Article published in Brazil's Newspaper, in 09/01/94

The revelation that the American government deceived or omitted information to hundreds of persons in submitting them with tests of nuclear radiation scandalized the American society. "I can only think that the people who led the experiences were Nazis", said the Energy Secretary, Hazel Larry, first authority to admit, officially, the accomplishment of the tests.

They were employees of the American government, which during more than 30 years supervised experiences with the goal of measuring the biological effects of ingested radioactive substances, inhaled or injected in human beings. The pretext was the "national safety": from the other side of the world, the Soviet Union was pointing their missiles at the American territory.

The Americans, however, are not accepting the patriotism as an excuse. Entities of human rights consider these experiences in the war crimes category.

The democrat deputy Edward Markey, the first to denounce, in 1986, the use of human in the tests, considering them unjustifiable and the experiences with human beings as "bizarre" or "repugnant". "American citizens where transformed into testing components of nuclear artifacts; in lots of cases they were labeled as populations destined to the "senior sacrifice, prisoners, patients with terminal or mental retarded diseases", wrote in the foreword of the report which was introduced, without success, to the government of Ronald Reagan, in the hope that the facts were investigated.

They started to occur in 1940 and where extended until the first years of the 1970 decade, under the supervision of the Manhattan Project (which built the first atomic bomb), of the Commission of Atomic Energy and of the Energy Research and Development administration. These three organisms gave origin to the current Energy Department, managed by O'Lary. These are the main experiments:

From 1945 to 1947, 18 terminal patients of cancer, of hospitals in Tennessee and in New York received plutonium injections to measure the quantity of the substance retained by the organism. The patients were not warned of the experience.

In the Technology Institute of Massachusetts, the well-known MIT, in the period from 1961 to 1965, 20 people, from 63 to 83 years, were injected with radium and thorium to evaluate the speed of the passage of these substances by the organism.

Starting from 1963, 131 inmates of the state prison of Oregon and Washington were recruited, by means of the payment of US$ 200,00 (two hundred dollars) to each one, to submit their penis and testicles to applications of X ray. The prisoners were alerted for the possible sterility and skin burns, but not regarding to the risk of contracting cancer. Afterwards, they suffered vasectomy, to avoid contaminating the population with a generation of irradiated mutants.

During the 60, in the scientific laboratory of Los Alamos, 57 healthy adults were fed with microscopic spheres, it contend uranium and manganese, to measure the time the spheres took to be expelled.

In 1946 and 1947, at the University of Rochester, in New York, six patients with good renal functions, were injected with uranium salts to verify which concentration of the radioactive substance would hurt the kidneys. Some patients suffered hallucinations and others, emotional disagreements.