9 ms·

US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis 1945-1970 (2011)

158 points by Jimmc414 2y ago

Jimmc414 2y ago
Server appears to be getting hugged to death. Here is the archive link. https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/13170 https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.u...
rightbyte 2y ago
When I am bitter about the state of academia I remind my self that research in medicine especially on mental patients used to be horrendous. These mocked ethics commitees are there for a good reason.
- observationist 2y ago
  That doesn't mean they shouldn't be reined in or criticized when they take themselves too seriously or go too far. Bureaucracies need regular pruning or they take over.
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians. By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2] 1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/ https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/ 2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/
- bguebert 2y ago
  It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens
  - zero-sharp 2y ago
    There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
  - greenavocado 2y ago
    It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.
    - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
      Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.
      - hkpack 2y ago
        People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it. We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too. And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.
odyssey7 2y ago
"Through this case study, the author explores how a large number of participants inside an organization will willingly participate in organizational acts that are harmful to others, and how large numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or harmful activity by an organization." Truly unsettling. Everyday Americans secretly exploited by their own government. If this were punishment for a crime, it would be unconstitutional due to being cruel, inhumane, and without due process. But it wasn't punishment for anything, the government just attacked them.
- odyssey7 2y ago
  From the timeline on page 253: 1944 - Army Medical Corps authorize Rochester to study polonium exposure on humans (Moss, et al, 196) April 10, 1945 - The first human plutonium injection occurs in Oak Ridge; three others were “approved” for Chicago, Berkeley/San Francisco, and Los Alamos by Dr. Friedell at Oak Ridge (under Langham‟s instruction), Hamilton, and Warren. (Moss, et al, 195) April 26, 1945 - Second human plutonium injection takes place in a 68-year old man at Billings Hospital in Chicago (Moss, et al, 197). May 14, 1945 - Third person injected with plutonium at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco (Moss, et al, 197). October 1945-July 1946 - Eleven patients were injected with plutonium at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY; this included seven men and four women ranging in age from 18 years through 68 years old. The 18-year old died approximately 1.5 years later (Moss, et al, 205).
  - hajile 2y ago
    Don't forget 751 pregnant women given radioactive vitamins. They claim only 3 kids died, but destroyed a bunch of documentation in the 70s, so the actual conclusions were probably far more damning.
- darkclouds 2y ago
  [dead]
- webdoodle 2y ago
  Sounds a lot like a certain pandemic, and haphazard vaccine program that was mandated afterwards.
tomwheeler 2y ago
St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It remains a problem to this day. Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers claim it's no big deal.
- tylerflick 2y ago
  All of this is still probably less toxic than the water in the Lake of the Ozarks (partially kidding).
  - fransje26 2y ago
    What's the problem with water in the Lake of the Ozarks?
- dole 2y ago
  I worked from 2008-2016 next to that landfill [0] and for the last three years of that, being outdoors meant constantly smelling the worst sour milk smell you've ever smelled everyday and stinging your eyes at least once a week. Coldwater Creek [1] is a whole other catastrophe with independent investigators and like you said, denial from the gov't entities. "In August 2015, the United States Army Corps of Engineers admitted that they found thorium-230 in the creek. In January 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the high rate of cancers in the area, and confirmed a potential link between the cluster and the polluted creek. In 2022, radioactive material was found at Jana Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District in Florissant. The radioactive material includes lead-210, polonium, radium, and other toxic materials." The Army Corps of Engineers has been cleaning up the creek for decades but refuses to share detailed information with the public about its findings." "... Most startling, however, was that the documents indicated that the USACE, dating back to 2016, had notified Hazelwood School Board members that it wanted to enter school grounds to conduct testing. ... Bernaugh and the Jana Elementary PTA sent a letter to parents informing them of their discoveries. On August 5, the Hazelwood School District, in a separate letter, acknowledged that the USACE had informed it of “low-level radioactive contamination” on the property on January 27, 2022. For over six months, it had failed to inform the community of these results, maintaining that the “contamination did not pose an immediate risk.” [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldwater_Creek_(Missouri_river_tributary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldwater_Creek_(Missouri_rive... [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jana-elementary-school-manhattan-project-florissant-missouri-nuclear-waste/ https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jana-elementar...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wumeow 2y ago
