In Episode 2 of the “Exposed” podcast, we explore a little-known chapter in San Francisco’s nuclear era: human experiments carried out to assess the health effects of radiation. Scientists from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, located at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, designed and executed at least 24 experiments that involved gathering data from humans — in some cases, injecting test subjects with radioisotopes or having them ingest fluids laced with trace amounts of radioactive materials. Even football players from the San Francisco 49ers were enrolled as test subjects in these so-called tracer studies.
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We hear from military veterans who were sent on a mysterious mission to spread radioactive substances onto rooftops at an Army base near Pittsburg, Calif., for an experiment the radiation lab played a role in designing. Some recount experiences of witnessing nuclear bomb blasts in the Nevada desert. We also examine a national pattern of human radiation experiments revealed by Eileen Welsome, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation, who shined a light on similar practices conducted by government facilities, hospitals and other institutions.
This radio documentary is part of a larger multimedia package stemming from a deep dive into declassified government records produced by the radiation lab in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Listen to Episode 1 of the podcast: “A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy.”
Explore the entire series at sfpublicpress.org/exposed.
TRANSCRIPT
Rebecca Bowe: At the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco where a massive real estate development project is under construction, there’s a white, windowless tower. It’s known as Building 815, and it once housed the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. During the Cold War, scientists who operated here studied radioactive debris from nuclear bomb blasts. Sometimes they conducted experiments that exposed humans to radiation.
- 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]
Holly Barker: The U.S. government enrolled them without their permission into a top-secret medical experimentation program called Project 4.1.
Eldridge Jones: When the blast goes off, then you put your hands over your eyes like this. You can see the bones of your hand. That’s how bright they are.
Rebecca Bowe: Welcome to “Exposed.” I’m Rebecca Bowe. In our second episode, we’ll zero in on the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, an institution that operated at the shipyard. The lab handled radioactive material and studied cleanup methods as part of its work. It dumped toxic waste into the surrounding area, which the Navy is still working on cleaning up today. While the cleanup has attracted plenty of attention, the lab’s connection to human radiation experiments and this dark chapter of the nuclear era has only seldom been acknowledged. Before we dive in, a note about me: I’ve practiced journalism since 2004. Currently, I’m on staff at an environmental nonprofit. I want to make it perfectly clear that this story, which I reported on a freelance basis, is unrelated to that work and doesn’t express the views of my employer. OK, here we go.
Eldridge Jones: In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it. And if you don’t do it, you have big problems. You better do it or you’re going to go to the stockade. Period. That’s it.
Rebecca Bowe: In 1956, Eldridge Jones served in the military. He was based at Ford Ord, not far from Monterey. But that summer he was sent to the San Francisco Bay Area to help with a research study that exposed him to radioactive material. Decades later, Jones, who was then 84, shared his story.
Eldridge Jones: God, if I had known then what I know now, and I had the opportunity, I would never have gone.
Rebecca Bowe: Our journey to connect with Eldridge Jones started in the National Archives, where my project collaborators and I found the first initials and last names of participants in government radiation studies. We eventually found Jones through a veterans’ association. The military experiment was called Operation Stoneman.
Eldridge Jones: There was a group of us in the 50th Chemical Platoon that were sent to Camp Stoneman.
Rebecca Bowe: Camp Stoneman was a military base, located in modern-day Pittsburg. When Jones and his comrades arrived, it had been abandoned for some time. During World War II, soldiers bound for combat in the Pacific had trained there.
Eldridge Jones: When we got there, they took us through various things. And then there was a truck that came in, and it was full of radiated material. They told us that we had to take that radiated material and put it on the roofs of at least, it was two or three buildings, I think it was. I was involved in putting it on one building.
Rebecca Bowe: Next, he says, he and other troops used Geiger counters to find out how much gamma radiation the dirt was emitting.
Eldridge Jones: And what we did, when we got it up there, we took readings of what the dosage was up there. Then we washed off the roofs of the buildings and then we took readings of the radiation that was left on the roof again. And I don’t remember the readings there. But all that mud was washed into the gutters.
Rebecca Bowe: They had to repeat the process over and over again for a week. Other soldiers who participated were made to rub radioactive dirt on their bare arms and hands. They were scanned for radiation, then they washed off, then they were scanned again. Scientists running the operation called the substance the soldiers coated themselves with “synthetic fallout.” But it gave off real gamma radiation. It contained a radioactive isotope of an artificial element called lanthanum-140. Although technical reports we found described the study participants as volunteers, Jones said he had no choice in the matter.
