allegedly president obama called bob kagan to the white house to discuss this early. that's what i read. i know for a fact hillary clinton had dinner with bob kagan to discuss this article. i would wager the majority of people in this room do not quite agree with that story. not that it'spxaxu totally wr my opinion but has pretty significant problems. i would suggest everything that agrees with it should read it and try to publish something about it. make an impact. communicate your views. affect public perception and the memory we have on these events. we have a chance to do that.

kagan's article and in the new republic of he's a well-known intellectual. maybe that's why he got it in the new republic. other people can write a counter view. if we're unhappy with the exceptional view of triumphalism, that's what we historians should try to do without getting caught in our own ideological biases, i would suggest. >> i'm going to make half the panel feel old. i was in high school, i was a freshman when the wall fell. sorry. >> at least you weren't there when the wall went up. >> i don't know where my parents were. let me play the role of splitter you suggested there was a

contrast. you can say on the whop happened those that tried to stand against the crowds with violence, then sort of succeeded, but those who acceded to the crowd, kind of their regions went away. where do we put romania in that? >> i think the roamanians like to be different. i think we have to put them in a third category because we should raoul that ceausescu did not have the opportunity to act as he wanted. he was forced to flee when he didn't want to. to the first question's point, it was he and hon kerr the ones

telling the rest of the soviet bloc that gorbachev had gone too far. this is crazy. we must hold fast to socialist roots and hold fast to the crowd. they were increasingly outnumbered. romania is the first place we can see more importantly less interaction between the crowd and regime than really the first steps of a civil war. remember, the violence in romania that occurs around christmas and after winds up being villager against villager and vim village against village driven by ethnic tension and conflict. i would say romania is the best example precursor of yugoslavia. the regions had done an effective job of tamping down historic tensions which, of course, bubble up in the aftermath. it's a great tragedy.

>> my name is david mayors. >> i teach at boston university. when we try to sort out the erosion of soviet power in eastern europe and its collapse, how important is our understanding of faith based descent, in particular the catholic church, pope john ii, policyholder, which is in some sense a rehearsal of what went on. protestants who played an active role. if you could just comment on that bundle of questions. >> yes. that was another category of middle actors that i discovered

where local church leaders, parishioners, peace prayer groups at clunchs, certainly in policyholder it can be overstated. he knows more about that than i do. the key of the church was significant but more complex than i originally thought. the kind of superficial narrative is that the church sheltered dissidents. there are even a number of books with titles, the revolution this came from the church, the churches brought down the wall and so forth. when i went and actually interviewed former church-based dissidents, they had very mixed feelings. because on the one hand they said, the stasi, secret police, tolerated the churches giving shelter because it made surveillance easier. it was basically one-stop

shopping for them. if you had churches of activity and all kinds of internal stasi reports that churches the main site for activity, you could just observing the churches. then they turned church staff as stasi agents, this is also happening in other countries, not unusual in germany. when i interviewed, mixed feelings, i found out later that minister was a stasi agent, this minister was, i had ambivalent feelings. on the other hand we had shelter, a space to meet, organize. the church was very important us. some of the ministers really cared. some really supported us. some parishioners really supported us. on the whole the church was a vital space. the actual picture much more ambivalent in the details that you can imagine. the church was a crucial space to shelter dissidents. but the irony is the stasi

permitted that space to exist as well as the activity in it didn't become too energetic. in 1989 when a whole host of factors come together, gorbachev, solidarity, mistakes regime is making, when suddenly the activity explodes exponentially the stasi is overprepared for it. the role of the church is critical but ambivalent. another factor that came into play when i interviewed dissidents from church groups, some would say to me i'm christian, some would say i'm not religious at all. i walked into a church and it was the only place in my country where people said what they thought. even though i didn't become religious, i appreciated that dialogue, i participated in those groups even though i'm personally not a person of faith. as so often is the case with historical events, when under the circumstances into the nitty-gritty details, the picture is more complicated. there were people involved in faith-based organizations but

their actions were not based on their own faith. the picture is a complex one. if you had to summarize in a nut shell, they were important and managed to be more valuable in the stasi surveillance that accompanied them. >> i want to pick up and second on this point because i think it's really quite crucial. it helps the broader point we're making all three of us, all four of us, you say a lot, too, different perceptions, historical perceptions. here is a good case where the prototypical american has a different view of what it means to say the church played an influential role in influencing events than would somebody in eastern europe at this time or even western europe at this time. as mary points out, the church is a social position and the evangelicals who are supporting church movements are

-- clandestinely during the '80s in particular, they are driven by a sense of faith. the people whom they are interacting with are using the church most often -- not always -- but most often as a vehicle for organizing in social dissent though not being animated by a desire for religious freedom themselves. it's an important lesson that with the exception of vatican city, the united states is about the most religious country in the world. consequently it makes us more prone to think people around the world, who are more organized by religion, are acting at the same level of passionate faith that so many americans are. >> i'm from marquette

university. >> the strongest visual i got from that night was there was an inordinate amount of drinking that went on that night. you can see where they tore down the wall, they were passing around champagne and schnapps and beer, whatever was available. some of that occurred in the united states where people went out on their lawns -- in my neighborhood. lived in a catholic neighborhood, we didn't have champagne but a lot of budweiser. a lot of people did go out. that was kind of a celebratory night. the doctor told me that the worst effects occurred 14 hours after you stop drinking. seems the hang over occurred 11 years after 9/11, 2001. a lot of distinguished historians like our panel that shortly after the event, this was the end of the short

century, the end of the 75-year-old 20th century that started in 1914 and ended in 1989. but that again quickly was eclipsed shortly 11 years later with this idea that actually 9/11 is the start of the new 21st century. i was just wondering if there's any commentary on the panel of is this the end of the 20th century. is it a formidable and important event that it supersedes what happens 14 years later. thanks. >> i'm sure my colleagues have a lot to say on this issue. i mean simply stated, yes, i think it is the end to the short century. i think it's a good framework to see the events of 1989 symbolizing the end to many

things. i would say the next decade is a decade of transition. and yes, you're right, after 9/11 we start talking about a new century and war, a new war on terrorism whatever that might mean. so yes, in many important ways, i think it's the end of the century. but as so many of us have been writing during the last 10, 15, 20 years, there are other important developments that transcend the world war that are happening parallel to the world war that intersected times with the world war, that affect the cold war and are very influential after the cold war.

issues of demography, issues of globalization and so forth. part of the answer to your question revolves around what do you think in terms of the international history are the most essential issues of the 20th century. if you think it is demographic growth or disease or globalization then you're going to have a different view. of the events of 1989, '90. if you think it is two world wars, the rise of total earn ar, then you probably see 1990, '91 as an appropriate book end. >> let me put a different spin on that if i could. in part agreement. to put a different context, i think it's true that it's very

easy to look at 1989 as the end of the 20th century. i'm personally comfortable, trends alluded to. trends like proliferation of information technologies which are crucial to the united states and its allies being able to see a future beyond the cold war in many ways which the soviets could not. this is significant, because i think it helps us not so much look back at what 1989 meant as an ending point, but look what it means going forward. i think that tells, frankly, 9/11 -- i have to be careful how i say this, because i live yards away from the library -- 9/11 wasn't that important. the trends that spawn 9/11, we're afraid more of proliferation, globalsation of ideas and 9/11 was, in many ways, an expected manifestation

of -- very expected -- an expected manifestation of trends of information flowing and of media flowing, which 1989 allowed to flow through a dramatically larger part of the world. so in essence, 1989 opened the flood gates and we're still seeing what followed later. >> just to follow what jeff said, i was surprised researching only this book but my previous book 1989 at a there were all these dramatic events from the ground up. you have solidarity in policyholder. you have the peaceful revolution in east grpz. all these dramatic changes. dramatic changes of the lives of east berliners, europeans, dramatically more life choices all of a sudden. from the ground up i saw this picture of change. when i looked from the top down, i didn't. the predominate cold war

security organization in the cold war was nato. now in europe the predominant security organization is still nato. the european community existed before. it renamed itself european union but basically existed afterwards. what surprised me was the mismatch between the dramatic change from the ground up and per pet wags of co-- perpetuati in the cold war era. a clear division line between eastern and western europe. this was obviously warsaw pact, nato, the fact russia got left on the periphery -- i now mean russia not the soviet union -- with nato expanding into eastern europe which means there's a dividing line that got moved eastward. i came to see 1989 not as an end to the century, because so many organizations that dominated 20th century persisted in the

post world cold war, because when you get to 9/11 you're trying to respond 9/11 with cold war institutions. if you look at the 9/11 report one of the reasons the united states was unprepared to deal with 9/11 was because security institutions were still those formulated to fight the cold war. that's true. that was also a strategic decision in 1990 to perpetuate these decisions. i came to see 1989 not so much as an ending because there is so much perpetuation into the 21st century. we are living today with that awkward juxtaposition into cold war institutions primarily formulated to defend western europe and the challenges of the 21st century. what's been kind of amazing with the crisis in ukraine and putin is that all of a sudden such institutions seem newly relevant, new rethinking.

