Project Sunshine was the code name for a worldwide survey of strontium-90 from nuclear weapons fallout, organized by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1953. To measure how much of the isotope had reached human bone, the AEC and its contract laboratories collected human bone, including the skeletons of stillborn infants and young children, in the United States and abroad. For the first years the program was classified Secret, and outside contacts were given a cover story about natural radium. Its records were reviewed in 1995 by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, at whose request a 1955 conference transcript was declassified.
Strontium-90 and the 1953 RAND study
The AEC’s study of long-range fallout began with Project Gabriel in 1949, which asked how many atomic weapons could be detonated before contamination of air, water and soil affected crops, animals and people (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13). Gabriel concluded that strontium-90 was the most dangerous long-range product of a fission explosion (RAND R-251-AEC, ch. 1).
In the summer of 1953 the AEC and the Air Force’s Project RAND jointly sponsored a review of the problem, led by Willard F. Libby of the University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies. It closed with a RAND-SUNSHINE conference on July 21–23, 1953. Attendees and consultants included Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, I. I. Rabi and John von Neumann (RAND R-251-AEC, acknowledgments). Invitees were told that the existence of the project and the conference “should not be revealed” to anyone not contacted officially (ACHRE staff memorandum, Feb. 8, 1995).
The resulting report, “World-Wide Effects of Atomic Weapons: Project SUNSHINE,” is dated Aug. 6, 1953. It gives four reasons for treating strontium-90 as the main hazard: about 1 gram is produced per kiloton of yield, its physical half-life is long (the report gives 20 years), it seeks bone and so stays in the body, and ingestion is high. Earlier estimates of how many bombs it would take to cause large-scale harm, the report says, had seemed safe because they “comfortably exceeded our stockpile capacity.” With high-yield weapons and a growing stockpile, that margin “is not so comfortable” (RAND R-251-AEC, ch. 1).
The report proposed a pilot survey of six areas: northern Utah or southwestern Idaho, Kansas or Iowa, Boston, South America, England and Japan. Each area was to supply 36 samples, 216 in all. Twelve per area were human: rib bone and teeth from three age groups (0 to 10, 10 to 20, and over 20). Japan was chosen in part because “excellent arrangements are presently in effect there for obtaining human specimens from all age groups” (RAND R-251-AEC, ch. 5). The advisory committee later noted that the report’s discussion of human samples dealt with uniformity of practice and did not mention the investigators’ relationship to the people sampled (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13).
The radium cover story
The AEC decided to keep the existence of the worldwide assay secret. Its July 1954 Gabriel report recorded that this decision “limited the freedom with which suitable combinations of samples might be obtained from foreign countries” (quoted in ACHRE staff memorandum, Feb. 8, 1995).
Robert A. Dudley of the Biophysics Branch of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine organized the foreign collection. In an Oct. 16, 1953 letter to Libby, he wrote that the stated purpose would be “a survey of the natural Ra [Radium] burden of human bones,” and that the emphasis on infants could be explained by saying such samples were easy to obtain in the United States. He also wrote that the AEC wanted to stay “out of the picture where possible” (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13). On Oct. 26 he asked Shields Warren, a former head of the division, for help approaching a Boston colleague who did not know the full purpose. Dudley wrote that radium would be measured in at least some samples, “so our story is merely incomplete, not false.” The same day he wrote to his father, who had contacts with missionary organizations in India, giving only the public purpose (ACHRE staff memorandum, Feb. 8, 1995).
On Dec. 9, 1953, Dudley set out the actual purpose “for you alone” in a letter to Dr. James Scott of the University of Rochester’s Atomic Energy Project, a major AEC contractor. The division was measuring the strontium-90 left by “the 40 or 50 nuclear detonations in the last few years.” The samples it was “concentrating” on were “the bones of infants, either stillborn or up to a year or two of age,” which he called easy to obtain in the United States. He asked for “perhaps 6 or 8 skeletons” from Japan through the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13). On Dec. 30, division director John Bugher wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation that arrangements were in place for specimens from India and South Africa through medical missions, and asked for help in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Chile or Bolivia (ACHRE staff memorandum, Feb. 8, 1995).
The appendix to the July 1954 Gabriel report lists the human material analyzed to that point: 55 stillborn infants from Chicago, one from Utah, three from Vellore in southern India, and three adult legs from Massachusetts (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13).
