they would soon call “ The Area” to spare time tinkering in basement and garage workshops. One engineer, an amateur smith, received 18 patents for his official Hanford work. And as he said in describing the Area’s shift from the Manhattan Project to the succeeding Cold War era, “ I could have just as easily have been working in a coal plant or somewhere else. . . . They presented us with what they needed and we went out and built it.” Because what was salient was the work of building, the nature of the product was secondary. When the bombs fell on Hiroshima.and Nagasaki, Hanford’s workers learned, along with the rest of the world, what it was that they had been creating. They believed we had no other options but to use the weapons on these civilian populations. They took pride in having ended the brutal war. The silence crystalized in a faith that there existed a group of men so wise they could be delegated the burden of the human future. So with exuberant innocence, the town of Richland, where the workers lived, proudly named streets Proton Lane and Neutron Lane. When Richland High School seniors graduated, embossed on their commencement programs was a gold leaf mushroom cloud. Like most citizens in what we’ve fairly casually termed “ the atomic age,” Hanford’s workers dealt with the implications of the new weapons by trivializing them. Consideration of any threat was banished initially by the legal prohibitions and later by far more subtle informa l mechanisms. When a Hanford wife in her bridge circle mentioned something unsettling—perhaps a vague fear that her husband might be exposed to harmful radiation— her peers would respond, “Oh, let’s not talk about the bad things,” and move on to safe topics of children, cooking, or deve lopments at the garden c lub or Orthopedic Guild. The men retreated to pride in their work. Community institutions had more urgent topics to discuss. The silence crystalized in a faith that there existed a group of men so wise they could be delegated the burden of the human future. It was enough that the cho ices wh ich crea ted Am e r ica ’s Hanfords should be discussed in the halls of RAND, the Hudson Institute, and the Pentagon. Ordinary citizens could only assume that these terrible matters were being taken care of as best they could. If Hanford’s workers surrendered, from the very beginning of their tenure, a fundamen ta l re s p o n s ib i l ity rega rd ing choices of unprecedented potential magnitude, this' surrender merely echoed that of other Americans of their era. They accepted it in part because of economic and psychological dependence on the atomic environment they inhabited. Their community offered ample camaraderie, support and friendship, yet also became a bar to vision and spur to complacency. As a veteran chemical engineer stressed, he couldn’t imagine his friends, and neighbors participating in anything unethical. In 1969 the Atomic Energy Commission was going to shut down Hanford’s original plutonium reactors; it had eight still operating. Because the community had no base but the atomic economy, school teachers had their kids write letters to then-President Richard Nixon. “ Dear Mr. Nixon,” or “ Dear Mr. President,” the letters would begin, accompanied by drawings of houses, trees, stick figure families and Oldsmobiles outside. “ I live here. I’ve always lived here. I like it here. Please don’t make us move. The country needs what my daddy produces.” "W h a t the Hell" w W a r here the men and women of Hanford’s founding generation acc limated themselves to their work through immersion in fragmented tasks, belief in government wisdom, and dismissal of awkward questions, the 1970s initiated a new era of cynical fatalism. Instead of trusting “ the men who know best,” this sensibility acknowledges and even celebrates the fallibility of expert prescriptions. Yet it also denies the possibility of worthwh ile human action, b lusters through a dependency no less dangerous than that of the wartime generation, and denigrates even the attempt to link moral vision with human choices. The cynicism appeared at its extreme in the attitudes of the young Hanford workers who for nearly ten years were building three commercial reactors for the Washington State Public Supply System (WPPSS). Mushrooming costs cancelled one plant, mothballed another and left a third barely limping to completion. The majority of the more mobile workers have left. But their attitude of flip resignation is no different from that of their generational peers still working at PUREX, a reprocessing facility recently renovated to generate plutonium for the new warheads, or at the reconverted N reactor. It is the same as that of those working far from the direct weapons facilities, both geographically and occupationally, but casually accepting their