Behind the Fog

How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans

Lisa Martino-Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138239678
• eBook ISBN: 9781315295190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Behind the Fog is the first in-depth, comprehensive examination of the United States' Cold War radiological weapons program. The book examines controversial military-sponsored studies and field trials using radioactive "simulants" that exposed American civilians to radiation and other hazardous substances without their knowledge or consent during the Cold War. Although Western biological and chemical weapons programs have been analyzed by a number of scholars, Behind the Fog is a strong departure from the rest in that the United States radiological weapons program has been generally unknown to the public. Martino-Taylor documents the coordinated efforts of a small group of military scientists who advanced a four-pronged secret program of human-subject radiation studies that targeted unsuspecting Americans for Cold War military purposes. Officials enabled such projects to advance through the layering of secrecy, by embedding classified studies in other studies, and through outright deception. Agency and academic partnerships advanced, supported, and concealed the studies from the public at large who ultimately served as unwitting test subjects.

Martino-Taylor's comprehensive research illuminates a dark chapter of government secrecy, the military-industrial-academic complex, and large-scale organizational deviance in American history. In its critical approach, Behind the Fog effectively examines the mechanisms that allow large-scale elite deviance to take place in modern society.

1

Atomic World

A low, non-descript building at the University of Rochester sheltered a deeply buried war secret. It was 1945 and a group of young male scientists affiliated with elite universities across the United States greeted colleagues in the secure location. The plan proposed by Dr Louis Hempelmann, M.D. at the urging of his superiors was well conceived, but Los Alamos Medical Director Hempelmann wanted assurance that his superiors at the Manhattan Engineer District, which would produce the only atomic bombs to be used in war, were on board. A secret project to test and develop a new form of weapon had unfolded alongside the classified atomic bomb effort, unbeknownst to thousands of military personnel and virtually every other American. Indeed it was dangerous to know “too much” about what was happening in what came to be known informally as “the Manhattan Project.” In a series of memoranda Louis Hempelmann conferred with colleagues and his supervisor Manhattan Project Director J. Robert Oppenheimer, regarding a proposed “biological” research program that would capture and sustain the creativity and loyalty of a group of scientists referred to here as the Radiological Weapons Experimentation Group (RWEG).

Stafford Leak Warren, a University of California graduate and chair of the University of Rochester Radiation Department, was Medical Director of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) that developed the atomic bomb, and Army Colonel at the project’s Oak Ridge Operations Office which coordinated “broad programs of research that cut across nearly every field of science and engineering” (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission 1957: 52).¹ Warren was the link that General Leslie Groves, the brusque Army officer who headed the bomb project, needed to establish a partnership between Rochester and Los Alamos, New Mexico where the bomb was being assembled. Under Warren’s watch the University of Rochester established a formal Manhattan District annex. “The Rochester Project was carried on in a special building erected in Elmwood Avenue in 1943. Special personnel for the research totaled 350, headed by Dr Andrew H. Dowdy, associate professor of radiology at the Medical School” (The Rochester Alumni-Alumnae Review, 1946: 7).

Rochester and Los Alamos, both under the auspices of the New York Operations Office (NYOO) of the Manhattan Engineer District (and later the Atomic Energy Commission), worked in close alignment with the University of California–Berkeley on a separate but highly classified project that was linked to the atomic bomb project. Persuaded by military officials to take on a project that others had wisely refused, beginning in 1943 RWEG members worked in secret collaboration on the development and testing of radiological weapons, which would comprise an important component of the military’s arsenal of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) weapons. Radiological weapons strongly paralleled but comprised a distinct program from the atomic bomb project in that radioactive materials themselves were being tested and developed as offensive weapons of war.

