Fascism U.S. style: radiation experiments on workers and youth

Hitler would have been proud of how U.S. rulers conducted a series of human radiation experiments on thousands of U.S. citizens during and after World War II. Author Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files takes its name from one experiment involving the injection of plutonium on 18 patients from 1945 to 1947. Almost all were given 5 micrograms  (two with 94 micrograms) when the “tolerance dose” of plutonium was listed as 1 microgram. (All quotes  are from Welsome’s book.)
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) supervised a “vast network of national laboratories, universities and hospitals that would investigate every imaginable effect of radiation.” The government succeeded in keeping its role secret from the public as well as from the patients themselves. Hundreds of scientists  and technicians who developed the atomic bomb were exposed to radioactive substances; some like plutonium were new and had unknown health effects. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, murdering a quarter of a million civilians, U.S. officials went to Japan to observe the effects on survivors.
In 1947 at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the prosecutors advanced the code that conducting such experiments without informing the subjects of their nature and hazards constituted a war crime. Yet “Thousands of human radiation experiments, many…without therapeutic benefit, were funded by the AEC” during 30 years of the Cold War. This included a proposal in 1949 to expose prisoners serving life sentences to 150 roentgens units of radiation to help determine how much radiation an air crew could tolerate while piloting an aircraft propelled by nuclear energy. Experiments continued for years:
Eight hundred and twenty-nine pregnant women at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic were given radioactive iron “cocktails” and told they “contained something nutritious that would benefit their babies”;
From 1946 to 1973, 74 boys at the Ferndale State School in Waltham, Mass., were given amounts of radioactive iron or calcium in their oatmeal by MIT scientists with the AEC’s support;
Between 2,000 to 3,000 enlisted men participated in experiments during the U.S. aboveground nuclear testing program in Nevada. Soldiers were moved as close as two miles from ground zero, a few within a mile;
From 1963 to 1971, over 100 prisoners in Oregon and Washington states “volunteered” to have their testicles exposed to as much as 600 rads of radiation;
“Operation Sunshine” sought to discover the hazards from fallout by collecting and analyzing “the body parts of more than 15,000 humans” often without permission from next of kin;
Between 1960 and 1973, the Defense Atomic Support Agency contracted with the Cincinnati General Hospital to expose over 90 cancer patients to total body irradiation.
Target Black and Poor White Women and Youth
In the Cincinnati study, the majority of patients were Black, at Vanderbilt poor white women and at Ferndale and Oregon working-class youth and prisoners. Some studies like the total body irradiation experiments “caused intense suffering and premature deaths in some patients.”
The AEC was primarily concerned that revealing the experiments might adversely affect domestic public opinion. President Eisenhower advised the AEC “to keep the public ‘confused’ about different types of radiation hazards.” (Paul Boyer, The Bombs Earl Light) A primary reason soldiers were sent into Nevada’s nuclear test zone was to show their parents back home there was nothing to fear from radioactive fallout. According to the chair of the Pentagon’s Medical Policy Council, the soldiers themselves were terrified of entering the area that had been subject to nuclear radiation. The exercise sought to “dispel a fear that is…entirely groundless” and thus mobilize the soldiers to march into a nuclear strike zone to fight a battle against an equally irradiated enemy.” (Moreno, “Undue Risks: Secret State Experiments on Humans, p. 164)
People outside the test zones got “equal treatment”: “Even though scientists were aware that fallout from the tests could pose serious hazards to nearby communities, they chose not to evacuate residents because they apparently feared such a move would harm public relations and jeopardize the test site.” A House Committee released a report on 31 human radiation experiments involving 700 people showing that they were conducted without informed consent and had been covered up for decades.
The fact that the U.S. ruling-class has conducted these barbarous fascistic experiments should leave no doubt that it will be ready to kill millions in nuclear war in order to preserve its profit system. All the more reason for a communist-led international working class to organize a revolution to wipe out capitalism forever.