The Plutonium Files (3 page)

Radiation experiments on soldiers began in 1951, the year atomic bomb tests began in Nevada. They continued until 1962, when above-ground tests were halted. Military troops were used in psychological tests, decontamination experiments, flashblindness studies, research involving flights through radioactive clouds, and studies aimed at measuring radioisotopes in their body fluids.

Many of the military experiments also were repetitive and poorly planned. Thomas Shipman, the Los Alamos scientist who guided the lab’s health division through much of the Cold War, complained in 1952 that some of the armed forces’ studies appeared to be the “same old chestnuts being pulled out of the fire again and again.”
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Five years later Shipman was still complaining about the military’s haphazard involvement. “From past experience we know all too well that everybody wants to get into the act.
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And all too frequently we find within [the] military establishment anxious souls who have had no opportunity to familiarize themselves with what has already been done.”

The researchers were a curious blend of spook, scientist, and soldier. Many were physicians who swore by the Hippocratic Oath, yet were willing to administer to their unwitting patients everything from radioactive arsenic to radioactive zinc. Those who were motivated by patriotism, especially scientists who had seen the ravages of two world wars, firmly believed the development and testing of nuclear weapons was essential
to maintaining the security of the United States. Shrewd and sophisticated, they were preoccupied with public relations and obsessed with the fear that someone would file a lawsuit against the Manhattan Project or its successors for some imagined illness arising from radiation exposure. Negative publicity and lawsuits, they worried, would jeopardize the nuclear weapons program.

They downplayed the amount of radioactive pollution emanating from the bomb factories and the health risks of fallout, reasoning that a few extra leukemias, bone cancers, or genetic mutations were an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect in the struggle against communism. “People have got to learn to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout,” said Willard Libby, a chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for developing the radiocarbon dating technique.
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When I returned to Italy, Texas, in August of 1997, ten years had elapsed since I found the footnote describing the plutonium injections. Thanks in large part to the massive releases of material that began in 1994, my thin manila envelope had grown to eight filing cabinets. As I sat on Main Street, listening to the late-afternoon, end-of-summer sounds and the deep silence of the country, I wondered what the people of Italy thought of Elmer’s story.

Though it was not yet six o’clock, nearly every store on Main Street was closed. City Hall was locked tight. So was the Uptown Cafe. But several women were talking quietly in the Magic Mirror Beauty Salon, one of the new businesses that had come to town. When I asked them if they had ever heard of Elmer Allen, they all began talking at one.
“I read something about that in the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram.”
“Didn’t they test something on him when he was in the Army?” “His widow still lives here, I think.” “Isn’t she rich on account of that?”

Fredna did still live in Italy and had received a substantial settlement from the government. But she had not moved out of the small house that she shared with Elmer for so many decades. She had aged rapidly and had begun using a walker to get around. While she was still gracious, a guardedness had crept in and she no longer gave interviews. But Elmer-ine, who as a child had been sent out to Italy’s fields with her brother to pick cotton, had become more outspoken than ever. She often said she couldn’t imagine going through life without knowing what had happened to her father. Although theirs had been a complicated and combative relationship, the knowledge had helped her better understand him.

On my way out of town, I swung by the cemetery. Sitting astride a lawnmower, a man in a broad-brimmed hat was working his way around the headstones. Down a hill behind this beautifully manicured swath of green is another collection of graves where Italy’s African Americans are buried. Elmer Allen is there. On my first trip to Italy, Elmer had been dead only a year and the grass had not yet grown back over the chalky soil where he was buried. Now the grass lay thick and undisturbed. At the head of his grave was a beautifully carved tombstone that wasn’t there during my first visit. Next to the Allen family name, the inscription read:

The inscription was his family’s shorthand way of telling visitors how Elmer had been transformed by the U.S. government from a man into a number after he had been injected with plutonium. This was the story of injustice that Fredna, Elmerine, and I had pieced together at the kitchen table. Strangers, though, might have a hard time deciphering the tombstone’s meaning. Even in Italy, the story was already fading from memory.

Would any of what we had learned from the thousands of documents made public over the last several years be remembered? I don’t know the answer. The granite, at least, will last.

Eileen Welsome
Albuquerque, N.M.
March 1999

The accident occurred on August 1, 1944, a morning like any other in Los Alamos: hot, dry, the sky an indigo bowl over the sprawl of wooden buildings and barbed-wire fences that constituted the core of the Manhattan Project. At seven thousand feet, the New Mexico air smelled of sun, pines, a trace of frost. Occasionally the scent of dust spiraled up from the desert, where temperatures hovered around 100 degrees.

In twelve months, two atomic bombs would be dropped on Japan, and the secret work being carried out in the wooden buildings would be revealed to the world. On the morning of the accident, the atomic bomb had progressed far beyond mathematical theories but was still an unproven weapon. Plutonium, a silvery metal discovered about four years earlier, was one of the key elements that would transform the theories into a fireball.

In Room D-119, a cheerful young chemist named Don Mastick was standing over a sink chatting with his laboratory partner, Arthur Wahl, a chemist not much older than himself and one of the four scientists from the University of California at Berkeley who had discovered plutonium. Mastick was just twenty-three years old, a “bushy-tailed kid,” as he would later describe himself, with short blond hair and an alert, friendly face. He had been one of Berkeley’s most promising chemistry graduates and was just about to enlist in the Navy when J. Robert Oppenheimer approached him and asked if he would like to join the scientific team being assembled in Los Alamos, the most secret site in the vast network of laboratories and factories established to build the bomb.

Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist, was already a legend
on the Berkeley campus, and Mastick was thrilled at the idea of working with him. When he arrived in Los Alamos in the spring of 1943, Oppenheimer had designated him the lab’s ultra microchemist. Working with amounts of plutonium that were too small to be seen with the naked eye, he studied the chemical reactions of the new material under a microscope. His glass test tubes were no bigger than sewing needles and his measuring instruments looked like a child’s toys. Even his laboratory was small: a claustrophobic box at the end of a hallway, ten feet wide and twelve feet long.

In Mastick’s hand that day was a small vial containing ten milligrams of plutonium—an amount so small it would have fit on the head of a pin. But it was far more plutonium than Los Alamos had had to work with only a year before. In fact, the radioactive material was still so scarce that a special crew had been assembled whose only job was to recover the material from accidents and completed experiments and then repurify it through chemical processes so it could be used again. The crew developed a flow chart to help separate plutonium from every other element in the Periodic Table.
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“They were prepared to tear up the floor and extract the plutonium, if necessary.
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They would even dissolve a bicycle. I mean, plutonium [was] so valuable that they went to great extremes to recover everything,” physician Louis Hempelmann recalled decades later.

Inevitably some of the radioactive molecules seeped out into the laboratory, spread by a starched sleeve, the scuff of boots, even the dust that blew in from the desert. Nervous and preoccupied with their efforts to construct a workable bomb, Oppenheimer and his colleagues viewed the spreading contamination with consternation. Their concerns were twofold: They didn’t want to lose any material, and they were just beginning to understand its potential hazards. Joseph Kennedy, another member of the Berkeley team who had discovered plutonium, acknowledged that it was “not pleasant” to think that unaccounted-for plutonium was floating around the lab.
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On the day of this particular accident—which would be the most serious of any thus far—it was not the lost plutonium that would be the problem. It was the plutonium in Mastick’s vial.

A purplish-color liquid that gave off an eerie, animallike warmth when concentrated in larger amounts, the plutonium in the vial had undergone an unanticipated transformation overnight. Some of the liquid had been converted into gas and was pushing against the walls of the bottle. Other molecules were tunneling into the sides of the glass itself.

Unaware of the small bomb he was holding, Mastick snapped the slender neck of the vial. It made a small, popping sound in the quiet
laboratory. Instantly the material spewed out of the bottle and onto the wall in front of him. Some of the solution ricocheted back into his mouth, flooding his lips and tongue with a metallic taste.

Not overly alarmed, Mastick replaced the vial in its wooden container. Then he trotted across the hard-packed ground of the technical area to knock on the door of Dr. Hempelmann’s first-aid station. He had just swallowed a significant amount of the world’s supply of plutonium. “I could taste the acid so I knew perfectly well I had a little bit of plutonium in my mouth,” he said in an interview in 1995.

Louis Hempelmann’s office was just a few minutes’ walk from D Building, where Mastick worked.
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With its “deluge shower baths” and clothes-changing rooms, D Building was one of the most elaborately ventilated and costly structures at Los Alamos.
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Except for the forest of metal pipes protruding from the roof, it looked no different from the other green clapboard structures in the technical area.

Hempelmann was the medical doctor in charge of protecting technical personnel on the bomb project from “unusual hazards,” and he reported directly to J. Robert Oppenheimer.
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With his long, narrow face and wide jaw, Hempelmann wasn’t handsome, but there was something refined and pleasing about his appearance. He was the son and grandson of doctors and a fine physician in his own right, although he was known to grow queasy at the sight of blood. (“Louie did his first sternal puncture on me and he almost fainted.
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He’s one of those doctors that can’t stand the sight of blood—he should have been a psychologist or something,” said Harold Agnew, one in a line of laboratory directors who succeeded Oppenheimer.)

Taking great pains to keep his long face expressionless, Hempelmann listened to Mastick’s account of what had happened and then left the room for a moment in order to make a frantic phone call to Colonel Stafford Warren, the affable medical director of the Manhattan Project. Hempelmann often turned to Warren, who was nearly two decades older, for advice and reassurance. In his late forties when he was commissioned as an Army colonel, Warren was a big man, well over six feet tall, who exuded a breezy confidence. Unlike many of the scientists on the bomb project, who refused to join the armed forces and chafed under military control, Warren loved being in the Army. He liked the rough feel of his starched uniform, the silver eagles on his collar, the .45 revolver tucked in a holster on his belt.

Speaking on a secure telephone line from his office at the Manhattan Project’s headquarters in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Warren tried to
calm Hempelmann down. He thought about the accident for a moment and then suggested that the young doctor try using a mouthwash and expectorant to remove the plutonium from the chemist’s mouth. Hempelmann hung up and hurried back to the examining room where he prepared two mixtures. The first was a sodium citrate solution that would chemically combine with the plutonium in Mastick’s mouth to form a soluble liquid; the second was a bicarbonate rinse that would render the material insoluble again.
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Mastick swished the solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into a beaker. The first mouthful contained almost one-half microgram of plutonium. A microgram of plutonium, which is a millionth of a gram, was considered in 1945 to be the maximum amount of plutonium that could be retained in the human body without causing harm.
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Eleven more times at fifteen-minute intervals Mastick swished the two solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into the beaker.

After the accident, Mastick’s breath was so hot that he could stand six feet away and blow the needles on the radiation monitors off scale. His urine contained detectable plutonium for many years. In one of several interviews Mastick said that he was undoubtedly still excreting “a few atoms” of plutonium but had suffered no ill effects.

When the mouth washings finally were finished, Hempelmann ordered the young man to lie down on a cot. Then he pumped out his stomach several times. Carefully he transferred the stomach liquids into a tall beaker. The plutonium would have to be chemically separated from the organic matter in Mastick’s stomach and mouth so it could be reused in future experiments. No scientist at the lab had ever undertaken such a task.