The Girls of Atomic City (42 page)

Oak Ridgers have not yet mastered twenty-first-century thinking, no more than have the rest of us. But instinctively they express what we all hope. In their own fashion they are saying: “We’d like to see all this new work turned into helpful things” . . . Men and women, wherever they are, must insist that Oak Ridgers be allowed to strive with atomics in the constructive measures of peace.

Stafford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project’s medical section, traveled to Japan to assess the aftermath. Meanwhile, research into the effects of radiation continued in Oak Ridge and elsewhere. A radiology professor at the University of Rochester medical school before joining the Project, Warren was on the road in Japan from August 7 through October 15.

Warren—and the rest of the Manhattan Project—relied almost exclusively on Geiger counter tubes made by one woman at Chicago’s Met Lab, Nancy Farley Wood. Nancy had the touch. She had worked on designs of several radiation detectors and when she tried to train others to make the tubes, no one, Warren thought, was as good as Nancy. She later went on to start her own company, the N. Wood Counter Laboratory. The “N.” was so that no one would know she, a woman, owned it. It had been an odd trip, Warren remembered, following the trail of the fallout with their Geiger counters as random kamikazes ran up, swords in the air, trying to surrender.

Heading into central Hiroshima, “it stunk terribly, and there were flies everywhere,” Warren later said. “The flies were so bad that we had to close up the windows of the car to keep them out. You would see a man or a woman with what looked like a polka-dot shirt on, but when you got up close, there was just a mass of flies crawling over a formerly white shirt.”

And in Nagasaki:

We had descriptions from the Japanese of the trains backing down into Nagasaki about ten o’clock in the morning, two hours or so after the detonation, and thousands of people packing themselves on the trains. Then the trains would stop ten or fifteen miles out from the city, wherever there was a school or a flat. A lot of the more seriously wounded or burned would get off there. An awful lot of them would be found dead. They had been squeezed in the train all standing upright like sardines. These deaths I’m sure were due to a combination of shock and a high dose of gamma radiation. And then there were those who had lethal doses of a less amount, which had produced bloody diarrhea and the small intestine then fell apart. Four to six weeks later the bone marrow was destroyed and bleeding and the pallor were evident. It was about that time when we arrived.

Weeks into his trip, Warren traveled to the Tokyo home of Admiral Masao Tsuzuki, a Japanese doctor and the country’s top radiation authority. After six weeks together, despite the circumstances, the two men had grown to like each other. Tsuzuki lived in a part of Tokyo that had escaped burning during the spring bombings. Warren didn’t think he needed to tell his security detail where he was going. He entered the admiral’s home, removed his shoes, and the sliding door shut behind him.

The admiral introduced his wife and son, but his daughter remained in the back of the house. Major Motohashi, who worked with Tsuzuki, sat across from Warren as they shared a pot of hot tea. Warren thought the major looked almost like a caricature, with his thick-framed glasses, dark hair, and squat build. He had been a broadsword fencing champion of Japan. Warren, a fencing buff himself at Berkeley, shared his passion for swords, and a sword presentation ceremony commenced after tea.

Motohashi unsheathed a samurai sword from its scabbard, presenting the edge to Warren. “More than three hundred years old,” he said, showcasing the blade’s balance. Warren, accompanied by a single aide and his whereabouts unknown to his security detail, thought about how this sword would have been used for decapitation. He felt sweat beginning to coat his skin. He looked at his aide; he, too, was exhibiting an unhealthy color.

Swords came and went, one a cavalry sword from the Russo-Japanese War that had belonged to Tsuzuki’s father, and his father before him.

Warren admired it, sweating as the serrated edge hung within inches of his face.

“On behalf of Dr. Tsuzuki, I have great pleasure in giving you this,” Motohashi said.

It was exceedingly generous—these men had nothing else to give. They had lost everything. Warren tried to refuse the family heirloom,
but there was no way around it. Samurai swords were offered for General Groves, General Farrell, and (soon-to-be-General) Nichols, too. Though all had gone well, Warren was ready to extricate himself from a small room chock full of so much weaponry.

