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

In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors....At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"—in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron—as part of their prenatal treatmen....

In 1945, the seismi...