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

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(More customer reviews)As a physicist, I learned early on in my education about the dangers of radioactive materials -- sadly, at the time I did not know that the information we had was gained through these heinous human experiments. This book, meticulously researched and believably written, is a convincing expose of the US Army's and the Federal Government's callous attitudes towards the people these two serve and are financially supported by -- the citizens of the US. It is also a history of atomic development. The author delves into the Manhattan Project and into the founding of Los Alamos. The entire book is written in an easy to understand style, with excellent explanations where explanations are needed, so that anyone could read this comfortably. The discomfort is in what was done to the victims, and the continuing publicity and attitude that the American government is the only MORAL government on earth. It is a very sad thing when the Federal Government shows itself to be dangerous to its citizens, but these experiments add to a growing mound of evidence. The author has done a thorough, dedicated, and compassionate job of investigating and documenting. We should be stirred into anger and action by the book, but it is a sad thing too that the American people can't be roused -- it is as if we are more interested in the fictional lives we see on our favorite TV shows than in our own, and our children's, lives. In a way, too, anyone downwind of the above ground nuclear tests (just about all of us, even the unborn and the unconceived) were guinea pigs of airborne radiation, and we are to this day from fallout. This book is about specific people who were directly injected or who ingested radioactive materials, but it is actually about all of us. Chilling things -- the horrible deterioration of the women who used liquid radium to paint the dials on watches and who licked the brushes, the fate of those who died during experimentation, and the coldness of the scientists and physicians (those meant to heal, not kill). This is the history of a horrible, unethical time in our country, and one cannot help wonder what other similar experiments are going on today, under the aegis of the military or of industry, all with the blessing of the government. One cannot help wondering, too, about the scientific community and its blind ambition for knowledge or its competition for the Nobel Prize at all costs. Anyone with any moral conscience should be shocked and wary after reading this book -- but please do read it. If the subject interests you, also check into The River, about the HIV epidemic and the scientists developing the polio vaccine for sub-Saharan Africa, which is another well-researched book exposing the threats posed by the scientific community.

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