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Floyd Stanfill would never have considered himself a guinea pig. A
retired truck driver, he was not anything like the experiment victims
whose suffering is now being probed by the government: 62 teenagers,
labeled retarded, who were fed radioactive meals at the Fernald state
school in Waltham, Massachusetts; 131 inmates at Oregon and Washington
state prisons whose testicles were X-rayed to measure the effect of
radiation on fertility; 18 severely ill patients injected with
plutonium to gauge how quickly the body excreted the radioactive
element. These cases from the late 1940s to the '70s so "appalled,
shocked and deeply saddened" Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary that she
has boldly promised compensation "to make these people whole."
All Stanfill did as a young Navy man in 1946 was follow orders to
board a ship in the Pacific after nuclear blasts went off nearby. Now,
however, he feels as victimized by the government's cold war-era
radiation experiments as any of the test subjects. Furthermore,
O'Leary's promise of compensation has helped him and thousands of
other Americans focus their questions -- and blame. Why should
government liability apply only to the victims of medical experiments?
What about the military personnel who were exposed to radiation during
nuclear tests? Or the civilian populations who lived downwind of those
blasts? What about the people afflicted by radiation emanating from
nuclear-weapons plants? And what about the next generation, the
children of test victims, who may have suffered genetic damage?
Stanfill's life changed on May 8, 1946, when he received orders
detailing his role in Operation Crossroads near the Bikini atoll in
the western Pacific. The document, titled Target Coordinator's
Memorandum No. 12-46, did not pretend that the mission was risk-free.
Paragraph 6 warned, "Do not pick up any souvenir pieces . . . they may
be radio-active and may cause serious illness and even death." The
next instruction: "Do not eat food and drink water . . . until it has
been inspected." Yet steam fitter Stanfill and the other 11 members of
his unit, Team Able, saw little cause for alarm. It was peacetime.
Their job was simply to inspect the pipes aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga
after a nuclear blast. Paragraph 5 assured, "Before Team Able comes
aboard to do its work, the ship will have been inspected for
radio-activity by qualified technicians . . . who will notify the
proper authorities that the ship is safe for reboarding."
In the years since then, Stanfill has concluded that there was a heavy
cost to his participation. In 1976 he had to quit his truck-driving
job because of prostate problems. After that, he underwent several
operations to correct spinal disorders and to separate his intestinal
wall from his bladder. The string of mysterious ailments reaches to
the next generations. In 1977 his daughter Shannon died at age 25
after an abnormal pregnancy. His son Shawn, 42, a Vietnam veteran, had
skin cancer and suffers from strange abdominal problems. One of
Shawn's two teenage sons suffers peculiar knee trouble; the other gets
migraine headaches. The Stanfill clan suspects that many or all of
these problems are cross-generational fallout from Operation
Crossroads -- but they have no way of knowing for sure. "The amount of
my father's exposure to radiation was significant. I think there was
some genetic damage to my father," says Shawn. "It could have affected
three generations."
The Stanfill experience is just another drop in the hard rain of fear
and potential litigation resulting from the government's disclosures,
a case of honesty breeding complaint. When O'Leary called upon the
government on Dec. 7 to lift the shroud of secrecy surrounding
radiation experiments conducted from the 1940s through the 1970s, then
topped that on Dec. 28 with a call for compensation, she was alluding
only to about 800 people, most of them incarcerated, mentally disabled
or terminally ill. "I knew this wouldn't be resolved in a week or a
month or even a year," O'Leary told TIME. Even so, no one could have
predicted the magnitude or intensity of the reaction. Last week alone,
10,000 calls came in to a toll-free Human Experimentation Hot Line set
up by the Energy Department to locate survivors. The department was
forced to triple its number of phone workers to 36 and extend service
to more than 14 hours a day.
The activity is bound to increase. Eight other departments and
agencies rushed to follow O'Leary's lead, promising to probe radiation
wrongdoings. While none have yet echoed O'Leary's call for
compensation -- which Energy officials estimate could produce
liability claims totaling anywhere from $1 million to $300 million --
all have promised to dredge up internal documents to ascertain the
full scope of the testing, the degree of informed consent involved and
the conditions of the remaining survivors. More ominously for an
Administration that is flirting with compensation, reports
proliferated of medical experiments and military tests that had not
been part of O'Leary's original calculation.
An alliance of environmental groups in a dozen states called the
Military Production Network, for instance, released documents showing
that the Energy Department had paid $47 million in legal fees over the
past three years to defend nuclear-weapons-plant contractors against
eight class-action suits by workers and civilians. "There's no
significant difference between someone who's been injected with
plutonium and somebody whose ((drinking)) well contains radioactive
elements," argues Bob Schaeffer of M.P.N. "They too are victims, and
the Federal Government must take responsibility."
In Tennessee public reaction reached near hysteria last month when the
local press dug up a series of nutritional experiments conducted in
the 1940s at Vanderbilt University's free prenatal clinic in
Nashville. Funded in part by the Tennessee Department of Health, the
tests involved feeding more than 800 women a "cocktail" laced with a
mildly radioactive iron isotope to chart how the iron was absorbed. A
follow-up study in the 1960s found a "small but statistically
significant increase" in cancer among the children born to the women.
University officials say they don't know if the women's consent was
obtained. At least one of them, Emma Craft, now 72, says she was never
told of any experiments. "Back then you felt like the doctors were
always doing the best they could," she recalls. "You didn't ask any
questions; you just took what they gave you." Craft's daughter Carolyn
died of a tumor at age 11.
That question of informed consent is rapidly emerging as the core
issue in the looming battle over governmental liability. Many
scientists and doctors argued last week that Americans must keep in
mind the context of the cold war tests. Standards for human
experimentation were less stringent back then; the long-term effects
of radiation were not yet known. Moreover, says Dr. Mark Siegler of
the University of Chicago's Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, in the
tide of press reports about medical and military experiments,
"unrelated studies are often lumped together into one big story." The
horrifying details of individual suffering also cloak the medical
advances that have resulted from experiments that used radioactive
tracers. "When the newspaper says 'radiation,' people panic," says
Professor Herman Cember, who is an expert on radiation protection and
safety at Northwestern University. "What people don't understand is
that radioactivity is all around us."
It is one thing if the tests were designed to defend citizens against
nuclear attack, a case of a few citizens being put at risk for the
benefit of society at large. But the moral stretch is more dubious if
the tests were aimed at developing a battlefield nuclear weapon.
Argues Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental
Research in Takoma Park, Maryland: "There's plenty of evidence that
some of these tests were designed to give the U.S. an offensive
radiological capability."
A recent report by Congress's General Accounting Office that documents
13 planned radioactive releases conducted at U.S. nuclear sites
between 1948 and 1952 seems to support that claim. In Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, a town created by the government to serve as the original
"Atomic City," a 1948 experiment tested for "the effectiveness of
scattered radiation from a single gamma-emitting source." Two tests at
the U.S. Army's Dugway, Utah, site were designed "to obtain
information about the uniformity of ballistic dispersal from an
air-dropped device over an approximately 1-sq.-mi. area." If that
proves to mean that U.S. service personnel were used as stand-in
guinea pigs for enemy troops, the government may find itself having to
answer for a lot more mistakes and crimes than O'Leary ever intended. |
