THE TRUTH ABOUT “OPPENHEIMER” Part I

Imagine this hypothetical.

A material is found that has the potential to unlock nearly unlimited energy. Although the scientific community familiar with the discovery knows that the material is dangerous to organic life, no one knows exactly how dangerous the material is, what its short and long term effects are, and in what doses these effects manifest.

Without this knowledge, a group of scientists embark upon and lead a secret project that consciously requires several thousand people to be exposed to the material. Outside this leadership group, most of the people involved in this secret project are unaware they are being exposed.

During the secret project, nearly the entire team is exposed to the material. Some members are more exposed than others. The project’s leadership studies how and why certain workers are injured, how much their doses were, and what the effects of their exposures are. Despite these injuries, the secret project continues and more individuals are exposed. Many are injured in ways that are not apparent until several decades later. 

At the same time the workers are being exposed, the scientists also conduct a parallel series of animal exposure experiments. For most of the animal experiments, the death of the subject is a given. 

Eventually, the scientists decide passive human observation and animal exposure experiments are not enough.

Instead, they devise a series of experiments that would see them purposely inject the material into human test subjects. 

But how could the scientists possibly ask for volunteers for such a dangerous and unpredictable study? 

They could not and did not.

Instead, these scientists secretly injected scores, if not hundreds of unknowing people with the material–just to see what happened. Many of these uninformed test subjects suffered adverse effects.

Meanwhile, the secret project continued to inflict an immeasurable amount of harm on everyone exposed to the dangerous material through the project. These effects were further studied by the project’s leadership.

Even more disturbing than the secret harm the project inflicted on its workers and the public, is the project’s ultimate objective.

The purpose of the secret project was to create a weapon capable of vaporizing an entire city in an instant. 

Indeed, the scientists were successful in this secret project. The city-destroying devices they created was used to obliterate two metropolitan areas–killing approximately 200,000 civilians.

When the secret project was publicized, the scientists were heralded as heroes instead of denounced as mass murders. The harm done to their fellow citizens and project members was swept under the rug. 

Is this story some kind of twisted horror cosmic from the fevered mind of a fiction writer? 

No. This is the hidden history behind Christopher Nolan’s new film “Oppenheimer.” 

PART I: Human Experimentation & The Radiological Weapons Group

During WWII, the Manhattan Project and its mission was known only to a small group of scientists, military brass, and government officials. 

Author Lisa Martino-Taylor writes:

“Secrecy in the Manhattan Project was so complete that many people working for the organization did not know what they were working on until they heard about the bombing of Hiroshima on the Radio.” (Martino-Taylor at 9 quoting Gosling 1999: 19). “Even those ‘in the know’ were not aware of the many layers of secrecy []…[Manhattan Project leader Lieutenant General Leslie] Groves insisted upon complete compartmentalization of tasks and basic information, and maintained rigid control of all project talk–even between spouses.

Therefore even those involved in the Manhattan Project were unaware that the Project had berthed an equally sinister brood–a sub-program that would further the project’s wholesale inversion of medical and scientific ethics in the pursuit of mass murder. 

It is admittedly impossible to gaze into the minds of men. But there are clues. In reviewing the correspondence of the architects of these programs, it seems they justified this destruction of medical ethics as an ugly means of avoiding a worse result. Specifically, the expansion of national socialism. 

However, that justification rings false. Instead of defending the American People and eliminating its foes, the Manhattan project violated medical ethics. It fixed US civilians in its crosshairs alongside their ostensible enemies. 

The truth is that the Manhattan project trampled medical ethics not unlike the infamous Nazi Medical experiments and the horrors of Imperial Japan’s Unit 731. 

Indeed, while it appeared to the World that the United States was leading the international prosecution of Nazi war criminals, a small circle of Manhattan Project scientists intentionally exposed US Citizens to dangerous levels of radiation without their knowledge or consent, often with no perceived or expected medical benefit. Many of these experiments resulted in severe adverse health effects and even death. They persisted throughout the remainder of the 20th century.

The stated purpose of these experiments was to better understand the effects of radiation on the human body for the protection of nuclear scientists, Manhattan Project staff, and the American public. This was only a half-truth. Its true purpose was much more sinister.

