Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thousands of Americans
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Denver-based journalist Eileen Welsome reveals how as a reporter for the tiny Albuquerque Tribune (circulation 35,000) she uncovered one of the country’s great Cold War secrets: the U.S. government had knowingly exposed thousands of human Guinea pigs with radiation poisoning including 18 Americans who had plutonium injected directly into their bloodstream. [includes rush transcript]
In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon-fed oatmeal laced with radioactive isotopes.In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium.
At a Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women were served “vitamin cocktails” containing radioactive iron, as part of their regular treatment.
No these are not acts of terrorism by common criminals.
These are just some of the secret human radiation experiments that the U.S. government conducted on unsuspecting Americans for decades as part of its atom bomb program.
In a gruesome plot that spanned 30 years, doctors and scientists working with the US atomic weapons program, exposed thousands of unwilling and unknowing Americans to radiation poisoning to study its effects.
For years, the experiments by the U.S. government and the identities of their human guinea pigs were covered up.
Then after a six-year investigation, investigative reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the names of 18 people who were injected with plutonium in the 1940s without their knowledge by federal government scientists. In 1993, she published her finding in The Albuquerque Tribune and later received the Pulitzer Prize for her work.
Another six years later, Welsome published “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War.” The book gives a detailed account of the unspeakable scientific trials conducted by the U.S. government that reduced thousands of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens.
- Eileen Welsome, Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and author of “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War.
- The Plutonium Files
