|
|
| |
| |
Date Published: 22/04/2001
Author: Eduardo Goncalves As the shockwaves from the organ retention scandal at some of Britain’s top hospitals continue to reverberate, The Ecologist reveals the nuclear establishment’s own grotesque brand of ‘bodysnatching’. Eduardo Goncalves on how doctors, multinational corporations and even Christian missionaries across the globe helped British and American nuclear scientists secretly steal the bones of thousands of dead children. |
 |
It was an icy-cold January morning in downtown Washington. The snow on the pavement contrasted eerily with the stony grey of the nondescript building where the men had been told to arrive. It was to be an important meeting, although few outside room 1201 here at the US Atomic Energy Commission would ever know its real purpose.
John Bugher, head of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, eyed the gathering. Of the 29 men hovering around the long table, most were government nuclear scientists like him. A handful were military men. There were also two representatives of the Rand Corporation. Their contribution to this secret operation would be crucial.
It had gone 9am. Bugher cleared his throat, and began.
‘We will come to order, please. We are a little late, and I notice the clock is four minutes slow anyway. The conference here as before is a classified conference. I will assume that no one is present who is not cleared for restricted data.’
And so began what was to be the most important meeting of ‘Project Sunshine’, one of a number of secret American atomic research programmes which today was to acquire special significance. Bugher introduced AEC Commissioner Willard Libby, who was to tell them of Sunshine’s new drive.
‘I would like to say that there is no effort which the AEC is engaged in which to my mind is more important than this project’, began Libby. ‘There are very great gaps in the data, and it should be our prime objective to fill those holes... By far the most important is human samples. We have been reduced to essentially zero on the human samples. I don’t know how to get them, but I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them and particularly in the young age group... Human samples are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of bodysnatching, they will really be serving their country.’
He paused. If his colleagues were shocked, it did not show. Libby continued.
‘I don’t know how to snatch bodies. We hired an expensive law firm to look up the law of bodysnatching. This compendium is available to you. It is not very encouraging. It shows you how very difficult it is going to be to do it legally. It is a delicate problem in public relations, obviously,’ he added, as if as an after-thought.
Laurence Kulp, an ambitious and energetic nuclear scientist from Colombia University, spoke up. He had already done research on the bones of young children and middle-aged people he had managed to acquire. He would later become director of Project Sunshine.
‘We have the channels in these places where we are getting everything. We have three or four other leads where we could get complete age range samples from different other geographic locations. These three are Vancouver, Houston and New York. We could easily get them from Puerto Rico and other places. We can get virtually everyone that dies in this range... The channel is there, and the samples are flowing in,’ he added.
‘We intend to get virtually every death in the age range we are interested in the City of Houston. They have a lot of poverty cases and so on. Down in Houston they don’t have all these rules.’
The scene could almost have been lifted from a B-movie, though the dialogue is not a film script, but is taken from official transcripts recently declassified by the US Department of Energy of meetings held in the 1950s, and these ‘bodysnatchers’ – as they were to become nicknamed – were not actors but government agents whose work was funded by taxpayers.
Concerns about the possible irreversible human and environmental consequences of nuclear testing had arisen after the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico, but now public and political pressure was growing.
America’s announcement in January 1950 of plans to develop the H-bomb sparked the beginnings of a global anti-nuclear protest movement. A few years later, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein were to launch the famous manifesto signed by 11 of the world’s top scientists – nine of them Nobel laureates – which warned of the massive genetic damage that could be caused.
Adlai Stevenson, who was to run for President in 1956, publicly called for an end to the tests, whilst an undated memorandum from the AEC to President Eisenhower showed that he too was worried: ‘The last time we talked, you mentioned strontium-90 occurring in the ‘fallout’ from atomic weapons tests. It seemed to me that you indicated some concern with the amounts that had been produced.’
The flurry of publicity that followed the US H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll which contaminated the entire crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, and reports of mysterious sheep deaths near the Nevada testing site, prompted AEC officials to conclude in 1954 that the public, ‘which is expected to accept a certain degree of hazard, has not been adequately informed of the extent and nature of the hazard’.
In 1949 the AEC had set up ‘Project Gabriel’, a study to determine ‘how many atomic weapons could be detonated before radioactive contamination of air, water and soil would have a long-range effect upon crops, animals and humans’4, and with it a secret operation to establish a global network for the collection and measurement of fallout. But as the nuclear test programme expanded, so did the need for data, and in 1953 the Rand Corporation was contracted to review the operation.
Its report concluded that ‘the release in the world of several kilograms of strontium-90 within less than a decade has probably disseminated enough of the contaminant to provide amounts that are probably now detectable in samples of inert and biological materials throughout the world... Today we are afforded the opportunity of doing a radioactive-tracer chemistry experiment on a worldwide scale.’
