After running the world’s first doctoral program in radiation biology, James Newell Stannard spent his retirement researching “Radioactivity and Health: A History.” The exhaustive record of the field’s early days, published in 1988, mentions some of the work done at a U.S. Navy radiation lab headquartered in San Francisco. Some but not all, because the paper trail was incomplete.
When the Navy closed the lab in 1969, “they threw out nearly all records, and there is nowhere, at least so far as I can find, one complete set of Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory reports!” Stannard said in a 1979 interview.
Now most firsthand witnesses are dead, and the memories of the living have faded. With the lab’s former home the anchor of the city’s biggest real estate development project, knowledge of what lies beneath may be permanently hidden from a community desperate to understand the extent of the site’s threat to public health.
- 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
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 5, we trace the obscure nature of the work at the lab to the military’s culture of secrecy, explore why officials shredded millions of pages of paper records and show how an ongoing lack of official interest in acknowledging this history has frustrated local people dealing with the shipyard’s environmental legacy.
Today, the former naval shipyard is contaminated with enough industrial and radioactive waste to land it on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list. Much of it is from the lab, which operated in makeshift quarters and, starting in 1955, a windowless purpose-built research center, still standing at the roughly 450-acre former military base on the city’s southeast waterfront.
The Navy’s destruction of vital research records means that the decades-long $1.3 billion-and-counting cleanup at the shipyard relies on incomplete information about what might be in the ground and where it might be, illustrated by the repeated discovery of radioactive objects.
Along with what the Navy did to the land, what it did to people has also been buried. Present-day communications from the Navy and redevelopment boosters rarely mention any human experiments.
In response to detailed questions about the lab’s research program and the human exposure toll, Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Callaghan acknowledged the experiments as “a matter of historical record,” but declined to address questions around their ethical propriety or scientific value.
“The Navy,” she said, “cannot speculate on possible internal deliberations or motivations of medical researchers more than 50 years ago.”
Did military officials of decades past deliberately cover up the lab’s conduct? Or was throwing almost everything out just a quick-and-dirty method to close an institution? It’s impossible to know for certain, modern experts say. “Either of those, or anything in between, is plausible,” said Gabrielle Hecht, a professor of nuclear security at Stanford University, who has studied the shipyard at length.
Others say the Navy’s behavior is deeply suspicious.
“You almost have a sense of a military entity, knowing it was involved in rights violations and other questionable activities, burning the file before the incoming troops arrived,” said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has authored several reports about shipyard and lab activities.
An official review ordered by the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1994 identified only nine human radiation experiments📄 conducted by the San Francisco radiation lab. But records scattered across a variety of government and academic archives paint a picture of a far larger research program.
What is clear is that the Navy’s San Francisco radiation lab has been condemned to a memory hole. The lab is barely a footnote in Bay Area history, even as it has a lasting impact on local geography and generations of Hunters Point residents.
DOCUMENTS SHREDDED
The lab faded into the fog of time after a very public life. The 1955 opening of its $8 million headquarters (roughly $92 million in today’s dollars) was a multiday civic occasion that made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner. James Halley, the city’s acting mayor, declared Oct. 14, 1955, “U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory Day.” Rear Adm. A.G. Mumma, chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Ships, dedicated the building “to the service of the world.”
Just a year later, with the lab’s work in full swing, Mumma would claim that innovation required keeping fewer documents, not more. “Records we think we may use some day but never do must be retired or destroyed,” he wrote📄, adding: “By reducing paperwork to a minimum, we shall have more time for the creative thinking so necessary for moving ahead in this nuclear era.”
Much of the lab’s work was out in the open and covered by newspapers and magazines. Results of some human experiments were published in contemporary scientific journals, or if they were less interesting, relegated to lab-issued publications and sent on to academic libraries. Most of what is known about the lab comes from these documents.
After a 1963 treaty banned atmospheric nuclear tests, part of its mission was moot. With the Vietnam War draining the Pentagon budget, the Navy closed the facility in 1969. What followed was a chaotic scramble.
The library was trashed. Piles of expensive equipment also went onto the scrap heap. A costly particle accelerator, never fully operational, was decommissioned.
“I was there and there were a lot of reports put out,” scientist Victor Bond, who ran the lab’s experimental pathology program, told Stannard in an interview for his book. “Unfortunately they seem to have been destroyed or lost. There are very few reports available now.”
Stacey Carter / San Francisco Public Press
Much of the lab’s remaining paper record is crumbling and faded, stored in cardboard boxes at the National Archives and Records Administration repository in San Bruno, Calif. Some documents were declassified at the request of journalists on this project.
