Atomic Women

by Roseanne Montillo

  The Argonne Forest was part of the Cook County Forest Preserve and was managed by a forest ranger and a handful of guards who were less than thrilled with their jobs. But every evening they seemed to take pleasure in cleaning their shotguns, something they practiced with a delicacy that bordered on deference. On one occasion, one of the guards accidentally discharged a round of pellets toward the offices. Fortunately, no one was working at that moment.

  Following her work at the Argonne Forest, Leona was sent to Hanford, Washington, to start up the plutonium production reactors.

  Hanford was a small village located at a bend in the Columbia River, downriver from the Grand Coulee Dam. For many years it had served as a center for several ranchers who had built their homes along the Columbia’s banks. The river and, more important, the dam, played a significant role in the government’s decision to choose that spot to build the plutonium production reactors. The dam made available more than 300 megawatts of electricity to power the construction, the pumps, and the city that would eventually spring up around the facility. And the reactor’s cooling systems required nearly 75,000 gallons of fresh water per minute, for which the Columbia River was ideally suited.

  Surrounding the few ranches, there was only vastness, a great empty space. It would be no trouble at all, officials felt, to lease some 500,000 acres. And those few ranchers who would be displaced would move elsewhere.

  When Leona arrived, she could see only empty land: the low hills across the Columbia River and, to the west, the foothills of Yakima Ridge, flanking the Cascade Range. There was an abundance of sagebrush, and she frequently spotted coyotes and rabbits. Sometimes she liked to watch flocks of geese as they flew across the Columbia and then returned at night—small dots speckling the sky.

  Because such a vast desert surrounded Hanford, they were often plagued by sandstorms. The wind blew sand in their faces, covering their bodies, getting in their hair and eyes. Storms could last two or three days and had the power to halt production.

  The project required not only scientists and engineers but also the help of hundreds, and eventually tens of thousands, of other workers. This gave job seekers from different walks of life the opportunity to be part of one of the most secret projects ever created. It was a mammoth operation. Pipefitters arrived daily, as did plumbers, bricklayers, canteen workers, and landscapers. Most of them were housed and worked in a camp made of temporary wood-framed buildings. The project brought extraordinary wealth to the area, as thousands of people arrived every day to work. By 1944, at the height of Hanford’s activity, the workforce hovered around 51,000 people. And of those, nearly 10 percent were women.

  The whole facility was built in a great hurry, the area bustling with carpenters, electricians, and everybody else arriving on the Northern Pacific Railroad. They mixed the sand and gravel already on the spot with cement and water to make concrete to build the reactor buildings, along the basins that would hold the cooling water. That water would stay there until the last trace of radioactivity was present, and then it would be dumped back into the Columbia River.

  The first reactor at Hanford become known as the B Reactor, and it was completed and operating in September 1944. Around the same time, other plants were finished, too, such as the ones needed to extract plutonium from irradiated slugs. It took less than a year to complete construction for the entire Hanford operation, and what rose in the Washington State desert was a gigantic complex that functioned completely on its own by early 1945. And soon enough, Hanford was able to produce the amount of plutonium that was needed for the July 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico as well as for the Nagasaki bomb.

  Enrico Fermi arrived at Hanford almost two weeks before the first plutonium reactor started up. When the time came to fuel up the large reactor, Leona and Fermi walked quietly around the control room, checking every knob, looking at graphs and charts, trying to appease bosses who had come in for the momentous occasion.

  The slow, easy movement of pulling out the rods, step-by-step, one by one, began. It was not unlike the experiment back at Stagg Field. However, this was of a much larger scale, and the witnesses were the tough employers whose expectations were much greater: the military and the government. The reactor was performing as it should have.

  Once again, all the scientists knew what they were supposed to be doing and went around the room controlling outlets, inspecting wires, taking readings, and talking to one another in whispers, as if fearing the reactors would hear them and decide to act capriciously.

  But then something odd happened, and Leona appeared to be one of the last to find out that there was something wrong with the apparatus. The radioactivity in the pile was slowing down, decreasing beat by beat, which was not supposed to happen. Slowly, the power dropped, until it died down completely. The initial excitement in the control room was now gone, replaced by an overwhelming sense of doom. No one said anything for a few moments.

  Leona had noticed the peculiar drop, she admitted to Fermi. It had been linear. Maybe a water leak had caused it and it wasn’t necessarily anything to do with radioactivity. Fermi agreed to have some testing done, but he wanted to wait until the morning, as he suspected that the problem was not as grave as they thought.

  Overnight, as one of the operators kept watch on the apparatus, he saw the pile restart and then go through the same process of shutting down just moments later. It repeated the operation a second time.

  For several days, operators, scientists, technicians, electricians, engineers, and everyone else involved in the construction of the pile watched as the apparatus shut down on its own, then restarted again. They made calculations, looked at possibilities, and tried to figure out what could possibly be happening. Finally, Fermi calculated that if all the extra holes of the reactors were loaded with uranium slugs, the reactors would have enough radioactivity for a successful operation. As indeed it did. There was no more shutting down. The reactors performed successfully, producing the first patches of plutonium, which were then shipped off to Los Alamos, where the makings of the atomic bomb were already under way.

