Deseret News
Wednesday, January 19, 1994

INQUIRY ORDERED INTO RADIATION TESTS AT DUGWAY
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By Lee Davidson, Washington Correspondent

President Clinton has ordered an inquiry into six tests that spread radiation in Utah between 1949 and 1952. The tests had been secret until last month.

The president signed an order Tuesday creating a 15-member Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Its members have not yet been named, but the White House said they will include experts in medicine, science and ethics to help government investigations into Cold War experiments that may have exposed people to radiation without their knowledge.

The group was instructed to look at numerous radiation experiments, and the list included six tests conducted at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground between 1949 and 1952. They included dropping cluster bombs filled with radioactive materials.

Those tests were revealed last month in a study by the General Accounting Office - a research arm of Congress - and released by Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio.

The GAO study said the Army Chemical Corps, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Air Force dropped the 2,000-pound cluster bombs filled with radioactive material at Dugway on Oct. 22 and Nov. 30, 1949.

It said the first test contaminated 0.6 square miles, and the second contaminated another 0.8 square miles.

As part of a program to develop weapons to radioactively contaminate small areas, the GAO said four more tests occurred at Dugway - two in September 1950, one in November 1951 and one in May 1952 - but it found few details about them.

The Deseret News has requested documents about the Dugway tests both informally and through the Freedom of Information Act. Dugway officials said records about them were in Virginia but referred inquiries to Army headquarters.

The Army referred inquiries to the Defense Department, which in turn said it is waiting for instructions from the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group for directions on how to release such information.

That interagency working group - formed on Jan. 3 - includes the secretaries of energy, defense, veterans affairs and health and human services, the attorney general and directors of NASA, the CIA and the Office of Management and Budget.

The new advisory group that Clinton formed Tuesday will report to that interagency working group, which Clinton has vowed will reveal as much as possible about the experiments.

Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary - who has released information about several radiation experiments in recent weeks - told a congressional hearing on Tuesday that about 800 Americans may have been involved in secret radiation experiments.

However, more than 15,000 people have called a hotline for possible victims (1-800-493-2990). O'Leary said said only about 40 percent of those calling believe they are victims, while the others have been calling to express outrage.

More radiation experiments than the six mentioned may have occurred at Dugway.

Deseret News probes in previous years found documents mentioning plans to drop radioactive material at Dugway in the 1950s and 1960s, but they did not say whether such experiments actually occurred.

Also, a story in 1960 announced Army plans to test radioactivity at a special grid at Dugway by running vehicles through 40 million pellets of cobalt under controlled conditions.

The radiological tests were in addition to the thousands of open-air trials involving germ and chemical warfare agents at Dugway in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.