In January 1947, the U.S. Navy was informed that plutonium was blowing around the docks at its San Francisco shipyard.
The USS Crittenden, one of the target ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll the previous July, had been towed across the Pacific to the Bay Area for study and attempts at decontamination. Kenneth Scott, a radiation researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who was present at the Bikini test and was working for the Navy as a consultant, observed that the fierce winds that buffet the city’s southeast were kicking up dust from the vessel containing the deadly element that fueled the bomb.
In the ship’s most contaminated area, “it would take only two hundred working days for the average person to inhale 0.1 micrograms of plutonium,” Scott wrote in a memo to the commanding officer at the shipyard, where the Navy had set up a new radiation research laboratory.
- 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
Breathing any amount of plutonium can be hazardous, modern-day experts agree. Even in that permissive era, it was considered very dangerous. Plutonium accumulates in bones, potentially irradiating the body from the inside for life.
But instead of suggesting that the Navy halt the work, Scott recommended that the civilian employees — who would spend hundreds of hours sandblasting and scraping paint laden with plutonium and fission byproducts over the next four years — should use military gas masks, even though their effectiveness was not precisely known.
The correspondence makes no reference to the possibility of the plutonium drifting beyond the docks and toward the growing Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, where thousands of Black shipyard workers and their families had settled beginning in World War II.
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 6, we detail how cavalier attitudes toward radiation exposure, and an indifference to how pollution left by the Navy might affect San Franciscans, have been constants since Scott’s plutonium warning three-quarters of a century ago.
Lab scientists tracked individual workers’ radiation doses and sometimes removed them from further activities if they received too much. However, we found no evidence that anyone tried to assess health risks for people living or working outside Navy property.
Now, with generations of Bayview-Hunters Point residents suffering some of the worst health in the Bay Area, thousands of shipyard neighbors have signed onto a class-action lawsuit claiming that environmental contamination made them sick. Critics say a major real estate development company continues to build homes there without first having located all the potentially hazardous radioactive hot spots.
The lab’s research peaked in the late 1950s. As the Cold War arms race spurred intense interest in developing techniques to survive a nuclear war, lab officials cut corners and pushed ethical boundaries. Conscripted soldiers were required to crawl through fields of radioactive “synthetic fallout,” which winds carried from Army camps to civilian areas in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Military personnel described as volunteers had radioactive dirt spread on their skin to test cleaning methods that scientists did not try first on animals, as was the emerging standard. Others had radioisotopes injected into their veins in biological experiments. (Years later, Pentagon brass admitted that many of these “volunteers” were coerced and had no choice whether to participate in experiments.) The Navy also set off radiation-laced bombs in the Pacific that contaminated fish.
During that time, the lab also exposed San Francisco. When the facility closed in 1969, Atomic Energy Commission inspectors noted “significant radioactive contamination📄” in several buildings, some of which “could not be removed📄.” More than half a century later, as a massive residential development with thousands of planned homes rises close to the still-standing old lab headquarters, environmental watchdogs and neighborhood activists claim that lingering pollution threaten human health.
The Navy’s practice of dumping industrial material into the bay, on the ground and down drains drew legal action from the state in the 1970s. But no penalties or corrective action were imposed until 1989, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the roughly 450-acre former shipyard a federal Superfund cleanup site, a designation reserved for the most dangerously contaminated areas in the country.
The Pentagon has spent at least $1.3 billion to remove or neutralize toxic and radioactive waste, allowing the shipyard to anchor the biggest real estate development in the city since the 1906 earthquake. The plan consists of more than 12,000 homes, millions of square feet of retail and offices, and acres of parks and open space at Hunters Point and Candlestick Point to the south. Roughly 20,000 people live east of Third Street, the area closest to the shipyard. But the population is expected to explode with the new homes.
Current residents of the neighborhood, which was a majority Black community from the 1960s to the early 21st century, have experienced some of the worst health outcomes in the Bay Area. Life expectancy there is 14 years shorter than in majority-white Russian Hill. Residents have long expressed frustration with the Navy’s reluctance to admit how much it might have contributed to the problem. They also point out that the Navy’s cleanup and investigations of contamination stopped at the shipyard’s property line — a demarcation toxic pollution does not obey.
Bradley Angel / Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice
Hunters Point community activist Marie Harrison, center, died in 2019 of a lung ailment she said was connected to neighborhood pollution, including radioactive and toxic contamination from the Navy radiation lab and shipyard.The Navy knew as early as 1984 that an industrial landfill containing tons of radioactive garbage had likely contaminated nearby areas including the bay, where some locals still fish for sustenance. It also knew that surplus fuel oil from the Crittenden and other irradiated ships was burned off in dockside boilers in the 1940s. In 1969, when the lab was shut down, the Atomic Energy Commission noted “several” readings above the agency’s limits. But, as noted in the lab’s decommissioning report📄, “small quantities of residual contamination can be tolerated in special cases.”
