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WASHINGTON - It was a secret kept for 40 years.
After the bomb ended World War II, the government wanted to know more
about how to protect America if the Soviets developed a radiation
weapon, and considered building radiation weapons of its own.
So it experimented - dropping radiation from the sky to see how
fallout traveled and putting it on the ground to see how it spread.
A dozen secret tests were conducted in New Mexico, Tennessee and Utah
from 1948 to 1952. They became public Wednesday, when Sen. John Glenn,
D-Ohio, released an unclassified version of a report by the General
Accounting Office.
The investigators said radiation bombs dropped from planes over Los
Alamos, N.M., caused clouds of fallout tracked 10 miles in one case,
70 miles in another, and unknown distances two other times.
Radiation bombs dropped at an Army site in Dugway, Utah, spread a
short distance, but 50% farther than expected. And in another
experiment, 60 times more radiation than escaped from the Three Mile
Island nuclear plant in 1979 was deliberately put on the ground at the
Atomic Energy Commission's facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
"In some cases, GAO was unable to uncover much specific information
about the radiation releases," Glenn said. "I do not believe that it
is currently possible to determine whether civilians or workers were
unwittingly exposed to health-damaging doses of radiation, or if there
was significant impact on the environment."
The Energy Department couldn't provide those
details, either. "We're researching the source documents and will make
every attempt to get them declassified as soon as possible," said
spokesman Sam Grizzle. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for
Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md., said the
disclosures confirmed educated guesses about government
experimentation after the Manhattan Project, which developed the first
atomic bombs.
"This is the first solid evidence that there was a systematic
radioactive warfare program," he said. "There had been indications
that the military considered radiation warfare to be very important
after the war, but no indication of thorough and systematic planning
like this." |
