The Girls of Atomic City (30 page)

When she first saw him, Rosemary didn’t think the man appeared dangerous. He seemed calm, not agitated at all. He was young, perhaps in his twenties, maybe thirties. During the time that Rosemary spent in the apartment, the patient didn’t do or say very much. Rosemary was left to assume that he must have been on medication to calm his anxiety. But the apartment remained locked down just the same.

Rosemary was part of the small team of nurses who were assisting Dr. Clarke during the procedure. The machine had just arrived and regular treatments would now begin. She watched as the electrodes were placed on the patient’s head. Rosemary had seen this sort of treatment during her nurse’s training back in Chicago. There was a technician who physically operated the automatic controls on the machine and controlled the voltage, but Dr. Clarke oversaw everything. The patient was compliant and not hostile before or during the procedure. Rosemary didn’t think this was his first treatment.

Though electroshock treatment had just been introduced in the United States in 1940, it was gaining in popularity among physicians
and was a part of training for doctors in the military during World War II. Ads for electroshock machines soon began to appear in the
American Journal of Psychiatry.
Newer models boasted such advances as the ability to predict a patient’s resistance to certain currents. But one of the main concerns remained patient injury.

One of the nurses placed a rubber block in the patient’s mouth. Rosemary’s role was a minor but important one. She and another nurse present carefully braced the patient’s legs and arms so that the treatment didn’t cause him to break any of his own bones or harm anyone else.

The technician turned the dial. As the current coursed through the man’s body, his hands clenched and his muscles thrashed as he reacted to the voltage. It was akin to a grand mal seizure. Watching the patient’s reaction to the jolt, Rosemary was in fact reminded of seizures she’d seen. After his muscles contracted and went rigid, twitching followed. How long that lasted depended on the patient and the shock administered: maybe 10 seconds, maybe a minute. Eyelids and extremities, the seizure now past, quivered in the aftermath. The treatment was often used for depression. Depending on each patient’s situation, it might take a series of treatments to get results. In some cases, it took only a few treatments.

Rosemary didn’t know how long the patient’s course of treatment would be or how many sessions he had already had. She hoped he would get better. But she doubted he would be able to go anywhere beyond the barred windows of her old apartment until the war was over, and Oak Ridge’s secrets revealed to everyone, including the Japanese emperor the man so badly wished to warn.

★ ★ ★

The first time she heard it, Kattie found the noise deafening. It scared her to death at first, like someone had flipped a single switch and started the entire monstrous building running all at once. If she had been outside, even a town over, she would have seen the steam rising as it had been for months. Steam from K-25 could be seen miles away. But this was different. Something in her section of the plant was stirring.

Inside, where she stood, she wondered if everything would be all right. Louder and louder, the din grew, bouncing off the towering walls, filling the vast, gaping yaw of a workspace. Now, she and her friend Small and the others had to holler just to hear each other.
Where was it coming from? Had something gone wrong?
The truth was, she had spent months cleaning in a factory that wasn’t fully operational. Now, as far as she could tell, the whole plant was kicking on at once. Work on the floor had never been quiet up to that point—far from it. But something in the concrete cavern she cleaned every day had come alive.

It was spring 1945, and winter was winding down. Not a minute too soon, as far as Kattie was concerned. The winters here in southern Appalachia were something she never thought she would get used to. She had never seen so much snow. People would talk about how it wasn’t as cold as it was up north, in places like New York or Massachusetts, but she wasn’t from up there so it didn’t matter to her. She had seen a few flurries in Alabama. Dainty and harmless on their own, they seemed to magically appear out of a heavy gray sky but never got together with enough of their brethren to cause any real trouble. A little cold, a little slick, a little excitement for the children, and a little rush to the grocer and woodshed for the adults.

