccessful treatment, he died at the age of sixty-two. In a 1979 follow-up study of the accident, Hempelmann admitted to the likelihood that Hemmerly’s death had been caused by the radiation he received in the Omega Site accident.¹⁸

This was not the first time the blue glow had been seen in the labs of Los Alamos. About two and a half months before the Daghlian accident, on June 4, 1945, another incident occurred at the Omega Site in which several people, including Harold Hammel, Jess Kupferberg, and James Bistline, received large doses of radiation. In this case, briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, the experiment involved slowly adding water to a tank containing enriched uranium. During the test, water had been added too quickly and, as occurred in the Daghlian case, a monitoring instrument indicated a sharp and dangerous rise in neutron activity. Kupferberg and Bistline responded by cutting further water intake, as well as releasing some of the excess water from the tank. In these brief moments, an observable blue glow could be seen around the water tank. Those closest to the tank, including Kupferberg, also “noticed a deepseated tingling sensation in their bodies.”¹⁹

Nolan, who was in Los Alamos during the June 4 accident, would hear another account of this particular symptom while stationed at Tinian Island. In the memo he sent to Stafford Warren, written the day after the Hiroshima bomb, Nolan recorded that one of the Enola Gay crew had experienced a similar sensation. As conveyed in the summary account of his medical examination of the crew, Nolan wrote, “One crew member at seven miles noticed a vague but distinctive odor or taste. This was purely voluntary information and was not suggested. The sensation was the same as that described by Sgt. Kupferberg after the Omega accident.”²⁰

As for those exposed during the June 4 incident, blood samples were taken from all who had been in the room at the time of the accident. The four closest to the water tank were taken to the hospital for further observation. In a report written one month after the accident, Hempelmann indicated that “there were no untoward symptoms of any kind,” although all four of the hospitalized workers experienced reduced blood pressure. Additionally, Bistline reported a loss of appetite and was found to have a lower white blood cell count, and Hammel’s “initial count … showed some leucocytosis and relative lymphopenia.” The four hospitalized workers were instructed to avoid further radiation exposure and to stay out of the sunlight. The accident resulted in the implementation of (or the attempt to implement) more stringent rules for the Omega group “concerning the handling of critical assemblies.”²¹

With full awareness of these earlier accidents and with the lab in a state of chaotic transition following the end of the war, Nolan was presented with the challenging task of collecting data from departing workers—many of whom were less than fully cooperative—while also establishing more rigorous and routinized safety measures to better protect those who remained at the lab. With the war over, there was no longer any excuse for a cavalier attitude toward the protection and safety of those handling radioactive materials.²² Nolan noted a change in attitude among the plutonium workers: “With the lifting of security and the lack of pressure afforded by the war, employees at this laboratory now have many qualms about the special hazards.”²³ No longer, for example, would anyone tolerate the high levels of plutonium excretion detected among the workers at the time of the Trinity test.

With many leaving Los Alamos “to return to peacetime pursuits,” the Health Group determined to collect and record data, including blood and urine samples, as systematically as possible from departing workers. This created an “enormous load” and “major headaches” for the Health Group, as there “was little cooperation on the part of individuals about to be discharged.” Nevertheless, “great pains” were taken to get these data, and Wright Langham was charged with obtaining “urine assays on plutonium workers who were terminating.” The physicians even set up a “milk-route” to collect specimens from individuals in their homes because of their lack of cooperation in furnishing them otherwise.²⁴

In addition to instituting termination procedures, the Health Group, under Nolan’s leadership, sought to increase the protection and safety of those still working at the lab, or at least to give the impression of showing greater concern for workers’ health. Implementation of these new measures was complicated by the involvement of Manhattan Project doctors in other activities, including continuing follow-up work with the Trinity test (for example, monitoring cows exposed to radiation) and preparing for Operation Crossroads, an emerging plan to test more atomic bombs in the Marshall Islands in the summer of 1946. All three of the leading Manhattan Project doctors—Nolan, Warren, and Hempelmann—were scheduled to be part of the radiation safety (radsafe) team of Operation Crossroads and had to devote some time to preparing for this new venture.

In spite of these distractions, new safety and monitoring practices were implemented during the interim period (November 1945–May 1946), which included assigning nurses to first-aid stations at some of the outlying sites and employing an additional nurse in the Tech Area. Joe Hoffman was tasked with more comprehensively distributing and collecting film badges to measure radiation at various locations around the lab. Additionally, in light of the earlier accidents, Nolan attempted to establish tighter supervision over the critical assembly group. Toward this end, following a conference meeting with the doctors, Canadian-born physicist Louis Slotin agreed to assign a man from his critical assembly team to report on monitoring activities to the Health Group.²⁵

This was a tragically ironic choice, as the thirty-five-year-old Slotin, who had been a close friend and colleague of Daghlian’s, would soon be involved in the most famous radiation accident to occur in Los Alamos. On May 21, 1946—exactly nine months to the day after Daghlian’s accident—Slotin was working with plutonium materials scheduled for use in the upcoming nuclear tests on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. In fact, Slotin was scheduled to take part in Operation Crossroads. Working at the Omega Site in the Pajarito Canyon, he was demonstrating to a group of six other scientists the steps involved in “tickling the dragon’s tail.” As in the Daghlian case, a security guard was also present in the room.

This time the experiment involved slowly lowering a half sphere of beryllium over a plutonium core. Slotin had conducted the experiment more than forty times before and had become a bit too comfortable and incautious with the exercise. The famous Italian physicist Enrico Fermi once warned Slotin, “Keep doing that experiment that way and you’ll be dead within a year.”²⁶ On the afternoon of May 21, using a screwdriver, Slotin gently lowered the beryllium tamper closer to the plutonium core while listening to the clicks of the Geiger counter sitting beside him. Suddenly, the screwdriver slipped and the hemisphere of tamper material came into direct contact with the plutonium. Slotin instinctively separated the two spheres with his bare hands, an action that likely saved the lives of the others in the room, though it exposed Slotin to a dangerous and ultimately lethal dose of radiation.

Once again, a distinctive blue glow emitted from the radioactive substances. As the security guard, Patrick Cleary, recounted, “I saw the sphere come off the assembly, and saw the blue glow all around the sphere uniformly, like a halo.”²⁷ In keeping with the prevailing policy of compartmentalization, Cleary, unlike the scientists in the room, had no understanding of the materials or the experiment that was taking place at the Omega Site that afternoon. “I did not actually know what the material or sphere was at the time, or anything about it,” Cleary recounted.²⁸

Slotin, along with the others at the Omega Site, who had received lesser doses of radiation, were rushed to the Los Alamos Hospital. Hempelmann and Nolan were among the attending physicians. Warren, having been told of the accident, flew immediately from San Francisco (where he was preparing for Operation Crossroads) to Albuquerque. Other medical specialists from around the country also traveled to Los Alamos. The triage efforts that followed were both medical and scientific in nature. Regarding the latter, the exposure of eight individuals to varying levels of radiation provided a valuable opportunity for scientific investigation of the effects of radiation exposure on humans. Unlike in Japan, there were no blast or fire burn injuries to disentangle from the radiation injuries; the injuries were entirely caused by radiation. Scientific analysis began immediately. When Norris Bradbury, Robert Oppenheimer’s successor as head of the Los Alamos lab; Phil Morrison; members of the Health Group; and others converged on the scene of the accident, they “started making measurements and collecting samples,” and the “night was spent counting coins, badges, blood and urine samples, and trying to get an understanding of the extent of the dose.”²⁹

Reenactment of the “tickling the dragon’s tail” experiment that resulted in Louis Slotin’s death.

