In September 1956, Cpl. Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old Army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.

Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the Cold War, where the threats to his life were all American.

The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of U.S. troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.

Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout,” material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, Calif., was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a Navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with the Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.

The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.

Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top U.S. civilian and military officials preapproved all of this in writing, documents show.

The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.

Read the rest of this story, listen to the two-episode podcast, review primary documents and see historical images through the links below. Watch for more stories coming in December.

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EXPOSED: THE HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS AT HUNTERS POINT | A series investigating the forgotten history of Cold War San Francisco

1. OVERVIEW: How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments • List of Studies

🎧 Podcast Episode 1: A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy

🎧 Podcast Episode 2: Why the Navy Conducted Radiation Experiments on Humans

COMING SOON:

2. THE DECISION MAKERS — After Atomic Test Blunder, Government Authorized Study of Radiation in Humans [Dec. 2]

3. THE STUDIES: Human Radiation Studies Included Mock Combat, Skin Tests and a Plan to Inject 49ers [Dec. 4]

4. ETHICS: Cold War Scientists Pushed Ethical Boundaries With Radiation Experiments [Dec. 6]

5. FADING HISTORIES: Destroyed Records, Dying Witnesses Consign San Francisco Radiation Lab to Obscurity [Dec. 9]

6. PERPETUAL EXPERIMENT: Shuttered Radiation Lab Poses Ongoing Health Risks for Growing Neighborhood [Dec. 11]