In exchange, Warren left a battery for Major Motohashi’s electrocardiogram machine. There was bowing and pleasantries. And though Warren respected the men he’d come to know, he didn’t even bother to lace up his boots before getting in the jeep and punching the accelerator.

Years later, Stafford Warren would return to the country with his wife, Vi, on a vacation with a mission. They would track down Tsuzuki’s family—the man himself would be already deceased—and return one of the swords to them.

★ ★ ★

In the first several weeks after the Hiroshima bombing, the only readily available information had been prepared under the auspices of the War Department and under the close watch of General Groves himself. Japan sought to control the story as well. An intrepid journalist named Nakamura—one of three men who paid a boatman to ferry them down a delta clogged with dead bodies to get the real story about what had happened to their homeland—described his trip in concise, harrowing detail:

Suddenly a burnt arm stuck up out of the water and the hand grabbed onto the side of the boat. We couldn’t ignore it and tried to pull it up. But the skin came off in sheets . . .

While Nakamura did manage to get word of what he witnessed to his editors in Tokyo, his story alarmed the censors. The news in the next day’s
Asahi Shimbun
stated that “two B-29s had caused ‘a little’ damage to the city.”

In September, a month after Little Boy was dropped and Warren’s arrival in Japan, the first Western journalist, Australian Wilfred Burchett, entered Hiroshima. He documented what he called “an atomic plague” that continued to kill people. His story was published in London’s
Daily Express
on September 5, 1945. General MacArthur tried to
get the journalist removed from Japan and declared that no civilian journalists would be allowed in Hiroshima.

Early reports that the atomic bomb could keep killing long after its blast had subsided were dismissed by the US military as propaganda. The Allied occupation of Japan, from the end of the war through April 1952, made it easier to censor news reports. For this reason, both the Japanese and American public were slow to learn of the longer-lasting consequences of this new weapon.

Bernard Hoffman, renowned photographer with
Life
magazine, who had already documented the concentration camps in Germany, was the first American photojournalist to document the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His pictures were featured in the October 15, 1945, issue of
Life
, the day Stafford Warren returned from his examination of the sites. The devastation was evident, but the mysterious ongoing deaths remained in the background, easily masked by the dust and ash that covered what remained of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

★ ★ ★

On October 25, 1945, lead Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer visited President Truman.

No one else in the world yet had the bomb and Truman wanted to do everything he could to keep it that way, to continue to keep the bomb and its technology secret.

What was commonly referred to as the Smyth Report had been prepared at the behest of General Groves and under the supervision of the War Department by Henry DeWolf Smyth. Smyth was the chairman of Princeton’s physics department and worked as a consultant with the Manhattan Project and the Army Corps of Engineers. His report told the story of the Project from 1940 through 1945. Copies were available for purchase, and Oak Ridgers snapped them up.

Some higher-ups in the military worried the report gave too much away. However, as Vi Warren pointed out, residents would find little about their contributions within the pages. The veil of secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project had hardly been fully lifted. As the preface explained:

“Secrecy requirements have affected both the detailed content and general emphasis so that many interesting developments have been omitted.”

But Oppenheimer and others did not believe it was possible to keep the details about atomic power secret: The majority of the scientists that helped develop the bomb didn’t feel that hoarding the information was the route to take as the world moved into an uncertain nuclear future.

That fall day, just two and a half months after the bombings, Oppenheimer told Truman he felt he had “blood on my hands.”

Truman didn’t like what he was hearing from the scientist who’d helped make the bomb a reality.
Blood on
his
hands?!
Truman didn’t have any patience for a “cry-baby scientist” or, as he and the Appalachians would have said, “bellyachin’.” Truman told Oppenheimer that if anyone had blood on his hands, it was Truman himself. Then he made it clear to his staff that he never wanted to see Oppenheimer again.

