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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Discussion Begins September 15
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ Tube Alloy, 1938
Chapters 4,5
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1), Listen to music the girls would have listened to at Oak Ridge. (http://www.girlsofatomiccity.com/sub_mid/music_click.png)
For Your Consideration
September 15-21
Introduction
1. How widely known were predictions of an atomic weapon in the years before WWII - i.e HG Wells in 1914?
2. Who first used the term "tube alloy"? Where did it come from? What does it mean?
3. From reading the "cast of characters in the Introduction, can you conclude how the author decided which of the many "girls" she had interviewed to feature in this book? Which of these girls got your attention?
Chapter 1 Train to Nowhere
1. What did Celia Szapka have in common with the other recruits for the Project? Didn't the secrecy concern any of them?
2. How did their experience differ?
Chapter II Taking of Site X, 1942
1. Why were surveyors considered "harbingers of doom" in East Tennessee at this time? What did you think of the way land was acquired for the Project? Where did everyone go after losing their homes?
2. How did these recruits differ from the well-known Rosie the Riveter?
Tube Alloy- element 92
1. Do you understand why the geochemist, Ida Naddack, was mocked when she questioned why the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi stopped experimenting when he reached element 82 on the periodic table (lead)?
2. Do you understand what she had accomplished?
Chapter 3 Through the Gates
1. Did the Presidential Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices put an end to desegregation in Tennessee at this time? How were Kattie and Willie Strickland treated compared to white recruits?
2. What were some of the problems the Project faced in recruitment to the CEW? Do you really think everyone got such a thorough background check as Jane Hallibuton Greer?
3. Can you share some of the details that caught you eye in this chapter - Chutes and Ladders, I.Miller shoes, for example?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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Welcome everyone! If you've started the opening chapters, you probably have many questions and observations regarding the recruitment to the secret Project at the Clinton Engineering Works in Eastern Tennessee. Please feel free to enter the conversation! As we share our thoughts and listen to one another's comments, some of the many questions you have will probably be answered.
The discussion schedule for each week is in the heading (the first post at the top of each page) - there are also some questions in the heading, but please don't feel you must limit your remarks to them, though hopefully our conversation will touch on each of these in the coming week.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
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Just opened the gates! Thanks, Jane! Let's see who gets here first!
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Should we start commenting on the book, or wait til tomorrow?
Jean
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You're first, Jean! and ready to chat - except no one else is here yet. :D
But since the door was unlocked, feel free to put the tea - or coffee on - and let's begin! Hardcover or paperback?
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I'm reading the hardcover, JoanP.
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I'm here.
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I'm reading a hardcover copy from the library. Just started and think that it will be very interesting getting a "home front" view of World War II. I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.
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I am here, too.
www.girlsofatomiccity.com/
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http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/11/14/a-trip-down-memory-lane-to-americas-secret-atomic-city/
Go down page.
There are pictures here.
You can click on them.
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bluebird, I love MessyNessyChic.
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Hardcopy!
For those of you who have seen Oak Ridge recently, is any of it operating as a government entity? Is there any sense of a "town" still there? Is there anything in the area that would make contractors want to build a development there? Or is it just nothing?
When i read that Celia's father had no work in the mines in the summer, that confused me. Why would the mines close in the summer? Then i thought, can it be as simple as folks aren't buying coal for home furnaces in the summer? It seems very strange to me that they wouldn't have some kind of market in the summer, or just mine for a build up for winter. What do you think?
I was also surprised that when talking about Celia ordering grits in the Cafe in Knoxville that it mentions there was a black waiter. That sounds wrong to me. Would a white restaurant have hired a black man as a waiter in Knoxville, in 1943?
BY THE WAY, i don't think i would just go to a job without knowing where or why. There were too many jobs available in 1943, i wouldn't need to take something mysterious.
Jean
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Hi all. Pardon me while I jump in with my initial thoughts as I began reading the book. It's a late hour so I hope to make some sense.
I love the clever way Denise Kiernan sets this story up. From the introduction to the cast of characters, the map and then that page and a half bombshell, "Revelation, August 1945." Was that a great opening or what!
I am fascinated by these women. It was such a different time and mindset in the country than where we are now. I was caught between complete pride in how patriotic everyone seemed and complete shock at how blindly they committed. I mean really, to leave your home and family for a virtual unknown except it was work and it (pg.7) "served one purpose only:to bring a speedy and victorious end to the war." As Tom Brokaw termed the folks from that era, "the greatest generation." They surely get my vote on that one.
I am also fascinated with the history of the science behind the atom bomb and the snapshot of my country back then. The issues of equality, women's rights, land ownership, government power...all of it.
Chapter 3-question 3-- My family had a Lionel train track and trains set up on a big piece of plywood in our Illinois basement (early 60's) so it was interesting to me that Lionel only offered paper trains that Christmas of 1943. Everything was affected by WWII.
That's all I've got for now.
P.S. I really enjoyed seeing the pictures on the messynessychic link. Wonderful!!
Becki
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1. I suspect that, as with many such discoveries, the military complex takes an interest. Once X-rays and radioactivity were discovered near the end of the 1800s, scientists do their thing and publish papers. So, on a limited basis, limited because not many people other than other scientists could or would read those papers, the possibility of weapons made from radioactive materials would have been public knowledge. The exception, of course, would be actual military related experiments that were labeled secret and above.
I don't think predictions of the atomic bomb would have been widely known or thought about except in scientific circles and the imaginations of science fiction writers and their readers. I don't know about back then, but most of today's science fiction writers do research the latest experiments and gadgets that science and technology have to offer in order to project future advances. So the question for me becomes which comes first, early discovery and experiment or the science fiction writer's imagination? Does the writer think up something and then go looking for actual scientific efforts, or vice versa? Many of the experiments we are just now hearing about have been ongoing experiments for years, including "Total Recall" style downloading and uploading of memories, controlling computers and robots via direct brain connections, and of course, the enhanced, smart body armor. I myself am waiting for the ansible. Google glasses are just the beginning.
H. G. Wells may have coined the term atomic bomb, but Cleve Cartmill and his publisher, John Campbell, gave the government virtual heart attacks with the publication of "Deadline" in 1944. http://boingboing.net/2014/07/29/the-1944-science-fiction-story.html
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The MessyNessy photographs were interesting. The only glaring error was about the F houses, which were large, one story family homes reserved for the top people. There were only about 57 of them. Some of them even had two bathrooms! I believe they are every one still occupied. The four unit complex described was probably an E apartment house.
The photo fo the Guest House was interesting. I spent the night of my first wedding anniversay there. The bathroom was down the hall. The building has been gutted and is currently being converted to an assisted living facility. I can't wait to see what they have done with it. They have preserved the facade. We might consider living there when we can no longer occupy our home.
Oak Ridge is still very much a government town. Two of the three plants are still in operation. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory occupies the x-10 site, and Y-12 is still doing weapons work. K-25 is in the process of being demolished.
The work going on at Y-12 is still very much secret.
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Wonderful - You have found your way here - and Jean had the coffee ready for the early risers!
Bluebird...the sites are marvelous! Thank you! I too enjoy the photographs. We'll be reading about Ed Westcott in Denise Kiernan's book -
"These photographs taken by the only authorised photographer for the entire town, Ed Westcott, documented life at Oak Ridge, from everyday moments of a seemingly normal suburban American town, to the residents performing their ‘tasks’ and ‘duties’ inside the secret nuclear facilities."
There were so many "girls" Denise K. interviewed. Can you guess why she selected those that she did for her book? Are you having any difficulty keeping their stories straight? I've got a bookmark in the introduction - keep flipping back to the little bios for reference.
I liked the close-up of the group - you can see them better than those on the book cover -
I think the photographs drive home the idea that this was another time in which these girls lived. I was only a child at the time, but the pictures, the hairdos, the skirts (no slacks!) seem very familiar to me.
As Becki points out - it is the information from Denise Kiernan's interviews that we get "the snapshot of my country back then. The issues of equality, women's rights, land ownership, government power...all of it."
(http://1-ps.googleusercontent.com/x/www.messynessychic.com/static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/991x680xshiftchange.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Wy0fLn2gLl.jpg)
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Oak Ridge is a thriving suburban small city (other than being as ursamajor said, a one-employer town).
I'd think there might well have been a black waiter in a white restaurant, although more likely in the kitchen as a dishwasher. Definitely only a server, though.
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Jean - interesting questions about summer coal mining - and the wait staff in restaurants. Does anyone have an explanation? My guess is that there wasn't a big market for coal in the summer, so some miners' jobs were cut. Maryz maybe with so many people off in the war, blacks were brought in from the kitchen to help with the service. What did you think of Jean's close reading?
Ursa - your on the ground presence in Oak Ridge is invaluable! Please don't go away! Your answer to Jean's question, for example -
"Oak Ridge is still very much a government town. Two of the three plants are still in operation. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory occupies the x-10 site, and Y-12 is still doing weapons work. K-25 is in the process of being demolished.
The work going on at Y-12 is still very much secret."
Are you allowed to share where your husband worked at war's end? How long did you both work in Oak Ridge ?
We'll think of you when reading about that Guest House...spending your first wedding anniversay there. And - you might consider living there when we can no longer occupy our home. How romantic!
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Frybabe - interesting thoughts on the bomb and science fiction/HG Wells, who coined the term, "atomic bomb." I haven't read the link you provided yet - but have a whole bunch of questions on "Tube Alloy."
Does it sound to you as if Denise Kiernan had a scientific background? She really gets into detail when describing this! Since there are many chapters on tube alloy - it seems we should make the effort to understand it... How about it? Can anyone explain it - in small doses - short sentences. So that even I can understand... :D
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No, Ms. Kiernan has a degree in the Arts. She has done freelance journalism, did a stint as head writer for So You Want to Be a Millionaire, produced some works for several cable stations, done some ghost writing, as well as co-authored several books with her husband, Joseph D'Agnese. She must take good research notes and be able to put into understandable form.
Tube Alloy is a term I hadn't run across before this. A Google search doesn't really help. Wikipedia says Tube Alloys was the British code name for their nuclear program during the war. I found a company that sells a tube alloy which it says is used to surface products that must be able to take extreme abrasion. Those listed looked mostly like parts you might find on heavy excavation/mining machinery. Another company with Tube Alloy in its name appears to customize tubing primarily for the petroleum industry. I guess I'll have to read on to see what Kiernan says.
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Tube alloy was a substitute word for uranium and its isotopes. Because uranium is naturally radioactive and the raw material for the project the word couldn't be used.
My husband and I didn't come to Oak Ridge until 1953, well after the war was over. He attended the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology, a program established by Admiral Rickover to train reactor engineers. He spent most of his career working in Oak Ridge, eventually doing scientific computer programming. Because he workedwithr people in many disciplines he has publications in many areas.
Today is our wedding anniversary, the 62nd; 61 years since we spent the night at the Guest House.
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Happy Anniversary, Ursa!
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Yes, to echo Fry - A very happy anniversary, Ursamajor! Does this bring back memories?
(http://smithdray1.net/angeltowns/or/images/AlexanderInnwGuestHouseMarkerlow.jpg)
(http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/12/c6/f2/12c6f21d1b53ea9469b78c3e50599e18.jpg)
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Happy anniversary, Ursa!
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Happy Anniversary, Ursa, and best wishes for many more.
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Happy anniversary, ursa. I love the photo of "your" guest house and the close-up photo of that line of women with others behind. I am particularly struck with the "secrecy" billboard: Make C.E.W. count. Continue to PROTECT project information."
