Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The Plutonium Files (17 page)
In Los Alamos, the debate over using the bomb was muted, in part a testament to the charismatic leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer as well as the crushing workload. Los Alamites were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The momentum of the technology itself was driving the project forward, and many scientists were intensely curious to see if the “gadget” would work.
Stafford Warren knew the detonation of an atomic bomb could release radioactivity equivalent to a ton of radium, or a million grams, into the atmosphere. “Now before the war, hospitals and doctors treating cancer thought they were in marvelous shape if they had a quarter of a gram or maybe a few milligram needles … and when you thought of a ton and a million grams, my God!”
Trinity site, the place where the first atomic test would be conducted, was about 230 miles south of Los Alamos in the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) valley.
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The Jornada was a treacherous shortcut on the Camino Real, the King’s Highway that linked old Mexico to Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico.
By early May, the engineers were constructing the tower from which the weapon would be dropped. Oppenheimer established a new organization within the lab called Project TR to oversee test preparations.
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The laboratory’s official history indicates that Project TR did not include a medical group until a month later, a small oversight that again demonstrates the second-class status of the medical doctors. They were the last hired, the last to be brought into planning on critical projects. Although the physicians grew accustomed to their lowly status, a tinge of bitterness often crept into their voices when they discussed their roles with historians after the war. “Everybody was too busy with getting the bomb fabricated to worry about what happened afterwards.
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In fact, we’d get brushed off,” Stafford Warren recalled years later. Hymer Friedell, his sidekick, described the men assigned to oversee health and safety operations as “hangers on.”
High-level officials at Los Alamos did not give serious attention to fallout hazards until a few months before the detonation, when two of their physicists, Joseph O. Hirschfelder and John Magee, did a wideranging study and concluded that radioactive debris might pose a more severe hazard than anyone had predicted.
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“In spite of all this work,” Hirschfelder remembered, “very few people believed us when we predicted radiation fallout from the atom bomb.
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On the other hand, they did not dare ignore this possibility.”
Leslie Groves assigned Stafford Warren the task of making sure none of the test participants or nearby residents was injured by the radioactive fallout. Hirschfelder said that he and Magee were Stafford Warren’s “chief helpers,” but their mission had such low priority that they had to borrow an automobile from a friend to get to Trinity.
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Warren also received help from Louis Hempelmann and members of his health group, who included James Nolan, Wright Langham, and Paul Aebersold, the
Berkeley scientist who had lent Robert Stone a hand in his prewar neutron experiment and had recently transferred to Los Alamos.
In the weeks leading up to the test, the men toured the blast area, studied topographical maps, consulted with meteorologists, and read everything they could about the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, the largest explosion ever recorded. Although they were both deathly afraid of flying, Warren and Hempelmann flew over the Trinity site. From their light aircraft, the doctors could see that there were “a lot of people” living in the vicinity of the test area. “We suddenly discovered Indian reservations there with lots of people.
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And then there were dude ranches that somebody hadn’t thought to mention,” Warren remembered.
After Warren developed a reasonably good idea of what the fallout pattern would be, he spent twenty-four hours drafting an evacuation plan for Leslie Groves.
I asked for a couple of hundred troops, jeeps, and trucks, because General Groves had told me that he would have the power of marshal law—he had talked with the governor—and that I would operate under that at that time.
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So I said to myself that if I needed to evacuate people, I would have to have armed troops to go in and take them out. Suppose grandma was cooking dinner and she says, “The heck with you boys.” These were independent people and had been living that way. They frequently had a rifle behind the door and wouldn’t take any nonsense.
General Groves initially scoffed at Warren’s safety plan, but eventually he ordered a couple of military trucks and more than 150 troops to stand by in case the surrounding towns needed to be evacuated. Leaving nothing to chance, Warren also directed that two planes remain on standby in Oak Ridge in order to ferry four psychiatrists to New Mexico in the event the bomb failed and the scientists had nervous breakdowns.
