The Plutonium Files (20 page)

Shields Warren moved from hospital to hospital, examining survivors and studying slides and autopsy notes made by Japanese doctors. As he toured the devastated city, he recorded his impressions in a small diary. At the front of the diary are Japanese words that he apparently learned while waiting off the coast of Japan for armistice to be declared:
ketsueki,
blood;
fushosha,
wounded person;
babsudan,
bomb;
ikutsu,
how many.
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Warren sent transmittal letters and specimens from the bombing victims to the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. According to Warren’s diary, copies of the letters were also sent to the director of naval intelligence.

Radiating outward for two miles from the hypocenter was a scene of total destruction, he wrote. “Rats, flies, mosquitoes killed.
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No larvae on bodies.” “Weeds + a little grass starting back.” “Horses & dogs died just like people, only protected ones lived. Even moles etc. were supposed to have died.” “No crawling bugs. No vermin.”

With scant medical supplies and no knowledge of the illness, little could be done for the victims. “Few transfusions given, no plasma.
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Used saline freely and injectable vitamin ABC,” Warren wrote. “Skin ripped off & viscera out from blast effect.” “Most had amnesia 1–2 days.” “Blast broke tympanun.” “Hemorrhages came back.” “Much GI irritation.” “Some complained of heat—enough to ignite clothes, others felt only mild warmth.” “Brightest light they had ever seen.” “Some ocular hemorrhages, 3 blind, others see dimly at about one meter.” He also jotted down the conflicting death tolls that were being reported at the time: “175,000 killed at Nagasaki.” “40,000 killed instantly.” “Estimates dead at 30,000 +.”

Sometimes huge, mottled patches of purple appeared on the bombing victims’ skin. Observers reported that blood often poured from nasal passages, eardrums, uteruses, and urethra. Ulcers soon developed in gums, throats, and tonsils. Before some patients died, their tonsils and tissues in the throat area became gangrenous. Those who survived the critical period often succumbed to pneumonia or some other infection, which their weakened immune system could not fight off.

Warren saw the same astounding damage on the internal organs removed during autopsies: lungs filled with fluid; kidneys, liver, and
hearts covered with bright red hemorrhages; depleted bone marrow; congestion in the brains; bizarre-looking cells and massive nuclei spawned by the huge radiation doses. “The injuries were diverse and confusing,” he recalled in an article published in September 1946:

Soon after the Manhattan Project team and the Navy group completed their preliminary surveys, the War Department dispatched 195,000 soldiers to Japan to aid in the demilitarization effort and help supervise the cleanup. The first troops arrived in Hiroshima about sixty days after the bomb had been dropped.
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GIs landed in Nagasaki forty-five days after that city had been bombed.

Bill Griffin, a Marine who survived the fierce fighting on Iwo Jima, arrived in Nagasaki on November 1, 1945. Occasionally he was ordered to patrol the bombed-out area. “I don’t know what the purpose of it was.
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There were no people. All the people had perished,” he said. “There were no birds, no wildlife, no crickets, no nothing. It’s hard to explain what complete silence is like. You have to experience it.” Griffin said he saw civilians wearing white coveralls and divers’ helmets (“They were all covered up”) taking radiation measurements of soil and water. Japanese who came down from the mountains often wore menstrual pads over their faces to avoid breathing the dust. He said the bombing victims, particularly those who were horribly disfigured by thermal burns, had been whisked out of sight so the American soldiers could not tell people back home what they had seen.

As Bill Griffin and other American GIs patrolled the desolate streets of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, top officials of the Manhattan Project went to Capitol Hill to testify before the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy that was investigating the problems related to the development and control of the atomic bomb. Brien McMahon, a freshman Democrat
from Connecticut, chaired the hearing. General Groves took a seat at the witness table in Room 312 of the Senate Office Building at 10:00
A.M.
on November 28, 1945.

By then Groves knew a great deal more about the effects of radiation on the human body than he did when he placed the two panicked phone calls to Oak Ridge the preceding August. He knew, for example, the details of Harry Daghlian’s death. He knew fallout from the Trinity bomb had injured livestock and exposed families such as the Raitliffs to a significant amount of radiation. And he was also aware that thousands of Japanese were dying from medical complications caused by radiation from the bomb. Intent upon calming the public’s fears and keeping the Manhattan Project’s laboratories and factories open, however, Groves chose to downplay the dangers from radiation.

“The radioactive casualty can be of several classes,” Groves testified.
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“He can have enough so that he will be killed instantly. He can have a smaller amount which will cause him to die rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact they say it is a very pleasant way to die. Then we get down below that to the man who is injured slightly, and he may take some time to be healed, but he can be healed.”

“Does that come about through treatment or through time?” Eugene D. Millikin, a conservative Republican senator from Colorado, asked.

“Through time,” responded Groves. “Anyone who is working with such materials, who accidentally becomes overexposed, just takes a vacation away from the material and in due course of time he is perfectly all right again.”

Later in the hearing, when Senator Harry F. Byrd, a Virginia Democrat, asked the general if there had been any “operating accidents” during the Manhattan Project, Groves gave a response that was a study in obfuscation: “We had no operating accidents throughout this project that were directly attributable to the unusual nature of the material that was a fatal accident.
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We had one after the bomb was exploded. We then had one we should not have had; there was no reason for having it. It was like all accidents, industrial or home accidents.”