In addition to the medical and scientific activities, Manhattan Project officials also worried about how to handle the public relations dimension of the accident. Two days after the accident, Bradbury assembled a meeting, which included Nolan, Hempelmann, and Paul Hageman—the new post surgeon at the hospital—to “coordinate the many immediate things to be done concerning the injured men.” Notably, the “things” requiring attention mainly had to do with how the lab would manage public information about the accident. Among the six points considered in the May 23 meeting of doctors and scientists was whether to issue a press release, who would make any public statement, and “how many next of kin should be notified immediately.” None of the six points for this hastily assembled meeting—which included four Los Alamos physicians—mentioned anything about the medical treatment of the injured men.³⁰

This is not to say that nothing was being done medically. Noting the seriousness of Slotin’s case, in particular, Bradbury acknowledged the work of the doctors in attending to their patient: “Nolan and Hempelmann are both here and the former will remain as long as needed. Col Warren has come.… I feel that all is being done that can be done.”³¹ However, there was little the doctors could do. Slotin’s body deteriorated even more quickly than did Daghlian’s, and once again in ways that approximated the frightful effects of radiation experienced by the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. On May 30, just nine days after the accident, Slotin died. It was an agonizing and painful death, only partially relieved by the morphine administered to him by the doctors. In terms of scientific observation, Slotin (as had Daghlian before him) willingly allowed his injuries to be measured, examined, and photographed, including full-length pictures of his naked and decaying body.

The accident did nothing to slow preparations for the Bikini tests, Bradbury assured his superiors. Once again Hempelmann would be asked to stay home and manage the crisis, while Nolan and Warren departed for the Marshall Islands.³² In fact, both Warren and Nolan left Los Alamos several days before Slotin died. Hempelmann, on the other hand, remained to attend to the aftermath of the accident, which included meeting Slotin’s parents, Alexander and Sonia Slotin, when they arrived at Los Alamos and traveling back with them, and the casket carrying their deceased son, to Winnipeg on May 31. The army moved quickly to settle with the Slotin family, offering $10,000 in compensation, but while requiring Slotin’s mother to sign a release form denying that the army had any liability for the accident. The army also covered all of the Slotins’ travel, room, and board expenses for the trip to and from Los Alamos.

As for the others who were in the room during the accident, it was estimated that, after Slotin, the physicist Alvin Graves received the next highest dose of radiation. Following the accident, he manifested some of the acute symptoms of radiation sickness, including high fevers and vomiting. He subsequently lost most of his hair, became temporarily sterile, and struggled with debilitating fatigue for several months.³³ Graves and his wife, Elizabeth (or Diz, as she was commonly known), had been two of Nolan’s monitors for the Trinity test. Diz, who was seven months pregnant at the time of the Trinity test, and thus also Nolan’s patient, had “raised hell” with him “to get in on the TR test.” She and her husband were finally “allowed to perch in the motel in Carrizozo” as part of the team monitoring fallout from the test. In retrospect, Nolan confessed that, had he known about the prospect of the Omega Site accident, he would never have allowed them to participate, as the May 21, 1946, accident might have prevented the couple from having any more children, thus making the baby with whom she was pregnant in June 1945 “the last Graves baby.”³⁴ In 1966, at the age of fifty-four, twenty years after the accident, Graves suffered a fatal heart attack while skiing. His heart condition, Hempelmann later acknowledged, can be “assumed to have been the result of the radiation exposure.”³⁵

After Slotin and Graves, Allan Kline received the next highest level of radiation, an estimated dosage of one hundred roentgens.³⁶ Four days after the accident, Bradbury sent a letter to Kline’s mother, June Kline. In it, he claimed that her son “was not seriously affected by his accidental exposure to radiation.” Bradbury quoted directly from Hageman’s medical report: “S. Allan Kline experienced only minimal symptoms and no objective evidence of radiation disease. Laboratory data is equivocal. To be kept under observation. Prognosis is good.”³⁷ After the accident, Allan Kline was terminated from the Manhattan Project and moved back to Chicago. He would suffer from the effects of radiation exposure for years. His hair fell out, he had to avoid exposure to the sun for a long time, he struggled with severe lassitude (and would sleep sixteen hours a day), and he was sterile for two years.

While in Chicago and then later in New York, he initially sought medical care from doctors connected with the Atomic Energy Committee (AEC), the civilian-controlled entity that took over the work of the Manhattan Project on January 1, 1947. However, Kline eventually realized that he was not really being given medical care but, like the victims studied by the Joint Commission and the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) in Japan, was rather being examined for the purposes of collecting scientific data. About three years after the accident, Kline wrote, “I was actually used as a guinea pig during this whole period as no medication or treatment was given me for my recovery, nor was any advised. All any of the physicians did was to check my physical condition and subject me to very long, uncomfortable tests and the results of these tests then became the property of the U.S. Government, and I was not given access to them.”³⁸

Kline eventually stopped cooperating with AEC physicians and turned to private doctors instead. He sought unsuccessfully for years to retrieve his medical records from Los Alamos and to secure some kind of settlement for his injuries. As late as March 1951, nearly five years after the accident, Kline was still trying to retrieve medical information from the AEC, including data from blood and urine samples, a sternum puncture, blood coagulation data, and radiation measurements from coins, his watch, his belt buckle, and so on, which had been collected during his stay in the Los Alamos Hospital after the accident.³⁹ In response, Kline was told the following: “There are certain data which you request such as calculations of radiation emitted from objects on your person which are apparently non-existent and we can only presume that if any count was taken on these objects it was primarily as a matter of curiosity and no record was made.”⁴⁰

The flagrant deception in this response became glaringly clear in the 1980s, when “hidden files” from the Kline case were accidentally discovered in a University of Tennessee archive by researcher Clifford Honicker.⁴¹ Included in these files was a document recording the “relative intensities” of radiation exposure of all eight men in the room, based on measurements from blood serum, film badges, coins, and so on, the collection of which Bradbury explicitly discussed in the memo cited earlier. In a memo to General Groves, written six days after the accident, Colonel C. W. Betts similarly acknowledged the collection and analysis of these materials: “All members of the party of eight were immediately hospitalized and placed under observation. Other experts spent the following night checking the radioactivity of metal articles in the possession of the victims of the accident and taking blood and urine radioactivity counts.”⁴² The data, which were withheld from Kline, make clear that, after Slotin and Graves, Kline received the highest dosage of radiation from the accident, one well over the maximum permissible dose, even by 1946 standards.⁴³

Why were these medical data kept from Kline? It appears that Los Alamos doctors were explicitly directed not to cooperate with Kline because of concerns about litigation. In response to a request by the Chicago-based doctor J. J. Nickson to hospitalize Kline “for further medical study,” Hempelmann wrote a revealing letter on December 10, 1946, nearly seven months after the accident. He acknowledged that the “case was being handled in a most unusual manner” and that he had been instructed “not to contact Kline directly nor to commit the project in any way.” As for the reasons behind this lack of cooperation, Hempelmann admitted that “the prospect of a lawsuit seems to have caused a most remarkable case of jitters.”⁴⁴

Later that month, prompted by the Kline case, Warren recommended introducing policy measures that would protect the AEC from future legal cases. Again, the explicit motivation for this policy “clarification” was to “save possible embarrassment of the Government by medical legal suits.”⁴⁵ Part of the issue for Warren and Hempelmann was that Kline refused to participate in any further medical examinations by Manhattan Project or AEC doctors. Kline objected because he justifiably felt he was being scientifically examined rather than medically treated. Warren’s proposed policy was, in essence, to better facilitate examinations of workers following similar accidents in order to prevent future lawsuits. Again, Warren was evidently motivated not by concerns for Kline’s health but by a desire to maintain “good public relations,” an issue he mentioned three times in the policy proposal.⁴⁶

The Omega Site accidents, and the Kline case in particular, provide another example of the pattern of caution, co-optation, and complicity we have observed in the doctors’ involvements in various episodes of the dawn of the nuclear age. Doctors offered warnings about the critical assembly experiments. These warnings were disregarded or not taken seriously. When accidents did occur, the doctors were used to procure scientific data and then became complicit in hiding evidence, motivated, once again, out of fear of litigation. These cases also demonstrate the inadequacy of quick assessments and the lack of concern about potential long-term consequences. When Hempelmann conducted the follow-up study in 1979, he demonstrated that the Omega Site accidents had outcomes that extended well beyond the unfortunate deaths of Daghlian and Slotin. Hempelmann had conducted an earlier follow-up study in 1952 in which six of the eight survivors agreed to participate. Two, both from the Slotin accident, did not participate: Kline, for reasons that should be clear, and Cleary, because he was away fighting in the Korean War, where he would die in combat at the age of twenty-seven.

