The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

by Denise Kiernan

Early reports that the atomic bomb could keep killing long after its blast had subsided were dismissed by the US military as propaganda. The Allied occupation of Japan, from the end of the war through April 1952, made it easier to censor news reports. For this reason, both the Japanese and American public were slow to learn of the longer-lasting consequences of this new weapon.

  Bernard Hoffman, renowned photographer with Life magazine, who had already documented the concentration camps in Germany, was the first American photojournalist to document the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His pictures were featured in the October 15, 1945, issue of Life, the day Stafford Warren returned from his examination of the sites. The devastation was evident, but the mysterious ongoing deaths remained in the background, easily masked by the dust and ash that covered what remained of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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  On October 25, 1945, lead Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer visited President Truman.

  No one else in the world yet had the bomb and Truman wanted to do everything he could to keep it that way, to continue to keep the bomb and its technology secret.

  What was commonly referred to as the Smyth Report had been prepared at the behest of General Groves and under the supervision of the War Department by Henry DeWolf Smyth. Smyth was the chairman of Princeton’s physics department and worked as a consultant with the Manhattan Project and the Army Corps of Engineers. His report told the story of the Project from 1940 through 1945. Copies were available for purchase, and Oak Ridgers snapped them up.

  Some higher-ups in the military worried the report gave too much away. However, as Vi Warren pointed out, residents would find little about their contributions within the pages. The veil of secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project had hardly been fully lifted. As the preface explained:

  “Secrecy requirements have affected both the detailed content and general emphasis so that many interesting developments have been omitted.”

  But Oppenheimer and others did not believe it was possible to keep the details about atomic power secret: The majority of the scientists that helped develop the bomb didn’t feel that hoarding the information was the route to take as the world moved into an uncertain nuclear future.

  That fall day, just two and a half months after the bombings, Oppenheimer told Truman he felt he had “blood on my hands.”

  Truman didn’t like what he was hearing from the scientist who’d helped make the bomb a reality. Blood on his hands?! Truman didn’t have any patience for a “cry-baby scientist” or, as he and the Appalachians would have said, “bellyachin’.” Truman told Oppenheimer that if anyone had blood on his hands, it was Truman himself. Then he made it clear to his staff that he never wanted to see Oppenheimer again.

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  In September, the teeth that had been removed from Ebb Cade’s mouth (patient HP-12) in March were sent to Los Alamos.

  Dated September 19, 1945, the following memo was addressed to Mr. Wright Langham, part of the analytical chemistry group at Los Alamos, where he developed a method for assaying trace amounts of plutonium in urine. The memo was sent to Langham in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It read:

  Inclosed [sic] is a brief resume of E.C.’s medical history, and a graphic record of the patient’s hospital course is forwarded under separate cover. The jaundice which this patient developed was apparently an infectious jaundice from which he recovered before his discharge from the hospital. At the time of discharge the patient was ambulatory and in good condition. Approximately 15 teeth have been extracted by Captain Peter Dale, and the rate of healing of the extraction sites was within the limits of normal. More bone specimens and extracted teeth will be shipped to you very soon for analysis. We would appreciate receiving your records of the complete analyses on the urines [sic], feces, bone samples, and teeth at your earliest convenience.

  For the District Engineer: Very truly yours, David Goldright, Captain, Medical Corps, Assistant.

  Conflicting language in memos such as this from the Atomic Energy Commission’s archives and later oral histories conducted by the Department of Energy tell two different stories: One, that Ebb Cade had been discharged, and another, that he had, one day, just up and disappeared. What is known for certain is that within eight years of this memo, Ebb Cade died and was buried in Greensboro, North Carolina. The cause of his death was listed as heart failure. He was about 61 years old.

  Ebb Cade was not the only test subject. It turned out that between 1945 and 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium, specifically: 11 at Rochester, New York, 3 at the University of Chicago, 3 at UC San Francisco, and 1, Ebb Cade, at Oak Ridge. Several thousand human radiation experiments were conducted between 1944 and 1974. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate these and other experiments funded by the United States government. Their final report was published in 1996.

