Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians.
By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2]
It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing.
I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process.
And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.
The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.
We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals.
Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.
Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives".
Sadly, heaps of paperwork with checklists does relatively little to protect safety in the end. Everyone just spends a lot of time filling out paperwork to justify whatever thing they want to do. At least when it comes to corporations and regulator oversight, the companies ultimately will continue to do whatever harm they were doing they just have to dedicate a large fraction of their resources to creating loads of paperwork that proves how compliant they are.
Actually corporations are naturally balanced by the free market: the competition and their customers (whose needs they must serve in order to even exist) keep them very well in check.
Regulations pretend to "improve" this but inevitably skew the balance to the side of safety, leading to ossification, stagnation, loss of competition and lack of innovation.
It's not just about preventing the bozos. It's also indirectly about making the general public trust that researchers aren't (still) acting like bozos. (Unfortunately, in this era trust in institutions is so wrecked that it might not matter.)
Presumably their ethical approvement was about considerably more than just potential physical danger of putting on the device for 10 minutes?
Of course ethics does need to make sure that the testing isn't going to harm the participants directly, which is nice and simple in your example, but it also needs to make sure that any measurements will be stored (and anonymised) in ways that conform to your friend's country's healthcare data laws. It needs to make sure there are adequate data protection plans. It needs to ask questions like have they considered ways in which they might accidentally create a device with racial bias (the way pulse oximetres are often worse at reading the blood oxygen level of people with dark skin as they were made by and tested on the fingers of white people). Etc.
Surely we can agree that researchers should be required to obtain informed consent from test subjects before dusting them with known radioactive toxins?
Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.
Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly.
This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy)
And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s.
To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.
Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect.
Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.
For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments.
Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole.
There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it.
> While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.
I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
Good news: you might not need to add a radon tank to the hot tub you already own. The control group for [2] was people who did not do any hot spring bathing at all during an average week, so their methodology does not explore the significance of the radon itself.
The interesting thing is that they didn't find a higher incidence of lung, esophageal, and other soft-tissue cancers in elderly folks who bath in radon springs more than once a week.
The blood pressure reduction probably has more to do with heat exposure than with radon itself. Seems to me that regular exposure to a normal sauna or hot spring would probably elicit similar results.
People don't die of cancer instantly -- in many cases, it's pretty indolent, and "alive with cancer"/"in remission" are fairly common statuses. This would surely be picked up in the respondent data.
If I were dying of cancer, odds are good that I would have ended up in the control group for not being especially proactive about visiting the hot springs. The authors of [2] explain this limitation themselves:
"Some study limitations should be considered. ... healthier people may have been more likely to bathe in the radon hot springs."
I am reminded of this somewhat unrelated but interesting bit of history involving glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. I got radium and radon crossed in my brain before looking up this article, but figured it's interesting enough to share anyway:
Radon mainly effects the lungs and requires continued exposure. I still personally would not expect a radon rich spring to be healthy, even with short term exposure. The effects of radon exposure over time on the lungs are well studied. Anecdotally, the primitive way to determine radon presence in a home without the use of sensors is to look at the number of scratches on a window. Radon causes them.
Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We did. No Radon...
AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going around about how a small amount of radiation can be beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.
The consensus does not exist. The LNT model is convenient because it lends itself to easy measurement, and extremely low radiation exposure (e.g. non-nuclear work on a submarine) can't be tied to any specific risk. You wouldn't want an occupational health organization behaving in any other way.
On the other hand, LNT utterly fails to address the well-documented trend that people in areas of high background exposure experience lower rates of cancer. The mechanisms of this effect are not understood, though often hypothesized, nor is there any strong argument for a particular upper limit (though plenty of known examples, like smoking and frequent flying, lie beyond it.)
I wouldn't advise anyone microdose on radon, nor ignore the risk of radon if you're in the habit of keeping your modern home closed up... but this matter is not settled as you portray.
Edit: sorry for my other flippant comment. The confident misunderstanding of science got me a little worked up.
I have one, and a sub slab Radon abatement system. My levels were pretty high for a basement and that was how I learned about Radon. You're 100% correct about that there is no safe level of Radon exposure. The international community decided on "safe levels" because the cost of abatement is far and away from what many countries can afford, but I think they're moving to the "no safe levels" definition this year.
You don't. "No safe levels" just means it'll be a health factor because there is no benign amount of Radon. The lowest my house gets is .4 due to ambient Radon, that just is what it is. The only thing you could do is move to somewhere that there's no Radon ATM.
The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the fact that the government tends to experiment on these populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.
About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat like dirt.
Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.
