The Plutonium Files

“It is hard to say which is more impressive about this book, the research or the writing.… between the well-crafted prologue and the powerful epilogue is a remarkable tale in five parts … any of which could stand alone as a story well worth reading.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“A disturbing look at what happens when scientists lose touch with their humanity in the single-minded pursuit of scientific advancement … the power of this book … derives from [Welsome’s] relentless pursuit of the names, forms, and personal histories of the victims of nuclear science.”

—Deborah Nelson,
The Washington Post Book World

“A fierce expose of governmental duplicity and dangerous science … The literature on the official crimes of the Cold War is large and growing. Welsome’s stunning book adds much to that literature, and it makes for sobering reading.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Welsome tells this sprawling, technically complex story in an engaged, jargon-free fashion … engrossing.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] reportorial tour de force … Welsome has compiled a staggering and invaluable chronicle.”

—Booklist

“A compelling narrative of what happens when science and morality are ‘wrapped in the flag.’ ”

—Los Angeles Times

“[A] well-written and carefully researched book …a timely, dramatic reminder that citizens must fight for openness and accountability if we are to have a civilized society.”

—The Denver Rocky Mountain News

“The Plutonium Files
is a memorable work of reporting that’s full of passion.”

—Herbert Mitgang,
Chicago Tribune

A long habit of not thinking
a thing wrong gives it a superficial
appearance of being right, and raises at
first a formidable outcry in
defense of custom.

T
HOMAS
P
AINE
Common Sense
1776

It came on suddenly, the desire to see Italy, Texas, again. The small town had grown indistinct in my memory, a place that had become more imagined than real as the months, then years, went by. I wanted to see the sagging storefronts on Italy’s Main Street, feel the clap of air conditioning on my face as I stepped from the sun-blasted emptiness into the Uptown Cafe.

On a late summer afternoon in 1997, I went back to look around. As soon as I landed at Love Field in Dallas, I got in a taxi and headed south. Though five years had elapsed since my first visit, I knew Italy was close when I began seeing the rows of freshly plowed earth, the crows diving in and out of the spent cornfields. On the edge of town was the old sign that Fredna Allen had once pointed out. It was badly weathered and nearly invisible in the shimering heat, but there was still pride in its message:
WELCOME TO ITALY. THE BIGGEST LITTLE TOWN IN TEXAS.

Then I was standing on Main Street. It was just as I remembered, especially the heat, which flattened and bent down everything before it. Drifting down through the thick air came the sound of a lawnmower, the metallic confusion of an engine that wouldn’t start.

Film crews from all over the world had passed through Italy to interview Fredna, the widow of Elmer Allen, but the intense media exposure had left no outward mark, no trace of worldliness, on the small community. Italy looked punch-drunk and haggard beneath the ashy sky, too far gone for some Dallas investor to turn into a quaint version of what it was and always had been: a rural town tethered to the boom-and-bust cycles of cotton. Although there was nothing faintly Mediterranean about the place, many years ago someone from the post office in Washington,
D.C., had suggested the village change its name from Houston Creek to Italy.
¹

Most of the stores were still vacant, the names of defunct businesses stenciled across the display windows. Out of a sense of respect, tact perhaps, sheets of brown paper were drawn down over many of the storefronts. Not all hope had been abandoned though. A new video store and a beauty salon had staked out space a few doors down from City Hall. And a block or two from the grim desolation of Main Street there were pockets of cool tranquility, neighborhoods with green lawns and white, two-story houses. With their awnings and screened-in porches, the homes had the stately air of Italy’s more prosperous decades.

In this unlikely place, I had found the first solid evidence that would help me unravel a story that began at the dawn of the atomic age. Just four months before two bombs were dropped on Japan, the doctors of the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project, the top-secret wartime machine that built the first atomic bomb, embarked on a human experiment so closely guarded that many details remained classified for fifty years.

Beginning in April of 1945 and continuing through July of 1947, eighteen men, women, and even children, scattered in quiet hospital wards across the country, were injected with plutonium. Urine and stool specimens were collected in jars, packed into wooden crates, and shipped to the Manhattan Project’s laboratory in Los Alamos for analysis. Some of the patients were close to death when they were injected; others, including some mistakenly believed to be mortally ill, would live for many years. Most went to their graves without knowing what had been done to them.

I came across the story in 1987, just a few months after I began working at the
Albuquerque Tribune,
a small afternoon newspaper in New Mexico. One late-spring morning, while thumbing through a dense report describing the Air Force’s efforts to clean up its waste sites throughout the United States, I noticed that several dumps at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque were on the list. Buried in the dumps were radioactive animal carcasses. Although this didn’t seem like much of a story, I have always loved animals and the disclosure caught my eye. What kind of animals were buried in those dumps, I wondered, and why were they radioactive?

I called around and eventually learned that the animals had been used in radiation experiments. Many of the technical papers written about the studies were stored at what was then called the Air Force Special Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland. When I made inquiries there, a
spokesman for the weapons lab assembled a stack of these papers and told me I was welcome to come to the base and read them.

A couple of days later I drove over to Kirtland, showed my driver’s license to the guards, and was waved on through. The official from the weapons lab escorted me to the basement, where I was told to take a seat at a long wooden conference table. On the table were the reports I had requested. Once the public information officer had departed, I looked around. Nearby was a walk-in vault where both classified and unclassified documents were stored. The heavy black door, which had a huge, 1950s-style tumbler lock, had been left ajar, and I could see hundreds of documents on the shelves. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the base had been a major launching site for many Cold War missions.

The reports were stiff with age and smelled of dust. As I pried the pages apart, I felt certain they hadn’t been read in many decades. I soon realized I wasn’t going to find a story that afternoon, but, having requested all those papers, felt obliged to read on. I was about to pack it in when my eye fell on a footnote describing a human plutonium experiment. The information jolted me deeply. One minute I was reading about dogs that had been injected with large amounts of plutonium and had subsequently developed radiation sickness and tumors. Suddenly there was this reference to a
human
experiment. I wondered if the people had experienced the same agonizing deaths as the animals.

I jotted down the citation. The following day I began my research at the University of New Mexico library. Naively I thought I might be the first to “break” this forty-year-old story, but I soon discovered that
Science Trends,
a small publication in Washington, D.C., had gotten there first with an article in 1976. The injections had also been the centerpiece of a 1986 congressional report, which had attracted some press coverage.