by Steve Olson
As at other Manhattan Project sites, Met Lab workers who got sick in later years wondered whether exposures to radioactive substances or other toxins might have caused their illnesses. But obvious evidence of ill effects was hard to find. With a few prominent exceptions, scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project had lower mortality rates than the general population. Still, basic questions about the health effects of radiation lingered. These questions would be asked again.
Chapter 7
THE DEMONSTRATION
ENRICO FERMI’S DEMONSTRATION OF A CHAIN REACTION ON DECEMBER 2, 1942, is one of the most famous scientific experiments in history. But it is often misinterpreted—or, rather, the interpretation does not go far enough. Yes, Fermi wanted to demonstrate that a chain reaction using natural uranium ore was possible. But he had a much more immediate goal: he needed to show that the plutonium production reactors being designed by the scientists and engineers at the Met Lab would work.
The end of 1942 was a shaky time for the Manhattan Project. Getting the materials and manpower to build the production plants was going to be difficult as the nation struggled to turn out tanks, aircraft, and guns. The best technique for separating uranium-235 from uranium ore was still unclear. There was no time to build pilot plants; the project would have to move directly from the lab to full-scale manufacturing.
Then, in October, Seaborg had a terrifying thought. Plutonium-239 is a relatively stable isotope, but it occasionally emits alpha particles. If the plutonium in a bomb were contaminated with light elements like beryllium or boron, alpha particles could chip neutrons from their nuclei. These neutrons could set off an atomic bomb prematurely, resulting in a dud. For the Met Lab to succeed in its mission, the plutonium coming from the production plants would have to be almost completely pure.
News of the purity requirements added to the Met Lab’s many problems. The scientists complaining about Stone & Webster that summer had been right—the company was not going to be able to build the production reactors. It was already doing too many other things for the Manhattan Project, and it had no expertise that it could apply to producing plutonium. But the army, tightening its grip over the project, wasn’t about to turn control over to the scientists. Instead, it started pressuring the firm it wanted to do the job all along—E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company.
DuPont, which was founded in 1802 in Wilmington, Delaware, as a gunpowder mill and subsequently grew to become one of the largest chemical companies in the United States, was reluctant to get involved. The company was still smarting from the “merchant of death” tag it received after manufacturing munitions during World War I. Like Stone & Webster, it was involved with other World War II projects and did not want to spread itself too thin. When DuPont officials heard how pure the reactor-produced plutonium would have to be, they were even more wary.
The army turned up the pressure. It said that the plutonium project needed one of the country’s best chemical companies if it was going to succeed. The outcome of the war might hinge on DuPont’s decision. No other firm could do the job. Company officials were torn. They didn’t want to take on the project, but they had a hard time rejecting the army’s appeals.
When in doubt, form a committee—and one of the most important committees of the entire Manhattan Project took shape that fall. Its job was to examine not only the Met Lab but also the isotope separation projects going on around the country to decide which parts of the project should be emphasized and which deemphasized or canceled. The chair of the committee was Warren Lewis, a chemical engineering professor at MIT who had served on the National Academy of Sciences committee the previous year. A second member was Eger Murphree, though he fell sick in November and did not participate in the committee’s deliberations. The other three members were all DuPont engineers, named to the committee in the hope that their review of the plutonium project would help convince the company to take it on.
The most influential of the three was Crawford Greenewalt, just 40 years old but already a rising star in DuPont. A lanky New Englander who carried himself with patrician grace, he had earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from MIT, went to work for DuPont, married the sister of DuPont president Irénée du Pont Jr., and played a key role in the development of nylon. Greenewalt would later become president of DuPont himself. His work on the Manhattan Project was both a pathway and rite of passage to that position.
The committee traveled first to Columbia University to inspect the isotope separation work being done there. The technique, which relied on forcing gaseous uranium through a fine wire mesh, appeared likely to work eventually. But isotope separation was going to be a long and arduous process. If isotope separation was the only route to a bomb, success was far from guaranteed.
The committee then took the train to Chicago, arriving on Thanksgiving morning, November 26. Gathering in Eckhart Hall’s conference room over platters of turkey, the committee heard from Compton first. He said that the Met Lab could produce enough plutonium for a bomb by 1944 and achieve regular production in 1945. Compton listed seven problems that had to be solved for plutonium production to work. Progress was being made on them all, he said.
Then it was Seaborg’s turn. Could he produce enough plutonium, the committee asked, of the purity required, for a successful nuclear explosion? He said that he could, so long as he had enough good chemists and metallurgists to do the job. The committee was impressed but noncommittal. That evening, still undecided on whether to recommend that the plutonium production effort continue, the committee members boarded the train for California to review the isotope separation work being done at Berkeley.