i don't see 1989 as a new century when we get into the brave new world. >> let me say one more thing, if i could. one other view is george bush's. >> h.w. or w.? >> no, h.w. 1989, in essence, is 1946 but in a good way. 1989 his vision of world order, we're finally going to get rid of this albatross around our neck, the cold war, which kept fulfilling u.n. mandate in world war ii of states working together cooperatively and respecting sovereignty. consequently for him there's a sense 1989 is a chance to sort of finally do what we were supposed to do and do it right. now, one criticism of that view one could make, it doesn't take into account some of these broader global trends. no one in bush's vision of a new world odor articulated manifestation of 1945 and u.n.

nowhere in there is a sense of nonstate actors. he can only conceive of the world in terms of states, which i think is one of the reasons why something like nato continues to persist because when one considers how to defend one's self, of course one thinks about other states. states are still the most powerful force in the world today, i think, with the exception of google. but they are simply more powerful than other nonstate actors which bush was not ready to integrate into world view because that wasn't view of 1945. >> one thing to comment. i taught at the army war college this last spring. there was a large international demographic in my class. in the course of the conversation we were talking

about 1989 and talking about 2011, talked about the trends of the 20th century. to fast forward, 25 years from now, we're not going to be talking about 1989 so much. we're going to be talking about 1979 much more than 1989. i was actually interested in the conversation. jeff, you mentioned that 1989 was when the world changed. it was a global affair. there was a big chunk of the globe that has not been discussed at all tonight. i mean we basically went from europe to china. from europe to china so as i said, i'm just sort of raising this. it's made me think about this periodization a lot, particularly in terms of what

began and what ended at different times. i don't in any way challenge the views that 1889 constitutes an end of an era of the 21st century. but it seems to me that something had begun before the the end that wasn't just trends that go on, they were political events that triggered something different. a quarter of a century from now, if i'm in the intelligence committee and i'm writing global trends 2060, i may be thinking about 1989 very differently. >> when i think of 1979 i presume you're referring to events in the middle east. >> afghanistan. >> afghanistan is pretty close. there's a common denominator there which i think is most

likely prevalent in the career trajectories of most of your students at the army war college that they had spent time -- the vast majority of the last decade concerned with radical islam. if you ask them what is the most important thing of their lives going forward, it's something they have to deal with on a daily basis. >> absolutely correct. >> my suggestion is we make sure the next 10 years are conflict against some place really innocuous like iceland. then we'll be able to see ice land as a really important place 60 years from now which it may be. is anybody here from iceland? it was very popular. >> from the university of warwick, united kingdom. thanks for your comments, everyone. sometimes when i think about these complex historical events

like the end of the cold war, it reminds me of a quote said about the danish prussian war, famous for its complexity. only a few people know what's happened. one is dead, one is mad and i've forgotten everything i knew. i would like to thank panelists for the figures identified. the question is very simple. it's about the historiography. professor immerman maybe touched upon it as well. but there is one thing about historiography of this important event, which you have thought very long and hard about that you could change, what would it be? so if there is one thing about the historiography surrounding this event and the end of the this it event and the end of the cold war, 1989, that you could change, what would it be?

thanks. >> well, i'm still trying to figure out which one of us is mad, which one of us is dead and which one of us is forgotten. so i'll let you go first. >> i'm not sure i can address that. but i think when we try to periodize things, jeff, richard, you're quite right. there are always continuities and discontinuities. so things that started in the 1970s and '80s are going to be important after 1989. it seems to me if you think about some of the basic issues such as the nature of the configuration of power in the international system. the configuration of power in

the international system was absolutely transformed in -- between 1989 and 1992. i would say that that change is far more significant than the fact that nato continued in a new form. the fact that the soviet union and the warsaw pact disappeared and american strength was predominant was extraordinarily important. the other thing is that for, you know -- depending on how you want to define it, 50 years or 70 years, there were competing ways. competing models of political economy. what's really important about 1989, 1990, '91, as symbolic years was that that -- those

years demonstrated to all human kind that the communist model was no longer a viable alternative way of life. yes -- so that's related to then the rise of islamism as a possible alternative framework. but the destruction of communism as a framework for ordering the political economies of societies is really important everywhere. now it's not just the events in berlin, but it's also obviously the trajectory and the reconfiguration of the political economy of china during these years. these things intersect. but on the whole, you have two huge transformations. the transformation in the structure of power in the international system,

transformation in the perception of the viability of certain political economies. those are huge, huge changes that i think help to define the 20th century. >> can i just say one thing real quick? >> sure. >> so just briefly, i think you asked -- if i understood your question, you asked what about the historiography would i like to change. what i would like to change is there is a lot of writing about the cold war and end of the cold war that talks about europe without talking about the europeans. there's writing on the berlin coming down that doesn't involve berliners. there's writing about the end of the german division that doesn't involve germans. i'm trying to show the significance of their agency. in the united states our foreign policy does go badly awry when we forget the agency and local actors. i'll give a quotation from a former activist i interviewed. this is a woman who was a very

active protester in east germany for years, before the wall came down. and she said, "it still amazes me when i read history books about the history that i live, the history i made. i read these history books, and they say the wall fell and it gave us our freedom." she said, "we fought for our freedom, and then the wall fell." and she's right. and so i would like to bring that understanding, that there was this peaceful revolution and that it mattered and that it was causal into the historiography, that the people on the ground fighting for their freedom and then the wall fell. >> so before i bring this session to a close, which i'm sure that we'll all continue the discussion, i should mention that i was negligent at the beginning. i meant to mention that many of you noticed that james wilson

was supposed to be on this session. james has just published a terrific book on the end of the cold war, the triumph of improvisation. james also works for the state department, the historical office. and he's actually a leader of a team working on ukrainian-russian crisis. so he did not feel comfortable leaving that to come up. we should feel comfortable that he's at work, solving international crises while we figure out what's missing from the historiography. but in any event, we all missed having james here. with that, let me thank our panelists who are wonderful. i really want to thank them, because i had insisted they speak for 10 to 12 minutes each. fortunately, as is my life, they ignored me completely, and i think we all benefited from it tremendously. so thanks very much.

this weekend on the c-span networks. start with the author talks about how world war i changed music. then discuss how music used as a catalyst for social change. later a look at feminism and its impact on popular music in the 1960s and '70s. that starts at 8:00 eastern here pq >> this weekend on the c-span networks, friday night on c-span native american history. then on saturday live all day coverage from the national book festival science apostlion. saturday from bbc scotland, a debate on scotlanded upcoming decision on whether to end its

political union. sunday, chief justice second court of appeals shares his approach to interpreting laws passed by congress. on c-span 2 friday at 8:00 p.m. in-depth with former congressman ron paul. then on saturday all day live coverage at the national book festival from the history and biography pavilions. speakers, interviews and viewer call-ins with authors. sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern acids afterwards with william burrows, talking about his book "the steroid threat." american history tv friday a nasa documentary about the 1969 "apollo 11" moon landing. saturday on the civil war, general william tecumseh sherman's atlanta campaign. a look at election laws, bush versus gore. find our television schedule at c-span.org and let us know what you think about the program

you're watching. call us at 202-626-34. on quirt use #c-123. or e-mail as comments c-span.org. join the c-span conversation, like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. next university of michigan history professor joel howell talks about human radiation experiments conducted by the pentagon from the end of world war ii through the cold war. professor howell describes some of the tests ranging from plutonium injections to full body radiation exposure. this is a little more than an hour. >> we're going to be talking today about the radiation experiments. by radiation experiments i mean experiments done in and around second world war and cold war, a fairly heterogenous set of experiments, more than we've talked about, done by lots of different people in lots of