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  In November 1945, just three months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics would go to Wolfgang Pauli and that Otto Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of fission. (The award had been delayed by the war.)

  But Lise Meitner, the colleague to whom Hahn turned to explain his findings, was not honored. The decision to exclude Lise Meitner from any prize that year shocked many in the scientific community. Lise herself thought it was “unjust” and “almost insulting” that she was referred to in the press as Hahn’s junior associate.

  The award ceremony wouldn’t take place until December 1946. Earlier that year, Lise had traveled to the United States, giving seminars and meeting friends. At a dinner of the Women’s National Press Club, Lise was honored as The Woman of the Year and met President Truman. “So,” Truman reportedly said, “you’re the little lady who got us into all this.” Lise later attended a cocktail party at which she met General Groves for the first time, where another guest reported the pair had little to say to each other. She recoiled at a script she saw for the 1947 MGM film The Beginning or the End, which she said was “nonsense.” She believed the film perpetuated the fabrications made earlier about the manner of her departure from Germany, depicting Lise escaping with, as she said, “the bomb in my purse.”

  The Nobel ceremonies were held December 10, 1946, in Stockholm, and Lise attended. During Hahn’s time in Stockholm, Lise was portrayed in the press as a student, an assistant, further diminishing her role in the fission discovery. After Hahn and his wife left Sweden, Lise wrote to a friend:

  “I found it quite painful that in his interviews [Hahn] did not say one word about me, to say nothing of our thirty years together.”

  Lise Meitner was not the only woman whose contributions to the discovery of fission remained obscured. In 1989, Emilio Segrè, a key member of Enrico Fermi’s team in Rome, wrote the following in Physics Today:

  Another error was in not paying enough attention to a 1934 article by Ida Noddack in Berlin, who criticized our chemistry and pointed to the possibility of fission. Much has been said of her prescience. Her article was certainly known to us in Rome, to Hahn and Meitner in Berlin and to Joliot and Curie in Paris. If any of us had really grasped its importance, it would have been easy to discover fission in 1935.

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  In the months and years that followed the war, the ebullient mood of victory became tempered by the emerging reality that international relations would never be the same and neither would Oak Ridge. With the revelation of the technology that had created the bomb, the worlds both within and beyond CEW’s still-standing fences oscillated between fear of atomic war and the anticipation of new scientific frontiers.

  Oak Ridge was a city in flux. By the end of 1946, its population had dropped to 42,465 from a peak of nearly 75,000 in 1945. Dorm services were reduced and rents increased. Employment dropped to 28,737 from 82,000. Much of this was due to the shutdown by the end o
f 1946 of all of Y-12’s calutrons except for the pilot units and those in the Beta-3 building. This alone left roughly 20,000 people with no jobs. S-50, the thermal diffusion plant, was shut down on September 9, just one month after the bombing of Nagasaki. The vacated plant was used initially to research the possibility of nuclear-powered aircraft.

  As the nuclear arms race ramped up, K-25 became the primary uranium enrichment facility and would continue to produce weapons-grade uranium until 1964, when the large U-shaped icon of Oak Ridge was finally shut down and smaller facilities such as K-27 focused on enriching uranium to only around 3 to 5 percent, enough for nuclear power reactors. This uranium fueled reactors in a number of countries, among them Japan.

  The X-10 plant (which became known as the Oak Ridge National Lab in 1948) began to grow its role in scientific research, notably in the field of radioisotopes. On August 2, 1946, a ceremony was held at Oak Ridge’s graphite reactor in honor of a shipment of one millicurie of Carbon-14 from Oak Ridge bound for the Barnard Free Skin and Cancer Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. It was the first-ever shipment of a radioisotope for medical purposes.

