Project Sunshine – The Secret ‘Body Snatching’ Programme

In January 1955, a senior United States official, Dr Willard F. Libby, told a room of scientists that ‘if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country’. He was not joking. The public line for the classified programme, Project Sunshine, was fallout research. The internal paperwork shows a second motive running just as hard. Its aim was to avoid embarrassment and legal liability, or the risk of being sued.

The Scientific Imperative

Project Sunshine grew out of a clear scientific question with urgent military and public consequences.

‘What would the long-term fallout from nuclear weapons do to people, and especially to children?’

The earliest government study aimed at that question was Project GABRIEL, started in 1949 to assess the radiation risk from fallout. That report and the early follow-ups singled out strontium-90, a radioactive isotope (an unstable element that emits radiation) that behaves chemically like calcium and therefore builds up in growing bone. Children’s bones were central to the problem because they take up calcium fast. If fallout contained measurable strontium-90, children would show it first and most clearly.

The technical uncertainty of the early 1950s is easy to underplay now, but it mattered then.

The RAND Corporation and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) agreed at a July 1953 conference that theoretical models were not enough and that real-world testing across countries was required. The RAND report R-251-AEC of 6 August 1953 set out that programme and became the charter for Project Sunshine. The report proposed direct measurement across the environment, and it made human tissue, especially rapidly growing skeletons, the most sensitive indicator of exposure.

That scientific argument hardened into something more urgent after the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test on 1 March 1954.

Castle Bravo produced vastly more fallout than planners had expected, increasing concerns about global contamination and transfer through the food chain. The AEC and its scientific partners framed Sunshine as necessary to know whether dietary exposure, milk, for example, would drive dangerous concentrations of strontium-90 in children. Taken together, GABRIEL, the RAND conference and Castle Bravo produced a powerful justification for a large, fast data collection operation.

The Architecture of Authority

Project Sunshine was not a fringe experiment. The AEC was the sponsor, and its Division of Biology and Medicine acted as the operational base. That places the programme at the centre of official scientific authority in Washington. AEC Commissioner Dr Willard F. Libby, a winner of the Nobel Prize, was the project’s public champion and its most visible scientific backer. His voice carried inside and outside the government.

RAND played the intellectual lead. The think tank hosted the 1953 conference and published R-251-AEC, which laid out the methods. Armed Forces and defence research bodies were involved in logistics and classification. Crucially, university laboratories provided the scientific analysis and the social channels that became supply routes.

Dr J. Laurence Kulp of Columbia University emerges in the record as the practical architect of the tissue-supply network, using professional contacts to build what the files call ‘channels’ (local supply networks). That mix of AEC authority, RAND planning and academic reach explains how a secret programme gained the scale it did.

The programme was international by design. Declassified documents record direct collaboration with the United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Authority and a parallel programme in Australia.

The UK-based work included the collection and shipment of infant remains from hospitals and coroners to Harwell, Britain’s main atomic energy research centre in Oxfordshire, and onward to US laboratories.

Australia ran a formal bone-testing programme from 1957 to 1978 that amassed several thousand samples, many from children, to monitor the fallout from British tests on Australian soil.

Those facts show that Project Sunshine was not a single country acting alone. Allied scientific bodies were also complicit in the supply and analysis chain.

The Doctrine of Deception

From the start, secrecy was a policy choice with clear non-military aims. The project was classified as ‘SECRET’ and internal memos give the reason plainly.

Officials said classification would manage ‘public and international relations’ (or the government’s reputation), avoid ’embarrassment’ and reduce ‘legal liability’ (the risk of lawsuits). That is not the same as protecting weapon designs. It is a bureaucratic argument for hiding the programme’s methods from a public whose reaction the commission feared.

To make the collection of remains feasible, the AEC and RAND built deliberate cover stories (misleading explanations given to suppliers). Pathologists, hospital staff and foreign go-betweens who were not cleared to see classified papers were told the samples were for radium surveys or nutritional studies. An internal memo argued the cover was ‘merely incomplete, not false’ because radium analyses would indeed be performed on some specimens. That wording is revealing. It shows the architects recognised the ethical line they were crossing and chose language designed to reduce resistance or legal trouble for their suppliers.

The files also show active legal contingency planning, which means making plans to handle legal problems.

RAND asked outside lawyers to research ‘the law of body snatching’ in the summer of 1953. The lawyer’s answer was, by accounts recorded in the conference transcripts, discouraging. The proposed methods were ‘very difficult to do legally’. That single fact is a hinge. The project was not ignorant of the legal problems, it was structured to work around them.

A Global Procurement Network

The practical steps that followed the legal advice and the cover stories are described in uncomfortable detail in AEC conference records.

At a Biophysics Conference on 18 January 1955, Libby said the project had ‘zero level on the human samples’ and urged scientists to find ways to supply them. In that same meeting, he used the phrase that has become the programme’s shorthand: ‘body snatching’. The words are in the official transcript, they are not a metaphor, nor were they said casually. The room understood this was serious work that crossed a line.