The people doing these things think they're the 'good guys making hard decisions for the greater good.' It's not done with animosity or antagonism. They deserve the most severe of consequences for their actions, but without understanding the motivation, perspective, and rationale for these things - we're doomed to repeat them in the future, and indeed it's entirely possible we are at this very moment.
This article has been hugged to death, but I assume they're referring to Operation LAC. [1] "We" weren't spraying these neighborhoods because they had black people, but because they had 'the projects' - poor urban housing buildings. These densely populated areas with large sprawling concrete prison-like apartment buildings, were extremely similar in design to the areas in the USSR we might attack with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. And so we wanted to see how such an attack would play out.
It's the same thing with Tuskegee. The people involved likely envisioned themselves saving millions of lives, and gaining invaluable information that could be used to treat not only syphilis but any other sort of other diseases which might manifest similarly. The exact same logic people use today to experiment with gain of function with ever more dangerous diseases, even as diseases escape from labs at a frighteningly high rates. [2] So why only black people with Tuskegee? Because syphilis rates in black Americans were pushing near an order of magnitude higher than in other groups.
This 'greater good' rhetoric is rhetorically appealing, because it sounds reasonable. But the outcomes are scarcely desirable, because the ends people seek with their means very rarely ever comes to pass. But the horrible things they do in the interim trying to get there, all most certainly do happen. If somebody starts talking about the greater good, it should be a major red flag. One needs not justify good and just actions, and those are the sort we ought pursue.
'good guys making hard decisions for the greater good.'
I don't know man?
'Experiment on the blacks, I mean they can't vote anyway!' Sounds like a pretty easy decision to me for a scheming group of politicians and generals.
Greater good might hold up if we experimented on them only in times of war, but that hasn't been our history. The experimenting is why they have such high disease rates in the first place. Similar socioeconomic populations do not. For instance, Brazilian blacks. Or Peruvian or Colombian blacks. The projects were probably even built, in part, specifically with an eye to these kinds of tests.
Occam's razor. "Who should we run the human testing on sirs?"
"Marginalized group that's not allowed to vote sounds good to us son!"
It wasn't just on black Americans, even for LAC (let alone the countless other experiments carried out on civilians). This paper [1] has a lot more details. Just quoting it:
---
"Other test locations were selected to simulate other Soviet cities (such as San Francisco, CA and Panama City, FL), forests (such as Chippewa National Forest, MN), flatlands (such as Fort Wayne, IN, and Corpus Christi, TX), deserts, and unpopulated areas (Dugway Proving Ground, UT)."
---
The paper includes extensive details on the other reasons the areas that were chosen was chosen. It has nothing to do with who lived there, let alone voting trends. For things like this, the government simply comes up with a cover story, and most people simply believe what they're told. In this case, they told people that they were testing a harmless aerosol clouding system to protect areas from the Soviets bombers. And people simply unquestioningly believed them.
As for the projects, they were built in a similar way to Soviet apartment buildings because they had the exact same goal - reliable and comfortable housing made as affordably as possible. Wiki has a great picture of the projects that were experimented with here. [2] The city tore down some old deteriorating slums and created that complex under designs from the same guy who designed with World Trade Center.
> Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.
I think all humans suck, just like all humans have the capacity to be kind, considerate and "good". It depends on the circumstances.
Most importantly, I think the somewhat common notion that inhabitants of Germany during the 30s and 40s were intrinsically evil is a very dangerous belief—if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.
The Milgram experiment, for all its faults, shows how evil can manifest from the banal.
It is not enough to defer to authority. It is not enough to go with the flow. It is not enough to support the status quo. ALL of these things can lead to extremely evil end results.
An individual must stand up and explicitly say "No. This is wrong. I will not do this. I will not promulgate this."
> if we as a society don't understand the underlying mechanisms of what happened and why, we're at risk of repeating it.
Germany was/is a central power. Geo-politically, you always have problems with your neighbor, where they are your ally in war or your enemy. Being a central power means all your neighbors are your allied enemies.
When you find yourself feeling so limited in valid rebuttals to use, it's OK to sometimes think "I agree, so this doesn't actually need a rebuttal" and just upvote someone without needing to comment with the whataboutisms.
"Through this case study, the author explores how a large number of participants inside an organization will willingly participate in organizational acts that are
harmful to others, and how large numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or harmful activity by an organization."
Truly unsettling. Everyday Americans secretly exploited by their own government. If this were punishment for a crime, it would be unconstitutional due to being cruel, inhumane, and without due process. But it wasn't punishment for anything, the government just attacked them.