different places but all unified by the fact they are studying interaction of human beings and radioactivity. curious phenomenon of radioactivity came to its biggest fruition explosion over hiroshima and nagasaki. before we talk about the experiments and make sense of them, we need to talk a little about the context which they were done. what we're going to talk about first of all was the world itself, second world war. we're going to talk about how it was a science based war. we're going to talk about the development of big science, lots of people, lots of investigators, lots of money. complicated system. and we're going to talk about the cold war. and ideas about national defense and national security and how

that played into the radiation experiments. like all medical history, in order to understand what happened, we need to understand the context in which it happened. now, there was medical research and physical science research going on in the interwar period. we're going to talk first about the physical science research and then about the medical research. there was some small poorly funded poorly organized research going on. and the example i'm going to use is the story about some military research designed to figure out where an airplane is. now, the first world war saw a little bit of air power, but airplanes were getting faster, they were getting bigger. they could show up over your head. you wouldn't know they were coming. and so one of the biggest military problems was how to detect airplanes before they got there. and in the 1930s, a staff member at the naval research laboratory

noticed that if you send radio waves out, they would bounce back from planes. and furthermore, if you looked at how long it took them to bounce back from the plane, you could figure out about how far away they were. in other words, he used radio to detect and range airplanes, and that's how he came up with the acronym r.a.d.a.r. radio detection and ranging. r-a-d-a-r. now, the discovery of radar was very uncoordinated. people didn't talk to each other. it was done in a naval research laboratory and the only way that the army even found out that it existed is that somebody from the army happened to go and visit the naval research laboratory. they didn't reach out to civilians who had expertise in how to design a radar apparatus.

they didn't have much funding. and this was fairly typical of the ad hoc manner of research in the interwar period. the second world war, of course, starts in 1939. starts in europe. the united states doesn't international 1941. -- enter until 1941. from the outset, people knew that the second world war was going to be a science-based war. that science was likely to determine who won and who lost. and one of the questions that arose is then how do you organize the pursuit of science in war time. now, we've talked about this before with the question of how to organize the medical corps. and a lot of the same issues apply. the medical corps, you'll remember, at the height of the second world war, the number of people in the medical corps was bigger than the entire army had been in 1939. so if all of a sudden you're expanding the size, how do you organize it? you've got to put some people in charge, you've got to figure out

how you're going to decide who is in charge and what the different units look like. and then once you've made that decision, that decision is very likely to persist well after the war is gone. so you create structures that then continue. well, the same thing happened for the organization of science. not surprising. a lot of it had to do with this guy here. vannevar bush. bush's grandfather had been a whaling captain. he was one of the early pioneers of concepts that we now call computing. he made a mechanical version of what we now have as an electronic computer. he was the dean at m.i.t. and he became head of the office of scientific research and development, osrd. the "new york times" said this made him the science czar. he knew that access to the president was going to give him a lot of power in organizing scientific research.

and he used that to get the medical research under his umbrella, as well. roosevelt was about to shell out the medical research and put it into a different unit, when he went to roosevelt and he said, you know, the people that you want to give that responsibility to are under criminal indictment right now. well, that was literally true. but the criminal indictment had to do with antitrust violations and hmos in washington, d.c. didn't matter. roosevelt said, i'm not giving this to people who are criminals. and it went instead under bush. now, what bush organized was a civilian organization. it was charged with coordinating the research, primarily funded by the military. and what they learned how to do there was to operate big scientific research. used to be people had pretty simple research labs. you wanted to do research, you had a lab, you hired some people, you did research. now suddenly you have people all

over the country. you have people here, you had people there, needed a lot of money. needed people who could organize the contracts, who could do the financing, who could obtain the resources. it was starting to become the kind of big science that has now become the norm since then. and, again, the changes that were made lasted well after the war was over. so let's get back to our example of radar, what happens with radar. well, by 1940, it's obvious that radar works, but it could be a lot better. you need to be better at discriminating the difference between airplanes and birds. you need to be better at picking up low-flying or fast-moving airplanes. and so the government decided to fund a research laboratory. and, again, they confronted the question of where do we put this lab? we've talked earlier about the tension with government-funded research. on the one hand, you've got people who say it ought to go equally to all the states. why should one state get more money than another state? on the other hand, if you're in the middle of a war or if a war

is imminent, as it was in 1940, it turns out people in some states don't have much in the way of research infrastructure, and people in other states do. and so the lab that was going to study radar was set up at the massachusetts institute of technology. and they called it the rad lab, r-a-d. rad lab. that was actually an attempt to be deceitful, trying to confuse people into thinking they were studying radiation physics, which in 1940 didn't seem like it was going to be a big topic for investigation. well, radar turned out to be terribly important. i'll give a couple different examples. you've heard of the battle of britain. hitler wanted to invade britain, operation sea lion in 1940 was supposed to smash britain's air force, germany had a lot more attack planes than britain had defense planes. but by using radar, they were able to see the planes coming, use their fighters effectively,

and as you know, germany, in fact, never did succeed in invading england, much to the surprise of many people at the time. the other place where it was perhaps even more important had to do with submarines. the german u boats were wreaking havoc on american convoys, supplying britain, later on supplying the war effort. they emitted confusing sonar signals. it was hard to find them. it turned out the subs needed to surface to take in fresh air and recharge batteries. and when they surfaced, airplanes with radar could see them up to five miles away. how effective? consider this. in january and february of 1942, without using radar, allied forces put in 8,000 hours of patrol in the atlantic, and managed to only find four submarines to attack. over a two-month period.

the very first night a plane went out with radar installed, they found four submarines and they sunk one of them. so it's that kind of effectiveness of radar that made its importance grow over the course of the war. it showed that organized research could make a difference. and it has been said possibly accurately the atom bomb ended the war, but radar won it. a few more examples of the kinds of big physical science research. sorry, this is the slide that shows the monthly german submarines. between 1941 and '42, not a lot and then they bring in radar and all of a sudden it goes up. these are examples of early computers. in this case, computers means people who are doing computation. eventually we then move to

electronic computers. another innovation was operations research. which meant using statistics and geometry to figure out the best way to find a submarine in the ocean or the best way to organize your bomber squad so it would be unlikely to get shot down. social engineering, as well. vannevar bush wanted to approach the secretary of the navy. the chief of naval operations was so tough, he was said to, quote, shave every morning with a blow torch and wasn't interested in civilians' ideas about how to best run his navy. however, the success of the operation together with the promise that first of all the navy would be in charge of everything and second of all the operations of research scientists wouldn't take credit for anything managed to convince him to use operations research and the radar and it got results. other kinds of results.

u.s. merchant vessels that used to take 35 weeks to be built were being built in 50 days. in 1939, the u.s. army air corps had 800 planes by the end of the war in 1944, at an airport just down the road, they were making almost 5,500 each year. proximity fuse that enabled munitions to explode when they got close to their target without actually having to hit it changed the entire strategy of warfare. so all of these research ideas from mathematics and the physical sciences convinced people that scientific research was something worth funding and worth doing and that it would make a difference in the war effort. so let's switch now to biological research that went on during the war. that's physical science research. poison gas.

mustard gas. one of the most dreaded weapons of the first world war. concerns that it was going to be used widely in the second world war. the problem with mustard gas is that it's species-specific. so in order to test gas masks, in order to test protective clothing, you have to do the experiments on human beings. you can't do them on anybody else. so lots of experiments were done using mustard gas. there were so-called man break experiments which were designed to see how long it would take a man to break.;ññ-gx people were put into a chamber, the mustard gas was introduced and they weren't let out until they collapsed and became unconscious, even though they might try very hard to get out. these were so-called volunteers. how voluntary were the volunteers? one person who was there said, quote, occasionally there have been individuals or groups who did not cooperate fully.

