Radioactive-Release Tests in U.S. Revealed : Experiments: The federal government purposely spread material 12 times between 1948 and 1952, says report obtained by Sen. Glenn.

The U.S. government deliberately dropped radioactive material from planes or released it on the ground in a dozen separate experiments after World War II, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) revealed Wednesday.

Eight of the tests occurred in Tennessee and Utah in an effort to create a battlefield radiation weapon. In four other instances, radiation was released into the air in New Mexico so pilots could chase the cloud of fallout to plot its movements.

In at least four of those 12 experiments, radiation spread beyond the planned boundaries of the test, moving in two cases into sparsely populated areas of New Mexico.

All of the tests were conducted between 1948 and 1952.

“The Cold War frenzy which gripped our nation immediately after World War II created a climate where tests such as these were deemed necessary. Twenty-twenty hindsight gives us a much different view,” Glenn said in releasing a report by the General Accounting Office that described the tests.

“There is no justification for the government to keep this information secret and there is no justification, except in extreme wartime conditions, for the principle of informed consent to be abandoned.”

The revelations come just a week after Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary promised to create a new atmosphere of openness about such Cold War nuclear matters and released details of human experiments involving plutonium. In letters to O’Leary and Defense Secretary Les Aspin, Glenn asked for investigations of the cases brought to light by the GAO and that further details be provided to Congress.

“We’re researching the source documents and will make every attempt to get them declassified as soon as possible,” said Energy Department spokesman Sam Grizzle. He added that Glenn’s concern for openness is consistent with O’Leary’s latest push for less secrecy about nuclear matters in the department.

Glenn, as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has conducted hearings on U.S. nuclear testing. The GAO investigation was triggered by revelations in 1989 of experiments that spread radiation over a 200-mile stretch of Oregon and Washington state in 1949. But Glenn said Wednesday that he was surprised at the number of previously undisclosed tests.

“I can’t think of any other program that needs more openness than the government’s planned releases of radiation,” Glenn said Wednesday.

Investigators reported that, in two tests designed to demonstrate how radioactivity clouds disperse, radiation bombs were dropped from planes over Los Alamos, N.M. The release created radioactive clouds that were tracked 10 miles in one case, 70 miles in another. In two other, similar tests the distance traveled by the clouds is unknown.

At Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, radiation from bombs dropped at an Army site spread 50% farther than expected, although the distance amounted only to 0.06 of a square mile. In the fall of 1949, the Army dropped cluster bombs containing radiation particles reaching 1,500 curies from a plane flying at 15,000 feet. That level of radiation could cause death in those exposed at extremely close range in about an hour.

Such radiation weapons were tested through 1952 and the research appears to have ended in 1954, the report says.

The 43-day emergency at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 emitted no more than 15 curies, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But all of those tests described by the GAO used radioactive sources that emitted radioactive levels of anywhere from 300 to 1,500 curies.

The report appeared to leave unanswered such questions as how deadly the radiation releases might have been, the exact routes the radioactive clouds traveled and whether any radioactive residue fell to the ground.

Experts said that generally the radioactivity achieved in the tests would have dispersed relatively quickly and added that no radioactive residue would remain in those areas today. But for populations in some of the remote communities downwind from the experimental sites, the GAO revelations are certain to spark further controversy over the government’s responsibility for cancer rates that many claim are above normal.

In Los Alamos, Margret Carde of Concerned Citizens for Environmental Safety called the revelations “absolutely shocking. It is very, very horrifying that it just isn’t a suspicion, it’s a reality.”