The United States General Accounting Office (GAO) defines radiation warfare as, “the use of non-bomb radioactive agents for offensive military purposes” (USGAO 1993: 2). Generally radiological weapons do not involve detonations or the visually profound mushroom clouds that most associate with atomic bombs. Rather, radiological weapons can involve the placement of radioactive materials into water, food, or dispersed via airborne particles to kill or incapacitate its targeted victims. Indeed, radiological weapons expanded the Army’s arsenal of incapacitators, in that rather than killing one’s target outright, some radiological weapons would deplete the enemy’s resources by rendering lingering victims. Radiological weapons (RW) as discussed in this book involve the use of radioactive materials as weapons administered via (1) injection; (2) ingestion (e.g. water, drinks or foodstuffs that are made to be radioactive); (3) inhalation (e.g. radioactive smokes, dusts, or airborne particulates intended to contaminate place or environment where people congregate and to prompt inhalation or absorption of radioactive particles); or (4) external beam/whole body radiation via high-dose x-rays. Radiological weapons were developed for offensive use in warfare to cause harm, trauma, death, depletion of resources, and to restrict use of physical spaces. The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) defines radiation warfare as, “the use of radioactive substances to produce personnel casualties or to deny the enemy full use of terrain or installations due to the physiological damage which will result from continued occupation of the area,” further noting that the “dispersal of radiological agents does not involve an atomic bomb … but [can include use of] conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material over a given area” (USDOD 1997: 59). Key in the distinction between radiological weapons and atomic bombs is that the outcome focuses not on annihilation via explosion, but on often unobservable, although direct effects to populations through exposure to radioactive agents and contamination of space. According to the DOD:

There were those who argued that radiological warfare could be a more humane form of warfare. It could effectively contaminate an area without necessarily causing immediate death. The radioactivity level of the weapon and the amount of time spent in the contaminated area would determine the possibility of injury or death … The interest in radiological warfare became a starting point for the establishment of programs and panels.

(U.S. Department of Defense 1997: 60)

An ambiguous and tense political relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War would come to affect the lives of private citizens not as victims of a foreign enemy, but of military leaders on their own soil. While developing the first atomic bomb to be used in an act of war, the U.S. military secretly established a formal program to develop and test radiological weapons through the impressive and surprisingly enduring efforts of a small cadre of RWEG scientists coordinated by the Army Chemical Corps. The U.S. military branches of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps had been established in 1789 and all military branches were subsumed under the “Department of War.” It was not until 1949, or after World War II that the Department of War’s name was changed to the Department of Defense (DOD). Thus, early radiological weapons research was conducted under the U.S. Department of War.

A Culture of Secrecy

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in the lap of luxury. His childhood was spent in a large New York apartment overlooking the Hudson River alongside his father Julius, Sr., a successful textile merchant who was born in Germany, mother Ella, and younger brother Frank. “Robert” was a precocious but isolated child in a family that valued above all else success and achievement, and in perfect alignment with those expectations he earned a scholarship to study chemistry at Harvard University where he graduated summa cum laude in just three years. Robert left Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts and headed to Cambridge University in England to study physics under professor Patrick Blackett, a future Nobel Prize winner and by all accounts a dashing and celebrated faculty member who years later would criticize the U.S. “for engaging in dangerous brinksmanship with the Soviet Union” by targeting Cold War operations research “with its scenarios of winnable nuclear war” (Wang 2006). Although Cambridge University should have been an exhilarating time for the budding young physicist, Oppenheimer revealed disturbing emotional issues during his stay in England. His Cambridge experiences can offer insight into later actions when he oversaw the atomic bomb project.

Shortly after Oppenheimer’s arrival at Cambridge University in 1925, Ella and Julius traveled to England to check on Robert, as he had alienated his peers by strange and dangerous behavior. Using cyanide that he obtained from the university laboratory, Oppenheimer reportedly laced an apple with the poison and placed it on Blackett’s desk for his consumption (Bird and Sherwin 2006: 46). Fortunately the professor discovered the ploy and alerted university administrators, who met with Oppenheimer’s parents. Julius Oppenheimer frantically and successfully lobbied the university to drop criminal charges, although school officials stipulated that the young Oppenheimer receive a psychological assessment before returning to the university, where he would be placed on probation status (Bird and Sherwin 2006: 46). After several evaluations Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a profound schizophrenia that psychoanalysis would not benefit, according to his third European psychiatrist. Soon thereafter Oppenheimer’s Harvard friend Francis Fergusson visited the troubled young man to share news of his engagement:

Robert was stunned at this news, and he snapped. I leaned over to pick up a book … and he jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap and wound it around my neck. I was quite scared for a little while. We must have made some noise. And then I managed to pull aside and he fell to the ground weeping.

