The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

by Eileen Welsome

Book Overview

In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385319541
• ISBN13: 9780385319546
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Delta
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Don't wait as long as I did to read this book. Just do it.

Don't wait as long as I did to read this very important book. Every thinking person needs to know what can happen when the apparatchiks get out of control. Secret experiments are done in hospitals. People are lied to and lured into treatments they don't need. Some are killed by the state without trial. And its all for the good of the state, not the people who are "treated." Russian, American and allied troops fought World War II to see that these things did not happen ever again. The Nuremberg Trials resulted in the Nuremberg Medical Code. The Code forbids medical experimentation on non-consenting citizens. In today's Russia the kind of activity talked about in Eileen Welsome's book would be outside the pale of what is now considered civilized behavior.So where did all the nefarious activity Ms. Welsome uncovered take place? The United States. Who were the culprits, the Dr. Frankensteins? They were doctors in some of America's most prestigious teaching hospitals. Whose government covered up the scandals for 50 years? Ours. Read this book right now and never let the government lie to us like this again. Our government lied to us, our doctors lied to us, our hospitals lied to us. All three experimented on our fellow citizens. This book tells us to take care. It tells us to watch our decision-makers carefully.Ms. Welsome's book The Plutonium Files reminds us once again that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty (and so it would seem are health and longevity)." She deserves all the accolades she has received and our thanks.

What we always suspected

Ms. Welsom has done an excellent job of presenting the available information on the use of human testing with radiation and radioactive materials. This book contains an excellent review of the early investigations on radiation and radioactivity as well as the development of the atomic bomb. At the core of this book, is the issue of ethics and scientific investigation. It is amazing to compare our present day attitude towards human rights with the Cold War era policy of secrecy. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in science and the responsibility of the government.

Just mindblowing!

Its not often that a book just explodes your safe old comfortable ways of thinking. To write such a book took enormous enormous courage. I am surprised it was published and not suppressed. Most authors just write books; some write books that may change the world. This is such a book. Bravo and thank you Ms Welsome. They say the truth is out there - well, its in here!

Important contribution to exposes of nuclear abuses

As a physicist, I learned early on in my education about the dangers of radioactive materials -- sadly, at the time I did not know that the information we had was gained through these heinous human experiments. This book, meticulously researched and believably written, is a convincing expose of the US Army's and the Federal Government's callous attitudes towards the people these two serve and are financially supported by -- the citizens of the US. It is also a history of atomic development. The author delves into the Manhattan Project and into the founding of Los Alamos. The entire book is written in an easy to understand style, with excellent explanations where explanations are needed, so that anyone could read this comfortably. The discomfort is in what was done to the victims, and the continuing publicity and attitude that the American government is the only MORAL government on earth. It is a very sad thing when the Federal Government shows itself to be dangerous to its citizens, but these experiments add to a growing mound of evidence. The author has done a thorough, dedicated, and compassionate job of investigating and documenting. We should be stirred into anger and action by the book, but it is a sad thing too that the American people can't be roused -- it is as if we are more interested in the fictional lives we see on our favorite TV shows than in our own, and our children's, lives. In a way, too, anyone downwind of the above ground nuclear tests (just about all of us, even the unborn and the unconceived) were guinea pigs of airborne radiation, and we are to this day from fallout. This book is about specific people who were directly injected or who ingested radioactive materials, but it is actually about all of us. Chilling things -- the horrible deterioration of the women who used liquid radium to paint the dials on watches and who licked the brushes, the fate of those who died during experimentation, and the coldness of the scientists and physicians (those meant to heal, not kill). This is the history of a horrible, unethical time in our country, and one cannot help wonder what other similar experiments are going on today, under the aegis of the military or of industry, all with the blessing of the government. One cannot help wondering, too, about the scientific community and its blind ambition for knowledge or its competition for the Nobel Prize at all costs. Anyone with any moral conscience should be shocked and wary after reading this book -- but please do read it. If the subject interests you, also check into The River, about the HIV epidemic and the scientists developing the polio vaccine for sub-Saharan Africa, which is another well-researched book exposing the threats posed by the scientific community.

U.S.Skeletons Exhumed

The research is thorough and the facts accurate as Eileen Welsome unearths the secrets of United States Government sponsored human medical experimentation. Doctors had no regard for ethics when they injected, fed, and otherwise exposed unwitting men, women, and children various known and suspected highly toxic substances. The family of CAL-3 (Elmer Allen), who was INJECTED with PLUTONIUM and whose left LEG was AMPUTATED and taken to 'radiological research,' is grateful to Ms. Welsome for lifting the cover of this deep dark secret. The truth, buried for too long by the scientific community and our United States Government, is now on display.