Frybabe, that podcast about the science fiction story, DEADLINE, that came out a year before the atomic bomb looks like it will be very interesting. Is it about 37 minutes long? I'm going to try to listen to it later. Thanks for the link. Secrecy is so much a part of life in so many ways. It's a topic that's intriguing and I'm going to be following that theme in this book.
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Marcie, the discussion about Deadline, Cartmill, and Campbell takes up about 15:30 minutes of the podcast. The rest is about other things, interesting but unrelated to our discussion.
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Happy Anniversary Ursa!! 62 years, oh how I hope my hubby and I make it to that, we are at 43 so far. Seems I was not even thought of when this project was taking place, since I was born in 1952. I look at the picture of the women and seeing all their dresses, skirts and blouses really dates us back to a whole different era. I noticed how well fit and in good physical shape they seem to be in.
I think someone said we have to remember to put our mindset back to this time frame. I will try to follow along and hope to get the book from my library. So far no luck. Pictures sure do help me, thank you all for those links and pics.
Ciao for now~
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Thanks for the info, Frybabe.
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I can see that you are going to be a help with understanding the Tubealloy chapters, Fry! I'm afraid I have little patience with them - because my mind isn't wired to understand such matters. I do see them as being important to the Project, however...and will welcome any help in understanding them. Those chapters are bringing up a number of questions.
Don't know if I told you we'd invited the author to the discussion. I was disappointed to get this response from her agent/publisher - would have liked to ask her about her background...where did she get so much of the scientific information from?
"So sorry for the delay. Unfortunately, Denise Kiernan currently does not have room in her schedule to come into book clubs. We are working on taking that option down from her website for the time being. Thank you so much for your understanding!"
Becki wrote earlier yesterday -
"I love the clever way Denise Kiernan sets this story up. From the introduction to the cast of characters, the map ... the history of the science behind the atom bomb"
I appreciated the fact that she broke up the explanation of Tubealloy, with the background of the girls who had no idea what the substance was - alternating the discovery of the properties of the substance with the recruiting of the girls.
I'm glad that she doesn't provide long Tubealloy sections...just enough to move the story along.
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Ursa tells us that Tubealloy was a substitute word for uranium and its isotopes. Because uranium is naturally radioactive and the raw material for the project the word "uranium" couldn't be used."
Wasn't it dangerous working with radioactive material? Was anyone aware of the dangers? I guess we'll soon see.
Jean, you say you wouldn't have blindly signed on for the project without more information. Why do you think so many thousands take the job offer at Oak Ridge if there was other work available?
Bella - are you saying that your library doesn't carry the book - or that all copies are checked out?
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JoanP., We had a difficult time finding a copy in the many libraries in and around my town. Many of them do not carry it, and when I kept searching online none of the libraries were showing it at all. Alas! They have finally located me a copy and I will be able to pick it up tomorrow. No e-reader copies. :( I really did not want to pay for the book, so hard copy it will be.
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Ursa- Congratulations on your anniversary!! Wonderful!
Bellamarie-- I am just a few years behind you and I noticed the style of dress as well. I think I was born after my time. I love that style. I hate today's fashions with everything hanging out. The gals in the picture all look so together. I enjoy men in shirt and tie as well. :)
Wasn't it dangerous working with radioactive material? Was anyone aware of the dangers? I guess we'll soon see. --- I thought I read somewhere that the girls doing the laundry would pass the detector(I am assuming this was to check for radioactivity) over the clothes and if the alarm/bell/whatever sounded they would wash them again. I wonder if those girls suffered effects of radiation. My first thought knowing they were building this bomb and working around uranium was WOW, they have lived a long time for possibly being exposed. So I will be paying close attention to who did what kind of work while at Oak Ridge.
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This paragraph on p69 really struck me.
The Project liked high school girls, especially those from rural backgrounds. Recruiters sought them out relentlessly, feeling young women were easy to instruct. They did what they were told. They weren't overly curious. If you tell a young woman of 18 from a small-town background to do something, she'll do it, no questions asked. Educated women and men, people who had gone to college and learned just enough to think that they might "know" something, gave you problems.
My how times have changed. Nowadays, an employer will barely, if at all, look at you if you have only a high school degree. They are less likely to want to deal with on the job training, thinking that college grads will not need any or as much. And for young women doing as they are told, no questions asked, HAH! I'm as "curious as a cat" and like to understand the whys for doing something a certain way.
That's an interesting question. When DID people become aware that radioactive material was so dangerous just being close to it? As a side note, my Uncle's family are from the Reading area of PA. Reading sits atop the Reading Prong, a formation that contains Uranium which decays into Radon. Many of his family ended up with cancer.
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BeckiC., I love the women's dress back then too, except today I am more jogging/sweatpants, and tee shirts or sweatshirts. I go for comfort, until Sunday when I have to dress for church. :D
Since I don't have my book just yet, I am relying on y'all's info, and in reading the women had to scan the clothes and wash them a second time if it went off, for me that is a sure way to alert ME, something is not right in the work that's being done.
Frybabe, Reading sits atop the Reading Prong, a formation that contains Uranium which decays into Radon. Many of his family ended up with cancer.
This reminds me of when my son was young and was hired by Cooper Tires to work at a very good hourly wage. Him being young, barely out of High School, he could have saved and made a ton of money IF he had stayed with them for very long. He came home only after two shifts of working on the hot line of making the rubber and we decided it was not a job for him. He had major burns on his arms from the heat of the rubber, not to mention his clothes smelled so bad he had to take them to the garage. I refused to put them in my washer for fear of chemicals. I was extremely concerned for his health, we discussed it and decided it was not worth risking his health for wealth. Best decision we ever made. He was meant to be corporate, behind a desk creating programs for Ford Motor Company transporting vehicles that saves them millions of dollars a year. It will be interesting to see if and how many who worked at the Oak Ridge plant did come down with any cancers. What about even those who live in and around the area? I wonder if they have higher rates of deaths or cancer cases?
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One thing we have to keep reminding ourselves when reading this book is that these were totally different times. People from rural areas (women AND men) were not very well educated. The country was only just coming out of the Depression which had hit these rural areas extremely hard. Jobs were just not available, so any legitimate source of income would be a godsend.
Oak Ridge was built literally out in a non-populated area. It's very hilly, so could be kept isolated.
We can't judge these people by today's standards.
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Reading sits atop the Reading Prong, a formation that contains Uranium which decays into Radon
I have friends who moved to this area several years back. I don't like the sound of this. And it is a natural formation? And then we compound our problems with waste products from manufacturing, farming, etc. I like the question WHEN DID people become aware of the dangers of radioactivity. If not for whistleblowers, activists, etc just imagine what our lives would be like. We need each other to keep ourselves in check. Otherwise we have become what we were fighting against with the atomic bomb. Which makes me wonder if we had known as a nation the great and utter destruction the bomb would cause would we/could we have stopped it? Hmm. As Mary's states it was a different time.
I just noticed at the back of the book (I have a hardcopy) is a wonderful Notes section.
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Maryz, thank you for that reminder. Can't say it often enough.
Becki described this period in our history well as "a snapshot of my country back then...
"One thing we have to keep reminding ourselves when reading this book is that these were totally different times. We can't judge these people by today's standards."
I know I found my fur rising when reading of Kattie and her husband, Willie, not allowed to live together - whose children were not allowed to move to Oak Ridge with their parents - because black children were not allowed. " My question? Were white children allowed?
"At Clinton, blacks were primarily laborers, janitors and domestics - and they lived in segregated housing, no matter their education or background."
Okay, will try to remember this is "a snapshot of the times" - but then to read of the Presidential Executive Order 8802 - "no descrimation in defense industries" - and the Fair Employment Practices committee - which was said "to put an end to segregation in Tenn."
Makes you wonder how the Project could override thes laws and continue the descrimnation? Is this a snapshot of the powers of the Project?
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Becki - just read your post... hopefully the radon has been removed from the affected Reading area. What do you think? I know there's a way to do it, but how extensive is the contaminated area?
Good point - I hope everyone notices those helpful notes in the back of the book - they cover each chapter, as you read.
ps. Please note that you can read at whatever pace you wish, but for the sake of this discussion - please don't comment on later chapters out of consideration for those who are reading with the discussion schedule posted in the heading. This week we are discussing only to the end of Chapter 3 - which is page 56 in the hardcover, I think. Thanks!
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hopefully the radon has been removed from the affected Reading area
Becki, that would be a little hard to do.
The Reading Prong is a granitic rock formation is part of a larger rock formation that extends up into the lower part of Connecticut and into New Jersey and in turn is within the Appalachian Mountain deposits. Want to scare yourself? Check out all the urainium deposits detected in the US. http://geology.about.com/library/bl/maps/blusradiationmap.htm Many people, to combat high levels of Radon seeping into their homes and businesses, install a device that monitors and vents the Radon outside. I am not sure how they remove radon from water supplies. Most people don't realize how ubiquitous radioactive materials are. Even building materials like cinderblock (is that even made any more?) and brick can harbor low levels of radiation. The EPA estimated that in 2010, 21,000 could be attributed to Radon. Pennsylvania is among those states with the highest cancer rates in the nation. I don't know how many of those can be attributed to Radon. Everyone is exposed to some background radiation. The concern is about how much and how long when it comes to exposure.
If you are interested in naturally occurring radioactive materials, the World Nuclear Association has a website with info on things nuclear. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Safety-and-Security/Radiation-and-Health/Naturally-Occurring-Radioactive-Materials-NORM/
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Discussion Begins September 15
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ Tube Alloy, 1938
Chapters 4,5 (to pg.98)
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1), Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan),
Music the girls would have listened to (http://www.girlsofatomiccity.com/sub_mid/music_click.png),
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview),
For Your Consideration
September 22-28
Tubealloy ~ Lise and Fission, 1938 (pg 57)
1. Are you already familiar with these scientists? Does the book change your feelings about them?
2. What happens when you split the nucleus of a uranium atom? How can this lead to a bomb?
Chapter 4 ~ The Project's Welcome for New Employees
1. Could the delay in processing background checks have been deliberate?
2.In this chapter and the next, we meet the rest of our cast of characters, and see them beginning to cope with this strange setup. Which ones do you relate to most, and why?
Tubealloy ~ Leona and Success in Chicago. December, 1942
1. What was the significance of Fermi's successful experiment?
2. Was it justified to do this experiment in the middle of Chicago, when it might have blown up a big chunk of the place? Why would they have made that decision?
Chapter 5 ~ Only Temporary Spring Into Summer, 1944 (to pg.98}
1. The workers don't have any idea what they are doing, are living in awful conditions, and are asked by the government to take it on blind trust that they are helping to win the war. Would people now accept that?
2. Are you surprised at how differently the black workers were treated?
3.How did people cope with the problems of living at Oak Ridge? Could you have managed? What crucial role did women have in shaping the character of the community?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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Have book in hand and plan to begin reading to catch up.
JoanP., Makes you wonder how the Project could override these laws and continue the discrimination? Is this a snapshot of the powers of the Project?
Nothing ever surprises me any more where the government is concerned. We keep reminding each other to not judge because it was a different time. Personally, I don't see much difference from then to now. We still have high unemployment, people not being able to afford a higher education willing to take whatever job comes their way, and the government still continues to not be transparent.
Becki, We can't judge these people by today's standards."
No, we can not judge them by "today's standards", but surely they should have been held to the same standards of safety to the community back then, as well as today.
It reminds me of the movie Erin Brockovich, where people were dying and contracting cancer, to do contamination of their water.
"A study, released in 2010 by the California Cancer Registry, showed that cancer rates in Hinkley "remained unremarkable from 1988 to 2008".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
Ciao for now~
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Well, ursamajor, we will be celebrating our 62nd also this year. Dec 17th,1952. Congratulations to you and your hubby.