  One day earlier, August 1, 1946, President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, which outlined the development and regulation of military and civilian use of nuclear matter and provided for government control of fissionable material. “It is reasonable to anticipate, however,” it stated, “that tapping this new source of energy will cause profound changes in our present way of life.” This act also meant that a new civilian commission was taking over from the Manhattan Engineer District, a change that officially went into effect January 1, 1947.

  Oak Ridge continued experiencing growing pains, as the people who lived there worked to build a future never anticipated by the Project.

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  Three years after the AEC came to be, smoke billowed and a miniature mushroom cloud hovered above Elza Gate at the Clinton Engineer Works. The throng surged en masse toward the gate where the ceremonial ribbon—flammable magnesium tape—had just been ignited. Everyone wanted to be among the first to walk through Elza Gate freely: no inspection, badge-free.

  It was March 19, 1949. Crowds had gathered for a street-busting parade that marched down Tennessee Avenue near Jackson Square, through Townsite, along the heart of the outpost-cum-town. President Truman did not attend, but Alben Barkley, his Kentucky-bred vice president, did, alongside congressional representatives, military brass, and Hollywood starlets.

  Opening the gates and eliminating the badges and the guards elicited mixed reactions. Security checks that had once seemed a nuisance had for many become a comfort. Many residents had grown to like the idea that anyone who did not belong in Oak Ridge was not permitted to enter. In a sense, the gates lent a feeling of belonging and exclusivity, the kind gated communities of the future would purport to offer. Inside the gates there were rules. There were jobs. Opening them meant Oak Ridge might become like any other town.

  Opening the gates was the first step the AEC took toward transforming Oak Ridge into a self-governing municipality. This effort began in 1948 and was not initially popular. In 1953, after the gates had been down roughly four years, a town meeting vote regarding incorporation was roundly rejected by a margin of nearly four to one. Nevertheless, Oak Ridge was entering a new phase, moving toward a future few had planned for.

  “Oak Ridge is a city without a past not destined for a future,” District Engineer Kenneth Nichols had written. The Manhattan District’s plans never included a blueprint for the post-Gadget Oak Ridge. But even if the plan in 1942 had been to close up shop, it would likely have been abandoned in the face of the Cold War. Now the great transition had begun.

  The postwar housing plan for Oak Ridge had fallen again to the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, as it had when CEW first began. The firm anticipated the need for many new neighborhoods once some of the hastily constructed housing was torn down or simply ceased to be usable any longer.

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  In 1954, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 had been amended to include a greater focus on nuclear power and allowed for the private ownership and management of nuclear power plants.

  But President Eisenhower soon passed another act, one that did not garner the same attention but that directly affected Oak Ridge. The Atomic Energy Community Act of 1955 provided for the self-governing of Oak Ridge and private ownership of homes and land. Control of the town of Oak Ridge began to more fully leave the hands of the military.

  Residents began purchasing land and building homes or simply buying the ones they had been renting from the government. The A, B, C, and D houses that lined the streets began to take on individual style: garden beds, sun porches, a touch of masonry flesh adhered to prefab bones. But the challenges of living under military supervision were replaced by the challenges of living without it: the possibility of unemployment, the need for police, jails, more schools, public transportation, and local elections. As the mantle passed, yet another vision of the city had to be born. The pioneer spirit that had carried residents through the war now had to evolve into an entrepreneurial one.

  Frustrations with the “new” Oak Ridge were played out in private, in the press, and even onstage. On March 20, 1957, Oak Ridge took another step toward independence when Governor Frank Clement signed the Oak Ridge Law into effect, providing for the town’s incorporation. Then finally, on May 5, 1959, Oak Ridgers elected to incorporate. The vote was 5,552 for, 395 against. The military and the AEC reduced its role in administration of the community, and by June of 1960, Oak Ridge was a fully independent, “normal” town.

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  “The Atom Bomb! Is it a blessing, or will it smash humanity? . . . Can Enemies Strike America? . . . Slave—or Destroyer? . . . Magic of Uranium . . . Atom Power in Your Home! . . .”

  With the advent of the Atomic Age came both trepidation and fascination, as evidenced on this cover of one of Jane’s 25-cent serial magazines. And as the cloud of mystery lifted—or at least dissipated a bit—from the Manhattan Project, a new darkness fell. Dread of “the bomb” combined with the promise of the power of the atom in your kitchen or garage. Uranium mining by private companies with government contracts took off. The AEC set uranium prices, and hungry prospectors, speculators, and mine workers came out of the woodwork, swarming to places like Moab, Utah.

  Schools in Oak Ridge—and across the country—grew accustomed to disaster drills as the Cold War descended upon the country like a blackout curtain. Information about the US Atomic program had made its way to the Soviet Union via Klaus Fuchs; David Greenglass, a.k.a. “Kalibr”; and George Koval among others. Greenglass and Koval had both spent time in Oak Ridge during the war, Koval for nearly a year. Greenglass was the brother of Ethel Rosenberg and passed information to her and Julius Rosenberg with the help of his wife, Ruth. When his role was uncovered in 1950, Greenglass’s eventual testimony resulted in the death penalty for the Rosenbergs and no charges for Ruth. He served a 15-year sentence. The Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear bomb on August 29, 1949, in Semipalatinsk, Kazakh. It was an implosion-type bomb, like Fat Man, sketches of which Greenglass had provided the Soviets.

  In 1950, the Federal Civil Defense Administration gave us “Bert the Turtle,” who taught folks how to “Duck and Cover.” The atomic bomb inspired everything from Pernod-infused cocktails—first served at the Washington Press Club within hours of the announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima—to music and movies, air-raid drills to luxury fallout shelters. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had landed in movie theaters in 1953, kicking off an age of movie monster madness and featuring as a major plot point the “only isotope of its kind this side of Oak Ridge,” humanity’s only hope of killing the beast. Oak Ridge had gone from secret to the center stage of a new world, which both enthralled and frightened people. Fear of the newer, far more powerful hydrogen bomb coexisted with the warm, fuzzy Walt Disney production “Our Friend the Atom.” There was an edge to ex
istence in this new age that the end of World War II was unable to soften.

  By the time Oak Ridge earned its independence in 1960, J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist of the Manhattan Project, had been deemed a security risk and stripped of his clearance. The Korean War had come and gone, and with it the threat of another atomic bombing, this time under the leadership of President Eisenhower. Shortly after the end of that Cold War conflict, President Eisenhower addressed the United Nations, saying:

  But let no one think that the expenditure of vast sums for weapons and systems of defense can guarantee absolute safety for the cities and citizens of any nation. The awful arithmetic of the atomic bomb does not permit of any such easy solution. . . .

  In 1961, the Soviets detonated the largest nuclear weapon in history over the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. It was a 58-megaton explosion, 4,000 times as powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Almost 18 years to the day after the first wartime use of an atomic bomb, August 5, 1963, representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear tests and explosions under water, in the atmosphere, or in outer space. Underground testing was still permitted. President John F. Kennedy ratified the treaty on October 7, 1963, shortly before his assassination on November 22.

  Oak Ridge, a city born of a secrecy now long revealed, a reservation once under military control and now fully independent, had played a role in altering the course of history, warfare, power, and technology. The Cold War would prevail for a time and eventually pass into memory as Oak Ridge’s place on the atomic landscape evolved further still, history and public opinion perpetually shifting beneath it.

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  Change came also for the Girls of Atomic City.

  Jane had married Jim Puckett, the man who had carried her suitcase up the stairs of the Guest House that very first day she arrived in Oak Ridge. She had found other work at Y-12 and continued to work there as a statistician. Uranium was still being enriched, weapons stockpiled, and an entirely new industry in Oak Ridge was growing as scientists sought to put the tiny atom to big use beyond nuclear material for the bomb it had helped create.