fruits. While the older workers continue to embrace atomic production with passion and skill, those younger deny identity with what they create. "W h a t the hell. By the time these suckers get on line—if they ever get on line—I'll be someplace else. I'll be long gone." The young workers took refuge in Trans-Ams, Porsches, high test grass and cocaine. One saw this exemplified in the constant stories of shoddy welds, forged blueprints, and pipes leading into the ground going nowhere. Though the stories checked out true , the ir te lle rs laughed them off, shrugging their shoulders and saying, “What the hell. By the time these suckers get on line—if they ever get on line—I’ ll be someplace else. I’ ll be long gone.” They took refuge in Trans-Ams, Porsches, high test grass and cocaine. They explain, “ Look, the reactors are here whatever I do. If they were someplace where people didn ’t want them I’d probably be protesting, climbing fences, and throwing rocks. But this is a nuclear town and it always will be.” Shortly after Three Mile Island, Saturday Night Live did a sketch called “ The Pepsi Syndrome.” An accident began when someone spilled a Pepsi on a reactor control panel and the buzzers started sounding, lights started flashing and radioactive water spilled into an adjacent room. The operators called in Garrett Morris as a black cleaning woman and, assuring her it was just a routine job, asked if she’d do them a favor by mopping up. The show ended with her a mutant giant and Jimmy Carter, having gone into the room and himself grown to fifteen feet, announcing, from the window high in the wall, that they were eloping. While the sketch wasn’t technically accurate, it worked, and no one enjoyed it more than the young WPPSS workers who watched, drinking beer and smoking dope, in front of a large TV set built into the brown Dodge van one had bought out of his $30,000 yearly earnings. They joked about whose weld caused the problem and why the managers were, as usual, nowhere to be found. They went in the next day to build their reactors. What is this separation where one can maintain, in the words of a Hanford computer specialist, that, “ Maybe the human race is just like a company gone on past its time?” The cynics may work hard at demanding tasks, or even follow political events as if they were the daily baseball standings. But their resignation forms a generational bond, crossing class lines from Hanford’s welders to Detroit autoworkers, Los Angeles lawyers, New York journalists, and young insurance salesmen from Seattle, Kansas City or Dallas. Readily incorporating images of contra terror, napalmed peasants, shoddy atomic welds, or a president’s banality, it makes them bitter proof that nothing can be done. And by denying or trivializing consequences, it destroys links between individuals and the sense of historical continuity which might sustain their risk and dissent. Neither cynicism nor sentimental optimism will ameliorate the implications of Am e r ica ’s Han fo rds . The nuc lea r culture’s sway extends with each increased weapons budget. Yet for all that the silence of the ordinary men and women who build the bombs exemplifies a far point of the logic E.P. Thompson terms “ exterminism,” it is a trap to use its lessons to validate despair. Six years back, when I first visited a Hanford complex whose threats seemed highlighted most by the near catastrophe of Three Mile Island, the area’s economy rested to a large degree on commercial nuclear operations. Now, as the WPPSS project has turned belly up, and as orders for nuclear power plants continue to be cancelled nationwide, the so-called p e a c e fu l a tom is s u b s t a n t ia l ly beleagered. Nuclear waste, of course, remains, still a growth sector, and despite its legacy of “ questionable integrity,” Hanford’s compliant culture has helped make the facility a leading Candidate for Ame rica ’s permanent high-level repository. But mostly, the Area has returned to its original military mission th rough the N-reactor conversion, PUREX restart, and a new facility developing those Laser Isotope technologies which will allow extraction of weapons grade plutonium from spent commercial fuel. Reason for Hope H a n f o r d ’s nuc lea r dependence makes it still a costly effort for its resi-. dents to dissent. It was and is far easier for individuals to leave here than to remain and create a public dialogue. Yet Hanford is also a model in a more optimistic context. However scarce were the men and women who broke from its institutions to challenge them, their critiques did catalyze other resistance. And as a resurgent peace movement has begun to weave its tendrils into all corners of a still resisting society—has created a presO u r fates are now linked with those of inhabitants of Vladivostok and Kiev, of Perth