The Plutonium Files

The Plutonium Files

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is a 1999 book by Eileen Welsome. It is a history of U.S. government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning series Welsome wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune.

The experiments began in 1945, when Manhattan Project scientists were preparing to detonate the first atomic bomb. Many of these experiments resulted in strong mutation. Radiation was known to be dangerous and the experiments were designed to ascertain the detailed effect of radiation on human health. Most of the subjects, Welsome says, were poor, powerless, and sick.

From 1945 to 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium by Manhattan project doctors. Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project continued into the 1970s. In Nashville, pregnant women were given radioactive mixtures. In Cincinnati, some 200 patients were irradiated over a period of 15 years. In Chicago, 102 people received injections of strontium and cesium solutions. In Massachusetts, 57 developmentally disabled children were fed radioactive oatmeal in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company. In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent.

In the book, these stories are interwoven with details of more well-known radiation experiments and accidents. These include: U.S. soldiers deliberately exposed to nuclear bomb blasts; families who lived downwind from atomic tests; radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands; and the Japanese Lucky Dragon trawler caught in the fallout from a massive hydrogen bomb blast in 1954.

The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpertrated them.

Jonathan D. Moreno was a senior staff member of the committee. He wrote the 1999 book Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, which covers some of the same ground as The Plutonium Files.