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caraher

(6,278 posts)
8. You can read her dissertation on this for free
Thu Oct 4, 2012, 12:36 AM
Oct 2012

It's open access on ProQuest

The evidence is pretty much circumstantial, and given the number of other studies involving deliberate exposures of humans to radioactive materials that were brought to light in 1994 it's hard to understand why this wouldn't have come out of the same investigation. It's not even clear what isotopes Martino-Taylor is suggesting may have been used; at one point she suggests radium, then later remarks that zinc and cadmium each have several radioactive isotopes (which is less informative than you may think; so do most elements, and she only points to one zinc isotope as one known to be available in reasonable quantities).

This is a sociology dissertation, and really figuring out whether anything radioactive was part of this research clearly takes a back seat to discussions of power relationships, Cold War machinations, experimentation without consent, etc. It's certainly true that the cover story used at the time about creating "smoke screens" to protect against nuclear attack was a lie. I'm inclined to take at face value the words of a declassified report in one of her appendices: that

The fluorescent tracer studies described here are part of a continuing program designed to provide the field experimental data necessary to estimate munitions requirements for the strategic use of chemical and biological agents against typical target cities. (p. 395 of the .pdf of the dissertation, p. 118 of the declassified report)


Reading that report I see no reason to believe that they used radioactive materials. The project involved a fairly large number of workers, with not even the slightest precautions taken for radiation safety. I'd imagine the researchers, at least, would seek to protect themselves! More importantly, had they actually used radioactive tracers the analysis would have been much simpler. Rather than hiring a small corps of technicians to conduct painstaking examinations of samples under microscopes (p. 333 dissertation/p. 58 report), they could count radioactive decays for far less expense.

The report does prove that the US was interested in developing chemical and biological weapons for offensive use against civilian populations. And these were conducted with little meaningful informed consent of the populace (though years before "informed consent" became one of the guiding benchmarks for research involving human subjects). That in itself is damning enough. But for this goal there would be no reason to use radioactive tracers in the diffusion studies.
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