The Girls of Atomic City (23 page)

Her social life had changed a little now that she was seeing more of Henry. But she still saw friends she had met at the dorm, like Rosemary, and others who were part of the CYO group that met every week at Father Siener’s house for potlucks, Colleen among them. The potluck spirit. Everyone bring your own, everyone pay your own way. That was an idea Celia could get behind, even if the men were still playing catch-up.

★ ★ ★

Toni was sure that Sherry was the one to ask. Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s secretary was tall, blond, always well-put together, and rarely seen wearing the same thing twice.

A friend from Clinton had invited Toni to an ROTC dance at the University of Tennessee and even arranged for Toni’s date. Toni needed a dress and some transportation. (She was lucky when it came to nylons; her daddy now worked at Magnet Mills, the hosiery mill in Clinton.) Toni didn’t have time to go to Gay Street in Knoxville to find just the right frock.

She had celebrated her first paycheck on Gay Street, shopping there for her baby sister, “Dopey.” Toni remembered Dopey’s birth. She watched the doctor arrive with his bag—where she believed the baby was hiding—and waited on the porch until she was allowed inside. Toni had wanted no part of that baby, until, that is, her mother said this child was Toni’s. Toni liked that idea. Her parents directed Dopey to Toni for permission to play with her friends, or go for a soda. And though Toni could not remember ever owning a new thing in her life of hand-me-downs and homemades, she wanted her Dopey to have
proper
clothes.

But Toni herself was short one party dress. Sherry obliged, but would need the dress back. Another hand-me-down, but so be it. Toni stood at the gate and hitched a ride to the UT campus with a man leaving CEW, placing the dress on the backseat. When she got to campus, she looked for a bathroom so she could change.

That’s when it hit her.

Oh no . . .
she thought.
Sherry’s dress!
She had left it on the backseat of the stranger’s car, and he was long gone.

Not one to miss a party, Toni attended the dance in the clothes she’d worked in all day. But she still had to track down Sherry’s dress.

She knew which entrance the man used to enter the Reservation, so the next morning, at 4
AM
, Toni stood at the gate, desperately scanning cars. She wondered how to explain to Sherry she’d lost a dress that was supposed to be on her body the entire evening.

Then she spotted him. She waved furiously, and he pulled over and popped the trunk. He’d hidden the dress there for fear his wife might see it, leaving him to explain why another woman’s dress was on the backseat of his car.

When Toni got to work, she stopped by Sherry’s desk.

“Thanks,” Toni said. “It’s in excellent condition. I never took it out of the box.”

★ ★ ★

Toni considered herself the world’s luckiest scatterbrain.

Her badge . . . goodness, how many times she’d forgotten that. Her usual technique for avoiding trouble was to just keep talking. She would jabber on, chatting up the guards and trying to make them laugh, hoping they wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t wearing her badge while they were inspecting a car at the gate. More often than not, all her charm won her was a trip back to the dorm with an armed escort.

She had taken to wearing the badge on her jacket,
under
her lapel. It was easy that way, walking past the guards up to the Castle—she casually flipped over the strip of fabric to reveal the badge and kept moving. Then one day, as she walked with her boss, Sergeant Wiltrout, she mindlessly flipped over her lapel as she walked past the guards unaware of the fact that there was no badge underneath.

Shouts from the guards—“Stop! Don’t move! Where’s your badge!”—snapped her back to reality.

But unfortunately her instinct that day was not to stop and sweet-talk, but to break out instead into a full-on run.

She escaped, no worse for wear. But the next day when she arrived at work, Wiltrout read her the riot act.

“Toni,” he said, “they’re going to shoot you one of these days.”

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SECURITY, CENSORSHIP, AND THE PRESS

In August of 1944, the Allies were on the move toward Paris, hoping to wrest the City of Light from the dark cloud of Nazi occupation.

Scientists were mired in their own battles—one for the present (how to accelerate the timeline for the Gadget) and one for the future (what was the future of this science
beyond
the Gadget).

In mid-July, Dr. Zay Jeffries, a consultant with General Electric at the Met Lab in Chicago, had written Arthur Compton, the director of the lab, with an idea. There were going to be some questions that might arise, he believed, some issues regarding how to employ this new energy. Wouldn’t it be best to meet these head-on?

Obviously, no one can now foresee the future, but your group is in as good position as any to speculate—and intelligent speculation is all that can be done now. The speculation of men knowing the fundamentals of atomic energy as now disclosed should be far superior to the wild guesses of laymen . . .

Compton wanted Jeffries to head up a committee of scientists—Fermi the Italian Navigator and James Franck among them—to look into the field that Jeffries had termed “nucleonics” and to formulate ideas about what might lie ahead with this new energy in the postwar world. Comments were solicited and began to roll in within a week. They included a missive dated August 8, 1944, from M. C. Leverett, director of the engineering division of the Met Lab:

There is no intent to disparage the opinion that atomic power is a wonderful thing and has a revolutionary future. . . . Until we get it, we should not talk like magazine ads for postwar plastics . . . The possibilities should be viewed with the greatest optimism, but any commitments as to one’s ability actually to put atomic power to useful work should be made very conservatively . . .

★ ★ ★

Keeping the lid on this burgeoning science and its applications was one of the General’s biggest concerns, and one that grew more difficult the longer the Project existed and the bigger it grew. The General knew as early as 1943 that the Project would have to set up its own security staff to take over from the War Department’s Counterintelligence. Each facility had its own security officer and assistants. The General continued to believe that compartmentalization—compartmentalization of knowledge, of responsibility, of information—was the “heart of security.”