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“One of the big problems that kept nagging my group,” he explained, “was the fact that if the first bomb test was a fizzle we would have a tremendous trauma and a psychological disintegration, really, of a great many of the scientists who had been working so hard on this bomb.”
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By early July, word had come down that the bomb was to be detonated on July 16, 1945, providing weather conditions were permissible. On that date, President Truman would be in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. On the negotiating table were postwar concerns in
Europe, surrender terms for the Japanese, and Russia’s planned entry into the Pacific campaign. If the Trinity test was successful, Truman would have more bargaining power and less reason to bring the Soviets into the war with Japan.
But mid-July also happened to be one of the worst times in New Mexico to test such a weapon because of the frequent summer thunderstorms. True to predictions, a fierce thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico in the early morning hours of July 16, bringing lightning, high winds, and several inches of rain. Oppenheimer was beside himself with worry. Groves was furious. And many scientists advocated canceling the test. When Jack Hubbard, a meteorologist, finally advised Groves that the storm front would pass and that the weather would be acceptable at dawn, the general snarled that Hubbard had better be right “or I will hang you.”
Fortunately, Hubbard’s prediction was correct.
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The skies cleared and the stars came out. The atomic bomb test was back on schedule.
At 5:15
A.M.
, Warren placed a call to Hymer Friedell, who was standing by at a hotel in Albuquerque. Friedell had been stationed there in case the bomb destroyed the southern half of the state and incinerated all the scientists. “Let’s synchronize watches,” Warren suggested.
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“It’s five-fifteen here, fifteen minutes to zero.” Warren told Friedell that field monitors were in position for the blast and everything was going according to schedule. “Keep this line open, no matter what,” he added, reminding Friedell before he hung up that he would be in charge if Warren was killed in the blast.
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Fifteen minutes later Warren lay in a ditch filled with hay and leaves nine miles from Ground Zero. His feet were toward the blast area; his eyes were protected by dark welder’s glasses. As the seconds ticked away, many of the other scientists sheepishly crept down in the ditch as well. “They were embarrassed, you know, to lie down; so I lay down, myself, so there would be no question, then Dr. Hempelmann and Nolan.
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Then it went off. And, at first, of course, there was a feeling of great heat as if you had just opened a big furnace door, and then it was shut. There was a funny squeezing sensation to the ears, in the mastoids, that I have noticed several times since and never was able to identify as anything real. Then the fireball developed.”
The scientists watched the awesome cloud as it rose into the sky and then turned to each other. Knowing their words would be recorded for posterity, some had thought in advance about what they were going to say and their language is filled with self-consciousness. Oppenheimer
remembered a line from the
Bhagavad-Gita:
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
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While the scientists stood about congratulating each other, Leslie Groves bustled off to see how Stafford Warren and his monitors were doing. Warren, it seemed, was the one who might soon be in need of a psychiatrist. Remembered Groves:
When I went to Warren’s headquarters in the base camp soon after the explosion, I was not pleased to discover that he had been so busy getting ready that he had gone without sleep for almost forty-eight hours.
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Although his decisions were sound and his instructions were clear, I was sure from listening to them as he talked over the telephone, that—quite understandably—his mind was not working so quickly as it normally did, by any means. Fortunately, we had at Alamogordo a Navy doctor who was familiar with our activities—Captain George Lyons, and I suggested that he spell Warren for a few hours to give him some rest. I was displeased, too, with myself, because I felt that I had fallen down in not making certain that Warren would be in first-class physical shape to handle the situation.
While Warren napped, his monitors spread out across the countryside. Hirschfelder and Magee, driving the borrowed sedan, stopped at the Bingham store, which was located about fifteen miles north of Ground Zero. An old man came out and looked at their white coveralls curiously. Then he broke out laughing and said, “You boys must have been up to something this morning.
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The sun came up in the west and went on down again.”
