Do as I Say, Not as I Do

Pilita Clark, ‘US confesses secret N-tests near Australia’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 09.12.93

The United States secretly tested 48 nuclear bombs on Australia’s doorstep in the Pacific Ocean after 1945.

It appears the tests were kept secret to mislead not only Washington’s Cold War foes in the former Soviet Union, but also its formal allies, Australia and New Zealand.

The newly released information reveals the US Government concealed a total of more than 250 nuclear weapons tests since the 1940s, 204 of which were done at its Nevada test site, the rest in the Pacific. Most of the tests were done in the 1960s and 1970s but 17 were done in the 1980s and one in 1990. All were described as being relatively small, that is, less than 20 kilotons.

The Energy Secretary, Ms Hazel O’Leary, who released this information yesterday, also confessed that 18 US citizens had been injected with plutonium during the 1940s without their knowledge or consent - a discovery she said had left her with “an ache in my gut and my heart”. 

The revelations came at a special news conference Ms O’Leary called to release the biggest batch of previously classified nuclear secrets in her department’s history.

“The Cold War is over - we’re coming clean,” she said, adding that there was more information to come and the day’s release was “just a foot in the tub”. 

Ms O’Leary said the department was looking at releasing full details of the Pacific tests, such as precisely when they were done; how big the fallout range was and what size of bomb was tested.

“We have to strike a balance between telling the public what they should know, now that the Cold War is behind us, [and] not making available information to allow nations to build their own bombs,” she said.

Of the previously secret nuclear bomb tests, the department said 36 had accidentally sent small quantities of radioactive gas into the atmosphere but said “there was no lasting environmental impact, even in the immediate areas”.

The New York Times said private analysts were especially intrigued by 18 unannounced tests conducted during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, the last one in 1990, a time when more sensitive seismological instruments could detect all but the smallest tests.

The Times said the Pacific tests were conducted at tiny atolls before atmospheric tests were halted in the late 1950s.

As Ms O’Leary conceded, the number of secret tests was some 50 per cent greater than that estimated by private researchers and academics.

Some 800 tests were conducted on human beings, including 18 people who were injected with highly radioactive plutonium in the 1940s to see how much exposure workers could safely handle.

The 18 are now dead but yesterday some of their relatives, contacted by reporters, expressed profound bitterness at the revelations.

Ms O’Leary’s revelations overshadowed a speech by the Defence Secretary, Mr Les Aspin, who suggested the US was simply unable to stop the proliferation of “loose nukes” in the former Soviet Union and other countries, including those controlled by terrorist regimes.

Announcing a range of new “protective” counter-proliferation measures, Mr Aspin said the US faced a bigger nuclear proliferation threat “than we have ever faced before”.

In Canberra, a spokeswoman for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Gareth Evans, said it was a “positive development” that the US had finally announced the tests had taken place.

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Tom Post with Douglas Waller, ‘The Dirty Little Secrets of the Atomic Age’, Newsweek, 16.12.93

It was time to “come clean,” Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary reckoned last week. What she revealed was a shocking, if incomplete, tale of deceit and lingering peril. Beginning in 1963, just after the two superpowers agreed not to detonate nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, until 1990, the United States conducted 204 underground tests, but never publicly acknowledged them. Beginning in the 1940s, the government subjected some 600 Americans to radiation experiments. More than a dozen received injections of plutonium, most without their consent. And the deadly legacy lives on. Nearly 34 metric tons of bomb-grade plutonium remain warehoused in six states, posing a colossal problem of disposal; almost 6 million pounds of radioactive waste are in rusted, leaky basins.

Why choose this moment to ‘fess up? Loose nukes have the Clinton administration more worried than ever before. Last week Secretary of Defense Les Aspin unveiled a “counter-proliferation initiative” that directs military commanders to draw up battle plans against rogue nations with newly acquired nuclear capability, instead of former Warsaw Pact countries. This week, Newsweek has learned, President Clinton will meet with senior advisers to consider the threat of terrorism and nuclear weapons. And O’Leary, on a visit to Moscow this week, will press the Russians to come clean about their dirty nuclear history, too.

The DOE’s sins of the past continue to haunt the present - perhaps none more ominously than the experiments on human subjects. According to a six-year investigation by The Albuquerque Tribune, 18 people - including house-wives, three African-Americans, teenagers, elderly retirees, even a 4-year-old boy - were part of a nationwide study from 1945 to 1947 to determine how quickly plutonium travelled through the body. One of them was John Mousso, a 45-year-old, blue-collar worker who checked into Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, in 1946, after a diagnosis of Addison’s disease. Doctors told him he’d receive an experimental drug, but actually injected him with plutonium 239 - 46 times the radiation a normal person receives in a lifetime, the Tribune reported. Mousso lived until 1984, plagued by skin diseases, digestive ailments and lethargy. His family went on welfare because he couldn’t work. The DOE never let on. “I equate it with some of the things the Nazis were tried and executed for in World War II,” Gerald Mousso, his nephew, told Newsweek.

With a huge and costly cleanup on its hands, the DOE must do more than atone. Its own survey of spent fuel at nuclear-weapons sites found appalling conditions at three facilities. Many storage tanks, built mostly in the 1940s, are severely corroded and leaking radioactive water. The debris from rusting parts could trigger a nuclear reaction. More horror stories will undoubtedly emerge as the DOE releases more of the 32 million pages of still-classified documents. By the time its all over, O’Leary may end up letting loose as many demons as she exorcises.