TLDR: they wanted to study how aerosols disperse in cities and they underestimated or ignored the risks of the tracer they used.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- odyssey7 2y ago
  The aerosols being dispersed were biological and chemical weapons. If the responsible government officials underestimated the risks, it was because they had no evidence that it would be harmless to spray their experimental biological and chemical weapons on schoolchildren. Page 30: "Army officials lied to city leaders and residents, saying the tests were intended to see if smoke screens could protect the city from Russian bomber attacks. But recently released Army reports admit that was a "cover story" for... secret biological and chemical warfare tests (Sawyer, 1994)."
  - wumeow 2y ago
    No, the aerosol was zinc cadmium sulfide. It wasn’t testing of biological and chemical weapons, it was testing of a simulant to model how those weapons would disperse through a city.
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      The official story was that the aerosols were "biological simulants." If the official story could have gotten away with zinc cadmium sulfide, it would have. Page 69: "The St. Louis study may have involved far more than biological “simulants”, per the official military talking point. There is indication of a secret study conducted in tandem to the “official” military-sponsored St. Louis aerosol study. The second study, which for some reason warrants even more secrecy than its parallel study, appears to have been connected to a new type of deadly nuclear weapon, one of many being developed by the coalition, to be tested on unsuspecting residents of St. Louis"
      - 2y ago
aaomidi 2y ago
“Why don’t people trust the government with vaccines???” Meanwhile. The government.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
  - popcalc 2y ago
    I like to think this influenced the counter-culture movement of the 60's.
    - krapp 2y ago
      One of the weird quirks of American history seems to be that 60's subculture was more or less accidentally created by the CIA via MKUltra introducing LSD to the populace and funding modern art movements as anti-communist propaganda.
- kube-system 2y ago
  -- Sent via DARPA Internet Protocol The US government does so many damn things that it can be used as an example of just about anything.
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    The internet was going to happen with or without US government involvement. The US government just made it faster. Also, comparing testing radiation vs testing fast communications is not a valid equivalency.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      I don't disagree, because that's entirely not the point I was making. I'm saying that the law of truly large numbers applies here. The US government has done exceptionally good things and exceptionally bad things because it does a ridiculous number of things. It simply does more than any other organization; it has been the world's largest organization for some time.
drewcoo 2y ago
Unless, I'm mistaken, this was at Pruitt-Igoe, the first US housing project, torn down in the 70s. The testing was long thought to be some kind of "conspiracy theory," which is a wonderful way to dismiss any claims of official abuse. The first link DDG gave me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-secret-cold-war-testing-st-louis-demand-compensa-rcna117149 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-s...
- no_exit 2y ago
  https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-community-under-the-atomic-cloud/ https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...
suby 2y ago
> A government study found that in a worst-case scenario, “repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity and lung cancer.” Yet the Army contends there is no evidence anyone in St. Louis was harmed. > A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement to the AP that health assessments performed by the Army “concluded that exposure would not pose a health risk,” and follow-up independent studies also found no cause for alarm. This whole thing is outrageous.
chrsmth 2y ago
This reminds me of another story. Apparently zinc cadmium sulfide was dropped on Canadians by the US military in 1953 -- 2 Albertan towns, and Winnipeg. The timing was so close it made me wonder if it was part of the same program. It seems so, Winnipeg is mentioned in the full research paper. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-secretly-tested-carcinogen-in-western-canada-during-the-cold-war-researcher-discovers https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-secretly-tested-car...
khana 2y ago
[dead]
ricksunny 2y ago
Very interested in this (the metastatic effects of secrecy in sensitivd projects that lack what you might call a 'secrecy-self-kill-switch' built-in from conception), thank you for posting.
- ricksunny 2y ago
  Curious whether surfacing it was precipitated by this exchange in House-DoE hearing yesterday? (timestamped): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=4032s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=4032s
