Documents show U.S. pondered pursuing radiological warfare

The long-secret project started in 1948.

WASHINGTON (AP) — These were cold calculations, at the outset of what came to be called the Cold War:

Could radioactive poisons be fashioned into a weapon to assassinate civilian or political leaders?

Could the highly toxic materials be inconspicuously dispersed in a room — perhaps in aerosol form — to kill “important individuals”?

Could the deed be done covertly, leaving behind no hint of U.S. government involvement?

These questions marked the starting point for a long-secret project approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948 — not to decide when, or even if, to use such a weapon but to determine whether it was even feasible. This was just three years after the first atomic bombs were detonated — in a test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 and then twice in Japan to end World War II.

It was the atomic bomb project itself that made U.S. scientists realize the potential for radiological warfare.

It has been known for years that the U.S. military pursued radiological warfare concepts, but newly declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press provide what military historians said appear to be the first indication that the work included exploring the potential for using radioactive poisons as an assassination weapon.

Targeting public figures in such attacks is not unheard of; just last year an unknown assailant used a tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Kremlin critic and former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London.

No targeted individuals are mentioned in references to the assassination weapon in the government documents declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP in 1995.

The decades-old records were released recently to the AP, heavily censored by the government to remove specifics about radiological warfare agents and other details. The censorship reflects concern that the potential for using radioactive poisons as a weapon is more than a historic footnote; it is believed to be sought by present-day terrorists bent on attacking U.S. targets.

The documents give no indication whether a radiological weapon for targeting high-ranking individuals was ever used or even developed by the United States. They leave unclear how far the Army project went. One memo from December 1948 outlined the project and another memo that month indicated it was under way. The main sections of several subsequent progress reports in 1949 were removed by censors before release to the AP.

The broader effort on offensive uses of radiological warfare apparently died by about 1954, at least in part because of the Defense Department’s conviction that nuclear weapons were a better bet.

Whether the work on an assassination weapon migrated to another agency such as the CIA is unclear. The project was given final approval in November 1948 and began the following month, just one year after the CIA’s creation in 1947.

It was a turbulent time on the international scene. In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and two months later Mao Zedong’s communists triumphed in China’s civil war.

As U.S. scientists developed the atomic bomb during World War II, it was recognized that radioactive agents used or created in the manufacturing process had lethal potential. The government’s first public report on the bomb project, published in 1945, noted that radioactive fission products from a uranium-fueled reactor could be extracted and used “like a particularly vicious form of poison gas.”

Among the documents released to the AP was an Army memo dated Dec. 16, 1948 and labeled secret. It described a crash program to develop a variety of military uses for radioactive materials.