Sign up for our Lehigh Valley School Zone education newsletter

WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE TO PROBE RADIATION EXPOSURE

THE MORNING CALL

The White House announced the establishment of a government-wide task force yesterday to identify the range of secret Cold War-era nuclear experiments by the federal government on humans and assess compensation issues for people found to have been wronged.

White House communications director Mark Gearan said the task force has been established to "go about the business of getting to the bottom" of Washington's long-secret radiation experiments on humans. The tests were authorized by a number of government agencies beginning in the 1940s, when the nuclear weapons program was born.

Senior officials from a dozen government agencies met at the White House yesterday to discuss the issue following the announcements last week by the Energy Department that up to 800 people were exposed to radiation in tests conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and 1950s.

Gearan said the Clinton administration is involved in a "fact-finding effort," aimed at assessing how much experimentation was done by the federal government, where and to whom it was done, whether compensation for some patients is justified and how that would be determined. The Office of Management and Budget has been designated to draw up what one official called "compensation models" of how unwitting victims of other government programs were compensated.

An Energy Department official who attended the meeting said the department's experience trying to track patients and their whereabouts suggests that the government-wide effort will be "quite difficult." She said follow-up was "spotty and unorganized" on just the experiments conducted by the old AEC, and that undertaking such an assessment on all experiments since World War II "is an incredibly ambitious undertaking."

Gearan said it was "premature" to declare that victims would be compensated but said that President Clinton believes "if Americans are deemed to have been wronged," some righting should be made.

The session yesterday did not include the Central Intelligence Agency, which has been named as conducting tests similar to the ones conducted by the AEC, a forerunner to the Energy Department. But Gearan said the National Security Council's involvement in the task force would ensure that the CIA will be involved "should that be appropriate."

Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., who headed a congressional subcommittee that looked into the testing issue in 1986, said senior White House officials assured him in a separate meeting yesterday that all agencies that might have conducted radiation experiments on human subjects, including the CIA, will be involved in the administration's examination.

Markey said he was assured by White House officials that "they are committed to compensating victims."

The White House meeting included representatives of the departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice, Defense and Veterans Affairs, the National Security Council, the OMB and others, officials said.

The same group is to meet next Monday to assess their information retrieval efforts, and Cabinet officials are to meet on the subject at the end of the month. Clinton did not attend yesterday's session, which was a staff-level meeting.

Lawmakers and outside experts praised the administration's swift decision to take charge of the issue. But many stressed that it is only the first step in a complex process of resolving one of the darkest chapters of U.S. involvement in the Cold War.

With hundreds of persons calling federal agencies to complain that they were guinea pigs in radiation tests, the federal government may be subject to hundreds of millions of dollars in claims.

The government has dealt with radiation claims before. In those cases, radiation victims have received $50,000 to $100,000 in settlements. Altogether, about 600 victims have been compensated, including researchers, uranium miners, and "downwinders" who were exposed to radiation gases released to determine how far downwind they would travel.

Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary recommended publicly last week that the victims of Cold War radiation experiments be located. "We cannot turn our back on our responsibility here," she said in an interview. "We have to do whatever is needed to make these people whole again."

Recent newspaper reports have documented a series of radiation tests sponsored by federal researchers during the 1940s and '50s. In one experiment, Massachusetts scientists fed several dozen mentally retarded boys doses of radiation mixed with breakfast cereal. In another, 11 people were fed radiation-contaminated fish near the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in Washington state.

Copyright © 2020, The Morning Call
37°