For all of us who love America as its citizens, it is something we would rather not think. But how do we react when we see evil being done?
I wanted to write a book review for
The Plutonium Files, but have not got to it yet. It's a large book – over 500 pages. However, it is a key factor in answering the question of this article. So, since I can't really say what I read yet, I will put before you the book description. The reason I am doing this is that I saw the author some time ago on Democracy Now and was impressed with her story.
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, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors.... At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"—in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron—as part of their prenatal treatment....
In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting Americans with radioactive plutonium. In this shocking exposé, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome reveals the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens with silvery radioactive metal circulating in their veins. Spanning the 1930s to the 1990s, filled with hundreds of newly declassified documents and firsthand interviews, The Plutonium Files traces the behind-the-scenes story of an extraordinary fifty-year cover-up. It illuminates a shadowy chapter in this country's history and gives eloquent voice to the men and women who paid for our atomic energy discoveries with their health—and sometimes their lives.A B&N reviewer writes:
Well researched,scary
Welsome does a great job of bringing this shocking and disturbing account of human guinea pigs in America, which is still probably happening now with experiments we are not told about. She specifically discusses the Fernald school and how unwanted kids were befriended by MIT researchers and given presents and trips in return for drinking radioactive milkshakes. This was scandalous some years ago and one might wonder if the research at Fernald was later used for things like the first microwave oven introduced by Raytheon. This is frightening in that it shows our government really cannot be trusted to act always in our best interests.Does this make anyone think twice about 9/11?
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