The Buchenwald touch.

• Position: U.S. nuclear radiation experimentation on humans - Editorial

On March 24, 1950, U.S. Government scientists employed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico exploded in the atmosphere a conventional (non-nuclear) bomb containing metal that had been charged with high levels of radioactivity. The scientists then went to Watrous, a town seventy miles east of the laboratory, to make a count of radiation levels.

Investigators for the General Accounting Office recently reported on this and about a dozen other experiments, all part of an effort to develop radiation weapons that would destroy human lives without damaging property. The U.S. Army and the Department of Energy confirmed that the tests had been conducted, and a Los Alamos laboratory spokesman said they might have been part of a series of 250 experiments between 1944 and 1961 in which radioactive matter was deliberately released into the atmosphere. No records made available so far indicate the extent to which human, animal, and plant life were jeopardized by these scientific endeavors, but as The New York Times reported, "all the tests released radiation at concentrations thousands of times higher than would be permitted by the Government today."

From 1963 to the early 1970s, more than 130 inmates of the Oregon and Washington state penitentiaries participated in an experiment that subjected their testicles to high levels of radiation to determine what it would take to render them temporarily sterile. Available records indicate that the prisoners signed consent forms but were not advised that there was a high risk of contracting testicular cancer.

During the late 1940s, researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville gave radioactive pills to 751 pregnant women who sought free care at a prenatal clinic. The pills exposed the women and their fetuses to about thirty times the natural level of radiation. A follow-up study of the children born to these women showed a higher-than-normal cancer rate; it is likely that at least three died of radiation exposure. Vanderbilt officials say they don't know whether the women were warned of the possible effects of radiation, or whether they even knew they were taking the pills.

At a state school in Fernald, Massachusetts, nineteen mentally retarded teenage boys were exposed to radioactive iron and calcium in their breakfast cereal. The study, intended to monitor the effects on nutrition and metabolism, went on from 1946 to 1956.

In an experiment that continued until 1974, almost 200...