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Investigations

Veterans used in secret experiments sue military for answers.

Caitlin Dickerson

Historic images from the Naval Research Laboratory depict results of a test subject who was exposed to mustard gas. Naval Research Laboratory hide caption

American service members used in chemical and biological testing have some questions: What exactly were they exposed to? And how is it affecting their health?

Tens of thousands of troops were used in testing conducted by the U.S. military between 1922 and 1975. As one Army scientist explained, the military wanted to learn how to induce symptoms such as "fear, panic, hysteria, and hallucinations" in enemy soldiers. Recruitment was done on a volunteer basis, but the details of the testing and associated risks were often withheld from those who signed up.

Many of the veterans who served as test subjects have since died. But today, those who are still alive are part of a class action lawsuit against the Army. If they're successful, the Army will have to explain to anyone who was used in testing exactly what substances they were given and any known risks. The Army would also have to provide those veterans with health care for any illnesses that result, in whole or in part, from the testing.

The law firm representing the veterans estimates at least 70,000 troops were used in the testing, including World War II veterans exposed to mustard gas , whom NPR reported on earlier this summer.

Bill Blazinski has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which he thinks may have been caused by the military tests. He was 20 years old when he volunteered in 1968.

"There would be a guaranteed three-day pass every weekend unless you had a test," he says. "There would be no kitchen police duties, no guard duties. And it sounded like a pretty good duty."

What sounded more like a vacation than military duty quickly changed, he says. In one test, doctors said they would inject him with an agent and its antidote back to back.

"We were placed in individual padded cells. And you know the nurse left and I'm looking at this padded wall and I knew it was solid but all of a sudden started fluttering like a flag does up on a flag pole," he recalls.

To learn about what substances made him hallucinate, in 2006, Blazinski requested the original test documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "It showed an experimental antidote for nerve agent poisoning with known side effects, and another drug designed to reverse the effects of the first," he says.

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Researchers kept information about which agents they were administering from test subjects to avoid influencing the test results. A lawyer representing the veterans, Ben Patterson of the law firm Morrison and Foerster, says that's a problem.

"They don't know what they were exposed to. You know, some of these substances were only referred to by code names," Patterson says.

Code names such as CAR 302668. That's one of the agents, records show, that researchers injected into Frank Rochelle in 1968.

During one test, Rochelle remembers that the freckles on his arms and legs appeared to be moving. Thinking bugs had crawled under his skin, he tried using a razor blade from his shaving kit to cut them out. After that test, he says he hallucinated for 40 hours.

"There were animals coming out of the walls," he says. "I saw a huge rabbit and he was solid white with red eyes."

In 1975, the Army's chief of medical research admitted to Congress that he didn't have the funding to monitor test subjects' health after they went through the experiments. Since then, the military says it has ended all chemical and biological testing.

Test subjects like Rochelle say that's not enough.

"We were assured that everything that went on inside the clinic, we were going to be under 100 percent observation; they were going to do nothing to harm us," he says. "And also we were sure that we would be taken care of afterwards if anything happened. Instead we were left to hang out to dry."

The Department of Justice is representing the Army in the case and declined to comment for this story. In June, an appeals court ruled in favor of the veterans. On Friday, the Army filed for a rehearing.

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Vietnam-era veterans exposed to nerve agents and hallucinogens in secret military tests seek years of back benefits

Test subjects in an undated photo enter a chamber where they were exposed to chemical agents as part of military experiments at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. (U.S. Army photo)

WASHINGTON – Vietnam-era veterans exposed to nerve agents and hallucinogenic drugs in a classified military research program more than 50 years ago are appealing for retroactive disability benefits after a federal court ruling found their constitutional rights were violated.

Now in their 70s and early 80s, the veterans were sworn to silence and restricted from reporting the debilitating health effects from the program, which included paralysis, cancer, depression and psychosis. They were also restricted from obtaining disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to the court.

