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Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Daniel J. Walkowitz
Many historians have heard of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Site X) and Los Alamos, New Mexico (Site Y) and readily associate each locale with the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government's top-secret effort during the Second World War to build an atomic bomb before Germany. The subject of this book, the reprinting of Hanford and the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Seattle (Seattle: The Living History Press, 1989), is the less well known third "atomic city," Hanford, Washington (Site W.). Comprising nearly sixty oral reminiscences conducted in the mid-1980s by journalist Stephen L. Sanger, this publication makes this important but less well-known story in early nuclear history available to a wider audience.
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Some scientists' view that Hanford was little more than a production "factory" for the separation of uranium into fissionable plutonium helps explain the town's relative obscurity. Oak Ridge and Los Alamos had the allure and excitement associated with the bomb itself; Oak Ridge produced the fissionable uranium used in the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima, while Los Alamos was where scientists actually made the atomic weapon and tried it out. As physicists such as Herbert L. Anderson, who never in fact visited the site, explained: "Hanford itself was a factory. The basic process had been worked out at Chicago and, to some extent, at Oak Ridge. Hanford was always referred to as the production plant." (p. 46)
Such views, however, are shortsighted. As S. L. Sanger's interviews document, engineers and working people had to invent a manufacturing technology for construction on an enormous scale with unprecedented complexities and under extraordinary secrecy and urgency. The remarkable engineering feat involved in creating the massive production facility at Hanford virtually overnight in the desert (and, not irrelevantly, on Indian land) is as important as the "pure" science involved in discovering fission, and can not be so easily separated from the bomb itself. Indeed, Hanford's plutonium fueled "Fat Man," the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Hanford's history, moreover, is that of an equally important set of stories with significant contemporary ecological and political resonance. The entire Hanford project - the production facility and the city created for its workforce - was one of the largest public works projects in American history. As important, the Du Pont Corporation's supervision of the project constitutes a major and early example of public-private sector integration where a private corporation would be required to work on a public project with public funds. The magnitude of Hanford as an engineering marvel can be gleaned from the town's meteoric rise. After confiscating more than half a million acres of sagebrush desert from some 2,000 owners in "among the largest foreclosures in American history," (p. 5) within about eighteen months from 1943 to early 1945, Du Pont built a city of huts, trailers and massive reactors which housed more than 52,000 people. In his introduction to the collection of interviews, Ferenc M. Szasz correctly compares the process to that of a gold mining camp, where migrants from all across the country poured into this western outpost lured by patriotism, adventure, and high wages.
The remembrances of World War II Hanford also resonate with contemporary concerns about the role of government, land use, secrecy, the environment and the conduct of war. Sanger provides accounts, albeit often modest ones, from a Wanapum Indian, local homesteaders who lost ranches and orchard land, and an appraiser who had to meet local expectations. Others speak of the problems of radiation and disposal of nuclear waste at the site, problems complicated by debates about the shroud of secrecy over all aspects of the project at the time. Finally, unresolved questions about the need to drop the bomb (and, then, especially the second bomb, which used the Hanford plutonium) permeate the interviews.
The resonance of the present through the past in Working on the Bomb also makes Sanger's history much more than a local case. Often the stories repeat one another on technical detail (i.e., issues such as fission); at other times, the less than scientifically-inclined reader will find descriptions of scientific or engineering scientific processes heavy-going. But persistence will be well-rewarded by storytellers who are generally able to keep their tale simple and engaging. Indeed, much of the book is less about the science of the project than a social history of life in a pioneer village in the wartime desert. Scientists and engineers often came with families and moved into nearby houses or into the trailer park of 4,300 units - the largest trailer park in the world. In contrast, most of the construction, maintenance workers and plant operators, who were often single men, lived in dorm huts; women were kept in a separate area separated by barbed wire. Blacks lived in segregated barracks. But the stories were not of racism so much as of decent wartime food, interminable dust, constant fighting, booze, a chilling climate of secrecy, and the promise of "doing" something important in the mysterious concrete bunker-like buildings.
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