In September 1956, Cpl. Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old Army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.
Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the Cold War, where the threats to his life were all American.
The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of U.S. troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.
- 1. OVERVIEW: How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments • List of Studies
- 🎧 Podcast Episode 1: A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy
- 🎧 Podcast Episode 2: Why the Navy Conducted Radiation Experiments on Humans
- 2. THE DECISION-MAKERS: After Atomic Test Blunder, Government Authorized Study of Radiation in Humans
- 3. THE STUDIES: Human Radiation Studies Included Mock Combat, Skin Tests and a Plan to Inject 49ers
- 4. ETHICS: Cold War Scientists Pushed Ethical Boundaries With Radiation Experiments [Dec. 6]
- 5. FADING HISTORIES: Destroyed Records, Dying Witnesses Consign San Francisco Radiation Lab to Obscurity [Dec. 9]
- 6. PERPETUAL EXPERIMENT: Shuttered Radiation Lab Poses Ongoing Health Risks for Growing Neighborhood [Dec. 11]
Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout,” material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, Calif., was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a Navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.
A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with the Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.
The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.
Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top U.S. civilian and military officials preapproved all of this in writing, documents show.
The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.
The Navy’s San Francisco lab was a major Cold War research facility with a unique focus on “radiological defense,”📄 techniques developed to help the public survive and armed forces fight back in case of an atomic attack. It was one node in a nationwide network that encompassed universities, hospitals and national labs that had permission to handle dangerous radioactive material. As one of the first such institutions under the control of the Pentagon, it was among the military’s largest and most important research hubs.
In a sign of the era’s lax medical ethics and safety standards, lab directors advocated taking risks with human subjects without seeking informed consent or testing first on animals, according to the documents.
These shortcuts appear to have contravened the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines established after the horrors of Nazi experiments in concentration camps.
Scientists later acknowledged they were ignorant of the long-term effects of their work.
“We were aware of the signs, the symptoms and the damage that would be caused” by high levels of radiation, William Siri, a prominent University of California, Berkeley, biophysicist who cooperated with the lab to set up at least one experiment involving human exposure, said in a 1980 oral history📄. “But down at the low end of the dose range, no one was sure, and unfortunately no one is sure even to this day as to whether there is a threshold and what the very low levels would do.”
One scientist developed a keen interest in elite athletes, who he theorized would be most likely to survive a nuclear conflict. In 1955, he negotiated with the San Francisco 49ers to use football players as subjects in a medical study. Letters between the lab and the team show researchers had formulated a plan📄 to study body composition by having the men drink water laced with tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, and receive injections of radioactive chromium-51. Many years later, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigators failed to find contemporaneous records confirming the experiment proceeded as planned, though a lab employee claimed he had witnessed📄 it.
‘ETHICALLY FRAUGHT’
The lab’s work and decades of warship repair left the shipyard, which the Navy vacated in 1974, one of the most polluted sites in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed it a Superfund site in 1989.
Today, the 450-acre parcel anchors the biggest real estate construction project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. More than 10,000 housing units, hundreds of acres of parks and millions of square feet of commercial space are proposed.
Critics say the Navy has long downplayed a possible link between the pollution and poor health outcomes in the surrounding Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which became majority Black by the 1960s, a transformation powered by the lure of shipyard jobs. Critics say the failure of the military to make the area safe amounts to environmental racism.
In the Pentagon’s response to detailed questions about the radiation lab’s research program and human exposure toll, Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Callaghan acknowledged the experiments as “a matter of historical record” but declined to address their scientific merit or ethical significance.
“The Navy follows strict Department of Defense policies and responsibilities for the protection of human participants in DoD-supported programs and any research involving human subjects for testing of chemical or biological warfare agents is generally prohibited,” she said via email. She added, “The Navy cannot speculate on possible internal deliberations or motivations of medical researchers more than 50 years ago.”
Sharon Wickham / San Francisco Public Press
Eldridge Jones served in the Army’s 50th Chemical Platoon, participating in exercises that exposed him to radiation. He says his health issues may be related to research organized by the Navy’s San Francisco laboratory.
Despite enjoying access to vast resources, the lab produced little in the way of valuable research, according to scientists who worked there and outside scholars. “It was fantastic,” former lab researcher Stanton Cohn said in an oral history interview in 1982. “We could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it.” In the end, he noted: “We did a lot of field studies and got nothing to show for it.”