“I never knew what I was given in those tests,” said Frank Rochelle, 76, of North Carolina, a former Army corporal whose service from 1968-1970 included a tour in Vietnam. “When I went to file a VA claim, I was told that the tests I took part in had never happened. The records were sealed. I had no way to prove my case.”

But a 2023 ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington is enabling Rochelle and other service members for the first time to obtain VA disability compensation retroactive to their date of discharge. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 veterans who participated as human test subjects in classified studies that the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland are believed to be alive today.

The facility was established in 1948 primarily as a center for researching chemical warfare agents, but military equipment, protective clothing and pharmaceuticals also were tested at the facility, according to the VA. The Vietnam-era veterans were considered volunteers in classified studies that began in 1956. They signed consent agreements prior to participating in experiments but said later they were not informed of the risks.

About 7,000 military personnel participated in the tests until the Army disbanded the program in 1975, according to the Defense Department. Edgewood Arsenal now functions as the Army’s center for research, tests and development in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense.

The court found the secrecy agreements that the participants signed, which carried the threat of criminal penalty if violated, effectively denied them due process and disability compensation to which they were entitled, said Mark Jones, the attorney for Rochelle and several other veterans.

“This decision importantly opens a pathway for all veterans who are under a secrecy agreement to pursue their claims, whether they are Edgewood Arsenal vets or not,” he said.

Rochelle’s case is pending a higher review in the U.S. Veterans Court of Appeals, which has already ordered retroactive compensation this year in three other cases involving Edgewood veterans.

Jones said though the VA states it now has a process in place for Edgewood Arsenal veterans to file to receive benefits, the agency continues to delay decisions and deny their claims.

Terrence Hayes, the VA press secretary, said the VA does not have figures on how many Vietnam-era veterans have submitted claims for retroactive payments related to illnesses and injuries from serving as test subjects at the Edgewood Arsenal.

In 2023, Army veteran Bob Taylor of Idaho was the first veteran to receive disability compensation retroactive to his military discharge for illnesses and injuries that he suffered after participating in the classified research project, according to court documents.

Taylor’s attorneys first argued in U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans that he was entitled to compensation back to his discharge date of 1971.

But the court denied the claim, which was then appealed in U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.

That court ruled the government-imposed secrecy that kept him silent about his medical problems entitled him to receive disability compensation dating to the day after he was separated from the military.

“I went to Edgewood, and my whole world fell apart,” said Taylor, a 73-year-old former private.

Taylor, who served from 1969-1971, has been diagnosed with multiple cancers, depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I’m trying to stay alive and see this case to the end,” he said. “This is not just about me. I’m fighting for all veterans to get their full benefits. You don’t leave your brothers and sisters behind. Anyone who signs a secrecy agreement should be able to get their claims prosecuted.”

He and other Edgewood veterans said they thought they had volunteered to test military equipment in the 1960s and 1970s but were directed instead to military research labs for human trials using chemical substances they received in gas chambers, by injection and other means.

“The court holds that when a veteran has been determined to be entitled to benefits for one or more disabilities connected to participation in the Edgewood program, the required effective date of such benefits is the date that the veteran would have had in the absence of the challenged government conduct,” according to the ruling.

Taylor was exposed to at least three highly poisonous chemical agents during the Edgewood experiments, according to court documents. Some of the agents were known only by numbered references with the prefix “EA” for Edgewood Arsenal.

They were EA-3580, a form of sarin gas; EA-3547, a derivative of tear gas, and scopolamine, a highly toxic chemical test as a “truth serum” but that can cause psychosis.

The service-connected illnesses and injuries of Taylor and other veterans from the experiments were not recognized by the VA until the secrecy agreements were partially lifted by the Defense Department in 2006, according to court documents.

