Health and Safety: Status of Federal Efforts to Disclose Cold War
Radiation Experiments Involving Humans (Testimony, 12/01/94,
GAO/T-RCED-95-40).

The federal agencies and an independent advisory committee have been
working diligently to disclose the details of U.S. government
experiments that exposed human beings to radiation during the Cold War
era.  Although the federal effort is still evolving and thousands of
experiments have been identified, it now appears that the full extent of
these radiation experiments may never be known because of difficulty
locating and analyzing all pertinent documents describing experiments
that occurred 30 to 50 years ago.  Furthermore, agencies have used
inconsistent definitions for their searches and, for the most part, have
not verified the accuracy of these searches.  As a result, federal
agencies are having trouble identifying persons involved in the
radiation experiments.  Thus, it may prove impossible to achieve one of
the major objectives of this effort--to contact the subjects of the
experiments or their relatives. Moreover, concern is growing that the
advisory committee will not be able to complete its work within the
current one-year time frame.  The committee is having problems
satisfying its original charters and has done little of the ethical and
scientific analysis of Cold War experiments called for in its charter.
Despite these difficulties, the committee has decided to expand the
overall scope of its work.

--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------

 REPORTNUM:  T-RCED-95-40
     TITLE:  Health and Safety: Status of Federal Efforts to Disclose 
             Cold War Radiation Experiments Involving Humans
      DATE:  12/01/94
   SUBJECT:  Biomedical research
             Nuclear radiation monitoring
             Radiation safety
             Nuclear weapons testing
             Atomic energy defense activities
             Information gathering operations
             Weapons research
             Radiation accidents
             Radiation exposure hazards
             Safety standards

             
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