Few events in modern history are able to hold a candle to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the United States Air Force dropped the first (and still only) atomic bombs ever used in warfare on these two doomed cities in Japan, the faces of war and humanity changed forever. No single weapon had ever showcased such incredible killing power, and it became immediately clear that the Cold War that followed the end of World War II would not only be a war of ideologies, but also a race to nuclear supremacy.
With maximum nuclear capability and knowledge becoming priority number one for the United States, government officials, researchers, and scientists all silently agreed to use any means necessary to grasp the astonishing power of nuclear energy and radiation as soon as possible. In this quest for nuclear supremacy, countless civilians, from children to inmates, from cancer patients to expecting mothers, were exploited, harmed, and sometimes killed in the name of scientific progress. The decades following the end of World War II, rife with secretive and dangerous radiation experiments, make for one of the darkest eras of the history of the United States.
Read on to find out more about the numerous ways US citizens were used in the study of radiation.