★ ★ ★

In September, the teeth that had been removed from Ebb Cade’s mouth (patient HP-12) in March were sent to Los Alamos.

Dated September 19, 1945, the following memo was addressed to Mr. Wright Langham, part of the analytical chemistry group at Los Alamos, where he developed a method for assaying trace amounts of plutonium in urine. The memo was sent to Langham in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It read:

Inclosed
[sic]
is a brief resume of E.C.’s medical history, and a graphic record of the patient’s hospital course is forwarded under separate cover. The jaundice which this patient developed was apparently an infectious jaundice from which he recovered before his discharge from the hospital. At the time of discharge the patient was ambulatory and in good condition. Approximately 15 teeth have been extracted by Captain Peter Dale, and the rate of healing of the extraction sites was within the limits of normal. More bone specimens and extracted teeth will be shipped to you very soon for analysis. We would appreciate receiving your records of the complete analyses on the urines
[sic],
feces, bone samples, and teeth at your earliest convenience.

For the District Engineer: Very truly yours, David Goldright, Captain, Medical Corps, Assistant.

Conflicting language in memos such as this from the Atomic Energy Commission’s archives and later oral histories conducted by the Department of Energy tell two different stories: One, that Ebb Cade had been discharged, and another, that he had, one day, just up and disappeared. What is known for certain is that within eight years of this memo, Ebb Cade died and was buried in Greensboro, North Carolina. The cause of his death was listed as heart failure. He was about 61 years old.

Ebb Cade was not the only test subject. It turned out that between 1945 and 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium, specifically: 11 at Rochester, New York, 3 at the University of Chicago, 3 at UC San Francisco, and 1, Ebb Cade, at Oak Ridge. Several thousand human radiation experiments were conducted between 1944 and 1974. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate these and other experiments funded by the United States government. Their final report was published in 1996.

★ ★ ★

In November 1945, just three months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics would go to Wolfgang Pauli and that Otto Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of fission. (The award had been delayed by the war.)

But Lise Meitner, the colleague to whom Hahn turned to explain his findings, was not honored. The decision to exclude Lise Meitner from any prize that year shocked many in the scientific community. Lise herself thought it was “unjust” and “almost insulting” that she was referred to in the press as Hahn’s junior associate.

The award ceremony wouldn’t take place until December 1946. Earlier that year, Lise had traveled to the United States, giving seminars and meeting friends. At a dinner of the Women’s National Press Club, Lise was honored as The Woman of the Year and met President Truman. “So,” Truman reportedly said, “you’re the little lady who got us into all this.” Lise later attended a cocktail party at which she met General Groves for the first time, where another guest reported the pair had little to say to each other. She recoiled at a script she saw for the 1947 MGM film
The Beginning or the End
, which she said was “nonsense.” She believed the film perpetuated the fabrications made earlier about the manner of her departure from Germany, depicting Lise escaping with, as she said, “the bomb in my purse.”

The Nobel ceremonies were held December 10, 1946, in Stockholm, and Lise attended. During Hahn’s time in Stockholm, Lise was portrayed in the press as a student, an assistant, further diminishing her role in the fission discovery. After Hahn and his wife left Sweden, Lise wrote to a friend:

“I found it quite painful that in his interviews [Hahn] did not say one word about me, to say nothing of our thirty years together.”

Lise Meitner was not the only woman whose contributions to the discovery of fission remained obscured. In 1989, Emilio Segrè, a key member of Enrico Fermi’s team in Rome, wrote the following in
Physics Today:

Another error was in not paying enough attention to a 1934 article by Ida Noddack in Berlin, who criticized our chemistry and pointed to the possibility of fission. Much has been said of her prescience. Her article was certainly known to us in Rome, to Hahn and Meitner in Berlin and to Joliot and Curie in Paris. If any of us had really grasped its importance, it would have been easy to discover fission in 1935.