Kline’s lack of participation in the 1952 study clearly frustrated Hempelmann, a response that reveals the manner in which a scientific mind-set superseded a medical one. At the same time that Kline was trying to retrieve his medical records and reach some kind of settlement with the AEC, Hempelmann and others were insisting that Kline first participate in another examination, for the purpose of completing the 1952 study, which Hempelmann and others were working on at the time. In a December 1949 letter, for example, Hempelmann wrote, “My interest in the Kline case is not limited to a desire for a speedy and fair settlement. I also want Kline to submit to an examination and to permit us to include his case in our study of radiation illness.”⁴⁷ Kline, of course, refused, and “Case 5” is conspicuously missing in both the 1952 and the 1979 follow-up studies. During a 1980 interview, Hempelmann tried to explain Kline’s absence from the studies, stating that Kline “was so disturbed by this experience that he … became a lawyer and then sued I think the AEC or something like that. I think we settled out of court or something like that and he would not cooperate with the follow-up.”⁴⁸

In the 1979 study, four of the six who had been reexamined in the 1952 study were now dead. Two (including Hemmerly) died from leukemia and two (including Graves) from heart conditions, all of which could plausibly be traced to the radiation exposure they received. As Hempelmann conceded, albeit with qualification, in 1979, “It seems likely that the two leukemic deaths represent late effects of the radiation exposure.… The other two deaths could conceivably have been related to the exposure.”⁴⁹ Again, as was the case in Japan, early and quick assessments simply could not capture the full extent of the radiation injuries from the Omega Site accidents.

Further Studies of the Effects of Radiation in Japan

More long-term studies in Japan would similarly reveal the inadequacies of the Manhattan Project team’s spot check and would demonstrate that Warren’s findings, not to mention Groves’s testimony, were themselves, at best, misleading. When Warren testified before the same Senate committee a few months after Groves had, he claimed that only 5 to 7 percent of the overall casualties in Japan could be attributed to radiation effects. He also stated that when his team departed from Nagasaki in early October, “the cases in the hospitals averaged 20 cases of fire burns to one of gamma-ray injury.”⁵⁰ This assertion does not comport with information reported by General James B. Newman Jr., on October 5, of a ratio of “about three burns to one gamma ray injury case” in Nagasaki.⁵¹ Nor does it square with the findings of John Flick, of Ashley W. Oughterson’s team, who observed of patients in one of the largest hospitals (five wards of about fifty beds each) in the Nagasaki area (likely Omura), at around the same time, that “nearly all [were] irradiation cases.”⁵²

Also challenging Warren’s estimate was the US government’s Strategic Bombing Survey, one component of which investigated the biological effects of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This group of more than 110 men, who spent ten weeks in Japan between October and December 1945, cooperated with the elements of the Joint Commission that remained in Japan. In its June 1946 report, the Strategic Bombing Survey argued that Warren’s estimate was “far too low.” Instead, as stated in the report, “most medical investigators who spent some time in the areas … generally felt that no less than 15 to 20 percent of the deaths were from radiation.”⁵³

Shields Warren and Oughterson, the heads of the other two American teams forming the Joint Commission, published a comprehensive report of their findings in 1956, Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan. Included in their analysis is a survey of the different types of injuries found among a sample of 9,292 casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of whom were still alive twenty days after the explosions. Of this sample, 4,262, or 46 percent, were observed to have some kind of radiation injury, though sometimes in combination with blast or burn injuries.⁵⁴ Given these kinds of data, it is not surprising that Shields Warren and Naval Captain Rupert Draeger would conclude that, rather than constituting only a very small percentage of overall casualties, a “greater number of injuries was probably caused by ionizing radiation-blast effects, gamma rays, and neutrons than by any other type of injury resulting from the explosion of the bombs.”⁵⁵

Regarding potential harm from residual radioactivity, rather than outright denying its presence, as did Farrell and Groves, Shields Warren and Draeger allowed that it was a real possibility: “Residual radioactivity due to contamination of the area by fission products of the bomb is a conceivable happening.”⁵⁶ In fact, a classified report written by Nello Pace and Robert Smith, two members of the Joint Commission’s navy contingent, found measurable residual radiation, both near the points of detonation and downwind from the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With respect to induced radiation, more significant than gamma rays, Pace and Smith reported, was the induced radioactivity at the epicenters caused by neutron penetration. Pace and Smith even observed that isotope production by neutrons was “several orders of magnitude” greater than isotope production by gamma rays.⁵⁷ Recall that all that was reported on in Stafford Warren’s preliminary report supplied to Groves for his Senate testimony was the impact of gamma rays.

The navy doctors also found downwind radiological fallout from both bombs, most significantly from the plutonium bomb, where an easterly-northeasterly wind blew fallout over Nishiyama, a small village about two miles east of Nagasaki. This finding was in keeping with the observations of Nagasaki Medical School doctor Raisuke Shirabe, as discussed with Barnett and measured by Collins, considered in Chapter 5. According to Pace and Smith, Nishiyama villagers received radioactive fallout that approached “the magnitude of the maximal tolerance dose.” The navy medical officers estimated the roentgen dosage absorbed by villagers to be about fifty-six roentgens, a level of radiation “capable of producing measurable physiological change.”⁵⁸

Japanese scientists, studying the same region, similarly found measurable fallout in Nishiyama. A team of researchers from Kyushu Imperial University discovered, in 1947, an increase in the number of leukocytes in over half of the villagers and cases of hyperchromic anemia (reduction in red blood cells) in about a third. As late as 1975, researchers reported higher concentrations of the radioisotope cesium 137 among Nishiyama residents than in the nonaffected population.⁵⁹ This is the same radioactive isotope, as we will see in Chapter 7, that would eventually prevent Bikini Islanders from returning to their atoll after postwar testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands.

Regarding residual radiation at the hypocenters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a number of accounts suggest that both Japanese rescuers and American servicemen who entered one or both cities in the early weeks and months after the explosions were found to have a range of radiation sickness symptoms, including diarrhea, nausea, high fevers, and hair loss. Even more severe illnesses—including various cancers, infertility, cataracts, and liver disorder—have been attributed to secondary radiation exposure.⁶⁰ Some of these more serious cases resulted in death.

