atomic explosion took place at Alamogordo, New Mexico, using a bomb made from Hanford plutonium. Since Germany had already surrendered and Japan never had developed a real atomic program, many top scientists (including Leo Szilard, future Atomic Energy Commission head Glenn Seaborg, Nobel Prize winner James Franck and Einstein) tried to have the weapon demonstrated in an uninhabited location rather than have it be employed against a human population. But the project, originally begun to neutralize a potential external threat, had now produced a destructive device so powerful that those who made the final decisions felt it would be folly not to use it to end the war. With a bomb made of Oak Ridge U-235 that fell on Hiroshima, and one of Hanford plutonium that was dropped on Nagasaki, the atomic era had its first public presence. Perhaps because theirs was more exclusively a production facility than were the theoretical labs of Chicago or Los Alamos, most men and women at Hanford knew nothing of the debates over their product’s use — and even those aware of what they were creating kept any apprehensions to themselves. Instead the workers heard the news of the bombs, realized their part in them and celebrated with cheering, laughing and champagne parties far into the night. No one considered until much later what other choices might have been possible. Taming the Atom With the end of the war, Hanford workers at last knew the product they had been creating. Turning their attention to peaceful applications, they discussed the possibilities of an atomic energy so limitless that users might not even have to meter it and debated whether it would be generated from the now wasted thermal energy of reactors, or whether some yet-to-be-invented process would enable electrons loosed in nuclear reactions to directly charge high- tension power lines. They received certificates signed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson thanking them for participating “in work essential to the production of the Atomic Bomb, thereby contributing to the successful conclusion of World War II,” and letters from Du Pont’s president expressing a similar message. With the newly formed AEC now the governThe A-bomb was the weapon which could have been used on us. It was the weapon which America J skill, vision and integrity had instead createdfirst (or which the Lord had granted us, thought some o fthe more religious workers). We could allow no other nation to brandish a more powerful version of it against us. ment body in charge, and with General Electric replacing Du Pont as prime contractor, Richland became known, to the local papers and many of its residents, as Atomic City. At the same time Hanford’s high- security atmosphere persisted. Engineers destroyed rough drafts, carbons and even typewriter ribbons used in preparing classified technical reports. They were still forbidden to talk about specific projects to their families or to workers lacking proper clearance. Billboards lining the road to the plants spelled out, in sequence, “Caution, Engage Brain Before Starting Mouth,” “A Secret Can Circle the Globe Without Refueling” and “Alcohol Preserves Almost Anything Except a Secret.” Later on Hanford’s old hands would decide the restrictions had created a public eternally frightened about basically unexceptional technical processes. But with Klaus Fuchs giving away atomic secrets to the Kremlin, Winston Churchill warning about an Iron Curtain falling across Europe and columns in the Kennewick-based Tri-City Herald revealing how profession after profession had been exposed before the House Un-American Activities Committee for harboring Communists, Hanford’s workers accepted readily the rules of silence. To a degree, the very horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki impelled unquestioning, unflagging efforts at Hanford. The A-bomb was the weapon which could have been used on us. It was the weapon which America’s skill, vision and integrity had instead created first (or which the Lord had granted us, thought some of the more religious workers). We could allow no other nation to brandish a more powerful version of it against us. The men who founded Hanford considered themselves, in often-repeated words, “doers, not thinkers.” That judgment had nothing to with intellect — they were as savvy as any of their predecessors in America’s long history of backyard inventors. But taking time to sort out the complex implications of their work would distract them from the building and creating they prized above everything else. They assumed their efforts fueled American progress toward increased strength and security, and they felt proud to provide for their families through good respectable jobs. They worried more about the practical questions of whether or not their machines would work than they did about how they would be used in the international confrontations whose ethics they left to the politicians and the preachers. The old hands felt a joy in mastering the newly unleashed powers of atomic fission through an alchemical meld of parts, materials and purpose, a satisfaction in pioneering a desert once fit only for rattlesnakes and jackrabbits, and a sense of worth in creating working technical monuments that would endure long after the men who built them were gone. It was true that the nuclear stars — men such as Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard and Teller — were based not here but at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Chicago, and in part because of this Hanford never became as publicly known as did the other sites. But for all that theoretical foundations were developed elsewhere, it was in these reactors by the Columbia that nuclear technology became an industrial process, and that the men who manufactured plutonium, not in micrograms but in pounds and later hundreds of ANTIQUES AND SMALL TREASURES PASTRIES • LUNCH • LIGHT DINNERS PAPAH/YDH 58 29 S.E. 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