V i i ^ u t s i d e of the Pacific Northwest, few Americans have heard of Hanford. Los Alamos and Oak Ridge are hallowed as birth sites o f the bomb: their scientists viewed as Godlike figures, their laboratories cauldrons distilling the brew of Armageddon, their historical role both terrible and alluring. But although Hanford produced the plutonium for Nagasaki, for Trinity, and for half the atomic weapons in America's arsenals, it has remained hidden and obscure. For the most part, this is because star scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller worked almost entirely at the other atomic sites. Hanford—a complex half the size of Rhode Island, located on a bend of the Columbia River in the Southeastern Washington desert—was less the domain of grand experimental frontiers than an industrial environment, where unprecedented atomic technologies became incorporated into production routines. The experience of its workers were more those of other ordinary citizens than of the Los Alamos physicists figuring whether or not the first H-bomb might explode the atmosphere of the earth. The rationalizations they soon developed paralleled those by which other Americans co n fron te d the new a tom ic jeopardy. A Culture o f Silence I o understand these mechanisms, one must first understand what could be called a culture of silence—one where the most important questions are neither talked about, addressed, nor even recognized. When the new workers arrived in 1943, they settled an environment devoted solely to production of the raw material for the first atomic weapons, one isolated 200 miles from Seattle and Portland, and one where wartime urgency reigned unquestioned. Yet aside from a few higher ups, they did not know what they were creating. Told only that this was a secret facility, that their job was crucial to the military effort, and that they could not talk about it—even to family, friends or co-workers with identical security clearances on other shifts—they lacked context to either question or judge the implications of their work. Instead they sought their challenges in the nuts and bolts effort of production. In thirteen months they completed the world’s first full working reactor, to be followed closely by processing facilities, a fuel fabrication plant, and underground tanks to store radioactive wastes. They designed monitoring instruments, safety systems, and the fuel claddings which would let the uranium rods burn at the hottest possible temperature and pro- _ duce the greatest quantity of the weap- ons-grade plutonium the workers /Galled ( and still call simply “ product." They delighted in what Oppenheimer would > < , term, years later, the “ technically sweet”, ,• J challenge of invention. Because the work was seductive and the men of Hanford’s founding generation loved their craft, they went from their work at the reactors and plants in what Clinton St. Quarterly 5
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