Did the government poison a city? Inside the Army’s secret tests in St. Louis

ST. LOUIS (NewsNation) — The summer of 1953 in St. Louis was relentless. The heat beat down on the brick facade of Pruitt-Igoe, the air heavy, clinging to 33 concrete towers that almost seemed to hold the sun captive. Children played outside, the shouts of their games echoing between high-rises.

And then the fog would come.

‘My government used me like a Guinea pig‘

It hissed from nozzles on vehicles that rolled slowly down the streets. It drifted from rooftops, where “maintenance men” had stood installing them just days earlier, wearing protective gear. A cloud that hung thick in the air — clinging to skin, seeping into lungs, leaving behind a chemical tang.

James Caldwell, who grew up in Pruitt-Igoe, remembers chasing after it as a child.

“It was summertime, it was hot, we’d run through it as fast as we could and try to just cool ourselves off. It stuck to you,” said Caldwell. “It was a regular flatbed truck, but it had a big machine on the back, and it had a big nozzle that sprayed a fog. You couldn’t even see through it; it was that thick, and it would adhere to our skin. And as far as the guys on top of the buildings, they tried to portray them to us as maintenance workers, but what are the maintenance workers doing in a hazmat suit? They had masks and goggles.”

For Jacquelyn Russell, the memory of the fog that moved like a ghost is visceral.

“It was such a sickening, nauseating … it was horrible. It would drive real slow. …You couldn’t see through it, that’s how thick it was. It’s a sickening smell, it’s something chemical.”

She remembers headaches, nausea, dizziness. Others remember worse.

“That’s what I remember, it made me sick,” said Cecil Hughes. “My momma had to take me to the emergency room.”

An American city chosen: Moscow 2.0

What the children of Pruitt-Igoe never knew was that they were living inside a government experiment.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the U.S. Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide — a compound containing cadmium, a known carcinogen — in the city of St. Louis. The government now admits to a secretive series of Cold War-era tests, including one dubbed “Large Area Coverage.” More than 30 tests were carried out in the U.S. and Canada spraying zinc cadmium sulfide from planes, rooftops and vehicles.

St. Louis was chosen for spraying experiments specifically because of its physical similarities to Moscow. According to the National Research Council, its population density, terrain and river access made it an ideal analog for the Soviet city. The residents — most of them Black, most of them poor — say they were never told.

“It was a lose-lose situation for us in Pruitt-Igoe. We were subjects, we were subjects,” said Ben Phillips.

“They didn’t ask our permission. We didn’t ask for them to spray us. My government used me like I was a Guinea pig,” Hughes said.

“If you’re going to test, you have to inform the people you’re testing on; it’s disrespectful, it’s really inhumane,” said Chester A. Deanes Jr.

The spraying lasted for years. But the people who lived under the fog say they still carry its weight, and with that burden, a troubling uncertainty. The residents now wonder: How much of their sickness, their cancers, might trace back to those years under the fog?

“I lost my two older siblings to cancer. I lost a brother last month,” Russell said. “Now all of a sudden, [residents] have kidney cancer? Brain cancer? Eye cancer? Any kind of cancer you can put anywhere, people have been dying from that from Pruitt-Igoe.”

“My parents’ friends started dying,” Phillips recounted, speaking of when he first became concerned about the health issues in his community. “I went to 10 funerals, and about seven or eight of them were cancer-related deaths.”

Philips himself had to have a tumor removed from his left eardrum that took his hearing — he says he still remembers when his little sister started having convulsions before she was 2 years old, then those convulsions stopped after his family relocated away from Pruitt-Igoe.

Dr. Michael Starks had cancer of the left kidney and had to have it partially removed.

Caldwell’s voice catches when he describes his own diagnosis.

“I’ve been diagnosed recently with a rare form of lymphoma. I have a mutated chromosome, and eventually, that mutation is going to turn my blood cells into cancerous cells,” he said.

Caldwell says it doesn’t run in his family. He worries for his children.

The government’s response

The Army contends there was no health risk from the spraying tests. In a statement to NewsNation, it pointed to reports like a 1994 review done by the Army’s own Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine and a 1997 report by the National Research Council — both concluding there was “no evidence” the spraying posed a health risk.

But a closer look reveals that when it comes to the NRC review, that may not be the whole story. In fact, the NRC report acknowledges that repeated exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity or lung cancer if levels were high enough.

Additionally, the NRC admitted it could not fully assess the risk — because some of the key Army records were still classified, the Army said, for national security reasons. Perhaps more troubling, the NRC wrote that other key Army records were “missing” — the Army couldn’t find them.

The NRC considered conducting its own study but concluded it wasn’t feasible. In short, it did not test the site, collect samples or test residents for its review. And the NRC did not have access to all the data. Their report was based on what the Army gave them and not what the Army either could not find or withheld.

Residents wonder if they will ever see the full scope of the experiments they were unwitting participants in. They believe the secrecy and delays are no accident.

