In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.

Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the cold war, where the threats to his life were all American.

The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of US troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.

Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout”, material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, California, was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point naval shipyard. A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with the Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.

The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.

Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top US civilian and military officials pre-approved all of this in writing, documents show.

The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program, and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.

The navy’s San Francisco lab was a major cold war research facility with a unique focus on “radiological defense”, techniques developed to help the public survive and armed forces fight back in case of an atomic attack. It was one node in a nationwide network that encompassed universities, hospitals and national labs that had permission to handle dangerous radioactive material. As one of the first such institutions under the control of the Pentagon, it was among the military’s largest and most important research hubs.

In a sign of the era’s lax medical ethics and safety standards, lab directors advocated taking risks with human subjects without seeking informed consent or testing first on animals, according to the documents.

These shortcuts appear to have contravened the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines established after the horrors of Nazi experiments in concentration camps. Top civilian and Pentagon officials debated these principles. While some at the Atomic Energy Commission advocated strict rules, they were not consistently applied.

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“We were aware of the signs, the symptoms and the damage that would be caused” by high levels of radiation, William Siri, a prominent University of California, Berkeley, biophysicist who cooperated with the lab to set up at least one experiment involving human exposure, said in a 1980 oral history. “But down at the low end of the dose range, no one was sure, and unfortunately no one is sure even to this day as to whether there is a threshold and what the very low levels would do.”

One scientist developed a keen interest in elite athletes, who he theorized would be most likely to survive a nuclear conflict. In 1955, he negotiated with the San Francisco 49ers to use football players as subjects in a medical study. Letters between the lab and the team show researchers had formulated a plan to study body composition by having the men drink water laced with tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, and receive injections of radioactive chromium-51. Many years later, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigators failed to find contemporaneous records confirming the experiment proceeded as planned, though a lab employee claimed he had witnessed it.

‘Ethically fraught’

The lab’s work and decades of warship repair left the shipyard, which the navy vacated in 1974, one of the most polluted sites in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed it a Superfund site in 1989.

Today, the 450-acre (182-hectare) parcel anchors the biggest real estate construction project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. More than 10,000 housing units, hundreds of acres of parks and millions of square feet of commercial space are proposed.

Critics say the navy has long downplayed a possible link between the pollution and poor health outcomes in the surrounding Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which became majority Black by the 1960s, a transformation powered by the lure of shipyard jobs. Critics say the failure of the military to make the area safe amounts to environmental racism.

In the Pentagon’s response to detailed questions about the radiation lab’s research program and human exposure toll, navy spokesperson Lt Cdr Courtney Callaghan acknowledged the experiments as “a matter of historical record”, but declined to address their scientific merit or ethical significance.

“The navy follows strict Department of Defense policies and responsibilities for the protection of human participants in DoD-supported programs and any research involving human subjects for testing of chemical or biological warfare agents is generally prohibited,” she said via email. She added: “The navy cannot speculate on possible internal deliberations or motivations of medical researchers more than 50 years ago.”

Despite enjoying access to vast resources, the lab produced little in the way of valuable research, according to scientists who worked there and outside scholars. “It was fantastic,” former lab researcher Stanton Cohn said in an oral history interview in 1982. “We could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it.” In the end, he noted: “We did a lot of field studies and got nothing to show for it.”

While routinely exposing humans in these “ethically fraught activities”, the lab often behaved like an institution in search of a purpose, said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the shipyard in detail. Hirsch and other critics said the lab demonstrated a remarkable disregard for radiation’s hazards and a cavalier attitude toward human health, even by the permissive standards of the time.

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In the early 2000s, journalist Lisa Davis revealed the enormous quantities of radioactive material the navy and scientists left at the shipyard and recklessly dumped at sea. This report expands on her brief mention of the lab’s medical and occupational experiments exposing people.

While lab scientists did sometimes publish in scientific journals and lab imprints, the navy destroyed voluminous piles of original documents after the facility closed.

Medical experiments on human subjects

Remaining files such as interagency memorandums, experiment proposals and technical papers indicate that human exposure was accepted up and down the chain of command, from Washington DC to the San Francisco docks, where as early as 1947 the navy knew that airborne plutonium was wafting off contaminated vessels.

The ships had been battered by atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and then towed to San Francisco, where hundreds of civilian shipyard workers were exposed in a vain attempt to clean them.

The agenda then expanded to medical experiments on human subjects. Lab officials told the Pentagon in 1959 that they employed “minimal quantities of radioactive tracer material” in clinical studies, implying their techniques were safe, even though no one knew if this was true.

In the mid-1950s, the lab developed what it called synthetic fallout: dirt or mud laced with the highly radioactive but short-lived isotope lanthanum-140, meant to mimic the poisonous material that could drift over US communities after a nuclear explosion. The lab exposed hundreds of troops and civilian personnel to this hazard in field exercises at military bases on the east side of San Francisco Bay, in rural Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

The synthetic fallout’s radioactive ingredient could cause cell damage to internal organs if inhaled. Jones, the former army corporal, said troops in his unit sometimes worked without adequate protective equipment.

“Nobody had to go up on to the roof, and nobody had to do all this stuff by hand,” he said. “There were better ways to have done it. These scientists, they want the result and they don’t care about the people who are doing it for them.”

