The Cold War Experiments
Radiation tests were only one small part of a vast research program that used thousands of Americans as guinea pigs
On June 1, 1951, top military and intelligence officials of the United States, Canada and Great Britain, alarmed by frightening reports of communist success at "intervention in the individual mind," summoned a small group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. The Soviets had gotten Hungary's Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty, an outspoken anti-communist, to confess to espionage, and they also seemed to be able to indocrinate political enemies and even control the thoughts of entire populations. The researchers were convinced that the communists' success must be the fruit of some mysterious and sinister scientific breakthroughs. By the following September, U.S. government scientists, spurred on by reports that American prisoners of war were being brainwashed in North Korea, were proposing an urgent, top-secret research program on behavior modification. Drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, lobotomy--all were to be studied as part of a vast U.S. effort to close the mind-control gap.
New revelations that government cold war experiments exposed thousands of Americans to radiation have prompted fresh congressional inquiries, including a hearing last week on tests conducted on retarded children in Massachusetts. A Department of Energy hot line set up to handle calls from possible subjects of the tests has been swamped. But the radiation experiments are only one facet of a vast cold war research program that used thousands of Americans as guinea pigs.
From the end of World War II well into the 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Department, the military services, the CIA and other agencies used prisoners, drug addicts, mental patients, college students, soldiers, even bar patrons, in a vast range of government-run experiments to test the effects of everything from radiation, LSD and nerve gas to intense electric shocks and prolonged "sensory deprivation." Some of the human guinea pigs knew what they were getting into; many others did not. Still others did not even know they were being experimented on. But in the life-and-death struggle with communism, America could not afford to leave any scientific avenue unexplored.
With the cold war safely over, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary has ordered the declassification of millions of pages of documents on the radiation experiments, and the administration is now considering compensating the hundreds of subjects of these odd and sometimes gruesome atomic tests. But the government has long ignored thousands of other cold war victims, rebuffing their requests for compensation and refusing to admit its responsibility for injuries they suffered. And the Clinton administration shows no sign of softening that hard line. "We're not looking for drugs," says cabinet secretary Christine Varney. "At least initially, we need to keep our focus limited to human radiation."
In Clinton's court. Now, the only hope for thousands who were injured or who were experimented on without their informed consent is that President Clinton or Congress will take action to compensate the forgotten casualties of the cold war. Continued secrecy and legal roadblocks erected by the government have made it virtually impossible for victims of these cold war human experiments to sue the government successfully, legal experts say.
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