a short explanatory talk and if necessary a slight verbal dressing down has always proved successful. and there's not been a single instance in which somebody refused to volunteer. which makes me wonder if they really were volunteering. some of the people who were used were prisoners and conscientious objectors. the idea there being you owed something to the war effort if you weren't going overseas to fight, you needed to do something at home. now, mustard gas, as many of you know, actually has a dual use. it was an early cancer chemotherapeutic agent. and there were experiments done at yale which showed some efficacy of treating cancer with night again mustard. some efficacy. patients died but got better for a while. however, these were secret results and they couldn't be published. what about epidemic diseases? always a problem in war time. gonorrhea. this is the federal prison in indiana where experiments were

done on gonorrhea. penicillin was discovered in the 1930s. it was not widely produced. in 1941, there wasn't enough penicillin in the united states to treat even one patient. in 1942, there was enough to treat one. osrd, the organization headed by vannevar bush organized not only clinical trials, but also the production of penicillin. controlled protocols showed it was incredibly effective for treating venereal disease like syphilis and gonorrhea. and by the end of the war, there was enough for the army, there was enough for civilians, there was even enough to give to some of our allies. there was also interest in using it to see if you could prevent people who had been exposed to gonorrhea from getting gonorrhea. and this touches on the complexity of the ethical issues we're going to get to with the radiation experiments. the experiments were proposed here at the federal prison in terre haute, indiana.

they were proposing to give these men gonorrhea and see if penicillin could be used to treat it. but they knew this was likely to be sensitive. so in a memo from the head of the committee on medical research, which was part of the office of scientific research and development, ann richards said, when any risks are involved, volunteers only should be utilized as subjects. and these only after the risks have been fully explained and after signed statements have been obtained which shall prove that the volunteer offered his services with full knowledge. now, this is a pretty clear indication of what you need to do to do experiments on people that might hurt them. it might have had wider applicability had it not been a secret memo. so it's unclear who actually read them. in any event, the experiments at terre haute were stopped because it turned out it was more difficult than you might think

to give people gonorrhea. they were not stopped totally. and in another series of experiments that we touched on in another class, some of the same people involved in the united states went down to guatemala and continued these experiments after the war. but that's another story. malaria. tremendous problem. in sicily, north africa, the pacific theatre, and you heard from ashley about some of the efforts to eradicate malaria during the war and afterwards. some people thought it was the biggest medical problem of the war. it was harder to treat during the war, because quinine, the drug most effective for treating malaria, came from plants that were primarily in areas occupied by our enemies. attabrain was another anti-malaria drug. as you can see, these men did not take their atabrine. experiments were done using

prisoners. we'll come back to prisoners later on in the lecture. one famous subject for the malaria experiments was nathan leopold who had kidnapped somebody at the university of became a famous cause celeb. this was on the prison in illinois. this led to issues in the nuremberg trial because there was a question about whether prisoners could give informed consent. but important as medical research was, doctors were not the star scientists. the people that really were the most important for the research in the second world war came from not medicine but physics. this is a statue at the university of chicago by henry moore entitled nuclear energy. dan kevlas has a wonderful book called "the physicists" which talks about the physics during and after the war.

in the 1930s scientists trying to understand pure science were trying to understand the nature of the atom and probably the most exciting scientific news in 1939 was the uranium nucleus and that happened in germany. so the question then arose if there's energy that can be derived from splitting the atom, can you make a bomb? nobody was quite sure. it might be possible. you needed to be able to separate isotopes. used to get uranium 235 from the moreuranium 2638. there's a wonderful play called copenhagen. it's a great play. it sets up this question of the early years of the war and whether or not you could make a bomb. it revolves around what we know was a true interaction between

heisenberg, probably the most brilliant physicist of the 20th century, and i'm including einstein in that generalization, and neil's bore who worked out the theory of the atom. it took place in copenhagen, this meeting. heisenberg came and visited moore. we don't know expected in that meeting. we know they had a split. they used to be very close. and we know that heisenberg went back to germany, and we know that shortly afterwards germany gave up its attempts to make a nuclear bomb. figured that the problems in making a bomb were so great that we wouldn't be able to make a bomb. and one of the great historical questions about this episode, which again is very nicely set up in the play, is -- i mean it's to speculate why, what

happened. did heisenberg make a math error or did he question whether or not it would be a good idea and a really horrible thing to speculate on is suppose germany had been able to make a nuclear bomb. i mean, they were dropping bombs on central london. as the war wound down, i don't think there's any doubt if they had had an atomic bomb, they would have dropped an atomic bomb if they could on central london, but they didn't. making the bomb was hard. it required technical and social innovatio innovations. you had to separate the isotopes. you had to figure out if a chain reaction could be controlled. you needed to have large production plants to make large quantities of material. you had to get scientists and people in the military working together which wasn't that easy. some of the work was done at existing universities like the university of chicago. some of it was done in facilities specifically built for the government like a

plutonium works on the columbia river in washington state near hah anford. it's a site to which we will return. let's turn to events at the university of chicago, not very far from where we're sitting right here. let's turn to stagg field. this is stagg field in 1927. the university of chicago played there. anybody know who the first person to win the heisman trophy was and where he went to school? obviously the answer is the university of chicago. jay burrwanger won the heisman. university of chicago is a founding member of the big ten football conference. they eventually -- here we see some action taking place out on stagg field. the university of chicago is an interesting institution. i had the opportunity to spend

some time there. the stadium fell into disrepair and here you see a chart which shows the library which now stands. so imagine if, if you can, they tore down their football stadium to build a library. true story. they actually did. they also left the big ten in 1946 and it left room for another member to join the big ten to make up the full complement of ten and, of course, in 1949 michigan state university was admitted to the big ten. so the university of chicago left, michigan state came in. they had a president who famously was known to observe that when i feel like exercising, i lie down until the feeling goes away. they were not big into the intercollegiate sports scene. however, in 1942 they still were in the big ten and stagg field still existed.

it had squash courts under the stadium. and it was on those squash courts that an event transpired that truly changed the course of history. december 2nd, 1942. they had all kinds of bricks laid up there in the squash courts. this is an artist depiction of the event. there were no photographers present. we don't have any photographs. a very famous physicist was there to see if they could have a self-sustained nuclear reaction. there were cadmium rods that were soaking up all the neutrons that gradually pulled up the cadmium rods. the clicks of the neutron counter increased, said to sound like crickets chirping, and finally it went critical showing you could have a self-sustaining

nuclear reaction. the code word sent back to headquarters is the italian navigator has landed in the new world. so under the stands of stagg field at the university of chicago found out that we actually had the capacity to build in theory a nuclear bomb. the story then shifts. in order to build this bomb, we needed to get some really, really smart smart people, and it had to be done in secret because we didn't know that germany was not going to be able to make a bomb or japan. and so here in los alamos, new mexico, 7500 feet north of albuquerque has gathered the greatest collection of nuclear physicists the world has ever seen. sometimes as many as eight nobel

lawyer yaureates would be dinin together. they cooked on hot plates because the wood stoves didn't work so well. they took physicists from all over the country. they were part of a system that cost eventually about $2 billion. they worked in complete secrecy to develop a nuclear weapon, to develop what they thought would be a nuclear weapon. they weren't sure. and finally on july the 16th, 1945, at ground zero shown here in new mexico the first nuclear bomb exploded. question, what do we do now? this is a subject that's been debated a lot more now i think than it was then. president truman was president,

and he had seen what happens -- what had happened in world war i. he wanted unconditional surrender from japan. the emperor wasn't much in the mood to negotiate. meanwhile, the u.s. military was working its way across the pacific ocean in some pretty brutal battles. iwo jima, four weeks, 30,000 u.s. casualties. okinawa, 12 weeks, 50,000 u.s. casualties, 90,000 japanese troops, 100,000 civilians. we thought this was going to be a rehearsal for invading japan. if we invaded japan, that's what it was going to be like. we also weren't sure if the bomb would work consistently. it went off once. you could spend a whole course talking about the development of the atomic work. remember, germany had decided it wasn't going to work, so we weren't sure if we tried it again, if it was going to work or not. in any event, the decision was

made and on august 6th, 1945, the enola gay dropped an atomic bomb on hiroshima. there were 350,000 people alive in hir roach ma on the 5th of august, 140,000 of them were dead the next day. war is hell. this is a picture of hiroshima after the bomb blast. of a colleague whohrhrhrhxn gr tokyo shortly after the war, everybody born shortly after the war. he lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building and he said you could see for miles, just to give you a sense of how much was wiped out. i mean, if you have been to tokyo, you know the city is quite densely built now, but after the war he said he could see for miles. on august 9th, we dropped

another atomic bomb on nagasaki. the picture on top show nagasaki before the bomb. the picture on the bottom shows nagasaki after the bomb. and the war came to an end. on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima, the sithsonian institution attempted to do a display in which they would show the enola gay which is the airplane from which the bomb was dropped, and it was so politically charged and so politically sensitive that they eventually threw their hands up and said -- they wanted to have of what was going on. they wanted to put thingsç in context, but whatever they tried ran into protests and disruptions and objections and they eventually said we just can't do it. and so they simply showed the plane with a very simple factual plaque and no other discussion.