1944 - Army Medical Corps authorize Rochester to study polonium exposure
on humans (Moss, et al, 196)
April 10, 1945 - The first human plutonium injection occurs in Oak Ridge; three others were “approved” for Chicago, Berkeley/San Francisco, and Los Alamos by Dr. Friedell at Oak Ridge (under Langham‟s instruction), Hamilton, and Warren. (Moss, et al, 195)
April 26, 1945 - Second human plutonium injection takes place in a 68-year old man at Billings Hospital in Chicago (Moss, et al, 197).
May 14, 1945 - Third person injected with plutonium at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco (Moss, et al, 197).
October 1945-July 1946 - Eleven patients were injected with plutonium at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY; this included seven men and four women
ranging in age from 18 years through 68 years old. The 18-year old died approximately 1.5 years later (Moss, et al, 205).
Don't forget 751 pregnant women given radioactive vitamins. They claim only 3 kids died, but destroyed a bunch of documentation in the 70s, so the actual conclusions were probably far more damning.
St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It remains a problem to this day.
Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers claim it's no big deal.
I worked from 2008-2016 next to that landfill [0] and for the last three years of that, being outdoors meant constantly smelling the worst sour milk smell you've ever smelled everyday and stinging your eyes at least once a week.
Coldwater Creek [1] is a whole other catastrophe with independent investigators and like you said, denial from the gov't entities. "In August 2015, the United States Army Corps of Engineers admitted that they found thorium-230 in the creek. In January 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the high rate of cancers in the area, and confirmed a potential link between the cluster and the polluted creek. In 2022, radioactive material was found at Jana Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District in Florissant. The radioactive material includes lead-210, polonium, radium, and other toxic materials." The Army Corps of Engineers has been cleaning up the creek for decades but refuses to share detailed information with the public about its findings."
"... Most startling, however, was that the documents indicated that the USACE, dating back to 2016, had notified Hazelwood School Board members that it wanted to enter school grounds to conduct testing. ... Bernaugh and the Jana Elementary PTA sent a letter to parents informing them of their discoveries. On August 5, the Hazelwood School District, in a separate letter, acknowledged that the USACE had informed it of “low-level radioactive contamination” on the property on January 27, 2022. For over six months, it had failed to inform the community of these results, maintaining that the “contamination did not pose an immediate risk.”
That doesn't mean they shouldn't be reined in or criticized when they take themselves too seriously or go too far. Bureaucracies need regular pruning or they take over.
This reminds me of another story. Apparently zinc cadmium sulfide was dropped on Canadians by the US military in 1953 -- 2 Albertan towns, and Winnipeg. The timing was so close it made me wonder if it was part of the same program. It seems so, Winnipeg is mentioned in the full research paper.
Unless, I'm mistaken, this was at Pruitt-Igoe, the first US housing project, torn down in the 70s. The testing was long thought to be some kind of "conspiracy theory," which is a wonderful way to dismiss any claims of official abuse.
"But not all Ikariots enjoy the same degree of longevity. Data from the ongoing study shows that people living in the northern part of the island outlive those inhabiting the southern part, and therein lies the mystery. Presumably southern Ikariots have no significant dietary differences from their northern counterparts—nor would genetics make sense, since there’s little chance of finding genetically isolated populations on a small island. That’s why some experts have proposed one possible reason for this discordant longevity—geology"
The north and northwest of the island are predominated by granite rocks, which naturally contain trace amounts of uranium and are known to emit very low doses of gamma radiation, between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually—somewhere in between the amount of radiation you would absorb from a single chest X-ray and a more-powerful CT scan.
“To the south of the island, on the contrary, limestone predominates,” says Christodoulos Stefanadis, professor of cardiology at the National University of Athens and the Ikaria study’s head researcher. Statistically, people in the north of the island live significantly longer than those to the south. In 2001, the northern part of the island had 11 male and 22 female nonagenarians and centenarians out of a total of 1,452 male and 1,359 female inhabitants—whereas only five out of 1,691 men and 19 out of 1,710 women were over 90 in the southern part.
Stefanadis says this appears to be tied to the excess in gamma rays in the north, which are between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually (over and above a universally “normal” amount of gamma rays would be about 1 to 2 millisievert per year). “This radiation difference is an independent prognostic factor of longevity,” Stefanadis says, though he is quick to add there is not enough evidence to confirm this definitively, simply because the question has not been properly investigated.
Would you endorse secretly spiking a stranger’s drink with uranium?
To make this scenario more comparable, you would need to randomize the amount of uranium because you would need to be unsure of the effect of the dose. You would also need to do this to schoolchildren.
You would also need to be the US Army or acting under the authority of the US Army.