Eldridge Jones: We had no idea who was involved. We were just told what to do and we did it.
Rebecca Bowe: As it turned out, the experiment was a partnership between the Army and the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. That’s the military research lab that operated at the Hunters Point Shipyard at the height of the Cold War. The lab was particularly focused on what was known at the time as decontamination — so, methods for clearing away nuclear fallout. Of course, scientists today understand that radioactive material can persist for hundreds or even thousands of years. That’s why the Navy is still working today to clean up radioactive waste at the Hunters Point Shipyard.
Rebecca Bowe: This wasn’t the first exposure for Jones. In 1955, he was deployed to the Nevada Test site, about an hour north of Las Vegas.
Eldridge Jones: And we were taken there to show what the atomic bomb looked like when it went off. We were given glasses that would withstand the light of the blast. It was like, if you were in the daylight you put those glasses on, you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see 10 feet or so at all. But with the glasses on and the nuclear bomb went off, you can certainly see the bomb really bright.
Rebecca Bowe: The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, back in San Francisco, also played a role in those nuclear detonation tests. Its scientists collected reams of data.
Eldridge Jones: And so after that, we were taken out to the testing grounds, and part of the, part of the people were put in a tent where the vehicles that go on out in the testing area would be brought in and they would be washed down and tested for radiation. I was within 1 mile of ground zero three times when the blast went off. We were in a revetment, which is below the ground level. And literally you could, when the blast goes off, it’s just like if you close your eyes and open them, and the blast goes off, then you put your hands over your eyes like this. You can see the bones of your hand and look right through your hands and see the vehicle that’s beside you bouncing around. That’s how bright they are.
Rebecca Bowe: All told, Jones witnessed 14 nuclear bomb explosions in the desert. Today he suffers from blindness and blood-flow issues that his doctors have suggested might be related to his radiation exposure. You can hear the way the military talked about these tests from this clip from the 1950s where a general describes a bomb blast that his troops had just witnessed.
Interviewer and general in clip: “What would you say was the main reaction of the troops there in the trenches as they were waiting for the bomb to go off?” “Well, the reaction of the troops in the trenches, they did exactly what they were told to do. They showed good discipline, which was good sense in this case. Any man stuck his head up, there was trouble in store for him.” “And they seem to take all the discipline very well?” “They did indeed.”
Rebecca Bowe: When Jones was made to spread radioactive dirt onto rooftops, he’d been sent in wearing nothing more protective than his normal summer fatigues. He was part of the first group sent to Camp Stoneman for the lab’s research. In 1958, a second group of soldiers was dispatched there.
Images from the series
Merle Votaw: As I do remember, they said it was going to be a decontamination, and that was about what they told us, that it was decontamination. I don’t remember them saying anything else until we got there.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s Merle Votaw, a Navy veteran who participated in Operation Stoneman II. This time, researchers wanted to simulate what would happen if combat troops were fighting in a nuclear battlefield. They studied how much radiation the soldiers’ clothing and their bodies would absorb. Each time they geared up, they had to crawl through several hundred feet of radioactive soil. It also used lanthanum-140 — synthetic fallout. It was manufactured at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, then transported to California in a specially designed vehicle. Votaw told my project collaborator, Chris Roberts, that he was exposed to asbestos in addition to radiation throughout his time in the service. Nearly 80 years old at the time of the interview, he was quick to note that he had emerged unscathed. In the tape, you’ll hear Chris asking questions.
Chris Roberts: So they told you that you would be taking some radiation, but not a lot. Did that worry you, or were you just kind of like, OK?
Merle Votaw: No, it didn’t worry me.
Chris Roberts: OK, OK, yeah.
Merle Votaw: I think it worried them more than it worried me. They cut out squares, like 2-inch squares of your clothing, and it was sent to Hunters Point. The Army had to crawl, actually had to crawl through it. And they cut out their clothes, and those samples were all sent to Hunters Point. But we never heard anything about it — what would happen.
Rebecca Bowe: In modern times, nuclear power plant workers aren’t supposed to receive more than 5 rads of radiation per year. But one Stoneman II study participant received an estimated 280 rads of beta radiation all at once. According to the Operation Stoneman report, a mixer truck was used to blend the synthetic fallout. The truck’s spray nozzle malfunctioned, and the lab machinist named Nicholas DeLambo took the nozzle apart to see what was wrong. He promptly sprayed the radioactive substance directly onto his hand. Attempts to wash it off with soap and water weren’t effective. It stuck to his skin. We tried but failed to track down DeLambo or his next of kin, so we’ll never know for certain what happened to him after that day. Over the last couple years, Chris and I made several trips to the research room at the National Archives branch in San Bruno where declassified government records are stored. We were trying to get a clearer picture of the human radiation experiments conducted by the Naval Radiological Defense Lab. Staff at the archives had very detailed instructions about looking through records.
National Archives and Records Administration staff member: So since you’re looking at original records today, we’re going to ask that you go ahead and keep it please, one folder at a time. And also please keep the pages in order.
Rebecca Bowe: Declassified memos from 1947 show that the radiation lab was established together with the Atomic Energy Commission, a civilian department that succeeded the Manhattan Project. In the first episode, we told you about how scientists from this lab medically monitored Hunters Point Shipyard workers, because their jobs involved sandblasting irradiated ships that had been subjected to nuclear bomb blasts in the Marshall Islands. Scientists saw an opportunity there for data collection, so they took urine samples to track workers’ radiation exposure.
We found evidence of a study conducted at the shipyard radiation lab that didn’t subject people to radiation but intentionally burned them using a heat apparatus. The idea was to simulate the flash burns that military personnel would be exposed to if they were close enough to a nuclear blast. But we were most interested in the studies showing a pattern of human radiation exposure. We found evidence suggesting several hundred people were exposed to radiation over two decades of the lab’s operation.
Chris Roberts: Individuals would be injected with radioactive potassium, for example. So individuals were drinking water with tritium, with H-3, it’s the isotope of hydrogen that’s in a hydrogen bomb. They were also absorbing by either injection or by drinking radioactive potassium, radioactive sodium or radioactive bromine. And these would essentially act the same way as normal potassium, normal sodium, but the individual studying the test subject would be able to see how that was absorbed throughout the body.
Rebecca Bowe: One of the researchers doing this kind of work was named Albert Behnke. He was the radiological medical director at the lab in Hunters Point. In 1955, Behnke also arranged a study using football players with the San Francisco 49ers as test subjects. He was an expert in determining body composition — essentially figuring out how much fat, bone mass, nutrients and other components are in a person. The hope was that research on body composition would help doctors diagnose and treat diseases. To do this, researchers would inject people with trace amounts of radioactive isotopes of elements naturally found in the human body. Behnke was especially interested in athletes, so he saw a great scientific opportunity when he got the chance to try this on the 49ers. It’s an example of what’s known as a tracer study, which at the time were happening all over the country.
Eileen Welsome: Tracer studies would be really minimal amounts of radioisotopes that were relatively harmless, that weren’t going to damage, say, the thyroid or another organ of the body, that would be excreted harmlessly.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s journalist Eileen Welsome. She authored “The Plutonium Files,” a book about human radiation experiments. In her book, she notes that institutions that carried out human radiation experiments often defended tracer studies as harmless. But she is skeptical of that conclusion.
Eileen Welsome: We don’t know whether they were harmless or not, because we don’t know who the patients were in all those studies. I think there are some records showing where they were done, but it would be very hard to find those records now and be able to find out who the patients were, where they lived, and what happened to them.
Rebecca Bowe: She says a key problem was that even if the doctors didn’t think that these substances would really harm the test subjects, many of them were given doses of radiation without informed consent.
Eileen Welsome: The right thing to have done was to say, this is radioactive iodine, it’s not going to hurt you, would you mind if we gave it to you. So if you are about to put a foreign substance in a person’s body, the least you can do is ask.
Rebecca Bowe: In 1993, Welsome published an investigative series for the Albuquerque Tribune that turned up something much more sinister. It all started when she stumbled upon an intriguing detail in a government document.
Eileen Welsome: I came across a footnote that described 18 people who were injected with plutonium during the Manhattan Project, so I was really shocked. So that began my research. And I spent the next six years trying to find these 18 people. But long story short, once this series came out, it created a furor. I mean, it was incredible. I called it the big story that nearly wiped out the little paper.
Rebecca Bowe: Her newsroom was inundated with calls, some from as far away as Japan. Welsome’s series had uncovered a chapter of history previously swept under the rug. Her work showed that scientists who had participated in the Manhattan Project, a vast government effort to build the atomic bomb, had also conducted a secret program of intentionally exposing people to radiation. This happened even though some within their ranks argued against experimenting on humans. Some even compared what was being done to experimentation carried out by the Nazis. But the studies went ahead, fueled by an obsession with preparing for nuclear warfare. And there was plenty of money to fund it. The Atomic Energy Commission shelled out the cash.
Eileen Welsome: All the armed forces, of course, got into the act. I mean, it was like millions of dollars available, largely from the federal government, to fund this research. So it was just an explosion of research all over the country, everywhere.
Rebecca Bowe: Her work told the stories of people who were exposed to radiation and later developed crippling diseases. She won a Pulitzer Prize. Her work prompted the federal government to launch an investigation. President Bill Clinton convened an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The commission would compile declassified public records and investigate what had transpired. On Oct. 3, 1995, the task force released its findings, and Clinton made a public statement.
Former President Bill Clinton: While most of the tests were ethical by any standards, some were unethical, not only by today’s standards but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted. They failed both the test of our national values and the test of humanity.
Rebecca Bowe: In another tracer study from 1949, a UC Berkeley researcher exposed inmates at San Quentin Prison to small amounts of radioactive iron. The prisoners were labeled as volunteers. Welsome also uncovered the story of a Chinese teenager who was being treated for bone cancer at the Chinese Hospital in San Francisco in 1947. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, gave him an injection of americium, a synthetic radioactive element. He died later, Welsome guesses, from his cancer. An americium injection would have done absolutely nothing beneficial for this patient. UCSF told the investigating committee that most of the records associated this patient had been lost or destroyed.
Former President Bill Clinton: The report also demonstrates that these and other experiments were carried out on precisely those citizens who count most on the government for its health — the destitute and the gravely ill. But the dispossessed were not alone. Members of the military, precisely those on whom we and our government count most, they were also test subjects. Informed consent means your doctor tells you the risk of the treatment you are about to undergo. In too many cases, informed consent was withheld.
Rebecca Bowe: You might think the president discussing revelations of secret military research carried out on vulnerable populations would be big news. Not exactly. By coincidence, the report came out on the same day as the O.J. Simpson murder trial verdict.
News clip: The jury in the above titled action find the defendant, Orenthal J. Simpson, not guilty of a crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187-A.
Rebecca Bowe: So it barely made a blip in the news cycle. Few people remember this, much less connect it with San Francisco or its shipyard. Even today, as Bay Area news outlets report on the decades-long environmental cleanup at the Hunters Point Shipyard, the lab’s role in human experiments almost never comes up. And throughout our research, Chris and I ran up against another obstacle: government secrecy. Here’s his take.
Chris Roberts: According to the National Archives, maybe as little as 1 or 2 percent of the voluminous paper record produced by the shipyard radiation lab exists today. We know that records were shredded. And we know some might have just been lost when the lab closed at the end of the 1960s and when everything was boxed up. How much of it went to the shredder? And how much of it ended up in the archives? I mean, most of it is gone.
Rebecca Bowe: Some records that were declassified were apparently reclassified under the Trump administration. One fall day in 2019, we went to the National Archives to look through boxes that had been pulled at our request, only to find that most of them were full of air. Instead of radiation lab records, we found notices inside, saying the information had been withdrawn over the past year and was now reclassified and physically relocated to a more secure government facility. Dial it back to 1995, and it’s almost as if members of the Clinton Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments saw this coming. Here’s Dr. Ruth Faden, who directed the investigation, addressing the members of her committee.
Ruth Faden: You have opened the doors of this nation’s records and they must stay open. Information must not be concealed again from people in their own time, so that it takes two generations for the truth to come out.
Rebecca Bowe: Among the records that did survive from the era are accounts of research the San Francisco lab conducted far away, in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. You might remember this from the last episode. The U.S. military had been conducting atomic tests here for years. This time lab scientists were brought in to study how radiation affected islanders. On March 1, 1954, the military detonated a bomb there with 1,000 times the energy of the one that destroyed Hiroshima in a test called Castle Bravo. This thermonuclear explosion was the largest nuclear test in U.S. history. Historic archives of Operation Bravo still exist showing footage of the explosion while a commander reports on measurements taken to determine the size of the blast.
Commander in Castle Bravo recording: This photograph was taken from an airplane at 50 miles. The width of the fireball at this time, about three seconds after detonation, was 4 miles. The top of the fireball at this time, 40 seconds after detonation, was 5 miles above sea level. Proof that we can have a high-yield weapon weighing less than 10 tons.