Samples had already been acquired of livestock, foodstuffs, water and soil. Now, though, the operation was to change codename and become known as ‘Project Sunshine’ – and human bones would be collected too. The first priority was to get baby bones.
Because the ‘security specifications’ of the operation had to be maintained, a cover story would be used: ‘The stated purpose of the collection is to be for a survey of the natural radium burden of human bones. There are still enough uncertainties regarding threshold dose for injury to provide a plausible explanation for further surveys. As for the emphasis on infants, we can say that such samples are easy to obtain here, and that we would like to keep our foreign collections comparable’.
By April 1956, the operation had begun to bear fruit. The previous year they had acquired ‘only’ 55 stillborn babies from Chicago, one from Utah, three from southern India and three legs from Massachusetts. Now, though, they could boast over 1,300 human bodies and bones collected from 26 different countries and cities around the world (see table on page 32). From Asia to Europe, Africa to South America. Some were young adults. Most were just hours or days old.
The report cataloguing the gruesome tally was classified secret. It shows how the bodies were assigned simple numbers. An English baby boy who died in February 1956 at the age of two became ‘sample B-1344’. A 13-month-old baby girl who died in September that same year was ‘B-595’. Both are among the 27 bodies that were shipped to the Americans that year by Middlesex Hospital. The oldest was 30 years of age. The youngest – identified only as B-1102 – was a mere eight months old.
The ‘bodysnatchers’ did not stop there, though. More ‘samples’ were acquired from the Catholic University School of Medicine in-- Santiago, Chile, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Foundation also helped secure human bones from the Maternity Hospital in Lima, Peru, and the Medicine Faculty at Brazil’s Recife University, and Dr Shields Warren, who supplied hundreds of bones from his own Cancer Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, arranged for further ‘samples’ to arrive from Bristol, England.
The Department of Energy says it has no evidence to suggest that consent was acquired from any of the relatives of the deceased, in Britain or elsewhere. In fact, the nuclear establishment in Britain was not only directly involved in Project Sunshine – it even had its own bone collection operation.
England was one of the first sites chosen by the AEC in the early 1950s to be part of the Sunshine network, and was assigned the codename Area 5. Reports show that US officials acquired ‘cadavers’ from the UK as early as 1953.10 Sometimes it was the British themselves who were to take the initiative. In 1956, a leading scientist at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote to the AEC: ‘I enclose two copies of reports on the intercomparison of samples and on radiochemical methods. You will see that there is good agreement between the UK and the US on samples of bone, hay and milk.’
The title of this UKAEA report is revealing: ‘Cross Checks between UK and US Sunshine Results’. The list of data offered within its pages includes ‘a still-born child’.
Other US documents state that samples of human tissue from England were ‘readily available’ – including the ribs and teeth of babies and children. One letter from the UK Atomic Energy Authority to Washington is unabashedly entitled: ‘Samples Required for Sunshine’. It followed a secret meeting between AEC Sunshine scientist Robert Dudley and UKAEA counterparts at the latter’s Harwell headquarters on 2 January 1955.
But if American freedom of information legislation is now allowing some of the story belatedly to emerge, the whole truth about the extent of British-American bodysnatching is unlikely ever to become public knowledge. When asked to release a file from the Project Sunshine archives entitled ‘Classified Discussions at Harwell’, the US government wrote back: ‘This document has been determined to be NOT DECLASSIFIABLE and has been removed from this folder’.
Ironically, files now being released into the Public Record Office in London are shedding new light on Britain’s own nuclear ‘bodysnatchers’. They show that, as with the Americans, their main interest lay in young babies: of 276 UKAEA ‘samples’ collected between July 1963 and June 1964, for example, 112 were new-born babies, and 104 were younger than four years old. Stillborn foetuses were provided by institutions such as the Royal Cancer Hospital in London, the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, and the Regional Physics Department in Glasgow.
More bodies and bones were provided to UKAEA scientists working in laboratories at Woolwich and Capenhurst by doctors in Cambridge, Newmarket, Norwich, Chelmsford, and the West London Coroner (see below). British nuclear scientists even mimicked their American friends’ global aspirations by acquiring babies from as far afield as Hong Kong.
The scandals at Bristol and Alder Hey hospitals, and now the organ-stripping of the Marchioness disaster victims, raised the issue of informed consent. But the nuclear bodysnatchers raises another question: where does the buck stop? Documents show that, in the United States at least, no less a figure than the President himself was kept informed of Project Sunshine’s progress. Who will now take responsibility in Britain for this latest proven abuse of ordinary people’s rights by the nuclear establishment?
Eduardo Goncalves is a Portuguese freelance journalist. He is currently writing a book about the hidden history of the nuclear age. He lives and works on an organic smallholding in southwest Portugal with his partner and 12 cats. References on page 66.
|
| |
| Back to articles related to Radiation |
| |
 |
|
|
|
'contentbuilder is a service provided by etribes Limited - ' |
| |
|
|