  Leona Woods married John Marshall in July 1943 and soon thereafter became pregnant. She moved around the building in large overalls and oversized denim jackets, which were her usual work clothes. Her pockets often contained pens, papers, pliers, notebooks, and rulers, all of which provided additional bulk, and for months her colleagues did not realize that she was pregnant.

  She arrived early in the morning by bus, one of those army-issued ones that had neither heat nor other comforts. It was painted blue for some reason, and the color made her queasy. It was not an easy trip, particularly for a pregnant woman. Her morning included the rough ride to the laboratory and a quick dash to the bathroom to vomit, and then she headed to her office to begin her day.

  The laboratory was nearly thirty miles away from the hospital where she was planning to give birth. Fermi worried that she would not be able to reach medical help in time if her labor came on suddenly. Initially, he did not tell Leona, but he had asked his wife, Laura, about childbirth lessons, just in case he had to deliver Leona’s baby himself. When Leona found out, she vowed that this would be an experiment he would not get to perform—something that she suspected he would be highly disappointed about. Neither one had to be worried. As it turned out, while at home one night she felt ill, her blood pressure spiked, and she was rushed to the hospital. Two days later, she left with a baby.

  While in the hospital, she recalled a time when she and a coworker were irradiated with a large dose of gamma rays. Her white blood cells quickly dropped to half the normal level, although at the time she hadn’t been worried; she had actually been more concerned with any leaks that might have occurred in the experiments. None had happened, and the work was later completed properly.

  She had continued to feel tired for a while and sought medical aid from the doctors at the Met Lab. But rather than helping her, they had lectured her about the proper duties of a woman and how many eg
g cells a female possessed. Did Leona know that she had only a certain number of good eggs, and that they could be easily destroyed by the radiation? She would never be able to procreate if she went down this path, the doctors told her, adding that perhaps she should have chosen a different career. She was left feeling ashamed and dumbfounded. Even though her colleague Willard Libby was irradiated in the same incident, she later learned that he had not been lectured about his sperm count.

  But now she had her baby, proof enough that the irradiation had caused her no harm.

  Leona returned to work shortly after the birth of her son, as her mother was willing to help take care of the child, the household duties, and whatever else needed to be done to keep Leona’s house running smoothly. The older woman practically ran Leona’s domestic life, which Leona didn’t mind. Her expertise was needed, she knew, and she was eager to get back to work.

  chapter seventeen

  The Los Alamos Visit

  In 1945, Maria Goeppert-Mayer visited Los Alamos. She left her children with a nursemaid and did not tell Joseph Mayer where she was going or why. On arriving in New Mexico, she met with Laura Fermi, whose family had been living in Los Alamos since the summer of 1944.

  Although she had not told her husband the reason for her trip, he sensed that his wife was involved in the development of the bomb, though he did not know to what extent. As much as he wanted to know, he was aware of the secret nature of the experiments and tried not to push her to disclose more than she was comfortable revealing. Joseph Mayer had also been invited to join the confidential project, but he had refused, unable to take the endeavor seriously. He found the idea of building such a weapon ridiculous and did not want to become entangled in a project that would certainly end in failure, he told officials. However, Joseph did not know that Enrico Fermi had been able to operate the first atomic pile beneath the stands of the University of Chicago stadium. And he also did not know of the work happening at Oak Ridge or Hanford, much less at Los Alamos.

  From Maria’s point of view, it was a strain on her marriage to keep that secret from Joseph. She also feared for Germany and its people. She despised Adolf Hitler but loathed the idea of harm coming to the good people of her country.

  As Maria traveled to Los Alamos and toured the facilities, she was overwhelmed with fear. She tried to pinpoint what that gnawing presentiment was about and realized that two factors were nagging her: She was worried that Hitler and his scientists had already advanced far enough in their designs and constructed a bomb; and she was also afraid that the Americans would soon succeed in building and detonating the bomb themselves. As a scientist, she wanted to see an experiment come to fruition; she wanted to see the work come to light. And yet, what would happen when it did? How many innocent lives would be lost because of their doings? And how many lives would be lost because of the doings of a madman?

  Her internal conflict was originally ignited by loyalty to her mentors. Max Born, the man she had gone to when her father passed away, the man who had put aside his own inner demons to help her wrestle with hers, had refused to help the British in their atomic projects; and James Franck, her former professor, had raised loud questions about the morality of unleashing such a powerful bomb on innocent people. Few had listened to him.

  She knew that her husband would be able to understand her sense of loyalty to her family and friends, to her nation, and, to a certain extent, to the good people who still existed in Germany. Yet she could not tell him. And she certainly could not tell her children. She felt torn. And that rip was destroying her.

  chapter eighteen

  Coming to America

  Elizabeth Rona was still in Europe. The finicky American immigration policies were not allowing her to travel, and she was becoming antsy.