“They’re waiting us out,” Caldwell said.

“They’re waiting on all of us to die,” Phillips added. “And when we die, maybe they’re going to wait for our kids to die.”

A researcher’s quest

The mystery might have stayed buried if not for Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor.

The sociologist, researcher and now retired faculty member from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville spent decades of her career trying to piece together what happened, combing through thousands of declassified files, pushing for the release of the ones that remain secret.

It all started, she says, when two people approached her separately: a colleague with breast cancer and a neighbor who had developed a brain tumor. Both told her they remembered spraying from their childhoods.

“[My neighbor said], ‘I was treated for a brain tumor about a decade ago, and I think it was related to something that happened to me when I was little,’ And I said, ‘Well, what was that?’ And she said, ‘I was sprayed on the playground at a school in St. Louis.’ And I thought, how can this be? These two people don’t know each other, and they were coming to me days apart with the same strange story,” said Martino-Taylor. “At first I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This is just really difficult for me to believe.’”

Martino-Taylor promised she’d look into it anyway. And when she began digging, the paper trail stunned her.

“What the military had told people, at least officials in St. Louis, was that they were going to conceal these cities under a cloud in case of Soviet attack. That was just sort of a veneer, a cover story if you will. They were not at all telling the truth about what they were actually doing and why they were doing it,” said Martino-Taylor. She believes it was “part of a much larger coordinated study that the Army Chemical Corps was responsible for, that involved the production and testing of radiological weapons.”

Martino Taylor says her research reveals the very men who designed the St. Louis tests were experts in radiological warfare. Brigadier General William Creasy led the Army Chemical Corps, the branch leading America’s secret radiological weapons program during the Cold War. He brought on Philip Leighton, his top chemist, who was the Army’s leading authority on using radioactive particles in aerosol form — foglike clouds designed to drift over enemy terrain.

“Yes. He was the expert,” Martino-Taylor said.

Secrets hidden in plain sight

Martino-Taylor’s work revealed chilling details from this era, when the U.S. government conducted human experiments on its own people in the name of preparing for the Soviet threat.

American children in state-run institutions like the Fernald School were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of studies by MIT sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission.

The children, some of them orphans, were told they’d joined a “science club” and were promised a quart of milk a day, a trip to a baseball game, a trip to the beach. A copy of the 1994 congressional hearing shows those children, now grown, describing being told the oatmeal was “just vitamins” — and recalling the health problems that followed: “lumps on my arms,” “my stomach.”

Pregnant women were also unknowingly given radioactive iron at top hospitals in Tennessee and California — to study how radiation crossed the placenta. Some later reported miscarriage, illness or birth defects. A class action lawsuit resulted in a settlement in the 1990s. 

“We know that they were giving radioactive cocktails to pregnant women. We know that they were feeding radioactive oatmeal to children in state schools. They’ve admitted to those things, and they won’t release the material related to St. Louis,” said Martino-Taylor.

The program that ‘wasn’t intended to be found‘

Martino-Taylor worked to declassify previously hidden documents, including Army records, and synthesized records already public and articles regarding this era of U.S. government testing.

“That was one of the things that really stood out to me in all of the radiological weapons experiments, that there were layers of secrecy. It was an offshoot of the atomic bomb project, and a lot of the people who were working in the early formation of the radiological weapons experiment were involved in the atomic bomb project. It was a four-pronged program: They wanted to do ingestion, inhalation, injection and full body scan on humans,” she said.

As she went deeper, she says she almost needed to adopt the lexicon of a codebreaker — the language was purposely veiled and obfuscated.

“They were speaking in coded languages. Radiological weapons was actually called ‘RW.’ They called plutonium ‘product,’ and so they would refer to ‘the product.’ So once you know how they refer to these different tests, or the radioactive components of these tests, you see exactly what they’re doing. It’s just hidden in plain sight,” said Martino-Taylor.

But still, she says, when it comes to St. Louis, there is a shroud of secrecy and documents she still has not been able to get the government to declassify.

“It really took going through thousands of documents, pulling those together, and sort of mapping those out, and following every lead as far as that could go to be able to understand that this was a program that was an offensive program, not a defensive program. An offensive program that was unique and even more secretive than the atomic bomb project. They didn’t want anyone to discover this program, which is why there were all these layers of secrecy to it. It wasn’t intended to be found.”

She says she still has not found a singular “smoking gun” document definitively showing radioactive material was sprayed in St. Louis, but she also doubts whether a single such document exists, given the clandestine and layered nature of the program. She believes the truth lies somewhere in the context of who ran the study, when they decided to conduct it and what they did with the results.

What was sprayed in St. Louis?

When asked if she believes the U.S. government sprayed some kind of radioactive material on the residents of St. Louis, Martino-Taylor answers plainly: “I believe that they did. There’s so much contextual evidence that points that way.”

She examined who was involved in the development of the St. Louis tests and found Creasey and Leighton.