While routinely exposing humans in these “ethically fraught activities,” the lab often behaved like an institution in search of a purpose, said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the shipyard in detail. Hirsch and other critics said the lab’s operators demonstrated a remarkable disregard for radiation’s hazards and a cavalier attitude toward human health, even by the permissive standards of the time.
“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out. It never occurred to us to even ask.”
— Army veteran Ron Rossi
The 1955 opening of the lab’s “huge $8,000,000” bunkerlike headquarters building was front-page news that drew “some of the Nation’s top civilian and military nuclear experts,” the San Francisco Examiner reported at the time. But today, the lab has been largely forgotten.
In the early 2000s, journalist Lisa Davis revealed📄 the enormous quantities of radioactive material the Navy and scientists left at the shipyard and recklessly dumped at sea. This report expands on her brief mention of the lab’s medical and occupational experiments exposing people.
While lab scientists did sometimes publish in scientific journals and lab imprints, the Navy destroyed voluminous piles of original documents after the facility closed.
MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ON HUMAN SUBJECTS
Remaining files such as interagency memorandums, experiment proposals and technical papers indicate that human exposure was accepted up and down the chain of command, from Washington, D.C., to the San Francisco docks, where as early as 1947, the Navy knew that airborne plutonium was wafting off contaminated vessels📄.
The ships had been battered by atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and then towed to San Francisco, where hundreds of civilian shipyard workers were exposed in a vain attempt to clean them.
The agenda then expanded to medical experiments on human subjects. Lab officials told the Pentagon📄 in 1959 that they employed “minimal quantities of radioactive tracer material” in clinical studies, implying their techniques were safe, even though no one knew if this was true.
In the mid-1950s, the lab developed what it called synthetic fallout: dirt or mud laced with the highly radioactive but short-lived isotope lanthanum-140📄, meant to mimic the poisonous material that could drift over U.S. communities📄 after a nuclear explosion. The lab exposed hundreds of troops and civilian personnel to this hazard in field exercises at military bases on the east side of San Francisco Bay, in rural Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
The synthetic fallout’s radioactive ingredient could cause cell damage to internal organs if inhaled. Jones, the former Army corporal, said troops in his unit sometimes worked without adequate protective equipment.
“Nobody had to go up onto the roof, and nobody had to do all this stuff by hand,” he said. “There were better ways to have done it. These scientists, they want the result and they don’t care about the people who are doing it for them.”
Some study participants had radioactive dirt rubbed on their forearms to test the effectiveness of cleaning methods. Others were ordered to crawl on their bellies through fields covered in it, to simulate the doses soldiers would absorb while fighting in a fallout zone. In 1962, lab officials acknowledged that wind and rain📄 carried the pollution away, potentially exposing unsuspecting members of the public.
After a team from the lab detonated bombs laced with isotopic tracer elements underwater in summer 1961 around San Clemente Island, near San Diego, state game wardens working with researchers caught a radioactive fish📄, indicating unintended and potentially widespread ecological consequences. They brushed aside📄 the discovery by noting that fish are typically gutted and presumably made safe before being eaten.
Across a wide array of activities, lab documents describe participants as volunteers. But Jones disputed this. “In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it,” he said, adding that if he declined or resisted, he risked discharge or imprisonment in the stockade.
“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out,” said Ron Rossi, who served with Jones in the Army’s 50th Chemical Platoon at the Nevada test site. “It never occurred to us to even ask — just did what we were told to do.” Rossi spoke with the San Francisco Public Press in 2021 and 2022; he died last year, at age 89.
Later Pentagon admissions support the veterans’ accounts. “There is little doubt that members of intact military units, which were sent to test sites to perform missions commensurate with their organizational purpose, were not given the opportunity to volunteer,” wrote Navy Vice Adm. Robert Monroe, a former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, one of the successors of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret World War II atomic bomb project, in 1979.
Hundreds of thousands of so-called atomic veterans were ordered to participate in Pacific island or stateside above-ground bomb tests, or served in Japan near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The U.S. government has, inconsistently, compensated many of them, as well as nuclear weapons workers. But many occupational or medical experiment participants have gone unrecognized despite clear signals they were in harm’s way.
