The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

Eileen Welsome. The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. ix + 580 pp. $26.90 cloth.

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War is investigative journalism at its best. The book, written by Eileen Welsome, describes, in part, 18 unsuspecting patients who were injected with cancer-causing plutonium, their fate, and the 50-year cover-up by the U.S. government of these experiments. It also describes many other deceitful experiments conducted on Americans since World War II. Drawing on many recently released documents that...