What the document says
This report is the transcript of an interview with health physicist Karl Z. Morgan, recorded on January 7, 1995 in Indian Springs, Florida. Two staff members of the Department of Energy's Office of Human Radiation Experiments asked the questions. They said they had come to ask Morgan what he knew about Cold War human radiation experimentation. Morgan was chosen because of his research for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and his work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where he directed health physics, the field that measures and limits radiation doses to workers and the public.
Morgan traces his own path into the work. He studied physics and mathematics in North Carolina, earned a doctorate on cosmic radiation at Duke University in 1934, taught at Lenoir-Rhyne College and did cosmic ray research in deep caverns and on mountains. In 1943 he went to Chicago as a senior scientist in health physics for the Manhattan Engineer District, the government body that ran the atomic bomb program. He moved to the newly formed laboratory at Oak Ridge the next year and served as Director of Health Physics from 1944 to 1972.
He answers a charge that Oak Ridge spread radioisotopes over the area and flew over them. What his group put out, he says, were solid sources lifted from heavy lead containers with a backhoe and set on ground marked with stripes, so that two men in his group could fly over them and work out how to find radioactivity from the air. He also recalls pressure in the early Hanford period to shorten the cooling time before material went to Los Alamos, while short-lived iodine isotopes had not yet decayed. He says he disagreed often with engineers at Oak Ridge and that he did not go along with what he calls the cover-up of human radiation experiments.
Key points
- 01Morgan joined the Manhattan Engineer District in Chicago in 1943 as a senior scientist in health physics, then moved to the new Oak Ridge laboratory the following year.
- 02He directed health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1944 to 1972, and later taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology after leaving in 1972.
- 03He says the sources his group placed outdoors were solid, taken from heavy lead containers with a backhoe and set on marked ground for aircraft to fly over.
- 04He says the air survey method his group developed for finding radioactive sources from aircraft later became useful to the Department of Energy.
- 05He recalls pressure at Hanford to cut the cooling time before material shipped to Los Alamos, even though short-lived iodine isotopes had not decayed.
- 06He says he is writing a book on the early history of health physics and relies mostly on memory, because Martin Marietta will not give him free access to the laboratory.
From the original
Incidentally, Oak Ridge is accused of spreading radioisotopes in the area and flying over them. Well, what we spread was solid sources, of course, that were carefully taken out of lead containers that weighed maybe a half a ton to two tons.
Source: U.S. Department of Energy, OpenNet declassified document archive, OSTI ID 233361, document number DOE/EH-0475. The summary is written from the document’s own text. Old scans can be hard to read, so check the original for anything you plan to cite.