Rebecca Bowe: Castle Bravo was nearly three times as powerful as its architects predicted, so Marshallese people living on Rongelap Atoll and nearby islands were exposed to extremely dangerous levels of nuclear fallout. The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory was involved here, too. Scientists were sent in after the blast to study Marshallese people who had received high doses of radiation from that event.
Holly Barker: There’s very little discussion of these human radiation experiments. It’s something that’s still not really talked about in the Marshall Islands. It’s something the U.S. government never talks about. It’s a conversation that very rarely happens at all in public.
Rebecca Bowe: That’s anthropologist Holly Barker, a professor at the University of Washington, who conducted extensive research in the Marshall Islands. This is her delivering a lecture in Seattle in 2012. As she points out, the Marshallese people who were caught in a blizzard of radioactive fallout were not evacuated prior to the Castle Bravo bomb explosion. In the years that followed, people suffered severe health consequences. They developed cancer, battled thyroid problems and gave birth to infants suffering from critical birth defects whose lives lasted less than a day. Yet during and after the immense explosion, medical researchers couldn’t resist the opportunity for data collection.
Holly Barker: Following the detonation of one of the largest nuclear tests ever conducted in the world, the Bravo test, that was tested on March 1, 1954, after a community — two communities — Rongelap and Utrick — were exposed to radiation from the testing, the U.S. governments took the people who were exposed and brought them to Kwajalein Atoll and created a military encampment made out of barbed wire where they put the Marshallese who had been exposed to the radiation inside the encampment and enrolled them without their permission into a top secret medical experimentation program called Project 4.1. And Project 4.1 was to test the effects of radiation on human beings. Some of these tests included injecting radiation directly into the bloodstream of Marshallese so that the U.S. could then study the difference if you expose somebody to radiation from fallout from a weapon or if the radiation goes into their bloodstream. Other human radiation experiments included having Marshallese drink radioactive substances directly again so they could compare what would happen if it went into the body via the mouth and they could compare that to the radioactive fallout. The U.S. government took a control population that was not from Rongelap or Utrick and had never been exposed to radiation from the testing program and also had them injected with radiation or had them drink the radiation so they could compare them to the other group. So they set up this medical experimentation.
Rebecca Bowe: Dr. James Robertson, who was assigned to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in 1953, went to Rongelap to track Marshallese people’s exposure. He used an instrument called a whole-body counter, a lead-lined room weighing about 30 tons. A 1995 interview he gave encapsulates the dehumanizing attitude researchers associated with this lab held toward islanders who suffered severe health effects from nuclear fallout. Marshallese people who were studied for these tests were made to spend up to half an hour inside the whole-body counter. Robertson’s interview explains that his team used the machine to measure radiation islanders had absorbed by eating contaminated food. He said that while Marshallese test subjects walked into the lead-lined room and waited for the screening process to be over, researchers played this song to keep the time and to entertain them. He told the interviewer that he grew tired of hearing the same song over and over again.
Audio clip of “Sweet Leilani”: Sweet Leilani, heavenly flower …
Rebecca Bowe: Back in San Francisco, some of the same radioactive material that was transported from nuclear bomb tests in the Marshall Islands persists today in the soil at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. A major development project is underway there, but it’s mired in a toxic cleanup scandal. The effort to clean up the soil that has cost more than a billion dollars and gone on for almost 30 years, prompting multiple lawsuits. Many of the shipyard workers and study volunteers who were exposed to radiation during the 1950s and ’60s are reaching the end of their lives today, and the history is fading with them. But a new generation hasn’t forgotten, and the mess left behind by the U.S. Navy has yet to be fully cleaned up. At this abandoned naval base, once a hub of nuclear research that routinely jeopardized human health on behalf of a military superpower, the future is far from certain.
“Exposed” is an investigative project from the San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit news organization that publishes accountability journalism on the web and on radio station KSFP-LP, 102.5 FM. I’m podcast creator and host Rebecca Bowe. Mel Baker engineered the episode and did the sound design. My collaborator Chris Roberts conducted original reporting for the series and Stacey Carter provided archival, audio and photographic research. Justin Benttinen assisted with gathering sound. Michael Stoll edited the series. Support for this podcast comes from the California Endowment and from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Local Independent Online News Publishers. To read the accompanying print story and see never-before-published historical photos, as well as documents unearthed from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, visit sfpublicpress.org/exposed. Thanks for listening.
[Catch up on episode 1 of the podcast: “A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy.”]
— Additional reporting by Chris Roberts.
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.
