杏吧原创

Cold war dreams of producing nuclear bombs fuelled shocking radiation experiments by US and Soviet governments, reveals Kate Brown鈥檚 Plutopia

MAKING plutonium for nuclear bombs takes balls, but not in the way you might think. In 1965, scientists at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in Washington state wanted to investigate the impact of radiation on fertility 鈥� and they weren鈥檛 hidebound by ethics.

In a specially fortified room in the basement of Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, volunteer prisoners were asked to lie face down on a trapezoid-shaped bed. They put their legs into stirrups, and let their testicles drop into a plastic box of water where they were zapped by X-rays.

The experiments, which lasted for a decade and involved 131 prisoners, came up with some unsurprising results. Even at the lowest dose 鈥� 0.1 gray 鈥� sperm was damaged, and at twice that dose the prisoners became sterile. They were paid $5 a month for their trouble, plus $25 per biopsy and $100 for a compulsory vasectomy at the end so they didn鈥檛 father children with mutations.

The testicle tests are just one of many disturbing details Kate Brown has unearthed from the official archives in her fascinating nuclear history. She also tells how tunnels created by muskrats undermined one of Hanford鈥檚 storage ponds, causing 60 million litres of radioactive effluent to pour into the Columbia river.

And there is the scary tale of how Hanford scientists conducted one of their riskiest experiments, later dubbed the 鈥済reen run鈥�. For 7 hours, they processed highly radioactive 鈥済reen鈥� fuel that had not been allowed to decay for as long as usual 鈥� and showered 407,000 gigabecquerels of radioactive iodine over nearby cities. The green run is said to have been an attempt to mimic what the US thought the Soviet Union was doing to boost plutonium production at its Mayak nuclear weapons plant at Ozersk, in the Urals.

It is the looking-glass links between Hanford and Mayak, and the communities that host them, that form the central theme of Brown鈥檚 book. They were two secretive citadels, dedicated to producing as much plutonium as possible to fuel the cold war arsenals of the world鈥檚 two opposing superpowers. They both conferred wealth and privilege on their elite staff, copying each other to create what Brown styles as a 鈥減lutopia鈥�.

But the two vast, creaking, nuclear complexes also deliberately discharged huge amounts of radioactivity into the environment, cut corners and caused countless accidents and leaks. Brown estimates that during their existence they each released at least 7.4 billion gigabecquerels, four times the amount released by the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986.

鈥淭he two creaking, nuclear complexes deliberately discharged huge amounts of radioactivity鈥�

The rivers that drain the two sites, the Columbia and the Techa, have both been called the most radioactive in the world, and many thousands of people who live downstream and downwind say the contamination has made them sick. These are, says Brown, 鈥渟low motion disasters鈥� created and covered up by state machines.

Brown argues that the US and the Soviet Union both subverted science to maintain the plutopia. The most shocking example was the US Atomic Energy Commission鈥檚 takeover of seminal Japanese research into the health impacts of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was necessary, according to a senior AEC official in 1955, to ensure that 鈥渕isleading and unsound reports鈥� were 鈥渒ept to a minimum鈥�.

Brown鈥檚 account is unique, partisan and occasionally personal in that she includes some of her thoughts about interviews she conducted: for example, she recounts how she ended up becoming friends with one interviewee. But because she is open and thorough about her sources, those are strengths to be celebrated, not weaknesses to be deplored. It also means her book is engaging, honest and, in the end, entirely credible.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he hot cold war cover-up鈥