Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military's pursuit of a "new concept of warfare" using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations.
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...
Among the documents released to the AP — an Army memo dated Dec. 16,
1948, and labeled secret — described a crash program to develop a variety of military uses for radioactive materials. Work on a
"subversive weapon for attack of individuals or small groups" was listed as a secondary priority, to be confined to feasibility studies and experiments.
The top priorities listed were:
• 1 — Weapons to contaminate "populated or otherwise critical areas for long periods of time."
• 2 — Munitions combining high explosives with radioactive material
"to accomplish physical damage and radioactive contamination simultaneously."
• 3 — Air and-or surface weapons that would spread contamination across an area to be evacuated, thereby rendering it unusable by enemy forces.
The stated goal was to produce a prototype for the No. 1 and No. 2 priority weapons by Dec. 31, 1950.
