The Plutonium Files (68 page)

A strong grassroots movement was triggered by the 1978 congressional hearing. Thousands of atomic veterans, or their widows and-children, began demanding more information on the testing program. Nuclear workers and people who lived near weapons sites also became concerned about radioactive contaminants. The following year an accident occurred that dealt a severe blow to the civilian nuclear power industry and further encouraged antinuclear activists.

On March 28, 1979, the cooling system of one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, malfunctioned. As radioactive gases spewed into the atmosphere, the governor ordered pregnant women and children living near the plant to leave. Utility officials worked frantically to dissipate a huge hydrogen bubble which had formed inside the reactor and threatened to explode. Although utility officials managed to bring the situation under control, the Three Mile Island incident provoked worldwide demonstrations against nuclear power. Coincidentally, just two weeks before the crisis developed, the movie
China Syndrome
had been released. The film, which starred Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, revolved around efforts by utility executives to suppress news of an accident that almost resulted in a core meltdown at a fictional nuclear power plant near Los Angeles.

Not long after the Three Mile Island accident, Howard Rosenberg, a reporter working for muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, began digging into the total body irradiation studies at Oak Ridge. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he gathered hundreds of documents and wrote an investigative article about the experiment that was published in 1981 in
Mother Jones
magazine.
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“It took eighteen months before I wrote a word,” he told a journalist.
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Rosenberg’s piece centered around a little boy named Dwayne Sexton who had leukemia and died in 1968. The child actually underwent two experimental treatments. The first was an unproven therapy in which
bone marrow from the child was removed, irradiated to kill leukemia cells, and then reinjected in the mother. Two weeks later, serum from the mother was reinjected back into the child with the hope that antibodies built up in the mother’s blood might kill the child’s leukemia cells. The experiment failed and the child was soon given traditional chemotherapy drugs. He lived for another three years before he had a severe relapse. At a loss over what to do, Oak Ridge doctors irradiated him in METBI, the Medium Exposure Total Body Irradiator. He died less than a month later.

The
Mother Jones
article triggered a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Vice President Al Gore, then a young congressman from Tennessee, chaired the hearing and soon zeroed in on the key issue: “Now the critical question, again, around which this entire investigation revolves is were the treatments for the patients altered in order to satisfy or facilitate the acquisition of the data?”

Gore had pinpointed the conflict inherent in all the dual-purpose radiation experiments carried out during the Cold War.
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In other words, did the experiment benefit the patient or the agency that funded it? The ACE’s Carroll Wilson had tried to address the conflict in 1947 when he instructed scientists that no radiation experiment should be carried out unless it held therapeutic promise for the patient. But Wilson’s directive, as well as other established rules and ethical guidelines, had taken a backseat during the Cold War.

Gore questioned Clarence Lushbaugh about a statement in which he disclosed that the doses being given to cancer patients in the low-exposure chamber had no therapeutic value but were “radiobiologically of great interest.” “It is a provocative quotation,” Gore continued, “because at a time when NASA was becoming more interested in the smaller and smaller doses, a couple of patients were given smaller and smaller doses.”
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Lushbaugh could not explain his remarks, but in a follow-up letter, he said the low doses were given to two patients to accommodate their schedules.

Although Gore’s committee eventually issued an equivocal statement noting that the experiments were “satisfactory, but not perfect,” the information that came out during the hearing was extremely damaging.
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The highly embarrassing internal reviews about the Oak Ridge hospital were put into the record, and NASA’s involvement was fully documented.

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In subsequent years various people around the country began delving into the human radiation experiments. In Cincinnati David Egilman, a medical doctor, and Geoffrey Sea, an activist, started looking into Saenger’s project and other experiments on employees at a uranium production facility near Fernald, Ohio, that was given the misleading name of the Feed Materials Production Center during the Cold War. In Tennessee, Cliff Honicker, a young student working on his master’s thesis, discovered a cache of extraordinary documents written by Stafford Warren. The file contained records on more than two dozen people, including Allan Kline, one of the victims of the 1946 Los Alamos criticality accident.
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The Atomic Energy Commission apparently had asked Warren, whose fear of lawsuits bordered on an obsession, how to proceed with the claims.

Honicker, Sea, and several other activists and union representatives then met with staff members of Richard Ottinger, a New York Democrat who in the spring of 1984 chaired the House Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power.
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Ottinger, a member of the subcommittee that had grilled the military representatives on the atomic maneuvers six years earlier, initiated an investigation into the human radiation experiments.

More than two years passed while subcommittee staffers collected information. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, became chairman of the subcommittee in January of 1985 and continued to press the DOE for documents. Finally, in November of 1986, the subcommittee released a report on thirty-one human radiation experiments involving nearly 700 people.

The plutonium injections were the first experiment described in the report. Also included was a brief description of the testicular irradiation studies, the cloud fly-through experiments, and numerous fallout studies. Although the experiments described in the Markey report represented only the tip of the iceberg, the report nevertheless represented the first time any comprehensive effort was made to examine the experiments. The study correctly noted that the government covered up the evidence of many of the studies from the victims or surviving kin and that informed consent often was not obtained. “Although these experiments did provide information on the retention and absorption of radioactive material by the human body, the experiments are nonetheless repugnant because human subjects were essentially used as guinea pigs and calibration devices.”
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Although Markey’s report was explosive, it received only cursory media coverage. The wire services reduced it to a several-hundred-word
report.
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Many of the major papers ran the story on their inside pages or not at all. The report had not identified any of the subjects, and without the ability to convert statistics into names and faces, the story seemed little more than a bizarre collection of events that had occurred in the distant past.