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    Maybe. They conspicuously refer to the radiation in what sounds like official language. Expanding the compensation for the harms of WWII-era toxic waste to people in St. Louis, rather than to include the people in St. Louis who were experimented on during the Cold War. Wild that right after this topic, Burchett pivots the discussion to UFOs and aliens and the US Secretary of Energy asserts that they aren’t real. I guess it could be read as a dismissive suggestion to those interested that the St. Louis experiments are just another conspiracy theory.
    - odyssey7 2y ago
      They also note that the government has been and will continue to be in charge of decontaminating the affected areas of St. Louis. This would entail the destruction of physical evidence of what happened.
    - ricksunny 2y ago
      Well I'm poorly placed to critically review the comparison as I'm a longtime supporter of Rep. Burchett's UAP transparency efforts.
      - ricksunny 2y ago
        Since you mention by the way, he was followed up shortly after by Rep. Luna's quite competent UAP transparency questioning of DoE Sec. Granholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=5656s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=5656s
jongjong 2y ago
That has to be the most disturbing abstract I've ever read. Clearly, that is proof that the government has conspired to harm its own citizens in the past. This precedent makes it clear that those who opposed COVID19 vaccines were not 'crazy conspiracy theorists' as the media led everyone to believe but were in fact potentially very reasonable people. Every person who called anti-vaxers 'crazy' essentially engaged in gaslighting. Firing unvaccinated employees was an act of pure malevolence. Do you think you would trust a vaccine from the government if that same government had sprayed your grandparents with radioactive materials? Yet that's exactly what was being asked of some people during COVID19 pandemic. It's disturbing how few people can understand the evil behind vaccine mandates. Variants of the story above were literally what many people faced. Many people can clearly remember instances of government abuse directed against their family members. You cannot expect, much less force such people to trust the government. If you suspect that you may have become a member of the underclass, you are right to assume that you may become a target of the government and you have the right to protect yourself. It sounds insane to say it like that, but this is the reality that the government has created. It has made it rational to be paranoid. The government has many tentacles and each tentacle doesn't necessarily know what the other tentacles are doing. It's foolish to assume that the government can always be trusted. It can never be fully trusted. The government shouldn't even trust itself. It should be designed with that in mind.
NULLKoIG 2y ago
"But not all Ikariots enjoy the same degree of longevity. Data from the ongoing study shows that people living in the northern part of the island outlive those inhabiting the southern part, and therein lies the mystery. Presumably southern Ikariots have no significant dietary differences from their northern counterparts—nor would genetics make sense, since there’s little chance of finding genetically isolated populations on a small island. That’s why some experts have proposed one possible reason for this discordant longevity—geology" The north and northwest of the island are predominated by granite rocks, which naturally contain trace amounts of uranium and are known to emit very low doses of gamma radiation, between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually—somewhere in between the amount of radiation you would absorb from a single chest X-ray and a more-powerful CT scan. “To the south of the island, on the contrary, limestone predominates,” says Christodoulos Stefanadis, professor of cardiology at the National University of Athens and the Ikaria study’s head researcher. Statistically, people in the north of the island live significantly longer than those to the south. In 2001, the northern part of the island had 11 male and 22 female nonagenarians and centenarians out of a total of 1,452 male and 1,359 female inhabitants—whereas only five out of 1,691 men and 19 out of 1,710 women were over 90 in the southern part. Stefanadis says this appears to be tied to the excess in gamma rays in the north, which are between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually (over and above a universally “normal” amount of gamma rays would be about 1 to 2 millisievert per year). “This radiation difference is an independent prognostic factor of longevity,” Stefanadis says, though he is quick to add there is not enough evidence to confirm this definitively, simply because the question has not been properly investigated. https://proto.life/2021/11/ikaria-the-island-of-mysterious-longevity/ https://proto.life/2021/11/ikaria-the-island-of-mysterious-l...
- odyssey7 2y ago
  Would you endorse secretly spiking a stranger’s drink with uranium? To make this scenario more comparable, you would need to randomize the amount of uranium because you would need to be unsure of the effect of the dose. You would also need to do this to schoolchildren. You would also need to be the US Army or acting under the authority of the US Army. You would also need to be immune to prosecution and to any legal remedy sought by the survivors.

