The success of the atomic bomb program deeply unnerved some of the scientists responsible. Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer’s later qualms are well known. But even before the first atomic explosion, one of his junior colleagues, Paul Tompkins, risked his career to voice his own reservations.
- 1. OVERVIEW: How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments • List of Studies
- 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
- 5. FADING HISTORIES: Destroyed Records, Dying Witnesses Consign San Francisco Radiation Lab to Obscurity
- 6. PERPETUAL EXPERIMENT: Shuttered Radiation Lab Poses Ongoing Health Risks for Growing Neighborhood
- 🎧 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
After earning a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, Tompkins spent the war years in Tennessee, working on the top-secret effort to build the bomb. In July 1945, Tompkins and other Manhattan Project scientists petitioned President Harry Truman. Citing the weapon’s “world-wide social and political consequences,” they urged him to give Japan fair warning about its power before dropping it on cities. Their advice went unheeded.
Tompkins nonetheless stayed in the nuclear enterprise. In 1949, he joined a naval radiation research lab in San Francisco, where he spent the next 11 years, the last nine as scientific director and top civilian employee. There, he seemed to abandon his previous caution. Under his leadership the lab pushed past ethical boundaries — acquiring atomic knowledge, but at a human cost.
This investigative series details how the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, based at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, exposed at least 1,073 dockworkers, military personnel, lab employees and others to radiation in technical exercises and medical experiments early in the Cold War.
A review of thousands of pages of government and academic records by the San Francisco Public Press shows scientists there conducted at least 24 studies exposing humans to radiation from 1946 to 1963, nearly three times more than a federal inquiry acknowledged decades later. Researchers reported dozens of safety violations without any apparent repercussions. There is no evidence the government tracked the long-term effects on study participants, or on residents of the historically African American neighborhood who have long suspected their health problems were connected to pollution from the lab.
In Part 4, we examine the ethical implications of scientists risking human health with radiation exposure when the consequences were unknown, and how such a gamble may seem more excusable in an atomic-age context.
As officials at the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission privately debated ethics and how to balance emerging human-rights standards with the urgency of an arms race, researchers had significant leeway to run medical and civil defense studies with little oversight or outside scrutiny.
Most of these experiments were conducted or published on Tompkins’ watch as scientific director. In 1953, Tompkins called for nuclear tests at a time when the U.S. was designing weapons far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though that would mean jeopardizing humans and the environment, as well as encouraging the Soviet Union to respond in kind, it also meant more opportunities for study.
“I don’t believe one will ever get reliable data solely from simulants at full scale or from smaller scale experiments using contaminants,” he wrote in a then-secret memo📄 to the military agency overseeing nuclear weapons development.
Under Tompkins, the lab conducted scores of animal radiation studies. But scientists also justified exposing humans without using animals first.
According to the 1947 Nuremberg Code, a set of 10 universal principles crafted in response to the horrors Nazi doctors perpetrated on concentration camp victims, research involving humans “should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.”
This was consistent with other ethical mores that slowly evolved over the 20th century. Within the Atomic Energy Commission, which along with the Department of Defense oversaw the lab, officials debated whether to require that radiation experiments have some possibility of therapeutic benefit for subjects in medical experiments. They also struggled to craft guidelines about how and when to obtain informed consent from participants.
As a result, in the first two decades of the Cold War, neither rule was enforced. “There is little indication,” a major government investigation published in 1995 found, that either patient benefit or informed consent “was imposed as binding policy on any AEC facility, contractor, or recipient of radioisotopes.”
Among the lab’s investigations were biological tests on civilians using tracer isotopes given intravenously or orally, but their research extended beyond the clinical setting. It also included occupational exposures, such as field exercises in which soldiers crawled through radioactive dirt on open fields, decontamination efforts by hundreds of local workers tasked with cleaning irradiated ships docked at the shipyard, and workers sent into highly radioactive containment chambers, or “hot cells,” to fix malfunctioning equipment to allow tests to continue.
In at least 33 instances, people were exposed to radiation in excess of contemporaneous federal standards. Surviving records show 228 examples of humans exposed to radiation at a level that many epidemiologists now say could lead to health complications including cancer.
“Nothing was too much,” said Bo Jacobs, a historian of nuclear technologies and radiation technopolitics at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan, describing American attitudes toward nuclear research in the Cold War. “People were just completely expendable.”
Neither the lab nor Tompkins appears to have suffered any consequences for these excesses. When the lab closed in 1969, it was not due to its ethical missteps. Instead, the Pentagon pulled funding to help cover the enormous cost of the Vietnam War. And after a 1963 treaty banned atmospheric nuclear tests, there was less to study.