“One of the reasons it is so hard to find things is that the crusty Admiral that supervised the closing said, ‘This has got to be completely dismantled,’ and out went the files,” Stannard told an interviewer in 1980.
Incomplete reports and faded memos on carbon copies are stored at the National Archives and Records Administration branch office in San Bruno, south of San Francisco. Among the existing records is a visual symbol of the Navy’s record-keeping strategy: a photo of the lab’s document shredder, big enough to fit a person inside.
A brief period of transparency under Clinton might have been the best time to uncover the lab’s fading history. Since then, previously available records related to the radiation lab were declared “not properly declassified” and removed from the National Archives. In their stead were single-page notices in folders that would otherwise be bulging with documents. There is no way to tell if the files mentioned human experimentation.
Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear history expert at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., speculates that the government may be holding back records related to nuclear weapons effects. It is unclear what national security risk is posed by describing weapons that have not been in the U.S. arsenal for more than 50 years.
‘GUINEA PIGS’
The public reckoning with midcentury human radiation experimentation began in the 1980s. Pressed by Congress, the U.S. government admitted that scientists affiliated with the military, academia and private companies had run tests on people throughout much of the Cold War, with government sponsorship.
These experiments used “human subjects as guinea pigs,” which yielded “little or no medical benefit to the subjects,” wrote Edward Markey, who was chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, and is now the junior senator from Massachusetts.
Those comments came in 1986, after his committee reviewed Department of Energy documents and concluded that American citizens were used as “nuclear calibration devices” for the benefit of scientific curiosity, not their welfare. The report highlighted certain ethical lapses: “For some human subjects, informed consent was not obtained or there is no evidence that informed consent was granted.” The committee called for the agency to identify subjects and conduct long-term health studies to identify any radiation-related illnesses.
San Francisco’s naval radiation lab was not mentioned. Markey’s committee relied on records provided by the Department of Energy, but not the Department of Defense. The problem was worse than Markey knew.
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the Albuquerque Tribune in 1993, investigative journalist Eileen Welsome detailed stories of more than a dozen unsuspecting Americans who had been used unknowingly in human radiation experiments run by the government. These included Bay Area hospital patients injected with plutonium by scientist Joseph Hamilton in affiliation with the Manhattan Project, the government’s secret wartime bomb development program.
The subsequent uproar prompted then-Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to declassify a cache of material related to the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Meanwhile, Clinton ordered the Department of Defense and other agencies to scour their archives.
In late 1995, the government identified📄 “nearly 4,000” research projects that exposed humans to radiation between 1944 and 1974. The Navy reported📄 that the San Francisco lab conducted nine studies, involving at least 161 people. That list included one test tube experiment exposing cells, not living people. Another appears, on close inspection, to be a review of prior work. But the numbers could be far larger — and may be impossible to know precisely.
The Navy omitted studies where people were “occupationally exposed,” such as workers cleaning ships irradiated in Pacific bomb tests. By including those, the Public Press found nearly three times as many studies, and more than six times as many people affected. And neither tally accounts for every time someone took a radiation dose while doing routine lab work, conducting an experiment or merely visiting.
ASSEMBLING A HUNT TEAM
As the Cold War-era veil of secrecy began to lift in the 1990s, the Navy recognized an imminent public relations disaster.
In March 1994, as preparations for mass declassification were underway, two top officers tasked with heading the Navy’s records search discussed what to do “when we get indications of a research project with a significant potential of embarrassment,” as Capt. Jim Bryant put it in a fax to Adm. H. Denny Wisely.
Whenever the Navy was alerted to such records, Bryant suggested the service assemble a “hunt” team consisting of “archivist and technical experts.” Their aim, he wrote, should be to “avoid the press getting this information out first.”
If the Navy’s mission was to bury its radioactive past, it succeeded. A few scattered news reports over the years have made brief mention of the Camp Stoneman and Camp Parks exercises, but lacked details about the human exposures and experimental results.
Wisely, a Vietnam veteran, former pilot and commander of the Navy’s Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron, who was then wrapping up his career at the Defense Nuclear Agency, retired in 1994, a few months after receiving the fax. Reached at his home in Arizona, he said he did not remember receiving the message. Nor did he recall much urgency about public relations from Pentagon brass.
Wisely remembered presenting the search’s findings to a meeting of “all the heads of the services” held in the Tank, the Pentagon’s secure briefing room. The response was muted.
“My recollection was that they didn’t think it was significant,” he said. “We didn’t find anything that we thought was gonna kill anybody.”
Retired Navy Capt. Jim Bryant spent many years aboard nuclear submarines. One of his final jobs before he returned to civilian life in 1994 was to aid with the hunt and review for evidence of human experimentation.
In a telephone interview, he said he was not the Jim Bryant who sent the fax — or if he was, he simply could not recall. What he did remember was a feeling of indignation: “It was my impression that the Clinton administration wanted to embarrass the military.”
Bryant said he found that the lab exposed some workers and test subjects to significant doses of radiation, a revelation corroborated by the Public Press’s findings.
For example, the federal exposure limit at the time of the second Stoneman operation in 1958 was 3 rem — a measure of the effective dose for humans — per 13 weeks. Despite project scientists pledging to follow these parameters, records show that four participants received more than that.
And it would get worse. In a 1959 radiological safety progress report, the lab counted “twenty exposures”📄 associated with street-cleaning tests at Camp Parks. “The exposures ranged from 1.5 to 4.0 r,” said the lab, which also noted one total yearly dose in excess of 5 rem.
“That’s a lot of radiation,” Bryant acknowledged. “That’s more radiation than I got my entire career.”
GONE, OR FORGOTTEN?
The enormous trove of documents declassified in the 1990s created an opportunity for anyone with the time to make sense of them. Nobody did until a San Francisco journalist forced the Navy to reckon with how radioactive it had left Hunters Point, by then a ground zero for real estate speculation.
In 2001, after spending six months digging through boxes at the archives that appeared to have been untouched since the lab closed, then-SF Weekly journalist Lisa Davis published “Fallout📄,” a series revealing how the Navy haphazardly dumped radioactive material in an on-site landfill, around the shipyard, in the Bay and in the Pacific Ocean.
Chris Roberts / San Francisco Public Press
The National Archives and Records Administration’s San Bruno branch office is home to most surviving paper records from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory.Davis’ series briefly mentioned scientific research into exposure of people overseen by the lab. “The human radiation experiments were not something that anyone from the Navy paid much attention to,” she said in an interview. “It was just kind of casually mentioned in the documents I reviewed.”
Davis’ work did force the Navy to conduct a further review, specific to Hunters Point. In its “Historical Radiological Assessment,” published in 2004, the Navy listed licenses the Atomic Energy Commission gave scientists to expose humans to radioactive material.
It was a sobering admission “hidden in plain view,” according to Daniel Hirsch, the former UC Santa Cruz lecturer.
What experiments did the lab do with those licenses? The Navy did not provide extensive detail in the assessment, the main source informing the billion-dollar-and-counting radioactive and toxic cleanup. The Navy did not say how many people were exposed to radiation or to how much. And since no government officials have called for transparency resembling Clinton’s, the Navy did not have to.
Bo Jacobs, a historian at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan, said the military has long had a blasé attitude toward disclosure: “My experience is that they feel no obligation to tell anybody anything.”
But even if the lab had preserved every scrap of paper, the record would still be incomplete.
“We could have all of the papers that they ever printed and produced, and we would still not have a full accounting, because there’s a gap between what was actually written down and what actually happened,” said Lindsey Dillon, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz, who has extensively studied the shipyard.
That means the lab’s true story was committed only to the dusty and inaccurate recollections of lab scientists, most of whom are now long dead.
Images from the series
HAZY MEMORIES
In 2003, the Navy started buying ads in Northern California newspapers. Under the heading “HUNTERS POINT SHIPYARD NEEDS YOUR HELP,” they asked any former shipyard or lab employees with “information about radiological operations” to come forward.
There is no sign anyone involved in this outreach effort interviewed Bond, the radiation lab researcher who died in 2007. But the Navy did question Roy J. Holloway, who studied liver physiology at the lab from 1951 to its closure in 1969. Holloway was there during all the synthetic fallout and tracer studies. In “Fallout,” SF Weekly reported that lab scientists had kept a human liver alive in order to study it.
But Holloway said that never happened. According to the summary of his testimony, printed in the 2004 radiological assessment, “He stated emphatically that there were never any human liver experiments at NRDL,” the report said, using the lab’s initials, “nor could he recall any other human experimentation.”
The written record contradicts Holloway’s account. What else was forgotten?
These gaps hide the extent of the risks scientists took with human health in the name of national defense and intellectual inquiry — risks that linger today. Neither the shreds of surviving paper nor the fading memories of the few living witnesses can fill them in. The full story will never be known.
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.
