CULTURE But while Hanford employees willingly worked their overtime shifts, put up with the slapdash accommodations and suffered through the twomen blew their whistles each time they returned to their empty stations so as to chase out trysting couples, and there were rumors of midnight liaisons through fences. Nonworking wives had to remain back home or seek lodging in nearby farm towns. The Mystery Project n many ways, the spirit existing during Hanford’s war years would never again be equaled. Since blueprints were often completed just before each new machine system was to be built and were usually classified, supervisors relayed their specifications through 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. oral instructions or crude drawings. Though this made each task more difficult, it also heightened the sense of being part of an urgent mission. Each job — whether milling the graphite blocks, bonding aluminum claddings on the uranium fuel rods, creating radiation-sensing instruments or designing remote control equipment to extract plutonium from the spent fuel — offered challenges to ingenuity, craftsmanship and skill. Whatever the mysterious product being created here, its use would help defeat a.barbaric enemy now threatening the world. (As an extra sacrifice, the Hanford men and women chipped in a percentage of their wages to finance an Air Force B-17 which was then named Day’s Pay.) The work provided a sense of purpose far beyond that offered in normal daily life. hour daily rides on the buses which the project provided, they were frustrated not knowing what it was they were creating. The construction workers, as well as the engineers and scientists, worked on specific tasks and asked no unnecessary questions. Both groups were prohibited from discussing their jobs even with spouses or friends from other crews. Less than a fifth of the operations people knew the end product of their work, and most guessed it was bombs or munitions — or perhaps some mysterious superfuel derived from the thousands of graphite blocks brought in to build the reactor core. A standard joke was that Hanford was making “fourth- term Roosevelt campaign buttons.” But when one worker took a graphite sliver into the mess hall and showed it to friends from another department, he was gone the next day — arrested by Military Intelligence. M.l. also opened mail and listened in on long-distance phone calls to ensure no revealing information was released. They had Enrico Fermi come through under the name Henry Farmer and Arthur Compton under that of A. Comas to hide the nature of the atomic product. They checked the background of each Hanford worker and even classified the amount of beer consumed so spies couldn’t determine the project’s size by the number of employees present. Monitors did warn the workers about radioactivity by timing them in “hot zones,” measuring them for contamination and generally watching out for their safety. Rules prohibited eating in work areas, mandated the wearing of dosimeters to log radiation exposure, and required medical inspection for even minor cuts that radioactive substances might have entered. Workers were forbidden to use the Boraxo soap which — because the boron it contained was the same as that in the reactor control rods — might contaminate the graphite and prevent a chain reaction from taking place. But the explanations of radioactivity were usually limited to vague comparisons with X-rays. When an instrument team developed a radiation detection device they named Pluto, after Disney’s constantly sniffing dog, project head General Leslie Groves decided it sounded too much like plutonium and made them change the name. But if the security rules were frustrating, they removed from most Hanford workers the burden of judging the wisdom of what they were creating. Simply assuming that their efforts were necessary to win the war, they could immerse themselves in details. They could take pride in having overcome the harsh environment, the pressure and awkward restrictions to meet an unprecedented technical challenge. They had the satisfaction of carrying out a job they were asked to do. r On July 16, 1945, the world’s first Clinton St. Quarterly 9
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