For Leighton’s part, in addition to his role in the St. Louis spraying tests, he was also the director of operations at Dugway Proving Ground — a remote and secretive facility in Utah used by the Army to test chemical and radioactive materials. It was the Army Chemical Corps’ main site for experiments with chemical and radiological weapons, including open-air releases to study how they spread.

Martino-Taylor was disturbed to find out not only about Leighton’s dual role but evidence that the data from St. Louis was gathered and then directly compared with Dugway Proving Ground.

Martino-Taylor also says the timing is notable.

“[In 1952], they were looking for a city to test their offensive weapons program. They wanted to do it. They expressed this in documents. St. Louis was their chosen city; that was their analog city to Moscow. They wanted to do this in 1953, and they showed up in 1953 in St. Louis.”

Additionally, Martino-Taylor says some of the St. Louis records she uncovered included notes about decontamination of the rental truck they used for the spraying — instructions she believes are inconsistent with zinc cadmium sulfide alone.

She believes these things were not coincidences.

“There is so much contextual evidence to this. They have documents that say we intend to do an open-air experiment using radioactive material. They wanted to spray an urban area. They wanted to develop radiological weapons to use against the Soviet Union. St. Louis was their chosen city,” said Martino-Taylor.

“From the 1940s, they were actively developing radiological weapons, many of these involved open-air spraying. They compared the St. Louis data to the data at Dugway Proving Ground, which was a radiological weapons proving ground. When you look at all of these elements and these pieces of evidence. It all points that way.”

There is one document that Martino-Taylor has never been able to unearth. It’s still classified. A series of Joint Quarterly Reports detail the spraying tests, all written by Leighton himself. The last one is missing — it’s called Joint Quarterly Report 5 — and NewsNation tried to get it.

Our team filed a Freedom of Information Act request on May 5, 2025. By law, the government must respond to a FOIA within 20 working days. As of publication, it has been more than three months despite multiple follow ups. The silence on the part of the government is called a constructive denial.

What did the Army know?

The substance the Army does admit to spraying is a chemical called zinc cadmium sulfide, which contains cadmium, now known to be a human carcinogen. But did the designers of this study know at that time that the chemical they were using to fog more than 10,000 Americans could be harmful to their health? Martino-Taylor says she believes they did.

“[Philip Leighton] was very well aware that cadmium was problematic. Using cadmium sulfide was toxic, and he was open about that. Even at that time, they knew that this was toxic,” said Martino-Taylor.

We looked into this further. Historian Leonard Cole contends Leighton, the Army’s top chemist working on this spraying experiment, wrote two pages about zinc cadmium sulfide in his own 1955 manual, titled “The Stanford Fluorescent-Particle Tracer Technique: An Operational Manual (U.S. Chemical Corps Research and Development Program).”

According to Cole, Leighton wrote, “Compounds of zinc and cadmium are both known to be poisonous when taken into the human system … the possibilities of toxic effects must be considered.” The manual served as a protocol for aerosol tracer tests.

Erin Brockovich weighs in

Renowned activist Erin Brockovich says the story in St. Louis reminds her of cases where the truth was hidden.

“I think my comment was, ‘Are we W-T-F kidding me?’ I mean, what the hell? … It’s awful. The biggest thing, and I’ve learned in 30 years, is it’s always the cover-up that enrages people, that hurts people. Communities can handle the truth. What they don’t handle — and where they’ll tip a scale — is the lie. So this has been a cover-up, and I think modern-day agencies owe it to them, the truth,” said Brockovich.

When asked if she thinks there’s been a cover-up, she replied, “It sure looks that way.”

What’s next

Meanwhile, the residents’ fight has now reached Congress. We spoke with Representative Wesley Bell of Missouri.

“When American citizens have been impacted and exposed to chemicals because — specifically because of the federal government — I think that we should, as Democrats and Republicans, we should all do the right thing and make certain to make these folks whole again,” said Rep. Bell. “Get them the compensation they deserve and the treatment that they need and also deserve.”

Rep. Bell is now fighting to get Pruitt-Igoe residents included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. But these residents are not currently able to prove radiation exposure, and they say key records that could help illuminate what was contained in the spray remain classified or missing.

And so they keep fighting.

“We want the truth. Whatever the truth is, we want to know the truth. I don’t think we’re getting it now,” Phillips said. “We gotta fight this. If we don’t win, they’re going to know they’ve been in a fight.”

Many of the residents say they left the concrete high-rises of Pruitt-Igoe to serve. Both Deanes Jr. and Dr. Starks are U.S. Air Force veterans. They say the betrayal from their own country carries a particularly sharp sting.

“We have died for America, we have fought for America,” said Deanes. “This whole thing is built upon hypocrisy, that’s why we’re going through this, hypocrisy. You treat me like you treat your mother or your father, or your sister or brother. That’s all we’re looking for.”

Hughes says he has a warning for all Americans.

“It can happen to you, don’t get duped and think it can’t happen to you. We didn’t think it was going to happen to us. We were babies, kids. It can happen to you.”