At the time, this small subset of the Manhattan project was unnamed. For the purpose of this series, this small group of scientists will be called the Radiological Weapons Group, or RWG. Their true mission: the express development of offensive radiological weapons.

Pictures https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/roadmap/roadmap/index.html 

Radiological Warfare, as defined by the Department of Defense, is: 

Some allege that the concept of radiological weapons, like many modern technological advancements, was birthed from science fiction. In May 1941, Robert Heinlein published “Solution Unsatisfactory,” a story about the use of radioactive dust as a weapon.” The idea was first given to Heinlein by his editor, John W. Campbell, who would later pen a July 1941 nonfiction piece entitled “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon?” 

In this case, it is unclear if life imitates art, or vice versa. As the second installment of this docuseries will explore, just two years after Heinlein’s piece, the Manhattan Project’s RWG had already begun to weaponize radiation alongside human tracer experiments at Los Alamos. 

Radiological weapons group research was conducted in close coordination with affiliated Manhattan Project facilities at the University of Rochester, the UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and at the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge Facility. (Martino-Taylor at 3-4). By 1943 these facilities were intimately connected with the Manhattan Project: much of the radioactive material it used was created in these Universities’ radiology departments. These Universities also conducted some of the first medical radiation research involving animal and human experimentation. 

As a subset of the Manhattan Project, the RWG shared many of its core members. 

The group itself was devised by the Medical Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Louis Hempelmann, at the request of his supervisors, Los Alamos Director Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and by the Director of the Manhattan Engineer District, Army Colonel Stafford Leak Warren. It also included Manhattan Project Health Division directors Joseph Hamilton, Robert Stone, and Wright Haskell Langham.

One may only speculate as to the true intentions of these men in devising such sinister applications for their research. One must wonder if these men were driven by evil, ego, sense of duty, or a utilitarian “ends justify the means” approach. A brief discovery of their backgrounds, however, reveals a common irreverence for medical and scientific ethics.

As the Director of the Los Alamos facility, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer is the man most popularly credited for the atom bomb’s creation. Lesser known is his checkered past. 

During his first year of graduate study at the UK’s Cambridge University, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with “profound schizophrenia that psychoanalysis would not benefit” after an acute deterioration of his mental state that began in the Fall of 1925. This decline would see Oppenheimer muttering repeated phrases to himself, and collapsing in a heap to the laboratory floors to roll around.

Oppenheimer’s diagnosis came in the fall of 1925 after he attempted to poison his supervising professor with a chemical–reportedly cyanide–obtained from a University laboratory. Oppenheimer’s wealthy parents intervened to save his career by convincing Cambridge not to expel him and to recommend the dismissal of criminal charges. Oppenheimer was instead placed on academic probation, which required he submit to mandatory psych evals. (Martino-Taylor at 5-6).

During the winter of 1925-1926, Oppenheimer’s continued to struggle emotionally. According to close friend and Harvard classmate, Francis Fergusson, Oppenheimer confided an incident where he became angry at a couple kissing on the train. After the male left the carriage, Oppenheimer reportedly kissed the woman and immediately fell to his knees, apologizing and crying. However, after Oppenheimer and the couple had departed the train and were descending the station steps, he threw his suitcase at the woman’s head, and missed, or so he told Fergusson.

Despite these measures, Oppenheimer again attempted murder in January 1926 when he began to strangle Fergusson with a leather trunk strap. Thankfully for Oppenheimer, this event did not occur on university grounds. Instead, it occurred in Paris where Oppenheimer’s parents had taken him for the Winter term while he was on the brink of expulsion. Aside from Fergusson, there were no witnesses. Fergusson was a close friend that understood his fevered mental state, which according to Fergusson, bordered on the suicidal. Oppenheimer later admitted this event happened and apologized to Fergusson. 

After his graduate studies, Oppenheimer accepted a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the California Institute of Technology and eventually began working at the UC Berkeley. 

