Fallout: Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Trinity Test

[IndianaGreen]

Fallout: Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Trinity Test

By Bill Witherup

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.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/1385/1/106/

[queeg]

1. Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Actually not true at all----the museum in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is considerably more involved with the "workers" and the town than it is with the physics. I have been to the museum there twice and was thouroughly impressed with a small town that had recorded its strange history well.

If Richland has failed to utilize the generous grants that have been available for the past 35 years to record its history then the fault cannot lie on the shoulders of the scientists or the government entities that hired these workers, but rather on the town itself, and its seeming failure to apprise itself of opportunities available to it.

Leslie Groves was definitely NOT the Rumsfeld of his time, because he actually built projects to last for the betterment of this nation, and performed a seriously worthwhile job for his country. You may not think much of the five sided palace built in a swamp in Washington, but it should be remembered that before the manhattan project he was in charge of building the Pentagon. And of you think the Manhattan project was a schoolboy chemistry shop then you are seriously mistaken.

Don't go blamin' the government if nobody in your town cares enough to give a damn.---You want a museum--hire some people to get the grants and build it.

There are a hell of a lot of people that would love to get in on the ground floor of a historical project like that.