Few Cold War research projects so vividly highlight the permeability of the body as Project Sunshine–a clandestine effort to procure bodies and body parts for analysis amid open-air atomic testing in Nevada and the South Pacific. It began at a meeting of Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) officials and affiliated scientists at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California in 1953. As Eileen Welsome puts it:
“The group decided the only way they could properly ascertain worldwide hazards from fallout was by collecting and analyzing plants, animals, and human tissue from the four corners of the Earth. Thus was born Operation Sunshine, one of the most bizarre and ghoulish projects of the Cold War. The source of its name is a matter of debate, but some say it was derived from the fact fallout, like sunshine, covered the globe.”
Collecting bodies–amid the continuing insistence of AEC and military officials that open-air atomic testing did not constitute a public health issue-was a public relations problem. And it was decided Project Sunshine would be conducted in strict secrecy.
A central concern was strontium-90 contamination. With a half-life of 29 years, it constitutes a serious and persistent radiological hazard. And it is a “bone seeker.” Chemically similar to calcium, radiostrontium locates in deciduous (baby) teeth and bone upon ingestion, typically through contaminated milk. It can contribute to leukemia and bone cancer, in time.
In January of 1955 the Commission held a Biophysics Conference in Washington, D.C. to review Project Sunshine data gathered over the preceding 13 months. AEC Commissioner Willard Libby stressed the challenges in assessing strontium-90 deposition when it dispersed over much of the globe. This included analysis of descent from the stratosphere and incorporation into milk and other foods products, retention in the oceans and human consumption of fish, and runoff from soil into creeks and rivers.
Of particular concern was the rate of absorption in human bone worldwide as weapons yields multiplied with the invention of thermonuclear weapons. Libby observed:
“By far the most important is human samples. We have been reduced to essentially zero level on the human samples. I don’t know how to get those, but I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get these and particularly in the young age group.”
Indeed, stillborn babies were particularly prized. A report passed about at the conference reported on the strontium-90 uptake among 55 stillborn children’s remains from Chicago, one from Utah, three from India, and three adult legs from Massachusetts. Their remains were cremated, and the ashes subjected to radiochemical analysis. The dead contributing to assessment of matter that could not be measured in the living.
Those assembled agreed more samples should be acquired through personal contacts with medical professionals, including hospital directors and pathologists. To sustain the secrecy of the program, the cover story was they were needed to study exposure to naturally occurring radium. In turn, Libby endorsed “body snatching.” Dr. J. Laurence Kulp, of Columbia University, confided that personal contacts were in-place from which to obtain human cadavers from Vancouver, Houston, New York, and Puerto Rico, noting:
“Down in Houston they don’t have all these rules. They claim that they can get virtually and they intend to get virtually every death in the age range we are interested in that occurs in the City of Houston. They have a lot of poverty cases and so on.”
The sleight-of-hand was twofold: 1) AEC officials did not want the public to know they were collecting human remains for radiological analysis; 2) People outside the AEC supplying human remains were told it was needed to assess the effects of something other than strontium-90.
Attendees at the January 1955 Biophysics Conference also wrestled with the legality of their efforts. Willard Libby reported that a law firm had been hired to investigate the “law of body snatching” but confided the results were not “encouraging.” “It shows you how very difficult it is going to be to do legally,” Libby confessed.
Participants at the 1955 Biophysics Conference also wrestled with data in regard to the question of whether adults absorbed strontium-90. Indeed, the data acquired over the preceding 13 months illustrated adult bone did not register “essentially zero assay,” as previously assumed. Willard Libby was surprised. The radiostrontium hazard encompassed more than simply the growing bones of children.
The covert effort to harvest body parts was key to determining strontium-90 uptake around the world. The intent was noble. The methodology was unethical even by the standards prevailing at the time, and AEC officials feared it was illegal. Nonetheless, Project Sunshine collected nearly 9,000 human samples, including intact skeletons and 600 fetuses from near and far. This would not have been feasible if scientists at prestigious universities around the country had not offered their expertise and technical resources to such a covert undertaking, not to mention the medical professionals delivering “human material.”
Atmospheric atomic detonations enrolled the entire world in a biological experiment without informed consent or voluntary participation, although some more than others. Project Sunshine data illustrated children had higher levels of strontium-90 in their bones as they were growing at a point in time when the two major superpowers were dispersing it with abandon.
Human samples covertly harvested from hither and far evoke images of people, in whole or part, treated as objects for dissection as opposed to subjects with value unto themselves. Moreover, an over-arching lesson of Project Sunshine was an evolving awareness it is was possible to contaminate much of the globe from a limited number of origination points. Stontium-90 was an unintended tracer descending back to earth relatively quickly when detonations were measured in kilotons and debris ascended to the troposphere, but detonations measured in megatons ascended into the stratosphere where debris circled the globe before drifting into the troposphere where it then returned to earth with rainfall.
As expansive as the planet may be, atomic military technology heralded a reduction of ontological distance that is jarring in its implications. Joseph Masco notes:
“Bodysnatching, baby bones, genetic mutations, sunshine units-these are the terms of a new American modernity based not only on technoscience but on managing the appearance of the bomb. Project Sunshine can be read as an official articulation of nuclear fear, a tacit recognition that a new tactile experience of the world was being created by the distribution of nuclear materials into the environment.”
Of note, many details of Project Sunshine were not uncovered until 1995. These details encompass deception, cover stories, and body snatching. Science, politics, and the macabre intertwining as the arms race accelerated over the course of the 1950s. In 1994 President Bill Clinton established the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to untangle the history of government-sponsored human radiation studies during the Cold War.
The Advisory Committee had unprecedented access to the archives of federal agencies and in October 1995 handed the President a 900-page report outlining not just the activities conducted under the auspices of Project Sunshine but a litany of other research projects in which informed consent of participants was not obtained, the potential risks were not fully discussed, and the family of deceased “samples” were not told their loved ones were obtained for bio-medical research.
The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released its own report in 1995 and documented 59 tissue analysis studies, including Project Sunshine, sponsored by the AEC and, later, the Department of Energy. More than 15,000 people were administered radioactive substances in some manner, and many of these studies employed deception and misinformation to solicit participation.
Human radiation experiments conducted on U.S. citizens have a “Buchenwald touch” irrespective of the ends to which the research was applied, Gerald Markowitz suggests. A survivor of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, as quoted in Michael Marder’s book The Chernobyl Herbarium, articulated this experience:
What is there to say about exposure to radiation that cannot be seen nor smelled nor heard nor touched nor tasted? Those of us who have been in its eerie neighborhood have resembled objects, onto which certain effects have been inflicted, as opposed to subjects in control and aware of what is going on.
For more information:
AEC, “Report on Project Gabriel,” Division of Biology and Medicine, July 1954.
Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dial Press, 1999).
AEC, “Rand Sunshine Project,” Division of Biology and Medicine, 30 December 1953.
The Rand Corporation, “Project Sunshine: Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons,” 6 August 1953.
“Final Report of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments,” Ruth Faden, Chair, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995).
AEC, “Thirty-Sixth Meeting of the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission,” meeting minutes, 17-19 August 1953.
Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
U.S. General Accounting Office, “Information on DOE’s Human Tissue Analysis Work,” May 1995.
Gerald Markowitz, “‘A Little of the Buchenwald Touch'”: America’s Secret Radiation Experiments,” Reviews in American History 28, (2000): 601-606
Michael Marder, The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016).