Some study participants had radioactive dirt rubbed on their forearms to test the effectiveness of cleaning methods. Others were ordered to crawl on their bellies through fields covered in it, to simulate the doses soldiers would absorb while fighting in a fallout zone. In 1962, lab officials acknowledged that wind and rain carried the pollution away, potentially exposing unsuspecting members of the public.

After a team from the lab detonated bombs laced with isotopic tracer elements underwater in the summer of 1961 around San Clemente Island, near San Diego, state game wardens working with researchers caught a radioactive fish, indicating unintended and potentially widespread ecological consequences. They brushed aside the discovery by noting that fish are typically gutted and presumably made safe before being eaten.

Across a wide array of activities, lab documents describe participants as volunteers. But Jones disputed this. “In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it,” he said, adding that if he declined or resisted, he risked discharge or imprisonment in the stockade.

“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out,” said Ron Rossi, who served with Jones in the army’s 50th chemical platoon at the Nevada test site. “It never occurred to us to even ask – just did what we were told to do.” Rossi spoke with the San Francisco Public Press in 2021 and 2022; he died last year, at age 89.

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Hundreds of thousands of so-called atomic veterans were ordered to participate in Pacific island or stateside above-ground bomb tests, or served in Japan near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The US government has, inconsistently, compensated many of them, as well as nuclear weapons workers. But many occupational or medical experiment participants have gone unrecognized despite clear signals they were in harm’s way.

In correspondence with superiors at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon, as well as in a journal article, scientists described the amount of absorbed radiation as relatively low. But since their detection equipment was crude and unreliable, these could easily be underestimations. At other times, scientists acknowledged grave risks, while permitting participants to receive exposures past their own suggested limits.

At least 33 times, the lab documented radiation doses “in excess of” evolving weekly, monthly or annual federal “maximum permissible exposure” limits, according to annual “radiological safety progress reports” from 1956, 1958, 1959 and 1960, obtained from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission through a Freedom of Information Act request and from the Department of Energy’s Las Vegas archive.

No evidence could be found that federal civilian nuclear regulators or the lab’s military supervisors imposed any discipline for safety lapses that violated federal regulations.

Hazards persist

The navy’s San Francisco lab was one of many research centers and hospitals across the country that exposed people to radiation and other hazards for scientific purposes. That makes it a demonstration of “the ways that people have been seen as disposable, to science or to the military”, said Lindsey Dillon, a University of California, Santa Cruz, assistant professor of sociology who is among a handful of academics familiar with the lab’s history.

“I do think it should shock and anger people,” she added. “They knew that radiation was not healthy.”

The navy has spent more than $1.3bn to remove toxic and radioactive material from the site. Cleanup is poised to stretch through the 2020s, thanks in part to a contractor fraud scandal: two supervisors at an environmental engineering firm hired by the navy to clean up the shipyard received prison sentences after pleading guilty in federal court to faking soil samples. Retesting and several lawsuits are ongoing.

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Beginning in 2019, an ongoing biomonitoring survey led by Dr Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician and neighborhood native whose father worked at the shipyard, has detected traces of radioactive elements and heavy metals in the urine of people who live and work nearby. Some of them are workers at a UCSF lab-animal complex on former navy property that once housed rats, mice and other creatures used in radiation experiments. They have filed workers’ compensation claims alleging that exposure to radioactive and toxic pollution from the shipyard made them sick.

Several elected officials who have enthusiastically backed the housing development, including former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco in Congress, and outgoing mayor London Breed, expressed concern about environmental exposure without specifically addressing the lab’s history of human experimentation.

In an email, Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager called the shipyard “a neglected and contaminated neighbor to the Bayview-Hunters Point Community” and noted that the federal government had invested heavily in the cleanup.

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Shamann Walton, who represents the Bayview and adjacent neighborhoods on the city’s board of supervisors, has called for the city to halt the development until all the pollution is gone. “We do have a say in determining whether or not any land is transferred to the city and county of San Francisco,” he said at a city hall hearing in September 2022. “Without a 100% cleanup, that land transfer does not take place.”

The mayor’s office echoed these sentiments, but has not advocated pausing development. “The health and safety of San Francisco residents remain our highest priority,” a Breed spokesperson told the Public Press. “To this end, we remain committed to ensuring the navy’s remediation of the Hunters Point shipyard is thorough and transparent to the community.”

It may be impossible to know exactly what harm the radiation exposure caused. Many survivors believe it to be a slow killer. Arthur Ehrmantraut, who served with Jones in the 1950s, said many men in the 50th chemical platoon died young. Others developed illnesses long after leaving the service. “I know that many had severe health issues, that, as with myself, manifested after 50 years,” he said.

Jones, now 89, said he did not regret his army service. But he suspected reckless radiation exposure caused the illnesses and premature deaths of others in his platoon, and his own impaired blood flow and partial blindness.

Experts agree that during the cold war, safety was secondary to precious knowledge that might give the United States an advantage in a nuclear third world war.

“The US government was very, very interested in information about how radiation affects the human body, internally and externally,” said Bo Jacobs, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan and co-founder of the Global Hibakusha Project, which studies people around the world affected by radiation from nuclear weapons. As for how that information was obtained, he added, they didn’t much care: “They want data.”

Additional reporting by Rebecca Bowe. Listen to episode 1 and episode 2 of her Exposed documentary podcast.

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