The federal government rewarded Tompkins after his lab service with plum posts in Washington, first at the U.S. Public Health Service and then at the Atomic Energy Commission. In the 1960s, as executive director of the Federal Radiation Council, Tompkins began his tenure advising Congress on safety and nuclear testing standards. Late in his career, he was arguing that stricter standards may be unnecessary or counterproductive.
As for the people his lab exposed to radiation? They would be quickly forgotten.
‘HUMAN SUBJECTS INSTEAD OF RATS’
In 1953, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson signed off on a then-top-secret policy outlining standards for protecting research participants that was circulated to high-level Pentagon officials. These included preceding human experiments with animal studies, keeping the number of subjects to a minimum and allowing participants to withdraw from experiments if physically or mentally unable to continue. The memo reiterated large sections of the Nuremberg Code, underscoring that informed consent of subjects was “absolutely essential,” and adding that it must be documented in writing.
Informed consent was an evolving concept. It is unclear how laypeople, living in an era when even experts did not understand how radiation affected human health, could provide it.
What is clear is that researchers at the San Francisco laboratory skipped the animal stage and went straight to people in at least one study.
In a 1956 field study at Camp Stoneman, an Army installation in Contra Costa County, 45 people had radioactive dirt rubbed on their arms to test removal techniques. “It was decided to use human subjects instead of rats for the skin studies since the extrapolation of data from rats to human skin is considered to be highly unreliable,” lab researcher William Friedman wrote📄 in “Decontamination of Synthetic Radioactive Fallout From the Intact Human Skin,” published in the American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal in 1958. Researchers noted that they could not rule out long-term damage.
In 1959, the lab found that rats exposed to low levels of radiation seemed to have their brains rewired. They could not see or taste the radiation but behaved as if they could sense it and were avoiding it. Similar effects were seen in mice and cats.
“The generality of this effect poses the question of similar effects in man,” Tompkins wrote to the Pentagon📄 in a cover letter accompanying a copy of the study. Extending the rat studies to humans, to see if they would also demonstrate avoidance behavior in the presence of a radiation field, he added, “presents an intriguing objective.” No documents reviewed by the Public Press suggest that any such tests advanced beyond Tompkins’ suggestion.
Ever since the 1940s, scientists had been pushing the boundaries of medical ethics in radiation research. Joseph Hamilton, director of biomedical research at the University of California, Berkeley, was among researchers nationwide who injected patients with plutonium. They conducted these trials before the Nuremberg Code. In a 1950 letter to government officials declassified in the 1990s, Hamilton appeared to have a change of heart. “For both politic and scientific reasons,” he wrote, it would be better to expose “large monkeys such as chimpanzees” rather than people.
“If this is to be done in humans, I feel that those concerned in the Atomic Energy Commission would be subject to considerable criticism as admittedly this would have a little of the Buchenwald touch,” he wrote. Anything too close to a concentration camp experiment, he warned, was not a good look for the agency.
His warning did not have the intended effect. In the Cold War research economy, human capital was cheap and data was precious.
“I think our position in this matter of human experimentation is the same as everybody else,” Navy Adm. Frederick C. Greaves said at a 1950 meeting at the commission’s Washington headquarters. “We don’t want to do it if we can get out of doing it, but if that is the only way we can get the answer, that certainly is going to be more economical in the long run to take a few chances now and perhaps not lose a battle or even worse than that, and not lose a war.”
NOT QUITE VOLUNTARY
The U.S. nuclear weapons program was rife with consent violations. Bomb tests in the Pacific and the western U.S. dusted potentially deadly radiation on unsuspecting residents of islands, ranches, towns and even the set of “The Conqueror,” a Hollywood epic starring John Wayne shot in 1954. Thousands of conscripted troops at the Nevada Test Site, the government’s main nuclear proving ground located outside of Las Vegas, conducted field maneuvers as a mushroom cloud rose into the sky a few miles away.
The San Francisco lab’s research program also relied on what could be seen as forced labor: military personnel who were inaccurately referred to as volunteers, according to a veteran.
Eldridge Jones, an enlisted man in the U.S. Army’s 50th Chemical Platoon, spent much of 1955 deployed to the Nevada Test Site, where he and his unit participated in “Operation Teapot,” a series of 14 bomb tests, he said in an interview. After a flash so bright Jones could see bones of his hands covering his closed eyes, he and his colleagues would emerge from a trench and advance on Ground Zero armed with radiation detectors.
