ABSTRACT
A deluge of military-sponsored experiments prior to and during the Cold War exposed thousands of people without their knowledge or consent to radiation, and the deception was in some cases sustained over decades to insure survivors' continued cooperation so the military could assess long-term health effects from radiation exposure. This chapter examines the larger structure surrounding state-sponsored human-subject radiation studies and the crucial links that made such experiments possible. The Isotope program that had grown out of Monsanto's Clinton Laboratories was subsumed by the AEC. In 1952 the AEC and US Air Force contracted with RAND Corporation to compile findings from Project Gabriel. AEC officials argued that the radium cover story would not raise suspicions because radium was a "naturally occurring" radioactive substance. Physicist Paul Hahn of Vanderbilt University was a protégé of Robley Evans from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and along with Louis Hempelmann had studied the mortality of US Radium workers.
