Bill Witherup: Richland, WA ... Where They Made the Plutonium Used in The Bomb
[Bill Witherup is a poet living in Seattle who writes on labor, nuclear issues, and prisons. His latest book is Down Wind, Down River: New and Selected Poems (West End Press, 2000). A longer version of this essay appears in the July 2005 issue of Political Affairs. Posted at Japan Focus on June 30, 2005.]
July 16, 2005, will be the sixtieth 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 writers 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 thirty-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 U.S. 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 military head of the Manhattan Project, ordered
the farmers and orchardists moved off their land -- and the farm houses, 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 equally affected. The Columbia, Yakima and Snake rivers
were salmon fishing grounds for the Yakama, Wanapum, Nez Perce, Cayuse, Walla
Walla, and other Pacific Northwest tribes, to say nothing of the riparian wild
life 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 war time plant (B-reactor);
the company town of Richland, and those whose jobs it was to process the plutonium
from yellow cake 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 put military intelligence to 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 General
Grove saw to it that 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 on line during the Korean War, had to
live down river in Pasco, Washington, in often substandard housing. There were
no Hispanics or Native Americans 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 security of the project. The top scientists,
however, the elite of the nuclear priesthood, were able to travel from Metlab
in Chicago to Oak Ridge, or to Los Alamos, or to Hanford to tune up and tinker
with the fissioning and manufacturing processes with security clearances
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, which had contracted to build and
run the very first nuclear reactor built in the United States. There were announcements
at dad's work place 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 9, 3 and 1 respectively. The youngest sibling, Constance, was
born in Richland in 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, war-time 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 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
or workers were to talk about their jobs with their families, or they and their
family would be on the next train, or moving van.
My father's first job -- he later told me -- was to help log in the graphite
blocks that were used in B-reactor. Then he was, for awhile, a Time Keeper;
then trained as an Operating Engineer 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 work stations 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, may
have weakened resistance to cancers and illnesses of the immune-deficiency system.
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,
which began the nuclear age, and was the template, after Nagasaki, for the nuclear
warheads that followed.
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. 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 has calls their sports teams Richland Bombers; and there are atomic
bomb logos on the green and gold letter sweaters, and 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 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.
This article first appeared at Japan Focus and is reprinted with permission.