The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  When the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, they heard the explosion and saw an enormous cloud rising over the city. A voice on the radio said, “Citizens of Nagasaki, get out, get out.” Then the radio went silent. Immediately, Mitsugi’s mother made plans to return to the city to find the husband, son, and daughter she had left behind. The children pleaded with her to stay. They could not survive without her, they cried. But she said that she had to go. Before she left, she gave them all the money she had and said, “If none of us survive, you must use this cash to do the best you can.”

  For three days, Mitsugi and his older sister and younger brother waited at the train station for their mother to return. A station master told them, “Nagasaki has been completely destroyed.” They talked among themselves about what to do. They were about to give up but did not know where to go. On their third night at the station, a hand shook Mitsugi awake in the middle of the night. He looked up and saw a ghost—a woman covered with dust, whose clothing was in shreds, her hair wild and flying about her face. It was his mother. Behind her stood his older brother and sister. She had found them and brought them back.

  They lived by the train station for several days. Mitsugi’s brother had been severely burned when the bomb destroyed the munitions factory where he was working. They had no medicine, so they applied grass to his wounds. His sister had been working in a wooden building that collapsed, but she was able to crawl out from under the debris.

  Someone told them that the war was over, and they decided to return home. As they walked through the cleared streets of Nagasaki, Mitsugi saw that nothing was left. They walked past demolished structures, through the smoke from funeral pyres. Mitsugi remembered the smell of burning flesh for the rest of his life. When they got to their house, they saw that the roof was gone but that the walls were still standing. Their father had survived. He had stayed home from his factory job the day of the bombing because the roof needed repairs.

  Seventy-three years later, retired from his lifelong job as an elementary school teacher, Moriguchi came to the Tri-Cities to tour the B Reactor and talk about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The trip was organized by a group called Consequences of Radiation Exposure, which Pritikin had established to work on issues important to Hanford downwinders. The B Reactor is not easy to reach—it requires a 30-minute bus ride each way from the edge of Richland—but it is by far the most impressive site in the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. It sits a half-mile or so from the Columbia River, its cinder block walls the color of the surrounding desert, a cenotaph to the horrors of war. If you know what you’re looking at, walking through the front entrance into the large room facing the reactor, where operators used to load uranium fuel elements into the process tubes, can take your breath away. The reactor is almost exactly the same as it was the day Enrico Fermi, Leona Woods, and Crawford Greenewalt started it up and watched it slowly succumb to xenon poisoning. The B Reactor Museum Association has placed exhibits in the building to explain its significance, which the National Park Service eventually will supplement and replace. As would be expected of displays erected by a group of engineers, they focus on the construction and operation of the machine, the technological feats it accomplished, and the ingenuity it embodies. The displays do not mention the destruction of Nagasaki or the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation posed by bombs containing Hanford’s plutonium.

  One of Moriguchi’s hosts at the B Reactor the day he visited was 90-year-old John Fox, a former mayor of Richland, a member of the B Reactor Museum Association, and an engineer who worked at Hanford for decades. At the urging of the Consequences of Radiation Exposure group, Moriguchi had brought a handheld dosimeter with which to measure the building’s radiation. He told Fox that if he stayed in the building for a year, his exposure would be greater than safety standards for the general public permitted. “We won’t keep you here for a year,” Fox replied.

  Speaking through a translator, Moriguchi seemed to be alternately amused and appalled by the reactor. He sat in the chair in front of the reactor control panel and had his picture taken. He wondered why the reactor displays made no mention of the suffering caused by the bombing of Nagasaki. “We learned it was going to become a national park, and we in Nagasaki are quite worried,” he said. “Was it going to become a national park to express pride? Or to promote reflection?”

  Fox and Moriguchi talked as they made their way through the reactor building. Fox told him about his work removing the fuel elements from the reactor and sending them to the canyon buildings. Moriguchi spoke about his sisters’ miscarriages in the years after the war and about the cancers that had ended his siblings’ lives. In 1945, Fox said, he was a young man about to enter the military and be sent to the Pacific. The bombing of Nagasaki “saved me from being drafted and participating in an invasion of Japan and ending up there dead on a beach,” he said.

  “I have nothing against patriotism,” said Moriguchi. “But I want people, in addition to loving their country, to love human beings, to love humanity.”

  The two men were not angry or accusatory. Their voices were wistful, as if their thoughts were far away. They were not asking for apologies. They seemed, rather, to be seeking simply an acknowledgment of what had happened, of what they had experienced, of what this place meant. At the end of the tour, both men had tears in their eyes. They stepped forward and hugged each other.

  EPILOGUE

  ENRICO FERMI WAS A MAN WHO LOVED TO SOLVE PROBLEMS. ONE DAY in 1950 he was walking with three other physicists to lunch at the Los Alamos laboratory. Inspired by a recent cartoon about flying saucers in The New Yorker, they were discussing whether extraterrestrial beings could travel from one planetary system to another. By the time they sat down for lunch, the conversation had turned to other subjects. Then, out of nowhere, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?”