“We were lied to about our reasons for going to Edgewood. We thought that the Army was testing equipment to better the forces,” said Rochelle, whose medical problems from his experiences at Edgewood made him “unemployable,” according to VA records. “This has been ignored for 30 to 50 years.”

previous coverage

• GOP lawmakers to subpoena VA over decision to register voters at medical facilities before presidential election
• House lawmakers urge support for caregiver services to help disabled veterans stay out of nursing homes
• VA rolls out virtual ER exams to compete with community hospitals and urgent care centers
• VA to create program that offers legal help to veterans denied benefits because of discharge status

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U.S. soldiers used as 'human guinea pigs' in top-secret chemical testing program

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A top-secret military program treated active-duty U.S. soldiers like they were guinea pigs according to a class action lawsuit that shed light on what happened.

For 20 years the government tested chemicals on soldiers who were not aware what was being put in their bodies.

The testing took place at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland from 1955 through 1975.

Nashville veteran Dennis Paul, 79, discussed his experience in the program with NewsChannel 5 Investigates, saying he it impacted him long after he left the Army.

Paul was serving at Fort Bliss in Texas in 1968, when he volunteered for what he thought would be an easy assignment.

"The word got around they were looking for volunteers for testing," Paul said.

"Weekends off and relaxing that's why I took it," Paul remembered.

He showed a black and white photo of a large group of soldiers in front of a sign "Medical Volunteers."

"That's me" he said pointing to a younger version of himself.

He said the group was told they would help test military equipment like gas masks.

But instead, the military deliberately exposed them to chemical and biological agents.

Attorney James Hancock works with the California law firm Morrison & Foerster, which filed a class action lawsuit back in 2008 against the CIA and Department of Defense.

"These were active-duty U.S. service members being used as human guinea pigs," Hancock said.

The lawsuit detailed how the military secretly tested drugs and chemicals on thousands of soldiers — including dangerous nerve gases like Sarin and incapacitating agents like LSD and BZ, that Paul called Benzene.

"It's an important story that needs to be told and it's a story that frankly a lot of people don't know," Hancock said.

Declassified military films show soldiers being given drugs and then being monitored to see their impacts.

"For the actual test Private Zadrovney received a high dose of the incapacitating agent," the film's narrator said.

One film showed soldiers being injected with BZ, which in high doses can lead to hallucinations and confusion.

After receiving the drug, soldiers were monitored to see if they could do basic tasks like run an obstacle course.

"Shortly after receiving the drug, he is grossly impaired," a narrator said as a soldier struggled through an obstacle course.

In the midst of the Cold War, the military was concerned chemical agents could be used against U.S. soldiers.

The lawsuit quoted a 1954 report to President Dwight Eisenhower which urged him to approve the human testing program, "If the United states is to survive, long standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered."

"It's sobering to hear the words and discussion that was happening about setting this program up," Hancock said.

Hancock said the class action lawsuit led to nearly 10 years of litigation.

It forced the Army to locate soldiers who were in the testing program and send them documentation detailing what happened to them.

It also released soldiers from their oath of secrecy.

Paul's paperwork shows he received BZ, which he said felt like he was in a nightmare for hours at a time.

"You can't coordinate anything you know. You can't hardly walk, and your mind is going so many different directions," Paul said.

"I'm glad to be talking to you about it. I feel like in my heart there's a lot of guys out there that went through the same thing I did," Paul said.

Documents reveal after getting BZ, Paul was put in temperatures of 105 degrees — then 125 degrees — for up to seven hours, to see if the drug impacted the way soldiers sweated.

"The doctor said, 'we're giving this test to see it in a warmer climate.' So, when I received the shot, we went into a heat room," Paul said.

But it wasn't just BZ he received.

Paul showed us an interview from April of 1968.

A nurse or doctor asked him questions after he was put in a chamber and exposed to an irritant, likely tear gas.

He was asked "Did you have pain every time you took a breath?"

He answered "Yes."

And "How would you compare this test with the last one?"

"Today was worse," he responded.

"We did volunteer," Paul said. "But not to get messed up," he continued.

"They didn't know they were signing up to get mystery chemicals injected into their bodies," Hancock said.

Paul retired from the military and went on to raise a family in Nashville.

At 79 years old, he actively harvests honey from his bee farm.

But he's haunted by what happened to him at Edgewood.

He believes the testing hurt him emotionally and stole part of his life.

"I missed out on so much with my family, not being able to say, when they were little boys, you know, I love them. It wasn't the real me there," Paul said.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has a page about the testing on its website.

"About 7,000 soldiers took part in the experiments that involved exposures to more than 250 chemicals," it stated.

It claimed "no significant health effects have been observed" in those who were tested.

Paul disagreed.

But now he just wants people to know what he and others endured.

"I've read several of the guys say they were never the same after BZ, and they are telling the truth," Paul said.

The chemical testing on soldiers stopped in 1975.

"It's important that these soldiers who served their country are honored and get to the tell their story," Hancock said.

The Army is now required to provide medical care to veterans if they can prove their health issues are the result of the testing.

Nashville Preds to simulcast on NewsChannel 5

San Francisco Public Press - Independent, Nonprofit, In-Depth Local News

San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/exposed-part-1-how-a-san-francisco-navy-lab-became-a-hub-for-human-radiation-experiments/)

How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments

Part 1: overview   |   exposed , an investigative series rarely seen documents show a cold war atomic research facility headquartered at hunters point conducted studies that exposed at least 1,073 people to potentially harmful radiation. the legacy of that era is a continuing risk to public health..

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In September 1956, Cpl. Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old Army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.

Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the Cold War, where the threats to his life were all American.

The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of U.S. troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.

• 1. OVERVIEW : How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments • List of Studies
• 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
• 4. ETHICS : Cold War Scientists Pushed Ethical Boundaries With Radiation Experiments [Dec. 9]
• 5. FADING HISTORIES : Destroyed Records, Dying Witnesses Consign San Francisco Radiation Lab to Obscurity
• 5. FADING HISTORIES : Destroyed Records, Dying Witnesses Consign San Francisco Radiation Lab to Obscurity [Dec. 12]
• 6. PERPETUAL EXPERIMENT : Shuttered Radiation Lab Poses Ongoing Health Risks for Growing Neighborhood
• 6. PERPETUAL EXPERIMENT : Shuttered Radiation Lab Poses Ongoing Health Risks for Growing Neighborhood [Dec. 16]
• 🎧 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

Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout,” material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, Calif., was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a Navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with the Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.

The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.

Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top U.S. civilian and military officials preapproved all of this in writing, documents show.

The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.

The Navy’s San Francisco lab was a major Cold War research facility with a unique focus on “radiological defense,”📄 techniques developed   to help the public survive and armed forces fight back in case of an atomic attack. It was one node in a nationwide network that encompassed universities, hospitals and national labs that had permission to handle dangerous radioactive material. As one of the first such institutions under the control of the Pentagon, it was among the military’s largest and most important research hubs.

In a sign of the era’s lax   medical ethics and safety standards, lab directors advocated taking risks with human subjects without seeking informed consent or testing first on animals, according to the documents.

These shortcuts appear to have contravened the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines established after the horrors of Nazi experiments in concentration camps.

Scientists later acknowledged they were ignorant of the long-term effects of their work.

“We were aware of the signs, the symptoms and the damage that would be caused” by high levels of radiation, William Siri, a prominent University of California, Berkeley, biophysicist who cooperated with the lab to set up at least one experiment involving human exposure, said in a 1980 oral history📄 . “But down at the low end of the dose range, no one was sure, and unfortunately no one is sure even to this day as to whether there is a threshold and what the very low levels would do.”

One scientist developed a keen interest in elite athletes, who he theorized would be most likely to survive a nuclear conflict. In 1955, he negotiated with the San Francisco 49ers to use football players as subjects in a medical study. Letters between the lab and the team show researchers had formulated a plan📄 to study body composition by having the men drink water laced with tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, and receive injections of radioactive chromium-51. Many years later, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigators failed to find contemporaneous records confirming the experiment proceeded as planned, though a lab employee claimed he had witnessed📄 it.

‘ETHICALLY FRAUGHT’

The lab’s work and decades of warship repair left the shipyard, which the Navy vacated in 1974, one of the most polluted sites in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed it a Superfund site in 1989.

Today, the 450-acre parcel anchors the biggest real estate construction project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. More than 10,000 housing units, hundreds of acres of parks and millions of square feet of commercial space are proposed .

Critics say the Navy has long downplayed a possible link between the pollution and poor health outcomes in the surrounding Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which became majority Black by the 1960s, a transformation powered by the lure of shipyard jobs. Critics say the failure of the military to make the area safe amounts to environmental racism.

In the Pentagon’s response to detailed questions about the radiation lab’s research program and human exposure toll, Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Callaghan acknowledged the experiments as “a matter of historical record” but declined to address their scientific merit or ethical significance.

“The Navy follows strict Department of Defense policies and responsibilities for the protection of human participants in DoD-supported programs and any research involving human subjects for testing of chemical or biological warfare agents is generally prohibited,” she said via email. She added, “The Navy cannot speculate on possible internal deliberations or motivations of medical researchers more than 50 years ago.”

Sharon Wickham / San Francisco Public Press

Despite enjoying access to vast resources, the lab produced little in the way of valuable research, according to scientists who worked there and outside scholars. “It was fantastic,” former lab researcher Stanton Cohn said in an  oral history interview  in 1982. “We could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it.” In the end, he noted: “We did a lot of field studies and got nothing to show for it.”

While routinely exposing humans in these “ethically fraught activities,” the lab often behaved like an institution in search of a purpose, said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the shipyard in detail. Hirsch and other critics said the lab’s operators demonstrated a remarkable disregard for radiation’s hazards and a cavalier attitude toward human health, even by the permissive standards of the time.

“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out. It never occurred to us to even ask.” — Army veteran Ron Rossi

The 1955 opening of the lab’s “huge $8,000,000” bunkerlike headquarters building was front-page news that drew “some of the Nation’s top civilian and military nuclear experts,” the San Francisco Examiner reported at the time. But today, the lab has been largely forgotten.

In the early 2000s, journalist Lisa Davis revealed📄 the enormous quantities of radioactive material the Navy and scientists left at the shipyard and recklessly dumped at sea. This report expands on her brief mention of the lab’s medical and occupational experiments exposing people.

While lab scientists did sometimes publish in scientific journals and lab imprints, the Navy destroyed voluminous piles of original documents after the facility closed.

MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ON HUMAN SUBJECTS

Remaining files such as interagency memorandums, experiment proposals and technical papers indicate that human exposure was accepted up and down the chain of command, from Washington, D.C., to the San Francisco docks, where as early as 1947, the Navy knew that airborne plutonium was wafting off contaminated vessels📄 .

The ships had been battered by atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and then towed to San Francisco, where hundreds of civilian shipyard workers were exposed in a vain attempt to clean them.

The agenda then expanded to medical experiments on human subjects. Lab officials told the Pentagon📄 in 1959 that they employed “minimal quantities of radioactive tracer material” in clinical studies, implying their techniques were safe, even though no one knew if this was true.

In the mid-1950s, the lab developed what it called synthetic fallout: dirt or mud laced with the highly radioactive but short-lived isotope lanthanum-140📄 , meant to mimic the poisonous material that could drift over U.S. communities📄 after a nuclear explosion. The lab exposed hundreds of troops and civilian personnel to this hazard in field exercises at military bases on the east side of San Francisco Bay, in rural Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

The synthetic fallout’s radioactive ingredient could cause cell damage to internal organs if inhaled. Jones, the former Army corporal, said troops in his unit sometimes worked without adequate protective equipment.