Based on his Geiger counter usage, Jones said he believed he took a minimum of 20 roentgen, a measure of radiation exposure, during each of five exercises in Nevada, for a total of 100 roentgen. That equates to 20 times the modern-day annual limit for nuclear power plant workers.
In August 1956, Jones and his unit got orders to deploy to Camp Stoneman. There, they spread 71,000 pounds of radioactive “synthetic fallout” around roofs and paths.
Synthetic fallout was a mockup of the nuclear ash that would poison vast areas after an atomic attack. Jones remembered measuring radioactivity in the dirt, but could not recall the exact levels. He said nobody from the lab informed them the material was dangerous. But since they were scanning it with Geiger counters, “we knew how much radiation we were getting,” Jones said. In this way, Jones was not the subject of a medical experiment. His exposure was considered “occupational,” just part of his duties as a soldier. In other words, there was no opportunity for informed consent, since he was ordered to participate.
Photo courtesy Jack Leary
Eldridge Jones, center, and fellow soldiers received radiation exposure in Nevada nuclear weapons tests, and later in Bay Area land decontamination experiments. Source: 50th Chemical Platoon Blog.The Pentagon later acknowledged that some nuclear research relied on exposing soldiers like Jones, who hardly had a choice.
“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,” Navy Vice Adm. Robert Monroe, a former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, one of the Manhattan Project’s direct successors, wrote in 1979 in response to questions about U.S. nuclear testing.
It took decades for the government to acknowledge the widespread lack of informed consent in research associated with the military. Medical ethics requirements were formalized starting in 1974.
And it wasn’t until 1995, during the administration of President Bill Clinton, that an extensive reckoning of the human toll of this period was compiled, in a report📄 titled “Human Radiation Experiments Associated With the US Department of Energy and Its Predecessors.”
The authors wrote that “the use of informed consent — or any degree of consent at all — is also very difficult to document for many experiments” conducted before the mid-1970s. But the report excluded what it deemed to be occupational exposures, and did not mention many of the studies the Public Press found documentary evidence for.
In addition to the questionable treatment of troops, the lab also dosed civilians, and did so in excess of even their era’s more relaxed standards.
EXPOSURE BEYOND LIMITS
Tompkins oversaw much of the lab’s experimentation with synthetic fallout, made from dirt or mud laced with a radioactive isotope of a rare element, lanthanum-140. While less hazardous than actual atomic fallout, it still emitted gamma rays, electromagnetic waves that are the most penetrating form of radiation. Standing next to too much of it for too long could cause tissue damage or lead to cancer. Breathing or ingesting some of the dust was even worse since it would emit beta particles — high-energy ionizing electrons and positrons — inside the body.
The lab obtained permission📄 to expose humans to lanthanum-140 as early as 1956, and conducted at least eight outdoor exercises using it, at Camp Stoneman in 1956 and 1958, and at Camp Parks in Alameda County from 1959 to 1963.
These exercises produced at least 13 published studies that tried to assess how humans could clean fallout off themselves or their surroundings after a nuclear attack. Part of the cost of that guesswork was human exposure and, repeatedly, larger radiation doses than the lab promised the Pentagon would be allowed.
During Operation Stoneman II, conducted in August and September 1958, soldiers including those in Eldridge Jones’ unit crawled in full combat gear through fields of radioactive dirt.
In their proposal for the exercise📄, Navy lab scientists R.H. Black and J.D. Sartor said participants would be exposed to no more than 3 rad — a measure of absorbed radiation dose — in the form of gamma rays. Any more than that, and the participants would have to leave.
As it happened, four people were documented as having received more than 3 rad of gamma radiation. But they were deemed essential for the work and kept on duty.
“These personnel functioned as key members of the team, so that it was necessary to utilize their technical abilities to continue the operation,” lab scientist William Friedman explained, adding that it would only result in “a small amount of exposure” beyond the study’s recommended safety limit.
Machinist Nicholas DeLambo was responsible for maintaining a spray nozzle attached to a truck that spread the fallout. When the nozzle broke down, DeLambo took it apart to fix it — and sprayed his hand with enough radioactive dirt for the lab to estimate a dose of 280 rads of beta radiation.
Because beta particles are riskiest when the substance emitting them is ingested, study participants could receive a heftier dose of beta than gamma. However, if left on the skin, beta can leave burns, as earlier experiments at the lab found.
“Prior attempts with soap and water washes were not effective, indicating the contamination was fixed to the skin,” Friedman wrote in the post-operation report📄. But DeLambo’s exposure was limited to “such a small area of the skin that no limitations were placed on the future exposure of the individual.” He was kept on the job and was free to participate in later synthetic fallout exercises, such as the Complex series of tests📄 at Camp Parks, where radioactive dirt was spread on the grounds using hand tools.
