Atomic Veterans Meet the Gulf War

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
January/February 1995
Vol. 51, No. 1
[excerpt]

Too much isn't enough

More than 50 years ago, radiologists knew that ionizing radiation was biologically dangerous. Pre-war experience with radium and X-rays had demonstrated that it could cause illness and even death. By 1943, Manhattan Project scientists were brainstorming about radiation weapons in an attempt to assess the possibility that the Germans might use such weapons against an invasion force. Rather than producing a nuclear explosion, a radiation weapon would disperse "radioactive material."

In a report dated September 9, 1943, James B. Conant, Arthur Holly Compton, and Harold C. Urey, key figures in the atomic bomb program, sketched possible radiation scenarios for Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt's chief science adviser.

The Conant Report first described how "radioactive material" might be spread on the ground, flooding the area with high levels of deadly gamma radiation. But there was another way in which the Germans might conduct radiation warfare:

"The effectiveness of such [ground] contamination arises from the fact that radioactive substances give off penetrating gamma radiation more or less equivalent in their biological effects to X-rays. A somewhat different use of the radioactive material would depend on the fact that extremely small quantities of certain of the radioactive elements appear to be absorbed in the lungs of animals and produce fatal effects after a period of some weeks. The amounts necessary to produce eventual death under such conditions are extraordinarily small."

The Germans did not develop radiation weapons, and the Conant Report remains little more than a footnote to the Manhattan Project. But it offers compelling evidence that more than 50 years ago, atomic scientists were distinguishing clearly between the biological impact of external and internal radiation.

In October 1946, after the conclusion of Operation Crossroads, the first post-war atomic tests, Col. Stafford W. Warren, the Manhattan Project's chief radiological officer, echoed the Conant Report in a secret lecture on ground-zero hazards:

"Later when the decay reduced the gamma radiation to safe levels you would be subject to dangerous hazards in the same area. This would not be lethal in the sense of being immediately dangerous. There is a potential and actual absorption hazard. You need only to absorb a few micrograms of plutonium and other long-life fission materials, and then know that you are going to develop a progressive anemia or a tumor in from five to 15 years. This is an insidious hazard and an insidious lethal effect hard to guard against."

And in 1985, in a futile court case brought against the United States by the widow of an atomic vet, government attorneys conceded that the United States "has been aware of the hazards of radiation since the inception of the nuclear weapons program." In fact, the attorneys quoted a judge who had declared in an earlier (and similar) case:

"This evidence establishes beyond dispute that throughout the period involved, the government had knowledge, albeit incomplete, of the nature and degree of the danger to test participants."

Fortunately for the government attorneys, their case was not based on whether the government had known of the risks. Rather, their argument-well supported in the law-was that the government, as sovereign, was immune to such suits.

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1995/jf95/jf95Manning.html