U.S. radioactive tests held in Canada, book reveals

1950s Cold War weapons experiments

The U.S. Army secretly dumped a carcinogen on unknowing Canadians in Winnipeg and Alberta during the Cold War in testing linked to weaponry involving radioactive components meant to attack the Soviet Union, according to classified documents revealed in a new book.

Between July 9, 1953, and Aug 1, 1953, six kilograms of zinc cadmium sulphide was sprayed onto unsuspecting citizens of Winnipeg from U.S. Army planes. The Army returned 11 years later and repeated the experiments in Suffield, Alta., and Medicine Hat, Alta., according to Lisa Martino-Taylor.

Local governments had no knowledge of these experiments, according to documents obtained by MartinoTaylor, a professor of sociology at St. Louis Community College and author of Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans. Instead, they were fed a cover story by the Pentagon.

“In Winnipeg, they said they were testing what they characterized as a chemical fog to protect Winnipeg in the event of a Russian attack,” Martino-Taylor said. “They characterized it as a defensive study when it was actually an offensive study.”

Even in Canadian and U.S. documents, the tests were referred to as biological and chemical, when documents suggest they actually involved combining the two with radiological components to form combination weapons.

The zinc cadmium sulphide acted as a fluorescent tracer which would help the U.S. Army determine how radioactive fallout from a weapon used on the Soviets would travel through wind currents, Martino-Taylor said.

Canada participated in the open-air experiments as part of a tripartite agreement it held with the U.S. and U.K. The Pentagon, however, never informed the federal government that it would be spraying a carcinogen (cadmium) on Winnipeg, a city with approximately 300,000 people in 1950, according to Martino-Taylor’s research.

The chemicals were odourless, colourless and so small that they wouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye. The small size of the particles may have made them more dangerous, according to the book, because of how deep they could become lodged in the human respiratory system.

But when the U.S. Army returned in 1964 for tests in Alberta a memo from Canadian officials expressed concern that an “American aircraft was emitting distinctly visible emissions,” Martino-Taylor said.

It was in Suffield where the U.S. Army suggested advancing some of its experiments to include phosphorus-32, a radioactive material, and VX, a nerve agent which was recently used to assassinate Kim Jong Nam, the brother of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The U.S. was working on producing a radioactive nerve agent out of the two. Internal memos make note of plans to have 100 pounds of VX delivered to Suffield.

Another 1964 memo from Suffield mentioned the U.S. Army wanted to visit Suffield to “discuss the use of radioactive tracer techniques in chemical weapons trials.” In preparation for other tests involving BG, a bacteria that is supposed to be harmless, the U.S. Army outlined the number of hospitals and hospital beds available in the area.

“The U.S. was very aggressive,” Martino-Taylor said. “Canada seemed less on board as I read through the documentation.”

On their own soil, the U.S. Army experiments were even more severe. Radioactive material was injected into hospital patients without their consent and pregnant women in Nashville were given a radioactive cocktail to ingest so that researchers could determine if it could be passed on to their babies. Children were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of a “science club,” Martino-Taylor said.

Canada has a long history of subjecting its people to questionable and dangerous experiments. During the Second World War, mustard gas tests were conducted on 3,000 volunteers at the military base in Suffield. In the 1960s, CIA experiments conducted in Quebec on unknowing subjects analyzed whether it was possible — with the use of LSD and electroshocks — to eliminate memories and build them back up.

Decades later, it’s still unknown what effect the spraying had on people. In 1994, Manitoba’s Chief Medical Officer found a “negligible risk to the general population.” In her research, however, Martino-Taylor found that Phillip Leighton, the open-air radiological weapons expert who designed the experiments, called the chemical “toxic” and said it came in a box with a poison label.

One St. Louis woman told The Associated Press that she remembers being sprayed with a fine powder by an airplane. She’s suffered from breast, thyroid, skin and uterine cancer. Another said she was born in a St. Louis building where the powder was dispersed from the rooftops. Four of her 11 siblings later died from cancer.

Three Democratic members of Congress, who represent the areas where testing took place in Missouri, California and Tennessee, have demanded answers since the book’s release.

None have been Martino-Taylor said. given, worst affected,” she said.

The government has also vowed to take steps to address the painful history of Inuit who experienced relocations and mistreatment during the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

“This is an essential part of the overarching work that we will be doing on tuberculosis elimination and it is also a central part in the reconciliation framework that must exist between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian government,” Philpott said.