The Public Press could not find evidence that the Navy alerted locals to these hazards.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of respiratory health in the southeastern corner of San Francisco, which suffered the city’s highest case rates. But air quality has been an issue for years: Ongoing construction at a condo complex called The San Francisco Shipyard kicked up dust containing radioactive material that poisoned the neighborhood, a class-action lawsuit claims. And recent independent research supports the view that the shipyard threatens locals’ health.
Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician educated at the University of California, San Francisco, and a neighborhood native whose father was a shipyard worker, has been trying to raise the alarm for years. In the urine of people who live and work nearby, she has found traces of toxic heavy metals and radioactive elements known to be in the shipyard.
Is the source of what’s making Bayview residents sick in located the shipyard, or elsewhere?
There is no shortage of industrial pollution in the area, home to much of San Francisco’s heavy industry. This includes a gas-fired power plant that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. operated until 2006, the city’s only open-air sewage treatment plant, a concrete factory, scrap metal yards and a fat-rendering facility. Cars and trucks traversing two major freeways also constantly spew particulate matter into the air.
But some experts say shipyard contamination is the likely culprit. Dr. Kim Rhoads, an associate professor of epidemiology and director of the office of community engagement at the UCSF Cancer Center, offered public comment at an October 2022 Board of Supervisors committee hearing. She said her colleagues had recently conducted research finding elevated numbers of leukemia cases in the neighborhood “compared to the rest of San Francisco.”
“You need to understand,” she told city officials, “this distribution of leukemia will persist as long as the contaminants persist there as well.” Asked in an email for details on the study, Rhoads declined to provide them, and the Public Press could find no relevant published papers in academic databases.
In public comment, Rhoads echoed activists’ calls for the shipyard to be cleaned to the level at which it could be approved for unrestricted use. Advocates argue that the current proposal, which would leave toxic and radioactive waste buried on site beneath soil and concrete, means forever risking the health of Bayview residents, regardless of race or income.
WHAT WAS LEFT BEHIND
At the shipyard’s peak, the Navy employed 17,000 people. Even then, the neighborhood struggled. The influential Black writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin visited Hunters Point in 1963, and the rampant segregation, poverty, over-policing and isolation from the rest of the city shocked him. “This is the San Francisco America pretends does not exist,” he said.
It was worse than he knew. By the early 1970s, the shipyard was dumping 12,000 gallons of “industrial wastes from a battery repair shop, a plating operation and various cleaning processes involving acids and alkalies” into the bay every day, according to the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board. On rainy days, the Navy also flushed raw sewage, for a daily “total of 75,000 gallons” of toxic waste, as California Attorney General Evelle J. Younger alleged📄 in a 1972 lawsuit.
The Navy had promised in the 1960s to rebuild storm drains and install a pair of wastewater treatment plants. Instead, it skipped town. In April 1973, the secretary of defense announced the shipyard would close. Agitated locals picketed the shipyard gates in protest. They wanted the Navy, and its thousands of jobs — the reason many Black families had come to the city — to stay. “Nixon has declared war on African people,” one sign read. Dianne Feinstein and her colleagues on the city’s Board of Supervisors urged the Pentagon to retrain or relocate the estimated 5,600 shipyard workers about to be laid off. If not, they warned of “an enormous welfare problem for the locality.”
They lost. The Navy left. The pollution remained.
The government knew there was probably a radioactive problem on its hands as early as 1969. That year, according to an “evaluation report📄” attached to the Atomic Energy Commission license for the lab’s closure, obtained by the Public Press through a Freedom of Information Act request, there was “Some likelihood that building could have been left with contamination.”
That same report lamented how lax the Navy had been📄 during the lab’s peak. “Unfortunately, Health Physics practices in the early years of the laboratory were considerably less stringent,” it read. “Some Shipyard buildings previously occupied by NRDL still had significant radioactive contamination.”
In 1975, the year after the base closed, a health physicist scanned the old laboratory headquarters and a bayside landfill where the Navy acknowledged having buried about 3 tons of radioactive materials, including fluorescent dials and knobs painted with highly toxic radium-226. “No radiological contamination was found,” according to a 1984 study📄, which noted the Atomic Energy Commission concluded that “the past radiological areas can be reused for any public or private operations without restrictions.” In other words, it was OK to start building amenities like apartments or parks atop a radioactive waste dump.