Kiyoshi Tanimoto, for example, one of John Hersey’s interlocutors, directly observed a number of instances in Hiroshima in which “people, who had not been in the city at the time of the explosion but had entered later, had died.” As recorded in the September 10, 1945, entry of his diary, “Mrs. K. Okinishi, from Furuichi ten kilometers away, had come to pick up the bones of her daughter who had died in her home located near the Buddhist temples in Tera-machi, a kilometer from the explosion.” As a consequence, Tanimoto wrote, she “died a few days later.” In another instance, a man named I. Nishimoto visited Hiroshima after the bombing in search of his daughter’s home in Mikawa-machi, which was also about “one kilometer from the explosion.” Nishimoto’s daughter was only recently married and was running a fish shop in Mikawa-machi. After visiting the ruins of his deceased daughter’s home, he likewise “died a few days later.” Another woman, “Mrs. Oguro’s mother,” had been living in Otake, about twenty miles away, at the time of the explosion. After visiting Hiroshima several times in search of “Jun’s bones,” she eventually contracted “the atomic disease,” which included “a high fever” and “finally died.” According to Tanimoto, “There had been many cases like that.”⁶¹

Accounts from US military personnel who were part of the occupying forces in Japan after the war also suggest serious effects from residual radiation. Bill Griffin, for example, a marine who entered Nagasaki on November 1, reported that he lost teeth, his hair fell out, and his skin flaked off as a result of radiation exposure in Nagasaki.⁶² Another marine stationed in Nagasaki, Sam Scione, was never told “anything about radiation or the effects it might have,” though he and other US occupation troops went to ground zero many times. After a year in Japan and upon his return to the United States, Scione’s “hair began to fall out and he was covered with sores.” He suffered a number of radiation-related ailments for years.⁶³

Another marine, David C. Milam, who was stationed in Nagasaki during the occupation period, likewise noted the effects of radiation on himself and his fellow servicemen. Among the first signs of radiation he witnessed while in Nagasaki was hair loss among some of the men. “It came out in clumps,” Milam remembers. Next came the loosening of teeth, severe headaches, and even leukemia. One of his friends began to experience fatigue and then, after finally reporting to the sick bay, died a few weeks later. Others experienced what Milam referred to as “cancer of the blood,” and Milam himself discovered years after the war that the residual radiation in Nagasaki had made him sterile.⁶⁴ Some recent studies indicate “significant exposure” for those who entered the bombed-out cities within a week of the explosions.⁶⁵ These findings are in keeping with what the radiologist Takashi Nagai and other Japanese doctors observed of residual radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during their efforts to treat patients in the first weeks after the bombs.

Such outcomes should not have been surprising to Groves, given Warren’s warnings about the potentially significant hazards troops might face when entering an area following a nuclear explosion.⁶⁶ However, Groves treated these data in the same way he treated Warren’s preliminary report for his Senate testimony. That is, he fully misrepresented and distorted the information when communicating it to others. Just a few days after receiving Warren’s warnings in late July 1945, Groves sent a memo to George C. Marshall, army chief of staff, stating, “No damaging effects are anticipated on the ground from radioactive materials.… We think we could move troops through the area immediately preferably by motor but on foot if desired.”⁶⁷ Historian Sean Malloy finds Groves’s willingness to disregard warnings that directly affected the safety of American troops as “one of the most shocking aspects of the entire story” and evidence that Groves may have internalized his own compartmentalization policy, resulting in a delusional sort of “self-compartmentalization.”⁶⁸

The dynamics of the complicated relationship between Groves and Warren, represented in these communications, continued even after the war. In April 1957, for example, when Warren was dean of the University of California, Los Angeles, Medical School, the New York Daily News printed an article debunking stories about radiation-induced two-headed salmon, likely in reference to the contamination of waters around the Hanford plant in Washington. The article dismissed the genetic effects of radiation, as such, as communist propaganda aimed at discouraging the continuation of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. The article cited the “respected Dr. Stafford Warren” as an authority to discount these stories. Warren was quoted in the article as having stated that “there is no conclusive evidence … that radiation has any effect on reproductive processes or results.” He was even reported to have said, “Nobody in any test area has suffered any damage from radioactive fall-out during the tests.”⁶⁹

When Groves read the article, he was delighted. Evidently still trying to manage the radiation narrative twelve years after the end of the war, he wrote Warren asking him to send any papers related to his refutation of the genetic effects of radiation exposure on salmon. In this letter, he also wrote disparagingly of those who continued to make claims about radiation injuries. “I am sure that you will agree that, like many others, I have had experience with a few, more or less queer people, all of them born before July 15, 1945 [the day before the Trinity test]. Their queerness cannot logically be blamed on radiation from atomic bombs.”⁷⁰

In an effort to diplomatically respond to Groves but also to set the record straight, Warren sent Groves a cover letter and accompanying paper. “We, too, have our share of odd-ball people,” Warren offered in the cover letter, “some probably born that way; others who assume the role to attract attention.” However, in the attached paper, though Warren defended the ongoing testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific, he also acknowledged that “there is no doubt … that radiation can cause genetic mutations,” most of which “are harmful in some degree.” It’s clear from the paper that he saw statements attributed to him in the Daily News article as having been taken out of context and misrepresenting his views as well as the scientific data on the topic. This exchange between Groves and Warren is indicative of previous efforts on Groves’s part to appropriate Warren’s expertise and on Warren’s part to maintain a modicum of intellectual integrity while also trying to appease his boss.⁷¹ In this instance, given the substance of his paper, it’s hard to see how Warren’s response would aid Groves’s efforts, though one could plausibly say the same of previous memos sent from the colonel to the general.

While the United States still maintains the position that the residual radiation near the epicenters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was negligible and thus not harmful, to officials in Japan the evidence of injuries from secondary radiation has been convincing enough that the Japanese government eventually increased health care coverage for those who entered within 1.25 miles of ground zero in either city within two weeks of the bombings.⁷²

While the effects of residual radiation are still debated and difficult to document scientifically, the long-term effects of initial radiation are indisputable. Summary reports by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, for example, show that survivors who were within 1.5 miles of the hypocenter at the time of the explosions were twice as likely as the unexposed population to die from leukemia, and those within 0.75 miles were six times as likely.⁷³ The younger the individuals, moreover, the greater the likelihood that they would one day contract leukemia. Children under ten, for example, who were within a mile of the hypocenter were diagnosed with leukemia at a rate eighteen times that of the general population. In addition to leukemia, studies show higher rates of stomach, lung, colon, and breast cancer among survivors. Interestingly, while deaths from leukemia among survivors peaked in the first five to ten years after the bombs, it took approximately twenty years for the long-term effects of other types of cancer to peak.

Long-term studies also show higher rates among survivors of such noncancer diseases and abnormalities as heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, benign thyroid tumors, liver disease, and cataracts.⁷⁴ Radiation-induced cataracts, for example, did not appear until between three months and ten years after exposure.⁷⁵ Studies also reveal that those exposed in utero were “adversely affected by radiation exposure.” For example, exposure within eight to fifteen weeks of conception “led to severe intellectual impairment, decreased academic performance and intelligence quotient (IQ) scores, and increased epileptic seizures.”⁷⁶ In utero exposure also resulted in children born with microcephaly, or markedly reduced head size, which was relatively frequent among those exposed within sixteen weeks of conception.⁷⁷ In her recent book on Nagasaki, in which she follows the lives of several hibakusha, Susan Southard also demonstrates the considerable social consequences and psychological strains endured by survivors. Because of their disfigured bodies and fears that radiation injuries could be passed on to children, hibakusha sometimes were shunned, were embarrassed to be seen in public, and experienced difficulties finding marriage partners.⁷⁸

Thus, regardless of how careful and accurate the Manhattan Project doctors had been in their five weeks of observing the damages in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a spot check, as such, could never have been adequate. The full consequences of this destructive new technology could only be understood on a longer-term basis, a reality that was not always lost on the doctors, who more than once recommended the sort of long-term studies that would be performed in research conducted by the ABCC and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

Plutonium Injections

Efforts by the doctors to understand the long-term consequences of radiation exposure took a rather dark turn following one of the earliest accidents in Los Alamos. This accident occurred on August 1, 1944, in Building D of the main Los Alamos lab, almost a year before the first critical assembly accident in the Pajarito Canyon. At the time, only very miniscule amounts of plutonium had been delivered to Site Y. So valuable were the microscopic plutonium samples that a special group was assigned for the sole purpose of recovering any plutonium that had been somehow misplaced, whether absorbed into rags or dropped on the floor, even to the point that “they were prepared to tear up the floor and extract the plutonium, if necessary.” According to Hempelmann, the “Recovery Group” would even “dissolve a bicycle.… They went to great extremes to recover everything.”⁷⁹

