Nuclear security

Exposed: The U.S. Army Tested Its Own Nuclear ‘Dirty Bombs’

We don’t know how long the Army continued to work on these dirty bombs. The Pentagon only declassified these two reports in 2000 as part of larger project to determine how many servicemen and women might have been exposed to dangerous radiation in such experiments over the years. The information had been kept secret under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.

But the Pentagon seems to have quickly passed over the radiological weapons for increasingly powerful nuclear bombs. By the 1960s, American and foreign scientists had discovered how to produce similar “enhanced radiation” effects with small hydrogen bombs, more commonly known as neutron bombs.