Oppenheimer at Berkeley

By many accounts, Oppenheimer’s schizophrenia did not hamper his charisma. “[H]is opponents claimed he had the uncanny ability to turn bright men, even geniuses, into slavish followers.” (The Plutonium Files: The Rad Lab, Eileen Welsome). This charisma likely caused him to be selected to lead the Manhattan Project by Lieutenant General Groves (Martino-Taylor at 6-7).

While Oppenheimer had only attempted murder, other RWG scientists had arguably succeeded. Throughout the 1930s, an insidious duo of future RWG scientists had already conducted several dubious human-radiation experiments, the ethics of which were questionable at best. They were: Radiologist Robert S. Stone and his then-intern Joseph G. Hamilton.

In the mid 1930s, Stone and Hamilton were both recruited by UC Berkeley “to develop biomedical applications for the Berkeley cyclotron,” a machine that was originally designed to produce high-energy ion beams for nuclear physics experiments. As these ion beams were also able to penetrate the body, attention quickly turned towards developing biomedical applications for the beams and the radioisotopes they produced. 

Berkeley Cyclotron

Cyclotron Diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron#/media/File:Cyclotron_diagram.png

Although Stone was a decade older than Hamilton, it was Hamilton who first stimulated [Stone] into working with him on these applications. (Welsome, citing Transcript of tape-recorded memoir, Plutonium Files, 2, 9/16). 

Hamilton himself had become inspired by the work of John and Earnest Lawrence, who, after inventing the cyclotron, attempted to employ the use of radioactive material in the treatment of cancer. (Welsome, Chapter 2). 

Lawrence working on the cyclotron

After arriving at UC Berkeley, Stone and Hamilton got to work. In 1936, the scientists injected two leukemia patients with “substantial doses” of radioactive sodium. (Life Atomic: page 29-30). 

The doctors’ follow up report did not indicate “whether the patients knew what was being administered or gave their permission.” (Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files, Chapter 2 8/16). It only indicated there had been a “consultation.” No severe adverse effects were documented, but neither were long term effects. This experiment is widely regarded to be “the first clinical administration of radioisotopes [in humans].” (Atomic Legacy ch. 2) 

A year later, in 1937, Stone and Hamilton conducted a second study documenting the effects of radioactive sodium on the human body. In it, eight healthy participants drank a solution of radioactive sodium. The subjects then placed their hand in a lead-lined box, where a Geiger counter traced the solution’s dispersal through their bodies by measuring its radioactivity. Although he thanked the “willing cooperation [of the] experimental subjects,” Dr. Hamilton’s report does not indicate that the subjects were given informed consent of the nature of the study’s risks. 

Although neither of these studies caused severe adverse effects to the subjects, it is clear that Hamilton and Stone engaged in Human experimentation with little or no expectation of medical benefit. Dr. John Lawrence, their Berkeley colleague would later express the opinion that these experiments were a “stunt” and that Stone and Hamilton “simply wanted to rush into using an isotope on a sick patient.” (Life Atomic, Ch. 2 pg. 10/60). 

But Stone and Hamilton did not stop with their radiosodium experiment, as Author Eileen Welsome writes in her Expose, “The Plutonium Files:”

With the help of [another] young scientist, named Paul Aebersold, Stone began using the neutron beam from the Rad Lab’s cyclotron for his human experiments. Between December of 1939 and September of 1941, he bombarded some 128 patients with neutrons. They were irradiated in a small lead-lined chamber adjacent to the cyclotron. Some of the patients came from the UCSF’s outpatient clinic and were in good or fair condition. Others came from the “Visible Tumor Clinic” and were deemed to be suffering from cancers that could not be cured by normal surgical or X-Ray treatment. Still others were apparently well-to-do individuals who had been referred to Stone by other doctors. 

(Stone and lawrence align neutron beam on patient)

At first, everything seemed to go well… As the experiment progressed, however, it became clear that Stone had underestimated the biological effects of neutrons. Although they are effective at killing cancer cells, they are difficult to control and can cause a lot of collateral damage as well. Nearly half of the patients died within six months of the treatment period. Many of the subjects suffered horribly from the side effects. Some developed gruesome skin damages that one radiobiologist likened to armor plates. Others eventually died of malnutrition rather than their underlying disease because they had such painful ulcers in their mouths they couldn’t eat. Although Stone acknowledged the statistics were discouraging, he nevertheless recommended that neutron therapy be continued because the neutrons did shrink tumors and, in some cases, caused them to disappear altogether. (Eileen Welsome, at Ch. 2, 11/18.

Indeed, Dr. Stone’s own report remarked on the severity of adverse reactions to the exposures. 

Because the patients all had cancer,   that mere fact does not mean they were killed by Dr. Stone. In his own report, however, Stone admits that approximately 26 of his patients died “either because their tumors were uncontrolled or because radiation brought about conditions incompatible with life.” Interestingly, he earlier admits that “14 [of his patients] were so sick that they probably should not have been treated.” 

Much like the radiosodium injection experiments, it is unclear how these patients were selected for treatment, or if their informed consent was obtained. Stone’s report merely states that “they were selected.”

Stone’s radiation experiments were later condemned by the Atomic Energy Commission, but this condemnation did not occur until a half century after Stone was selected to lead the Manhattan Project Health Division situated at the University of Chicago’s Met Lab, where he conducted more human experiments.

In his own right, Hamilton was infamous around the Berkeley campus for “engaging in flagrant safety violations and reckless on-the-job antics, such as drinking radioactive iodine in front of students during lectures, handling radioactive material without gloves, and purposely running through the highly dangerous cyclotron area without protective gear.” (Martino-Taylor at 13). Despite these concerns, Hamilton would be selected to lead the Manhattan Project Health Division located at UC Berkeley. 

In addition to his collaboration with Dr. Robert Stone, Dr. Joseph Hamilton participated in other human radiological experiments. This included “a collaboration with Mayo Solley of the UC San Francisco’s Medical School to administer iodine-131 orally to patients.” (Life Atomic, Chapter 2, 22/60).

In early 1941, Dr. Louis Hempelmann observed the work of Drs. Robert Stone and Joseph Hamilton at UC Berkeley, which included Dr. Stone’s ill-advised neutron beam experiments and Dr. Hamilton’s radioactive phosphorus trials. 

After his UC Berkeley studies, Hempelmann was assigned to the University of Rochester, where his supervising professors expressed strong concern that he “might be a little too enthusiastic about their clinical results” which included “”human radiation experiments.” (Martino-Taylor at 11) (citing Evans 1942 and Heffron 1941)). In 1942, after studying at an assortment of American universities, including the University of Rochester, Hempelmann accepted a position at Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO. This position was funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

Once there, Hempelmann personally injected patients “several times per week with radioactive material produced by the Washington University cyclotron, and ‘he soon became uneasy when some of the patients developed dangerously low blood counts and even hemorrhages.’” (Martino-Taylor at 12). It wasn’t long after these experiments that Hempellman was selected by Oppenheimer to be Medical Director at Los Alamos. At the time, Hempelmann was 29 years old and had only been working with radiation for three years. 

Like Hempelmann, another key member of the RWG, Wright Haskell Langham, had also studied under Dr. Robert Stone at UC Berkeley. Also like Hempelmann, Langham reportedly showed a keen enthusiasm for human radiological experimentation. (Martino-Taylor at 15). 

Langham had barely earned his PHd in biochemistry just before he joined the RWG in 1944, but he would soon become “active in … correlating nearly all of the toxicological work on plutonium and related elements for Los Alamos, Argonne National Lab, Rochester, and later the programs at Utah and other laboratories.” Martino-Taylor at 15 (quoting Moss and Eckhardt 1995: 206). 

One may speculate that these scientists were selected not for their intellect or work ethic, but for their connections, shared vision, and willingness to push ethical boundaries.

Oppenheimer was a card-carrying communist, a diagnosed schizophrenic, and an attempted murderer. Hamilton was a pariah for laboratory safety. Stone, Hamilton, and Hempelmann had all violated medical ethics by irradiating patients with little expectation of medical benefit. Hampelmann and Langham both expressed enthusiasm for human radiological experimentation. 

Nevertheless, by 1942, the RWG was assembled and had begun their work on the Manhattan Project in earnest. Like their university research, human experimentation soon followed.

