6-28-05, 9:45 am

July 16, 2005, will be the 60th anniversary of the plutonium-fueled atomic bomb, tested at White Sands, New Mexico. On July 15th and 16th the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear-weapons watchdog, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, will hold poetry readings and a silent auction in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. John Bradley, a fellow poet, and editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (1995), and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (2000), and this writer, are two of the readers invited to participate.

As my father helped in the manufacture of the plutonium used in the Trinity A-bomb, and in its twin, Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945, I want to reflect on my father’s 36-year Hanford work history which began in January 1944 at what was then coded the Hanford Engineering Works (H.E.W.). Because my father was typical of Hanford workers – most of whom came to the world’s first plutonium-manufacturing plant on the banks of the Columbia River in the scablands of southeastern Washington State from other states as far away from Washington as Louisiana and New York, I am writing then about Hanford workers in general, and about the invisible class structure of a US government 'company town.'

The company town was Richland, which I sometimes pun as en-Richedland; a former farming town on the Columbia plateau, as were also White Bluffs and Hanford itself. General Leslie Groves, the Donald Rumsfeld of his time, the military head of the Manhattan Project, had the farmers and orchardists moved off their land – and the farmhouses, town halls and granges bulldozed over. The property was needed for the war effort, and to help defeat the Axis powers. They were paid off cheaply for alfalfa fields and beautiful apple, cherry and pear orchards – so that the US might seed atomic fruit.

The Native Americans were affected also, as the Columbia, the Yakima and Snake rivers were traditional salmon fishing grounds for the Yakama, Wanapum, Nez Perce, Cayuse, Walla Walla, and other Pacific Northwest tribes, to say nothing of the riparian wildlife that depended on the rivers. The Yakama tribe was forced to give up some of their legal rights as their reservation included part of what was to be called the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

When you read the histories of the Manhattan Project, and of the creation and use of the atomic bombs, you read about Robert Oppenheimer (the scientific head of the Manhattan Project), General Groves, and others of the nuclear and military priesthood: physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. But you will seldom read about workers, the men and women who built the huge wartime plant (B-reactor); the company town of Richland, and those whose jobs it was to process the plutonium from yellowcake uranium (sent to Hanford from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, another company town) into plutonium pucks after B-reactor had been completed.

Richland, Washington, was as much a 'company town' as any coal mining town owned by Peabody Coal. But instead of Pinkerton thugs watching over the town, Groves had his military intelligence at work, making sure there were no communists, socialists or unpatriotic types working at the nuclear plant or in the businesses that served the community. (I wrote about ur-Homeland Security in 'Mother Witherup’s Top Secret Cherry Pie' in my 1990 book Men at Work). Also, and this was General Grove’s doing, the workers and businesses in Richland, were all white folks. The African Americans who worked on construction helping to build the plant, and the other reactors that went online during the Korean War, had to live downriver in Pasco, Washington, and in often substandard housing. There were no Hispanics or Native Americans either working at Hanford – and there were only one or two Hispanics and/or Native Americans in my graduating class of 1953.

The young and mostly white work force at Hanford was not by accident. Groves made certain that no workers at Hanford, Oakridge or Los Alamos – the nuclear Holy See of the Manhattan Project – transferred from one community to another. This, in Groves’ mind, insured the secrecy of the project. The scientists, however, the nuclear priesthood, were able to travel from Met Lab in Chicago to Oak Ridge, or to Los Alamos, or to Hanford to tune up and tinker with the fissioning and manufacturing processes.
My father, Mervyn Clyde Witherup, came to Hanford from Kansas City, Missouri, January or February of 1944. He had been working in quality control, checking the annealing on cartridges, at the Remington munitions plant in Kansas City. Remington was then a subsidiary of DuPont. I don’t have the space to go into the history here, but DuPont contracted to build and run the very first nuclear reactor in the United States. There were announcements at Dad’s workplace that there was an opportunity for higher wages were one to 'Go West, young man.' My father decided to make the move, and the rest of the family joined him in June 1944: my mother, me, sister Sandra, and Mervyn Jr., ages nine, three and one respectively. The youngest, sibling, Constance, was born in Richland, 1945.

Father was typical also of having worked for a DuPont company. Many of the other workers recruited for H.E.W. had come from DuPont plants across the country. Dad was 4-F because of a bad shoulder from an auto accident in Kansas City – and he always felt somewhat guilty about not being in the war, though he balanced this, as did many of the other workers, and their families, with the satisfaction that he was doing important, wartime work. Few of the workers knew what they were making at Hanford, until the actual dropping of Little Boy on Hiroshima, and Fat Man on Nagasaki. Then, and throughout the cold war, and even to this day, workers and the majority of the families believed that the atomic bombs helped win the war in the Pacific, and that their use against civilian populations was justified.

General Groves saw to it that the table cracks were filled, and the table varnished over; that is, he saw to it that newspapers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho did no investigative reporting on what was going on at H.E.W. Nothing but company propaganda got through into the community. One never heard from school lectern or church pulpit any criticism of Hanford. As everyone was white, or European American, we were not aware of class or racial differences either, except when our sports teams played the mostly Black Pasco Bulldogs!

