The Girls of Atomic City (17 page)

Three times as much.

It wasn’t the first such revision. Shortly after taking over the Project, the General had asked the scientists to estimate how much Tubealloy would be needed for testing and building the Gadget, and he wanted a degree of accuracy to go along with it.

Answer: The numbers were good within a factor of 10.

The General was flabbergasted. He was demanding, yes. Difficult, sure. Odd, perhaps. (An FBI investigation into his life revealed a habit of stashing chocolate in his safe.) But wanting a more accurate estimate was hardly unreasonable.

The size of the plants depended on the accuracy of these estimates.

Equipment purchases depended on the accuracy of these estimates.

The number of people needed to work in the plants depended on the accuracy of these estimates.

So for, say, 100 pounds of Product, wiggle room of a factor of 10 meant they might need 10 pounds or they might need 1,000. The General felt like a “caterer” told to “plan for between 10 and 1,000 guests.” The Y-12 plant alone originally required more than 38 million board feet of lumber. That was akin to building the catering hall without knowing how many guests were coming for dinner.

The first of the three Alpha buildings initially planned for Y-12 was up and running in September 1943, but that Christmas, the first in CEW’s existence, the General had traveled to CEW to shut it down for repairs. The magnets caused enough shimmying to pull the several tanks out of line. Unlike X-10, which was a much smaller version of the larger nuclear reactors being built at Site W, Y-12 was
the
plant. There was no pilot plant upon which to work out kinks. It was the only electromagnetic separation
plant
in the country—the world, for that matter. (Or so the Project hoped.)

A second Alpha racetrack was ready to go in the beginning of 1944, and by that March a Beta track was completed. The four Alpha tracks had finally begun operating together in April, four months later than planned. As estimates of the amount of Product increased, so did the number of calutrons. Despite challenges, the chips were still down on the electromagnetic separation process, though there was a growing hope that the K-25 plant, once up and running, would provide a more efficient and cost-effective mode for enriching Tubealloy. The idea was that eventually enriched material from K-25 would be fed into Y-12. But that wouldn’t happen without a working barrier.

So, the Project continued to explore other viable options. That’s where the fourth plant, S-50, came in.

MRS. H.K. RISES TO AN UNUSUAL OCCASION

Evelyn Ferguson (née Handcock) had been widowed just six months when she first met with the General. Her late husband, Harold Kingsley Ferguson, had been head of the H. K. Ferguson Company of Cleveland, Ohio, one of the most reputable constructors of war plants in the country. H.K. had had a go-get-’em attitude and a knack for getting factories done on time. Eve, an attractive and energetic woman, had often traveled with him on business. Now she traveled alone, a heart attack having taken her 60-year-old husband from her. She may still have been “Mrs. H.K.” to everyone who met her, but now the H. K. Ferguson Company—her husband’s legacy—was in her charge.

Eve’s meeting with the General was inspired by some compelling news he had received from the Scientist in Los Alamos. At the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Nobel Prize–winning physicist and codiscoverer of neptunium, Phil Abelson, had been working on enriching Tubealloy using a process called
liquid thermal diffusion.
He was, according to the Scientist, making excellent progress.

Liquid thermal diffusion employed concentric vertical pipes, cooled on the outside by water and heated on the inside by high-pressure steam. The different isotopes of Tubealloy—235 and 238—would rise up through the columns at a different rate, with the 235 adhering more closely to the heated surface and rising more rapidly than the 238, which preferred the cooler surface. A 100-column pilot plant was being built at the Navy Yard and would likely be finished midsummer, 1944. Couldn’t that slightly enriched Tubealloy also be fed into the insatiable monster that was Y-12?

It was not the first time that the Project had considered the thermal diffusion process. Abelson had successfully enriched a small amount of Tubealloy in 1941. The verdict was, at the time, that the process would take too long, cost too much—even by the Project’s spendthrift standards—and wouldn’t produce enough highly enriched Product for the Gadget. But advances had been made. Maybe now whatever enrichment liquid thermal diffusion could achieve might help move things along in the other plants.

The General sent a team to Philadelphia and liked their report. He decided a plant
could
be built at Site X, one that would be operational by 1945.

Enter Eve Ferguson. H. K. Ferguson Company’s motto was “We design, build, and equip your plant—one contract, one responsibility, one profit,” and it fit the Project’s modus operandi to a T. Simplicity. Delegation. Compartmentalization. A subsidiary company, Fercleve, was created to handle operation once the construction was complete. But things had to move fast. The General wanted the plant operational in 120 days and its features had to be, as he put it, a “Chinese copy” of the Abelson’s pilot plant. But much bigger.

Bigger! More! Now!

This was precisely the kind of challenge H.K. would have loved. “Stop worrying” he was once quoted as telling an under-the-gun manufacturer. “Leave the worrying to Hitler and Hirohito.” The new plant, code-named S-50, wouldn’t have a paltry 100 separation columns, but instead would boast 2,142: each 48 feet long, comprised of nickel pipes surrounded by copper pipes, then swathed in a cool jacket of water, and then wrapped snugly again in galvanized iron. The columns were gathered into racks, or groups, of 102 columns. The location would be near K-25, which would provide the much-needed steam for the process.

“You can’t win a modern war at thirty-five miles an hour,” H.K. once said, referring to his lead-foot tendencies on the road and in business. The General would likely have agreed. And a mere thirteen days after the General handed Eve Ferguson her company’s assignment, site clearing began. It was July 9, 1944: Eve’s 47th birthday and almost seven months to the day since she’d lost her husband. He couldn’t have done it better himself.