I have a HB copy of the book and am truly interested in the first 3 chapters. The history of uranium and the women scientists who were involved in the atomic bomb is fascinating.
In the back of the book, we have a list of other books written by Denise Kiernan. They are:
"Signing Their Lives Away" and "Signing Their Rights Away". Both books are about the same things. "The Fame and misfortune of the 39 men who signed the Declaration of Independence". She co-wrote these two books with her husband, Joseph D'Agnese.
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I tend to forget about Fermi at Chicago. What if the experiment had gone horribly wrong? Why ever in the world did they place such a dangerous lab in a big city?
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Well, I guess I will have to return my book and put a new hold on it. Aside from at least one hold, two books are overdue, one is "in transit", and three are not due until next week. I may get lucky, if whoever is overdue takes it back today or tomorrow.
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Here's a link to a podcast concerning the sci-fi story that was published in a sci-fi magazine in Feb, 1944. Caused an uproar in the community at the Pentagon? http://boingboing.net/2014/07/29/the-1944-science-fiction-story.html
Most interesting!
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Thanks, everybody.
I believe people were already aware of the dangers of radiation, but with our soldiers dying in Europe and the Asian islands those in charge didn't worry too much about a little radiation exposure for the workers. A number of the people who have claimed compensation for radiation injuries worked in contruction areas, which of course did not include women.
The link below will tell you more than you really want to know about disease caused by radiation in Oak Ridge.
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/oakridge/phact/c_3.html
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Found this interesting:
pg. 11 "Other women in other cities were doing what they could, moving into the workforce in record numbers. A cover of the Saturday Evening Post in September 1943 would depict a Stars and Stripes-clad woman, marching forward, toting everything from milk, a typewriter and a compass to a watering can, telephone, and monkey wrench. Women's roles in the workforce were expanding exponentially.
I was trying to image what this cover looked like and had to Google it.
http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Rosie-to-the-Rescue-Saturday-Evening-Post-Cover-September-4-1943-Posters_i7566976_.htm?AID=96280778&ProductTarget=95166830330
"Rosie to the Rescue" Saturday Evening Post Cover, September 4,1943
By: Norman Rockwell Item #: 7566976
(http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/52/5284/4M8IG00Z/posters/norman-rockwell-rosie-to-the-rescue-saturday-evening-post-cover-september-4-1943.jpg)
Talk about multi tasking.....yep this would be your typical American woman. I especially like the oxford shoes. Didn't we all have a pair of those at some point in our years growing up? They held up like steel boots.
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We have the jigsaw of this one also by Rockwell:
http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/52/5271/V3RZG00Z/posters/norman-rockwell-rosie-the-riveter-saturday-evening-post-cover-may-29-1943.jpg
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Oh I love The Saturday Evening Post cover. Haha...things haven't changed. :)
I have been reading many of these links. Wonderful what sort of information is available at a fingertip...literally.
bellamarie you are giving me credit for someone else's thoughts but I agree with the statement and your view as well. I think we have evolved somewhat when it comes to "public safety," OSHA guidelines, etc but there are so many other factors involved. I became involved with a local Say No to GMO group which I will use as an example. There are those who believe strongly GMO's are a good thing and are good for the environment and there are those that feel strongly that is incorrect and we are ruining our health, our lands, our very basic crops by GMO's. Big business says good, little people say bad. Who do you think gets their way?
Oak Ridge was government run and unfortunately things are done differently. I truly believe our national security depends on being able to be "secretive." It flies in the face of what we the people demand from our government, transparency, but in my humble opinion it is a necessary evil. I listen to the news and cannot believe we report every move we make. If we know what we plan on doing than the countries we are "fighting" know it too and that concerns me greatly. My brother said there is no time for thought and adjustment in today's instant everything. But I digress. Regarding our Oak Ridge community, I agree with Ursa's comment the dangers were probably known but the bigger issue was this ongoing horrible war and how to stop it. From the other links it would appear as though studies were being done to see the effects of radiation on the workers. Unfortunately we sometimes end up being the lab rats. The best we can hope for at that point is some sort of compensation.
Oh, I've gone on and on. Sorry. It is all very interesting.
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Congrats to you Ursa and to your husband.
I am cataractless in my right eye, but still have some swelling in my cornea and am still a little bleary. I can read the ipad because of being able to enlarge the print and can, with a little blearing, read the narrative of the book, the "notes" are a little harder, but i'm with you.
Just a point about the Exec Order 8802 that ordered no discrimination in employment in the Dept of Defense. It was Mary McCloud Bethune's influence on herfriend Eleanor Roosevelt that started the discussion about non-discrimination in federal programs, first in the New Deal programs and then following through on the defense programs. ER, obviously, convinced FDR to sign the Exec Order, although he resisted at first - he had to have the southern Democratic vote you know.
Even with an Exec Order, as we are still well aware, not everybody follows the Orders everytime. The Order applied only to employment, not to housing or dining or shopping, etc. Even after Truman had ordered the integretion of the armed forces in 1948, the "clubs" - non-commissioned officers, enlisted men's, officer's clubs were almost all still segregated - even at Ft Dix in NJ - well north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I wonder if Ken Burns addresses that influence of ER in his tv series? I'm sure he will.
As for stepping out of a car into knee-deep mud..........they couldn't put down some wooden sidewalks??? It was "a man's world." I'm sure they all wore combat boots or construction boots, the women should have too. :)
As to why people came to work there not knowing what, where and why, so far i've read about Celia who was already a gov't employee, others who were living close by, Blacks who didn't have many job options even in wartime and especially not good paying ones, professionals who were selected/asked/encouraged to go to work on something important.
The secrecy did pose interesting problems.....how DID you get mail? That wasn't answered yet in my reading, but my guess is that they might have had an APO address as soldiers still have. And it was hard to believe , on pg 55, when Celia asked how she should address the mysterious uniformed man with no nametag, that a general would respond "Just call me GG". Secrecy makes for unusual behaviors. Lol
Curious how we've never heard of these women physicists (tic) :o I'm glad Kiernan is bringing them to our attention.
Thank you all for your wonderful comments, pictures and links. They 're what makes this the best book group I'm a part of. :)
Jean
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we will be leaving today and won't be in touch electronically most of the time we are gone. Also we will be be very busy with family. I have not been able to stop reading this most interesting book but will not mention anymore than the 3 chapters. Will return by the 22nd, Tuesday.
My only connection with Oak Ridge was through friends of my parents who were moving there in 1949. They spent the night with us while traveling. The father was going to a new job but couldn't speak about it. As far as I know, they are still there. Kidding!
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Annie! - haven't had the chance to view the Deadline podcast yet. Do you think the "girls" viewed this in 1944? If so, I wonder if they concluded that the Project they had been working was anything like "Deadline"? Maybe we'll hear about that at the end of the book. We'll be watching for you. September 22 is Monday! You'll be just in time for the start of the discussion of the next Chapters as you can see in the heading.
September 22-28 ~ TubeAlloy, 1938
Chapters 4,5
Frybabe - I'm running into the same situation as you are - need to wait till 4 of the 12 copies in our library are returned before I can check out the book again. I have taken notes on the next section so I'll be okay for the coming chapters next week. I see you have read ahead too - as you are asking about the experiments in Chicago. I hope we both get lucky for the week starting September 29!:D
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Jean! Hoping each day is better than the one before! When did you say the other eye is to be treated? Thanks you for sharing your thoughts with us, despite the difficulty.
Am watching and enjoying the Ken Burns' Roosevelts series too - interesting to know what was going on behind the scenes... I wonder how closely FDR was monitoring the Oak Ridge Project - and the social implications of bringing so many people of different backgrounds to live together "temporarily" in those 90 sq. miles.
As Becki points out - "Oak Ridge was government run and unfortunately things are done differently." Besides, who was going to report the conditions at Oak Ridge - and to whom would they report the unfair practices? You'd risk losing your job.
As Jean says, "blacks who didn't have many job options even in wartime and especially not good paying ones" couldn't risk what they had in Oak Ridge.
War time is not the best time to file complaints!
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Ursa - thank you for your comments regarding the dangers of working at Oak Ridge at this time and the link you provided - I admit I got lost in the detailed report. As you say, white males suffered more effects - especially later in life, because of where they worked. I'm wondering what those women who worked in Y-12 were working on? I'm hoping to hear directly from the girls the author interviewed...and what they have to say about their friends and spouses they worked with in Oak Ridge in the 40's.
"The population under study included white males employed at least one month between 1943 and 1983, who were followed for various periods of time in several investigations, most recently through 1994. The mortality experience of this group was compared to that of the general population. Significantly elevated leukemia and overall cancer mortality were observed among the workers at the later follow-up time periods. The leukemia mortality was found to be related to both internal and external radiation exposure. Workers at the X-10 facility were included in several multi-site investigations, as well as internationally pooled site studies designed to estimate leukemia and overall cancer mortality risks from exposure to external ionizing radiation."
A second group of studies was conducted at the Y-12 nuclear weapons fabrication facility on the Oak Ridge Reservation, by researchers at ORAU, UNC, the University of Michigan, and NIOSH.
In one study, lung cancer was found to be significantly elevated in workers employed for longer periods or hired at an older age. The most recent follow-up of Y-12 workers, which includes nonwhite and women workers, found significantly elevated lung cancer mortality compared to the general population." Again, I'm wondering what those women who worked in Y-12 were working on?
"Workers employed at the K-25 gaseous diffusion facility have been studied for mortality associated with exposure to uranium dust and-separately-to various chemicals, including epoxy resin, powdered nickel, and nickel oxides. Among all workers employed for a month or more over a 40-year period, significant increases in mortality were observed for all causes of death, respiratory system cancers and other respiratory deaths, bone cancer, mental disorders, and accidents. Studies have shown workers handling nickel powder had rates of buccal cavity and pharynx cancer deaths almost 20 times as high as other workers. Welders were not found to have elevated lung cancer mortality rates. Workers exposed to epoxy resins and solvents had overall cancer mortality rates similar to those of other workers, with the exception of bladder cancer"
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I thought I read just to the end of Chapter 3, JoanP. (p80 or p81).
The library system besides five books, also has an LP book and an audio CD. The LP book, for some reason, isn't due back until the beginning of November. Huh? I didn't know you could hold a book that long; that's over a month. This is a very, very popular title.
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Becki,
"Oak Ridge was government run and unfortunately things are done differently." Besides, who was going to report the conditions at Oak Ridge - and to whom would they report the unfair practices? You'd risk losing your job.
I will play the devil's advocate here for the sake of answering this. Someone, could have easily secretly broke this to the media/press. I believe back in those times the journalists were more readily and willing to print and expose things like this, and keep their source protected. They did their jobs, reported news! Today our media covers up everything, and reports Hollywood happenings. It's sad to watch morning shows that used to keep us informed of world news, and now all I get is celebrity news or recipes. The news has turned into Entertainment Tonight.
I could not imagine any of the employees would file a complaint of any kind with CEW, they certainly would lose their job.
p.s. Sorry Becki if I credited you earlier for someone else's thoughts. :-[
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Frybabe, now I'm really confused. Can you tell us once again which copy of the book you are reading? Is it one with large print? We've been basing our discussion schedule on the paging in the regular hardcover, in which Chapter 3, "Through the Gates" ends on page 56. Can you clear this up for us?
Oh no Bella, I can't see anyone from the inside leaking information to the press - no matter how bad the food, or unfair the housing arrangements. Consider the times. These hardships were considered necessary to win the war, to bring the boys home. The enemy (Germany) was known to be perfecting a weapon that would defeat this goal. For anyone to leak details of the secret project would have been unpatriotic...an act that would aid the enemy.