It began with Hempelman, who, as a function of his position as Medical Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, “engaged in health and mortality data collection when his colleagues were exposed to radiation.”

As Medical Director at Los Alamos, Hempelmann was acutely aware that the Manhattan Project was one of the first times in history where so many individuals were being exposed to radioactive material. Dr. Stone himself stated: “the whole clinical study of the [Manhattan Project] personnel is one vast experiment. Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much irradiation”

Dr. Hempelmann “our understanding was primitive” 

In response:

 A special hospital was built on the Hill [at Los Alamos] where Hempelmann was “in charge of the stricken scientists when they arrived at the hospital [and] doctors would have a chance to observe what would happen to a healthy person exposed to radiation from an atomic weapon without the confounding effects of blast or burn.” (Martino-Taylor at 12-13 (citing Welsome 1999: 185)). Hempelmann isolated and followed stricken employees exposed to acute radiation doses during their lingering demise.

Although these accidental exposures gave opportunity for Hempelmann and his ilk to study the effects of radiation, passive observation quickly proved insufficient for the RWG’s purposes.  The scientists were simply unable to control any variables,which is a crucial element in scientific research. To overcome this, the RWG began to petition in earnest to begin human tracer experiments.

In May 1943, Oppenheimer received a request from Joseph Hamilton, his former Berkeley colleague. Hamilton’s letter detailed the aims and methods of human tracer experiments, and iterated his eagerness to conduct them. 

In April 1944, Hempelmann had begun planning “animal radiat ion inhalation studies using radioactive dusts along with a human ‘clinical investigation.’” He wrote to a classified letter to Manhattan Engineer District Director, Colonel Stafford Warren:

The petitions were well received. J. Robert Oppenheimer officially authorized a human radiation injection study program on August 16, 1944, though the program had already been arranged for months. Oppenheimer wrote:

On August 23, 1944 “a proposal for a secret human radiation research program was submitted by Hempelmann…whereby the RWG group would oversee covert human-subject radiation research under Colonel Stafford Warren’s order and Hempelmann’s program coordination.” The letter read:

In a series of correspondences, Hempelmann proposed that all five Manhattan Project locations work in tandem to conduct the tracer experiments.

It was ultimately decided that the animal trials would occur concurrently at the Los Alamos and Rochester facilities, with the Oak Ridge Facility to provide the test subjects. The plutonium was to be issued from Los Alamos. 

After four months of animal experimentation, the project moved to human testing. On March 2, 1945, Hempelmann wrote:

The Manhattan District is asked to help make arrangements for a human tracer experiment to determine the percentage of plutonium excreted daily in the urine and feces. It is suggested that a hospital patient at either Rochester or Chicago be chosen for injection of from one to ten micrograms of material and that the excreta be sent to this laboratory for analysis.

(Hempelmann 1945b)

Just “a few days after Hempelmann’s recommendation that a hospital patient be injected with plutonium, Wright Langham … sent 5 micrograms of plutonium to Dr [Hymer] Friedell, with instructions for their use on a human subject” (ACHRE 1996). (Martino-Taylor).

As we will see in Part II of this series, much of the human experiments that followed were conducted without the informed consent, or in many cases, even the knowledge of their subjects. The experiments were not supported by medical necessity and in some cases even intentionally caused harm. These experiments were not isolated, and did not cease with the end of the Second World War. Indeed, with no enemy left to fight, the war’s end would only pan the RWG’s crosshairs further inward.

The human radiation studies conducted by the Radiological Weapons Group shock the conscience. They have no place in a just and moral society. Nonetheless, they occurred–abetted by a veil of secrecy, untouched by an unknowing and apathetic populace. The vast majority of its victims ignored and left without acknowledgement, meaningful reform, or recourse. 

In a time where the world once again teeters on the brink of nuclear war it is important to recall the evil that is wrought by an ends-justify-the-means approach.

The True story of the Manhattan project and its atrocities is an embodiment of the ends justify the means worldview on the grandest and most dire scale.

In Part II, we will explore the Radiological Weapons Group’s scheme to develop radiological weapons and the depravity of their first human radiation experiments.