Perhaps father of the calutron Ernest Lawrence was right when he said the General’s reputation depended on the Project’s success. But the success of the Project depended not solely on the General nor the brilliance of the men in New Mexico.

The most ambitious war project in military history rested squarely on the shoulders of tens of thousands of ordinary people, many of them young women.

CHAPTER 6

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

To Work

Then we started stewing about the furnace and the laundry and the mud and the sitter problem—and forgot all about the project.

—Vi Warren,
Oak Ridge Journal

The contest had been the Engineer’s idea, though it was unclear if the young women even knew they were competing.

One of the Project’s more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic, and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists.

In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electromagnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence’s calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence’s team would work out the kinks for the calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.

Then the District Engineer gave Lawrence some surprising news: the “hillbilly” girls were generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs had. And Product was all that mattered.

A gauntlet had been thrown down.

The two men agreed to a production race. Whichever group generated the most enriched Tubealloy over a specified amount of time
would win—though “winning” only meant bragging rights for the Engineer or Lawrence.

By the end of the designated contest period, Lawrence and his PhDs had lost handily.

They just couldn’t stop fiddling with things, Lawrence thought, trying to make things run smoother, faster, harder. Still, he was surprised.

The District Engineer understood perfectly. Those girls, “hillbilly” or no, had been trained like soldiers. Do what you’re told. Don’t ask why.

He and the General knew that was how you got results.

★ ★ ★

Women occupied every corner of every workplace at CEW, from the personnel processing down to chemical processing. They were janitors, saleswomen, chemists, operators, and administrators. Those women who worked in personnel processing were considered a lucky bunch, as they often got first look at newly arrived men. News of a group of incoming GIs would spread rapidly through any affected offices. Oh-so-fortunate was the girl who filled out personnel security questionnaires (PSQs) for incoming men. Everything you wanted to know was there: age, marital status, education, where they were from. You name it. The PSQ had it all. In triplicate.

CEW was a social limbo in many ways, neither here nor there, where transplants felt at once rootless and immediately grounded. New place, no history, instant community. A fresh start for some. Most GIs were sent to CEW without their wives, and not all of the married men working on the Project—GI or not—were quick to share details of their marital status at a dance or the bowling alley. Some advertised their status, some did not. It made more than a few women a little leery about falling hard for anyone, and made those women who worked in personnel processing at any of the plants or administrative offices particularly valuable as friends, and they were routinely quizzed by friends about potential new suitors.

Is there a wife in the picture? Could you check . . .

Knowing something might mean bearing bad news. (Yes, there was a wife. Children, too.) Other times, the woman in the know could wave a friend on toward romantic bliss. Green light, all systems go. A quick, highly forbidden glance at a file was enough to send a potential girlfriend to the rafters with joy or sulking away in disappointment. In a world of secrecy, where infractions—including the unauthorized accessing of personnel files—could be punished with firing and eviction from your home, this kind of delving was nonetheless seen as a necessary risk.

★ ★ ★

Celia’s work in the Castle was happily predictable: she typed memos, took the transcription, completed insurance forms. She did not have to type or file any coded materials—words, numbers, strange names, and other gibberish—though some other secretaries did. “G.G.” visited now and then, and everyone continued to scurry like mice when he arrived. Celia still didn’t know why. It was a year later, and they had yet to be properly introduced.

Being on a day schedule meant no graveyard shift. This made it much easier to find time to spend with Henry, which she did, often meeting him for dinner. Lew had taken it all quite well. The friends continued to socialize together. In a town as small as Oak Ridge, if you lost a date you moved on to whoever had room on their dance card. No one knew how long they would even be living here—certainly not once the war was over.

Elsewhere in the Castle, Toni found herself on yet another coffee run. There were a number of secretaries in the pool who could have gotten coffee for the group visiting Mr. Diamond, but Toni had always been an antsy sort. Here was another opportunity to get up, move around, socialize.

Across the hall from Toni’s office was a room full of members of the Women’s Air Corps. As far as Toni could tell, all the WACs did was read newspapers. She struggled to remember a time when she saw them doing anything else. All day they sat, periodicals in their hands, intently scanning each page. Toni wasn’t the only one who had noticed; some of the other secretaries had, too, and a theory about
what they were doing had developed. (No one would dare ask the WACs directly.)

Word around the pool was that the WACs were looking for secret words in the papers, words the government didn’t want mentioned. What were the words that were off-limits? Neither Toni nor any of the other secretaries had the slightest. But when one of the WACs spotted an offending word, that newspaper got a visit from . . . well . . . Toni didn’t know that part, either. FBI, maybe? FBI had become a kneejerk response to many questions without obvious answers.

Who was back home asking about me? I don’t know, FBI?

Whom did he get in trouble with? I think FBI.

Toni’s work was routine, but the contracts she was always typing up for her immediate bosses in Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s section, Sgt. Glen Wiltrout and Sgt. Ed Whitehead, were a bit strange. Despite her inauspicious interview, Toni took a lot of dictation. It still didn’t make much sense, but often it was because of the words rather than Mr. Diamond’s accent.

To her mind, it sounded nonsensical, like repetitive, wordy say-nothingness:

The subcontractor is hired and is given the responsibility to do the work prescribed to get the assigned task done . . .