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Many of the women were employed as secretaries or office workers, and probably not exposed to much radiation. A large number were "calutron girls", who sat and watched dials and made adjustments to keep the numbers in a certain range. I don't really understand the various things they were monitoring, but I don't think they would have been exposed to a lot of radiation either. That may explain why women were not included in the first radiation study. I had a friend who had been a calutron girl; she lived to be in her eighties. She never talked about her wartime experiences.
It is hard to sort out what is long ago radiation damage and what is just the disabilities associated with old age. Some men complained that radiation exposure had caused them to lose their hair or caused their arthritis. The situation is further complicated by the fact that almost everybody was a heavy smoker - assuming they could get cigarettes - during the was years.
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Ursa, it seems possible that because the workers were kept in compartmentalized jobs and locations, that they never did come into contact with the tubealloy product that would have caused noticeable health issues at the time.
I'm interested in these "girls" Denise Kiernan chose to feature in her book. Can think of two reasons she chose them. They were living, and willing to talk about their experiences...OR because they were from different backgrounds, working in different capacities. At first I thought that it must have taken forever to conduct background checks as thorough as what Jane Halliburton Greer went through. They interviewed every school she went to, every neighbor...butI think people like Kattie Strickland and her husband from Alabama were hired for janitorial service...and probably didn't require this sort of investigation.
The majority seem to be young girls right out of high school - small town girls, without extensive background to investigate.
What do you think? Were all of the girls introduced at the start still alive and willing to be interviewed?
it would be interesting to see who of those interviews are still living...starting with Celia Szapka (the gal with the I.Miller shoes. (did you ever own a pair? I did)
Yep - here's Celia - an extensive interview. She's 95 now...sharp as a whip. You can listen to the 2013 Interview here (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview)... As of 2013, she still lived in Oak Ridge. Did you ever meet her, Ursa?
Next in the "Cast of Characters" - Toni Peters...(her aunt and uncle's farm was seized for the Project...)
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I was listening to the interview Denise Keirnan had with Jon Stewart from the link above. It was only part 1. Not sure how to listen to part 2. They go to break and say they will be right back. Denise does explain how certain compartments and jobs never came in contact whatsoever with the plutonium, so they would have had no known health issues. I was hoping to hear the next segment.
JoanP., You are possibly right about the people not being able to reveal anything. We live in an age where no one can be trusted with confidential information including our own president and his aides that I keep thinking how easy it would have been for someone to leak it to the press/media back then. There was certainly more patriotism, loyalty and trust back then for sure.
I had never heard of I. Miller shoes until reading it in this book. Manolo Blahnik's are the rave today. Who on earth can afford them?
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The second part of the interview on the Daily Show.....
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan
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Thank you mable for part 2 of the interview. Imagine that! We are discussing transparency, and moral obligations of the government with this project and Jon Stewart brings up these very issues. Denise K. tells Jon S. the government was interested in how plutonium would affect the human body so they secretly inject a black man who goes through a stop sign, and ends up being taken to a hospital. Unbeknownst to him, he becomes the candidate to be injected with plutonium. I also thought it was interesting how Denise K. tells Jon S., how after the bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima, the president goes on television and reveals there has been people in Oak Ridge Tenn. working on this. OMG! So things really haven't changed in all these years, we still have presidents giving out information that could put people or areas in danger.
Okay, well I am going to go and read the next assigned pages, since I will be out of town tomorrow and don't want to get behind. Going back in time, to Sauder Village, in Archbold Ohio.
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Not pleased to hear about how our government tested plutonium on an unwitting citizen. I don't think I even want to touch that it was a black man that was chosen. Was it a wrong place, wrong time situation that he got pickedf? Were there others besides him?
It reminds me of the accusations around here years back that the government was secretly releasing viruses (or chemicals, I forget exactly) in the turnpike tunnels and possibly on base. Chemical warfare or counter-measures experiments to see how something might be introduced and spread? Benign or not, it raises ones hackles to find out you are or were experimented on without your permission.
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Thank you for the link to Part 2, Jean. Wasn't going to add it to our heading until we get to the end of the book - as Part 2 answers our question of the the reaction of the Oak Ridge girls AFTER the Bomb was dropped. But if you want to read that before reading the rest of the book, it is very revealing.
We've got two more days to consider the first chapters...two items we missed - the way the land was acquired for the Project - and the Discovery of Tubealloy. Did you notice that the female scientists involved were all foreign? And that their findings were considered secondary to the males - even mocked as Ida Nadduck was when she questioned the great and respected Enrico Fermi?
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Frybabe, I'm with you on the fact they decided on that particular person, a black man, without his consent, did give me cause to wonder if his life was not valued as much as a white person's. If you listen to the interview D.K states there were others they later tested without their knowledge. The government was getting worried about what damage they could be doing to the thousands of employees at the CEW, so they needed to test it on humans to find out results. War time or not, it is blatantly, unconstitutional, illegal and A moral, to use humans for testing, without their knowledge or permission. But then our government has been known to step outside the Constitution for their own purposes. We the people, get to know about it after the fact, provided the ends justifies the means.
JoanP., As far as how the women reacted after finding out, D.K. did not really reveal much in the interview. Mostly she says, when they found out. I don't think it's detrimental to our discussion knowing.
When I was reading about how the government was taking families homes and land from them, giving them little money for them and little time to relocate, my heart went out to them. There were families of generations who lived on their land. Their home and belongings are all they had. I realize they say, that particular climate and area was perfect for the place to build for this project, but to displace families, to create a bomb to destroy other human beings, is hard for me to understand. The United States has so much vast, open land. I was traveling from Las Vegas to Laughlin Nev. a few years back, and there were a few Government isolated sites, that I am sure were used for secret projects. It was isolated and mostly desert land. Not a sole to see for miles and miles.
I guess what I keep thinking is, what if, something would have gone terribly wrong, and the plutonium they were creating for this A Bomb, would have gone off in that plant? Imagine how the outcome of that would have been, right here in the United States. All precautions can be factored into a project, but there is always room for human error, especially when you are taking anyone and everyone off the streets with no knowledge or education of what they are dealing with.
Got to run, off for the day..... Ciao for now~
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Great interview! Part 1 is wonderful. I will try to delay watching Part 2. ;)
The taking of land by the government was nothing new. But that is another story. It is horrific though the number of deep-rooted families that were displaced and often with not enough money or a place to go. We certainly can be a ruthless bunch. Sad really. I found it encouraging there were those who tried to fight essentially "giving up" their land. Again, history proves the government is usually the victor. Such a balance our government must maintain to ensure it is "of the people, by the people, for the people." It's a big job. And we make mistakes.
Interesting to me, I was telling the husband about the book and I started off describing the place the a-bomb was built and he said oh Los Alamos (Site Y) and I said and also Oak Ridge, another site (Site Y). He likes to watch The History Channel and knew a lot about all of this EXCEPT what this book is about. And that makes me wonder why was this particular area still kept a secret. Hmmm? And if I my reading comprehension is correct, Site X, Oak Ridge was used to produce the bomb material and the Los Alamos site was where it was assembled. So it could be just a matter of what story was more interesting. But I have to say, I am finding this story quite interesting. Maybe because I am a woman and that was a huge time for us being in the workplace and performing many jobs traditional to men. Rosie the Riveter!
In my opinion, the male dominant world was the reason for the female scientists ideas to be considered irrelevant and mocked.
Now to go listen to Celia's interview......
Finished listening. I really like Celia. Cindy Kelly, not so much. Felt like an interrogation instead of an interview. :(
I liked Celia's answer to how did they feel once they heard the news of the bomb. She said relieved. They didn't have to keep secrets anymore. Can you imagine the daily pressures of watching what you say?
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Colleen black is still alive. I don't know about Celia.
When my husband was cleared for ORSORT he was only 22. The FBI investigated his background for 10 years back, which means they talked to people who knew him in junior high!
There has been repeated government taking of land in east Tennessee. Land was confiscated for the Smoky Mountains National Park, for impoundment of water behind the TVA dams, and finally for the Oak Ridge Reservation. A few people actually had their property confiscated three times! I don't think any of these things could be done today; it would be in the courts for decades.
The project was located in east Tennessee for several reasons: It was thinly populated, it was inland and away from population centers, and there was a source for massive amounts of electric power, mostly generated by TVA. The project required enormous amounts of electricity.
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I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement Ursa regarding why that area was chosen.
"The project required enormous amounts of electricity."
Site X was Oak Ridge-- my typo.
May I ask what ORSORT stands for?
Nowadays we leave so much of our "fingerprints" in what we buy, what we look at, what we "like" that the government already has a good idea about us. Scary thought.
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Yes, electricity - and lots of water! Thank you, Ursa! I thought it was notable - those working within the CEW didn't complain about inequities...but that didn't mean those whose land was confiscated for the plant didn't complain. I noticed the reference to the House Military Affairs Committee - the results of the farmers' complaints were predictable, don't you think- considering the war?
House Military Affairs Committee Hears Complaints of the dispossessed (http://books.google.com/books?id=cu803f66QU0C&lpg=PA43&ots=pMQIa-DXu1&dq=House%20Military%20Affairs%20committee%20Oak%20ridge%201942&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q=House%20Military%20Affairs%20committee%20Oak%20ridge%201942&f=false).
I found Toni Peters, one of those featured in the Introduction - Toni Peters Schmitt. She was the girl from Clinton, whose aunt and uncle's peach orchard was taken. When she was 18, she began to work at CEW -
She says in this interview - that she loved OAK RIDGE - no detectable hard feelings over the confiscated land -
Toni Peters Interview in 2004 with Jim Kolb (http://www.osti.gov/COROH/ORHPA/Schmitt_Toni_48kHz_16_bit_mono.mp3)
Here is a link to her OBITUARY (http://highland.tributes.com/show/Toni-Peters-Schmitt-89695016) - note that she married an Oak Ridge boy - and in 2012 died at the age of 85 and was buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery.
And Ursa tells us that Colleen Black is alive too.
I'm beginning to think that all of those featured in the Introduction were living at the time this book was written and Denise Kiernan made use of their first-person interviews ...not from hear-say.
I enjoyed Celia's 2013 interview too - put it in the heading. I'm hoping she's alive to enjoy the book. Now that you mention it, Becki, I thought Cindy Kelly was a bit to pushy, assuming that Celia needed prompting...while Celia took it in stride - as sharp as a tack!
ps a question for the science majors - the difference between plutonium and uranium? Some seem to be using these two interchangeably. My understanding - separating uranium for the Gadget was the purpose of the Oak Ridge labor. Am I wrong?
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Plutonium is, except for extremely rare occurrences, not natural but is a by product from reactors. It's atomic number is 94. Uranium 235 is what they use to make plutonium. It's atomic number is 92. Los Alamos website has an article about Uranium. http://periodic.lanl.gov/92.shtml I skipped over the properties section, but the rest has some interesting bit of info in it.
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I too noticed that D.K. in her interviews uses the word plutonium, instead of uranium. Interesting? I'm not a scientist but I did Google and find this: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090112152740AAebXVc
uranium has 92 protons and plutonium has 94
plutonium is extremely scarce on earth because the half-lives of its isotopes are generally much shorter than isotopes of uranium, so the most of the plutonium that formed in supernovas and was deposited on earth 4.6 billion years ago has since decayed away, whereas uranium isotopes have a much longer half-lives and much still exists naturally. Most plutonium is made sythetically in nuclear reactors. Certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium are fissile and can cause a nuclear explosion/chain reaction once they are imploded or exposed to a neutron source.