On the morning of August 1, Don Mastick, a twenty-three-year-old chemist from Berkeley who had been recruited by Oppenheimer to join the secret project on the mesa, was working in Building D with a small glass vial containing ten milligrams of plutonium. When the neck of the vial accidentally snapped off, the liquid spilled out, some of which ricocheted off the wall in front of Mastick and splattered back into his mouth. Mastick carefully returned the broken vial to its wooden holder and then made his way to Hempelmann’s office to report the accident. After numerous mouth rinsings, using concoctions recommended by Stafford Warren, Hempelmann then pumped Mastick’s stomach. Demonstrating just how valuable were these small samples of plutonium at the time, after pumping Mastick’s stomach, Hempelmann handed to the young chemist the four-liter container of his vomit and instructed him to chemically extract the plutonium from it.⁸⁰

The accident, as well as the toxic effects of plutonium in the lab more generally, caused considerable anxiety among the workers. Two weeks after the accident, Hempelmann sent a memo to Oppenheimer describing these worries and urging him to initiate research that would deepen understandings of the effects of radioactive materials on the human body.⁸¹ Hempelmann and the Health Group doctors simply didn’t know how Mastick’s body would handle the plutonium to which it had been inadvertently exposed. How much of the plutonium, for example, would be excreted from his body, and how quickly? How much would remain in his system, and what harm, if any, might it cause? Scientists had conducted some tests on rats in the Berkeley lab in an effort to answer these questions, but the extrapolation of their findings to humans remained uncertain.

In response to Hempelmann’s memo, Oppenheimer authorized “the development of methods of detection of plutonium in the excreta,” recognizing that these methods might involve “even human experimentation.”⁸² Two weeks later, Hempelmann confirmed plans to pursue, among other tests, “tracer experiments on humans to determine the percentage of plutonium excreted daily.”⁸³ Oppenheimer fully supported and signed off on the program, though, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he wanted the tests conducted at sites other than Los Alamos. Then, in March 1945, representatives from the Chemistry Division and the Health Group met with, among others, Hymer Friedell and Stafford Warren to discuss implementation of this new program, after which Hempelmann issued a memo suggesting that “a hospital patient at either Rochester or Chicago be chosen for injection of from one to ten micrograms of material and that the excreta be sent to this [Los Alamos] laboratory.”⁸⁴

A few days later, a candidate was discovered who was viewed as suitable for the first plutonium injection, though he was in Oak Ridge, rather than Rochester or Chicago. The first “patient” selected for this test was a fifty-three-year-old “colored male” named Ebb Cade. Cade, a cement worker at the Oak Ridge Site, had been involved in an automobile accident while on his way to work in the early morning of March 24, 1945. The accident resulted in multiple injuries, including a broken leg and arm, the former of which required surgery. Cade, who was in otherwise generally good health, was assigned the code name HP-12 (Human Product 12) and was injected on April 10 with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium, nearly five times what was accepted at the time to be the maximum body burden for ingested plutonium. It was not enough plutonium to cause acute symptoms, though it was understood, even at the time, to be sufficient to eventually cause cancer.

Joe Howland—who would be heading to Nagasaki as part of the Joint Commission in about four months—was instructed to make the injection. At first he refused, demonstrating his unease with the experiments. According to Howland, he only acquiesced after his boss, Friedell, issued a written military order insisting that he make the injection. Howland recalled that Cade neither consented to the procedure nor was told what substance was being injected into his body. The operation to reset his leg did not take place until April 15, five days after the injection and nearly three weeks after the accident. Delaying the surgery until after the injections enabled the doctors to measure levels of plutonium deposited in the bones. During the procedure, the doctors biopsied two bone specimens from Cade’s leg. Additionally, doctors removed fifteen of Cade’s teeth, which were also eventually sampled for plutonium. It is not clear whether his teeth were removed primarily for medical or scientific testing purposes, though the doctors at the Oak Ridge Hospital noted that Cade had considerable “tooth decay and gum inflammation.”⁸⁵ On the day after the operation, Friedell shipped a box “containing 21 urine and stool specimens, 2 bone specimens and one blood sample” to Los Alamos “for analysis by Dr. Wright Langham.”⁸⁶

After his reset bones healed, Cade discharged himself from the hospital and eventually moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. The doctors were unable to locate him for follow-up studies. Eight years after the injection, at the age of sixty-three, Cade died of a heart attack. Eileen Welsome points out that Cade came from a family with longevity in their genes, including a sister who lived to be over one hundred.⁸⁷ Cade was the first of eighteen patients who would secretly be injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors, though he was the only one injected at Oak Ridge. Three patients were injected at the University of Chicago, three at the University of California, and eleven at the University of Rochester. At least two of the three Chicago patients were injected at the Billings Hospital, the same hospital where Allan Kline had been “treated” before he stopped cooperating with Manhattan Project and AEC doctors.

One of the California patients was a four-year-old Australian boy with a rare disease, who had been flown from Australia to the University of California hospital for special treatment. The ideal was to inject patients who were terminally ill, so that the potential long-term consequences of the injections would never be realized. However, not all patients were terminally ill, as was the case with Cade, and some who were thought to be seriously ill had been misdiagnosed. A forty-nine-year-old woman in Rochester, for example, had been misdiagnosed with a terminal illness. Doctors admitted, after the injection, that this woman “may have a greater life expectancy than originally anticipated due to an error in the provisional diagnosis.”⁸⁸ In addition to the plutonium injections, six patients were injected with uranium and five with polonium. The latter types all took place at Rochester. In the case of the uranium injections, it was even understood that there could be possible acute effects from the injections. Of all the patients, only one apparently gave consent, though, even in this case, the doctors did not make clear to him what they were putting into his body. None of the patients were told that they were being injected with radioactive material; they were not told the reasons for the injections; and there were no anticipated therapeutic benefits. Indeed, it was understood that these injections could cause harm.

When Shields Warren assumed leadership of the Biology and Medicine Division of the newly created AEC in the fall of 1947, he soon learned of the existence of this secret program and was not pleased with what he discovered. He subsequently introduced policies that would prohibit such practices in the future, requiring that there be informed consent and that there be a therapeutic benefit for any such procedure. However, it appears that these new standards did not stop follow-up work on those previously injected (including the exhumation and reexamination of dead bodies) and that, at least in California, new experiments continued. Even in the follow-up studies, patients were not informed as to the real purposes for their “medical” examinations.

As late as 1949 and 1950, Robert Stone and General James Cooney were pushing for new total-body irradiation tests on prisoners with life sentences. Stone, for example, proposed experiments in which healthy prisoners, on a voluntary basis, be exposed to 25, 50, and even up to 150 roentgens of full-body radiation, to better understand the effects of nuclear radiation on the human body. At the time, the military was interested in the development of nuclear-propelled aircraft; and then, starting in 1950, the military feared that nuclear weapons would be used in the Korean War. Military officials wanted to understand what this might mean for American troops entering into bombed-out areas. This time, however, some of the doctors, including Shields Warren and Joseph Hamilton, expressed strong reservations.

With the full impact of the Nuremberg trials still fresh in the public memory, Hamilton feared that such total-body irradiation tests “would have a little bit of the Buchenwald touch.”⁸⁹ Hamilton had participated in the plutonium injections of the California patients and would himself die from leukemia before his fiftieth birthday, likely because of his extensive work with nuclear materials in the Rad Lab. Shields Warren’s comparison to the Nazis was even more explicit. “It is not very long since we got through trying Germans for doing exactly that thing,” he asserted. Warren, who had been part of the Joint Commission, also argued that, given all the data they had collected in Japan, further experiments were unnecessary. “Actually, we have got the results of an enormous experiment. We have the experiment involving over 200,000 people in the Nagasaki and Hiroshima areas, and I think that those results are real. I was there, and I saw the people when they got sick.”⁹⁰ The hibakusha who complained of feeling like guinea pigs at the hands of Joint Commission and ABCC doctors would likely agree with Warren’s characterization of the bombs and the studies that followed as an “enormous experiment.”