The committee was especially interested in the question of whether the two bombs had left any residual radiation in Japan. In fact, a transcript of the hearing shows that was the first question Groves was asked when he took a seat at the witness table. The general stuck to the line that he and Oppenheimer fed to reporters during the Trinity tour. “There is none. That is a very positive ‘none,” he snapped.
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When Richard Russell, a Democratic senator from Georgia, pressed Groves about the injuries, he responded, “There was no radioactivity damage done to any human being excepting at the time that the bomb actually went off, and that is an instantaneous damage.”
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“Let me ask you,” said Senator Millikin, “would the effect be different had the bomb exploded in the ground?”

Groves replied, “If the bomb had exploded on or near the ground, that is, within a hundred feet or so, the effect would have been the same as at New Mexico, I believe; there you would have had lasting effects for a considerable period of months.
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You would have had a considerable number of radioactive casualties, and I think that you would have had an area which should have been banned from traffic. The first mission given to our organization that went over there was to determine that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 100 per cent safe for American troops, and to know absolutely that that was a fact so that the men themselves would know everything was all right.”

But many of the men who were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not believe that “everything was all right.” Not long after Bill Griffin was discharged, his skin flaked off and his hair and teeth fell out. One of his grandsons was born with a club foot; another appears to have an impaired immune system. Griffin is certain that he received a significant dose of radiation while in Nagasaki and that the exposure damaged his reproductive cells. “We were the first issue of guinea pigs.”

Other soldiers stationed in the bombed-out cities said they developed rare cancers and blood disorders, or suffered from premature heart attacks, chronic fatigue, lung diseases, and inexplicable skin afflictions. Many believe their diseases and illnesses are due to the radiation they received in Japan. For decades the Defense Department has vigorously denied that occupation troops were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, maintaining the doses ranged from a “few tens of millirem” to a “worst case” dose of up to one rem.
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The Pentagon’s desire to prove the two Japanese bombs left no residual radiation became one of the prime motivating factors in the atomic maneuvers that began at the Nevada Test Site in 1951. Thousands of troops were marched through the swirling radioactive dust at Ground Zero over a decade or so. Instead of quelling fears, however, the military’s strategic plan backfired and thousands of soldiers came to believe that they, too, had been used as unwitting guinea pigs by their government.

When the news of the Hiroshima bombing reached Los Alamos, the scientists rejoiced. Some raced to the telephone and booked tables at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. Others stayed at Los Alamos and celebrated. They substituted dynamite for fireworks and snaked through the streets banging garbage-can lids. “Everybody had parties, we all ran around.
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I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on,” recalled Richard Feynman, a math wizard and future Nobel laureate.

As the devastation from the bombings became better understood, some of the scientists’ elation began turning to guilt about the past and fear about the future. No one better demonstrated these conflicting emotions than J. Robert Oppenheimer. Deeply fatigued and more emaciated than ever, he departed Los Alamos in mid-October of 1945. In a ceremony before he left, he warned his colleagues: “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”
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General Groves selected Norris Bradbury, a Berkeley-trained physicist who had worked on the explosives aspects of the plutonium bomb, as the interim laboratory director. Bradbury agreed to take the job for six months, but those six months eventually turned into twenty-five years.
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While politicians, military leaders, and even the scientists themselves debated the future of the atomic bomb at public forums and congressional hearings that would continue for the next year, the physicists, chemists, metallurgists, and explosives experts who had built the bombs drifted from day to day, uncertain of their future.

But the project’s second string of scientists—the medical researchers who had been shunted to the sidelines while the great bomb-building drama unfolded—seemed moved to redouble their efforts at this stage. If anything, the Trinity fallout, the deaths in Japan, the demise of Harry Daghlian, had made it even more imperative to obtain accurate information on the effects of radiation. In addition, nose counts and urine counts taken from Los Alamos workers that summer had shown that some employees had been seriously overexposed to plutonium. Were those workers going to come down with the same grisly cancers the radium dial painters had developed? The thought terrified Louis Hempelmann. The contamination was so severe, he warned Joseph Kennedy, “that the situation seems to be getting completely out of hand.”
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Ebb Cade, Arthur Hubbard, and Albert Stevens were more or less on their own as the cataclysmic events of the summer of 1945 unfolded. Toward the end of his hospital stay, Ebb Cade developed infectious jaundice. But by the time he was discharged, “the patient was ambulatory and in good condition,” an Oak Ridge physician observed.
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Ebb moved back to Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife after he was released from the hospital. On Sundays, he brought sacks of oranges to his nieces and nephews. He encouraged them to stay in school and warned them to be careful when they got behind the wheel of a car. “We just loved to talk to him,” recalled his niece, Mary Frances Cade Derr.
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“He would throw his head back and laugh with us.”

On April 13, 1953, almost exactly eight years to the day of the injection, Ebb Cade died of heart failure. He was sixty-three years old. His brothers and sisters outlived him by decades. One sister, Nanreen Cade Walton, lived to be more than one hundred years old and went to Washington in 1979 to speak with the House Select Committee on Aging. On the eve of her 107th birthday, she told a reporter, “I believe the old days was pretty hard but these days are more wicked.”
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Arthur Hubbard remained in fair condition until August of 1945, when he began complaining of chest pains. Despite the radical surgical procedures he had undergone, the cancer continued to spread rapidly. Confused and in considerable pain, he died on October 3, five months after the injection. Twelve hours after he died, his body was autopsied and his organs harvested and examined for plutonium deposition. The hottest parts were his bone marrow and liver, but scientists were convinced the injection had not affected the disease or hastened his death.
They did note that the plutonium did not seem to concentrate in the tumor area, an observation that seemed to rule out the possibility that the radioactive substance could be used for therapeutic purposes.
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