TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT0053> <title> Jan. 17, 1994: The Widening Fallout </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Jan. 17, 1994 Genetics:The Future Is Now </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> INVESTIGATIONS, Page 30 The Widening Fallout </hdr> <body> Government disclosures about radiation tests breed complaints about other nuclear experiments By Jill Smolowe--Reported by Sheila Gribben/Chicago, Scott Norvell/Atlanta, Bruce van Voorst/Washington and Susanne Washburn/New York Floyd Stanfill would never have considered himself a guinea pig. A retired truck driver, he was not anything like the experiment victims whose suffering is now being probed by the government: 62 teenagers, labeled retarded, who were fed radioactive meals at the Fernald state school in Waltham, Massachusetts; 131 inmates at Oregon and Washington state prisons whose testicles were X-rayed to measure the effect of radiation on fertility; 18 severely ill patients injected with plutonium to gauge how quickly the body excreted the radioactive element. These cases from the late 1940s to the '70s so "appalled, shocked and deeply saddened" Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary that she has boldly promised compensation "to make these people whole." All Stanfill did as a young Navy man in 1946 was follow orders to board a ship in the Pacific after nuclear blasts went off nearby. Now, however, he feels as victimized by the government's cold war-era radiation experiments as any of the test subjects. Furthermore, O'Leary's promise of compensation has helped him and thousands of other Americans focus their questions--and blame. Why should government liability apply only to the victims of medical experiments? What about the military personnel who were exposed to radiation during nuclear tests? Or the civilian populations who lived downwind of those blasts? What about the people afflicted by radiation emanating from nuclear-weapons plants? And what about the next generation, the children of test victims, who may have suffered genetic damage? Stanfill's life changed on May 8, 1946, when he received orders detailing his role in Operation Crossroads near the Bikini atoll in the western Pacific. The document, titled Target Coordinator's Memorandum No. 12-46, did not pretend that the mission was risk-free. Paragraph 6 warned, "Do not pick up any souvenir pieces...they may be radio-active and may cause serious illness and even death." The next instruction: "Do not eat food and drink water...until it has been inspected." Yet steam fitter Stanfill and the other 11 members of his unit, Team Able, saw little cause for alarm. It was peacetime. Their job was simply to inspect the pipes aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga after a nuclear blast. Paragraph 5 assured, "Before Team Able comes aboard to do its work, the ship will have been inspected for radio-activity by qualified technicians...who will notify the proper authorities that the ship is safe for reboarding." In the years since then, Stanfill has concluded that there was a heavy cost to his participation. In 1976 he had to quit his truck-driving job because of prostate problems. After that, he underwent several operations to correct spinal disorders and to separate his intestinal wall from his bladder. The string of mysterious ailments reaches to the next generations. In 1977 his daughter Shannon died at age 25 after an abnormal pregnancy. His son Shawn, 42, a Vietnam veteran, had skin cancer and suffers from strange abdominal problems. One of Shawn's two teenage sons suffers peculiar knee trouble; the other gets migraine headaches. The Stanfill clan suspects that many or all of these problems are cross-generational fallout from Operation Crossroads--but they have no way of knowing for sure. "The amount of my father's exposure to radiation was significant. I think there was some genetic damage to my father," says Shawn. "It could have affected three generations." The Stanfill experience is just another drop in the hard rain of fear and potential litigation resulting from the government's disclosures, a case of honesty breeding complaint. When O'Leary called upon the government on Dec. 7 to lift the shroud of secrecy surrounding radiation experiments conducted from the 1940s through the 1970s, then topped that on Dec. 28 with a call for compensation, she was alluding only to about 800 people, most of them incarcerated, mentally disabled or terminally ill. "I knew this wouldn't be resolved in a week or a month or even a year," O'Leary told TIME. Even so, no one could have predicted the magnitude or intensity of the reaction. Last week alone, 10,000 calls came in to a toll-free Human Experimentation Hot Line set up by the Energy Department to locate survivors. The department was forced to triple its number of phone workers to 36 and extend service to more than 14 hours a day. The activity is bound to increase. Eight other departments and agencies rushed to follow O'Leary's lead, promising to probe radiation wrongdoings. While none have yet echoed O'Leary's call for compensation--which Energy officials estimate could produce liability claims totaling anywhere from $1 million to $300 million--all have promised to dredge up internal documents to ascertain the full scope of the testing, the degree of informed consent involved and the conditions of the remaining survivors. More ominously for an Administration that is flirting with compensation, reports proliferated of medical experiments and military tests that had not been part of O'Leary's original calculation. An alliance of environmental groups in a dozen states called the Military Production Network, for instance, released documents showing that the Energy Department had paid $47 million in legal fees over the past three years to defend nuclear-weapons-plant contractors against eight class-action suits by workers and civilians. "There's no significant difference between someone who's been injected with plutonium and somebody whose ((drinking)) well contains radioactive elements," argues Bob Schaeffer of M.P.N. "They too are victims, and the Federal Government must take responsibility." In Tennessee public reaction reached near hysteria last month when the local press dug up a series of nutritional experiments conducted in the 1940s at Vanderbilt University's free prenatal clinic in Nashville. Funded in part by the Tennessee Department of Health, the tests involved feeding more than 800 women a "cocktail" laced with a mildly radioactive iron isotope to chart how the iron was absorbed. A follow-up study in the 1960s found a "small but statistically significant increase" in cancer among the children born to the women. University officials say they don't know if the women's consent was obtained. At least one of them, Emma Craft, now 72, says she was never told of any experiments. "Back then you felt like the doctors were always doing the best they could," she recalls. "You didn't ask any questions; you just took what they gave you." Craft's daughter Carolyn died of a tumor at age 11. That question of informed consent is rapidly emerging as the core issue in the looming battle over governmental liability. Many scientists and doctors argued last week that Americans must keep in mind the context of the cold war tests. Standards for human experimentation were less stringent back then; the long-term effects of radiation were not yet known. Moreover, says Dr. Mark Siegler of the University of Chicago's Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, in the tide of press reports about medical and military experiments, "unrelated studies are often lumped together into one big story." The horrifying details of individual suffering also cloak the medical advances that have resulted from experiments that used radioactive tracers. "When the newspaper says `radiation,' people panic," says Professor Herman Cember, who is an expert on radiation protection and safety at Northwestern University. "What people don't understand is that radioactivity is all around us." It is one thing if the tests were designed to defend citizens against nuclear attack, a case of a few citizens being put at risk for the benefit of society at large. But the moral stretch is more dubious if the tests were aimed at developing a battlefield nuclear weapon. Argues Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland: "There's plenty of evidence that some of these tests were designed to give the U.S. an offensive radiological capability." A recent report by Congress's General Accounting Office that documents 13 planned radioactive releases conducted at U.S. nuclear sites between 1948 and 1952 seems to support that claim. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a town created by the government to serve as the original "Atomic City," a 1948 experiment tested for "the effectiveness of scattered radiation from a single gamma-emitting source." Two tests at the U.S. Army's Dugway, Utah, site were designed "to obtain information about the uniformity of ballistic dispersal from an air-dropped device over an approximately 1-sq.-mi. area." If that proves to mean that U.S. service personnel were used as stand-in guinea pigs for enemy troops, the government may find itself having to answer for a lot more mistakes and crimes than O'Leary ever intended. </body> </article> </text>