Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

Ironically, experimentation on human subjects in the United States only got worse after Nuremberg. Cold War hysteria prompted an almost “anything goes” mentality among government scientists, and thousands of ghastly tests were performed on inmates and unsuspecting members of the general public. In 1946 scientists with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission collaborated with Quaker Oats and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to feed breakfast oatmeal spiked with radioactive calcium to mentally retarded children and teenagers at the Walter E. Fernald State School outside of Boston. (MIT and Quaker Oats paid a $1.85 million settlement to the test’s adult victims in 1998.) And when the arms race escalated in 1949 after the Soviets set off their first nuclear bomb, U.S. troops bore the brunt of early, large-scale radiation experiments. On November 1, 1951, some three thousand military personnel were trucked to the Frenchman Flat basin in the Nevada desert, and a bomb more powerful than “Fat Man,” which wiped out Nagasaki, was detonated seven miles away. Given no shelter or protective gear, the men were exposed to the shock waves, intense heat, and radioactive fallout. During a similar exercise the next year, troops were positioned four miles from a nuclear blast, and in 1953 they were placed a mere seven thousand feet away. Sailors aboard U.S. warships were also anchored downwind of nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and the Veterans Administration has since designated 210,00...