From Espionage, torture techniques, and the space race, to the nuclear missile measuring contest,
the Cold War era was a tumultuous time in human history. But it also played a major part in
shaping up the world we live in today. However, not everyone knows the lengths of all the good,
bad, and downright ugly practices that were not only permitted
but were considered standard during the age of the Cold War. And that is why today on Nutty History,
we bring you all the creepy things that were normal during the Cold War.
In the middle of August 1945, the USA dropped two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities Nagasaki
and Hiroshima. These bombs eliminated millions of civilians and turned these cities into
radiation-laced graveyards for centuries. There is much debate about the necessity of a nuclear
attack to bring the war to an end but let’s think about the possibility of Japan not surrendering
even after the Fat Man desolated Nagasaki. What was the contingency that had been planned
in such circumstances? Another atomic bomb, obviously. Apart from the plutonium-rich core
of the Fat Man and the uranium-rich core of the Little Boy, another core of plutonium was
supposed to be used if Japan hadn’t promptly surrendered after the tragedy of Nagasaki.
So as usual, this core was turned into a tool for Manhattan Project researchers interested in
high-risk radiation experiments. According to science papers, in 1945, Harry Daghlian
went into the lab alone and surrounded the core with tungsten carbide bricks that were meant to
reflect neutrons to the core, pushing it closer to criticality. He accidentally dropped one of the
bricks onto the core, which went critical, bathing Daghlian in the blue light of a deadly reaction.
Now, we know it eerily sounds similar to the original story of Dr. Manhattan but that is not
what happened here. Unfortunately, it was the opposite, instead of becoming an omnipotent,
immortal being, Harry Daghlian died 16 days later suffering from immense radiation poisoning despite
intensive medical care. Less than a year later, in May 1946, Louis Slotin was running a similar test,
almost completely shielding the core with a pair of beryllium half-spheres, which he kept apart
with just a screwdriver. That's just as dangerous as it sounds, obviously, the screwdriver slipped,
and, once again, the core went critical. Slotin’s end was no prettier than Daghlian
as both were brutally blistered and suffered from extreme cases of burns,
gangrene, peeled-off skin and well, the rest of it is just too graphic for us to describe here.
The core was dubbed later “demon core” and conclusively people at Los Alamos stopped
playing hands-on with a nuclear core as if it was a baseball. But that doesn’t
mean the United States learned its lesson. Let us present to you the Atomic Veterans.
From 1946 to 1962, the United States conducted about 200 atmospheric nuclear tests.
That is way more than the other nuclear tests put together at that time. Approximately 400,000
servicemen enlisted in the US Army, Navy, and Marines were ordered to attend these atmospheric
tests either as witnesses or as post-test cleanup crews. These soldiers not only experienced Nuclear
Tests from as close as possible without being turned into charred turkey instantly. They were
also ordered to walk towards the nuclear mushrooms to inspect them closely. As nuclear power and its
risks were still new, most of these servicemen did not know about the effects of radiation exposure
and did not question if their health was at risk. But sooner or later, many of these men developed
serious health complications, including cancer. Some of the first atomic veterans were servicemen
who were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to help clean up the two cities after the atomic bombings.
Approximately 255,000 troops were involved in the occupation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Some veterans noticed the effects quickly. Marine Corporal Lyman Eugene Quigley,
who was sent to Nagasaki, recalled that when he got back, he had burning, itching,
running sores on the top of his head and the top of his ears. Furthermore,
he had sores that looked suspiciously similar to the sores developed by atomic bomb survivors.
The doctors who examined him during his discharge examination in 1945 claimed that the sores were
caused by a fungus. But nearly a year later, Quigley began developing stomach tumors that
caused him massive amounts of pain. This was only the beginning of his deteriorating health,
which included lipoma, or cancer of the fatty tissue. Despite these warnings,
during the early Cold War, the United States wanted to prepare servicemen for the possibility
of nuclear war and placed them only miles away from nuclear test detonation sites. Depending
on the particular shot, servicemen were stationed approximately 6 to 11 kilometers away from ground
zero during Operation Buster-Jangle in 1951. The idea behind such tests was so messed up that
these soldiers were considered expendable guinea pigs when you come to know that the authorities
also wanted to research the psychological impacts of witnessing these explosions.
Psychiatrists were present before, during, and after tests to assess the psychological effects.
