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 government 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 In December of 1958, Richland became its own incorporated town at a ceremony attended by Governor Albert Rossellini and Senators Henry ‘‘Scoop ’' Jackson and Warren Magnuson and capped by the setting off of a mock atomic bomb. 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 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 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 o f it against us. jackrabbits, and a sense of worth in creating working technical monuments that wduld 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 pounds, laid the ground for the massive atomic establishment America was soon to develop. Because the atomic industry would end up being staffed not by world-renowned physicists but by ordinary engineers and technicians, Hanford became the prototype for a nuclear future in terms of human as well as technical arrangements. To “tame” atomic processes was to bring them from the realm of the unexplored to that of the pedestrian and routine. The Tinkerers Clark Reitnauer transferred to Hanford in March of 1944 from Du Pont’s heavy-water plant in Morgantown, West Virginia. A supervisor there had already taught him about high-level security by telling him, “One word about what we’re doing here, and I’ll have you incarcerated for the rest of the war.” When his wife suggested, out of the blue, that Hanford might be making an atom bomb, he envisioned her telling people and himself jailed, then spent three days explaining how she was being ridiculous. Clark began here building special planes and lathes to fabricate the B, D and F reactor graphite, then worked on a variety of radiation-monitoring instruments, including the one abortively named “Pluto.” Although he came to Hanford without a college background — he supplemented his high school education with night school and correspondence courses in mechanical engineering — Clark developed 16 patents and was a senior engineer at United Nuclear by the time he retired in 1977. When I asked if working with atomic reactions differed from basement tinkering, Clark said it was at first “a little mystifying and scary.” But he adjusted quickly to entering hot zones so he could test the new systems he’d developed. He knew the dose limits were sufficiently low so no hazard existed. Even the year he was high man in terms of exposure didn’t really worry him. “I guess the monitors must have metered me wrong,” Clark explained when I asked how this happened, but he said the annual dose allowable was normally three REMs and five as an absolute limit (REM stands for Roentgen Equivalent Man — a unit of radiation exposure that factors in the biological damage created by different radioactive emissions) — and that the dosimeter in his badge indicated he’d ended up with more than five. Since the international limit was 15, that didn’t bother him. “But they had to file an AEC report, and they called me on the carpet just as if I’d broken the traffic laws by speeding.” An IdealFamily Town Despite the massive military enterprise supportingjt, to its residents Richland was the atomic age equivalent of a homey small town. Since no one was allowed to live here except Hanford employees, their families and a few merchants running stores under government contract, Richland had no poor, no old and no unemployed. Crime was almost nonesis- tent — from 1945 to 1947 the local jail did not hold a single prisoner. Richland even had its own mascot, a jaunty potato-headed cartoon figure in overalls named Dupus Boomer (Dupus referring to Du Pont), who appeared each week in the Richland Villager, chasing after the trash cans which the termination winds blew down the block, looking out at the desert while his kid asked, “Pop, how far away are we from the United States?” and joking with the local barber about all the “long-hair” scientists in town. That Hanford’s workers considered themselves “a fine class of people” testified not to any snobbery, but to optimism and innocence. In a 1952 League of Women Voters survey only half the respondents considered Richland their permanent home. But just as Hanford’s plutonium manufacture became routine, so Richland slowly shed its makeshift character and began striving, almost like Pinocchio, to become a real town in the mainstream world. At times this desire took the form of strutting. Atomic Frontier Days began in 1948 as an annual Westernstyle celebration. Movie stars visited, the men put on fake beards and held a male beauty contest, and local organizations used wire, crepe paper and paint to turn cars and trucks into elaborate floats. A diaper service built a huge winged stork. Mother Hubbard and her children proclaimed the merits of a shoe store. Members of Rainbow Girls dressed in an array of spectacular hues. Judges picked Miss Richland, one year selecting local belle and future Hollywood actress Sharon Tate. The Navy’s Blue Angel jets performed acrobatics overhead. A ground parade showcased tanks, howitzers and Nike missiles from the protective base on top of Rattlesnake Mountain; the high school sports teams, the Richland Bombers, rode by in their yellow and green colors displaying a finned metal bomb. Gradually Richland moved toward becoming a normal single-industry town. Electric meters were installed, then water meters. A 1955 advisory ballot on self-government lost by 500 votes. The AEC decided to sell the property anyway, for 50 percent of appraised value and, in 1956, 1500 residents gathered at the Bomber Bowl to protest the appraisals running too high. A delegation flew to Washington, D.C., to work out compromise prices. The houses were finally offered at bargain rates. In December of 1958, Richland became its own incorporated town at a ceremony attended by Governor Albert Rossellini and Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson and capped by the setting off of a mock atomic bomb. Because Richland was in part just a small rural town, its kids went hiking and swimming and rode their bikes all around the sagebrush terrain. They hung ropes from alphabet-lettered 10 Clinton St. Quarterly
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