“Nobody had to go up onto the roof, and nobody had to do all this stuff by hand,” he said. “There were better ways to have done it. These scientists, they want the result and they don’t care about the people who are doing it for them.”

Some study participants had radioactive dirt rubbed on their forearms to test the effectiveness of cleaning methods. Others were ordered to crawl on their bellies through fields covered in it, to simulate the doses soldiers would absorb while fighting in a fallout zone. In 1962, lab officials acknowledged that wind and rain📄 carried the pollution away, potentially exposing unsuspecting members of the public.

After a team from the lab detonated bombs laced with isotopic tracer elements underwater in summer 1961 around San Clemente Island, near San Diego, state game wardens working with researchers caught a radioactive fish📄 , indicating unintended and potentially widespread ecological consequences. They brushed aside📄 the discovery by noting that fish are typically gutted and presumably made safe before being eaten.

Across a wide array of activities, lab documents describe participants as volunteers. But Jones disputed this. “In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it,” he said, adding that if he declined or resisted, he risked discharge or imprisonment in the stockade.

“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out,” said Ron Rossi, who served with Jones in the Army’s 50th Chemical Platoon at the Nevada test site. “It never occurred to us to even ask — just did what we were told to do.” Rossi spoke with the San Francisco Public Press in 2021 and 2022; he died last year, at age 89.

Later Pentagon admissions support the veterans’ accounts. “There is little doubt that members of intact military units, which were sent to test sites to perform missions commensurate with their organizational purpose, were not given the opportunity to volunteer,” wrote Navy Vice Adm. Robert Monroe, a former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, one of the successors of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret World War II atomic bomb project, in 1979.

Hundreds of thousands of so-called atomic veterans were ordered to participate in Pacific island or stateside above-ground bomb tests, or served in Japan near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The U.S. government has, inconsistently , compensated many of them, as well as nuclear weapons workers. But many occupational or medical experiment participants have gone unrecognized despite clear signals they were in harm’s way.

24 Studies. 18 Years. At Least 1,073 People Exposed.

After scrutinizing thousands of pages of records, we conservatively tallied 1,073 people exposed to radiation in medical and technical experiments conducted by the San Francisco-headquartered U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1946 to 1963.

You can explore primary materials on DocumentCloud .

Caveats : Where participant numbers from scientific studies or technical reports were unavailable, we relied on accounts from oral histories, footnotes from internal memos and interagency letters, some initially marked classified. Where the timeline was unspecified, we provided a publication date. Where no count was documented but human exposure was indicated, we added one person to the total. Where studies appeared to overlap, we included only the higher tally.

This list does not detail the full extent of radiation exposure. Several lab safety reports indicate it was routine, and more than 200 people received dangerously high doses (see upcoming stories in this series for examples).

Almost everyone entering the lab’s headquarters encountered some radiation, but scientists did not carefully track every individual affected. They also did not study how radiation lingering in the nearby environment affected Bayview-Hunters Point neighbors in subsequent decades.

In correspondence with superiors at the Atomic Energy Commission, forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Pentagon, as well as in a journal article, scientists described the amount of absorbed radiation as relatively low. But since their detection equipment was crude and unreliable, these could easily be underestimations. At other times, scientists acknowledged grave risks, while permitting participants to receive exposures past their own suggested limits.

At least 33 times, the lab documented radiation doses “in excess of” evolving weekly, monthly or annual federal “maximum permissible exposure” limits, according to annual “radiological safety progress reports” from 1956📄 , 1958📄 , 1959📄 and 1960📄 , obtained from the NRC through a Freedom of Information Act request and from the Department of Energy’s Las Vegas archive.

No evidence could be found that federal civilian nuclear regulators or the lab’s military supervisors imposed any discipline for safety lapses that violated federal regulations.

HAZARDS PERSIST

The Navy’s San Francisco lab was one of many research centers and hospitals across the country that exposed people to radiation and other hazards for scientific purposes. That makes it a demonstration of “the ways that people have been seen as disposable, to science or to the military,” said Lindsey Dillon, a University of California, Santa Cruz, assistant professor of sociology who is among a handful of academics familiar with the lab’s history.