In the words of an atomic veteran, authorities were not going to let the opportunity go by
to see what would happen to a bunch of men also, when they experienced such a travesty firsthand.
Sworn to secrecy, many of these servicemen never told anyone of what they witnessed. If they told
anyone that they were involved in these nuclear tests, they could have been fined up to $10,000.
Some feared that if they spoke about witnessing the tests, they could be tried for treason
and shot. In the 1970s and 1980s, these atomic veterans began speaking out about
their experiences. It was not until 1994 that the authorities openly apologized to all people
involved with US nuclear radiation testing, including the atomic veterans as well as those
who were injected with plutonium without their consent. Yes, Plutonium injections!!
Manhattan Project researchers would find hospital patients with bleak diagnoses
often proven incorrectly diagnosed, and inject them with dangerously high amounts of plutonium.
Guess, the authorities were really desperate to create a Doctor Manhattan or Captain America-ish
superhero. But in reality, it was all done to see how the body would hold onto or secrete
the radioactive element. What makes this disaster worse is that these patients weren’t even aware
of being injected with such a dangerously high dosage of such a dangerous element. Plutonium
would be absorbed by bones and stay there for years if their ailment wouldn’t terminate them.
Shockingly, this nuclear madness doesn’t end there. Some might say how much worse can it
get? Pregnant women? You bet! According to the Associated Press, in the 1940s researchers at
a free clinic at Vanderbilt University gave over 750 pregnant women iron pills.
The idea according to researchers was to study how iron was absorbed by pregnant women. However,
the iron was fed along with a certain cocktail they had to drink to swallow the pill.
We do not exactly know what else was in the pills or what kind of concoction
those cocktails were made of. The records of the clinic were destroyed during the 1970s.
But there were still studies conducted on the concerned mothers and their babies
indicating that a handful of children died really young as a result of various cancers in the 1960s.
Now anybody can put 2 and 2 together to determine what those cocktails and pills contained.
Believe it or not but when somebody mentions Lab X, they are not talking about another comic book,
but how creative and invested the Soviets were with poison manufacturing. Since 1921,
there was an entire facility dedicated to perfecting poisons in Soviet Russia.
Dubbed The Special Room, this facility had a particular goal,
to discover poisons that were odorless, tasteless, and invisible to autopsies, or in other terms,
the perfect assassins. This is where things get James Bond-like ridiculous, according to reports
the lab X and the Kamera or the chamber were able to come up with creepy stuff like fatal gasses
such as gaseous cyanide that could cause death to appear to be from a heart attack.
They also invented crazy devices and weapons like a poison-tipped umbrella or the idea to spray the
poison on a lamp so that the heat would disperse it throughout a room. Targets included potential
spies, dissidents, and political rivals, but the real messed up stuff was about the
unfortunate test subjects who were sacrificed to perfect these poisons. Prisoners, intellectuals
who didn’t agree with communism, people who tried to escape Soviet Russia, etc., etc.
The Cold War era was a period of paranoia, anxiety, and constant anticipation for an upcoming
war which fortunately never happened. Else we could have been living in a post-apocalyptic
world right now. Both sides were ready to sacrifice anything to obliterate the other side
in sheer hope of somehow prevailing in the aftermath of such a dastardly confrontation.
One example of this desperation was the continued testing of biological weapons and exposing
civilians and military servicemen alike during the cold war despite the Geneva Conventions.
Not only did both sides stop developing biological weapons but also exposed
innocents and used them in wars. The Soviet Union employed a glanders biological weapon
against the mujaheddin in remote locations in Afghanistan in 1982.
Glanders is the scientific name for Pseudomonas mallei, a bacterium lethal for horses and potent
enough to incapacitate humans. More questionable, though, were the tests on civilian populations
through the 1950s and '60s. Agents would carry briefcases or lightbulbs into airports or subways,
releasing bacterial agents into the air to track how bacteria might travel through a population.
A really big test was done in San Francisco in 1950. Two types of bacteria were sprayed into
the air of San Francisco Bay over the course of about a week. The city's inhabitants were
breathing in millions of these bacteria every day, and at least one person died potentially
from the tests. And that wasn’t the only case, well over two hundred such tests were conducted
and people getting exposed to bacteria had no idea they were used as lab rats. Well that is
all we have for you. Thanks for watching Nutty History.