  US officials had already invited Elizabeth’s friend Lise Meitner to visit Los Alamos to see how their work was progressing and what they were planning. They had nearly begged her to go. But Lise had declined. Officials knew she was unhappy in Sweden, and they had come to believe that time away from her current environment would be good for her, and for them. They had made many offers and tried to entice her with a terrific visiting schedule to Los Alamos, but she always said no. She knew that it was not out of generosity that the Americans had asked her to travel to the United States, nor to simply look at their facilities; it was because they wanted her to work on the bomb.

  The British delegation heading to Los Alamos also tried to persuade Lise to join them as their guest in New Mexico, but she had once again adamantly refused. “I will have nothing to do with a bomb,” she told them, this time more firmly.

  The idea that people could die because of something she had done weighed heavily on Lise, although it had not always been so. In fact, early in her career, morality had not even entered her mind. She could pinpoint the precise moment when she began to question a scientist’s place in the grand scheme of things and her own responsibility toward others.

  She recalled that day in Berlin. In 1914, World War I had broken out. Hahn had been called into the service by the German army, and within their circle he was no longer Professor Hahn but Lieutenant Hahn. One day, in full uniform, he had spoken at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry to a group of scientists and professors, many of whom were about to leave the institute to perform their own military duties.

  Lise appeared not to understand the gravity of the situation. “But why now?” she had asked Hahn. “Just when we’ve hit upon isotopes!” It struck some as an unusually selfish way to be looking at the outbreak of war, but then she had never been confronted with the possibility of war before.

  She, too, would have to do her part, she was told. She was going to become an X-ray nurse with the Austro-Hungarian Army, where she would come face-to-face with the perils of war and the damages of conflict, both on the body and on the mind.

  In a way, she was following in the footsteps of her idol: Marie Curie had also left her laboratory for the battlefield, driving a vehicle people had dubbed the “Little Curie,” upon which she carried X-ray equipment and other materials used on the front lines. Did Marie Curie reflect on the horrors of war? Did she face the moral dilemmas Lise was now pondering? There was no way of knowing, but Lise suspected that it was impossible to come face-to-face with the evil of combat and not wonder about one’s role in it.

  As she helped the wounded and looked at their X-rays, Lise was shocked by what she saw. The injuries were horrendous, insidious, and deadly, and more often than not, the patients died a long and painful death.

  But as she considered those deaths, she also thought of Marie and Pierre Curie, whose lives had inspired her own. The Curies had worked as much as possible because they had suspected that radium existed, that it was there to be discovered. It was their scientific curiosity that had prompted them to move forward, not some grand design. The same scientific curiosity to discover had pushed Lise’s own work.

  That the Curies’ curiosity led to X-rays was a beneficial outcome, but one they had really not intended. It had just happened. Yet radium could also kill those who inhaled it for too long.

  The brutal conditions, the gruesome wounds that Lise saw, gave her a deeper understanding of human nature and of her role as a scientist in the world at large. She felt a growing obligation to ask questions she had never bothered with before: Did she have a responsibility toward her fellow human beings? Did she have to think about the repercussions of what she did before she embarked on experiments? And if so, should the answer stop her from more elaborate scientific inquiries? Things no longer seemed as clear-cut as they had during her early university days.

  Now another war was being fought, and she decided she did not want to go to America and leave her family and friends in Europe, not knowing what would happen to them. She would rather take her chances in Europe, she told everyone. She wanted to remain where she was, she repeated to the British and the Americans. She did not want to have anything to do with a bomb.

&n
bsp; Unlike Lise Meitner, Elizabeth Rona had decided to leave Europe. She felt there was no reason for her to remain in Hungary any longer than necessary. She watched as her country was threatened on both sides: to the east, there were the Russians, and to the west, the Germans. She hoped that Hungary would remain free, but there was no reason for her to stay.

  Her application to go to the United States through the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars had been denied. This program, which found teaching positions in American universities for teachers, scientists, and scholars persecuted by the Nazis, had seemed like the perfect way out of Europe for her. She had not been surprised by the denial, though she was deeply disappointed. Elizabeth would have to find another way to reach America.

  She did receive a visitor visa, which allowed her to enter the United States for a limited period. Before leaving, she took a short detour to Vienna to visit a friend, who picked her up at the train station and drove her to the home of her former boss, Stefan Meyer. There she found old friends who had gathered to say their good-byes.

  Despite the fact that her scientific skills were needed on the Manhattan Project, Elizabeth had yet to hear from any of the project’s officials. She was confident that eventually something would open up that would make use of her talents. In the meantime, she walked the streets of her new city. She loved New York City, the excitement that permeated its neighborhoods and its streets. In fact, she enjoyed everything about this new country, particularly the fact that in America she didn’t need to hide what little money she had behind wood paneling, as she had as a young woman.