In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.⁠ ⁠ The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of US troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.⁠ ⁠ Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout”, material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb.⁠ ⁠ The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, California, was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.⁠ ⁠ The Guardian has collaborated with the San Francisco Public Press on a series of investigations that reveal how lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 workers to potentially harmful radiation between 1946 and 1963. It is based on thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen.⁠ ⁠ The analysis shows how the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.⁠ ⁠ Follow the link in bio to read the full story.