page_title: Project 4.1
section_title: Intentionality
hierarchical_section_title: Project 4.1 / Intentionality
caption_attribution_description: English: Page 36 from the Project 4.1 final report, showing four photographs of exposed Marshallese. Faces were been blotted out for privacy reasons. Original captions were: Plate 3.1: Early hyperpigmented maculopapular neck legions at 15 days. Case 39, age 15, F. Plate 3.2: Neck legions at 28 days. Wet desquamation. White color is calamine lotion. Case 78, age 37, F. Plate 3.3: Repigmenting superifical neck lesions at 40 days. Hyperpigmented areas not completely desquamated. Case 34, age 15, F. Plate 3.4: Healed neck lesions at 77 days showing dusky pigmentation of back of neck. Case 39, age 15, F. Suomi: Projekti 4.1:n päätösraportin sivulla 36 on neljä valokuvaa radioaktiiviselle laskeumalle altistuneista marshallinsaarelaisista. Kuvattujen naamat on sumennettu yksityisyydensuojan vuoksi.
context_page_description: Project 4.1 was the designation for a medical study and experimentation conducted by the United States of those residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to radioactive fallout from the March 1, 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which had an unexpectedly large yield. Government and mainstream historical sources point to the study being organized on March 6 or March 7, 1954, six days after the Bravo shot.
context_section_description: Some Marshallese have alleged that the exposure of the Marshallese was premeditated. In 1972, Micronesian Representative Ataji Balos charged at the Congress of Micronesia that the exposure during Bravo was purposeful so that the AEC could develop medical capabilities for treating those exposed to fallout during nuclear war, and charged that the Marshallese were chosen because of their marginal status in the world at large. According to a U.S. internal transcription of Balos' talk, Balos alleged that "The U.S. chose to make guinea pigs out of our people because they are not white but some brown natives in some remote Pacific islands. Medical treatment that Rongelapese and Utrikese have been receiving is also highly questionable." The AEC issued a staff comment denying these charges.
  In 1994, a 1953 Castle Bravo program prospectus was found which included reference to Project 4.1 apparently written before the Bravo shot had occurred. The U.S. government responded that someone had gone back into the project list after the Bravo test to insert Project 4.1; thus, according to the U.S. government, the acts were not premeditated. All other U.S. documents point to Project 4.1 having been established after the Bravo test—most sources point to its having been organized on March 7, 1954. The final Project 4.1 report began in its preface with the statement that "Operation CASTLE did not include a biomedical program" (it mentions this in discussing the ad hoc nature by which the project personnel were assembled). All official and mainstream historical accounts of the Bravo test indicate that its high level of fallout was a result of a miscalculation in relation to its design and was not deliberate (see the Castle Bravo article for more information on the alleged accident).
  Barton C. Hacker, the official historian of U.S. nuclear testing exposures (who is, in the end, very critical of the U.S. handling of the Bravo incident), characterized the controversy in the following way:
  In March 1954, the AEC had quickly decided that learning how the Marshallese victims of Castle Bravo responded to their accidental exposure could be of immense medical and military value. Immediate action centered on seeing them evacuated and decontaminated, then cared for medically. But studies of their exposures and aftereffects also began. That effort became project 4.1 in the Castle experimental program. This unfortunate choice of terminology may help explain later charges that the AEC had deliberately exposed the Marshallese to observe the effects. Like the American radium dial painters of the 1920s and the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Marshallese of 1954 inadvertently were to provide otherwise unobtainable data on the human consequences of high radiation exposures. Findings from project 4.1 soon began to appear in print.
  Controversy continues however, fed by the legacy of mistrust sown by American nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, which involved relocating hundreds of people and rendering several atolls uninhabitable. While most sources do not think that the exposure was intentional,  there is no dispute that the United States did carefully study the exposed Marshallese, but never obtained informed consent from the study subjects. This study of the Marshallese was in some cases beneficial for their treatment, and in other cases not. In these ways, the study of the exposed Marshallese reflects the same ethical lapses as were undertaken in other aspects of the secret human radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and 1950s, which came to light only after the end of the Cold War.
caption: Photographs of exposed Marshallese studied during Project 4.1 (in this case, the photographs are showing the development and healing of neck lesions) caused by the nuclear fallout sticking to the common damp areas of exposed human skin, and the resulting beta burns.[10]
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