In my last blog post on Memorial Day, I talked about how U.S. troops had been deliberately and repeatedly exposed to radiation in bomb tests and clean up in Japan after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many times they have become ill and been denied swift and adequate medical aid. Today, I am going to widen the focus beyond people serving in the U.S. military to civilians who have been deliberately exposed to radiation, often without their knowledge.
Millions of people were exposed to radioactive fallout from more than two hundred atmospheric and underground tests that spread radioactive particles around the northern hemisphere. Thousands of people living in small towns downwind from nuclear tests in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico experienced some of the worst exposure along with their animals, food and other farm products. One document of the Atomic Energy Commission callously referred to some of the people downwind of the Nevada Test Site as "a low use segment of the population."
Some "downwinders" told by the Public Health Service that hair loss and burned skin with occured because they were "neurotic." Some women were told that they had "housewife syndrome," whatever that is. It was the practice at the Nevada Test Site to wait for the wind to blow towards Utah before conducting atomic tests. They wanted to avoid having fallout blow towards Los Vegas or Los Angles.
During the Cold War, doctors and scientists connected to the U.S. government spread the propaganda that a little radiation was not dangerous to health. Actually, it was already known that radioactive fallout could increase risk of cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, immune system disease, reproductive abnormalities, sterility, birth defects, and genetic mutations which could be passed on from generation to generation. Because it can take many years for cancers and other health problems to appear, it is not possible to accurately count the number of U.S. citizens who have been harmed by radiation from fallout.
Because of fear of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, thousands of people in the United States were the unknowing victims of more than four thousand secret and classified radiation experiments. These experiments were carried out by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Public Health Service, the National Institute of Health, the Veterans Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Between 1944 and 1974 a number of secret experiments were conducted. Eighteen Americans were injected with plutonium, most of whom were terminally ill. In the 1940s, eight hundred women were given radioactive iron to see how it affected their fetuses. Forty nine retarded and institutionalized teenagers were fed radioactive iron and calcium in their cereal between 1946 and 1954. One hundred Alaskan villagers were given radioactive iodine during the 1960s. Six newborn Black babies were injected with radioactive iodine. The testicles of over a hundred prisoners were exposed to levels of radiation high enough to cause cancer up to the 1970s. Two hundred cancer patients were exposed to high levels of radiation from cesium and cobalt up until 1974. Psychiatric patients in San Francisco were given radioactive materials. In 1995, the Department of Energy admitted that four hundred and thirty radiation experiments had been conducted on over sixteen thousand people, many of whom were not informed as to the danger.
In Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, it says that that the government shall provide for the "general welfare." It is obvious that those who carried out the experiments above were not concerned with the welfare of those they experimented upon. Although the radiation experiments were supposedly stopped decades ago, I can't help but wonder what sort of secret unethical experiments are being carried out today in United States in the name of national security.
