Why choose this moment to ‘fess up? Loose nukes have the Clinton administration more worried than ever before. Last week Secretary of Defense Les Aspin unveiled a “counterproliferation initiative” that directs military commanders to draw up battle plans against rogue nations with newly acquired nuclear capability, instead of former Warsaw Pact countries. This week, NEWSWEEK has learned, President Clinton will meet with senior advisers to consider the threat of terrorism and nuclear weapons. And O’Leary, on a visit to Moscow this week, will press the Russians to come clean about their dirty nuclear history, too.
The DOE’s sins of the past continue to haunt the present–perhaps none more ominously than the experiments on human subjects. According to a six-year investigation by The Albuquerque Tribune, 18 people–including housewives, three African-Americans, teenagers, elderly retirees, even a 4-year-old boy–were part of a nationwide study from 1945 to 1947 to determine how quickly plutonium traveled through the body. One of them was John Mousso, a 45-year-old, bluecollar worker who checked into Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., in 1946, after a diagnosis of Addison’s disease. Doctors told him he’d receive an experimental drug, but actually injected him with plutonium 239–46 times the radiation a normal person receives in a lifetime, the Tribune reported. Mousso lived until 1984, plagued by skin diseases, digestive ailments and lethargy. His family went on welfare because he couldn’t work. The DOE never let on. “I equate it with some of the things the Nazis were tried and executed for in World War II,” Gerald Mousso, his nephew, told NEWSWEEK,
With a huge and costly cleanup on its hands, the DOE must do more than atone. Its own survey of spent fuel at nuclear-weapons sites found appalling conditions at three facilities. Many storage tanks, built mostly in the 1940s, are severely corroded and leaking radioactive water. The debris from rusting parts could trigger a nuclear reaction. More horror stories will undoubtedly emerge as the DOE releases more of the 32 million pages of still-classified documents. By the time it’s all over, O’Leary may end up letting loose as many demons as she exorcises.
