The date is March 1946, and deep in the Nevada desert all is quiet and still.
The peace of the desert calm is only broken by the distant drone of an aircraft's engine,
as a lonely B-17 superfortress cruises along at extreme altitude.
Suddenly the bomb bays on the belly of the aircraft swing open, and a single, very large
bomb is ejected.
The aircraft immediately dives and turns, desperate to pick up air speed and put as
much distance between itself and the plummeting bomb.
On the desert floor below a single sharp wailing tone warns two platoons of American infantrymen
to don their protective goggles, which they do as they hunker down in trenches cut into
the desert floor.
Forty five seconds later, an altimeter inside the bomb sends an electrical signal to a firing
pin, which immediately detonates conventional explosives to slam a stack of uranium rings
at supersonic speed into a uranium core.
A nanosecond later a second sun is born two thousand meters above the Nevada desert, and
the troops brace themselves for the impact of a shockwave that reaches out for miles.
As this new sun dims and dies, an order is barked out over their radios, commanding the
men to rise up and march directly into ground zero.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're taking a look
at what happened when the US government deliberately exposed its soldiers to radiation.
When nuclear bombs were first developed the effect of radiation on the human body was
poorly understood.
Marie Curie had introduced the world at large to radioactivity in the early 20th century
by coining the term, yet even she had no idea of the ill effects radiation has on the human
body.
She would often carry around radioactive materials in her pocket, and handled radioactive ores
with her bare hands.
Sadly, she would go on to die on July 4th 1934 from leukemia, and yet even at the time
of her passing the effects of radiation were still poorly understood.
When the nuclear bomb was first theorized, and then when its reality began to become
a certainty, several scientists involved with the Manhattan project feared that the bomb
would burn with such intensity that it would scorch the atmosphere around the test area.
Others feared that the fission event which produced the atomic blast would incinerate
the entire world.
While nobody considered it a serious probability, it's important to note that the best project
head Robert Oppenheimer could do to reassure President Truman was that the incineration
of earth's atmosphere was, “very unlikely”.
Physicist Enrico Fermi even took wagers with the troops present at the first atomic test,
betting whether the bomb would blow up the entire world or only New Mexico.
He was ordered to stop when the troops began to get seriously scared of the possibility.
Yet of all the fears of what the bomb might or might not do to the atmosphere, nobody
gave much thought to the radioactivity.
It was known that they generated extreme amounts of radioactivity, and that in very high doses
such radioactivity could be fatal to life, but how much was truly harmful, and how much
could the average soldier- or citizen- absorb in the case of nuclear war?
Only after the first bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did serious tests on
the subject of toxic radioactivity begin, and up until then the bomb was seen as nothing
more than another tool in the US war fighting arsenal.
Had Japan not surrendered when it did in World War II, General Douglas McArthur had proposed
softening up the beachheads with nuclear bombs, and then marching American troops in immediately
after the bombardments.
At the time, nobody had any serious objections to this plan other than the expense of creating
further nuclear bombs.
Even when the effects of radioactivity on the human body had begun to be understood
though, McArthur would double down on the free use of nuclear weapons, proposing just
a decade later that he would have won the Korean war in 10 days by using 50 tactical
nuclear bombs to destroy North Korean and Chinese air fields, and then by creating a
strip of radioactive cobalt across North Korea that would reach from the Sea of Japan to
the Yellow Sea.
The cobalt would be dispensed via wagons, carts, trucks, and planes, and would have
made a radioactive border between korea and china that would have prevented any land invasion
for up to one hundred and twenty years.
In essence, General Douglas McArthur was what most modern psychologists have come to refer
to as “bat-shit crazy”.
Luckily for China and Korea, President Truman agreed and the General was eventually fired.
It quickly became clear that troops marching under the cover of radioactive atomic bombs
was not very feasible, but just how harmful was radiation to the human body, and in what
doses?
The American and Russian governments both needed to find out, and with the likelihood
of a conflict between communism and capitalism growing by the day, it would be vital to understand
how soldiers would be affected fighting on nuclear battlefields.
For its part, the US began a program where it marched soldiers directly through ground
zero after atomic tests.
During maneuvers code named Desert Rock VII and Desert Rock VIII, 18,000 soldiers were
marched directly into the radioactive hot zone following a nuclear test.
These bombs though were primarily air blasts, or detonations where the nuclear device explodes
two thousand meters or higher over a target.
This is the preferred way of deploying nuclear weapons against a target, as a ground blast
will have its explosive force dampened by the rise and dips of terrain.
From above though, the force of the nuclear blast would be unaffected by the terrain,
and as an added bonus, the majority of the radiation was ejected directly upwards into
the upper atmosphere and into space.
However, a 1980 survey of affected troops found that everyone exposed had developed
double the lifetime risk of leukemia and other cancers.
As the US and Russia both developed long-range bombers capable of striking deep into each
other's countries, it became clear that nuclear war would affect the homeland.
The US government thus desperately needed to know just how such a war would affect the
civilian population, and what could be done to treat, or alleviate, symptoms if possible.
With a nuclear blast over a population center putting trillions of tons of dust and debris
from buildings into the atmosphere, the effects of nuclear fallout became imperative to understand.
Thus the US government began one of the most immoral series of tests in history, and in
1957 launched Operation Plumbbob.
The tests took place deep in the American west, but were designed to specifically launch
a great amount of radioactive debris into the air.
The plumes of fallout would then travel downrange into communities and military positions that
came to be known as “Downwinders”.
