Response on Radiation Studies Suggests an Iceberg Is Below

Some 4,000 American civilians have given government investigators accounts of studies that they believe may have exposed them to radiation, suggesting for the first time that the Cold War’s human guinea pigs may be far more numerous than previously believed.

In addition, a far larger number of U.S. military veterans--roughly 8,000--have called the Energy Department to report accounts of experimentation on servicemen. Those calls are being directed to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has acknowledged in recent days that radiation experiments involving human subjects were conducted at 48 of its facilities.

The calls, coming into the Energy Department’s hot line at a rate of as many as 700 per hour, have swamped a hastily organized reporting system and overwhelmed a government effort designed to “come clean” with Americans and possibly compensate victims.

When she unveiled her department’s new openness policy, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary said that her agency’s records indicated between 600 and 800 human subjects may have been used in past radiation experiments.

And while officials do not yet have a system to handle the volume of calls they are receiving, they cautioned that they do not want to discourage the overwhelming public response to O’Leary’s initiative. As they work to piece together a picture of experiments from three decades’ worth of confusing and incomplete documents, government workers are counting on the torrent of information they are getting from citizens to plug “holes” in the government’s records, a senior Energy Department official said.

“We do not know the total universe” of radiation experiments conducted under federal sponsorship, said Michael Gauldin, an O’Leary spokesman and a key member of a government task force established to review the conduct of radiation experiments performed between 1944 and 1974. “There’s never been a net cast to catch all of this, so we really have no idea the extent of what went on. It is impossible to overestimate the problems we may have. But we are determined to overcome them.”

Gauldin said the Human Radiation Inter-Agency Working Group has begun to organize itself to oversee the task of culling and classifying documents on what could be thousands of radiation experiments conducted across the nation with government funds.

Complicating the task is the fact the Energy Department did not exist during the entire period under study. Several agencies--including the Atomic Energy Commission and the Energy Research and Development Administration, which were subsumed into the Energy Department in 1977--as well as several Pentagon offices, appear to have funded most of the studies.

Moreover, those organizations frequently sponsored the studies but allowed researchers broad latitude in organizing and maintaining their experimental logs and material. As a result, some of the documentation that could confirm a subject’s participation may have been lost or destroyed, officials warned.

That has prompted government investigators to remind universities, hospitals and research institutions that it would be illegal to destroy documents related to the search. In addition, the investigators are developing chain-of-custody procedures like those used in the handling of criminal evidence to ensure that existing documents are not tampered with.

Even when the government’s task force has gathered those documents, it will have the monumental task of sifting through them and recommending which of those experiments may qualify subjects for compensation or for some form of government action.

While some experiments underwritten by the government were designed to benefit the health of the subject, others were not. While some government-sponsored experiments informed subjects of the nature of the experiments, others clearly did not. And while some continued to track the health of subjects over the long run, others did not.