50th anniversaries are usually t the toughest. 25 anniversary, everybody agrees with the original intent. 100 anniversaries nobody is left. this statue was put up on the 10th anniversary. this is more or less on the spot where this reaction took place. so what we have in a sense here is the triumph of big science. we spent $2 billion and we had an atomic bomb. what should we do now? the war is over. what are we going to do about long-term control? after all, the bomb is based on the laws of nature which are available to everybody. the united states proposed a comprehensive evaluation, on site inspections to survey and control all uranium deposits,

and then we would relinquish our arsenal and scientific information. the soviet union proposed an immediate ban on the manufacture and use of atomic weapons. the united states said the soviets were asking the united states to give up their monopoly and make everything public before they agreed to comply. the u.s. said the soviets were being unreasonable and nothing happened and the cold war started. the cold war is where a lot of the radiation experiments took place. some of them started in the second world war, most of them in the cold war. what was the cold war all about? europe was divided. now, don't forget that the united states and the soviet union were allies. we were partners in the second world war. we were on the same side. no longer. mao took over china. we had only a handful of warheads and only a few

long-range missiles and, of course, to no one's surprise in 1949 the soviet union obtained an atomic weapon. we got a hydrogen bomb in 1952. the soviets got a hydrogen bomb in 1953. we raced to develop more and more efficient ways of raining down destruction on each other. this is a titan 2 missile. this is the culmination that came along a little later. this missile, which you can see is no longer functional -- there's a girder covering the outl outlet, this is the only one that still exists, outside of tucson, arizona. this missile carried 600 times the destructive power of the bomb that landed on hiroshima, 600 times. there were three cities, wichita, little rock, and tucson. each one of them had 18

different sites. people who ran this missile were sitting underground. they didn't know where the missile was targeting. they had keys. they each had to turn their keys simultaneously for the missile to be fired. b-52s went overhead. the idea here was mutually assured destruction. the idea here was we've got overwhelming nuclear power and if you attack us, we'll attack you. kind of like somebody said two scorpions in a bottle each knowing if one stings the other, they both die. and that's why i wanted you to watch dr. strangelove, because dr. strangelove on the one hand, it's a comedic farce, it's black comeby, one of stanley kubrick's greatest movies ever. he had a lot of them, 2001, clockwork orange, et cetera, but it really gives you a sense of

what the cold war was like. it's not a coincidence that if you notice at the very beginning of the movie there is a disclaimer that says this is fictional and the u.s. military says there's no way this could actually happen, but the notion of b-52 bombers being poised to take off and overfly russia and deliver unbelievable destruction was real. i don't think there really was a doomsday machine but it was an essential doomsday scenario. i personally grew up in columbus, mississippi, which was the home of a strategic air command base and i was there when the base was closed during the cuban missile crisis as was depicted in dr. strangelove. they closed the base and that was real. people sat at the end of the runway ready to jump into a b-52 and go nuke everything. this is the war room, one of my favorite lines is there's no fighting in the war room,

gentlemen. what did you guys think of strangelove? did you like it? gl glad you watched it? this is major t.j. king kong riding the bomb down. it was originally offered to john wayne but he turned it down. well, this affected the way people lived. again, we'll get to the experiments in a second but you have to understand how did we live. this is a manual for survival under an atomic attack. if you happen to be bombed, don't rush outside, don't take chances. this is a real -- if the nuclear weapon is coming, you don't have anywhere to go, jump into a trench and cover yourself up with drying laundry. that will protect you in the heat. so people lived with this notion of what do we do if there's a nuclear attack. fallout shelters shown here and reflected in dr. strangelove, of

course. the people would go underground and survive forever. people had fallout shelters and we had discussions in high school, what do you do if you only have enough food and water for one family and another family wants to come and jump into your fallout shelter? i think a more realistic question is if nuclear war really comes and you manage to get into your fallout shelter, just what do you think you're coming out to when you finally come out? the korean war. there were overflights. this was a cold war but it was a very hot war in many very real sens senses. we competed on many grounds. when "sputnik" went up on october 1957 it was a huge deal. the soviet union was supposed to be a backwards state, we were supposed to be much better than them, and all of a sudden they

launched a satellite and every 90 minutes that satellite was coming around the globe. and then they announced other satellite and this one had a dog in it and they sent back telemetry showing that the dog was still alive. so we decided we're going to launch a satellite, too, and on december 6th, we tried to launch a satellite from cape canaveral only it didn't work. we're in this conflict with the soviet union. it's not entirely clear that we're winning. finally the last part of the cold war ethos i want to mention is, of course, the cuban missile crisis which comes along in 1962. as you may recall, the united states saw evidence of the soviet union putting missiles in cuba just south of us. we said bring them out. bep we put a blockade around cuba and we danced around the concept of nuclear war until eventually a deal was struck and we did not have a nuclear war.

i want to talk about some of the specific experiments that went on once you have a sense of what life was like. let me just pause. any questions thus far about the cold war, what life was like during the cold war, what the ethos was like? okay. we're going to talk about experiments, some of the things that we're going to talk about are informed or not, were people told what the experiments were all about or not. we're going to talk about experiments done on patients, on children, on the general population. we are not going to touch on soldiers being used for radiation experiments. that's a fascinating topic. it's just we don't have time for that. it's a whole other topic. and we're going to talk about the actual risk as we now understand it and what people understood then about the risk. but our story, we have to go

back to los alamos, up in the mountains. people weren't sure they could get enough uranium 235 so a guy named glen seesorb helped derive a new element called plutonium. it was named after the planet pluto. it should have been plutium but he liked the way it sounded better. he was chancellor at berkeley. he was very active in arms control later in his life. now, what were the health effects of this plutonium thing? >> it didn't seem to penetrate the skin but what about if the auto active material was swallowed? we knew that was not good for you because in the interwar period there were women who were painting luminous dials on watches. if you have a glow in the dark

watch, it has radium on them. the women were paid to paint the dials and they had fine grain rushes and they would put the brush in their mouth to get the tip right and then they would paint the wash and then swallow the radium and they would get a bunch of not so good diseases. so we knew that incompetent jesting plutonium was probably dangerous. we knew the characteristics of radium but not of plutonium. so 1944 in room d-119 and a 23-year-old chemist named done mastick was working in los alamos with plutonium. like so many things in medicine, this started with a mistake. potentially pretty serious mistake. he got it in his mouth. he could taste the acidic taste of the plutonium. he tried to spit out everything he could. they called for help but he

swished his mouth out every 15 minutes, did it 12 times. they pumped his stomach. they tried to extract as much out as possible. this is very valuable stuff. this is all the plutonium in the world. we're trying to build an atomic bomb and the stuff we could extract from his stomach may be what we need from the bomb. he didn't seem to have any horrible ill effects except for many, many wex thereafter if he walked into a room and blew into the room the raid yition counters would go off the scale. but we knew wasn't going to be the first person to incegest plutonium and we didn't know what it did. we didn't know what the health effects were. so we started to do a series of experiments. not at los alamos where there really wasn't much in the way of medical facilities but at oak ridge and rochester at the

university of chicago and at others. first patient was at oak rich, 53-year-old african-american cement worker named ed cabe. he was in a car accident. he was injected with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium. he wasn't told he was being injected. he wasn't told what it was. remember, the very word plutonium was top secret. the fact it existed was top secret. but we wanted to see what would happen and how it bwould be excreted. experiments went on to the university of shi. first person was a 68-year-old man with an advanced cancer of the mouth and lung and the next was a 55-year-old woman with breast cancer. so here they were trying it would appear to pick patients who were likely to die. the third was a young man with hodgkins.

the last two got 95 micrograms. remember, first guy got 4.7 microgra micrograms. the last two got 95 micrograms. we learned the he can creation was different. the fecal excretion rate was lower in humans than animals so that was useful information in trying to predict what would happen to people who ingested plutonium. again, it's unclear if the people who we injected with this plutonium were even told what they were being injected with. similar kinds of things happened the massachusetts general hospital took patients with brain cancer, 11 patients with brain cancer. they were terminally killed. they were injected with uranium to see where it would go in the body. one of them didn't actually have brain cancer. they thought he did. he actually had some bleeding into his brain. so all these experiments were done without getting consent,

without informing patients in order that we could continue to build bombs and take care of the people who were helping to build these bombs. the last set of experiments i'll go into a little more detail happened in cincinnati between 1960 and 1972. so-called total body irradiation or whole body irradiation. these experiments were done at some other places as well, houston, baylor memorial, sloan-kettering in new york. >> the theory was if you had cancer, we knew that radiation could be used to treat cancer. maybe irradiating your whole body, total body irradiation, would help slow the cancer. actually we had some pretty good evidence at this point that it didn't work for the cancer. but the department of defense was very interested in the

effects of total body irradiation because if there's a nuclear war and people get irradiated, are they going to be able to function? will a pilot who is flying a plane be able to land the plane? will they be able to fight? will they be able to work? ironically the people that wanted to do this experiment on were precisely the people who were least likely to derive any benefit from it. we knew that certain kinds of cancer were sensitive to radiation. so irradiating those patients might except to help them but then the side effects of the radiation would be the side effects of the cancer and the department of defense wasn't particularly interested in the effects of radiation on people with metastatic cancer. they want to know what the effects of radiation were on a healthy 23-year-old pilot and that could be best studied by

irradiating people whose cancers were not going to respond to the radiation. most of the patients who were irradiated were poor. most of the patients who were irradiated were african-american. all of them had cancer. some of them weren't all that sick. some of them were still ambulatory. some of them were still going to work. and the radiation had some pretty serious effects. out of the 90 people who were irradiated, 21 of them were dead within a month. and here's what's -- many things that are bothersome about this. we know that when you irradiate people, they have side effects. you get nauseated. you can get very nauseated, but the department of defense didn't

want the patients to be given medicines to reduce the nausea because they wanted to know what the effects would be without the medicines to reduce the nausea. nft, as a matter of fact, they didn't even want the patients to be informed they might get nauseated. they weren't given medicines to help prevent the side effects of the medication. these experiments let's say ended in 1972. 19. 1972 is the date you will remember it's when a lot of things happened. i'll move on in a second to radiation experiments on children. any questions about these radiation experiments? [ inaudible question ] >> the question is was this

before informed consent. that's a very good question, and it raises all sorts of issues. not to play word games but the question is what is meant by informed consent? and the notion of informed consent as we now understand it hadn't really been fully articulated although there's the court case in 1914 of schaumburg versus new york hospital. it was established that the patient has a right to decide what happens to her or his own body. the memo that i showed you earlier for the terre haute gonorrhea experiments suggested that in 1942 the head of the committee on medical research thought something very much like informed consent was absolutely essential. clearly, that was not being followed here. we'll talk about sources in a little bit, but one of the questions is how do you know somebody had informed consent? we have in some of the physicians claimed they got informed consent but there's not

documentary evidence of it. there was a lawsuit, by the way, and as a result of this a plaque now sits in the hospital in cincinnati. other questions? all right. the walter e. fur nan school in boston. research funded by the national institutes of health, the atomic energy commission, and quaker oats. this was an experiment on breakfast food which children were given breakfast food with radioactive iron and calcium to see how that food would be absorbed. the rationale for this was that quaker wanted to get a leg up on cream of wheat. they wanted to be able to show that their cereals were better absorbed and better spread

throughout the body. i'm not making this up. how did they get them to do this? here is an excerpt from a letter. letter to parents, 1953. we have done some examinations in connection with the nutritional department of the massachusetts institute of technology. with the purpose of helping to improve the nutrition of our children. i want to point out just like we saw if you remember in some of the letter in the tuskegee experiments asking the men to come in or a spinal puncture. here massachusetts institute of technology, a very well represented, highly recorded boston institution. the blood samples are taken after one test meal which consists of a special breakfast and if you sign up for this, you got to be a member of a science

club. if you're a member of the science club, you get additional privilege it's. a quart of milk, you get to go to a baseball game and to the beach and to some outside dinners. nothing in here that says we're going to give you radioactive tracers. this raises all sorts of questions similar to the ones we talked about with the willowbrook experiments. the willowbrook experiments were also funded in part by the military, the armed forces were interested in a vaccine and that's why they funded some of those experiments. first of all, can children give informed consent? are parents being coerced. this was not a great institution. this was not a place you really wanted to be. did parents really feel like they had any sort of choice? a quart of milk a day may not

sound like a big deal, but if you don't have it, is this too much coercion? it turns out when you look at this critically, the levels of radiation that they got probably didn't hurt them very much or at all, but nonetheless is raises questions about whether it is appropriate to do experiments on institutionalized children without informing either them or their parents. any questions about the fur rald experiments. okay. let's move to oregon. so this is the cold war and we're into radiation and the idea of nuclear power is very big, and the hope is that we will soon have nuclear powered airplanes. quite seriously being discussed.

and pilots who are flying nuclear powered airplanes are going to be exposed to a lot of radiation. who else is going to be exposed to radiation, people who go up in space. people who work with nuclear power. if there's a nuclear attack, people will be exposed to radiation. what are they worried about? well, when they talked to potential crew members on nuclear planes they were especially concerned about damage to what was you've misisticically in those kinder, gentler years as the family jewels. testicles contained rapidly dividing cells. if there's radiation exposure, those are cells that you would expect to be more likely to be hit by the radiation and this could produce chromosomal damage and potentially problems for your proge ny down the road.

testicles also have the advantage in that they can more easily than some bodily organs, they can be irradiated without having to irradiate the entire body. so in the oregon state and the washington state prisons between 1963 and 1973 there were a series of radiation experiments done to determine the effect of irradiation on testicles. well, these are healthy men who aren't going anywhere for a while. it's also a way to give them a chance to pay back to society for what they've done. the experiments in oregon were overseen by an extremely prominent endocrinologisendocri. men were asked to lie on their stomach. testicles were placed in warm water so they would hang down

and then they would be irradiated. this will be followed bye-b biopsies and then a vasectomy. it was done by word of mouth suggesting that the atomic research committee saw it as being sensitive. there was a loose and informal psychiatric examination and a consultation with the chaplain. the chaplain was required to certify that the man in question was not roman catholic because if they were roman catholic, they were not to have a vasectomy. needless to say there was no benefit to these men in terms of their health. they did get money. they were paid 25 cents a day. they got $25 for a testicular biopsy and another $25 for a vasectomy at the end of the experiment. 25 $25 in those days was roughl

equal to $200 and i will let those of you in the audience con template it for $200 you would have a testicular biopsy or a vasectomy. these were another set of radiation experiments that went on in the prisons. they were stopped in 1970 probably because of changing environment. the administrators were concerned prisoners could not fully consent. i think that's a very valid concern. similar experiments were done in the washington state penitentiary. it's interesting to think for a moment about the use of prisoners in human experimentation in general. the concerns about experimenting on prisoners in the 1940s and '50s were not the same as the ones we might have today. the main concern was they wouldn't be adequately punished.

if you're in an experiment, you would get special privileges, you get to go to the hospital and get better food and if you're in prison, you are supposed to be punished for your crimes. it was affirmed in the journal of the american medical association as being a legitimate way to do experiments. by 1972, 90% of the subjects of phase one drug trials came from prisons. phase one are when you have a new drug and you just want to try it out and see what happens just to look for toxic effects. the experiments on prisoners were seen as being a privilege, tended to be more white than african-american prisoners. we were in the united states way out of touch with the rest of the world. almost the entire west of the world experimentation on prisoners was seen as not ethical and not appropriate.

if you're in prison, you can't really make a free choice about what you're doing. and eventually prison experimentation became nonexistence. they came up in the hearings about the tuskegee airmen kennedy had only for one day. prisoner experiments. any questions? about the prisoner experiments? okay. okayk)oé hanford, washington. it's a lovely town. it's on the columbia river. it's remote, and in 1942 it was the site for a plutonium factory, and for many years it was the place where a lot of plutonium was made. it was picked for a couple reasons, one is there was ready access to fresh water for

cooling. the columbia river. second reason is that it was out of the way and if you're making plutonium when plutonium is top secret, you want to be secret, so here is a billboard, don't talk. silence means security. and other sign loose talk is a chain reaction for espionage. this is also from the hanford heights. atomic frontier days, a new light on the old frontier. you recall that the soviet union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949. how do we know what the soviet yub was doing? we know what they're doing because the radiation when you put it up in the atmosphere, it spreads all over the world, and we can pick up evidence of radioactivity here. how do we interpret that?

well, that's hard. so we wanted to figure out what radiation was like when it was put into the atmosphere. how did it come down? where did it come down? how could you detect it and what better way to find out what that's like than to intentionally release raid yaths from a plant like hanford. they started releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere so that they could study how and when and where it came down. because this is top secret, of course, they're not bothering to tell the people in the area that, oh, by the way, we'll be putting a lot of radiation into the atmosphere. there were problems. the weather wasn't what they expected or desired. they got more exposure at local sites. we now know that drinking milk from cows that graze on

contaminated pastures is the main source of exposure for children. in other words, if you release the radiation, they land on fields, the cows eat the grass, they make the milk, children drink the milk. when they did go out to see how the radiation spread around they did so with considerable secrecy. they pretended to be animal husbandry experts from the department. this is in the united states, this is in your backyard. you have somebody working for the atomic energy commission who claments to be an animal husbandry expert who wants to check your cows. it's unclear how much damage was actually done, how many people were actually injured. it's also clear that there was probably more radiation released from the normal operation of the plants from 1944 to 1947. they released about 80 times as

much radiation by accident. but there's an enormous sense of destruction and personal violation that comes from this. here is a cartoon showing hanford in the 1940s and 'gif50. it says yes, sir, it's reassuring to know if we were in any kind of danger here, our government would let us know right away. >> you lose enormous trust when you start dumping radiation out into the field. you're also now using the entire population as your he can pairmental subject. it was done in a number of places. there were explosions, nuclear explosions released to the atmosphere. that impacted holy sites for the pueblo indians who live in close relationship to the land. and there was some concern, some

observations that the spanish and native american residents of these areas tended to find themselves more often down stream of the releases than others. before i transition to how we know about this and how the experiments came to light, any questions about the experiments? how many of you knew about these experiments before this class? any of you? word of mouth or reading about them? >> word of mouth. >> word of mouth. >> in another history class. >> okay. the question is how do we know about this? >> there were early reports and rumors that some americans had been injected with plutonium. a congressional report in 1986 was called america's nuclear guinea pigs. it was written in fairly land

congress language. a journalist by the name of eileen we willsome working for the albuquerque tribune wrote about the story the way journalists write about stories like this which is to say she got names and faces. stories are much more compelling when there's an actual person associated with them. i mentioned a few names of people here. she wrote some incredibly stories. she's got a wonderful book out called "the plutonium files." but really we started to find out a lot more about these with this -- the book that came out of a commission. this is the rather thick book. this is from the advisory committee on human radiation experiments. it was created in january of 1994. president bill clinton ordered all federal agencies to comb their files and to make them public. he said, i want all the

information about these radiation experiments out there, and as a result, a ton of stuff was declassified, and one of the things that's happened as a result of this book and this commission was that those declassified documents are now publicly available. and lots of people have gone to them and written about them. now, the commission that he formed was made up of historians, figure loss if is, lawyers, physicists, even a private citizen. they were deluged with inquiries of people who wondered if something happened to them or staff members. one of the staff members who is typing this shared with me his father was at hanford in this period. people wonder just what was going on. they held lots of hearings. there were lots of groups of people who felt aggrieved. veterans, convicts, mothers, people in the wrong place at the wrong time. they grapple with the tension of

how do you make judgments? how do you differentiate between wrongness of actions and blame worthiness of actions. it's one thing to say it's wrong, it's another thing to say who is to blame. they were asked to decide who should receive monetary damages? who deserves money for this. they came up with a short list and they were criticized for that. the report was released and president clinton apologized on october the 3rd, 1995. and on that -- the evening news that night, i don't think it was even mentioned because also on october the 3rd, 1995, the jury came down with the verdict in the o.j. simpson trial. it's an example of bad timing to

release a report. quaker outside of this independent lie settled for $1.85 million. now, this is a wonderful book. this is really a tremendous job of historical and policy making research, and you may have noticed that some of what i'm telling you has not been quite as crystal clear as it might be, and that is because the nicer of historical research that many of the records of what happened are incomplete. we just don't know. some things we don't have protocols before. you asked about informed consent. we don't know for many of these experiments. maybe because it was being done in wartime. maybe because it was top secret. maybe because nobody bothered to write it down. maybe because maybe what we're doing here is a little dicey and maybe we don't want to keep records and maybe we need to lose these records. we don't know.

i think the committee did as good a job as they possibly could of finding out as much as they possibly could about this. a fundamental question they grapple with is how do we make retrot speck tiff judgments. how do we assess what people did in the past from our own perspective, again taking informed consent as an example. a lot of the concepts of informed consent were not fully articulated until well after this time, so it's not really fair to go back and say, well, they didn't do things the way we would have done them. they did say, the committee did come up with a tri par tate method of making retrospective judgments that i think makes a lot of sense. first of all, they said there's certain basic ethical principles that stand the test of time and place. they then, of course, pointed out that all of those ethical principles have exceptions.

then they said there are certain policies of government departments or agencies. you ought to follow the policies of wherever you're working. the problem here is that if the policies are secret, how do you know about them? finally, they said there are the rules of professional eth micks that people need to pay attention to. they did conclude, and i agree, that it's not okay to just use people because they're dying. some of the rationale for some of the plutonium experiments and the total body irradiation experiments and the other injections was that these people are dying and we might as well get some information from them. being ill and hospitalized does not justify using people as mere means to the ends of others. you still have to respect them as people. so what are the key lessons from these radiation experiments?

and i've only scratched the surface, and i really hope that you will go and read more about them in books like wilson's book, jonathan moreno has a wonderful book on the histories of these experiments, these human irradiation experiments books has a lot more detail. one of the lessons is that medicine and the quest for knowledge has to be looked at in a specific social and economic context. it can't be understood if you take it out of context. these started in the context of a world war and continued by and large in the con sex of a cold war which turned quite hot on occasion which was characterized by secrecy, which was characterized by fear that these weapons could be used against us. nonetheless, some of the features that came out of these experiments continue to this day. the penchant for large-scale

research, for big research, for the idea that if you want to do a big project, that you can get government funding to do huge, big protocols. even smaller scale protocols have a lot to do with the era that this comes out of, the idea of doing study that is go across several different hospitals, for example. and people got used to the idea that they ought to be funded to do research. and many institutions such as the university of michigan and others are built on this notion that people doing skins and physics, and medicine should get funding -- should get the funding they need to do the research. one of the casualties of these experiments is trust. even if nobody got hurt, there aren't very many people who think, for example, it's a good idea to give children radioactive oatmeal without telling anybody or to release

radiation from a plutonium plant to see what happens. even if at the end of the day nobody got hurt, i think it impedes the kind of trust that helps to bind society together in the best possible examples. so what i have tried to do is give you a sense of some of the radiation experiments, what happened, what some of the consequences were. let me just ask if there are any questions or comments. no? okay. well, thank you all for your attention and we'll see you on monday at the medical science building. the instructions are going to be sent. thank you very much. [ applause ]cree. with live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and the

senate on c-span2, here on c-span3 we complement that coverage by showing you the most relevant congressional hearings and public affairs events and then on weekends c-span3 is the home to american history tv with programs that tell our nation's story, including six unique series. the civil war's 150th anniversary, visiting battlefields and key events. american artifacts, touring museums and historic sites to discover what artifacts reveal about america's past. history bookshelf with the best-known american history writers. the presidency, looking at the policies and legacies of our

southern methodist university. we'll also hear from andrew card who served as deputy chief of staff for george h.w. bush. this event was hosted by the university of virginia's miller center. from c-span3's american history tv, this is about two hours. >> this event we call the manuscript review. it was suggested by ira katz nelson about ten years ago. he said, you know, it's a great conference but you need something to tie the room together. why don't you have a leading scholar come in and present a manuscript in progress and really bring some of the leading scholars and practitioners who can critique that manuscript before it's too late.

we've all been there, you know, where our book has come out and you've participated in a panel and people always say, you know, you should have done this, you should have done that. well, today we do have one of the world's leading scholars, jeff engel, who i'll say a word about first. jeff is presenting his manuscript very much in progress and the title is "when the world seemed new: george h.w. bush and the cold war's peaceful end." jeff is an associate professor of history and the director of the center for presidential history at southern methodist university. he's the author of numerous books, two of the most recent include "into the desertdesert"

"the fall of the berlin wall." we're fortunate to have jeff with us. he's going to say a few words about his manuscript and he's put a few chapters of it up online. i know some of you have had a chance to look at it. ira said, you know, you really should get a practitioner in there, somebody who knows a thing or two about how government actually works. we're very fortunate to have just the right person in this case. that's andrew h. card. mr. card was the chief of staff to president george w. bush from january 2001 to april 2006. an extraordinary long tenure for a chief of staff if i'm not mistaken about my history. he also has experience with bush one. he was his deputy chief of staff and secretary of transportation for president george h.w. bush.

mr. card is currently the executive direct everybody in the office of the provost at texas a&m university, and thank goodness that johnny manziel was finally picked in the draft because i was worried we were going to lose a commentator to be honest. ira said you should get really a leading scholar from history and a leading scholar from another discipline, and we have those scholars with us today as well. david farber is a professor of modern american history at temple university. he's author of a raft of books and even more very unfinfluenti articles. two of his recent books are "everybody ought to be rich," great title. "the life and times of john

j.rasco capitalist." so thank you for joining us today, and commenting last but certainly not least is melanie mccallister who is an associate professor of international studies, and head of media and public affairs and also chair of her department, american studies at george washington university. melanie is the author of "epic encounters, culture, media and the u.s. interests in the middle east since 1945," and she's also the co-editor with marie griffith of "religion and politics in the contemporary united states." ira, i know you're watching like a hawk this webcast, along with at least seven other people, so we, i think, are fulfilling not

only our obligation to create mentors but to a dream panel for your idea of a manuscript review. so without further ado, i'm going to hand things over to jeff and he can take it away. >> thank you, brian. it's traditional at this particular moment to say how pleased the speaker is to be here, but i have to admit that last night was the nfl draft, and i was fully expecting to be winging my way to a new city at this point, but there is also round 2 and round 3 coming up, so i have hope still. let me begin by thanking brian and evan mccormick and everyone here at the miller center for this tremendous opportunity. it really is a wonderful opportunity for me to get important feedback at the precise moment that it's most useful, i think, from such esteemed commentators. i want to say it's just wonderful to be here at the miller center once again because

this is really a place that's a model for how the academy and policy making can come together and move forward together. having just found a new center for professional history at smu, i can't tell you the number of times where an issue came up, an idea came up, a program came up and we said, how does the miller center do it? because they do it well. >> we ask the same questions. >> we should coordinate on that. let me also take a moment to thank, obviously, the panel. andy card, melanie and david for taking time out of their extraordinarily busy schedules to read probably more pages than was necessary at this point for them. i'm going to do two things in my brief commentary. i've been told to speak for about 10 minutes or so. i have to say my wife will often say i can't clear my throat in 10 minutes, but i'll do two things. the first is to give you a little discussion of what the book is about, how it's set up,

the methodologies involved and the areas i'm trying to cover. and then tell you a little about george h.w. bush and what the book ultimately argues and the story it tries to tell. the book actually tries to do several things at once. it is simultaneously a study of u.s. foreign policy during the tumultuous end of the cold war. it is also a group biography looking primarily at george h.w. bush -- i should mention whenever i refer to president bush, i refer to our guy, 41. and it's also a study of those around him, a collective biography of national security decision making during this time period. but then it tries to do something else. it tries to situate american policy making within a broader international venue. it tries to be an american study and international history. because time and again, we discover events that occurred during 1989, during 1990 and '91

were in many ways not generated by the united states. in fact, the united states reactive a lot more than prescriptive during these events. one of the arguments which i make is that this is really the essence of president bush's policymaking and of his foreign policy on a whole was to be cautiously reactive. realistically reactive without being too overly exuberant reacting to foreign events. because there were dramatic foreign events going on during this period. it's important to recall all that occurred during the four years of the bush presidency. that list would have to include, of course, the end of the cold war with ensuing events such as the fall of the berlin war, the break up of the empire in eastern europe, the breakup of the soviet union itself, something few commentators anticipated, even months or years before. we also have events on the other side of the globe. we have things like tiananmen square, democratic protests in

china which are ultimately met with repression and violence and force. simultaneously or almost simultaneously, we have a democratic invasion of panama. we also have the gulf war. we also have events going on in south africa. we have not only the gulf war but further difficulties in the middle east, vis-a-vis ethnic cleansing and vis-a-vis the kurds and speaking of ethnic cleansing, we have the beginning of the tragedy that was post-cold war yugoslavia. looking at these events, it's quite astounding to know that they all occurred within a four-year period of time. in fact, i would make the argument that more occurred during president bush's single term in office on the international scene than faced any other president in u.s. history, with the possible exception of fdr during the height of world war ii. for each of these events, president bush and his staff essentially adopted what i like to call hypocratic diplomacy. that is, first do no harm.

the world was in their minds, going in the proper direction. democracy was on the rise. markets were on the rise, the soviet union and communism, the great antagonist of the free world, was clearly an the decline. what would happen when the decline actually occurred, however, was something that no one could quite put their finger on. in fact, bob gates who when don becomes secretary of defense in later administrations, was at this point in time deputy national security adviser and gates who had trained as a historian was fond of going around the white house and the nsc and telling everybody who he cowl that never in human history had a massive empire collapsed without a major war ensuing. consequently, when people in the white house saw the soviet union begin to collapse, they feared the next step in that logical chain. and at every step, the administration approached their

difficulties, approached unexpected events by thinking to themselves not, what can we do, but how can we promote stability? how can we keep things that we believe are already going in the right direction continuing to go in the right direction without either speeding them up, speeding them up to the point where they might go off the rails or without perhaps doing something that would stop the process of change, which they thought was going in the right direction. in fact, time and again during this book, i come back to a quote uttered with no reference whatsoever to the cold war, a quote by bismarck years before who said, and i'll quote directly, the stream of time flows along. by plunging my hand into it, i am merely doing my duty. i do not expect thereby to change its course, end quote. now, what bismarck is telling us here is that the world is moving in a direction. policymakers might attempt to change things at the margins, but they're never going to change the current, never going to change the flow.

i think to myself this is something which president bush, though i had never heard him once quote bismarck on this topic, something president bush believed innately. that the world was going in the right direction, and the only thing he could do as president of the united states was to make sure it continued on that proper path without hitting the rocks along the way. in fact, to give you a singular example of this, president bush was pillaried in the press during the initial aftermath of the fall of the berlin wall, an aftermath which, of course, was covered on international television to great acclaim which people around the world saw celebrations in germany that no one could have imagined, even weeks before could have occurred, and occurred peacefully at that. and president bush at one point invited reporters into the oval office to witness him watching these events on tv because he was watching them in realtime like everyone else. he's leaning back in his desk and cbs' leslie stall says to

him about halfway through the press conference, you know, mr. president, you just don't seem excited. this is the culmination of the entire half-century cold war effort. we won, and you don't seem excited. and he responded, i think, in a very important way. he said, well, i guess i'm just not an excitable guy. but that wasn't actually the truth of why he was trying to lay down his excitement. later on in that news conference, he did point out that one of the great things about dynamic change is that it's all moving in our direction. that's a direct quote. and he did not want to, as i mentioned, change the direction, and, in fact, he knew something, of course, which leslie stahl and the other reporters in the room did not, which is that he had spent most of the night and previous hours on the telephone with margaret thatcher, helmet kohl and especially mikhail gorbachev who pleaded with him

not to do anything because the great concern was this excitement in the crowd would get out of hand. that violence would ensue. that no one could control this incredible change that no one had foreseen. each of them had in the back of their minds a singular example of celebration going too far and being turned into violence by those who had thought it had gone too far which was, of course, tiananmen square which had happened only months before. time and again, president bush and his staff said to themselves and approached changes in eastern europe by suggesting, let us not go too far in celebrating those who are democratizing from the streets up. let's not celebrate those reformers because those reformers have enemies and those reformers, i.e., those in control of the communist state have tanks and have guns. and we can see what can happen when they get pushed too far. and ultimately the great fear of the administration t