24 Studies. 18 Years.
At Least 1,073 People Exposed.
After scrutinizing thousands of pages of records, we conservatively tallied 1,073 people exposed to radiation in medical and technical experiments conducted by the San Francisco-headquartered U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1946 to 1963.
You can explore primary materials on DocumentCloud.
1. Radioactive ship decontamination, 1946-1950. Hundreds of shipyard workers tried to remove plutonium and fission byproducts from vessels irradiated in the first post-World War II nuclear weapons tests. Officials acknowledged the serious risk and imposed controls, including safety equipment like gas masks, despite doubts that they were effective.
2. Simulating flash burns from nuclear explosions, 1950s. To mimic the radioactive flash wounds suffered by bomb survivors, an unknown number of volunteers at the lab had “low-level beta radiation” applied to their skin. Some, including lab scientists, also were subject to intense light sources that left scars.
3.
Failed fallout study, 1953. An unknown amount of dirt laced with a radioactive material, possibly yttrium-90, was spread around Navy buildings in San Bruno, Calif., to test decontamination methods, but was found not to be a good facsimile of fallout. An Army study and a lab memo that mentioned this experiment did not specify the number of exercise participants exposed.
4. 49ers experiment, 1955. With assistance from UC Berkeley, lab scientists planned to give an unknown number of football players with the San Francisco 49ers radioactive water to drink and administer injections of radioactive chromium in “tracer” studies to measure the athletes’ body composition. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory investigators in the 1990s evaluated correspondence and a scientist’s claim that he witnessed it, though they failed to locate documents proving that the tests were carried out.
5. Stoneman I: lotion on hands, 1956. Scores of people, including those who had spread fallout simulant from roofs and fields in the decontamination exercise described above in study No. 3, participated in tests of handwashing methods and preventative techniques like “barrier creams.” Some proved worthless, since soap and water were just as effective, but none assured radiation could be reliably removed in a wartime scenario.
6. Stoneman I: fallout on roofs and fields, 1956. Service members and civilian workers spread and cleared radioactive dirt laced with lanthanum-140 from roofs, paths and other surfaces at Camp Stoneman, a decommissioned Army base in Contra Costa County.
7. Stoneman I: testing skin protection, 1956. Lab scientists rubbed “synthetic radioactive fallout” onto the forearms of “volunteer human subjects” to test nine techniques of removing radiation from bare skin, a pathway identified as a vulnerability in nuclear testing and warfare.
8. Stoneman II: nuclear combat exercise, 1958. Nearly 100 Army soldiers and lab workers either spread synthetic radioactive fallout or crawled through a field of it, in a mockup of infantry maneuvers in a postnuclear-attack fallout zone. The lab reported that four people, all workers mixing the material, received radiation beyond the contemporaneous legal limit for the exercise but were kept on the job.
9. Stoneman II: roof cleaning, 1958. In a follow-up to the 1956 exercise, researchers tested more “land target reclamation” techniques using simulated fallout contaminated with lanthanum-140. Personnel, including members of the Army’s 50th Chemical Platoon, used equipment such as a dispersal truck and hand-operated spreader.
10. Potassium measurement in the body, published 1959. Scientists worked out an improved method for measuring potassium levels after an injection of a radioactive isotope of the element.
11. Small underwater radioactive explosions, 1959. San Francisco radiation lab researchers set off 31 bombs laced with lanthanum-140 in a Washington, D.C.-area pond to simulate an underwater nuclear blast, in an exercise known as Operation Hydra I. They reported that two exposed workers were “quickly and easily decontaminated.”
12. Body water measurements, published 1959. “Healthy men” were given water containing tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, so scientists could quickly and accurately measure the total amount of body water that can be exchanged with the environment.
13. Lean body weight measurements, published 1959. A group of men drank water containing tritium as a tracer for a study of methods to estimate body composition through the measurement of bones.
14. Injection in health studies, published 1959. “Healthy men” of varying body types received injections of radioactive bromine, potassium and radioactive water to assess various body metrics.
15, 16, 17. Radioactive sand cleanup, 1959-1960. In three tests at Camp Parks in modern-day Dublin, Calif., workers used hand tools to spread at least 30,000 pounds of sand mixed with barium-140 and lanthanum-140 to simulate wartime “radiological recovery.”
18. Large underwater radioactive explosions, 1961. In Operation Hydra II, researchers set off 13 explosives off San Clemente Island near San Diego to study the behavior of nuclear weapons detonated underwater. Of those, three with an explosive yield of 10,000 pounds were laced with radioactive lutetium-177 and one with xenon-133. While study authors reported “no biological problems,” they noted exposure of personnel, as well as catching a radioactive fish.
19. Radiation in the time of cholera, 1961. During a cholera outbreak in the Philippines, San Francisco radiation lab scientists injected an unspecified number of acutely ill patients with radioactive chloride and sodium to monitor patients’ fluid levels.
20. Underground bunkers, published 1963. Twenty-four men hunkered down in six radiation lab-designed fallout shelters during nuclear weapons tests in Nevada. Three shelters “were in the path of significant fallout.” Scientists could not meaningfully measure how much radiation entered the structures because the men had also brought fallout samples inside.
21, 22. Radiation in the streets, 1959-1961. At Camp Parks, the lab experimented with street-cleaning equipment, flushing away sand laced with lanthanum-140 to test its effectiveness in decontaminating public spaces.
23. Hosing down buildings and pavement, 1963. Sand mixed with radioactive lanthanum-140 was dumped on streets and buildings that workers then fire-hosed in a series of three different tests.
24. Dirty grass, published 1965. Recognizing that “lawns contaminated by fallout from nuclear attack” could not be cleaned like roads or roofs and that grass tended to trap fallout (as the Soviet Union discovered after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster), the lab conducted 12 tests with a commercially available “sod-cutting machine” to remove ground cover contaminated with synthetic fallout.
Caveats: Where participant numbers from scientific studies or technical reports were unavailable, we relied on accounts from oral histories, footnotes from internal memos and interagency letters, some initially marked classified. Where the timeline was unspecified, we provided a publication date. Where no count was documented but human exposure was indicated, we added one person to the total. Where studies appeared to overlap, we included only the higher tally.
This list does not detail the full extent of radiation exposure. Several lab safety reports indicate it was routine, and more than 200 people received dangerously high doses (see upcoming stories in this series for examples).
Almost everyone entering the lab’s headquarters encountered some radiation, but scientists did not carefully track every individual affected. They also did not study how radiation lingering in the nearby environment affected Bayview-Hunters Point neighbors in subsequent decades.
In correspondence with superiors at the Atomic Energy Commission, forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Pentagon, as well as in a journal article, scientists described the amount of absorbed radiation as relatively low. But since their detection equipment was crude and unreliable, these could easily be underestimations. At other times, scientists acknowledged grave risks, while permitting participants to receive exposures past their own suggested limits.
At least 33 times, the lab documented radiation doses “in excess of” evolving weekly, monthly or annual federal “maximum permissible exposure” limits, according to annual “radiological safety progress reports” from 1956📄, 1958📄, 1959📄 and 1960📄, obtained from the NRC through a Freedom of Information Act request and from the Department of Energy’s Las Vegas archive.
No evidence could be found that federal civilian nuclear regulators or the lab’s military supervisors imposed any discipline for safety lapses that violated federal regulations.
HAZARDS PERSIST
The Navy’s San Francisco lab was one of many research centers and hospitals across the country that exposed people to radiation and other hazards for scientific purposes. That makes it a demonstration of “the ways that people have been seen as disposable, to science or to the military,” said Lindsey Dillon, a University of California, Santa Cruz, assistant professor of sociology who is among a handful of academics familiar with the lab’s history.
“I do think it should shock and anger people,” she added. “They knew that radiation was not healthy.”
The Navy has spent more than $1.3 billion to remove toxic and radioactive material from the site. Cleanup is poised to stretch through the 2020s, thanks in part to a contractor fraud scandal: Two supervisors at an environmental engineering firm hired by the Navy to clean up the shipyard received prison sentences after pleading guilty in federal court to faking soil samples. Retesting and several lawsuits are ongoing.
Reid Brown / San Francisco Public Press
Military officials say these problems are surmountable and their remediation efforts will pay off.
“The Navy’s work at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard has been and is focused on identifying contamination and ensuring public health is protected during cleanup and into the future,” a spokesperson for the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, the service’s office overseeing the shipyard cleanup, said in an email.