DeLambo could not be definitively identified, but a Nicholas J. DeLambo, who died in 1996 at age 79, is buried in Skylawn Memorial Park in San Mateo.
No record of lab scientists monitoring the long-term health of anyone exposed could be found.
The Public Press located one survivor: former Navy combat engineer Merlyn M. Votaw, who drove a truck at the exercise. According to a lab safety report, Votaw absorbed 2.88 rem📄 — a measure of effective dose — of gamma radiation, almost triple what some epidemiologists say could be a threshold beyond which lifetime cancer risk rises. Living in Oklahoma when the Public Press first contacted him in 2019, Votaw said he did not suffer any negative health outcomes as a result of his exposure that he could identify.
“We didn’t know much about radiation,” he said, noting that what concerns people had about exposure seemed to come from lab scientists rather than fellow Seabees. “It didn’t worry me. I think it worried them more than it worried me.”
Votaw died in 2021 at age 82.
Images from the series
Though the lab had government permission📄 to work with plutonium, weapons-grade uranium and vast amounts of highly radioactive cobalt-60, cesium-137 and other dangerous material, the synthetic fallout proved to be a constant hazard.
In a 1959 radiological safety progress report, lab scientists recounted another overexposure📄. Twenty people “associated with the experimental program at Camp Parks” took doses averaging 2.6 rad. “In only one case,” however, another unnamed study participant absorbed 5.25 rad — in excess of federal standards at the time. There was no indication of any consequences or corrective action.
In another group of approximately 35 people working with simulated fallout at Camp Parks, the average dose was 2.8 rem — but one person received a “whole-body deep dose” of 4 rem. Worse, “Some internal contamination was detected,” the lab said in the 1959 report. The lab promised to improve. “Changes are being made in the equipment and experimental procedures prior to the next experiment to ensure that all exposures of personnel will be below 3 r per quarter.”
Instead, the following year, the lab reported the worst exposures recorded in surviving documents. Yet again, it was the synthetic fallout. Equipment, including an air filter installed incorrectly, kept malfunctioning inside a “hot cell” at Camp Parks where the fallout was mixed.
In a scene eerily familiar to decontamination workers at Chernobyl nearly three decades later, four workers were sent into the area to fix the faulty gear and keep the experiment going. “Malfunctions in the hot cell apparatus made it necessary for persons to go into high radiation areas in order to make repairs,” the lab reported in a 1960 annual radiological safety report📄.
Two people took the highest doses in records located by the Public Press: full-body doses of 7.14 and 6.73 rem. Their names were not reported.
‘WE WERE AWARE’
So how bad was all this, really? In one analysis, every experiment violated informed consent, because the scientists involved had no idea what low doses of radiation would do, and so could not tell anyone with any certainty what would happen.
“We were aware of the signs, the symptoms, and the damage that would be caused” by high levels of radiation, William Siri, a prominent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory biophysicist, told an oral history interviewer📄 in 1980. “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.”
In the retrospective view of some critics, using people in experiments of questionable utility is inexcusable.
“This testing on people who were not genuine volunteers, who were not genuinely informed of the risk — they were human guinea pigs in an experiment that had no value at the end of the day,” said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This is a real abuse of power.”
Yet other modern-day ethics experts and nuclear historians hesitate to declare the entire radiation research program immoral. The lab’s work, including the human exposure, should be considered in its cultural context.
“Fear of nuclear annihilation was front and center in the lives of all these people,” said David Shumway Jones, a physician and professor of the culture of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the university’s Center for Bioethics. “It was such a different time.”
This fear was everywhere. Post-apocalyptic novels like Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon” and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” crowded best-seller lists. Cinemas screened films like “On the Beach,” in which Gregory Peck, the captain of a U.S. submarine deployed overseas during a nuclear war, returns to San Francisco to find a ghost town, everyone killed by toxic fallout.
Was it better for a soldier, who accepted risk as part of his job, to handle radioactive substances in California or face bullets and bombs in Korea? Was it better for Cold War scientists to diligently follow arbitrary exposure limits, or to push the envelope to make discoveries that could save lives in a very plausible nuclear war in the near future?
Then and now, it’s debatable. “The history of research ethics is totally complicated,” said Harvard’s Jones.
Jacobs, of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, takes a different view. “I tend to personally not see these things as driven by some specifically cruel people at the top,” he said. “It’s just that cruelty is perfectly acceptable to those people at the top.”
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.