Libby’s 1955 call for “body snatching”
On Jan. 18, 1955, the Division of Biology and Medicine convened a classified “Biophysics Conference” on the Gabriel-Sunshine program. Bugher opened by citing the 1954 Castle test series, which had brought fallout to wide public attention, and said the program had to accelerate (ACHRE staff memorandum, June 9, 1995).
Libby, by then an AEC commissioner, told the conference that no AEC effort was more important. Human samples were the largest gap, and the supply of stillborns had been “cut off.” He said: “So human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.” He added that the 1953 RAND study had hired “an expensive law firm to look up the law of body snatching,” and that its findings showed “how very difficult it is going to be to do legally.” The committee’s staff could not locate the law firm’s memorandum (ACHRE staff memorandum, June 9, 1995).
J. Laurence Kulp of Columbia University reported that samples covering ages one to 30 were already arriving from Vancouver and Houston, and that sources in Houston intended to obtain “virtually every death in the age range we are interested in.” “They have a lot of poverty cases and so on,” he added. Bugher described paying local collectors by the sample as the method that had worked in earlier Rockefeller Foundation studies. Merril Eisenbud of the AEC’s New York office suggested a trace-element study as a “blind” (ACHRE staff memorandum, June 9, 1995). The 196-page transcript was classified Secret and was declassified from Restricted Data status in 1995 at the committee’s request (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13).
| Date | Record | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| July 21–23, 1953 | RAND-SUNSHINE conference | Existence of project and conference not to be revealed |
| Aug. 6, 1953 | RAND R-251-AEC | Strontium-90 named principal long-range hazard; 216-sample pilot survey proposed |
| Oct. 16, 1953 | Dudley to Libby | Radium cover story adopted for foreign collections |
| Dec. 9, 1953 | Dudley to Rochester | Real purpose stated “for you alone”; infant skeletons sought from Japan |
| July 1954 | Gabriel report appendix | 55 Chicago stillborns among human samples analyzed |
| Jan. 18, 1955 | Biophysics Conference transcript | Libby’s “body snatching” remarks; Houston and Vancouver channels |
| Feb. 1957 | Kulp, “Strontium-90 in Man,” Science | Worldwide network’s human data published |
From secret assay to published data, 1956–1957
Fallout became a public issue after the 1954 Bravo test and during the 1956 presidential campaign, when Adlai Stevenson raised it. In October 1956 Libby presented the strontium research at the dedication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s new building in Washington. In February 1957 Kulp’s “Strontium-90 in Man,” based on data from the worldwide network, appeared in Science. Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy held its first major fallout hearings in May and June 1957 (ACHRE staff memorandum, June 9, 1995). A report on Sunshine’s 1955–1956 operations recorded hundreds of human bone samples collected by dozens of stations abroad and by researchers in Boston, Denver, Houston and New York (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13).
In June 1957, responding to a National Institutes of Health proposal to collect children’s milk teeth, Libby wrote that the idea was good but that “in collecting human samples publicity is not particularly helpful” (ACHRE staff memorandum, June 9, 1995).
The advisory committee’s 1995 finding
The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments published its final report in 1995. Chapter 13, “The Practice of Secrecy,” concluded that the AEC’s tissue sampling “involved secrecy and deception.” It found that the commission “evidently considered the legal aspects of ‘body snatching,'” but there was “no evidence that it sought to consider any independent ethical requirements for disclosure” to the families of those sampled. In the surviving documents, it said, “concern for public relations emerges as the dominant motivation” for the secrecy. On reviewing the 1955 transcript, Eisenbud told the committee he was surprised it had been classified at all (ACHRE Final Report, ch. 13).
Sources
- RAND Corporation, “World-Wide Effects of Atomic Weapons: Project SUNSHINE,” R-251-AEC (Aug. 6, 1953), via DOE OpenNet. Also cataloged by RAND.
- Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, staff memorandum, “Documentary Update: Fallout Data Collection” (Feb. 8, 1995), Briefing Book 11, Tab I.
- Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, staff memorandum, “Documentary Update on Project Sunshine ‘Body Snatching'” (June 9, 1995), Briefing Book 15, Tab D.
- Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Final Report (1995), Part II, Chapter 13, “The Practice of Secrecy”.