BY THE DAY OF Fermi’s experiment, the review committee had returned to Chicago from California. It was Chicago’s coldest December 2 of the previous half-century—just below zero Fahrenheit, with a howling wind to compound the misery. Over the previous three weeks, Fermi and a rag-tag team of physicists, technicians, and young men hired from the rough neighborhood north of campus had built a massive pile of graphite blocks and embedded uranium spheres in a racquets court beneath the west stands of the university’s abandoned football field.* The pile was controlled by wooden poles covered by strips of cadmium metal, which is a voracious neutron absorber. So long as these poles were in the pile, the chain reaction could not occur. But as the poles were withdrawn, the flux of neutrons within the pile would increase, to the point, Fermi hoped, that the pile would be producing more neutrons than it was absorbing.
With his colleagues crowding the balcony of the racquets court, Fermi, at 9:45, began ordering that the control rods be withdrawn. Fermi knew the significance of what he was doing, and he had planned his performance accordingly. Each time the main control rod was pulled out another foot or six inches, he took his slide rule from a pocket, made a few calculations, and jotted some numbers on its reverse side. “This is not it,” he would say, pointing to the chart recorder that was documenting the neutron flux. “The trace will go to this point and level off.”
About midmorning, Compton got a call in the conference room where he was again meeting with the review committee. He should come to the west stands to watch the experiment, he was told. But he could bring along only one member of the committee, because the balcony was crowded. Compton chose Greenewalt, explaining that because he was the youngest member of the committee he “would probably remember longer than the others what he would see, and it should be something worth remembering.” Greenewalt later ventured that perhaps he was the most expendable.
The crucial moment did not come until 3:20 that afternoon. “This is going to do it,” Fermi told Compton after directing that the control rod be withdrawn one more foot. “Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace will climb and continue to climb. It will not level off.” As the scientists on the balcony crowded around Fermi, the needle of the chart recorder began to rise. In the pile, neutrons were splitting uranium atoms, which released neutrons that split more uranium atoms, which repeate
d the process again and again. Leo Szilard’s vision of the chain reaction had been realized. The atomic age had begun.
After Fermi powered down the reactor, Compton and Greenewalt walked back across campus toward the conference room. Greenewalt’s “eyes were aglow,” Compton later wrote. “His mind was swarming with ideas of how atomic energy could mean great things in the practical lives of men and women. . . . Here was a source of endless power that could warm peoples’ homes, light their lamps, and turn the wheels of industry.” Greenewalt spun his reaction differently: “What I was really thinking about was how happy I would be to get home.”
The other members of the review committee could tell as soon as Compton and Greenewalt walked through the door that the experiment had been a success. Two weeks later, DuPont agreed to take on the job of building and operating the plutonium production plants.
Seaborg was not among the people on the balcony on December 2, but word spread quickly through the Met Lab that afternoon. That evening, he wrote in his journal, “Of course we have no way of knowing if this is the first time a sustained chain reaction has been achieved. The Germans may have beaten us to it. . . . [But] one thing is certain: though Fermi has demonstrated that we now have a means of manufacturing [plutonium] in copious amounts, it is the responsibility of chemists to show that [plutonium] can be extracted and purified to a degree required for a working bomb.”
Because Chicago Pile 1 was secret, no photographs were taken of the completed structure. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses and published accounts, Chicago Tribune staff artist Gary Sheahan painted this rendition of the observers crowded around Fermi on the balcony of the racquets court. Courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration.
THINGS HAPPENED QUICKLY after December 2. A week later, the federal committee overseeing the Manhattan Project decided to move ahead full speed with both the isotope separation facilities and the plutonium production plants. The initial idea had been to place the plutonium plants in Tennessee, near the immense factories that would be built to isolate uranium-235. But the production reactors would compete with the separation facilities for electricity. Plus, they were too dangerous. A reactor accident could shower Knoxville and other downwind communities with radioactivity. The plutonium facilities would need to be built elsewhere.
Meanwhile, as soon as DuPont agreed to take on the plutonium project, the company convened a group of top engineers and executives to oversee the company’s involvement. To avoid perceptions of war profiteering, DuPont asked for a contract that would cover its costs plus a fixed fee of one dollar. The contract with the company called for any patents arising from the project to belong solely to the federal government. It also indemnified DuPont from any liabilities the company might incur.
In the middle of December, Corps of Engineers Colonel Franklin Matthias attended a meeting in Wilmington at which DuPont engineers and Compton established the criteria a plutonium production site must meet. Back in Washington, DC, Matthias told his commanding officer that he needed to reread Buck Rogers cartoons to get up to speed on the project. A few days later, he and two DuPont engineers departed for the West Coast to scout out potential locations. One was especially promising: a broad, sparsely populated plain in south-central Washington State near the small farming town of Hanford.
* It was not a squash court, as has been reported in the past. A squash court, even a doubles squash court, would not have been large enough for Fermi’s pile. Plus, courts built for racquets, which is a game invented in the 18th century that preceded squash, have a balcony on one end where the scorekeeper could sit, and Fermi put his electronic equipment on this balcony.
PART 2
A FACTORY IN THE DESERT
“Some of the flattest, most lonesome territory I had ever seen.”
—Glenn Seaborg
Chapter 8
THE EVICTED
ON MARCH 6, 1943, JUST AS THE FIRST WARM BREEZES FROM THE south had begun to hint of spring, Frank and Jeanie Wheeler of White Bluffs, Washington, received the following letter:
Dear Sir or Madam:
Re: U.S. vs. Alberts, No. 128
You are advised that on February 23, 1943 the United States of America instituted the above proceeding to acquire certain real property by condemnation, including lands apparently owned or occupied by you. Pursuant to the court order that day entered in said proceeding I herewith enclose a copy of such order, which will serve to advise you that the United States was on said date given the right immediately to take possession of such property. . . .
Respectfully,
Hart Snyder
Special Attorney for the Department of Justice
The Wheelers stared at the letter in disbelief. The attached legal notice said that the land was being taken “for military, naval or other war purposes.” What could the government possibly want with their orchards and fields? It was far away from any military installation or transportation center and could be farmed only with constant effort. That part of Washington State was scorching hot in summer and cold and foggy in winter. It didn’t make sense.
By 1943 the Wheelers had been living in eastern Washington for more than three decades. They had raised six children there, four of whom had gone to Reed College in Portland and one of whom became a Rhodes Scholar. “It was a wonderful place for the children,” Jeanie recalled many years later. When the Columbia flooded in spring, the older kids rowed onto the river to capture wood floating downriver from distant forests, which would supply the family with firewood for the year. In the summers, they could swim in the river or in the irrigation canals that crisscrossed the desert.* On warm summer evenings, as heat lightning flashed in the purpling sky, Frank and Jeanie could sit outside and watch the Columbia roll by in front of the terraced backdrop of sand, gravel, and clay that had given the town of White Bluffs its name. The Wheelers grew apples, peaches, apricots, and pears in their orchard, which they shipped to markets from the nearby rail station. Agricultural prices were low for much of the 1920s and 1930s, and many of the farmers in the area had left. But prices for food were going up with the United States at war, and the Wheelers were looking forward to a profitable year.
The Wheelers soon learned that everyone in White Bluffs had gotten the same letter. So had the 300 or so residents of the nearby town of Hanford, named after a Seattle lawyer who helped bankroll a nearby irrigation district. Everyone in Richland, a town of about the same size 30 miles south of White Bluffs, also had gotten the letter. Along with the people who lived on the surrounding farms, about 1,500 people had to leave their homes. “It was a terrible shock,” said a resident of Hanford. “The only thing that made it credible to us was because of the war. Our town had been chosen for the war effort. We were so patriotic. Although we could go along with that idea, it was still a terrible blow.” Even the dead had to leave. The army dug up 177 graves at the White Bluffs cemetery and moved the remains to the town of Prosser on the other side of Rattlesnake Mountain.
In May, appraisers arrived at the Wheelers’ farm. “What’s the old barn over there?” one asked of the almost completed house Frank and Jeanie’s son had been building. Another said, “You should be glad to get out of this godforsaken place.” When their appraisal arrived, the Wheelers were shocked anew. Their 40 acres of property, with three houses, barns, wells, and 20 acres of thriving orchards, were valued by the government at $1,500. Their neighbors were equally appalled. “They appraised my father’s 30 acres at $1,700,” said one. “The pump and well alone had cost us $1,900.”
Frank wrote to the children who had moved elsewhere. “If you want to see this place again, you had better get over here.” Only one could get away from her wartime job. Frank and Jeanie’s daughter Helen arrived from Seattle just as a bulldozer was ripping out the family orchard. “I’ve never gotten over that scene,” she later said. “I many times wished I had not come.”
Finally, the day to leave arrived. “They came that morning to take us away so e
arly that we just finished breakfast and the stove was still hot,” said Jeanie. The Wheelers moved in with another daughter in Seattle and eventually retired to an island in Puget Sound. “We always thought that they should have left us there,” said Jeanie many years later, “that peaches were a better crop than atom bombs.”
FRANKLIN MATTHIAS HAD BEEN BUSY since he’d flown over Richland, Hanford, and White Bluffs the previous December and had decided that the area would be perfect to build the plutonium production facilities. His boss, General Leslie Groves, had traveled to the site in January 1943 and had agreed with Matthias about its merits. Back in his Washington, DC, office, Groves arranged for Secretary of War Henry Stimson to seize the land under the War Powers Act. Eventually the federal government acquired more than 600 square miles of property, an area 10 times that of Washington, DC.