The Navy had been alerted to the radioactive pollution problem as early as 1984. Yet for decades, public health advocates and community activists said the Navy misled neighbors about health risks, an assertion supported by a 2020 city-commissioned scientific panel from the University of California, San Francisco, and UC Berkeley.
Beginning in 2019, an ongoing biomonitoring survey led by Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician and neighborhood native whose father worked at the shipyard, has detected traces of radioactive elements and heavy metals in the urine of people who live and work nearby. Some of them are workers at a UCSF lab-animal complex on former Navy property that once housed rats, mice and other creatures used in radiation experiments. They have filed workers’ compensation claims alleging that exposure to radioactive and toxic pollution from the shipyard made them sick.
Images from the series
Several elected officials who have enthusiastically backed the housing development, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco in Congress, and outgoing Mayor London Breed, expressed concern about environmental exposure without specifically addressing the lab’s history of human experimentation.
In an email, Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager called the shipyard “a neglected and contaminated neighbor to the Bayview-Hunters Point Community” and noted that the federal government had invested heavily in the cleanup.
He said Pelosi’s priorities were “fighting to ensure the health and safety of Bayview-Hunters Point residents; requiring a transparent cleanup process that involves the community; holding the fraudulent contractor accountable; and insisting the Navy fulfill its responsibility to fully clean up the Shipyard.”
Shamann Walton, who represents the Bayview and adjacent neighborhoods on the city Board of Supervisors, has called for the city to halt the development until all the pollution is gone. “We do have a say in determining whether or not any land is transferred to the city and county of San Francisco,” he said at a City Hall hearing in September 2022. “Without a 100% cleanup, that land transfer does not take place.”
The mayor’s office echoed these sentiments but has not advocated pausing development. “The health and safety of San Francisco residents remain our highest priority,” a Breed spokesperson told the Public Press. “To this end, we remain committed to ensuring the Navy’s remediation of the Hunters Point shipyard is thorough and transparent to the community.”
It may be impossible to know exactly what harm the radiation exposure caused. Many survivors believe it to be a slow killer. Arthur Ehrmantraut, who served with Jones in the 1950s, said many men in the 50th Chemical Platoon died young. Others developed illnesses long after leaving the service. “I know that many had severe health issues, that, as with myself, manifested after 50 years,” he said.
Jones, now 89, said he did not regret his Army service. But he suspected reckless radiation exposure caused the illnesses and premature deaths of others in his platoon, and his own impaired blood flow and partial blindness.
Experts agree that during the Cold War, safety was secondary to knowledge that might give the United States an advantage in a nuclear World War III.
“The U.S. government was very, very interested in information about how radiation affects the human body, internally and externally,” said Bo Jacobs, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan and co-founder of the Global Hibakusha Project, which studies people around the world affected by radiation from nuclear weapons. As for how that information was obtained, he added, they didn’t much care: “They want data.”
Additional reporting by Rebecca Bowe. Listen to Episode 1 and Episode 2 of her podcast.
A series investigating the forgotten history of Cold War San Francisco
The San Francisco Public Press sifted through thousands of pages of obscure records, interviewed experts and tracked down elderly veterans who were subjected to ethically questionable radiation exposure by the U.S. Navy in San Francisco during the Cold War. What we found reveals a troubling history with effects still felt today.
Reporting: Chris Roberts and Rebecca Bowe | Editing: Michael Stoll and Liz Enochs | Research Editing: Ambika Kandasamy | Web Design: John Angelico | Copy Editing: Kurt Aguilar, Michele Anderson and Richard Knee | Archival Research and Illustration: Stacey Carter | Audio Editing: Liana Wilcox, Mel Baker and Megan Maurer | Sound Gathering: Justin Benttinen | Photography: Sharon Wickham, Yesica Prado and Guillermo Hernandez | Graphic Design: Reid Brown | Fact Checking: Dani Solakian and Ali Hanks | Proofreading: Lila LaHood, Noah Arroyo, Zhe Wu and Sylvie Sturm | Special thanks to Alastair Gee and Danielle Renwick at The Guardian and Ben Trefny at KALW Public Radio, and to Laura Wenus and Amy Pyle
Funding for “Exposed” comes from the California Endowment, the Fund for Environmental Journalism, the Local Independent Online News Publishers Association and members of the San Francisco Public Press. Learn more at sfpublicpress.org/donate.