Despite his reservations, even after learning about the plutonium injections, Shields Warren determined that data on the tests should remain classified. Once again, concerns about public relations and potential lawsuits were the motivating factors that kept the experiments secret. As the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) concluded, “It appears that this decision [to keep the experiments secret] was based on concerns about legal liability and adverse public reaction, not national security.”⁹¹ It was not until the 1990s, largely because of the investigative work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Eileen Welsome, that the plutonium experiments became public. Welsome’s reporting sparked a government investigation into the tests, directed by Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary, during the Bill Clinton administration.

On October 3, 1995, after a comprehensive and detailed investigation by the ACHRE, Clinton and O’Leary held a press conference at which they publicly released their findings. At the press conference, Clinton noted that some of the experiments conducted by doctors during the early years of the nuclear age “were unethical, not only by today’s standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted.” In this context, he made explicit reference to the eighteen plutonium injections. He acknowledged further that these experiments were “carried out on precisely those citizens who count most on the government for its help—the destitute and gravely ill.… Informed consent was withheld. Americans were kept in the dark about the effects of what was being done to them.… These experiments were kept secret.”⁹²

The ACHRE’s final report provides a thorough accounting of these and related human radiation experiments that were conducted between 1944 and 1974. A few years after release of the ACHRE report, Welsome published her book The Plutonium Files, which provides in more narrative form the disturbing development, execution, and cover-up of these tests. That the troubling findings of the ACHRE did not create a greater public stir, Welsome argues, may be due, in part, to the timing of the report’s release—on October 3, 1995, the same day as the announcement of the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial. The wall-to-wall press coverage of the “trial of the century” verdict arguably prevented a fuller public recognition of the significance of the ACHRE’s findings.⁹³

Obscuring the Medical Paradigm

As the unfolding of the dawn of the nuclear age makes clear, the plutonium experiments were really only the most extreme manifestation of a more general pattern that one finds at a number of critical moments in which the Manhattan Project doctors were involved—for example, the Trinity test, the Los Alamos accidents, and the postwar investigative work in Japan. With what little knowledge the doctors did have about the dangers of radiation, they offered warnings. These warnings were often ignored, dismissed, or misrepresented. When some of the outcomes of their warnings were subsequently realized, doctors were then put in a position of having to cover for the military, often out of concerns about litigation and public relations.

The military prerogatives of security, secrecy, and speed superseded the medical prerogatives of health, healing, and patient care. The cover-up and secrecy of the Los Alamos accidents and the plutonium injections suggest that overriding military concerns caused doctors to, in essence, violate one of the central tenets of the Hippocratic ideal: “First, do no harm.” Indeed, in the case of the plutonium injections, though the doctors were motivated by a desire to establish proper safety measures for those working with radioactive materials, they were the ones who actually initiated and implemented the experiments, albeit with the clear support and direction of Oppenheimer, and operating within a program determined by military objectives.

In this instance, the doctors allowed a scientific paradigm of experimentation and the quest for knowledge to obscure a more purely medical paradigm, which resulted in doctors treating sick people as objects or products rather than as human patients. While the circumstances of the moment (a war mentality) and the structure of the situation (a hierarchical military bureaucracy) shaped decisions and determined certain behaviors, this is not to deny the place of human agency. For example, it appears that Nolan and Hempelmann may have had different perspectives on the acceptability of the plutonium injections and may have, as a consequence, participated differently as a result.

Nolan seems to have had little, if any, involvement in the experiments, though he was certainly aware of them, and I have found no evidence that he publicly objected to them. In fact, the first specimens sent from Oak Ridge were addressed to Nolan—who was head of the hospital at the time—though with instructions that they be given to Wright Langham for analysis. Nolan is not mentioned once in the ACHRE report, nor is he implicated in Welsome’s study. In the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s description of the plutonium injections, he is not listed among the eight Manhattan Project doctors who participated in the experiments. He was not present at the 1944 and 1945 meetings that launched the program. Why was he not more deeply involved, as were Warren and Hempelmann, with whom he so often collaborated at this time? One explanation may be that, when the programs were first imagined and initiated, he was still the post surgeon and overwhelmed with running the hospital in Los Alamos. In other words, he was occupied with his work as a doctor and thus simply not available.

It’s possible, however, that his lack of participation was more than circumstantial. That is, unlike Hempelmann, he may have, on principle, preferred his role as a doctor and been uneasy with what could be viewed as a clear departure from the physician’s vocation. His daughter, Lynne, remembers that he actually saw himself as different from Hempelmann on this score. He would jokingly refer to himself as a “practitioner” and to Hempelmann, neologistically, as a “theoreticer.” That is, Hempelmann was more “the archetype of the crazy scientist … a pure scientist.” She also recalls her father saying of his good friend that he “never treated people.” Moreover, in reference to the plutonium experiments, Lynne understands that it was because of practices such as these that “Dad wanted out of that whole thing, of this whole business of the disposability of people.”⁹⁴

My father similarly recalled that his dad saw himself primarily as a doctor: “He was first and foremost a physician whose No. 1 concern was the welfare of his patients.” Lawry recollected a clear sense that, given some of the tensions and pressures Nolan faced at Los Alamos, his parents wanted to leave the place: “My parents were anxious for us to return to their home town, St Louis, where my father could resume his career as a physician and medical school professor. They could not wait to leave the Hill.”⁹⁵

The use and perceived disposability of people was an issue at the heart of the ACHRE’s moral critique of the experiments. As pointed out in the committee’s final report, “In the conduct of these experiments, two basic moral principles were violated—that one ought not to use people as a mere means to the ends of others and that one ought not to deceive others—in the absence of any morally acceptable justification for such conduct.”⁹⁶ A common image invoked for making sense of how humans were used in these experiments is that of a guinea pig. For example, this is how Joe Speed described what had happened to his friend Elmer Allen (or CAL-3), the eighteenth and final patient injected with plutonium and the third of the California patients involved in the tests. Allen was thought to have terminal bone cancer in his leg. Three days after the injection, his leg was amputated. Speed recalls Allen’s understanding of what had happened to him: “He told me they put a germ cancer in his leg. They guinea-pigged him. They didn’t care about him getting well. He told me he would never get well.”⁹⁷

Many Japanese have used similar imagery to describe their experience in postwar Japan. In coverage of the Joint Commission’s work in Hiroshima in early September 1945, for example, a Japanese newspaper article began, “At last, natural science entered the new century called the atomic era. Unfortunately, our country was cruelly made the guinea pig of a bomb that was used without consideration of whether it was reasonable to do so.”⁹⁸ Critics of the ABCC in Japan have likewise referred to hibakusha as guinea pigs, especially in light of its no-treatment policy. Recall also that Allan Kline used the same terminology in objecting to the treatment he was offered by Manhattan Project and AEC doctors following the May 21, 1946, accident at the Omega Site. Likewise, Tina Cordova has invoked this image to describe the plight of the Trinity downwinders.⁹⁹

As we turn to the next chapter of the dawn of the nuclear age, in which the Manhattan Project doctors again played a central role, we find that actual guinea pigs—sixty of them, to be precise, as well as two hundred mice—were used to study the biological effects of the fourth and fifth atomic bombs detonated in human history. At one point during their debate about total-body irradiation tests and animal experimentation, General Cooney noted that one of his generals, who was evidently worried about the potential effects of nuclear radiation on his troops, had asked him, “What are we—mice or men?” As we venture again to the Pacific, we will be given another opportunity to reflect on this prescient question, as both mice and men (and guinea pigs) would be exposed to high levels of nuclear radiation and doctors would once again be put in the difficult position of trying to understand and manage this exposure.