158 points by Jimmc414 2y ago

Server appears to be getting hugged to death. Here is the archive link. https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/13170 https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.u...

rightbyte 2y ago

When I am bitter about the state of academia I remind my self that research in medicine especially on mental patients used to be horrendous. These mocked ethics commitees are there for a good reason.

observationist 2y ago
That doesn't mean they shouldn't be reined in or criticized when they take themselves too seriously or go too far. Bureaucracies need regular pruning or they take over.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago

Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians. By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2] 1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/ https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/ 2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/

bguebert 2y ago
It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
- greenavocado 2y ago
  It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.
  - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
    Governments are happy to exploit their citizens for any -- or no -- reason whatsoever.
    - hkpack 2y ago
      People with power are happy to exploit other people for their own benefits if they can get away with it. We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too. And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.

odyssey7 2y ago

"Through this case study, the author explores how a large number of participants inside an organization will willingly participate in organizational acts that are harmful to others, and how large numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or harmful activity by an organization." Truly unsettling. Everyday Americans secretly exploited by their own government. If this were punishment for a crime, it would be unconstitutional due to being cruel, inhumane, and without due process. But it wasn't punishment for anything, the government just attacked them.

odyssey7 2y ago
From the timeline on page 253: 1944 - Army Medical Corps authorize Rochester to study polonium exposure on humans (Moss, et al, 196) April 10, 1945 - The first human plutonium injection occurs in Oak Ridge; three others were “approved” for Chicago, Berkeley/San Francisco, and Los Alamos by Dr. Friedell at Oak Ridge (under Langham‟s instruction), Hamilton, and Warren. (Moss, et al, 195) April 26, 1945 - Second human plutonium injection takes place in a 68-year old man at Billings Hospital in Chicago (Moss, et al, 197). May 14, 1945 - Third person injected with plutonium at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco (Moss, et al, 197). October 1945-July 1946 - Eleven patients were injected with plutonium at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY; this included seven men and four women ranging in age from 18 years through 68 years old. The 18-year old died approximately 1.5 years later (Moss, et al, 205).
- hajile 2y ago
  Don't forget 751 pregnant women given radioactive vitamins. They claim only 3 kids died, but destroyed a bunch of documentation in the 70s, so the actual conclusions were probably far more damning.
darkclouds 2y ago
[dead]
webdoodle 2y ago
Sounds a lot like a certain pandemic, and haphazard vaccine program that was mandated afterwards.

tomwheeler 2y ago

St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It remains a problem to this day. Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers claim it's no big deal.

tylerflick 2y ago
All of this is still probably less toxic than the water in the Lake of the Ozarks (partially kidding).
- fransje26 2y ago
  What's the problem with water in the Lake of the Ozarks?
dole 2y ago
I worked from 2008-2016 next to that landfill [0] and for the last three years of that, being outdoors meant constantly smelling the worst sour milk smell you've ever smelled everyday and stinging your eyes at least once a week. Coldwater Creek [1] is a whole other catastrophe with independent investigators and like you said, denial from the gov't entities. "In August 2015, the United States Army Corps of Engineers admitted that they found thorium-230 in the creek. In January 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the high rate of cancers in the area, and confirmed a potential link between the cluster and the polluted creek. In 2022, radioactive material was found at Jana Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District in Florissant. The radioactive material includes lead-210, polonium, radium, and other toxic materials." The Army Corps of Engineers has been cleaning up the creek for decades but refuses to share detailed information with the public about its findings." "... Most startling, however, was that the documents indicated that the USACE, dating back to 2016, had notified Hazelwood School Board members that it wanted to enter school grounds to conduct testing. ... Bernaugh and the Jana Elementary PTA sent a letter to parents informing them of their discoveries. On August 5, the Hazelwood School District, in a separate letter, acknowledged that the USACE had informed it of “low-level radioactive contamination” on the property on January 27, 2022. For over six months, it had failed to inform the community of these results, maintaining that the “contamination did not pose an immediate risk.” [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldwater_Creek_(Missouri_river_tributary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldwater_Creek_(Missouri_rive... [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jana-elementary-school-manhattan-project-florissant-missouri-nuclear-waste/ https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jana-elementar...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wumeow 2y ago

