The expression “cover-up” ? when used in conjunction with the federal government ? is so common today it?s almost a cliche. But in The Plutonium Files, Pulitizer Prize winner Eileen Welsome reveals a breathtaking series of actions, designed to hide the facts about experiments on unsuspecting patients, as well as provide a good history of the dawning of the atomic age.

Welsome?s well-documented book chronicles a 50-year time span and looks at hundreds of formerly classified documents to ferret out how the government deliberately injected citizens to see how they would react to plutonium ? a product of the wartime factories of the Manhattan Project.

National security, of course, was cited for many years as the reason behind keeping the experiments a secret. But by 1995, when President Clinton accepted a report by an advisory committee, the door was opened to lawsuits and public scrutiny. Activists who had expected a large public outcry about the experiments were disappointed. Clinton?s powerful public statements about the intentional poisoning of citizens came just two hours before the jury in the O.J. Simpson jury returned its verdict, totally eclipsing the importance of the Advisory Committee?s report.

The Plutonium Files is a thorough study of the dawning of the Atomic Age, seen through the filter of many of the victims of the unknowns of radiation and radiation poisoning. It also documents the radiation poisoning of many of the scientists working on atomic projects.

For the most part, the book reads as well as a novel and is described by judges for the Scripps Howard Foundation Public Service Award as “A superb journalistic effort. It took fifty years to tell this story.”

The Plutonium Files is recommended reading and can be found on the browsing shelf in the university library.