The children of physicists, doctors, chemists, engineers and workers wore pretty much the same style of clothes to school, shirts, slacks and shoes ordered from Montgomery Ward or Sears and Roebuck in Seattle; and although the better paid scientists lived in single unit government housing, while the rest of us lived in prefabs or duplexes, the gray and brown shingle sameness of government housing erased class differences. Because of government secrecy – neither scientists nor workers were to talk about their jobs with their families, or said chemist or worker, and his/her family, would be on the next train, or moving van.

My father’s first job – he told me later on – was to help log in the graphite blocks that were used in B-reactor. Then he was, for awhile, a timekeeper; then trained as an operating engineer to work in the process that separated the plutonium from the slurry after the uranium was fissioned. The separation process was done in a huge two-block long facility called a 'Queen Mary,' and this was one of the more toxic workstations in the process. Also, most workers had to pull shift work: days, swings and graveyards. Such shift work, which made for disrupted sleep rhythms, along with the toxic work environment, helped bring on cancers and illnesses of the immune-deficiency system in later years.

Dad had his 35th birthday on July 14, 1944, two days before the Trinity test. I doubt he, or any of the other workers, even knew of the Trinity test, though they had helped manufacture the plutonium, softball-sized core used in the Trinity A-bomb. Though Little Boy, a uranium bomb, of a gun-fired type, was used first, and Hiroshima thereby became the icon for the atomic age, it was the Trinity test, an implosive device with a plutonium core wrapped in explosive lenses, that began the nuclear age, and was the template, after Nagasaki, for the nuclear warheads that followed.

At this writing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is being discussed at the UN. That nation-states even argue for the maintenance of nuclear weaponry, in the name of 'national security,' is but a continuation of insanity. In the United States the myth still prevails, and intentionally so, that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped win the war. Many Historians and scholars of the Manhattan Project have since pointed out that the atomic bombs were used, not to win the war against Japan, but to prevent Stalin and the Soviets from encroaching further in Europe.

It is documented that General Groves himself admitted that Stalin was the real target of the atomic bombs. As Joseph Rotblatt, a physicist who left the Manhattan Projects on ethical grounds, says in the introduction to Hiroshima’s Shadow (Pamphleteers Press, 1998), an important anthology of nuclear essays and documents (privately published, I might add): Although I had no illusions about the Stalin regime – after all, it was his pact with Hitler that enabled the latter to invade Poland – I felt deeply the sense of betrayal of an ally. Remember, this was said at a time (General Groves at a dinner where Rotblatt was present, that the intention of the Manhattan Project was to subdue the Soviets) when thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front, tying down the Germans and giving the Allies time to prepare for the landing on the continent of Europe. Until then I thought our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim. Until my father’s death from prostate cancer in 1988 – an illness due to thirty years of labor at Hanford, he held to the belief that his work had been patriotic and meaningful. He always claimed that Hanford had a history of being a safe workplace; that the various contractors, DuPont, GE, United Nuclear, etc. had the workers health in mind. Meanwhile, workers, family members, farmers downwind from Hanford and salmon-eating Native Americans continued to die from all kinds of cancer. The workers and family members who still live in the Richland area – now called the Tri-Cities (Richland, Kennewick and Pasco), and the sons and daughters of Hanford workers who went to work at Hanford, or went to college, then came back to work at Hanford, are still patriotic, and yet, many of them, believe the myth the the atomic bombs ended World War II. Though the high school in Richland, from which I graduated in 1953, has fissioned into two high schools, the older and larger of the two, Richland High, still calls their sports teams the Richland Bombers; and there are atomic bomb logos on the green and gold letter sweaters, and a mushroom cloud at the center blooming from the letter 'R' in the center of the gymnasium floor.

In spring of 1994, my father having been dead six years, I toured the Hanford site with members of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and visiting educators and scientists from Chelyabinsk, Russia. The Chelyabinsk nuclear facility was very much like Hanford, both in its physical buildings and in its cold war mission. I was sitting alongside a woman journalist and educator as the bus passed by B-reactor – I forget the exact words we exchanged (my Russian had long since rusted) – but I mentioned the word 'graveyard,' and it suddenly hit me, again, not only my emotionally charged father’s death, but all the many ghosts of Nagasaki, ghosts of Hanford workers, and the ghosts of the Yakama and Wanapum people: the spirits of salmon, grouse, coyotes, geese, and rattlesnakes – on the once beautiful Columbia plateau, a land and river still striking and resonant, but now one of the most contaminated places on the planet.

Of the scientists and military people who witnessed the Trinity test, Robert Oppenheimer’s quote is probably the most well known and repeated: 'I am become death, the Shatterer of Worlds. (quoting from the Bhavagad-Gita). But I prefer what Kenneth Bainbridge, the naval officer who was in charge of the Trinity test, said.

'Now we are all sons of bitches.'



--Bill Witherup is a poet and playwright from Seattle.