You would also need to be immune to prosecution and to any legal remedy sought by the survivors.
Very interested in this (the metastatic effects of secrecy in sensitivd projects that lack what you might call a 'secrecy-self-kill-switch' built-in from conception), thank you for posting.
Maybe. They conspicuously refer to the radiation in what sounds like official language. Expanding the compensation for the harms of WWII-era toxic waste to people in St. Louis, rather than to include the people in St. Louis who were experimented on during the Cold War.
Wild that right after this topic, Burchett pivots the discussion to UFOs and aliens and the US Secretary of Energy asserts that they aren’t real. I guess it could be read as a dismissive suggestion to those interested that the St. Louis experiments are just another conspiracy theory.
> A government study found that in a worst-case scenario, “repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity and lung cancer.” Yet the Army contends there is no evidence anyone in St. Louis was harmed.
> A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement to the AP that health assessments performed by the Army “concluded that exposure would not pose a health risk,” and follow-up independent studies also found no cause for alarm.
One of the weird quirks of American history seems to be that 60's subculture was more or less accidentally created by the CIA via MKUltra introducing LSD to the populace and funding modern art movements as anti-communist propaganda.
Now what is the measure by which that is judged? Of course, if we are to say that only the governments with a spotless record are trustworthy, then the only trustworthy governments are fictional ones.
That might be a bit unreasonable of an expectation for an organization made up of fallible humans, though, so many reason that some non-zero number of mistakes are inevitably bound to happen, even within bounds of trustworthiness.
At the end of the day, trust is a personal judgement call. But it's my opinion that if you have an impossible standard of trust, you may just have an unreasonable opinion.
This isn’t an engineering problem where you can just hit some metric. Trust gets earned informally on person-by-person terms over a long period of time.
People in St. Louis died / were killed at the direction of the US Army. Frankly, if they decide they don’t trust vaccines that government officials recommend, I can’t tell them their distrust is invalid. They’d be right. For decades, administration after administration has lied to them about what the government did to sabotage their health.
The course of action in this specific case that would build rapport would be to plainly tell the public the truth. It’s not rocket science where you have to invent a metric. Keeping the secret allows the government to avoid oversight. So that it can do the same sort of thing again? Because it is doing the same sort of thing right now?
Yes, as I said, trust is a personal judgement call.
However, I doubt anyone who distrusts the damn COVID vaccine because of the story in the OP is not going to be convinced by anything. There's such a ridiculously weak association between those activities that the person is simply ignorant of how the world works.
Their personal beliefs may be sincere, but they are not a person worth convincing of anything because they draw their conclusions through superficial means.
Consider the perspective of a person whose loved ones died because the US Government sabotaged their health.
They might know more about how the world works than you imagine.
“not a person worth convincing” — Not worth convincing them to protect their health? Clearly their health was considered expendable by the government when the experiments were carried out. The government should demonstrate that this fact has changed.
The US government is not some monolith. It's ~3 million different people, under different operational silos, none of whom worked there back when the project in the OP happened. The link between Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition is extremely weak. The severity of anyone's experience has nothing to do with any strength or weakness of that link.
If there is no longer anything to hide then government officials should be open and candid about what happened to begin to restore trust. In theory they work to serve us.
If someone believes that Pfizer/BioNTech and the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition have anything in common that is relevant to their trustworthiness, there's no amount of transparency that can convince them of anything.
Really, the only way you can be sure that nobody is out to get you is to disconnect from society entirely. Otherwise, you'll have to trust others a little bit.
For me, I'm pretty sure that the Manhattan Project doesn't have much to do with the operations at Moderna.
Other than the US using a fake vaccination program to find Osama.
I say this as someone who got the vaccine as someone first in the line.
I’m pissed at the government doing this, because I can’t blame folks for not trusting the government over this. And what that means is the next pandemic will take so much longer to deal with because of this distrust.
I absolutely understand why someone might not understand the practical and operational differences between the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and how that chain of command has nothing in common with CIA operations in Pakistan. It's a very explainable opinion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
If you "understand why someone might not understand," then I don't get how you could also believe someone with an incorrect understanding "is not going to be convinced by anything" or, even worse, is "not a person worth convincing of anything."
Your response to conspiracy theorists is to place the burden of proof on them and then ignore them since your understanding transcends theirs? That may work for you as an individual, but on a macro scale, it seems defeatist, and also unhelpful to all sides (since you're neither convincing them to give up unfounded theories, nor increasing safety against actual conspiracies for yourself).
If a government agency doesn’t use vaccines as a vector for some ulterior purpose, then it’s nothing like the other time when it used vaccines for some ulterior purpose?
