The Plutonium Files (31 page)

In his New Year’s Eve memo, Hamilton advised that a full-scale investigation of rad warfare (RW) be launched by the armed services in an isolated region. His suggestion was taken seriously and implemented by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. As an added bonus, Hamilton himself was made chairman of a panel charged with overseeing the safety for the RW experiments. On at least one occasion he flew in a plane tracking the radioactive cloud.
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According to the Clinton Advisory Committee, sixty-five tests were conducted at Dugway between 1949 and 1952 and more than 13,000 curies of radioactive tantalum were released into the atmosphere.
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The program was kept secret out of fear that the rad warfare program might cause “public anxiety,” “undue public apprehension,” and even “public hysteria,” the committee reported. The program remained under wraps until 1974 and was largely unknown by the public until 1993. Funding for the RW program was cut in 1953, just as the Chemical Corps was proposing a huge expansion in its testing program. Its demise was probably due to budget cuts as well as practical questions about its military effectiveness, the presidential panel speculated.

Wright Langham was to make Los Alamos his base of operations for the rest of his life, becoming a familiar figure at the scene of some of the
world’s most hair-raising nuclear accidents. In 1966 he flew to Europe when four thermonuclear weapons were dropped near Palomares, Spain, during a midair refueling collision over the Mediterranean Sea. Two of the weapons were found intact. The other two underwent nonnuclear explosions, which resulted in the release of some fissionable fuel and some burning. Langham was also sent to Greenland in 1968 when a B-52 bomber from the U.S. Strategic Air Command that was carrying four unarmed nuclear weapons crashed seven miles west of Thule Air Force Base. The explosives in the unarmed weapons detonated, and considerable plutonium spewed over the ice.

Louis Hempelmann left Los Alamos briefly in 1946 to return to Washington University in St. Louis, but was persuaded by lab director Norris Bradbury to come back for a couple more years. With few paved streets, no sidewalks, and only a limited number of telephones, living conditions were still primitive on the mesa. Residents shopped at the post exchange and purchased other items through the mail. A series of calamities, including a water shortage, had driven all but the heartiest out of town. Robert Bacher, the unflappable scientist whom Oppenheimer confided in during the dark and uncertain days of the bomb project, later told Congress, “The technical developments during 1946 had slowed not to a stop but were so slow the motion was hard to detect.”
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Hempelmann and fellow physician James Nolan were almost overwhelmed by the paperwork and physical exams associated with processing civilian and military personnel who were leaving the site. Although they weren’t always successful, the doctors tried to obtain blood and urine samples from departing workers to protect the project from possible lawsuits. Nolan wrote:

The Los Alamos doctors also established a “milk route” to obtain urine specimens from the homes of recalcitrant employees who worked
with polonium, a highly radioactive material, and consciously attempted to make safety procedures part of everyday life.
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Just when the two physicians thought they were bringing the “chaos” under control, another devastating criticality accident occurred on May 21, 1946. Because the accident occurred on the eve of Operation Crossroads and at a time when sensitive negotiations were occurring over the domestic and international control of the bomb, many details of the incident remained unknown to the general public for decades.

Louis Slotin, a young Canadian-born scientist and a close friend of Harry Daghlian, had his passport ready and his bags packed for Crossroads when he decided to show his colleagues how to perform an experiment know ominously among physicists as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” On that fateful day in May, Slotin and a number of other scientists gathered around a table at a remote laboratory in Pajarito Canyon. One of the men standing nearest to Slotin was Alvin Graves, a member of the so-called Chicago suicide squad who had stood on a platform above Fermi’s pile, ready to halt the chain reaction with neutron-absorbing cadmium.

Slotin was an intense-looking young man who had the reputation of being a daredevil.
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He had served in the Spanish Civil War as an antiaircraft gunner and had joined the Royal Air Force when World War II broke out. When authorities discovered he was nearsighted, he was forced to resign. On his way home to Winnipeg, Canada, he visited with a colleague in Chicago who encouraged him to join the Met Lab. Eventually Slotin transferred to Los Alamos, where he became the resident expert at the “tickling the dragon’s tail” test, which was done to determine the exact amount of fissionable material needed to ignite a chain reaction. Enrico Fermi believed the test was so dangerous that he had warned Slotin, “Keep doing that experiment that way and you’ll be dead within a year.”
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Slotin shrugged off Fermi’s words of caution; he had already performed the test successfully some forty times before.

Wearing a loose, open shirt and his trousers tucked into cowboy boots, Slotin stood in the middle of a large, sun-filled room and slowly lowered the upper half of a hollow beryllium hemisphere around a mass of fissionable material that was resting in a similar lower hemisphere.
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He held the upper sphere in his left hand with his thumb and fingers inserted in the plug hole at the top. In the other hand he held a screwdriver, which he used to keep the two shells apart. Suddenly the screwdriver slipped and the telltale blue halo appeared. “You can guess the rest,” Norris Bradbury confided to several colleagues two days later.
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“The
hemisphere fell, there was the familiar blue glow and feeling of heat in his hands.”

Slotin knocked the two spheres apart and then made for the exit. Four other scientists, a technician, an engineer, and one guard who also were in the room raced out the door. Ten minutes later Slotin gathered the group around him and drew a sketch of where everyone was standing in order to help estimate how much radiation each had received.

