The Committee finds that since the end of the Manhattan Project in 1946 human radiation experiments (even where expressly conducted for military purposes) have typically not been classified as secret by the government. Nonetheless, important discussions of human experimentation took place in secret, and information was kept secret out of concern for embarrassment to the government, potential legal liability, and concern that public misunderstanding would jeopardize government programs. In some cases, deception was employed. In the case of the plutonium injection experiments, government officials and government-sponsored researchers continued to keep information secret from the subjects of several human radiation experiments and their families, including the fact that they had been used as subjects of such research. Some information about the plutonium injections, including documentation showing that data on these and related human experiments were kept secret out of concern for embarrassment and legal liability, was declassified and made public only during the life of the Advisory Committee.
I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about whether, on the balance, the world is better or worse off because nuclear weapons were technically feasible, and it's pretty miserable to put the historical fact of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered in cold blood and thousands or tens of thousands of dead American downwinders killed by government neglect on a scale across from the unknown possibility of the red scare boiling over into a third world war fought with every weapon except nukes in the 1950s
