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MESSED UP THINGS THAT HAPPENED DURING THE COLD WAR
By: Mina Nakatani - Grunge News - 05-11-21
Re: https://www.grunge.com/411996/messed..._campaign=clip

When you hear "Cold War," what do you think of? Maybe it's the Space Race — Sputnik and the Moon landing and all of that. Maybe there's some thought of spies and espionage and sabotage. Or maybe it's just the looming threat of nuclear war and everything that would entail should the U.S. and the Soviet Union start firing nukes at each other.

And, yeah, all of those things were part of the Cold War, but there's a lot more than just that. For all the already scary aspects of the Cold War that are pretty well-known, there are plenty of lesser-known things done behind closed doors and kept locked inside once-secret files. In the end, the secrecy is almost understandable; there was some seriously messed up stuff going on during the Cold War.

With that in mind, here's a short list of just some of the weird things that happened. These events run the gamut of things you'd associate with the Cold War — radiation, espionage, nuclear weapons — but are all alike in being somehow concerning, terrifying, or morally reprehensible. In truth, "morally reprehensible" is a pretty common theme here.

You probably know about the nuclear bombs that hit Japan in World War II, but did you know that a nuclear core developed for those bombs caused trouble even after the end of the war? As Science Alert explains, aside from the two nuclear cores in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a third core was also prepared, but Japan surrendered before it could be used. Instead, that core was turned into a tool for Manhattan Project researchers interested in high-risk radiation experiments.

According to the*American Physical Society, in August 1945, Harry Daghlian went into the lab alone and surrounded the core with tungsten carbide bricks, meant to reflect neutrons back to the core, pushing it closer to criticality. He accidentally dropped one of the bricks onto the core, which went critical, bathing Daghlian in the blue light of deadly reaction. That wasn't an isolated incident, though: Less than a year later, in May 1946, Louis Slotin was running a similar test, almost completely shielding the core with a pair of beryllium half-spheres, which he kept apart with just a screwdriver. That's just as dangerous as it sounds — the screwdriver slipped and, once again, the core*went critical.

Both Daghlian and Slotin received deadly doses of radiation, and their deaths weren't pretty. Extreme blistering and burns, gangrene, entire patches of skin peeling off (like Daghlian's hand, above) — you get the picture. The core was fittingly dubbed the Demon Core, and afterward, criticality experiments were no longer conducted hands-on at Los Alamos.

In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. military doctor Jim Ketchum honestly believed that chemicals were the humane way to go (via NPR). No more bullets and guns — drugs like LSD and 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ, for short) could effectively take someone out of a fight, incapacitating them in exactly the way you might imagine. These were heavy drugs, after all.

But the military couldn't just start using these weapons. They had to test them out first, and their methods really played fast and loose with morality. Army personnel would consent to taking part in these experiments, but they were never told that they involved drugs. They might get sprayed in the face with a liquid they thought to be water but was actually LSD. Or they might get stuck in an experiment called "The Longest Weekend," described by We Are the Mighty as a three-day-long test in which four volunteers were dosed with varying levels of BZ and locked inside a room, where they had to complete "missions" (mostly relaying radioed information). One soldier was given a placebo, two were given a more moderate dose, and the fourth was high to the point of incapacitation, constantly confounded by being trapped.

And the reason for the secrecy? Researchers didn't want the volunteers' knowledge of being high to affect how they would act while drugged. It seemed best to have them go into things uninformed, though the whole idea of drugging unsuspecting volunteers is still pretty messed up.