The Navy leased docks, cranes and workshops to a private ship repair company, but briefly returned in the late 1980s after the firm, Triple A Machine Shop, was caught illegally dumping more toxic waste. The lab’s animal colony, where researchers bred and cared for rats, dogs and other animals used in radiation experiments, was sold to UCSF. Beginning in 2019, Porter Sumchai tested 14 people employed there and detected traces of contaminants that can be found in the shipyard. Six UCSF employees later filed workers’ compensation claims that allege health problems including asthma and hypertension, a disease that has been linked to radiation exposure.
The reinforced-concrete lab headquarters building, in use for only 14 years, and an adjacent building that housed the lab’s particle accelerator were sold off📄 for pennies on the dollar in the 1980s to a local contractor.
Safety standards tightened in the decades since. Surveys in the 1990s discovered radiation that scans since the 1970s missed. (The lab headquarters, now used as a commercial document storage center, was “likely” contaminated, a later assessment found.) But by then, the Navy seemed mostly interested in getting the shipyard off its books.
NAVY VS. NEIGHBORS
With ambitious real estate plans underway, in 1994 the Navy started working with a community panel, the Restoration Advisory Board, to foster neighborhood involvement in the cleanup process.
It soon became clear that analyzing complex risk assessments and exposure modeling was beyond the ken of the board’s volunteers. Even a “technical assistance team” that included chemistry and geology professors from San Francisco State University, funded by a grant from the EPA, was overwhelmed.
In one instance, the Navy dumped 11,000 pages of documents spread across four CD-ROMs on the team just weeks before a June 2007 meeting, during the busiest time of the academic year, said Raymond Tompkins, a Bayview native with a doctorate in chemistry, who served on the panel. “There was a deliberate suppression of information to the RAB,” he said. It wasn’t just the Navy that was uninterested in helping residents understand the data. “It was always the practice of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Navy, not to provide information or presentations before the meeting.”
Though current contamination was the focus, Tompkins often wondered about the radiation lab. He saw troubling signs. On Navy Road, a short distance away, there were 12 families in which at least one person developed cancer, Tompkins said.
In a write-up extolling the facility’s lasting value published in a Navy engineering journal in 1957, Robert Hinners, the recently retired commanding officer and director of the radiation lab, noted that the target room of a 2 million volt Van de Graaff nuclear accelerator had a 4-foot-thick concrete door, which could be rolled aside. That would “permit the beam to emerge into a fenced-in enclosure against the hillside” nearby for experiments that scattered high-energy particles off various materials. Understanding that many such particles do not respect fences, Tompkins said he suspected radiation exposure from such devices might have played a role in the cancers.
Scientists at the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory tested prototype devices in the 1950s to detect radiation levels in the field. Challenges in measuring pollutants at the site continue to the present day despite technological advancements. Source: Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory via Bureau of Ships Journal, 1959.
But Tompkins said a Navy officer, visiting from San Diego, told him that information about the accelerator was a military secret.
Janice Gale, a former radiation lab librarian who started work there in 1948, told the board in 2001 that she had developed three cancerous tumors she believed were connected to lax Navy health and safety standards.
One neighborhood activist called such cancers part of “the first round of deaths” connected to shipyard contamination, according to a 2011 research paper by professor Lindsey Dillon at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Exposures today, the activist added, are “the second round of deaths.”
To this, the Navy never issued a report or other communication demonstrating a serious review. Nor did the city’s Department of Public Health or any state agency, Tompkins said.
After deeming the meetings unproductive, the Navy unilaterally shut down the advisory board in 2009. The following year, the Board of Supervisors approved the redevelopment project. Several times, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom unsuccessfully pitched the shipyard as a location for a new San Francisco 49ers stadium.
The Navy infamously and recklessly dumped📄 tens of thousands of 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste near the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco from 1946 to 1970. In contrast, an unidentified San Francisco Department of Public Health official told the city’s Civil Grand Jury in the early 2010s, “there is no evidence that the really bad stuff is here” at the shipyard.
That seemed to contradict an acknowledgment by the health department’s director that “parts of the shipyard remain contaminated and unusable.” There was also the matter of a possible conflict of interest: The developer reimbursed the city to employ that anonymous official, who was assigned to monitor the shipyard project.
In 2018, the cleanup and transfer plans were disrupted after supervisors working for Tetra Tech EC, one of the environmental engineering firms hired by the Navy to remove contamination, admitted in federal court to faking cleanup work.