Winters here were longer and colder and snowier. Kattie was sure it was the worst place she had ever seen in her life. The ground was hard, and it was cold when she tucked herself into her cot at night. When she arose early the next morning—she prided herself on being the first to clock in, so she could be among the first to clock out—it was even worse. She would look outside the door of her hutment (there were no proper windows) and all she could see in every direction was snow. Much worse than any amount of shoe-sucking mud, as far as she was concerned. Spears of ice hung from the edges of the hutment, a little bit of sun and they would be sent spiraling downward, points glimmering, sharp, freezing and deadly. Seeing the white melt and sink into the brown beneath brought color and hope back into her days, her spirits rising with the temperature.

Kattie worked cleaning the tanks and the floors, but was more than happy to clean the bathrooms when the opportunity presented
itself. She couldn’t understand why some people didn’t want to do it. She got more privacy while she was working in the bathrooms, and there was less walking. If she cleaned it with a friend, the two could actually talk face-to-face. The tanks she cleaned were so massive that she couldn’t see Small working on the other side. Cloth in hand, Kattie scrubbed and cleaned the tanks each day until they gleamed above the floors that were her other primary responsibility.

When they worked on the floors, there were always a few women in front, walking slowly, throwing damp sawdust on the concrete as they moved along. Then Kattie and other women followed in behind, sweeping it all up. They had a wheelbarrow to carry the spent sawdust away, making sure none was left on the floor. The sawdust did its job, absorbing grease, oil, and other sludge left on the floor from the prior construction, while the friction of the powdery wood remnants rubbed against the concrete and worked the surface into a shine like glass by the time Kattie and the others were done with it. There was a long row of workers walking to and fro, about 30 janitors in all, working their way down the length of what appeared to be a long lane in the K-25 plant. One appeared to Kattie to be as wide as some of the larger houses she had set foot in. It took them about an hour to get from one end to the other, sweeping and scooping as the sawdust piled up.

Chatting had always been the way to pass the time. Now, though, she had to scream and yell at the top of her lungs just to be heard by coworkers who were standing on the other side of the huge steel tanks that populated the floor. Spread, sweep, pile it up, cart it away, do it again. From one end to the other then back again, each and every day, until it was time to punch out and go to Willie’s hut and get cooking. There she would leave the deafening rumble of mysterious and invisible progress behind. She and her coworkers would continue to wait in the shadow of steamy Appalachian skyscrapers for the war’s end, which they were all working to speed.

★ ★ ★

Over at Y-12, work and progress hung firmly on the percentages of Tubealloy—or Product or alloy or greencake, depending on your role in the process—coming out of the calutrons.

Virginia continued analyzing the material that came in the lab door—from where, she did not know. Dr. Larson oversaw her lab’s activities, and Virginia quite liked him. She found him intelligent but easygoing, despite the pressures they were all under. As their supervisor, he would occasionally stop by the lab to say hello and to check on progress and the all-important percentages.

“How was the last sample?” he’d ask Virginia. She’d tell him, and offer to write the information down. But almost every time, Dr. Larson refused, offering to call later to get it again. Some time later, Virginia’s phone would ring. Dr. Larson would ask the same question and Virginia would give the same answer. Only this time, Larson’s response was much more effusive.

“Oh
MY
!” he would begin, his volume cranked up to 11. “Ninety-eight-point-nine percent? That is
wonderful
!”

This happened more than once, and Virginia began to understand: Dr. Larson was waiting until he had a group of bigwigs in his office to make that call. Saying it out loud must have had more impact than passing around a number on a scrap of paper.
Smart man
, she thought. Whoever he was trying to impress and whatever those percentages meant to them, one thing was becoming clear to people like Dr. Larson: The percentages were, compared to a year earlier, much better.

TUBEALLOY

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

THE PROJECT’S CRUCIAL SPRING

The longer the Project went on, the bigger it got, the more people in the surrounding areas began to wonder if this city behind the fences wasn’t anything more than a massive failure—or worse, some sort of intricate swindle at the expense of taxpaying Americans. The “everything’s going in and nothing’s coming out” joke hadn’t died down. It had only become less amusing.

