Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Interview with General E a Pinson (Missing PP. 116-117)

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GZ,"IEXAL PIXSON: It also rernizdec me many other things that I can't recall, like who the peogle involved in this. I have no recolle MR. FITZGERALD: Right. Some of Well, this is, what's today, March 1995. My name is Patrick Fitzgerald. I am here General S.A. Pinson, Earn st Pinson and his wife, We are going to talk about some 0: research during the 195Os, mostly during the SO GENERAL PINSON: During the 1950s, All this work, I suspect the work that we are goi talk about most was a l l in the period from 19! 1959. It was at that time that I got out ol nuclear weapons development and test activities

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To do thac, I became then the Commander of the Cambridge Research Laboratories up at Boscon, Massachusetts- Subsequent to that, the Vice Commander acd Commander of the Officc of AerosGace Research, which was one of the Air Force's commands during the Then my last duty was as Commandant of the Air Force Institute of Technology out at Dayton, Ohio. In those latter three positions, my duties were almost totally administrative, over research elements, but nonetheless, these elements were so big that I had very little to do with the details or the activities within them. -MR. FITZ GEW : So you had stopped doing the research itself, and started just doing the GENERAL PINSON: Right. My duties during the part of the 1950s were administrative, but I was still administering elements that I knew mostly what was going on within them. I still had sufficient time so that I could particisate in some of tims;~=

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nuclear test that you were involyied in? GENE= PINSON: The first test I was involved in was Ranger. GENERAL PINSON: Which was the first test in Nevada. My recollection is that that was in January, early part of 1951. My responsibilities in that test were in GENERAL PINSON: Yes. I was in the Rad Safe Organization at Ranger. We were based at Nellis. At that time, there had been no construction of buildings out at the Nevada Test Site, at what later became Camp Mercury. MR. FITZGERALD: That was the first test. GENE,SAL PINSCN: That was the first test. 20 The tests were all weapons dross from aircraft. 21 My duties were to visit the cornrnunitj-cc

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east and nortSeast of the Nevada Test Site in Nevada ar,d in Utah, and CC) advise the people in these communities of what was taking glace in so f a r as I knew it, and I could do so. And also to advise we didn't anticipate there woi them of the fact Id be any falloi these areas, but that w e would be driving up and the roads and visiting the communities during these tests, and particularly, after each test, to assure that there had in fact, been no fallout in those areas. If by chance there were fallout, they could be advised of the nature of it and the extent of it. MR. FITZGERALD: What kind of reactions; did you get from the community members when you GENERAL PINSON: We didn't get any negative reaction at all. The reactions were positive. In fact, I think during that test, I think there was no fallout in the area, because these w e r e all airdrops. They wera, detonated at sufficiently high altitude so that they d i h ' t touch the gr3und.

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1 Therefore, the large particles didn't get sucked up 2 into the cloud. As a consequence of that, the 3 radioaczivity dispersed in the air. 4 MR. FITZGERALD: Then the next test was 6 GENERAL PINSON: The next test was 7 Greenhouse. That was also during 1951. That started I think in February of 1951 and extended into the mid10 My involvement in that was, how to put C11 this. At L o s Alamos, there was a fellow by the name 12 of Bob Carter. F o r reasons that I don't understand, IS MR. FITZGERALD: . Was he doing this with he was involved in measuring the hazard in the clouds from these nuclear weapons. 17 GENERAL PINSON: Yes. Why was he doing 18 this? I don't know. I think it was because the 19 operational air commands of the A i r Force had 20 established what was called an operational 21 requirement, to know something about the hazards of

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these clouds ac times after detonation. Thsre had therefore, because it had been arranged because of this operational requirement, a plan to f l y droxes through tSese clouds, 8-17. These In flying those drones through, there was also an endeavor to measure with instrumentation, the radioactive characteristics in the clouds. Also there was a measurement made to construct in that aircraft, a compartment in which mice could be placed. I had been assigned to Los Alamos in February of 1950. I do recall that at one time during that first year I I went to Eglin Field in Florida inspect the drones and to see what was being done about providing this mouse, this compartment for the mice in this aircraft, in this ai*rplane. Ventilation was to be provided through that compartment, which would result in a fairly rapid turnover of air ir, tkis mouse ccmgartnent. filters on the aiqlane itself, CT: the air intakes?

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1 GENE= PIXSON : No. There were no 2 filters on the akqlane, and there was 30 c r e w in the 3 aiqlane. There were no filters. 4 There was a special provided air intake 5 for this mouse compartaent, so that it would be 6 assured that the mice would in fact be exposed as much they were just in the clouds. MR. FITZGERALD: So they could breathe GENERAL PINSON: So they could breathe 12 radioactive particles. Bob Carter was a medical 13 officer at the L o s Alamos Scientific Laboratory, who 14 worked in the Health Physics Department. 5 5 Specifically, I think in, what was that laboratory 16 called that Wright was in charge of? 17 MR. FITZGERALD: The Health Physics 19 GENEXAL PINSCN: There was a research 20 element of that Health Physics Department. Wright 21 Langham was the head of that. When I went to LOE

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Alamos, I had been assigned to that research element because of a special problem that they had. I had been assigned to L o s Alamos with the e.wectation that I would, work in the theoretical physics department. But when I got there, they just had this accidental exposure of three members of the laboratory to an unknown quantity of tritium. They not only didn't know how much tritium these people had taken in, but there was at that time, no way to measure it. what motivated the tritium studies. GENERAL PINSON: I walked in just at tWf time that that occurs. If you looked the world over for a person whose qualifications were such as to work on that problem, it was I. Because I had not only been trained in physiology, but I had also just finished graduate work at the University of California So they asked me if I would forego the assignment to the Theoretical Physics Department in

