Part 6 (1/2)

Stafford Warren had stuck by Leslie Groves through 1945 and most of 1946. But by then the novelty of being in the Army had worn off, and he longed to return to civilian life. After he had recovered from Operation Crossroads, he hit the lecture circuit and began warning select audiences about the dangers of the atomic bomb. Having witnessed Trinity, the devastation in j.a.pan, and the ma.s.sive contamination from the Pacific tests, Warren seemed to have developeda”at least temporarilya”a dread of nuclear weapons. Some of his more candid speeches were reserved for scientists and military personnel with security clearances. But other talks were given to carefully selected groups of nonmilitary people: medical students at Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospitala”ano reportersa; the Rochester Medical Societya”astudents and MDsa”no reportersa; the Chatterbox Cluba”aWomenas Semi-professional Cluba”no reporters.a1 Warren asked General Groves for permission to tell some of the lay groups about the hazards of plutonium, noting that when the medical research was decla.s.sified it would show that plutonium ais probably the most toxic metal known, and that extremely small amounts deposited in the marrow will eventually cause progressive anemia and death years later.a2 He continued, aI believe a frank statement of this sort should be made now to professional and intelligent lay groups as part of the general discussion on the effect of the bomb as a whole. Sooner or later one of your favorite columnists will focus attention on product [plutonium] alone and the effect on public relations will be difficult to combat. Merged with the rest, it does not appear so startling.a During a cla.s.sified speech given in aBuilding Xa on a Sunday afternoon in October 1946, Warren sketched the apocalypse he feared would come. aSoon the number of bombs which will have been let off will have made available so much radioactivity that it will seriously damage our food supplies and make serious changes in our world economy.3 This is not a figment of the imagination at all.a To the security-cleared audience, he added the following warning: You need only to absorb a few micrograms of plutonium and other long-life fission materials, and then know that you are going to develop a progressive anemia or a tumor in from 5 to 15 years.4 This is an insidious hazard and an insidious lethal effect hard to guard against. It has a tremendous morale-destroying effect. Would you want to live in an area which was contaminated with something that was all around you which you couldnat eliminate and which would get on your clothes, in your house, in the water, in the milk, and all the food?

Warrenas dire p.r.o.nouncements upset many scientists at the time and have continued to rankle researchers down to the present day who feel the hazards of plutonium have been exaggerated. One person who was particularly upset when the remarks were first made was Los Alamos chemist Don Mastick. In a letter to Louis Hempelmann, Mastick wrote: It has recently come to my attention that Dr. Stafford Warren has made a very serious and deeply implicated statement; namely, that the long lived component of the atomic bomb (Pu, 24,000 year) is of such a nature, physiologically speaking, that all life on this planet, as we know it, would probably be extinguished by the detonation of 1,000 (one thousand) Nagasaki type atomic bombs.5 Thus, we have only 995 bombs to go by this reasoning a Due to the hidden implications in such a statement, I would like some information on this matter, purely for personal consumption.

Hempelmann dismissed Warrenas comments, saying that he was surprised that Mastick gave any serious consideration to what the colonel said. aYou know Staff better than that.6 I think that the plutonium from the thousand bombs scattered universally over the earth would do us all good (stimulates the spermatocytesa”not for publication),a he wrote. aPlutonium, next to alcohol is probably one of the better things in life. We are using it for toothpowder out here.a After getting permission from General Groves, Stafford Warren mustered out of uniform on November 3, 1946. He had spent three years and two days in the Army.7 Homesick for his native state of California, Warren accepted a job as the first dean of the still-to-be-built medical school at the University of California at Los Angeles.