They would not explode from a hammer hit, fire, or electrical current because they are not chemical explosives and instead require neutrons to undergo a chain reaction releasing energy (nuclear explosion). You also would not want to do any of these things to plutonium or uranium without wearing the proper respiratory equipment because it would release small Pu and U particles which could be inhaled. Pu and U are both alpha particle emitters, and they are generally not a radiation hazard unless they are inhaled, alpha particles cannot penetrate the skin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_parti...
One more link if you care to read up on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1idbux/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_uranium_and/
From an engineering perspective, there is not a major difference between Plutonium and Uranium weapons. They can both be used in different configurations, and both require roughly the same masses to become supercritical (ie, they use roughly the same amount of metal). From the "weapon" perspective (ie, "The boom") Plutonium and Uranium are functionally the same.
Most US weapons are Plutonium based. Plutonium has favorable nuclear characteristics as compared with Uranium (namely: it has a broader neutron cross section - if that means anything to you (I will explain in a bit) - and it releases a slightly larger amount of energy per fission event.
Both Uranium or Plutonium can be used in fission bombs (what the US used in WW2) and in fusion bombs (modern thermonuclear bombs). Fusion bombs are much more powerful, but it has more to do with their design than the radioactive material used.
We also use depleted uranium in armor-piercing bullets since it is incredibly dense and only weakly radioactive.
I stumbled upon a couple more interviews of Denise Kiernan that I enjoyed.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment-jan-june13-atomiccity_03-26/
I like how Ray Suarez when interviewing Denise says:
RAY SUAREZ: Again and again, I had to remind myself while reading this book how circumscribed the lives of women were in 1943. You’re reading it with your 2013 head. And then you have to remember, oh, yes, they couldn’t do this. They couldn’t do that in so many cases.
This is what we all keep saying and trying to remind oursleves as we read this story. How easy it is to forget, and try to imagine those times into today's world.
I especially liked this interview since it gives a lot of images of the CEW plant and the many workers.
http://www.goodreads.com/videos/38200-denise-kiernan-interview
I like how Denise says, (paraphrasing), that there is probably no way today we could have a secret project with 70,000 people involved without it being found out. I agree with her, with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapshot, Instagram, just to name a few, along with the thousands of blogs, and websites for media and the means journalists have to uncover things in the government today, it would seem impossible. Edward Snowden, sure was nothing like these 70,000 + people who could be trusted to keep confidential information safe, for the safety of our country. Is it the people were more loyal, patriotic, and trusting of our government back then, versus today? I know polls show only 38% of Americans trust our president and the percentage is even lower for their trust in our government. I highly doubt anyone would keep a secret this big today.
ursa, That is true, the TVA was essential to the project, in the book it stated, Oak Ridge during this project was using more electricity than New York City. Makes sense for them to choose this spot.
In D.K.'s interview she does say all the people she chooses to use in the book was alive at the times of her interviews, and some have passed on. She sounds like she spent enough time with these ladies, and some men, to see them as friends. I like D.K., she is someone I could see myself sitting down with, and just feeling very comfortable to talk about anything.
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I very much enjoyed the interviews with Denise Kiernan. Thank you Bellamarie.
ORSORT was the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology.
I have been amused that recently the K-25 Credit Union (K-25 doesn't really exist anymore) has changed its name to Enrichment. Somebody enjoyed the play on words.
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One more reason why Oak Ridge was chosen was that although it's isolated, it has good railroad access, a quick trip to New York and Chicago.
Right, Bellamarie, uranium and plutonium are two different elements, in the same way that silver and gold are different elements. Both have isotopes that can be used for bombs. The usable isotope of uranium, U-235, is a small fraction of the total, and has to be separated out by a very tedious process. Plutonium can be made by sticking the common uranium isotope, U-238, in a reactor and bombarding it with neutrons. This turns out to be easier, and you need less plutonium for a bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was uranium, and the Nagasaki bomb was plutonium.
In addition to being radioactive, both uranium and plutonium are really nasty poisons.
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...am I right in concluding that only usable uranium was produced in the Oak Ridge plant - and that the nasty poison, plutonium was left to the Los Alamos plant?
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Yes, Oak Ridge produced enriched uranium. The Los Alamos plant mostly designed and assembled the bombs. The book says that most of the plutonium was produced at Site W, in Washington State. This would be the facility at Hanford, WA. They're mostly decommissioned now, and from time to time they get into the papers because they have a humongous nuclear waste contamination problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site)
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Thank you for the link PatH., very interesting information on site W.
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I was a croctchety, cranky ole lady last night because I tried a new recipe for slow cooker chickeen that was not so good and I was having aches and pains and my eyes are at an inbetween spot of surgeries so that nothing is quite clear........... then I started reading Ch 4, which made me more crochety......... I read the quote from Vi Warren's journal at the beginning of Ch 4 and said "What?" I didn't get it at all.
Then the second sentence of the narrative read " If there WERE a penance designed specifically for the ".......etc...... Is noone teaching English grammar any more and we've already commented sev'l times about the lack of editing at publishing houses.
I would never have made it at Oak Ridge, even if I was unlucky enough to have taken the chance of going to a place I knew not where. On pg 65 an instructor tells a student that "Curiousity for curiousity's sake was not appreciated." Oh my! I'd be seent home!
Then on pg 69 she gives the Project's attitude toward women......high school girls weren't overly curious, a young woman of 18 from a small town background would do what she was told, no questions asked........ well, that is such a bad stereotype.
When they talked about Colleen not wanting to go to CEW after she had visited relatives and friends who were there, I wondered how did they have visitors? Could you tell family and friends where you were and how to get there?
Also, it began to remind me of the novel The Dollmaker by Harriot Aarow. In the story people from Appalachia went to Detroit for work during the war. That's one of favorite books, even if it has some very sad parts. Aarow does a marvelous job of writing the dialect of Appalachia, I could "hear" them talking as I read.
How did anyone survive into old age who worked at Oak Ridge, between the radiation and the asbestos, good lord! And the mental depression of being in those environments must have been heavy. Of course, Blacks had the worst of all the conditions. How do you rise above that kind of discrimination? I guess our instinct for survival keeps us going, mentally and physically.
Was this a particularly disturbing reading, or was i just being crumpy? .........
Jean
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Jean, it's hitting you harder because you're uncomfortable, but everything you say is there. Worker turnover was remarkably high, even though ditching a war job was frowned on. The psychiatrists on-site found a very high level of stress- and exhaustion-related problems. But some people managed to thrive through a sense of adventure and doing something important, plus inventing a new sense of community.
The administrators who looked down on women owed them more than they realized; it was the women who forged a new, coherent community, which gave moral support to all.
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"Was this a particularly disturbing reading, or was i just being crumpy? ........."
Dear Jean, Dear Heart, if anyone has reason for feeling "crumpy"...t'is you! What happened to your chicken dinner? And then you strained to read with your eyes in their t'ween state - only to come away more upset than you already were before picking up the book!
My library copy is on the way back to the library shelf, where hopefully I can pick it up in a few days. Was Vi Warren's quote the one that disturbed you - "if there Were a penance"...or was it Denise Kiernan's narrative? Your post reminded me of several inconsistencies I'm finding, for example, the use of the term "TUBEALLOY" is sometimes one word, sometimes 'tube alloy" Which is it? I keep waiting for an explanation, but fear that there will be none.
I understand why the small town high school girls who did what they were told without questioning were desirable in this job where speed and accuracy in performing one small task would be preferable to those wanting more information about where "the pipe" was going to be used.
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Discussion Begins September 15
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ TUBEALLOY, 1938
Chapters 4,5 (to pg.98)
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1), Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan),
Music the girls would have listened to (http://www.girlsofatomiccity.com/sub_mid/music_click.png),
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview),
For Your Consideration
September 22-28
Tubealloy ~ Lise and Fission, 1938 (pg 57)
1. Are you already familiar with these scientists? Does the book change your feelings about them?
2. What happens when you split the nucleus of a uranium atom? How can this lead to a bomb?
Chapter 4 ~ The Project's Welcome for New Employees
1. Could the delay in processing background checks have been deliberate?
2.In this chapter and the next, we meet the rest of our cast of characters, and see them beginning to cope with this strange setup. Which ones do you relate to most, and why?
Tubealloy ~ Leona and Success in Chicago. December, 1942
1. What was the significance of Fermi's successful experiment?
2. Was it justified to do this experiment in the middle of Chicago, when it might have blown up a big chunk of the place? Why would they have made that decision?
Chapter 5 ~ Only Temporary ~ Spring Into Summer, 1944 (to pg.98}
1. The workers don't have any idea what they are doing, are living in awful conditions, and are asked by the government to take it on blind trust that they are helping to win the war. Would people now accept that?
2. Are you surprised at how differently the black workers were treated?
3.How did people cope with the problems of living at Oak Ridge? Could you have managed? What crucial role did women have in shaping the character of the community?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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Attitudes toward women reminds me of some of Lise Meitner's problems. She was only the second women to get a PhD at the University of Vienna, and she had a lot of trouble getting allowed to work in the lab. The nervous men didn't like to have women around; one lame excuse was that of safety--"their hair might catch fire." For perspective, here's a respected senior male chemist of the time:
http://www.famousscientists.org/dmitri-mendeleev/ (http://www.famousscientists.org/dmitri-mendeleev/)
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Jean, you have every right to be "crumpy" and I will tell you I am a bit grumpy, after reading these two chapters. BUT Alas! I was excited to see my curiosity satisfied in this chapter.....regardless of:
"The response from the instructor was clear: Curiosity for curiosity's sake was not appreciated. Or this: " What you do here, What you see here, What you hear here, please let is stay here."
Here comes the media, snopes, spies, and loose tongues.....
pg. 65 A woman thoughtlessly wrote her family describing the size and number of facilities in her new town...Someone kept a diary...A man told a friend about the type of machinery he saw in his plant...
pg. 71 Spring was in the air, Townsite was growing by leaps and bounds__
"McCrory's 5, 10, & 25 Cent Store Now Open in Jackson Square next to the Ridge Theatre!"__and The Oak Ridge Journal paused to ask residents, "Does Your Tongue Wag?"
...Specialists in Axis espionage and sabotage activities are standing before their leader...they are about to embark on a vital mission for Naziland...and here are typical instructions to enemy agents...
We have reports that somewhere in the American state of Tennessee there is a new war project about which you MUST get DETAILED information...
Talk and listen: Get public opinion and current speculations about the work being done...
The natives and workers will aid you__they will talk, talk, talk. Listen. Some will tell you because they are unsuspecting, have faith in everyone they meet, others are plainly ignorant that they are giving information...
Search discarded plans and trash. Listen to every possible conversation___these Americans talk constantly about their work...psychological sabotage is your weapon of which our Dr. Goebbels is the master. When you hear a rumor spread it to every ear that will listen...bad food, mud, sickness, poor pay, strikes, waste, discrimination, race prejudice, and persecution___make the place sound so dirty and miserable, so poorly managed and inefficient that no decent person would want to remain there...
Make the hate the state of Tennessee until they leave in droves...
Let the looseness of their tongues and the softness of their brains do your work for you. Bring me the report that this project in Tennessee will be entirely useless to America. Heil Hitler!
In comes two men recruiting Helen Hall to be their eyes and ears....their spy!
Reading this confirmed that no matter how hard we try to keep things classified, confidential, or secret, there is always going to be someway, someone, somehow that it will get leaked.
We also learn in this chapter that complaints were filed for various reasons, and the people were not fired for filing. Yet, many did leave due to the conditions, food, prejudice, etc., e.g., the turnover of employees, and the complaints fell on deaf ears.