The results of the experiments were difficult to ascertain, given the extremely long time
needed for the results of such dispersed amounts of radioactive fallout to make itself medically
known.
However it was determined that of the communities affected, there was a marked increase in thyroid
cancers and leukemia, which is estimated to have killed between 1,000 and 20,000 people
who would not have otherwise developed cancer.
Yet a nuclear detonation directly over an american city would result in huge quantities
of radioactive fallout being ingested by the surviving population, so more, and higher
intensity studies were needed.
Believing they were acting for the greater good- certainly a muddled point- scientists
began a new study involving patients who had been diagnosed with terminal illnesses.
As the patients were going to die anyways, they were seen as the perfect guinea pigs
for testing the effects of radiation inside the human body.
Thus plutonium was administered directly into their bodies via an IV drip, and then urine
and stool samples were analyzed for signs of radioactivity.
Scientists wanted to know just how much of the radioactive material was absorbed by the
body.
As the patients were already dying, the plan seemed harmless enough- yet when 58 year old
Albert Stevens was misdiagnosed with a terminal cancer, he was given the largest dose of plutonium
any human has ever received- just under one microgram.
But Mr. Stevens did not have cancer, and instead only suffered from a severe gastric ulcer.
For twenty one years Mr. Stevens' health deteriorated, with the highly radioactive plutonium in his
body weakening the bones of his spinal column, fogging his eyes with cataracts, and destroying
his immune system.
At the time of his death on January 9th, 1966, Mr Stevens had absorbed more radiation than
any other human being; 6400 rem- or 60 times the government's maximum safe lifetime exposure.
The man who oversaw early experiments on unwitting human subjects was a medical researcher named
Joseph Hamilton.
Hamilton had become a world-class expert on radiation's effects on living tissue, even
by experimenting on himself.
He would often rub his skin with radioactive samples or drink radioactive water in order
to garner data.
However as the Manhattan Project became the Atomic Energy Commission, Hamilton became
more of a consultant, and in 1950 he wrote an infamous memo where he urged an end to
the radiation experiments, saying that they had “a little of the Buchenwald touch”.
Buchenwald was a reference to the infamous nazi concentration camp where hundreds of
torturous medical experiments were carried out on the prisoners.
His advice was ultimately ignored though, and the human tests went on.
Hamilton, by the way, would go on to die from leukemia at age 49.
This time the experiments moved to Cincinnati, where Dr. Eugen Saenger took over human testing.
In Cincinnati Dr. Saenger selected test subjects from mostly non-white, poor cancer patients,
and then would expose them to high doses of whole-body radiation.
This was despite the fact that it was well known that the cancers the individuals suffered
from were not treatable via whole-body radiation.
Some patients were nonetheless left on tables and exposed with radiation for an entire hour,
receiving the equivalent of 20,000 chest X-rays.
About one in four of the patients would die directly from the effects of the testing,
and the rest suffered through all the misery of radiation sickness: nausea, vomiting, severe
mental confusion and other neurological effects, hair loss, loose teeth, and mouth ulcers.
Despite the fact that these immoral experiments, and Dr. Saenger's part in them, were publicly
revealed in 1999, he still received glowing praise in his obituaries in the Los Angeles
Times and the Cincinnati Enquirer when he died in 2007.
Over the next few decades the United States government would go on to test the effects
of radiation on not just its own soldiers or the poor, but on everything from pregnant
women who were given pills with radioactive iron, and special needs children who were
lured into a series of radioactive experiments under the guise of joining a “science club”.
The pregnant women had themselves and their babies monitored for the effects of radiation,
which only reached between five and fifteen rads- or the same as if you lived for one
year living in a high-altitude city such as Denver.
Yet back then the experiments were conducted with absolutely no knowledge of how even such
a low dose could affect a developing fetus, making them particularly morally reprehensible.
The special needs children who formed the MIT and Harvard sponsored “science club”
were taken on fun trips to Fenway park and museums, and when hungry were fed oatmeal
and milk laced with radioactive calcium and iron.
Later their stool was checked to see how much of the radioactive calcium and iron had been
absorbed by the body.
If you think this story can't get any worse, of course it does.
The experiments it turns out where not sponsored by the US government to study the effects
of radiation on a population suffering through nuclear war- a goal which while morally murky
at best, at least does serve some purpose and has some benefit to public welfare.
Instead the special needs children were irradiated on behalf of the Quaker Oats company, who
wanted to figure out how much iron and calcium from their cereals was absorbed in the human
body so that they could craft an ad campaign that touted the health benefits of oatmeal.
Remember that next time you go grocery shopping- Quaker Oats by the way is owned by PepsiCo.
Just saying.
Over the course of thousands of tests and exposures to unwitting human subjects, a fearful
US government slowly came to the opinion that all-out nuclear war was simply an unwinnable
conflict.
Similar tests in the Soviet Union would lead the Soviets to the same results.
Troops could not fight in a nuclear environment, and any life that survived the initial blasts
was sure to die later from the effects of radiation.
While there can be little forgiveness for the men and women who oversaw these highly
immoral studies and tests, at least the knowledge they gleamed helped to avoid nuclear catastrophe
in a world where for years the bomb was seen as nothing more than just another tool to
use as needed.
Do you think the knowledge gained in these tests was worth the price?
Let us know in the comments!
And if you liked this video, make sure you watch our other video, Why These Countries
Are Almost Impossible To Visit!
See you next time!