Project Sunshine: The Secret Search for Strontium-90 in Human Bones

The Story

By the early 1950s, atmospheric nuclear tests were scattering fallout around the planet. One product worried scientists most: strontium-90, which the body treats like calcium and builds into bone. To find out how much was getting into people, the Atomic Energy Commission needed human bone, and young bone above all.

In 1953 the AEC held a conference at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, to review its fallout studies. According to a 1995 staff memo of the presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, attendees were told that 'the existence of the project and the conference itself should not be revealed.' The effort that came out of it was called Project Sunshine.

AEC Commissioner Willard Libby, 1955: 'if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.'

The man handling foreign collections, Robert A. Dudley of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, worked through personal contacts with doctors and missions abroad. In a December 9, 1953 letter seeking infant skeletons from Japan, he explained the real purpose 'for you alone': 'One type of sample on which we are concentrating is the bones of infants, either stillborn or up to a year or two of age. We have found that stillborn bones are easy to obtain in the United States.' The project had been classified SECRET, he wrote, so 'the unclassified description of our purpose in obtaining these bones is for Ra analyses' (radium). In an earlier letter he called the cover story 'merely incomplete, not false.'

A July 1954 report recorded 55 human stillborn infants collected in Chicago, plus samples from Utah and from Vellore, India. Then the supply dried up. At a January 18, 1955 AEC conference, in a transcript declassified at the advisory committee's request, Commissioner Willard Libby told the room: 'We have been reduced to essentially zero level on the human samples.' The supply of stillborns, he said, 'has now been cut off also.'

Then came the line that gave the program its notoriety: 'So human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.' Libby added that at the 1953 RAND study, 'we hired an expensive law firm to look up the law of body snatching.' The result, he said, 'is not very encouraging.'

Columbia University's J. Laurence Kulp described 'channels' in Vancouver, Houston and New York where, he said, 'We can get virtually everyone that dies in this range.' Of Houston he said: 'They have a lot of poverty cases and so on.' He explained that cooperating doctors did not need to be told anything 'except that they realized it was something confidential.'

The advisory committee's 1995 final report concluded that Project Sunshine 'was kept secret from its 1953 inception until 1956, and AEC officials and researchers employed deception in the solicitation of bones of deceased babies from intermediaries with access to human remains.' It added that 'concern for public relations played a key role' in the secrecy. The verdict: confirmed.