The pronoun 'it' in that sentence is referring to tens of millions of different people in different centuries. It is absolutely silly to pretend that they're a single actor.
Again, you're saying this as if it is a monolith, which it isn't. The information you're asking for isn't something that "the government" as a whole even has, only a very few specific people ever had the information and they're probably dead now. And certainly the CDC/FDA/NIH doesn't have a clue. So distrusting them for something they don't even know about is hand-waving away a whole hell of a lot of nuance here.
You might as well say that you're not going to trust anything Tom Brady says until the NFL tells the truth about Nicole Brown's death. Just because someone is a member of a group doesn't mean they're all acting in lock step.
I don't disagree, because that's entirely not the point I was making.
I'm saying that the law of truly large numbers applies here. The US government has done exceptionally good things and exceptionally bad things because it does a ridiculous number of things. It simply does more than any other organization; it has been the world's largest organization for some time.
We trust scientists working at private companies to develop vaccines and we trust the private US healthcare providers to administer them and we get to live long.
There is a deep regulatory involvement in developing vaccines and there is a long supply chain from manufacturing a dose to delivering it into the body of a patient.
The regulators exist because we can’t trust the private companies. Who regulates the regulators?
The whole thing depends on the integrity of our institutions. If those institutions fail to uphold their trustworthiness, then we won’t be able to trust the process.
That has to be the most disturbing abstract I've ever read.
Clearly, that is proof that the government has conspired to harm its own citizens in the past.
This precedent makes it clear that those who opposed COVID19 vaccines were not 'crazy conspiracy theorists' as the media led everyone to believe but were in fact potentially very reasonable people. Every person who called anti-vaxers 'crazy' essentially engaged in gaslighting. Firing unvaccinated employees was an act of pure malevolence.
Do you think you would trust a vaccine from the government if that same government had sprayed your grandparents with radioactive materials? Yet that's exactly what was being asked of some people during COVID19 pandemic.
It's disturbing how few people can understand the evil behind vaccine mandates. Variants of the story above were literally what many people faced. Many people can clearly remember instances of government abuse directed against their family members. You cannot expect, much less force such people to trust the government.
If you suspect that you may have become a member of the underclass, you are right to assume that you may become a target of the government and you have the right to protect yourself.
It sounds insane to say it like that, but this is the reality that the government has created. It has made it rational to be paranoid.
The government has many tentacles and each tentacle doesn't necessarily know what the other tentacles are doing. It's foolish to assume that the government can always be trusted. It can never be fully trusted. The government shouldn't even trust itself. It should be designed with that in mind.
The aerosols being dispersed were biological and chemical weapons. If the responsible government officials underestimated the risks, it was because they had no evidence that it would be harmless to spray their experimental biological and chemical weapons on schoolchildren.
Page 30:
"Army officials lied to city leaders and residents, saying the tests were intended to see if smoke screens could protect the city from Russian bomber attacks. But recently released Army reports admit that was a "cover story" for... secret biological and chemical warfare tests (Sawyer, 1994)."
No, the aerosol was zinc cadmium sulfide. It wasn’t testing of biological and chemical weapons, it was testing of a simulant to model how those weapons would disperse through a city.
The official story was that the aerosols were "biological simulants." If the official story could have gotten away with zinc cadmium sulfide, it would have.
Page 69:
"The St. Louis study may have involved far more than biological “simulants”, per the official military talking point. There is indication of a secret study conducted in tandem to the “official” military-sponsored St. Louis aerosol study. The second study, which for some reason warrants even more secrecy than its parallel study, appears to have been connected to a new type of deadly nuclear weapon, one of many being developed by the coalition, to be tested on unsuspecting residents of St. Louis"
Admittedly, I couldn't find a precise source used by the dissertation stating that "biological simulants" other zinc cadmium sulfide were sprayed specifically on St. Louis. One of the references isn't available online. It might also have been a source that was overlooked in the references.
Anyway, it's 2024 now, and more information has come to light. Martino-Taylor's 2011 belief has been confirmed. US News reported [1] on the situation as recently as September 2023, quoting a member of the House of Representatives acknowledging that it really did happen:
"Democratic U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis said in a statement that she and her staff "are currently looking into alternative pathways that the federal government can take to ensure those impacted by the spraying of radioactive compounds and biochemicals in Pruitt-Igoe are also addressed.”"
I’m talking specifically about the claim that there was a secret study tandem to the zinc cadmium sulfide one that was testing a new type of nuclear weapon on the population. The dissertation doesn’t refer to any of its sources or references for this claim.
By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2]
1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/
2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/