Markey urged the DOE to make every effort to find the experimental subjects and compensate them for damages. But his instructions were blatantly ignored by DOE officials who were confident that if they stonewalled long enough the controversy would blow over. Department of Energy officials not only knew who had conducted the experiments, but the names of some of the subjects. As of November 1986, they knew, for example, that Elmer Allen was still alive in Italy, Texas.
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The other three long-term survivors had passed away the previous decade. Janet Stadt, who had not participated in the follow-up studies, died in a nursing home on November 22, 1975. She had metastatic cancer of the larynx as well as far-advanced scleroderma and had lived for nearly thirty years after she had been injected with plutonium.
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Eda Schultz Charlton, the lonely housewife who had been misdiag-nosed and injected with plutonium on a wintry day in 1945, lived for thirty-seven years with the radioactive material circulating in her body. She died on January 24, 1983, but the government’s interest in her case continued. Two years after her death, Argonne officials were still trying to obtain X rays from her physician. “I explained how important these X-rays are to the study and he promised to see if he could have them sent to us on loan,” wrote an Argonne official in an April 18, 1985 memo.
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John Mousso died at home on April 6, 1984. Given a “terminal” prognosis by the Manhattan Project doctors, Mousso carried plutonium in his body for thirty-eight years and outlived his beloved wife, Rose. According to his death certificate, he died after suffering from a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

As for Elmer Allen, there was no pot of gold waiting for him, no government men who came to Italy in his waning years to try to make good. He lived almost another five years after the Markey committee published its findings. He spent some of his last days at Italy’s nursing home, a quiet place shaded by a large cottonwood tree. There among the other aged residents, the cheerful nature of the amputee described by surgeons so many years earlier was still evident. “I knew he didn’t want to be here, but he wasn’t mean to us because he didn’t want to be here.
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He tried to do quite a bit of stuff for himself,” said Alithea Brown, a licensed vocational nurse at Italy’s Convalescent Center. She added, “He wasn’t a
conversation starter. He would talk to you if you talked to him. I just never asked him how he lost his leg.”

Elmer died on June 30, 1991, of respiratory failure caused by pneumonia. He was eighty years old. On his death certificate, his occupation was listed as Pullman porter.

Elmer Allen, John Mousso, and Eda Schultz Charlton had managed to outlive many of the experimenters. Stafford Warren, the architect of the injection study, was quieter than usual when a small group of friends gathered in his southern California home in the summer of 1981 to help him celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday.
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Five weeks later, after spending a few relaxing days at his mountain retreat, he told his second wife that he felt a little weary and wanted to take a nap instead of eating lunch. On the afternoon of July 26, he died in his sleep.

Shields Warren, who had replaced him when the AEC came into being, tended an oyster farm on his beloved Cape Cod after he retired.
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He, too, had died in his sleep, one year earlier, on July 1, 1980.

Hazel O’Leary looked every inch the establishment lawyer when she appeared for her confirmation hearing before a Senate committee in January of 1993. President Clinton had nominated her as his new energy secretary, but no one knew much about her except that she had been a utility executive at Northern States Power Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and had worked decades ago in the administrations of Presidents Ford and Carter. She was an African American, fifty-six years old, married three times, with a bachelor’s degree from Fisk University and a law degree from Rutgers.

Sounding like a Republican, O’Leary emphasized her experience in both the private and public sector, pointing out how poorly crafted regulations could negatively impact jobs and the economy. In soothing corporate tones, she told the senators of her plans to integrate and balance the “Three Es”—energy, the environment, and the economy. “We’ve got to do it all,” she said.
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“Female and black, she was a walking advertisement for diversity, which Clinton made a very public priority,”
Rolling Stone
magazine later wrote.
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“That, combined with the apparently last-minute, second-string quality of her selection, all but howled of tokenism.”

As O’Leary spoke to the committee members, her long hands moved in graceful circles. She had light skin, and her face and neck were smooth and nearly free of wrinkles. Her language often slipped into corporatese but that habit was barely noticeable because of her ability to connect with audiences. Although she had no experience in the nuclear weapons field, which gobbled up 70 percent of the Department of Energy’s
budget, the committee was impressed by her presentation, and two days later she was confirmed by the full Senate. With her silvery wedge cut and silky designer suits, O’Leary didn’t look like a revolutionary who would send shock waves through the Department of Energy’s fossilized nuclear weapons establishment. But that’s exactly what she did.

Born in 1937, a year when many of the great physicist-refugees from Europe were already at work in the American laboratories that would become part of the Manhattan Project, O’Leary was a member of the first generation of Americans who grew up with the knowledge that annihilation of the human race was possible. She was a child when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a teenager when the first atmospheric detonation took place in Nevada, a young housewife entering Rutgers when atmospheric testing finally stopped.

But it wasn’t the Cold War that shaped her political views. She was a black child raised in the South, and the most powerful influences on her life were segregation and the civil rights movement.
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Newport News, Virginia, the mosquito-infested city where she grew up, was a “thoroughly and severely segregated society” until the 1960s, novelist William Styron once said.
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“It was a world apart.” There were separate birth announcements for whites and “Negroes” in the local newspapers, separate schools, churches, restaurants, and shops.

O’Leary was buffered from the harsh realities of segregation by her family’s affluence and the vigilance of both her parents. Her father, a surgeon, chauffeured her and her sister to their after-school activities. Her stepmother, a schoolteacher, carefully planned shopping trips for them to “Overtown,” the white business center in Newport News early in the day. “It was because in those days black women couldn’t try clothes on.
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But we had this privilege as doctors’ daughters. We could try them on during off hours—if nobody saw us,” she told a journalist.