(Bird and Sherwin 2006: 47; Monk 2012: 102)

Even after two incidents involving battery, assault, and possibly attempted murder, Oppenheimer continued on at Cambridge through Julius’s desperate negotiations. Approximately two years later Oppenheimer was vacationing with friends in Corsica when he told them, “I’ve done a terrible thing. I’ve put a poisoned apple on Blackett’s desk and I’ve got to go back and see what happened” (Bird and Sherwin 2006: 50). The young men had no knowledge of the incident and believed their friend was hallucinating (Bird and Sherwin 2006: 46).

Oppenheimer left England for Göttingen, Germany, to pursue theoretical physics before landing a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that brought him to the California Institute of Technology and ultimately the University of California–Berkeley, where he was reportedly an enthusiastic albeit cruel instructor and colleague. UC–Berkeley had become involved in the war effort by the early 1940s and although throughout much of his young life he was strikingly detached from political and social issues, Oppenheimer openly expressed to Berkeley colleagues a strong desire to secure a position on the Manhattan bomb project. The ambitious young physicist, who was drawn to power and privilege like a moth to light, positioned himself to gain the attention of the Manhattan Project organizing officer (Monk 2012). One Berkeley colleague later commented that the Army felt it easier to monitor Oppenheimer if he was a project insider (Monk 2012: 313).

On October 8, 1942, Army Corps of Engineers General Leslie R. Groves selected Oppenheimer to be Project Director of the Manhattan bomb project (Steeper 2003: 63). According to Groves, “Oppenheimer was my first selection for Los Alamos. All of the people he brought were brought in under my direction. This decentralized Oppenheimer” (Ermenc 1989: 247). There is some debate as to why General Groves selected Oppenheimer, who was less acclaimed than many of the scientists he would come to supervise. Indeed some of his colleagues did not believe Oppenheimer to be capable of managing any projects let alone one of vital national significance. Oppenheimer had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had known communist sympathies; both his former girlfriend and future wife were card-carrying communists. Nevertheless, the gruff general stuck to the unlikely selection and he also sought to bring the UC–Berkeley physics and chemistry departments on board.

General Leslie Groves was a “West Point graduate and a career officer who had studied engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” designed the Pentagon, and as a reward for overseeing the Manhattan Project was later promoted to Brigadier General (Steeper 2003: 63). “Groves didn’t want the job. But his foot hit the accelerator and he didn’t let up for 1,000 days” (Broad 2007). One colleague recalled:

At 250 pounds, with a truck-tire stomach, a wave of greasy hair, and a dead-fish handshake, Groves was a West Point man with a bookkeeper’s thirst for minutiae and a mind that could graph a colossus from a few lines of statistics. He also had a total disregard for what people thought of him. His alkaline personality won him few friends (he was notorious for ordering colonels to pick up his dry cleaning), but it mattered little to him. He always favored prompt action over staff morale. Groves’ chief deputy, Kenneth D. Nichols, perhaps the closest thing he had to a friend, called him ‘the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none, he had tireless energy; he was a big man, a heavy man, but he never seemed to tire … I hated his guts and so did everyone else, but we had our form of understanding.’

(Zoellner 2009: 40)

Groves was placed in charge of the New York-based Manhattan Project, which had at least ten locations “including warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters—a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall” (Broad 2007). The Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway in Manhattan employed 3,700 bomb project employees, and the central Manhattan Engineer District office was on the 18th floor of an unremarkable 28-story office building mere blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge (Broad 2007). Groves later moved the Manhattan Engineer District headquarters from New York to Washington.

Project and political officials were convinced that the United States was locked in an arms race with Germany to determine who would be the first to develop an atomic bomb, as Adolf Hitler’s troops pushed across Europe instilling a gripping fear in their wake. Most Americans who had the ability to contribute to national defense did so willingly during World War II as a wave of nationalism swept the United States, and lent just cause to leaving one’s job or family behind for the war effort. Under the harsh General Groves, many scientists came to work alongside military personnel, eventually accepting a newly regimented lifestyle, “with Army representatives becoming a constant presence in their lives, laboratories, and meetings” (Conant 2005: 34). Even those “in the know” were not aware of the many layers of secrecy in the Manhattan Project. Groves “had a mania for secrecy, and one of his first acts was ordering an information blackout, which extended to the popular media” (Zoellner 2009: 40). Groves insisted upon complete compartmentalization of tasks and basic information, and maintained rigid control of all project talk—even between spouses. Those scientists who relocated to Los Alamos could not tell family, friends, or employers about where or even that they were moving (Jette 1977: 20). As director of the atomic bomb project, Oppenheimer had an exceedingly difficult challenge on which to focus his brilliant yet troubled mind, and although his security clearance was delayed due to his communist affiliations, project work did not pause.