  The others all laughed, because they knew what Fermi had done. He had run the numbers in his head. He had been thinking about the immense number of stars in the galaxy and the galaxy’s great age. Say that an advanced civilization evolved on a planet around one of those stars, and that this civilization developed the ability to travel from its own planetary system to another. Maybe it would take a spaceship a few hundred years to reach another star, maybe a few thousand. But once members of this civilization reached another planetary system, they (or more likely their descendants) could use it as a steppingstone to keep going. Certainly within a million years or so, Fermi figured, a technologically advanced civilization could spread to every habitable planet in the galaxy.

  But our galaxy is thousands of times older than that. Therefore, if such a scenario has even a slight chance of happening, it almost certainly would have happened by now. Since we have no good evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, the spread of intelligent beings across the galaxy must never have happened. This argument—that extraterrestrial visitors should have visited Earth but appear never to have done so—has become known as the Fermi Paradox.

  People have proposed dozens of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Maybe we are the only technologically advanced civilization that has evolved in the galaxy. Interstellar travel could be too difficult or expensive for civilizations to undertake. Maybe intelligent creatures quickly realize that broadcasting their existence to the rest of the galaxy is not a good idea, or maybe we’ve been quarantined from the galactic community for some reason.

  But the grimmest explanation seems the most likely. Advanced civilizations may not last long enough to launch themselves into space. Maybe they deplete their planet’s resources and decline. They might succumb to volcanic eruptions, meteoroid impacts, or exploding stars. Or, as soon as they discover nuclear energy, they blow themselves up.

  We have already come close to destroying ourselves several times. Reflecting on the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy thought that the odds of worldwide nuclear war had been at least one in three. One premise of the Fermi Paradox is that even unlikely events will happen eventually. If f
uture international crises have at least some possibility of going nuclear, human civilization will not last for long. People may be reassured that the number of warheads on Earth has declined by three-quarters since the end of the Cold War. But even before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the leaders of the Manhattan Project knew that numbers don’t matter with atomic bombs. Even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons, besides killing millions of people, would loft enough smoke into the atmosphere to cause widespread famine. A full-scale nuclear war would end food production on the planet for years. If the United States and Russia fired even a fraction of their warheads at each other, human civilization would likely end. And if we really are the only civilization in the galaxy, such an event would have cosmic significance.

  Given the possibility that any use of nuclear weapons could rapidly escalate into a more general conflagration, the only way to safeguard human civilization is to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the Earth. The best way to do that will be to rid the world of the materials bequeathed to it by the Manhattan Project—the uranium-235 and plutonium-239 that can be used to make atomic bombs. That does not necessarily mean abolishing nuclear power, which will almost certainly be needed to counter the potential calamity of global climate change. But it does mean eliminating the chemical process Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues pioneered in their Berkeley laboratory during that stormy night of February 24, 1941—the separation of plutonium from irradiated uranium. The reprocessing of reactor fuel to yield plutonium will always pose the risk that atomic bombs could be quickly reconstructed in a nuclear weapons–free world, whether by a breakout nation or by terrorists who somehow gain access to plutonium. Plutonium generated in nuclear reactors is safeguarded by the intense radioactivity of the fission products in fuel elements. But reprocessed plutonium that has been removed from fuel elements is too dangerous to permit its continued existence in this world.

  The abolition of nuclear weapons and all remaining fissile materials will require something that has been the antithesis of US policy since Seaborg and his fellow scientists quit publishing their research in the scientific literature at the beginning of World War II. The United States and all other countries will need to open their nuclear facilities, both civilian and military, to international inspections. All countries will need to agree to a verifiable and enforceable treaty that bans the manufacture and possession of fissile materials and nuclear weapons. All nations will need to agree to intrusive and rigorous inspections of their nuclear facilities. Any nation that violates the treaty will need to be subject to economic sanctions and to military responses with conventional forces.

  Many groups are working to achieve these goals. Direct action groups like Jim Stoffels’s World Citizens for Peace continue to draw attention to the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Groups founded by scientists, physicians, and other professionals are working for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons and fissile materials. A decade of advocacy by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons led to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by the United Nations in 2017. The nations that possess nuclear weapons have not signed the treaty, severely limiting its effectiveness. But it establishes a goal toward which the world can strive.

  Yet the United States and Russia—which together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons—are headed in exactly the wrong direction. They have steadfastly refused to adopt nuclear abolition as an objective. On the contrary, they continue to miniaturize and modernize their nuclear weapons, making it ever more likely that the moral abomination of nuclear war will someday occur.

  Beyond the threat that nuclear weapons pose to all humans and other living things is their outrageous cost. If even a portion of the trillions of dollars and rubles spent on such weapons had been devoted instead to health care, education, housing, transportation, energy research, and pollution control, people in the United States and in the former Soviet Union would lead better lives today, as would people around the world. Americans continue to spend an average of hundreds of dollars per person per year to maintain and upgrade our nuclear weapons. The decision to spend those resources on instruments of destruction has been an immense historical tragedy.

  I entitled this book The Apocalypse Factory not to shame the leaders of the Manhattan Project or the proud and resourceful workers at Hanford. Rather, I’m using the word apocalypse in its original sense. In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that’s Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold on a trade route linking Egypt and the Middle East. An apocalypse is a revelation—literally an uncovering—about the future that is meant to provide hope in a time of uncertainty and fear. Apart from the brilliance of its technological achievements, the story of Hanford is mostly a story of human misunderstanding, belligerence, and short-sightedness. Yet nuclear annihilation has not yet occurred. We have learned how to generate electricity using nuclear energy, and future reactor designs promise major improvements in safety. Many nuclear sites have been cleaned up, even if the remaining cost of cleaning up Hanford is daunting. We have many more things to clean up in this world, not just radioactive wastes but chemical wastes, dangerous biological agents, and the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide that we have emitted into the atmosphere. Hanford’s cleanup, if done persistently and well, could provide an object lesson in making the Earth whole again.

  One time, Fermi was walking with a group of friends next to an irrigation canal near Hanford. Such canals are common in the region. They carry water from the Columbia River to croplands, often quickly to avoid evaporation. Fermi was a good swimmer. He wondered if he could get into and out of such a canal without being swept away. Before his companions could talk him out of it, he took off his shirt and jumped into the canal. He was swept away.

  I’ve been in those canals. They’re killing machines. They carry you along too swiftly to swim. The concrete sides of the canals are mossy and smooth. There’s nothing to grab onto. Kids I knew drowned in those canals when the water swept them down a causeway or passed through a culvert.

  Fermi’s companions ran along the side of the canal, trying to catch up with him. Soon they saw him in the distance. He was standing on the road next to the canal, bleeding and shaken.

  We can get out of the mess we’ve created. It won’t be easy. It will take all the ingenuity we have. But we are ingenious creatures.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In 1984, Allen Hammond, editor of the magazine Science 84, sent me to Hanford to report on the decommissioning of the Shippingport, Ohio, nuclear reactor, the first commercial reactor in US history. As a Department of Energy official and I were driving across the sageland to the trench in which the reactor would be buried, we began passing, in the distance, immense concrete buildings. “What are those?” I asked him.

  “They’re the plants where we made plutonium for our nuclear weapons,” he told me.

  That has to be a great story, I thought.

  It took me a long time—and a move from Washington, DC, back to the state where I grew up—to figure out how to write about Hanford, but when I finally mentioned the idea to my friend and agent Rafe Sagalyn, he liked it immediately. So did my talented and insightful editor at W. W. Norton, Alane Mason. Over the ensuing months and years, Rafe and Alane both helped me shape and sharpen the story I had to tell. This book would not exist without their hard work.

  Also at Norton, Mo Crist, Julia Druskin, Amy Medeiros, Laura Goldin, Beth Steidle, and Sarahmay Wilkinson shepherded the book through production. Gary Von Euer copyedited the manuscript, Yang Kim designed the cover, and Rachel Salzman handled publicity.

  The Sloan Foundation, through its Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics program, provided me with a grant to support the researching and writing of this book. I’m very grateful to Doron Weber and his colleagues for their assistance.

  A book like this would not be possible without the
help of librarians and archivists, who continually amaze me with their enthusiasm in responding to the questions of authors. At the University of California, Berkeley, I’m grateful to the staff of the Bancroft Library for providing me with access to the journals of Glenn Seaborg. Also at Berkeley I’d like to extend my thanks to Doris Kaeo and Esayas Kelkile for a guided tour of Room 307 in Gilman Hall, where Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues first isolated plutonium that stormy night of February 24, 1941.

  At the Department of Energy’s Public Reading Room in the library at Washington State University–Tri Cities, Janice Scarano and her staff—Teresa Hall and Doug Sharpe—spent many hours with me going through materials on Hanford that they and their predecessors have been compiling and safeguarding for decades. The librarians at the Richland Public Library, including Ann Roseberry and Gavin Lightfoot, were very helpful in providing me with access to the materials in the Richland Collection.

  At the Library of Congress, Patrick Kerwin and his colleagues made it possible for me to work with the 1,020 boxes of materials that Glenn Seaborg left to the library. At the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, Greg Fleming and Daniel Meyer were equally helpful guides to the papers of Herb Anderson, Sam Allison, and Enrico Fermi and to the other resources in the library’s special collections. At the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, Lucas Clawson provided me with the papers of Crawford Greenewalt and Franklin Matthias and talked with me at length about DuPont’s role in building and operating Hanford. In the archives office of the National Academy of Sciences, Janice Goldblum provided me with materials from the committee that studied the feasibility of atomic bombs in 1941.