At UCLA, Warren maintained close ties to the Atomic Energy Commission, using his wartime connections to bring lucrative AEC contracts and researchers to the university. In fact, Warren disclosed in his oral history, all of the start-up medical school faculty that he hired were funded by the AEC. He also established a cla.s.sified Atomic Energy Project at UCLA modeled after Rochesteras Manhattan Annex.8 One of the first tasks undertaken by the UCLA group was an investigation of how the radioactive fission products at Trinity were moving into the food chain, a study that AEC attorneys were initially reluctant to fund. Recalled Warren, aThey were afraid we might find something.9 And I said, aWell, youave got to look, because if there is something, youad better find it and prevent further things, or pay off, and face it before there is some scandal.a a UCLA scientists also did yearly fallout studies at the Nevada Test Site and examined people who claimed to have been injured by the radioactive debris. How committed Warren was to the Atomic Energy Project is unclear. Years later one AEC official doing a field review noted bitterly the projectas aextremely low morale.a Warren, he was told, had used the Atomic Energy Project as a place to employ his staff until the medical center was built.10 aThose that are left are the unwanted leftovers.a Hymer Friedell, Warrenas second in command, also returned to academic life in 1946. He, too, maintained close ties with both civilian and military officials involved in atomic energy issues. He partic.i.p.ated in some of the secret debates that occurred in the late 1940s over whether healthy prisoners should be used in total-body irradiation experiments and served on a joint military-civilian panel that oversaw biomedical research at the bomb tests. In Cleveland, at what is today known as Case Western Reserve University, Friedell established another large program called the Atomic Energy Medical Research Project. Under an AEC contract, he brought together a team of researchers to study the toxic effects of internally deposited radioisotopes and their possible applications in medicine.11 Every once in a while he would get a letter or a phone call from someone interested in Ebb Cade, the Oak Ridge patient injected with plutonium.

With both Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell gone, General Groves was forced to appoint an interim director of the Manhattan Projectas Medical Section for the few remaining months of its existence. He chose James c.o.o.ney, a career Army officer and radiologist who had been a.s.signed to his staff in February of 1946. c.o.o.neyas first experience with the atomic bomb had occurred at Crossroads, where he served as one of Stafford Warrenas a.s.sistants. Warren told an interviewer years later that c.o.o.ney would take off about 4:00 P.M. every afternoon for the beach club. aHe wasnat about to stay up all night to see if anything was going to happen.a12 Ironically enough, James c.o.o.ney, a stout, middle-aged man from Iowa, would go on to become one of the most powerful military leaders in the Cold War testing program.

In the ensuing years, c.o.o.ney blamed Stafford Warren for much of the public hysteria about nuclear weapons. He believed Warren awas so conservative he was a disaster,a recalled Herbert Scoville, an employee in the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and later the Central Intelligence Agency.13 c.o.o.neyas son, James P. c.o.o.ney Jr., said his father believed one of the biggest fear mongerers was David Bradley, the physician who wrote the 1948 book about Operations Crossroads. aHe was tremendously upset about the misinformation,a the son recalled.14 Robert Stone returned to San Francisco, where he conducted additional human experiments with both radioisotopes and X rays. As irascible as ever, Stone locked horns with s.h.i.+elds Warren, the new director of the AECas Division of Biology and Medicine, over an experiment in which Stone was administering dangerously large amounts of radio-phosphorous to arthritis patients. Stone would also become a leading advocate of a controversial proposal put forth by a civilian-military group to perform total-body irradiation experiments on healthy prisoners. Lined up behind him would be many of his old allies from the Manhattan Project and the admirals and generals of the Army, Navy, and Air Force who were preparing to wage the next war on a nuclear battlefield.

The nuclear battlefield, an unthinkable Armageddon that Albert Einstein predicted would return civilization to the Stone Age, was uppermost on the minds of civilian and military war planners after j.a.pan surrendered. How would the armed forces wage such a war? How could they defend against it? One of the scientists they turned to for advice was Joseph Hamilton, who had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of how radioactive materials unleashed in bombs behaved in the human body. Hamilton maintained close links with the AEC and the military, frequently flying back and forth to meetings in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. He had become, according to his protg, Patricia Durbin, a awalker in the corridors of power.a15 Hamiltonas old dream, radioactive warfare, had been revitalized by Shot Baker, the spectacular underwater atomic bomb detonated at Operation Crossroads. On New Yearas Eve of 1946, the day before the Manhattan Projectas sprawling factories and laboratories were transferred to the AEC, Hamilton wrote a long memo to Colonel Kenneth Nichols, who directed the daily operations of the Manhattan Engineer District, describing how radioactive materials could be used to destroy cities, poison food supplies, and render uninhabitable thousands of square miles. Trivial amounts of fission products absorbed in the body could irradiate the bone marrow and produce alethal effects,a he wrote. Aerosols of radioactive materials mixed with smokes could be fatal when breathed into the lungs. aOne of the princ.i.p.al strategic uses of fission products will probably be against the civilian population of large cities,a he continued.16 aIt can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population after its initial use.a In his New Yearas Eve memo, Hamilton advised that a full-scale investigation of rad warfare (RW) be launched by the armed services in an isolated region. His suggestion was taken seriously and implemented by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. As an added bonus, Hamilton himself was made chairman of a panel charged with overseeing the safety for the RW experiments. On at least one occasion he flew in a plane tracking the radioactive cloud.17 According to the Clinton Advisory Committee, sixty-five tests were conducted at Dugway between 1949 and 1952 and more than 13,000 curies of radioactive tantalum were released into the atmosphere.18 The program was kept secret out of fear that the rad warfare program might cause apublic anxiety,a aundue public apprehension,a and even apublic hysteria,a the committee reported. The program remained under wraps until 1974 and was largely unknown by the public until 1993. Funding for the RW program was cut in 1953, just as the Chemical Corps was proposing a huge expansion in its testing program. Its demise was probably due to budget cuts as well as practical questions about its military effectiveness, the presidential panel speculated.