For the Project, however, progress could finally be seen: Although in the very early months of 1945 they were not getting the enrichment levels they hoped for, there were clear signs of improvement. The Alpha and Beta tracks at Y-12, though still plagued by some maintenance issues, were humming along more smoothly than a year earlier. At long last, K-25 and its seemingly elusive barrier were coming under control. By March 1945, the largest building in the world—with a price tag of roughly $512 million—was beginning to send its first (barely) enriched supplies of Tubealloy to the calutrons of Y-12. Mrs. Evelyn Handcock Ferguson, the H. K. Ferguson Company, and its subsidiary, Fercleve, had all come through in spectacular fashion in the fall, completing and even starting operation of S-50 within just 69 days of the start of construction. At the beginning of the year, early operational troubles ironed themselves out. By March, all 2,142 columns were up and running, and S-50, too, was sending slightly enriched Tubealloy to K-25 and Y-12.

Y-12 was still carrying the bulk of the Tubealloy enrichment load. What had originally been budgeted as a $30 million plant came in with a price tag closer to $478 million. At least winter was past. During the dark, colder months, if snow sent a bus skidding off the road, delaying the arrival of the next shift of workers, whoever was perched on a stool stayed there until relief arrived. This could sometimes mean a 16-hour shift.

Rapid pace combined with exhaustion sometimes made for safety and health issues. The electricity alone coursing through the plants and factories could be dangerous for anyone exercising even a momentary lapse of judgment. Some of the cubicle operators of Y-12 were unfortunate enough to witness a maintenance man enter the cubicle control room and forget to hang his grounding hook on the unit before beginning work. He was electrocuted instantly.

There was now a fairly regular stream of Product heading to the scientists at Site Y in the New Mexico desert, some of it with a percentage potent enough for the Gadget. Armed, plainclothes couriers continued to travel by train, occasionally by air, transporting the precious cargo across the country. Medical personnel routinely met the couriers in Oak Ridge to see how they were feeling after their journey. They were taken to the hospital, given a massage and a bath and a big, juicy steak—quite a perk in rationed times. Then, for dessert, a sedative, giving them a solid day’s sleep and recuperation.

Billions of dollars were on their way to being spent. Tens of thousands of acres cleared and hundreds of thousands of people working around the clock. All of the financial and intellectual and physical sacrifice and commitment and collaboration and man-hours boiled down to this: one small suitcase with an even smaller, gold-lined container inside, grams of results from the most comprehensive and expensive military program ever.

The health and safety of the couriers themselves was addressed by Dr. Hymer Friedell, a doctor with the Project who worked closely with the chief of the Project’s medical section, Stafford Warren. In a November 1944 memo sent to one of the Project’s intelligence officers, Friedell had written:

The conditions under which couriers transport radioactive material have been discussed . . . and it has been definitely established that only under extreme circumstances would it be possible for an agent to receive more than the tolerance dose. The radioactive material is carefully measured and proper shielding provided. Measurements are made with the shield and container in various positions to establish the adequacy of protection. It may be feasible for couriers to carry radiation monitoring devices (film badge) which are available through the Manhattan District Medical Section, but a regular program of blood analyses should be introduced only in the case of a courier who transports such material more frequently than twice per month.

In Los Alamos, the design for the gun model of the Gadget using enriched Tubealloy coming out of CEW was set. A test of the implosion model of the Gadget, using 49 being produced at Site W, was planned for July. But this new element had other considerations as well. It was feisty, very active, and posed potential health problems, the extent of which were still being determined.

On January 5, 1944, scientist Glenn Seaborg, a codiscoverer of 49, had written to one of the Project’s health directors that “the physiological hazards of working with [49] and its compounds may be very great. Due to its alpha radiation and long life it may be that the permanent location in the body of even very small amounts, say one milligram or less, may be very harmful.”