TLDR: they wanted to study how aerosols disperse in cities and they underestimated or ignored the risks of the tracer they used.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
odyssey7 2y ago
The aerosols being dispersed were biological and chemical weapons. If the responsible government officials underestimated the risks, it was because they had no evidence that it would be harmless to spray their experimental biological and chemical weapons on schoolchildren. Page 30: "Army officials lied to city leaders and residents, saying the tests were intended to see if smoke screens could protect the city from Russian bomber attacks. But recently released Army reports admit that was a "cover story" for... secret biological and chemical warfare tests (Sawyer, 1994)."
- wumeow 2y ago
  No, the aerosol was zinc cadmium sulfide. It wasn’t testing of biological and chemical weapons, it was testing of a simulant to model how those weapons would disperse through a city.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    The official story was that the aerosols were "biological simulants." If the official story could have gotten away with zinc cadmium sulfide, it would have. Page 69: "The St. Louis study may have involved far more than biological “simulants”, per the official military talking point. There is indication of a secret study conducted in tandem to the “official” military-sponsored St. Louis aerosol study. The second study, which for some reason warrants even more secrecy than its parallel study, appears to have been connected to a new type of deadly nuclear weapon, one of many being developed by the coalition, to be tested on unsuspecting residents of St. Louis"
    - 2y ago

aaomidi 2y ago

“Why don’t people trust the government with vaccines???” Meanwhile. The government.

aaomidi 2y ago
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
- popcalc 2y ago
  I like to think this influenced the counter-culture movement of the 60's.
  - krapp 2y ago
    One of the weird quirks of American history seems to be that 60's subculture was more or less accidentally created by the CIA via MKUltra introducing LSD to the populace and funding modern art movements as anti-communist propaganda.
kube-system 2y ago
-- Sent via DARPA Internet Protocol The US government does so many damn things that it can be used as an example of just about anything.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  The internet was going to happen with or without US government involvement. The US government just made it faster. Also, comparing testing radiation vs testing fast communications is not a valid equivalency.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    I don't disagree, because that's entirely not the point I was making. I'm saying that the law of truly large numbers applies here. The US government has done exceptionally good things and exceptionally bad things because it does a ridiculous number of things. It simply does more than any other organization; it has been the world's largest organization for some time.

drewcoo 2y ago

Unless, I'm mistaken, this was at Pruitt-Igoe, the first US housing project, torn down in the 70s. The testing was long thought to be some kind of "conspiracy theory," which is a wonderful way to dismiss any claims of official abuse. The first link DDG gave me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-secret-cold-war-testing-st-louis-demand-compensa-rcna117149 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-s...

no_exit 2y ago
https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-community-under-the-atomic-cloud/ https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...

suby 2y ago

> A government study found that in a worst-case scenario, “repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity and lung cancer.” Yet the Army contends there is no evidence anyone in St. Louis was harmed. > A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement to the AP that health assessments performed by the Army “concluded that exposure would not pose a health risk,” and follow-up independent studies also found no cause for alarm. This whole thing is outrageous.

chrsmth 2y ago

This reminds me of another story. Apparently zinc cadmium sulfide was dropped on Canadians by the US military in 1953 -- 2 Albertan towns, and Winnipeg. The timing was so close it made me wonder if it was part of the same program. It seems so, Winnipeg is mentioned in the full research paper. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-secretly-tested-carcinogen-in-western-canada-during-the-cold-war-researcher-discovers https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-secretly-tested-car...

khana 2y ago

[dead]

ricksunny 2y ago

Very interested in this (the metastatic effects of secrecy in sensitivd projects that lack what you might call a 'secrecy-self-kill-switch' built-in from conception), thank you for posting.