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1 favor of working on this particular problem. I agreed 2 to do thac. 3 There was another person, Ernie Anderson, 4 who had a Doctorate Degree in Chemist--y. He was 5 assigned to help me with that. It was he who was 6 most, not helpful, but he really constructed the 7 instrumentation that was required to measure this. After a few weeks, why w e had the instrumentation developed. We could measure how much 10 tritium these three people had had to have in them. 4- 12 we were collecting urine samples every day from these 13 three people. Collecting it and putting in a refrigerator so that when we got the instrumentation,14 we could measure it. Once in a while, we'd take some 16 blood samples from them. 17 I remember the names of those three 18 people. One of them was Harold Agnew. He later 19 became the Director of the L o s Alamos Scientific 20 Laboratory. And another one's name, whose last name 21 was -go. I can't remember what the name of the thizd

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individuals aren't the people who ingested the tritium during the studies? Those were different individuals? GENERAL PINSON: They were involved in the development. Just at that time that Los Alamos had gotten the go-ahead on the development of a fusion weapon, and up to that time, they had worked during the Manhattan Project, they had been working on a It was known if you could achieve fusion, you could get the same sort of energy, even more energy from a fusion reaction than you could get fratrt so the laboratory there had been working on, I don't know why they were working on tritium, what they had been doing. But at any rate, in the process of doing this, these three people had been exposed accidently. They didn't know how much e,xposure they had had. MR. FITZGERALD: Were, in the studies that

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1 you performed, there other individuals who ingested just small arnouncs or' tritium a baseline or were these individuals used so you could determine? of course the information, other than that accidentalS exposure, they were never used as subjects in any6 other work that I did. B u t I did use, of course, the data that we collected from them as a means of ascertaining what of excretion of tritium from the body was.the rate MR. FITZGERALD: Do you remember who the GENERAL PINSON: You mean the subjects at MR. FITZGERALD: Of the later experiments. GENERAL PINSON: Later experiments? I there were only three of them. I was a in I think all of these experiments except three. I could use myself over and over, because the rata of excretion of tritium from the body, after w e determined what it was,was such that if you W:~TC:

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exposed today, then the half-life of that edqosur2 was norrnally about 10 or 12 days. It was a fu xx tion of how rag idly you ran water through the body. If you forced fluids, you could reduce that ta two o r thze? Bur in any case, what that means is that in two or three days, you could reduce the exposure level to one-half of tritium, f r o m the time you got it, you could reduce it by one-half. If you kept forcing fluids, i n another two and a half days, it would be one-fourth. In another two and a half days, it would be one-eighth, and another two and a half days, would be one-sixteenth. So you could get tha, down in a matter of a month or two, to something like one or two percent of what it had been. So therefore, if I did an experiment on myself, then I could go back and repeat some other experiment in two or three months because my level would be down to within a percenc of z e x , of what it had been befors it w a s done. MR. FITZGERALD: So you subjected yourself

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wayit should be. That's the wayI have always done it, even back a t Wright Field, where we were involved i n developrnenr of personal equipmex acd were exposed a t high altitudes.Iwas involved, not solely, but with other people inthe development of oxygen masks f o r people, before World -- When I first went t o Wright Field in 1939, the Air Force didn ' t have any oxygen masks. cFurthermore, they didn ' t have any planes that flew much above 20,000feet, so you didn ' t need them. But w e had planes coming on that were They neededgoins to be flying at 30 at 40,000 f e e t . IS t h e oxygea mask. What they had used up to that time wa s. . 17 justa pipe stem in the mouth, with a tube going t o 1 8 oxygen. You could breath a little. Very, very 20 But I w a s icvolved in the develogment of 21the oxygen masks and ejection seats, G-suits f m

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people. All of these, you know, I was not alone in these things, but these are things that I was involved in, in which I was used as a test subject. MI?. FITZGZEZAL3: So you have a lot o f experience as a test subject. GENERAL PINSON: But if you are going to do something l i k e this and you think it's safe to do it, then you shouldn't ask somebody else to do it. The way you convince other people that at least you think it's all right, is do it yourself. So I was just carrying this to the work that I was doing in Los Alamos. To the extent that I didn't need other people, I used myself. r ) Now in addition to that, the most authoritative person in the world, I think at that time, on radiation exposure to all different kinds of radioactive products, was a guy who was Wright Langham, who was in charge of that research activity at L o s Alamos. So I was doing this under his direction and advice and consent. So he was alsc a subject in sone of these eqeriments.

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There's anocher person that I note frcm the resorts thac you have sent me her?, that Iv rotc when I was at Los Alamos. There was another subject I think it was a medical officer who was Wright Langham's assistant, perhaps. who that was. I don't remember who it was. person was involved in only one experiment. This was after I had experimented, you know, with myself and extended periods of time, where the exposures were with Wright Langham.. . of course, before we did any of this, why we had this exposures to animals, mice and rats, over much higher than any that we were exposing ourself to. The exposures that I did for myself and Wright Langham were exceptionally low, because the instzumentation that you used is so sensitive, that you can fixi out such things as how fast, how is this tritium absorbed. How fast does it absorb through the skin? How fast does it absorb through the lungs7 Yor!

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know, if you are eqosec! ta it, h o w do you get: it into the body? So, with what sceed is it absorbed i n these2 various modes of entry into the body, as well as3 knowing at what speed is it excreced.4 it the lungs or the skin?6 7 GENERAL PINSON: The lungs. B u t if you are exposed to an environment of tritium, the tritiuma gas, it's almost innocuous because the gas is not9 absorbed into the body at any higher degree than …