The ACHRE recognized the tensions that the Manhattan Project doctors faced in their conflicting roles “that linked the arts of healing and war in ways that had little precedent,” where doctors “at one and the same time … counseled the military about the radiation risk to troops … and debated the need for rules to govern atomic warfare-related experimentation.”¹⁰⁰ In such a context, with competing vocational interests and pressures, did the doctors still bear moral responsibility for their actions? At least with respect to the plutonium experiments, the ACHRE concluded without much qualification that “the medical professionals responsible for the injections are accountable for the moral wrongs that were done.”¹⁰¹

 

Notes: 

1. Nolan was awarded the citation for Legion of Merit in October 1945 for his work “from June 1943 to July 1945,” when he “devised and instituted plans for safeguarding the post against any possible disaster due to the handling of hazardous finished products. He organized and staffed the post medical facilities consisting of a seventy-five-bed hospital and a complete clinic serving five thousand persons. Through his inspiring devotion to duty, superior professional skill and executive ability he contributed in great measure to the elimination of health hazards for the personnel engaged in the vast research and production program necessary to the development of the Atomic Bomb. Captain Nolan’s achievements reflect great credit upon himself and the military service.” James F. Nolan papers, in the author’s possession (hereafter JFN papers). Then in November 1945 he was given a Bronze Service Star for his role as part of the 509th Composite Group and his participation in the Eastern Mandates Campaign—that is, his role in the delivery of the bomb and his service on Tinian Island. JFN papers.

2. Lynne Handy, interview by author, March 23, 2015.

3. Stafford Warren to Major General L. R. Groves, cover letter to “Preliminary Report—Atomic Bomb Investigation,” November 27, 1945, Stafford Leak Warren Papers, UCLA Library Special Collections (hereafter Stafford Warren Papers, UCLA).

4. Leslie Groves, testimony, in Hearings before the Special Committee on Atomic Energy, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress (Wednesday, November 28, 1945), 33.

5. Ibid., 31–37.

6. Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiment in the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1999), 113.

7. Stafford Warren to Leslie Groves, “Preliminary Report—Atomic Bomb Investigation,” memo, November 27, 1945, 8, Stafford Warren Papers, UCLA.

8. Ibid., 4.

9. David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 199.

10. Stafford Warren, interview by Barton C. Hacker, October 30, 1979, Department of Energy, Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas (hereafter NTA).

11. James F. Nolan, interview by Lansing Lamont, 1965, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO.

12. Groves, testimony, 34.

13. Warren to Groves, “Preliminary Report,” memo, 1.

14. Groves, testimony, 36.

15. Ibid.

16. Louis Hempelmann, Clarence C. Lushbaugh, and George L. Voelz, “What Has Happened to the Survivors of the Early Los Alamos Nuclear Accidents?” (October 2, 1979, presented at the Conference for Radiation Accident Preparedness, Oak Ridge, TN, October 19–20, 1979), 5, Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives (hereafter LANL).

17. Louis H. Hempelmann, Hermann Lisco, and Joseph G. Hoffman, “The Acute Radiation Syndrome: A Study of Nine Cases and a Review of the Problem,” Annals of Internal Medicine 36, no. 2 (February 1952): 284.

18. Hempelmann, Lushbaugh, and Voelz, “What Has Happened?” 16.

19. L. H. Hempelmann to files, “Accident Report at Omega,” July 6, 1945, LANL.

20. James F. Nolan to Stafford Warren, “Additional Medical Activities at Destination,” secret memo, August 7, 1945, JFN papers.

21. Hempelmann, “Accident Report at Omega.”

22. As Alex Wallerstein puts it, “The exigencies of the Second World War had privileged expediency over safety.… The Cold War, in spite of its many anxieties, could be taken at a more steady pace.” Alex Wallerstein, “The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin,” New Yorker, May 21, 2016.

23. J. F. Nolan, “History of Health Group during Interim Period, November 1945 to May 1946,” April 16, 1945, LANL.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Quoted in Jonathan Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 138.

27. Patrick Cleary, “Account of the Parajito Laboratory Accident of 21 May 1946,” May 29, 1946, Production Materials for Louis Slotin Sonata, 1946–2006, Collected by Paul Mullin, New York Public Library (hereafter Slotin materials, NYPL).

28. Ibid.

29. Norris Bradbury to Marshall and Roger, memo, May 22–26, 1945, Slotin materials, NYPL.

30. Memo about “Meeting—May 23, 1946 2:30 p.m.” to Louis Hempelmann, James F. Nolan, Paul Hageman, Harry O. Whipple, Darol Froman, Phil Morrison, Robinson, Newburger, C. W. Betts, Challis, Slotin materials, NYPL.

31. Norris Bradbury to Roger and Marshall, May 26, 1946, Slotin materials, NYPL.

32. A May 24, 1946, press release from Los Alamos stated, “In answer to inquiries, Dr. Bradbury stated the laboratory accident would not affect the projected Bikini tests.” Slotin materials, NYPL.

33. Hempelmann, Lisco, and Hoffman, “Acute Radiation Syndrome,” 284–285.

34. Nolan, interview by Lamont.

35. Hempelmann, Lushbaugh, and Voelz, “What Has Happened?,” 2. The authors also observe later in the same follow-up study that “one might suspect that the myxedema of Case 4 [Graves], presumably radiation induced, may have promoted his coronary disease by elevating the blood cholesterol. This could well have precipitated the first heart attack.” Ibid., 15.

36. C. W. Betts to Leslie Groves, “Radiation Accident at Site Y,” May 27, 1946, Slotin materials, NYPL. “Dr. Slotin received a dose of 700 R and Dr. Graves received a dose of about 200 R. Doses of 100 R were received by Kline and Young.”

37. N. E. Bradbury to Mrs. June Kline, May 25, 1946, Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, National Archives (hereafter ACHRE, National Archives), College Park, MD.

38. S. Allan Kline, “Estimated Damages to S. Allan Kline Resulting from Radiation Accident at Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1946,” ACHRE, National Archives, College Park, MD.

39. S. Allan Kline to Caroll L. Tyler, March 13, 1951, ACHRE, National Archives.

40. C. L. Tyler to S. Allan Kline, response to March 13, 1951, letter, n.d., ACHRE, National Archives.

41. Clifford T. Honicker, “America’s Radiation Victims: The Hidden Files,” New York Times Magazine, November 19, 1989.

42. Betts to Groves, “Radiation Accident at Site Y,” May 27, 1946, Slotin materials, NYPL.

43. “Relative Intensities,” compiled 1:00 p.m., May 22, 1946, Slotin materials, NYPL. In another document, Joseph Hoffman provided an estimated dosage for all eight men. According to these estimates, Kline received a minimum of forty-five roentgens, a maximum of one hundred roentgens, and a probable sixty roentgens. “Estimates of Dosage Range,” November 7, 1946, ACHRE, National Archives.

44. Louis H. Hempelmann to J. J. Nickson, December 10, 1946, ACHRE, National Archives.

45. Stafford Warren to Colonel K. D. Nichols, “Policy Matters,” memo, December 28, 1946, ACHRE, National Archives.

46. Ibid.

47. Louis Hempelmann to Robert Kimball, December 7, 1949, ACHRE, National Archives.

48. Louis Hempelmann, interview by Barton C. Hacker, June 3–4, 1980, NTA.

49. Hempelmann, Lushbaugh, and Voelz, “What Has Happened?” 16.

50. Stafford Warren, testimony, in Hearings before the Special Committee on Atomic Energy, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress (February 15, 1946), 510.