ricksunny 2y ago
Curious whether surfacing it was precipitated by this exchange in House-DoE hearing yesterday? (timestamped): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=4032s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=4032s
- odyssey7 2y ago
  Maybe. They conspicuously refer to the radiation in what sounds like official language. Expanding the compensation for the harms of WWII-era toxic waste to people in St. Louis, rather than to include the people in St. Louis who were experimented on during the Cold War. Wild that right after this topic, Burchett pivots the discussion to UFOs and aliens and the US Secretary of Energy asserts that they aren’t real. I guess it could be read as a dismissive suggestion to those interested that the St. Louis experiments are just another conspiracy theory.
  - odyssey7 2y ago
    They also note that the government has been and will continue to be in charge of decontaminating the affected areas of St. Louis. This would entail the destruction of physical evidence of what happened.
  - ricksunny 2y ago
    Well I'm poorly placed to critically review the comparison as I'm a longtime supporter of Rep. Burchett's UAP transparency efforts.
    - ricksunny 2y ago
      Since you mention by the way, he was followed up shortly after by Rep. Luna's quite competent UAP transparency questioning of DoE Sec. Granholm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=5656s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=5656s

jongjong 2y ago

That has to be the most disturbing abstract I've ever read. Clearly, that is proof that the government has conspired to harm its own citizens in the past. This precedent makes it clear that those who opposed COVID19 vaccines were not 'crazy conspiracy theorists' as the media led everyone to believe but were in fact potentially very reasonable people. Every person who called anti-vaxers 'crazy' essentially engaged in gaslighting. Firing unvaccinated employees was an act of pure malevolence. Do you think you would trust a vaccine from the government if that same government had sprayed your grandparents with radioactive materials? Yet that's exactly what was being asked of some people during COVID19 pandemic. It's disturbing how few people can understand the evil behind vaccine mandates. Variants of the story above were literally what many people faced. Many people can clearly remember instances of government abuse directed against their family members. You cannot expect, much less force such people to trust the government. If you suspect that you may have become a member of the underclass, you are right to assume that you may become a target of the government and you have the right to protect yourself. It sounds insane to say it like that, but this is the reality that the government has created. It has made it rational to be paranoid. The government has many tentacles and each tentacle doesn't necessarily know what the other tentacles are doing. It's foolish to assume that the government can always be trusted. It can never be fully trusted. The government shouldn't even trust itself. It should be designed with that in mind.

NULLKoIG 2y ago

"But not all Ikariots enjoy the same degree of longevity. Data from the ongoing study shows that people living in the northern part of the island outlive those inhabiting the southern part, and therein lies the mystery. Presumably southern Ikariots have no significant dietary differences from their northern counterparts—nor would genetics make sense, since there’s little chance of finding genetically isolated populations on a small island. That’s why some experts have proposed one possible reason for this discordant longevity—geology" The north and northwest of the island are predominated by granite rocks, which naturally contain trace amounts of uranium and are known to emit very low doses of gamma radiation, between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually—somewhere in between the amount of radiation you would absorb from a single chest X-ray and a more-powerful CT scan. “To the south of the island, on the contrary, limestone predominates,” says Christodoulos Stefanadis, professor of cardiology at the National University of Athens and the Ikaria study’s head researcher. Statistically, people in the north of the island live significantly longer than those to the south. In 2001, the northern part of the island had 11 male and 22 female nonagenarians and centenarians out of a total of 1,452 male and 1,359 female inhabitants—whereas only five out of 1,691 men and 19 out of 1,710 women were over 90 in the southern part. Stefanadis says this appears to be tied to the excess in gamma rays in the north, which are between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually (over and above a universally “normal” amount of gamma rays would be about 1 to 2 millisievert per year). “This radiation difference is an independent prognostic factor of longevity,” Stefanadis says, though he is quick to add there is not enough evidence to confirm this definitively, simply because the question has not been properly investigated. https://proto.life/2021/11/ikaria-the-island-of-mysterious-longevity/ https://proto.life/2021/11/ikaria-the-island-of-mysterious-l...

odyssey7 2y ago
Would you endorse secretly spiking a stranger’s drink with uranium? To make this scenario more comparable, you would need to randomize the amount of uranium because you would need to be unsure of the effect of the dose. You would also need to do this to schoolchildren. You would also need to be the US Army or acting under the authority of the US Army. You would also need to be immune to prosecution and to any legal remedy sought by the survivors.