Los Alamos scientists believed Slotin received a dose of about 800 roentgens, more than twice the lethal dose.
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Alvin Graves received an estimated 100 roentgens; junior scientist Allan Kline, 60 roentgens; Dwight Young, a technician, 50 roentgens; Patrick Cleary, a security guard, 30 roentgens; junior scientist Marion Cieslicki, 12 roentgens; scientist Raemer Schreiber, 8 roentgens; and Theodore Perlman, an engineer, 6 roentgens.

Alvin Graves was standing about a foot behind Slotin and was shielded from some of the radiation by Slotin’s body. After Harry Daghlian was killed, Slotin and other scientists had kicked around the question of whether it was better to run away or knock apart the assembly once a chain reaction had begun. They concluded it was better to stop the reaction. “This is not because there was any possibility of an explosion,” Graves once explained.
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“It is because one cannot run fast enough to decrease the radiation exposure as much as it would increase from the reaction itself. It is very much to his [Slotin’s] credit that he had the presence of mind to remember this conclusion at such a moment. It is unquestionably true that I and perhaps others of those present owe our lives to his action.”

Louis Hempelmann was in charge of the stricken scientists when they arrived at the hospital. For the third time, the doctors would have a chance to observe what would happen to a healthy person exposed to radiation from an atomic weapon without the confounding effects of blast or burn.

Slotin knew he was dying but maintained a cheerful demeanor even as his blood counts dropped, his body began to swell with fluid, and giant blisters appeared on his hands. “When we were alone together in a hospital room,” Graves wrote, “he said, ‘Al, I am sorry I got you into this.
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I am afraid I have less than a fifty-fifty chance of living. I hope you have better than that.”

Slotin’s decline mimicked the course followed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. A tube placed in his throat soon became painfully
irritating because of the ulcers that developed on his tongue and the back of his mouth. He developed uncontrollable diarrhea, and his hands became gangrenous after the swelling had shut off the blood supply. Morphine was his only relief. “Nothing could be done to stop the steady progress of total disintegration of body functions,” J. Garrot Allen, one of the treating physicians, later wrote.
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On May 30, nine days after the accident, Slotin died. Philip Morrison, the scientist who had testified so eloquently on Capitol Hill about the “penetrating” effects of radiation, helped pack up Slotin’s belongings and return them to his parents. Among his possessions were a pair of opera glasses and three mounted glass containers filled with Trinity sand.
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Several of the other scientists who had been in the room also grew sick. Alvin Graves suffered from nausea and intermittent vomiting while he was hospitalized.
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He developed a fever on the fifth day, a rash on the ninth. He was discharged two weeks later but was so weak that he had to remain in bed for sixteen hours a day. Eventually the hair on his head and his beard began to fall out and his sperm disappeared altogether. Eventually he regained his strength, returned to work, and fathered healthy children.

Louis Hempelmann warned Graves to avoid further exposure in the years that followed, but Graves ignored his advice and waded more deeply into the world of atomic weapons. In 1948 he was named the leader of the Los Alamos weapons testing division and was the man considered by many to be the most influential scientist in the atmospheric testing program. Having survived his own exposure, Graves came to believe fallout worries were “concocted in the minds of weak malingerers” and recommended that radiation exposures be compared to on-the-job accidents.
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A dose of fifteen roentgens, for example, could be the equivalent of a “cut finger not requiring stitches,” he suggested.
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“Such a guide would not only be useful for operational decisions but would be extremely useful for public relations purposes.” But the radiation damage Graves received was not a figment of his imagination; he died about twelve years after the accident at the age of fifty-four from medical complications caused by the exposure.

Allan Kline, who was standing about four feet from the assembly, was also nauseous when he was admitted to the hospital.
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Like Alvin Graves, he, too, experienced a marked weakness when he was sent home. The hair on his head and eyebrows fell out, his eyes watered continually, and he complained of an inability to concentrate for more than a few moments at a time.

Kline’s life took a radically different turn from Graves’s.
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He left Los Alamos soon after the accident and returned to Chicago. According to a
New York Times
article, Kline entered Billings Hospital in December of 1946 for a battery of tests. Convinced he was being used as a guinea pig, though, he stormed out of the hospital and soon became embroiled in a dispute with Los Alamos over compensation and access to his medical records. Documents obtained from Los Alamos under the California Public Records Act show that his physician was J. J. Nickson, one of the doctors involved in the Met Lab’s TBI experiments and the Chicago plutonium injections.
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An attorney representing Kline charged in a 1949 letter to Brien McMahon, who by then was chairman of the new Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, that Kline had received “unusually shabby treatment” from the Manhattan Project, the AEC, and the University of California, which manages Los Alamos.
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“Mr. Kline was refused medical care and information at a time when he was dangerously ill from radiation and was emitting enough radiation from his body to cause a Geiger counter to react with some force,” the lawyer wrote. “This refusal of treatment, dropping him from the payroll with little reserve funds about 2,000 miles from his home, in an extremely weakened radioactive and dangerous condition, and the subsequent indifference to his existence and well being constitute a very tarnished chapter in the history of the development of the atom.”

In an attachment, Allan Kline described in detail the physical ailments he had suffered. The neutrons had made many molecules in his body radioactive; his teeth were so hot that a metal shield had to be placed over them to protect delicate mouth tissues; his skin became so sensitive to the sun’s ultraviolet rays that it swelled perceptively; he was completely sterile; he required frequent naps or sleep totaling up to twelve to fifteen hours a day; and he was unable to walk up a short flight of stairs without becoming completely exhausted. Worst of all, Kline was not even allowed to see his own medical reports. As a consequence, he began seeing private physicians. Ironically, those doctors were not informed of the origins of Kline’s physical complaints because of secrecy rules. He wrote: