Victims: U.S. owes for action in Cold War

ST. LOUIS — Ben Phillips’ childhood memories include basketball games with friends, and neighbors gathering in the summer shade at their St. Louis housing complex. He also remembers watching men in hazmat suits scurry on the roofs of high-rise buildings as a dense material poured into the air.

“I remember the mist,” Phillips, now 73, said. “I remember what we thought was smoke rising out of the chimneys. Then there were machines on top of the buildings that were spewing this mist.”

As Congress considers payments to victims of Cold War-era nuclear contamination in the St. Louis region, people who were targeted for secret government testing from that same time period believe they’re due compensation, too.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Army used blowers on top of buildings and in the backs of station wagons to spray a potential carcinogen into the air surrounding a St. Louis housing project where most residents were Black. The government contends the zinc cadmium sulfide sprayed to simulate what would happen in a biological weapons attack was harmless.

Phillips and Chester Deanes disagree. The men who grew up at the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex are now leading the charge seeking compensation and further health studies that could determine whether the secretive testing contributed to various illnesses or premature deaths that some Pruitt-Igoe residents later suffered.

“We were experimented on,” Phillips said. “That was a plan. And it wasn’t an accident.”

The new push comes as federal lawmakers are weighing compensation for people claiming harm from other government actions — and inactions — during the Cold War.

The Associated Press reported in July that the government and companies responsible for nuclear bomb production and atomic waste storage sites in and near St. Louis were aware of health risks, spills and other problems, but often ignored them. Many believe the nuclear waste was responsible for the deaths of loved ones and ongoing health problems.

Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley introduced legislation soon after the news reports calling for expansion of an existing compensation program for exposure victims. The Senate endorsed the amendment. While the House has yet to vote, Democratic President Joe Biden said last month that he was “prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of.”

Former residents of PruittIgoe say they should be taken care of, too.

“We were living in so-called poverty,” Deanes said. “That’s why they did it. They have been experimenting on those living on the edge since I’ve known America. And of course they could get away with it because they didn’t tell anyone.”