The Navy said it was a victim, lamenting in court papers that “the fraud and uncertainty” surrounding the incident had “caused a complete loss of trust in the Navy by the local community.”
City officials also were on the defensive. In an extraordinary scene that year at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors committee hearing, health regulators were asked what might account for the neighborhood’s terrible health outcomes. Amy Brownell, an environmental engineer at the public health department responsible for the shipyard, suggested it was “stress.” Supervisors were aghast.
“The depth of mistrust toward the U.S. Navy, and increasingly, other government agencies involved, should not be underestimated,” wrote a research panel convened by UC Berkeley and UCSF at the city’s request in 2020. “An additional challenge is created by the information communicated to the public by the Navy in flyers with wording such as ‘no risk to human health’ (rather than ‘no radioactivity detected above baseline levels’).”
Rather than minimizing risk, the group advised, the Navy should be forthright, and “public information about risk should be conveyed in a way that is consistent with what the data actually show.”
Despite calls to revive the Restoration Advisory Board, the Navy has preferred to hold sporadic “open houses” and appear at a less-empowered citizens’ advisory committee. In the meantime, the Navy acknowledged, the fraud fueled frustrations that were “channeled into a strong activist element which has made the Navy’s public meetings tense, aggressive, and explosive.”
INTO THE UNKNOWN
The Navy has occasionally admitted its pollution may be spreading beyond its property line. “It is highly probable that toxic, hazardous and radiological waste in the landfill have reached the ground water and are now migrating into the Bay,” the Navy wrote📄 in 1984.
In 2019, UCSF’s Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry studied Bayview, at the request of the city health department. It found 487 cancers of the kind the American Cancer Society says “can be linked to radiation exposure” recorded in the area from 2008 to 2012.
Anyone hoping for an authority to mark the shipyard as the center of a cancer cluster was disappointed. Aside from a 31% higher incidence of lung cancers in men compared with similar neighborhoods across the Bay Area, which could be due to an elevated smoking rate there, the review did not find “an excess number of cases” of 11 other types of cancer in Bayview. That confirmed the findings of a similar analysis published in 1998.
Further, identifying causes was outside the review’s scope. The available data “could not address potential past or current radiation exposures,” or other risk factors, wrote Tomás Aragón, then the county health officer.
Sophie Maxwell represented Bayview-Hunters Point on the Board of Supervisors from 2001 to 2011. Less than a year after her first election, her son Rama Kellum died at 30 from Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare cancer.
Maxwell said that she believed the area’s toxicity caused his illness, but that identifying a single perpetrator was impossible. “You can certainly blame the shipyard,” she said. “You can blame other things, like living in an industrial area. Living near a power plant. You name it, you got it.”
She did not regret leading calls for the shipyard to be redeveloped, despite the testing fraud and concerns over long-term safety. “It was oozing,” she said. “It was a sore. You have to do something about it. You have to try and fix and improve this situation.”
Generations of politicians, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and former Mayor and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, have been cheerleaders for redevelopment of the shipyard, where radioactive waste including cesium-137, strontium-90, radium-226 and plutonium-239 as well as toxic heavy metals lurk. The effort to build thousands of homes, spearheaded by FivePoint Holdings LLC, an offshoot of homebuilding giant Lennar Corp., benefited from friendly legislation and project boosterism.
Stacey Carter / San Francisco Public Press
Owners of new condominiums sued the developer and the Navy, alleging they were misled about the health threat from the shipyard. The radiation lab’s white, nearly windowless former headquarters remains a looming presence on residential streets.Having previously lured Chinese investors to sink money into the project with the promise of visas, Brown told this reporter in 2018 that even after the fraud scandal, homes there were a fine investment. And in 2020, he signed on as a government-relations consultant to the developers. Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by homebuyers alleged significant losses to their investments.
In 2000, 86% of San Francisco voters supported Proposition P, a nonbinding policy statement declaring that the shipyard should be cleaned to permit “unrestricted use,” the highest standard, and that whatever the cost, the Navy should pay for it. The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, the local think tank known as SPUR, noted that federal law says “community acceptance” is one of nine major criteria that must be considered before a cleanup plan is approved.
In late 2021, advocacy groups met with the EPA to press for these standards. They were rebuffed. The “institutional controls” — covering the radioactive waste dump with concrete and soil — were adequate, the agency responded.
“As things stand now, the plan at Hunters Point is to pave over contamination rather than remove it,” said Jeff Ruch, Pacific director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an independent watchdog.
Top elected officials seem satisfied.
A spokesperson for Pelosi said “insisting the Navy fulfill its responsibility to fully clean up the shipyard” was a high priority.
