US Sociologist documents Army experiments on Americans

It is now confirmed that during the Cold War, the United States Army conducted experiments on St. Louis, Missouri residents, which at the time they claimed were for the purposes of protecting the population. Sociologist Lisa Martino-Taylor filed multiple Freedom of Information requests and obtained documents from the US Army that confirmed her worst fears: Some 10,000 people in St. Louis had been sprayed day and night with radioactive particles in the 1950s and 60s.

Zinc and Cadmium radioactive particles were sprayed inside and around a housing complex without the consent of its inhabitants. Most of the people living there, Ms. Taylor says, were under the age of 12 years of age. The experiments were not limited to St. Louis. They were done in Corpus Christi, Texas and other cities around the country. In Texas, the Army used planes to spray the chemicals over the city under the excuse that a new system to generate a smokescreen was being tested to protect the people from a possible Russian attack.

According to Martino-Taylor, the Army was actually spraying Zinc and Cadmium sulfide, among other chemicals, a fact that was kept secret from the victims of the spraying and from city authorities. “They obviously went to great lengths to keep it secret,” says Martino-Taylor.

As it has happened in many other US government and military experiments, the chemicals were released in and around low-income areas where blacks, Hispanics and other minorities lived. At the time, the Army insisted that the chemicals being sprayed were safe, but documents obtained by Martino-Taylor reveal quite the opposite. “There is a lot of evidence that suggests that people in minority communities were subjected to military tests,” she said to Channel 5 I-Team news.

Martino-Taylor says that the chemical spraying done in St. Louis and other cities around the country were part of a larger radiological weapons development program which was also concealed by the US Army. According to the documents uncovered by Martino-Taylor, a company known as US Radium was involved in the execution of the experiments. US Radium was a company founded in 1914 in Newark, New Jersey. Its founders, Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky and Dr. George S. Willis, was originally called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation, but it was later renamed United States Radium, was it moved its operation to Orange, New Jersey. There, the company became famous for producing radioluminescent paint.

The Freedom of Information Act documents show that the Army never performed long term studies to determine whether the exposure to radioactive Zinc and Cadmium Sulfide could have caused harm to the thousands of people who were experimented on in the 1950s. Later in the 1970s, the government conveniently decided to implode the very same housing complex in St. Louis where the radioactive experiments had been held 20 years earlier.