Dr Kulp described the mechanics.

He spoke of established ‘channels’ in cities such as Houston, where contacts could obtain nearly every death in the age groups of interest. Those channels relied on relationships with coroners, pathologists and hospital staff who, in many cases, were not told the full truth. Where necessary, material was reduced to ash or bone fragments to allow tests that measured strontium-90 per gram of calcium. That practical description matches the operational pattern of a covert supply chain rather than a formal public health programme.

In Britain, documents show material reached Harwell from hospitals, including Middlesex Hospital and other regional centres. Coroners and hospital pathologists supplied remains for burning and shipment. For decades, successive British governments denied official involvement. The declassified US records contradict that denial and show a sustained, if secretive, collaboration.

In Australia, the scale is explicit. Some 3,058 bones were collected and reduced to ash for analysis, of which 900 ash samples were later returned to Adelaide as the only remaining physical trace. The numbers make the enterprise hard to view as a series of accidental or isolated incidents.

The Evolving Science

It is tempting to accept the scientific case as a justification that cannot be questioned. That would be a mistake.

The operational urgency in 1953 was fuelled by R-251-AEC, but the report relied on temporary estimates that were later revised. The unclassified 1956 version and its preface acknowledge two substantial corrections.

The half-life of strontium-90 was revised from about 19.9 years to 27.7 years, an increase of roughly 39 per cent. Half-life here means the time it takes for half the atoms to decay. At the same time, the estimate of fission yield, meaning the explosive energy or radioactive output of a nuclear blast, was revised so that a larger yield (around two megatons rather than one) was needed to produce the same level of global fallout.

Those adjustments cut in opposite directions. A longer half-life increases the long-term hazard, while a lower amount produced per megaton reduces the immediate contamination estimate. The report retained the original 1953 numbers in the main body ‘to preserve perspective’, noting that early decisions were made based on data that the authors knew to be temporary.

Despite those flaws in the early model, the data acquired through the sample network produced measurable scientific findings. Papers checked by other experts, such as the later ‘Strontium-90 in man’ series, quantified peak concentrations in the tissue of unborn babies and variation between hemispheres. Those results fed into policy debates that led towards the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, an international agreement that banned all nuclear-weapon tests except for those conducted underground.

The record is therefore mixed. The methods were ethically compromised and the early models were imperfect. Yet the scientific findings were real and they informed later policy. That complexity matters because it complicates simple moral stories and forces us to weigh the good outcomes against the bad in a specific historical context.

The Contradiction of Motive

There is no single explanation that fits every fact. The files allow three plausible theories, each with evidence for and against it, and the contradictions are themselves telling.

Theory one is the national security imperative. The Cold War made some actors convinced that understanding the effects of large-scale nuclear exchange was essential for survival and strategy. Evidence for this view includes the programme’s grounding in fallout modelling and its links to defence establishments. Yet if national security were the sole motive, internal worries about ‘embarrassment’ and ‘legal liability’ would be secondary. The record shows these worries were front and centre in classification decisions, suggesting national security was not the only driver.

Theory two is bureaucratic momentum and ethical inertia, which is the tendency for a project to continue through routine. Some internal memos complain the programme ‘simply growed like Topsy’ and lacked administration. That image fits the unofficial channels and messy collection process. Still, the deliberate commissioning of legal advice and the successful coordination across at least 20 countries point to a level of planning inconsistent with a project that was merely drifting. The truth appears to combine elements of growth without proper oversight and purposeful administrative choices where they seemed necessary.

Theory three is information control and liability management. The AEC had, since 1947, precedent for classifying human experiments to avoid public relations problems. The use of cover stories, the careful wording about classification, and the timing of declassification in 1956, which coincided with public political debate about fallout, support the idea that Sunshine functioned in part as a way to manage the public story and limit legal and political exposure. That theory best accounts for the repeated emphasis on ‘embarrassment’ and ‘legal liability’ in the files, even while conceding the project also produced real science that policymakers later used.

Which theory weighs heaviest depends on which evidence we count as decisive: operational aims, memos about public reaction, the legal opinion before collection began, or the measurable scientific results.

The documents do not yield a single motive. They show a coalition of pressures. Scientific urgency, political risk, and the way the bureaucracy worked at the time all combined to produce the programme’s character.

Sources

Sources include: declassified US government records from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the RAND Corporation, including the foundational 1953 report R-251-AEC; the official transcript of the AEC’s January 1955 Biophysics Conference where the ‘body snatching’ methods were discussed; staff memoranda and the final report from the US Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), which reviewed the project retrospectively; foundational scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, such as the ‘Strontium-90 in Man’ series, which detailed the findings from the tissue analysis; investigative journalism and public records detailing the direct participation of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the parallel, long-running government programme in Australia; and finding aids from the US National Archives relating to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP).