The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  The Chicago scientists and their allies mobilized to defeat the bill and advance the cause of international control, but what approach would be most effective? They had several choices, such as emphasizing the advantages of a strict international regime governing nuclear weapons. Instead, they decided to stoke people’s fears.

  The tactic seemed obvious at the time. If anything, public alarm and despondency deepened in the months after the war. One anthropologist described America as being in the grip of a “fear psychosis.” An article in Life magazine published in November 1945 and entitled the “36-Hour War” was emblematic of the mood. The article opened with a spread of a nuclear bomb detonating above Washington, DC. It then described a future nuclear war in which intercontinental ballistic missiles rained down on American cities. Antiballistic missiles fired from the United States stopped a few of the incoming missiles, but most got through. The magazine observed that 40 million Americans would be killed and most of the nation’s cities leveled. The final page showed technicians testing the rubble of the New York Public Library for radioactivity, with only the proud lions at the former library’s entrance left standing.

  Scientists arguing against the May-Johnson bill sought to intensify people’s anxiety. A March 1946 book published by the Federation of Atomic Scientists entitled One World or None included essays by Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and other scientists on the threat posed by atomic weapons. The first essay was by physicist Philip Morrison, who had helped load the bombs onto the Enola Gay and Bockscar and later went to Hiroshima to survey the damage. Entitled “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,” Morrison’s essay described what would happen if an atomic bomb were detonated a half-mile above Third Avenue and East 20th Street in New York City. “From the river west to Seventh Avenue, and from south of Union Square to the middle Thirties, the streets were filled with the dead and dying,” he wrote. Nor did those farther away escape harm:

  An illustration in the November 19, 1945, issue of Life magazine depicted the effects on New York City of a nuclear attack on the United States. Courtesy of Noel Sickles.

  The most tragic of all the stories of the disaster is that of the radiation casualties. They included people from as far away as the Public Library or the neighborhood of Police Headquarters downtown, but most of them came from the streets between the river and Fifth Avenue, from Tenth or Twelfth to the early Thirties. They were all lucky people. Most of them had had remarkable escapes from fire, from flash burns, from falling buildings. . . . But they all died. They died in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and St. Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages, of wildfire infections, of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh. Nothing seemed to help them much, and the end was neither slow nor very fast, but sure.

  Altogether, predicted Morrison, 300,000 New Yorkers would be killed by a Nagasaki-sized bomb, and about an equal number seriously injured. Furthermore, this was the consequence of just a single bomb. As Morrison warned:

  The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands. Even if, by means as yet unknown, we are able to stop as many as 90 percent of these missiles, their number will still be large. If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and not our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.

  AMIDST THIS POLITICAL MANEUVERING, the residents of Richland awaited the decisions that would determine their futures. At the end of World War II, about 15,000 people lived in Richland, with about the same number living in Kennewick and Pasco a few miles farther down the Columbia. Almost all of them were there because the federal government had chosen to build a factory in the desert to produce plutonium. Now they wondered what would happen next. Would the government shut down Hanford? If so, the towns would likely shrivel up and blow away, as so many western towns had done in the past.

  Right after the war, Groves had ordered production at Hanford scaled back. But the three reactors continued to operate, and the T and U Plants continued to separate plutonium from the irradiated slugs. By the end of the year, Groves expected to have 20 Nagasaki-type bombs in the US nuclear arsenal.

  News reports after the war had discussed both plutonium and implosion, but Groves and Matthias continued to insist that Hanford’s workers maintain absolute secrecy. “Discussion of process, production or the employment of the Atomic Bomb should be limited,” Groves proclaimed. Hanford employees had to sign a statement saying they would not talk about what they saw, heard, or did at the site, even with family members. Military intelligence continued to open mail, listen to phone calls, and otherwise monitor the lives of Hanford workers. Local police had copies of the key for every house in Richland, photographs required the approval of the area manager, and even the phone book was classified. Right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the town was filled with journalists who wrote stories about Richland as the “atomic village” and a “model residential city.” “Richland is News Center of the World: Army Lifts Curtain on Village Plant,” The Richland Villager enthused, but the journalists left after a few days. By the end of 1945, the people of Richland were hard at work and worried about their jobs, just like the people in any factory town. They just happened to make plutonium.

  IN THE FALL OF 1945, the Chicago scientists and their allies led a massive lobbying campaign against the May-Johnson bill. They criticized the bill’s many flaws in congressional hearings. They gave interviews to journalists about what would happen if the bill passed. They convinced other scientists and engineers and other organizations to oppose the bill, thereby widening their movement. In December, they began publishing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which remains a powerful voice on nuclear issues today.

  The public was impressed by the sincere young physicists who had won the war. By the end of 1945, public sentiment had turned sharply against the bill. Even President Truman, initially a backer of the May-Johnson bill, had withdrawn his support.

  On December 20, 1945, with the bill all but dead, the junior senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, introduced a new proposal to control the future of atomic energy in the United States. Strongly influenced by the atomic scientists, this bill was much more to their liking. The security provisions were less onerous; scientists did not have to fear that their laboratories would again be turned into armed camps. The commission members would be full-time and appointed by the president, which in theory would reduce military control of the commission. The commission also could work toward international control of atomic energy, though the proposed legislation did not specify how this was to be done.

  The McMahon bill faced powerful opponents, and none was more visible than Leslie Groves. Groves knew that the military could not continue to control nuclear weapons in the way he had controlled them during the war. Yet he was convinced that the military needed to have a dominant role in decisions about nuclear weapons, even if authority ultimately resided in the president. Groves was convinced that the Soviet Union and other countries would take many years to build atomic bombs. He knew how much effort, creativity, and industrial capacity it had taken for the Manhattan Project to succeed, and he did not think the Soviets capable of a comparable achievement. If the proper legislation could be passed, the United States could maintain a monopoly over nuclear weapons well into the future and leverage its nuclear strengths to get what it wanted in the world.

  Among Groves’s allies in the spring of 1946 was Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who attached an amendment to the McMahon bill establishing a Military Liaison Committee to the commission. It would be the perfect perch for Groves. Even if Groves was an unwise choice for a commissioner, he could nevertheless exert his influence on the commission through the liaison committee.

  Yet Groves’s opposition to the McMahon bill was also the beginning of his downfall. He had emerged from the war a national hero. On September 2
1, he and his wife were cheered by a crowd of 5,000 people at New York City Hall, and the mayor presented him with a scroll. He received honorary degrees from colleges and universities and was profiled in national magazines. But Groves had made many enemies while running the Manhattan Project, and after the war they were even more jealous of his success. He clashed repeatedly with those inside and outside of government who wanted access to Manhattan Project files. The atomic scientists caricatured him as a warmongering martinet. His brash personality, so effective in building the bomb, was a liability in the more politically complex postwar world. His final efficiency report said that Groves was “an intelligent, aggressive, positive type of man with a fine, analytical mind and great executive ability. His effectiveness is unfortunately lessened somewhat by the fact that he often irritates his associates.”

  Groves and his political allies succeeded in weakening provisions of the McMahon bill that would have reduced the military’s influence over nuclear matters. But the effort seemed to exhaust him. In 1948, he retired from the army, moved to Darien, Connecticut, and went to work for the Remington Rand Corporation. He gave lots of speeches, played lots of golf, and finally went on vacations with his long-suffering wife. He also got Remington Rand interested in a new technology that had hastened several key aspects of the Manhattan Project: electronic computing.

  ON AUGUST 1, 1946, President Truman signed the McMahon bill, officially known as the Atomic Energy Act. It established a five-member civilian commission that would take control of what had been the Manhattan Project and oversee a massive expansion of America’s nuclear capabilities. Additions to the bill imposed by conservative congressmen guaranteed that the military would continue to have a powerful influence on nuclear affairs. For example, amendments required that the president could direct the commission to deliver fissionable material and authorize the military to produce nuclear weapons. But the atomic scientists succeeded in wresting at least some of the control of nuclear energy away from the military.

  Now they focused their full attention on a much more ambitious goal: achieving some sort of international control of nuclear weapons. In a world where national self-interest came first—even when mutual interests served self-interest—the prospects for international control were never great. Yet the appeals of the atomic scientists had effects. A 1946 poll found that 54 percent of Americans favored transforming the United Nations into a “world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.” But when the questions were more detailed, such as asking about specific aspects of national sovereignty that would have to be forfeited, public support dwindled.

  Within the US Congress and military, support for international control, much less world government, was virtually nonexistent. Within two weeks of Japan’s surrender, the air forces sent Groves a list of 15 cities, including Moscow and Leningrad, that could be targets for atomic bombs in the next world war. In a confidential memo written a few months after the war, Groves argued that “if there are to be atomic weapons in the world, we must have the best, the biggest and the most.”

  In 1946, the US government proposed a plan for the international control of nuclear weapons that was very unlikely to be acceptable to the Soviet Union. Calling for total disarmament, it would have prohibited the Soviet Union or any other country from developing nuclear weapons. Only after the Soviets and other countries agreed never to build atomic bombs and to open their countries for inspections would the United States dismantle its own weapons. As expected, the Soviets rejected the U.S. plan and made a counterproposal—the United States should eliminate its weapons and then the Soviet Union would consider a system of international control and inspection. The competition between the two superpowers was sharpening. In March 1946, Churchill said that an Iron Curtain was dropping across Europe. In July of that year, just as the negotiations on international control were entering a critical phase, the United States tested two Nagasaki-type bombs near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, which the Soviets interpreted as intimidation. A spy scandal a few months later made it clear that the Soviets had been stealing secrets from the US nuclear program all along.

  Meanwhile, the campaign of fear waged by the atomic scientists had backfired. Rather than encouraging Americans to accept international control of nuclear weapons, it made them fear and distrust the Soviet Union and want to protect themselves through any means possible. At the time, the United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons. If it could maintain its advantage over other countries, it would not need to rely on international control.

  In this climate of heightening international tension, President Truman announced his appointments to the Atomic Energy Commission in October 1946. The head of the commission was David Lilienthal, former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had brought electricity, modern farming practices, and educational programs to the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s. A lawyer, friend of Robert Oppenheimer, and advisor to the federal government on atomic energy, Lilienthal was enthusiastic about using nuclear power for electricity generation and other peaceful purposes. But in the grim international climate of 1947, he knew that the commission would need to focus on military needs first.

  Early that year, the commissioners toured the Manhattan Project sites that they now controlled. They were shocked at what they found. The United States had just a single operable atomic bomb. The parts for a few more Nagasaki-type bombs were available, but they would have to be assembled. If the United States wanted to maintain a credible nuclear capacity, work on the bombs had to expand rapidly. And the greatest single need identified by the commissioners was for more plutonium to fuel those bombs.

  After almost two years of uncertainty, Hanford was back in business. The Atomic Energy Commission desperately needed what only Hanford could make.

  Chapter 20

  BUILDING THE NUCLEAR ARSENAL

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1949, A B-29 OUTFITTED WITH SPECIAL AIR FILTERS took off from an Air Force base in northern Japan and flew to a base near Fairbanks. When it landed, technicians removed the filters and tested them for radioactivity. The tests were positive. More flights crisscrossed the northern Pacific to gather air samples. Within a few days, the evidence was unassailable. The Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb.

  At first, Truman refused to believe it. US intelligence agencies had agreed with Groves that the Soviets could not possibly build a bomb so quickly. The statement issued by Truman on September 23 tried to downplay the significance of the event, saying that such a development was inevitable. But for the American public, the shock was enormous.

  The bomb exploded by the Soviets on August 29, 1949, in what is today Kazakhstan, was essentially a replica of the plutonium-based bomb dropped on Nagasaki. When Stalin learned about the bombing of Hiroshima, he was furious that Soviet scientists had made so little progress in their wartime atomic bomb program. A few days later, he told his officials in charge of munitions, “Provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time. You know that Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The equilibrium has been destroyed. Provide the bomb—it will remove a great danger from us.”

  Soviet scientists and engineers did not need to start from scratch. The Soviet Union had infiltrated the Manhattan Project with spies who kept them thoroughly up to date on the building of the bombs. In the Los Alamos laboratory, the German émigré Klaus Fuchs and at least two other spies provided documents to Soviet agents during and after the war. Several Met Lab employees were suspected of passing secrets to the Soviets and were fired from their jobs. According to documents made public after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviets had a spy codenamed MAR at Hanford—though the details of this espionage are still not known. With the information from spies and from public reports published after the war, Soviet scientists were able to move quickly.

  The postwar Soviet Union did not have the industrial might to separate uranium-235 from uranium ore. It therefore pursued o
nly one route to a bomb—the route pioneered by Hanford. Using gulag labor and nearby lakes and rivers for both cooling water and disposing of waste, the Soviets built graphite reactors and reprocessing facilities at the Maiak plutonium plant a thousand miles east of Moscow. The first reactor the Soviets built, to test the purity of graphite and uranium, was a close copy of a reactor built at Hanford for the same purpose. The first Soviet weapon, which was based on the implosion design developed at Los Alamos, even exploded with about the same force as the Nagasaki bomb, lighting up the steppes of central Asia just as the Trinity bomb and Fat Man had lit up the New Mexican desert and the Urakami Valley.

  The explosion of Joe-1, as it was code-named in the United States, marked a turning point in the Cold War. A few months later, Truman announced that the United States would embark on the development of hydrogen bombs much more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than two years later, the United States successfully exploded the hydrogen bomb Ivy Mike, which had a force of more than 10 million tons of TNT—five hundred times that of the Nagasaki explosion.

  The development of hydrogen bombs had major consequences for Hanford. Hydrogen bombs work by raising isotopes of hydrogen to such high temperatures that they begin to join together to form helium, which releases energy through the same nuclear reactions that power the sun. The only way to achieve such temperatures in a bomb is to set off a conventional fission weapon. At the center of every hydrogen bomb in the world’s nuclear arsenals today is a pit of plutonium, sometimes mixed with uranium, surrounded by high explosives. When the explosives go off, they compress the pit to start a chain reaction, which ignites the light elements adjoining the plutonium bomb. Making hydrogen bombs therefore requires making plutonium pits, and at the beginning of the 1950s all the plutonium for US bombs had to come from Hanford.