51. James B. Newman Jr. to Leslie Groves, October 5, 1945, Tinian Files, National Archives, College Park, MD.

52. John J. Flick, “Ocular Lesions following the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” American Journal of Ophthalmology 31, no. 2 (February 1948): 139.

53. US Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 30, 1946), 15.

54. Ashley W. Oughterson and Shields Warren, eds., Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 88–89. See also Harry M. Cullings, in reference to the same report: “From Table 4.4 of that reference, it may be calculated that -30,000 (42% of 72,000 injured survivors in Hiroshima and 13,000 (51%) of 25,000 injured survivors in Nagasaki were estimated to have sustained ‘radiation injury’ often in combination with other injuries.” Harry M. Cullings, “Impact on the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivors of Radiation Received from the Bombs,” Health Physics 106, no. 2 (February 2014): 284.

55. Shields Warren and Rupert Draeger, “The Pattern of Injuries Produced by the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” U.S. Naval Medical Bulletin 46, no. 9 (September 1946): 1350.

56. Ibid., 1352–1353.

57. Nello Pace and Robert Smith, “Measurement of the Residual Radiation Intensity at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Sites,” (April 16, 1946), Naval Medical Research Institute, 1–3, Stafford Warren Papers, UCLA. See also Averill A. Liebow, Shields Warren, and Elbert De Coursey, “Pathology of Atomic Bomb Casualties,” American Journal of Pathology 25, no. 5 (1949): 853–1927. Regarding the bombs dropped in Japan, the authors observe, “Potentially of greater significance may be the neutrons, for they can be projected for considerable distance through the atmosphere. Their effectiveness in damaging tissue is several times greater than that of gamma rays, measured in roentgens equivalent physical (rep).” Ibid., 861.

58. Pace and Smith, “Measurement,” 2.

59. Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, trans., Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 79, 151.

60. Greg Mitchell, Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Greatest Movie Never Made (New York: Sinclair Books, 2012), 30–35; Welsome, Plutonium Files, 119.

61. Entry for September 10, 1945, in Diary of Kiyoshi Tanimoto, 101–102, John Hersey Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

62. Welsome, Plutonium Files, 119.

63. Mitchell, Atomic Cover-Up, 30–31.

64. David C. Milam, The Last Bomb: A Marine’s Memoirs of Nagasaki (Austin: Eakin, 2001), 23.

65. See Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War (New York: Penguin, 2015), 223–224; Welsome, Plutonium Files, 119; Tetsuji Imanaka et al., “Gamma-Ray Exposure from Neutron-Induced Radionuclides in Soil in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Based on DS02 Calculations,” Radiation and Environmental Biophysics 47, no. 3 (2008): 331–336; and George D. Kerr et al., “Workshop Report on Atomic Bomb Dosimetry—Residual Radiation Exposure: Recent Research and Suggestions for Future Studies,” Health Physics 105, no. 2 (2013): 140–149.

66. Stafford Warren to Leslie Groves, “The Use of the Gadget as a Tactical Weapon Based on Observations Made during Test II,” July 25, 1945, Stafford Warren Papers, UCLA. Janet Farrell Brodie notes that Warren’s memo may have been intentionally ambiguous. She describes it as “a masterful blend of reassurance and of realistically honest assessment of radiological dangers.” Janet Farrell Brodie, “Radiation Secrecy and Censorship after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 4 (2015): 855. Thus, the memo supplied enough “reassurance” for Groves to focus on that which supported his preferred narrative about the effects of radiation.

67. Sean L. Malloy, “ ‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Radiation Effects and the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb against Japan,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (June 2012): 539; Leslie Groves to George C. Marshall, July 30, 1945, Top Secret, Manhattan Project File, Folder 4, Trinity Test, National Archives, Washington, DC, http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/correspondence/groves-leslie/corr_groves_1945-07-30.htm.

68. Malloy, “ ‘Pleasant Way to Die,’ ” 540.

69. Quoted in “No Two-Headed Baby Salmon,” New York Daily News, April 28, 1957.

70. Leslie Groves to Stafford Warren, May 8, 1958, Stafford Warren Papers, UCLA.

71. Brodie similarly observes that after Trinity, Warren wrote memos to Groves that were intentionally ambiguous and that minimized “the radiation dangers” in order to “placate Groves.” Brodie, “Radiation Secrecy,” 855.

72. Southard, Nagasaki, 224; Brodie, “Radiation Secrecy,” 851. Lindee identifies 1962 as the year when the Japanese government began to include “early entrants” as deserving of assistance for medical treatment. Lindee, Suffering Made Real, 9.

73. Southard, Nagasaki, 177.

74. Radiation Effects Radiation Foundation, A Brief Description (Hiroshima: Radiation Effects Radiation Foundation, April 2016), 26–30.

75. Information from permanent exhibit at the Atomic Bomb Medical Museum, Atomic Bomb Disease Institute, Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Science.

76. Radiation Effects Radiation Foundation, Brief Description, 30.

77. Ibid., 31; information from permanent exhibit at the Atomic Bomb Medical Museum, Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Science.

78. Southard, Nagasaki. See also Cullings, “Impact on the Japanese,” 281. Cullings writes, “Survivors experienced psychosocial effects such as uncertainty, social stigma, or rejection, and other social pressures.” Hiroshima survivor Tomiko Morimoto West had a cousin who had been so injured by the bomb that he “had a hard time finding a wife because of his disfigurement.” West also told me of a “very good friend” whose mother had been “a very good-looking lady” but had also been disfigured by the bombing. When her husband returned from overseas after the war, “he divorced her because she was so disfigured.” Tomiko Morimoto West, interview by author, July 10, 2019.

79. Deposition of Louis H. Hempelmann, MD, December 20, 1979, 31, Bernice Lasovick v. United States of America, LANL.

80. Welsome, Plutonium Files, 15–19.

81. Louis Hempelmann to Robert Oppenheimer, “Health Hazards related to Plutonium,” August 16, 1944, NTA. Hempelmann wrote, “A great deal of concern has been expressed during the past two weeks by members of the Chemistry Division about the inability of the Medical Group to detect dangerous amounts of plutonium in the body. This concern was occasioned by the accidental explosion of 10 milligrams of Plutonium in Don Mastick’s face.”

82. Robert Oppenheimer to Louis Hempelmann, August 16, 1944, NTA.

83. Louis Hempelmann to Robert Oppenheimer, “Medical Research Program,” August 29, 1944, NTA.

84. Louis Hempelmann to Robert Oppenheimer, “Meeting of Chemistry Division and Medical Group,” March 26, 1945, NTA. It appears that Hempelmann, Warren, Friedell, Joseph W. Kennedy, Arthur Wahl, and Wright Langham attended this meeting.

85. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, October 1995), 241.

86. Hymer L. Friedell to Commanding Officer, Santa Fe Area, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Attention: Capt. James Nolan, “Shipping of Specimens,” April 16, 1945, NTA.

87. Welsome, Plutonium Files, 121.

88. Advisory Committee, 244.

89. Quoted in Welsome, Plutonium Files, 321.

90. Quoted in ibid., 324.

91. Advisory Committee, 267.

92. Remarks by President William J. Clinton in acceptance of human radiation final report, October 3, 1995, Old Executive Office Building, Washington, DC.

93. Welsome, Plutonium Files, 470.

94. Lynne Handy, interview by author, March 23, 2015.

95. James L. Nolan, “Los Alamos and the Atom Bomb through the Eyes of a Young Boy” (lecture at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, January 24, 2006).

96. Advisory Committee, 267.

97. Quoted in Welsome, Plutonium Files, 5.

98. “Osaka University Probe the Atomic Bomb in Depth,” Mainichi Shimbun, September 14, 1945.

99. Quoted in Samuel Gilbert, “Inside America’s Atomic State,” Al Jazeera, February 16, 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/01/america-atomic-state-160107102647937.html

100. Advisory Committee, 37.

101. Ibid., 269.