Breed’s office said the cleanup should be “thorough and transparent” to ensure public safety, adding that the mayor had insisted on independent testing by experts at Bay Area universities.
In June 2022, the city’s Civil Grand Jury released a report saying sea level rise could create a “toxic soup” at the old waste dump. Breed dismissed many of the report’s concerns, saying several agencies were assiduously monitoring the situation and adding: “Our shared goal is to proactively ensure that all the actors responsible for the clean-up process are using remediation best practices so that the community’s health is, and remains, protected.”
But Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, said the city should be careful agreeing to take control of polluted areas. “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 meeting of the Board of Supervisors in 2022. “Without a 100% cleanup, that land transfer does not take place.”
Images from the series
Following EPA guidelines, the Navy can leave pollution behind so long as it is predicted to cause no more than 1 person in 10,000 living or working there to develop cancer. Whether that standard is met can be verified only by how many people fall ill in the future. In the meantime, officials say they cannot guarantee the area is entirely safe. For example, growing fruits and vegetables📄 in local soil is prohibited. But in the midst of the Bay Area’s chronic housing shortage, these risks did not stop Lennar Corp. from selling out its initial condo offerings before they were built. By late 2023 more than 500 units had been completed, with dozens more under construction.
In 2017, two Tetra Tech EC supervisors pleaded guilty to faking work and were later sentenced to federal prison. In their plea agreements, which became public the next year, they admitted “illegal switching” of soil samples beginning in 2012. The fraud scandal was a massive embarrassment for the Navy. It also wreaked havoc on the redevelopment plan, setting it back years and triggering a flood of litigation.
Hundreds of shipyard homebuyers sued developer Lennar and Tetra Tech EC, claiming they had been lied to about how bad the contamination was, their real estate investments diminished thanks to the fraud. Lennar settled for $6.3 million in March 2022, but the homebuyers’ suit against Tetra Tech is still pending.
The U.S. government sued Tetra Tech EC, as did FivePoint. As of late last month, the government and Tetra Tech EC were “discussing the specific terms of a potential settlement” ahead of a tentative trial scheduled to begin in October 2025. FivePoint also sued the government for allowing its marquee project to become embroiled in controversy. Tetra Tech EC sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for triggering the reevaluation of the company’s data and the retesting, though U.S. District Court Judge James Donato tossed the company’s suit in 2022.
And in 2019, a lawyer representing 9,500 Hunters Point residents sued the developers in a class-action suit that sought a halt to the development, $1 billion in damages and — at long last — an identified culprit to blame for the neighborhood’s ill health. That case, too, is pending after a federal judge rejected a relatively paltry $5.4 million settlement offer last year.
The Navy has since hired other contractors to resurvey Tetra Tech EC’s work. A limited retesting program, and the search for traces of toxic and radioactive substances began in 2020 and is scheduled to continue through 2026.
More cleanup could follow if the new survey discovers trouble. Meanwhile, the litigation has piled up. A June 2024 lawsuit by local environmental watchdog Greenaction alleges that the Navy is resisting calls to retest the entire base after having uncovered more contamination. In November, attorneys representing former San Francisco police officers claiming to have been exposed to radiation while stationed in former Navy buildings appealed a dismissal of an earlier claim to the U.S. Supreme Court. That matter is now nearing a settlement, according to court documents filed last week.
No one knows when promised amenities such as grocery stores and restaurants will appear. The limbo is frustrating everyone — artists working out of old shipyard office buildings, new condo residents, developers and Bayview residents who were promised jobs.
Yesica Prado / San Francisco Public Press
Parts of the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard have been closed off from the public for decades while buildings and land receive testing and cleanup funded by the U.S. military.“We all would like to see development proceeding at the Shipyard and are equally frustrated by the lack of progress,” Suheil Totah, senior vice president of FivePoint, wrote, on behalf of a subsidiary company, in June 2021 to artists angry about two large piles of dirt outside their studios. What was in the dirt? The company had no reason to believe it was dangerous, Totah wrote, but remained powerless to do anything about it until the Navy’s retesting was completed, a process that could take several more years.
Some critics say there are clear parallels between the real estate development and the human radiation experiments generations ago. The research question this time is whether poisoned land can be reused — and at what human cost.
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, has concluded that there is “high likelihood that contamination migrated from the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard into the neighboring community.”
The failure to understand how the Navy’s radiological research program might be poisoning Bayview now and in the future, he said, displays an attitude straight out of the Cold War.
“The irony is, what they did in the 1940s and the 1950s continues today,” he said. “They’re still hurting people.”
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.