“I do think it should shock and anger people,” she added. “They knew that radiation was not healthy.”

The Navy has spent more than $1.3 billion to remove toxic and radioactive material from the site. Cleanup is poised to stretch through the 2020s, thanks in part to a contractor fraud scandal: Two supervisors at an environmental engineering firm hired by the Navy to clean up the shipyard received prison sentences after pleading guilty in federal court to faking soil samples. Retesting and several lawsuits are ongoing.

Reid Brown / San Francisco Public Press

Military officials say these problems are surmountable and their remediation efforts will pay off.

“The Navy’s work at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard has been and is focused on identifying contamination and ensuring public health is protected during cleanup and into the future,” a spokesperson for the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, the service’s office overseeing the shipyard cleanup, said in an email.

The Navy had been alerted to the radioactive pollution problem as early as 1984. Yet for decades, public health advocates and community activists said the Navy misled neighbors about health risks, an assertion supported by a 2020 city-commissioned scientific panel from the University of California, San Francisco, and UC Berkeley.

Beginning in 2019, an ongoing biomonitoring survey led by Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician and neighborhood native whose father worked at the shipyard, has detected traces of radioactive elements and heavy metals in the urine of people who live and work nearby. Some of them are workers at a UCSF lab-animal complex on former Navy property that once housed rats, mice and other creatures used in radiation experiments. They have filed workers’ compensation claims alleging that exposure to radioactive and toxic pollution from the shipyard made them sick.

Images from the series

Several elected officials who have enthusiastically backed the housing development, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco in Congress, and outgoing Mayor London Breed, expressed concern about environmental exposure without specifically addressing the lab’s history of human experimentation.

In an email, Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager called the shipyard “a neglected and contaminated neighbor to the Bayview-Hunters Point Community” and noted that the federal government had invested heavily in the cleanup.

He said Pelosi’s priorities were “fighting to ensure the health and safety of Bayview-Hunters Point residents; requiring a transparent cleanup process that involves the community; holding the fraudulent contractor accountable; and insisting the Navy fulfill its responsibility to fully clean up the Shipyard.”

Shamann Walton, who represents the Bayview and adjacent neighborhoods on the city Board of Supervisors, has called for the city to halt the development until all the pollution is gone. “We do have a say in determining whether or not any land is transferred to the city and county of San Francisco,” he said at a City Hall hearing in September 2022. “Without a 100% cleanup, that land transfer does not take place.”

The mayor’s office echoed these sentiments but has not advocated pausing development. “The health and safety of San Francisco residents remain our highest priority,” a Breed spokesperson told the Public Press. “To this end, we remain committed to ensuring the Navy’s remediation of the Hunters Point shipyard is thorough and transparent to the community.”

It may be impossible to know exactly what harm the radiation exposure caused. Many survivors believe it to be a slow killer. Arthur Ehrmantraut, who served with Jones in the 1950s, said many men in the 50th Chemical Platoon died young. Others developed illnesses long after leaving the service. “I know that many had severe health issues, that, as with myself, manifested after 50 years,” he said.

Jones, now 89, said he did not regret his Army service. But he suspected reckless radiation exposure caused the illnesses and premature deaths of others in his platoon, and his own impaired blood flow and partial blindness.

Experts agree that during the Cold War, safety was secondary to knowledge that might give the United States an advantage in a nuclear World War III.

“The U.S. government was very, very interested in information about how radiation affects the human body, internally and externally,” said Bo Jacobs, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan and co-founder of the Global Hibakusha Project, which studies people around the world affected by radiation from nuclear weapons. As for how that information was obtained, he added, they didn’t much care: “They want data.”

Additional reporting by Rebecca Bowe. Listen to Episode 1 and Episode 2 of her podcast.

Podcast Episode 1: A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy

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 .

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