The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

The Plutonium Files is the shocking exposé of the US government’s medical experiments on unwitting citizens during the Cold War. Americans recoiled when they learned of the brutal experiments conducted by Nazi doctors. But as the world was learning about those horrors, US scientists were injecting eighteen patients in hospital wards with plutonium, a deadly substance used to make the atomic bomb. The patients were given code numbers and went to their graves without knowing what had been done to them.
In The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Eileen Welsome describes how she uncovered the identities of these patients and goes on to chronicle the web of deceit that enabled the experiment to remain largely unknown for fifty years. It’s a searing, cautionary tale about what can happen behind the cloak of secrecy
In this new edition, the book returns to the July 16, 1945, Trinity Test in southern New Mexico. Trinity was not only the world’s first atomic bomb, but the world’s first dirty bomb. Survivors and their descendants in the path of the fallout experienced a huge increase in radiation-linked cancers and are still fighting for reparations.
The Plutonium Files also traces the murky origins of other radiation experiments. Like the plutonium injectees, the subjects were surreptitiously followed for years. They included children in Massachusetts, pregnant women in Tennessee, and prisoners in Oregon and Washington.

＂A fierce expose of governmental duplicity and dangerous science ...The literature on the official crimes of the Cold War is large and growing. Welsome’s stunning book adds much to that literature, and it makes for sobering reading.＂

Kirkus Reviews