Sajza Alphin's Reviews > The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

For those interested in Atomic History, this book is required reading. And I would highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in Medical Ethics regardless of their familiarity with atomic subjects.

Every page of The Plutonium Files is a densely packed unraveling of decades upon decades of declassified government records, personal testimonials, published journals, and interview transcripts. The amount of care and detail Welsome poured into this book's research shines through in every chapter. She expertly navigates multiple dense subjects without insulting the reader or dumbing down the depth of her topics and insures that her readers will walk away with a greater understand of radioactivity, the men who worked with these substances, the medical consequences of exposure, the political maneuvering of the 40's and the 90's, and knowing the names and a small fraction more about those unconsentually affected by experimentation.

It will read like a horror story. And in hindsight will come a mounting sense of dread as the book continuously resets and walks beside the cognitive dissonance, arrogance, and decisions made by the United States Government and dozens of researchers through more than half a century. It will hurt to read about the incarcerated, the low-income pregnant women, the black community, the terminally sick, the mentally ill, and disabled who were all viewed as replaceable and treated like trash. But I urge those interested in this book to time their time, to read slow, and to come up for air frequently. It is easy to loose yourself in the weight and the mire of it all, but The Plutonium Files is history that deserves to be known and understood.

On a final, personal note, I believe the most important takeaway for readers of The Plutonium Files now is stated by Welsome in the final sentiments of her work: Trust comes from consistent behavior and honest communication over a long period of time. The victims exposed to or dosed with radioactive materials lost trust in the institutions that they believed in and relied upon, from the military to the medical. That broken trust was passed down to us: their children, their families, our communities, and that distrust-- that mysterious wound that splits and festers and struggles to heal-- has a half-life far longer than the isotopes that lingered in their bones.