University of California–Berkeley’s Nobel-prize winner Glenn Seaborg, co-discoverer of plutonium, was helping to assemble the Manhattan Project team. Seaborg recruited a group of promising scientists from the stable of young break-through scholars that surrounded him; the average age of Manhattan Project chemists was 25 (Jette 1977: 20). University of California’s Joseph Kennedy, a tall 27-year-old chemist from Texas, would play an important role in the bomb effort when he arrived in Los Alamos in March 1943. Kennedy’s bespectacled colleague Arthur Wahl, a radio-chemist and plutonium expert, followed his friends to Los Alamos on April 1, 1943.

Secrecy defined life in Los Alamos. Names and words were forbidden, including “plutonium,” and even its atomic number, “element 94,” was referred to as “49”—its atomic number backwards. The words “uranium,” and “atomic bomb” were also banned; the bomb was the “gadget,” and uranium was “tuballoy” (Sparks 2000: 20). Even the town’s name was forbidden to be used, and residents were instructed to use “the Hill” to signify Los Alamos. “Laboratory members were not allowed personal contact with relatives or friends … even when off the mesa, there could be no conversations with friends or strangers,” according to a former Hill resident (Steeper 2003: 91). This group was closed and rigorously insular, maintaining a lock-tight culture of secrecy and forced isolation. Sociologist Fred Emil Katz would describe Los Alamos as a Closed Moral Universe, a closed reference group that filled the vision of its “rank-and-file” members who each actively and willingly contributed to the cause and converted the vision into reality (Katz 2004: 8, 73).

Situated on a massive plateau 7,355 feet above sea level just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico the atomic bomb project site was located at the former Los Alamos Boys Ranch School. The project quickly grew beyond the capacity of the Army barrack-builders trying to furiously keep pace. “By early spring of 1943, most of the Project buildings had been thrown together to produce a ramshackle community that officially did not ‘exist’” (Steeper 2003: 70). The children attending Los Alamos schools were taught by teachers who lived on the Hill, and wives took jobs in the project to contribute to the war effort or to simply escape boredom. Families shopped at the Army commissary on site using ration coupons. Armed Military Police were stationed at two entry points where all were required to check in, and at the top of the mesa the “Tech Area” building was surrounded by a 10-foot fence “topped with barbed wire and patrolled by armed MPs” (Sparks 2000: 15). All Hill personnel had to undergo FBI clearances, and security meetings were held every Wednesday night whereby residents were silenced by ominous threats that included court-martials and potential firing squads (Sparks 2000: 19, 25):

Our letters were censored coming to the project, and letters we wrote were sent to the censors unsealed. They were read, and if no breach of security was evident, the letters were sealed and mailed. In the early days of the project at Site Y, the letters were flown to Chicago and mailed from there. Everyone thought we were working in Chicago. We were finally given orders to use the return address of Box 1663, Santa Fe, NM. We were told to write that we were working in a warehouse in Santa Fe, nothing more. The name Los Alamos was never to be used.

(Sparks 2000: 25)

Secrecy became a strong norm for project workers and “made it possible to make decisions with little regard for normal peacetime political considerations” (Gosling 1999: 19). “Secrecy in the Manhattan Project was so complete that many people working for the organization did not know what they were working on until they heard about the bombing of Hiroshima on the radio” (Gosling 1999: 19). All who worked on the project entered through the rusted iron gates of 109 East Palace i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Atomic World
• 2. The Radium Legacy
• 3. Blinded by Science
• 4. The Militarized Academy
• 5. Structure of Deceit
• 6. Military Analogs
• 7. The Army Chemical Corps and Open-Air Field Studies
• 8. In This House: Embeddedness and the Military Radiation Studies
• 9. Fallout “Simulant” Testing
• 10. Deviance, Secrecy, and Closed Worlds
• Conclusion
• Methodology and Afterword
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index