Germany was his primary concern. No other nation would be able to readily use any information they might be able to gather. Not Italy, not Japan. The General remembered his first week on the job when he’d learned that the Russians were using American Communist sympathizers to get info on the lab at Berkeley. And there were workers on the Project who had not, as far as he was concerned, been properly cleared. He decided that in addition to keeping the Germans from learning about the Project, they had to focus on keeping the Russians in the dark as well.

Every security protocol he put in play was guided by a simple rule: “Each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else.” People weren’t here to grow and learn, they were here to do a job. Period. Visually, living was separate from factories, factories were separate from each other, and ridges and valleys served to help further geographically detach it all. At work, floors might separate access as well as buildings, numbers, hierarchy. Top down, to each his own. There was no need to talk to anyone except those directly above or below you. None of the cogs needed to understand the size, shape, and purpose of the machine of which they were a vital part. In other words, the General felt, just “stick to your knitting.”

Employees would be screened for a variety of infractions, not all obvious. “We had to know if they were in trouble, or if they had bad companions,” Col. Stafford Warren, chief of the medical section, would later say. “Were they crooks, drug addicts, homosexuals, or things like that? We were not so worried about those particular items, per se, but by the fact that they would be vulnerable to pressure which might make them likely to say things that they shouldn’t if they were blackmailed.” Workers from other countries were trickier, but security did the best it could. The General knew there were those within the Project who considered his techniques too “Gestapo”—that was the term he’d heard. But he felt he was doing what was necessary considering the circumstances. When he first took over the Project, he was alarmed at how many people working for the Project hadn’t been cleared. The General also knew if they let someone with details about the Project go, that person was a major risk if he or she felt there wasn’t cause for dismissal.

Security measures also meant unions would not organize at CEW. Throughout the country, unions had limited rights within military organizations. Despite these restrictions, when the war was over, unions that had played nice with the Project would be in the perfect position to organize the existing labor force—thousands of workers deep—that was present in the monstrous new plants.

But there was no way to get extensive background on every construction worker or employee. The thoroughness of investigations varied according to what kind of job that individual was going to perform. Background checks might be as simple as fingerprints and a check for an arrest record for a truck driver to a full examination of a person’s life, if that person was a physicist with access to top secret information. Prints went to the FBI. Anyone guilty of such crimes as arson, narcotics, or rape was not hired. Public drunkenness? Well, they might be interviewed. There was a labor crisis, after all, and the Project had booze locked down on the Reservation—or at least they tried.

Dealing with the press was something else altogether.

On December 19, 1941, less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8985, establishing the Office of Censorship, which issued the Code of Wartime Practices for American Broadcasters and encouraged what was called “voluntary” censorship. The Project worked with the Office of Censorship and also individual editors. The situation was delicate, but the message was quite clear: No publishing anything that would disclose vital information or draw unnecessary attention to the Project.

Where
information was published also made a difference. Big-city newspaper stories were riskier because of readership size and visibility. The Project also did not want papers blindly reprinting articles from abroad. Good foreign intelligence agents would know how to take a tidbit from one source, add it to a smidgen from another, put it all together, and come up with enough of a theory for their governments to run with.

All papers and magazines were asked not to use certain phrases that might disclose what the Project was about, as seen in this June 28, 1943, memo, which went out to 20,000 news outlets:

. . . You are asked not to publish or broadcast any information whatever regarding war experiments involving: Production or utilization of atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atom splitting, or any of their equivalents. The use for military purpose of radium or radioactive materials, heavy water, high voltage discharge equipment, cyclotrons. The following elements or any of their compounds: Polonium, [tubealloy], ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium.

And, of course, mentioning the location of the Project’s sites or the General’s name was completely off-limits. Job advertisements, sports league results, or a war bond drive might make their way into the Knoxville paper, but rarely more.

The WACs that worked in the Castle with Toni and Celia did their part, scouring every publication, making sure periodicals stayed in line. Infractions might result in a call or visit from a Project representative.

Policing this policy had not been without oversights, ranging from local violations to wire stories. Enforcement was a challenge, and there were infractions: the Mutual Broadcasting Company mentioned Columbia University, atomic energy, and explosives in a broadcast. A newspaper in Atlanta wrote of the “hush-hush” Reservation outside Knoxville and referred to workers as “orderly, well-paid ghosts” who “pledged to unnecessary secrecy for the simple reason they do not know what they are working on.” Seeking to avoid a showdown between the Project and the press, heavy hands were replaced with those outstretched in patriotic cooperation. The press would be a reluctant partner rather than an adversary. As it was explained to them, everyone had the same goal in mind: Victory. Safety.

CHAPTER 8

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The One about the Fireflies . . .

Q: What are they making in those plants?

A: About 80 cents an hour.

Frances Smith Gates found the restrictions a bit trickier to maneuver than most. She was editor in chief of the
Oak Ridge Journal
now, a widow of a West Point graduate and officer who had been killed in the war, and not unfamiliar with Army life and the need-to-know approach to information exchange that went along with it all. There was other news to cover. There was no shortage of pictures, most of which were courtesy of Ed Westcott, the man with access to everything. Dances and Boy Scout clothing drives, cigarette lines, and war bond rallies; if you saw a picture of Oak Ridge or the Project, it was likely first glimpsed via the lens of the Photographer’s Speed Graphic camera.