Wright Langham was to make Los Alamos his base of operations for the rest of his life, becoming a familiar figure at the scene of some of the worldas most hair-raising nuclear accidents. In 1966 he flew to Europe when four thermonuclear weapons were dropped near Palomares, Spain, during a midair refueling collision over the Mediterranean Sea. Two of the weapons were found intact. The other two underwent nonnuclear explosions, which resulted in the release of some fissionable fuel and some burning. Langham was also sent to Greenland in 1968 when a B-52 bomber from the U.S. Strategic Air Command that was carrying four unarmed nuclear weapons crashed seven miles west of Thule Air Force Base. The explosives in the unarmed weapons detonated, and considerable plutonium spewed over the ice.

Louis Hempelmann left Los Alamos briefly in 1946 to return to Was.h.i.+ngton University in St. Louis, but was persuaded by lab director Norris Bradbury to come back for a couple more years. With few paved streets, no sidewalks, and only a limited number of telephones, living conditions were still primitive on the mesa. Residents shopped at the post exchange and purchased other items through the mail. A series of calamities, including a water shortage, had driven all but the heartiest out of town. Robert Bacher, the unflappable scientist whom Oppenheimer confided in during the dark and uncertain days of the bomb project, later told Congress, aThe technical developments during 1946 had slowed not to a stop but were so slow the motion was hard to detect.a19 Hempelmann and fellow physician James Nolan were almost overwhelmed by the paperwork and physical exams a.s.sociated with processing civilian and military personnel who were leaving the site. Although they werenat always successful, the doctors tried to obtain blood and urine samples from departing workers to protect the project from possible lawsuits. Nolan wrote: With the lifting of security and the lack of pressure afforded by the war, employees at this laboratory now have many qualms about special hazards.20 It has been necessary for the protection of the contractor and for the morale of the worker to do things which are not absolutely necessary for the protection of workersa health. This office has attempted to make more of a ashow.a Nurses have been employed in the first aid rooms of outlying sites rather than G.I. first aid men.

The Los Alamos doctors also established a amilk routea to obtain urine specimens from the homes of recalcitrant employees who worked with polonium, a highly radioactive material, and consciously attempted to make safety procedures part of everyday life.21 Just when the two physicians thought they were bringing the achaosa under control, another devastating criticality accident occurred on May 21, 1946. Because the accident occurred on the eve of Operation Crossroads and at a time when sensitive negotiations were occurring over the domestic and international control of the bomb, many details of the incident remained unknown to the general public for decades.

Louis Slotin, a young Canadian-born scientist and a close friend of Harry Daghlian, had his pa.s.sport ready and his bags packed for Crossroads when he decided to show his colleagues how to perform an experiment know ominously among physicists as atickling the dragonas tail.a On that fateful day in May, Slotin and a number of other scientists gathered around a table at a remote laboratory in Pajarito Canyon. One of the men standing nearest to Slotin was Alvin Graves, a member of the so-called Chicago suicide squad who had stood on a platform above Fermias pile, ready to halt the chain reaction with neutron-absorbing cadmium.

Slotin was an intense-looking young man who had the reputation of being a daredevil.22 He had served in the Spanish Civil War as an antiaircraft gunner and had joined the Royal Air Force when World War II broke out. When authorities discovered he was nearsighted, he was forced to resign. On his way home to Winnipeg, Canada, he visited with a colleague in Chicago who encouraged him to join the Met Lab. Eventually Slotin transferred to Los Alamos, where he became the resident expert at the atickling the dragonas taila test, which was done to determine the exact amount of fissionable material needed to ignite a chain reaction. Enrico Fermi believed the test was so dangerous that he had warned Slotin, aKeep doing that experiment that way and youall be dead within a year.a23 Slotin shrugged off Fermias words of caution; he had already performed the test successfully some forty times before.

Wearing a loose, open s.h.i.+rt and his trousers tucked into cowboy boots, Slotin stood in the middle of a large, sun-filled room and slowly lowered the upper half of a hollow beryllium hemisphere around a ma.s.s of fissionable material that was resting in a similar lower hemisphere.2425 He held the upper sphere in his left hand with his thumb and fingers inserted in the plug hole at the top. In the other hand he held a screwdriver, which he used to keep the two sh.e.l.ls apart. Suddenly the screwdriver slipped and the telltale blue halo appeared. aYou can guess the rest,a Norris Bradbury confided to several colleagues two days later.26 aThe hemisphere fell, there was the familiar blue glow and feeling of heat in his hands.a Slotin knocked the two spheres apart and then made for the exit. Four other scientists, a technician, an engineer, and one guard who also were in the room raced out the door. Ten minutes later Slotin gathered the group around him and drew a sketch of where everyone was standing in order to help estimate how much radiation each had received.

Los Alamos scientists believed Slotin received a dose of about 800 roentgens, more than twice the lethal dose.27 Alvin Graves received an estimated 100 roentgens; junior scientist Allan Kline, 60 roentgens; Dwight Young, a technician, 50 roentgens; Patrick Cleary, a security guard, 30 roentgens; junior scientist Marion Cieslicki, 12 roentgens; scientist Raemer Schreiber, 8 roentgens; and Theodore Perlman, an engineer, 6 roentgens.

Alvin Graves was standing about a foot behind Slotin and was s.h.i.+elded from some of the radiation by Slotinas body. After Harry Daghlian was killed, Slotin and other scientists had kicked around the question of whether it was better to run away or knock apart the a.s.sembly once a chain reaction had begun. They concluded it was better to stop the reaction. aThis is not because there was any possibility of an explosion,a Graves once explained.28 aIt is because one cannot run fast enough to decrease the radiation exposure as much as it would increase from the reaction itself. It is very much to his [Slotinas] credit that he had the presence of mind to remember this conclusion at such a moment. It is unquestionably true that I and perhaps others of those present owe our lives to his action.a Louis Hempelmann was in charge of the stricken scientists when they arrived at the hospital. For the third time, the doctors would have a chance to observe what would happen to a healthy person exposed to radiation from an atomic weapon without the confounding effects of blast or burn.

Slotin knew he was dying but maintained a cheerful demeanor even as his blood counts dropped, his body began to swell with fluid, and giant blisters appeared on his hands. aWhen we were alone together in a hospital room,a Graves wrote, ahe said, aAl, I am sorry I got you into this.29 I am afraid I have less than a fifty-fifty chance of living. I hope you have better than that.a Slotinas decline mimicked the course followed by the Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki victims. A tube placed in his throat soon became painfully irritating because of the ulcers that developed on his tongue and the back of his mouth. He developed uncontrollable diarrhea, and his hands became gangrenous after the swelling had shut off the blood supply. Morphine was his only relief. aNothing could be done to stop the steady progress of total disintegration of body functions,a J. Garrot Allen, one of the treating physicians, later wrote.30 On May 30, nine days after the accident, Slotin died. Philip Morrison, the scientist who had testified so eloquently on Capitol Hill about the apenetratinga effects of radiation, helped pack up Slotinas belongings and return them to his parents. Among his possessions were a pair of opera gla.s.ses and three mounted gla.s.s containers filled with Trinity sand.31 Several of the other scientists who had been in the room also grew sick. Alvin Graves suffered from nausea and intermittent vomiting while he was hospitalized.32 He developed a fever on the fifth day, a rash on the ninth. He was discharged two weeks later but was so weak that he had to remain in bed for sixteen hours a day. Eventually the hair on his head and his beard began to fall out and his sperm disappeared altogether. Eventually he regained his strength, returned to work, and fathered healthy children.

Louis Hempelmann warned Graves to avoid further exposure in the years that followed, but Graves ignored his advice and waded more deeply into the world of atomic weapons. In 1948 he was named the leader of the Los Alamos weapons testing division and was the man considered by many to be the most influential scientist in the atmospheric testing program. Having survived his own exposure, Graves came to believe fallout worries were aconcocted in the minds of weak malingerersa and recommended that radiation exposures be compared to on-the-job accidents.33 A dose of fifteen roentgens, for example, could be the equivalent of a acut finger not requiring st.i.tches,a he suggested.34 aSuch a guide would not only be useful for operational decisions but would be extremely useful for public relations purposes.a But the radiation damage Graves received was not a figment of his imagination; he died about twelve years after the accident at the age of fifty-four from medical complications caused by the exposure.

Allan Kline, who was standing about four feet from the a.s.sembly, was also nauseous when he was admitted to the hospital.35 Like Alvin Graves, he, too, experienced a marked weakness when he was sent home. The hair on his head and eyebrows fell out, his eyes watered continually, and he complained of an inability to concentrate for more than a few moments at a time.

Klineas life took a radically different turn from Gravesas.36 He left Los Alamos soon after the accident and returned to Chicago. According to a New York Times article, Kline entered Billings Hospital in December of 1946 for a battery of tests. Convinced he was being used as a guinea pig, though, he stormed out of the hospital and soon became embroiled in a dispute with Los Alamos over compensation and access to his medical records. Doc.u.ments obtained from Los Alamos under the California Public Records Act show that his physician was J. J. Nickson, one of the doctors involved in the Met Labas TBI experiments and the Chicago plutonium injections.37 An attorney representing Kline charged in a 1949 letter to Brien McMahon, who by then was chairman of the new Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, that Kline had received aunusually shabby treatmenta from the Manhattan Project, the AEC, and the University of California, which manages Los Alamos.38 aMr. Kline was refused medical care and information at a time when he was dangerously ill from radiation and was emitting enough radiation from his body to cause a Geiger counter to react with some force,a the lawyer wrote. aThis refusal of treatment, dropping him from the payroll with little reserve funds about 2,000 miles from his home, in an extremely weakened radioactive and dangerous condition, and the subsequent indifference to his existence and well being const.i.tute a very tarnished chapter in the history of the development of the atom.a In an attachment, Allan Kline described in detail the physical ailments he had suffered. The neutrons had made many molecules in his body radioactive; his teeth were so hot that a metal s.h.i.+eld had to be placed over them to protect delicate mouth tissues; his skin became so sensitive to the sunas ultraviolet rays that it swelled perceptively; he was completely sterile; he required frequent naps or sleep totaling up to twelve to fifteen hours a day; and he was unable to walk up a short flight of stairs without becoming completely exhausted. Worst of all, Kline was not even allowed to see his own medical reports. As a consequence, he began seeing private physicians. Ironically, those doctors were not informed of the origins of Klineas physical complaints because of secrecy rules. He wrote: I was actually used as a guinea pig during this whole period as no medication or treatment was given me for my recovery, nor was any advised.39 All any of the physicians did was to check my physical condition and subject me to very long, uncomfortable tests and the results of these tests then became the property of the U.S. Government, and I was not given access to them. This condition still exists. This amounted to a denial of medical care.

Records that were not decla.s.sified until the mid-1990s show that Kline was being used as a guinea pig in other ways. Louis Hempelmann carefully collected the data from Klineas exposure and the other healthy men injured in the criticality accidents and used it in later years when military and civilian officials in Was.h.i.+ngton were trying to predict what would happen to soldiers on an atomic battlefield.40 Kline, who is still alive and living in California, spoke in general terms about the accident, but did not answer specific questions about his health or legal issues related to his case. He is a cla.s.sic example of what President Clintonas Advisory Committee came to refer to as an aexperiment of opportunity.a That is, he was not the subject of an experiment per se, but his exposure provided scientists with a unique opportunity to collect data.

Louis Hempelmann remained at Los Alamos until 1948, when he joined the University of Rochester medical school, where he was to remain for the rest of his career. Like the other Manhattan Project doctors, Hempelmann maintained his close ties with the AEC. He was always one of the first experts called upon whenever someone was injured by radiation.

19.

THE AEC AND THE POLITICS OF SECRECY.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1947, the wartime empire belonging to the Armyas Manhattan Engineer District was officially transferred to the new, civilian-run Atomic Energy Commission, which was headquartered in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The complex was scattered over thirteen states and included more than 2,000 military personnel, 4,000 government employees, and 38,000 employees of contractors.1 On December 24, six days before the transfer, U.S. Army Col. Kenneth Nichols, who directed the daily operations of the Manhattan Project from a rambling administration building in Oak Ridge known as the castle, sent the following memo to the Manhattan Districtas representative in Berkeley: The first paragraph of this report indicates that certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as part of the work of the contract.a2 It is felt that such work does not come under the scope of the Manhattan District Program and should not be made a part of its research plan. It is therefore deemed advisable by this office not only to recommend against work on human subjects but also to deny authority for such work under the terms of the Manhattan contract. You will take immediate action to stop this work under this contract, and report to this office upon compliance.

The stop-order apparently was triggered by a progress report written by Joseph Hamilton and sent to Oak Ridge a month earlier. In his usual dry language, Hamilton had advised his superiors that asuitable solutionsa of uranium, americium, and plutonium were being prepared for aintravenous administration to human subjects.a3 He had sent many similar reports to the Manhattan Project, and there was nothing remarkable about his statements. But suddenly, the bomb builders found that the research was unacceptable. The abrupt policy change is one of the most inexplicable events surrounding the plutonium injections. Were Colonel Nichols and General Groves, who were about to lose control of their empire, trying to clean up the paper trail so it would appear as if they hadnat known about or supported the human experiments? Was Nichols objecting to the ethical implications? Did he feel that the injections did not fall within the wartime contract between the Rad Lab and the Manhattan District? Or could there have been other reasons for the stop order?

Records that have surfaced so far donat fully explain what was going on, but at least one doc.u.ment suggests that Nichols, who had been appointed by Groves to serve as a liaison to the AEC, may have felt that the decision to continue such studies should be made by the Manhattan Projectas civilian successor. In fact, a memo sent to Berkeley on January 8, 1947, indicates that AEC officials did want to review the human studies: aUntil the Atomic Energy Commission is able to consider sponsoring this type of experimentation, authorization cannot be given for the use of radioactive materials in human subjects under this contract.a4 Other events going on in the world might have been making General Groves and Colonel Nichols jittery. Throughout the summer and fall of 1946, American prosecutors were preparing for a historic trial in Nuremberg, Germany. In December of that year, twenty-three medical doctors, including Hitleras personal physician, went on trial for a.s.sorted crimes involving murder and torture performed in the name of medical science. Even before the trial began, the American Medical a.s.sociation (AMA) went on record with guidelines for ethical human experiments. The three rules published by the AMA required the voluntary and understanding consent of the subject, prior animal experimentation, and appropriate medical supervision.

An editorial writer for the Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation pointed out that the guiding principle behind ethical human experiments was the voluntary consent of the subject. aIn the American army,a he wrote, athe tradition is well established that human beings, even under military conditions, are not ordered to submit to procedures that violate the sanct.i.ty of their own persons.a5 Alluding to the medical experiments conducted in n.a.z.i Germanyas concentration camps, the editorial writer pointed out that the medical profession in the United States would rally behind any enlisted officer who refused to conduct an unethical human experiment, even if ordered to do so by the ahighest political leaders.a Itas likely that some Manhattan Project officials saw the editorial. One AEC official, writing years later, noted that as early as 1946, adoubts were expressed concerning the ethics of the [plutonium] study.6 At one time, consideration was given to referring the matter to the A.M.A. ethics committee but this was not done.a But Stafford Warren, who was just getting settled in at his new job at UCLA, had no ethical qualms, at least initially, about the radioisotope injections and wanted to continue them. Warren chaired an interim committee that provided advice to the AEC on the future course of its research. Not surprisingly, much of the proposed research was slated for the doctors who had done the wartime work, including Stafford Warren himself. aIt is the opinion of this Committee,a Warren wrote on January 30, 1947, athat in the further study of health hazards and of the utilization of fissionable and radioactive, and other materials, final investigations by clinical testing of these materials will be necessary under the proper and usual safeguards.a7 Always conscious of litigation, Warren suggested that the AECas legal department determine what the commissionas afinancial and legala obligations were when aclinical testinga was done. Warren didnat explain what he meant by aclinical testing,a but presumably he was referring to the kind of studies being done by Joseph Hamilton, Robert Stone, and scientists at Rochesteras Manhattan Annex.