The monitors also stopped at William Wrye’s ranch, which is about nine miles north of the Bingham store. Wrye and his wife had been on a trip and had just gotten home several hours earlier. When Wrye saw the monitors waving their bulky counters over his property later that morning, he went out and asked them what they were doing. “They told me they were checking for radioactivity.
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I told him that we didn’t have the radio on,” Wrye remembered in an interview in 1998. In a rocky gorge that was subsequently dubbed Hot Canyon, the monitors came across fallout readings of fifteen to twenty roentgens per hour. Since maps indicated the area was uninhabited, they turned around and left quickly.
In a few hours, the cloud had disappeared from sight. Feeling elated and yet strangely empty, many of the scientists piled into cars and headed back to Los Alamos. Wright Langham spotted a sedan with a flat
tire on the side of the road just south of Albuquerque.
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It was Enrico Fermi’s car. Using methane gas from one of his radiation counters, Lang-ham inflated the tire and Fermi, who had been christened the “Italian Navigator” after the Chicago pile went critical, was on his way. The automobile that Hirschfelder and Magee had borrowed was so hot from fallout that it read four roentgens per hour in the driver’s seat.
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Back in Los Alamos four days later, the car was still hot enough to throw sensitive Geiger counters in nearby laboratories off the scale.
Troubled by the high readings in Hot Canyon, Louis Hempelmann decided to spend the night at the Trinity base camp and do some further investigation. The following morning he met Hymer Friedell, and the two men drove into the rock-strewn gorge. To their dismay, they discovered a two-room adobe house, which the Army had somehow overlooked and omitted from the monitors’ maps. An elderly couple named the Raitliffs and their grandson lived there. The grandson had left for the Bingham store on horseback on the morning of the explosion, Hempelmann wrote:
By being at Bingham during the day and indoors at night, he missed most of the heaviest exposure of the first day in “hot canyon.”
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During this day, Mr. Raitliff had spent most of the day outdoors but Mrs. Raitliff was indoors a large portion of the time. During the following two weeks there was no change in their usual habits of going indoors about 7:00–8:00 o’clock to dinner, retiring after hearing the evening news broadcast and arising at about 6:00 AM.
During the next six months, Hempelmann and his fellow Manhattan Project doctors were to make several visits to the Raitliffs’ ranch. Mr. Raitliff told Hempelmann that the ground and fence posts had the appearance of “being covered with light snow, or of being ‘frosted’ for several days after the shot,” particularly at sunrise and sunset.
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Although the family seemed healthy, Mr. Raitliff complained of “nervousness, tightness in the chest and poor teeth.”
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Hempelmann did not think Mr. Raitliff’s symptoms were related to his radiation exposure since the symptoms had been present before the detonation. But in a later memo, Hempelmann was less certain. The color of Mr. Raitliff’s hands and lips, he wrote, indicated he might be “slightly anemic.”
Hempelmann also examined the family’s animals and realized that they had been injured by radioactive debris from the cloud.
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The paws of two black house dogs were raw and bleeding from beta burns. “One of
the dogs was so badly affected that she was unable to walk except with extreme difficulty.” A milk cow and heifer and one of the dogs also had white hair on their back or patchy areas where the radioactive particles had sifted through their coats and irradiated their skin.
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Hempelmann estimated that the members of the Raitliff family each received about forty-seven roentgens, or nearly fifty rem, of whole-body radiation in the first two weeks after the Trinity test.
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It’s not known whether the family was ever informed of the exposure or urged to take precautions, although fifty rem can cause nausea in some people and increase the risk of contracting cancer.
William Wrye, who still lives on his ranch, said in 1998 his beard fell out three months after the Trinity explosion. “I was slick-faced except for the corner of my chin.
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When my beard grew back it came in gray, and a couple of months later, it came back black again.” Wrye told newspaper reporters the same thing in 1945, but the Manhattan Project doctors dismissed his statement as tomfoolery. Wrote Louis Hempelmann in a December 1, 1945, memo to the files:
