PROJECT SUNSHINE

Opening

Project Sunshine was an Atomic Energy Commission study, with RAND, from 1953. The question was strontium-90 in bone after the test years. The sample they wanted was young bone. Stillborns. Infants. Children. Willard Libby, AEC commissioner, told a January 1955 room that legal advice on consent was not very encouraging and that doing it legally would be very difficult. A 1947 AEC rule asked consent of the living. The dead in this project sat in a gap. Cover stories to pathologists were later called merely incomplete, not false.

By 1956 the take was in the thousands, from dozens of cities and countries. British desks at Harwell wrote about samples required for Sunshine and about a stillborn child in a cross-check. Middlesex ribs sit in the Anglo-American paper. Parents were not the correspondents. The Department of Energy later said it had no evidence of family consent.

Timeline

1953 the project starts18 January 1955 Libby speaks the legal difficulty out loud.

1956 the take is already in the thousands across cities and countries. Harwell writes about samples required.

Later DOE language: no evidence of family consentCover stories to pathologists sit in the later reviews as incomplete.

Fallout science used the numbers. That use is later life. The 1955 room is first for how they knew it was hard to do legally.

Young bone was the point, not a side effect. Stillborns and children were named as the sample. Libby telling a room that legal advice was not encouraging is why this is not a later morality play hung on innocent science. By 1956 the take was already international.

Harwell asking for samples, Middlesex ribs in the Anglo-American paper, DOE later finding no family consent: that is the chain. Cover stories to pathologists called incomplete still mean the parents were not the correspondents.

Key figures

Willard Libby owns the 18 January sentence.

AEC and RAND own the study design.

Pathologists who sent bone own the gap between cover story and parent.

Harwell owns the British desk. The families own an absence on the correspondence.

Physical and documentary trail

What exists:

One: the project design aimed at young bone.

Two: Libby's 18 January 1955 remark on legal difficulty.

Three: the 1956 scale, thousands of samples.

Four: DOE's later statement on consent.

There is no parent-letter archive the DOE pointed to. There is no small take. There is no claim this was only animal bone.

How very difficult it is going to be to do legally.

Things you might not know

• Libby wanted "body snatching". At the same January 1955 meeting, Willard Libby said that "if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country."
• Australia tested bone for 21 years. Australia measured strontium-90 in human bone from 1957 to 1978. In the early years, bone from babies, children and adults up to 40 was reduced to ash and sent to the United States and Britain.
• Its own agency doubted consent. When the Australian programme came out in 2001, the head of the radiation safety agency ARPANSA said it was unlikely relatives had been asked.
• A British mother found out decades later. One mother said her stillborn baby's legs had been removed, and that she had not been allowed to dress the baby for the funeral.
• A 2010 inquiry found thousands more. The UK's Redfern inquiry, set up after organ removal from Sellafield workers came to light, found thousands of tissue samples had been unlawfully taken for nuclear and medical research over nearly 40 years.

Competing explanations

A secret harvest. This is the shocked reading. It has Libby's own difficulty. It has DOE on consent.

A sloppy scientific take that should have asked and did not. Also true on the record. Sloppy here still means thousands of children.

A study no larger than ordinary pathology leftovers. Weak against the 1956 count and the legal advice.

Later life of the case

The strontium-90 numbers helped make the case for the 1963 treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, which is the use Sunshine's defenders point to. The way the bones were gathered only became public decades later, through the American reviews of the 1990s, the Australian disclosures of 2001 and Britain's Redfern inquiry in 2010. For another Cold War programme that used people without their knowledge, see the Plutonium Files.

Finding

Project Sunshine collected young bone from the mid-1950s for strontium-90, Libby said out loud that doing it legally would be very difficult, and DOE later found no evidence the families consented.

What still will not resolve: a consent letter file, or a full public ledger of every sample.