and Dar Es Salaam, of all the nations of the earth. Perhaps this offers both the necessity and possibility of creating a less predatory world. ence, even if a minority one, which would have been unimaginable just a few years back—so it has been echoed even here. On August 9th, 1982, over 100 local residents of various ages and occupations commemorated the anniversary of Nagasaki with a vigil in front of the Richland Federal Building—the community’s first public acknowledgment that the date might demand more than just civic pride. Since then, a new local peace group has picketed to protest PUREX renovation, held forums and put together leaflets on Hanford’s militarization—encouraged whistle-blowing and discussion where people had previously kept their silence. Because we may get no second chances, our current situation gives us a r e s p o n s ib i l i ty in many ways un paralleled. If one considers only the deployment or pending deployment of first strike systems like MX and Trident, Cruise and Pershing II, the growing array of high-tech, immensely destructive “ conventional weapons,” of the plans for Star Wars space battlefields—then we’re clearly inhabiting a more precarious world than we did even a few years back. And yet there is also reason for hope. In part this hope lies in a new possibility of community. Visions of a universal human family have always existed— the religious notion of God’s children, the solidarity of the labor and Marxist traditions, the French Revolution with its cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. They have been honored in periodic surges, those moments when humans believe their shared dreams just might be realized. But in a manner not true in any other era, our fates are now linked with those of inhabitants of Vladivostok and Kiev, of Perth and Dar Es Salaam, of Istanbul, of Santiago, of all the nations of the earth. Perhaps this offers both the necessity and possibility of creating a less predatory world. The commonality embodied in a global jeopardy has also sparked another current—that producing the unparalleled breaching of the atomic silence began to develop at precisely the point that Reagan first took office six years back. This movement recognizes that private sanctuary no longer exists and that optimism must be actively reclaimed. And that the atomic threat may become a window for understanding both the nature of our peril and our choices in confronting it. If the current situation is ultimately the product of deep-rooted strains in our society, then recognizing their bleakest implications may allow us the chance not only to avert immediate danger but also to examine who we are, how we live and how we might live. So in the midst of our jeopardy we see a nascent renewal. Three years back, a handful of teachers talked in a Massachusetts classroom about discussing the atomic threat with their kids; now nuclear curriculums are taught in practically every state in the nation. The Catholics’ Pastoral Letter steadily brings discussion into additional parishes, yet was itself fruit of a process initiated by a small group of activists within the church hierarchy, and by those unheralded dissenters who moved the initial bishops to question and to speak. That even some Hanford workers ngw challenge a surrounding complacency is the result of those who first risked and resisted. We have the option of sectoring off and insisting we’re neither strong enough nor wise enough to deal with the horror. We can maintain that no vision is worth fighting for, that the effort's too difficult, and that we’re only a small shabby species which, as the Hanford computer scientist said, goes on, like a company everyone knows is dead, past its time. We can hope that those already speaking and acting will take care of it. But we also have the choice of addressing the situation in its full implications. Of reaching beyond our individual lives for broader purposes and broader visions. And of raising a dialogue not only on the grand stage of national politics, but within the same day to day institutions which up till now have harbored only the prevailing silence. Whether citizens can successfully raise this dialogue, to convey not only the reasons for fear but those for hope—to draw the most root and most rigorous lessons from our peril—may well determine whether the nuclear culture is successfully confronted or continues to cow, wound, and perhaps even extinguish the interesting and complex experiment known as the human species. And this is a task which cannot be delegated. Nuclear Culture is back in print, in paperback from New Society Publishers. Writer Paul Loeb lives in Seattle and works with CSQ as an Associate Editor. Artist Henk Pander lives in Portland. 6 Clinton St. Quarterly
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