JoanP., Your post reminded me of several inconsistencies I'm finding, for example, the use of the term "TUBEALLOY" is sometimes one word, sometimes 'tube alloy" Which is it? I keep waiting for an explanation, but fear that there will be none.
I do remember hearing in Denise K.'s interview she addressed deciding to combine the two words and make it one, it was easier for her, and since it really made no difference whether it be tube alloy, or tubealloy, she went with the one word.
Jean, Good catch on the inconsistency of the visiting.
Did everyone actually read and comprehend all the tubealloy breakdown, fission, etc., in these two chapters. Now that made me grumpy. I came away scratching my head. ??? Talk about combustion, I thought my head would burst!!!! ::) ::) ::)
Ciao for now~
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Bellamarie, you raise some important points here.
Curiosity and secrecy--if you didn't experience it, it's hard to believe the atmosphere of wariness about spies then. I was just a kid then, but I can still remember the feel of it. "Loose lips sink ships." I'm not at all surprised at the attitudes you quote. I am surprised, though, that they thought anyone could do a good job in a factory or mechanical type situation without knowing anything beyond what some administrator thought was necessary. If you don't know what you're doing, you can't always realize when things are going wrong. I hope we will hear more about Helen Hall's listening assignment, and whether it ever led to anything.
Tubealloy--in a note, Denise K gives the three versions of the word that were used, and says why she picked the one she did. I agree with her choice, though it doesn't matter a lot. I would prefer she just said uranium, but it's a valid choice to go with the code words.
Did everyone actually read and comprehend all the tubealloy breakdown, fission, etc., in these two chapters.
That's a big problem in telling this story. It's actually two parallel stories, both of them exciting. But they are sort of independent, and you can enjoy either one while ignoring the other.
The main story, of Oak Ridge, and of the people who worked there, why they came, how it affected them, how they coped, and changed things, isn't technical, and it's the point of the book.
The second story, the scientific one, is kind of a subtext. It's important, because that's why Oak Ridge is important, but you don't have to know it to appreciate the main part of the book. So if you don't like it, forget it or skim over it, and don't let it get in the way of a really good book.
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Tubealloy: I'm a retired chemist, and although this is far from my field, I do indeed find it a very exciting story. It's worth following for anyone who feels like it. It's hard to describe technical things; I think Kiernan does a good job, but it's not easy.
Scientists are awful gossips about other scientists, so it's amusing to me to read some of this stuff.
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I understood why they didn't want curious people, i'm just not one of those and would not have lasted for more then a week. ;D Of course, the environment may have sent me home anyway. I did grow up in small town, rural America and i just must see green things at least every couple days - trees, grassy hills, mountains with trees. I do get both crumpy and grumpy :D, and depressed, if my surroundings aren't naturally pleasant. I need some quiet, alone time on a regular basis also.
Add to the mud, the crowding, the lack of understanding a process, if i lived in a trailer, there is NO bathroom and NO plumbing. Now, my sister's first farm which she lived on when i was ages 5-14, and where i spent a lot of my summers, had an outhouse. There was a pump for water in the kitchen and they had electricity. I didn't mind the outhouse, i could walk across a nice patch of grass to get to it; i could hear the birds, and the cows and horses, it was a not an unpleasant spot. But that's not the same as having NO bathroom in a community of trailers and strangers.
Do i sound unpatriotic? Also i am looking at the situation as a 73 yr old, maybe not as i would have at 18. :)
Yes, the tubealloy sections are difficult for this non-scientist to grasp, but i get the essence and it is interesting.
Joan - I was making teriyaki chicken from a recipe i hadn't used before and it turned out way too sweet and too dry. Very disappointing.
Jean
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Many of the workers on the Manhattan project stayed in Oak Ridge after the war, bought the cemesto houses the government originally assigned them, and live there to this day unless they are buried in Oak Ridge cemetery. Many of them have lived an astonishingly long time, well into their 80s or 9os. I was not here during the war years, so I don't remember the mud or the trailer villages with the common bath house. You have to remember that this was wartime and our soldiers were dying on two fronts. That made the sacrifices look pretty insignificant.
Almost all of the people I know personally were professionals of one kind or another, and so less likely to have had significant exposure to either asbestos or radiation. They have generally been a pretty healthy lot, though of course they are dying rapidly now. The cemesto construction may have been an asbestos hazard to the carpenters who built the houses, but the people who lived in them were not affected. The larger cemesto houses are still in great demand. Most of them have been improved and/or expanded and are well designed and quite comfortable.
Something not mentioned in the book is the remarkably high birth rate in the city during and immediately after the war years. The joking answer to "What are you making there?" Answer "babies" was pretty apt. Families of four, five or more children were common. I have five myself. The Oak Ridge schools were the best in east Tennessee for many years. We remained in Oak Ridge until our last child graduated from high school.
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PatH.,
It's actually two parallel stories, both of them exciting. But they are sort of independent, and you can enjoy either one while ignoring the other.
I agree, even though it seems a bit confusing to follow, I do feel I already have learned more about the science of alloy than I ever knew before reading just these six chapters.
Ursa, Something not mentioned in the book is the remarkably high birth rate in the city during and immediately after the war years. The joking answer to "What are you making there?" Answer "babies" was pretty apt.
I guess you could say it was the onset of the Baby Boomers! I don't suspect you will ever see a population growth as fast as this time ever again. Young college kids today don't have a direction, they are very immature, dependent on their parents, and don't want to marry or have children well into their 30s and 40s. They are so unaware of what is going on in the world, they don't even have a clue who ISIS is. Now that we have officially committed to destroying this group with airstrikes in Syria, I am sure you will see protestors on the universities, but if asked who is ISIS, or where Syria is located, they couldn't tell you. They can only say they don't want war. No one wants war, we know from history there are times we have to get involved, as painful and ugly as it is.
Ciao for now~
Ciao for now~
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Ursa, I found a pdf file that indicated Virginia Spivey, one of the rare "girls" with a college degree - in chemistry, married a Dr. Coleman and lived in Oak Ridge into the 50's - at least. I found a photo in the same file...but don't know how to lift photos from pdf files. Will try to learn how to do that. Maybe you knew her~
My guess is that they didn't know what to do with her - which is why they kept her in the "bull pen" waiting for an assignment. Would they have kept her there as a teacher indefinitely had she not requested to be sent to a chemistry lab? She requested the lab when she learned she wouldn't move up on the pay scale as a teacher. (What else is new, Jean?) I was surprised they honored her request.
Hope you've cheered up some, Jean! That was a blue Monday!
Even if Denise Kiernan decided to refer to the product as one word (TUBEALLOY) in her book -- I'm sure I saw it a number of times as two. Of course I can't find them now - but will keep an eye out for tube alloy as we go forward! :D A strange term, isn't it? What does it mean to you?
I'm enjoying the scientists too...they are in a hurry to get this project going. What would have happened without them?
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Here's the photo - wish I could make it bigger. Taken in May, 2009 -
(http://web.ornl.gov/info/reporter/no110/ladies.jpg)
Several retired ORNL staff members recently attended the Women in Science and Engineering Celebration at ORNL. Left to right with the Nuclear S&T Division’s Peggy Emmett are Nancy Landers, Liane Russell, Carolyn Gooch, Fay Martin, Virginia Spivey Coleman, Mozelle Rankin Bell and Marty Adler-Jasny.
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I know Virginia Coleman - her son Frank hung out with my older girls all the time they were in high school. Frank wouldn't let anybody but me cut his hair - and it always needed cutting. Virginia has recently moved to an assisted living facility. I didn't make the connection when I read the book.
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How cool, Ursa!
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Ursamajor, it's great having our own in-house expert to fill in the details.
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2. What happens when you split the nucleus of a uranium atom? How can this lead to a bomb? I would be happy to hear from those to whom this makes perfect sense. I have a feeling that Einstein's theory plays a part here...splitting an atom. Will wait for you who know more than I do.
Denise Kiernan wrote this as non-Fiction - based on live interviews conducted between 2009 and 2013. And Ursa is here to back the story. So whenever we are tempted to conclude how things must have been, how the girls "must have felt" and the dangers they must have faced, Ursa reminds that they lived to their 80's and 90's. It couldn't have been that dangerous in Oak Ridge at the time, could it? That's not how these girls viewed it then - or even oday for that matter.
"Which of the girls do you relate to most, and why?" I think I'd choose Jane Halliburton Greer (Puckett) , the one who chose to stay near Oak Ridge to be near her recently widowed father, who lived in Paris, TN. I think I understand her reason for sacrificing her future plans to be near her father and to put her plans on the back burner until the boys came home. She had enrolled in UT with the intention of studying engineering at Knoxville.Once she arrived in Knoxville after taking preparatory classes in Alabama, however, Puckett was not allowed to study engineering because she was female,
Instead, she was directed to the university’s statistics program where Puckett graduated two years later with a degree in governmental economics. She was the first student in Knoxville’s history to graduate from this program.
Even after the purpose of the work being done at Oak Ridge — the creation of an atomic bomb — was publicly announced and the war brought to an end, she continued to work in the lab at Oak Ridge.
She married James Beverly “Puck” Puckett in the late 1940s. The two were married for 59 years until his death in 2006
Her daughter said that a short time after her mother was interviewed for the book, she had elective shoulder surgery from which she never fully recovered.
As of 2013, she lives in a facility for patients of dementia in Tennessee.
I found her photo -
(http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/parispi.net/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/8/00/8007424b-b690-5907-92d6-6c57eb10dca4/5301a978f35c8.image.jpg)
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JoanP, that's a great photo of Jane Greer Puckett. She sure looks like someone who has no regrets. It looks like Kiernan did her research just in the nick of time. Thank goodness.
I'm working on a scientific summary.
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It would be wonderful if we could contact Denise K., and invite her to our discussion.
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PatH - looking forward to your explanation for the layman - laywoman. ;D
It's been clear that the girls who worked on this Project knew nothing of what they were working on. I wonder how familiar they are today - with the names of the scientists who developed the formula that would lead to the bomb. How much do people know about the contributions of the female scientists? I know we need to look at this from the perspective of the times, but wasn't it grossly unfair that women were kept in the shadows - that men were supposed to be respected as the scientists? I couldn't help but wonder if Denise Kiernan wasn't giving more credit than was due to these women - Their names aren't that well known - or are they?
I found this article - that indicates the importance of these women -
" Ida Noddack correctly criticized Enrico Fermi's chemical proofs in his 1934 neutron bombardment experiments, from which he postulated that transuranic elements might have been produced, and which was widely accepted for a few years. Her paper, "On Element 93" suggested a number of possibilities, centering around Fermi's failure to chemically eliminate all lighter than uranium elements in his proofs, rather than only down to lead. The paper is considered historically significant today not simply because she correctly pointed out the flaw in Fermi's chemical proof but because she suggested the possibility that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element." In so doing she presaged what would become known a few years later as nuclear fission. However Noddack offered no experimental proof or theoretical basis for this possibility, which defied the understanding at the time. The paper was generally ignored. However Noddack offered no experimental proof or theoretical basis
Later experiments along a similar line to Fermi's, by Irène Joliot-Curie, and Pavle Savić in 1938 raised what they called "interpretational difficulties" when the supposed transuranics exhibited the properties of rare earths rather than those of adjacent elements. Ultimately on December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann provided chemical proof that the previously presumed transuranic elements were isotopes of barium, and Hahn wrote these exciting results to his exiled colleague Lise Meitner, explaining the process as a 'bursting' of the uranium nucleus into lighter elements. It remained for Meitner who had been forced to flee Germany in July 1938 and her exiled nephew Otto Frisch utilizing Fritz Kalckar and Niels Bohr's liquid drop hypothesis (first proposed by George Gamow in 1935) to provide a first theoretical model and mathematical proof of what Frisch named nuclear fission (he coined this term).
ps We did tried to contact her, Bella. You must have missed her publisher's response...posted on the first page of this discussion - post #29.
But, aren't we fortunate to have ursamajor with us - who actually knew these girls?
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Re women's discoveries - women were rarely given credit for such discoveries. They weren't supposed to be able to comprehend such things.
Digressing a moment from Oak Ridge, but in the same vein and time frame....Have we talked about the discoveries made by Hedy Lamaar? Nobody ever heard of those things. Here's a link to her Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
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Someone did mention it quite a while back. Don't remember who or in which discussion.
I just reread some of the article. I remember spread spectrum, not from her day but back in the early seventies when my X and I went up to Rochester, NY to evaluate spread spectrum equipment for the company he worked for at that time. I was pretty excited about it, as I recall.
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Hedy Lamarr just goes to show you there's no correlation, plus or minus, between beauty and intelligence. But beauty gets in the way of using your intelligence. That article says that when she tried to get on the Inventor's Council in WWII, she was told she could help the war effort more by making appearances to encourage buying War Bonds. ::)
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Hedy Lamarr! Fascinating! She is remembered for her beauty, not her brains, isn't she? Who knew? Maryz did. (Frybabe did too!) But the rest of us? I only knew her as a movie star...and also I had this set of Hedy Lamarr paperdolls (https://www.google.com/search?q=hedy+Lamarr+paperdolls&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&rlz=1I7ADRA_enUS491&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=uJYkVO66E6_CsATnwICwBQ&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=2133&bih=1021#rls=com.microsoft:en-US&tbm=isch&q=hedy+Lamarr+paper+dolls&spell=1) - so surprised to find them online! Does anyone remember them?
I don't think there is anyone to blame for not crediting these women for their ideas and discoveries. It seems to that they were unwilling to speak up for themselves, to insist their names appear on their discoveries. And who would have listened to them if they did? This was another age...we keep saying that, maybe because it is true!
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Women involved in nuclear policy today, many more then in 1930s anf 40s, on both sides of policy.
http://thebulletin.org/women-and-nuclear-weapons-policy7165
Jean
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I knew too, but only in the last few years (probably from her obituary).
It was another age, and women were unwilling to push for recognition. It's more cut and dried with the woman scientists in our story, though. They wanted recognition, and worked for it, even though at times they knew they had to keep a low profile. What about the scientists in our story? Ida Noddack got a raw deal because she saw the possibility of fission at a time when the theory hadn't caught up to the point where anyone could see how it could be possible. By the time theory caught up, she was lost in the shuffle. Lise Meitner fared better, but I remember when I first became aware of her (probably in the early '50s) there was a feeling that she had been shortchanged on recognition. Only Otto Hahn got the Nobel prize for their work, but that means that Fritz Strassmann was also left out, so it's hard to know what to make of it.
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Back in business; I came home with another copy of the book from the library.
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Good. When I went to renew mine, I couldn't because there were holds--annoying, because there weren't any two days before. So I quick got the paperback.
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I was sneaky. When the library wouldn't let me get on the hold list because I still had a copy out, my husband signed up and was on hold for only three days. The day I returned my copy, he was notifed that "his" copy was ready to pick up.
PatH, does your paperback have a section of photos in the center of the book....in the middle of Chapter 12? I feel pretty silly hunting the Internet for current photos of the "girls" - Denise Kiernan has already done that work for us. The photos are right there!
There's a question over these chapters that has me thinking - Would people now accept those conditions on blind trust that they are helping to win the war? I had to ask myself - would I do what these girls did - knowing that the enemy was watching closely and that the success of the Project depended on my cooperation and silence? It's a tough one. I think I'd need some assurance that the Gadget I was working on would be used only in warfare - and not to harm innocent civilians. I realize this sounds naive, And that back in the 40's, if I'd have asked such a question, I would have been rejected.
Back to the big question - about other people - it's awful to think that offered good money during hard times, people would do the same as the girls did - - especially if it meant winning the war and bringing loved ones home, no matter how destructive the weapon would have been harming civilians.
Still, there are the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
Off to read more closely Jean's find on today's women of nuclear science...
Another question - where were American women in nuclear science in the 40s - do we know that?
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Clever sneaking, JoanP. Yes, my paperback has the same pictures as the hardback.
I think people trusted the government more then than they do now. There would be a lot more skepticism to the request "we want you to come work really hard in appalling conditions and we won't tell you what you're doing, but it's important".
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I was skimming the rather extensive article on Wikipedia where I saw this map of all the Manhattan Project sites. I had no idea it was so extensive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manhattan_Project_US_Canada_Map_2.svg
One of the sites mentioned in the Wiki article was the Argonne National Laboratory. I've always associated it with photonics research, but apparently they do a lot more. I had no idea they were involved with the project. it turns out that Enrico Fermi's Metalurgy Lab and Argonne one and the same, just a short move and a name change. http://www.anl.gov/about-argonne/history
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What happens when you split the nucleus of a uranium atom?
To split it, you hit it with a neutron. If it’s U-235, it turns into U-236, which promptly splits into barium and krypton (3/5 and 2/5 of the original weight). In the process several neutrons are emitted, and a huge amount of energy is released. U-238 splits similarly, but the neutrons are lower energy.
How can this lead to a bomb?
There are two keys: 1) The reaction propagates through the U-235; the neutrons produced hit other uranium molecules, causing them to split, releasing more electrons, which hit more molecules, an increasing chain reaction.
2) The incredible amount of energy produced means you can cause an unbelievably large explosion with a small amount of material. One bomb will blow up a city.
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Research timetable:
1932: Chadwick discovers neutrons. You can’t hit something with a neutron if you don’t have one.
1934: Fermi bombards uranium with neutrons, but can’t discover the product. Ida Noddack suggests the atom has split into much smaller pieces, but this isn’t believed.
1936: Niels Bohr proposes the liquid drop model for atomic nuclei.
1938-9: Hahn and Strassmann identify the product of splitting uranium—barium. Lise Meitner and Frisch figure out how this could happen, using Bohr’s model.
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JoanP.,
Would people now accept those conditions on blind trust that they are helping to win the war?
I would say NO, the American people would NOT go on blind trust today. I saw a poll the other day that showed only 38% of Americans trust in president Obama to keep us safe. These recent polls show his approval is low.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/175697/trust-federal-gov-international-issues-new-low.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/124922/Presidential-Approval-Center.aspx
There are many other polls but most all of them will show the American people do not have strong trust in the president or in any part of the government. Americans have too much access to information today, they don't have blind trust, and since Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now the present war in Syria, there is a lot of mistrust. Today Americans do not see "ends to wars" they see ongoing conflicts, throughout the world. It's not about lack of loyalty or patriotism, it's all about lack of trust. We have been lied to, and there is no transparency, too much saying one thing, and doing another. World leaders refuse to trust in the U.S., and refuse to join us in this most recent war. Back in the 40's the Americans were willing to trust, work and participate in ending the war, along with making a good wage. Today more people live off of entitlements, unemployment, their families, or other subsidies that they have gotten comfortable with, and would not risk their health working in total secrecy, on "blind trust."
When my hubby went to check my book out of our library it was to be for the normal 3 weeks. Knowing it was for my book discussion he asked if he could extend it and they gave me an extra week on it. Should I go over, I will just keep it and pay the few cents in fees. ;)
Ciao for now~
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If you are not old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, you have no idea what the feelings were in this country during the war. The few days after 9/11 is as close as we have come in recent times. Not only that, people were scared of further attacks on the American states, especially people along the coasts. Our installations in the Phillipines had been overrun. Every able man or boy of military age had been drafted, and they were dying on two fronts. Everybody had a loved one in one of the armed services. Fear and hatred of the enemy was rampant. Thousands of soldiers were waiting for the assault on the Japanese homeland, and most didn't expect to survive it.
If Japan had chosen to surrender after Hiroshima (they were given a chance) there would have been no atomic bomb in Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was hailed as a a miracle weapon that ended the fighting. Immediately after the war at least one Oak Ridge business had a mushroom cloud as part of its logo. It was only later that people began to have misgivings, and most of those were people who had never been under threat.
Re: women scientists: Lisa Meitner was done out of the Nobel prize that was given for what was mostly her work. The men who received the award intimated that she was no more than a student.
http://www.planet-science.com/categories/over-11s/science-celebrities/2010/09/lise-meitner-(1878-1968)-.aspx
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With all due respect, I think we all can understand the feelings of war. We are all human, and can feel the devastation of war, regardless of what war you were living through. I believe we all, no matter what our age is, can express our own personal feelings, and not have to have lived in Oak Ridge, or in that particular era/war time. I think there is a misconception, that we must be in sync and thought, with the author, the ladies in the book and anyone who has lived in Oak Ridge. What makes a discussion even more interesting are opinions, thoughts and feelings of others who are not a part of any of these equations, and we need to respect those. It is common for some to question, speculate and even possibly doubt certain things, although we do have much information provided to us.
I, like a few others in the discussion, can see ourselves not feeling the same as these ladies. We are more curious, more independent thinking, and more hesitant to trust in a government project full of secrecy, and all the other issues about the living conditions and how the workers were treated. While we continuously are reminded, "you had to be there" or "you must remember to put yourself back in this time frame" it is normal for some of us to still question. In D. K.'s interviews the person doing the interview asked and expressed many our our similar questions and feelings. I don't think anyone questions the pride the country/residents of Oak Ridge felt ending the war, using the atomic bomb. But, I do believe we learned a big lesson, it is NOT something we would want to repeat today. We saw the devastation, and must realize other nations have the same nuclear advantages today. I am certain every American hailed the victory, but it would be an assumption, to think or say, every American, agreed with the use of the bomb.
This quote came to my mind..“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana
This quote also came to mind, where Ursa reminds us Japan had the chance to surrender, and I can see it fitting for all conflicts and wars that preceded and followed WW11.
“When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”
Winston Chruchill—House of Commons, 2 May 1935, after the Stresa Conference, in which Britain, France and Italy agreed—futilely—to maintain the independence of Austria. (My book* page 490).
http://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/blog/churchill-quote-history/
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Joan mentioned that she would have had to have been assured that the "project" was to be used only in the war. I know i told this story on some other discussion some time ago, but it fits here.........
My husband and i were at a Cell Institute at Syracuse U in the late 70s. One of the presentations was by a man who had done research at U of Kansas on improving crop output. He had developed a chemical that would vastly improve crop output and was pleased that he could lessen the amount of hunger in the world. However, he was warning researchers to have as much control as they possibly could as to how their research would be used. His "beneficial" chemical had been taken over by Dupont and, by using much greater amounts of it in application, was the basis for Agent Orange-type DEfoliant in North Vietnam and in areas held by the Viet Cong. And you are probably aware of the damage that was done to human beings, including our soldiers, in the way of cancer and other diseases. That must be a concern to any researchers who are not in total control of their research and i would think that would be most of them.
Something to be grateful for today? That i, and nobody in my family, was flying anywhere today!
Jean
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I'm supposed to be flying Sunday. We'll see if I actually get to take off.
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Thanks for the timeline, Pat and the additional information on future testing after the war, Fry. (I'm not going to ask for information on the development of the Hydrogen Bomb just yet...)
Right now, I'm trying to understand the degree of danger the workers at the K25 plant were exposed to in Clinton before the A-Bomb was used. Am I right in concluding that the only thing that was going on in Clinton was the extraction of uranium to be used elsewhere for the actual making of the bomb?
But first- back to the testing beneath the U. of Chicago football field. Safe to say that Fermi and scientists had little idea of the power of the experment before this - just how much of a reaction could actually blow up a city? This was the riskiest of all the tests that I can think of...
But Fermi had been correct in estimating that the 57th layer would "go critical." Fortunately. Don't you wonder how many people above ground in Chicago were aware of the experiment?
(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7136/8167736696_e977d3bd56_c.jpg)
So then when did the CEW plants get involved in the testing? I know the four plants
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"That must be a concern to any researchers who are not in total control of their research and i would think that would be most of them."
Jean - if I knew that the weapon I was working on was capable of blowing up an entire city... I think I would have passed on the opportunity. But no one knew what they were working on, did they? People higher up in the chain knew two things - that there was danger involved for the Clinton workers and that this Gadget was capable of catclysmic danger - more than these workers could possibly imagine. (They also knew that the Germans were racing to ready a similar weapon.) Do you think it was morally right to keep the nature of this "weapon" from those working on it?
Bella - I will be looking for a time when the American people or the "girls of Atomic City" began to look back and show signs of remorse - regret for the secrecy they had agreed to.
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Waahhhhhh! I lost my post. Oh, Well. Start over.
New word I like, "prefabulousness", referring to prefab homes.
On p99, in the first paragraph, the author mentions Mallinckrodt. I was somewhat familiar with the Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals during my studies in college. Mallinckrodt, originally G. Mallinckrodt & Co. and then Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, was the first company to introduce barium sulfate as a medium for contrasting x-rays in 1913. Here is a timeline and at the bottom, below the process section and beginning with It all began in, is a bit Manhattan Project history. http://www.lm.doe.gov/Weldon/Interpretive_Center/Online_Tour/Tribute_to_the_Mallinckrodt_Uranium_Workers.pdf
Harshaw Chemicals still exists, but with several mergers and sales, they are now a part of Engelhard in Oakland, CA. I found this pdf of Harshaw's involvement and subsequent site contamination. http://www.epa.state.oh.us/portals/30/FFS/docs/dod/FUSRAP/Harshaw_Chemical.pdf
These are two of the companies that processed the Uranium ore and sent the purified Uranium on to Oak Ridge.
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K-25 is located near the town of Kingston; no work took place in Clinton. The Clinton Engineering Project was a name used before the Oak Ridge project got underway. Most of the exposure to radiation and to dangerous materials did not affect the workers at the time. The increased rates or cancer and lung disease have developed in later years. Quite a large number of people have received a $150,000 settlement from the government because they have developed one of several forms of cancer or other disease attributeable to exposure to radiation or toxic substances at one of the plants. It's not really enough, although treatment for the condition is is also covered for life (or what's left of it).
Good quote from Winston Churchill!
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Right now, I'm trying to understand the degree of danger the workers at the K25 plant were exposed to in Clinton before the A-Bomb was used. Am I right in concluding that the only thing that was going on in Clinton was the extraction of uranium to be used elsewhere for the actual making of the bomb?
I think that's right--they took the uranium which had already been purified from ore, and separated the two isotopes. It's a difficult process, and you don't get 100% pure U-235. That used in the Nagasaki bomb was 80%. So the enriched U-235 was made into bombs, but not at Oak Ridge, and the depleted U-238 was turned into plutonium, mostly at Hanford.
How much danger the workers were in would depend on the safety precautions taken. Maybe we'll learn more further on, but I'm sure they weren't as good as they should have been. Somewhere when I was flipping through the book I saw a scene of a worker whose job was to hold something up to each piece of laundry, and if it "clicked", she sent that item back to be re-washed. She didn't even know she was monitoring for radioactivity with a Geiger counter.
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ Tube Alloy, 1938
Chapters 4,5
Sept. 29- Oct. 5 ~ Tube Alloy, The Quest for Product
Chapters 6, TUBEALLOY, Chapter 7 (to pg. 150)
[ RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1), Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan),
Music the girls would have listened to (http://www.girlsofatomiccity.com/sub_mid/music_click.png),
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview),
For Your Consideration
September 29 ~ October 5
TUBEALLOY ~ The Quest for Product (pg 99)
1. What are the two kinds of transformed Tubealloy that were needed for the two models of the Gadget?
2. Site X-10 was the site producing 49 by means of fission chain reaction. How did the other three plants at CEW separate T-235 from T-238?
3. Can you describe the way some of the different processes worked? Have you found any images of the plants at CEW or the processes to help you understand the workings?
4. What are some of the ways the motto, "Bigger. More. Now," apply to events described in this section?
Chapter 6 ~ To Work
1. In this chapter, what are some of the traits of young women recruited for the Project that made them successful?
2. What are some of the challenges that faced some of the women?
3. What are some examples of gender inequality?
4. What are some of the incidents described in this chapter that you found especially interesting?
TUBEALLOY ~ The Couriers
1. After learning about the football-length transforming facilities, were you surprised at the actual "size" of the Product carried by the courriers?
2. Did any other detail in this section arouse your curiosity?
Chapter 7 ~ Rhythms of Life(to pg.156)
1. "Morale, though often boosted by patriotic duty, remained vulnerable to the strain of daily life." What were some of the activities created to help morale that you might have joined if you lived there?
2. What were some of the "fashion-challenges" faced by the women?
3. What were some of the inequalities faced by the Black residents?
4. What did you learn about the attitudes of the surrounding townspeople toward those who lived "over the fence."?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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Ursamajor, we were posting at the same time. Thanks for the actual story.
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JoanP.,
I will be looking for a time when the American people or the "girls of Atomic City" began to look back and show signs of remorse - regret for the secrecy they had agreed to.
If you listen to D.K.'s interview she states, once the women find out about the atomic bomb, and realize what they were working on, it began to bother them. I think it was in the second part of the interview with Jon Stewart.
ursa, Quite a large number of people have received a $150,000 settlement from the government because they have developed one of several forms of cancer or other disease attributeable to exposure to radiation or toxic substances at one of the plants.
This does not surprise me at all. They could rewash the laundry a second time if it "clicked" to try to eliminate the radioactive chemicals, but they couldn't rewash the humans.
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There are a few questions in the heading we haven't talked about that were brought up in these chapters...like this one:
We're you surprised at how differently the black workers were treated?
I really wasn't, were you? Remembering the treatment of the enlisted blacks in the war-
During World War II, most African American soldiers still served only as truck drivers and as stevedores (except for some separate tank battalions and Army Air Forces escort fighters).[27] In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, General Eisenhower was severely short of replacement troops for existing military units which were totally white in composition. Consequently, he made the decision to allow African American soldiers to pick up a weapon and join the white military units to fight in combat for the first time.[27] More than 2,000 black soldiers had volunteered to go to the front.[28] This was an important step toward a desegregated United States military. A total of 708 African Americans were killed in combat during World War II.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_African_Americans#World_War_II
I really liked Kattie Strickland - she knew how to get around the unfair restrictions.
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Bella...I haven't listened to Part II of that interview...but I suppose that since the author said this, she must have mentioned it in the book she was telling Mr. Stewart about in the interview. Haven't read ahead in the book yet either...the "girls" know nothing about the Gadget at this point in the book.
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JoanP., I have not read ahead as well. I did go to Amazon.com and read reviews of those who have read the book, and I must say I feel like I just spent an evening with residents of Oak Ridge, Tenn. So many of those in the reviews either have parents, grandparents or some other relative that worked in the CEW. Some also knew ladies in the book that D.K. had interviewed. Just reading their personal responses and mentioning their relative who lived this, is so much more intmate for me. I have not been able to yet get a personal feel of the characters so far introduced to us in the book. I realize D.K. compartmentalized the book, and I am not critiquing her style, I just feel in doing so it keeps jumping around so much so, that I forget the person by the time she comes back to her, or introduces a new woman, in between the very complicated scientific methods. You asked earlier which of the women we could see our self as, and I honestly couldn't remember the names of the few women introduced to this point. I got bogged down in the splitting of the atoms, the neutrons, and tubealloy, and forgot the women. Most of the reviews said the first few chapters were the most difficult to follow, so I have hope to be more focused in the coming chapters.
I just know this story is fascinating to learn about, and it is also fascinating for me to be reading History! My hubby just giggles every time I choose to join a discussion that has anything to do with history, because he knows how little I cared to know about it, yet since I have been with this book club I can actually hold an informed, somewhat intelligent conversation with him, (the History buff) AND even inform him of things he never knew, such as the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tenn.! So there you have it.....I like the women of Oak Ridge, will continue to sludge through the mud, and finish this project/book. The only advantage I have over the women of Atomic City is, I know what they were working on. :D :D
So, I am ready to tackle the next chapters as soon as they are put in the heading.
As for was I surprised at how the blacks were treated during these times, I must say emphatically NO! I have only ever lived in Michigan and Ohio. My daughter married a guy from Georgia, and they moved to Florida in 1995. My first visit to their apartment in Florida after they were married was shocking! I was appalled at how southerners still had so much prejudice in their thinking and speech. When they got married in Georgia we had booked a hotel in his hometown of Bainbridge, for the wedding reception. Again, I was shocked at how the black workers were spoken to and treated at this very nice hotel, in this very nice small town. I was embarrassed and felt like I was in a pre civil war movie scene. Our family, seemingly like the rich family, (which we are not), and the blacks being ordered to please me and do anything I said to prepare the reception room, made me very uncomfortable. My husband and I, or any of our relatives were not allowed to lift a finger to help arrange the room. I had never experienced anything like that in my lifetime. If things were still this bad in 1995, fifty years later than the time of this book, it did not surprise me whatsoever how the blacks were being treated in Oak Ridge, Tenn. in the 1940's. It made me sad then, and it makes me sad now reading it in this book.
It's getting late and I have to be up early, so I will say Good Night!
Ciao for now~
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PatH is in the air today. One of her questions she left for us to pondere this week,we have touched on - but can get to know these girls better if we think about what they told Denise Kiernan.
Could you have managed? What crucial role did women have in shaping the character of the community?
In Chapter 5 we hear more of the details that made life difficult- worse than mud and secrecy, outdoor bathrooms with long lines. . Did you notice the three plants were located 17 miles apart - in case of explosions? The big turnovers - complaints about food, housing. I wondered how those exiting were sworn to secrecy about the place.
Denise Kiernan wrote that although the Project's goal single goal was to enrich Tubealloy for the Gadget, life at the CEW was turning into a social experiment. It was the women who were turning the place into "home" - which might explain why so many chose to remain after the war.
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We're moving today to the next Tubealloy section and to Chapters 6 and 7 this week. Of course, we can still talk about anything in the previous chapters. The same themes seem to run throughout the book, among them: secrecy, doing one's duty for the War effort, gender inequality, making community in unlikely places.
In this next Tubealloy section we learn more about the technical aspects involved in the transformation of Tubealloy for use in the "Gadget." What are the two kinds of transformed Tubealloy that were needed for the two models of the Gadget?
Site X-10 was the site producing 49 by means of fission chain reaction. How did the other three plants at CEW separate T-235 from T-238?
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Bellamarie, I also have trouble making coherent pictures of the girls. They're well described, and I feel sympathy with them, but we hop around so much I have trouble keeping the details straight, assigned to the right person. I see why Kiernan tells it this way, though. I'm guessing this problem will clear up as we go on through the book.
I like Kattie too, and her ability to deal with unfair restrictions. Unfortunately, her life had probably given her plenty of practice.
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I found this section kind of hard to follow. I think I have the gist of the various processes but I wasn't able to visualize the details even from the detailed descriptions. There are several relevant photos in the middle of the book. Two are of "cubicle operators" monitoring control panels in the Y-12 plant. One is of an Alpha "racetrack."
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"I see why Kiernan tells it this way, though. PatH"
I can too, Pat. Can't imagine the story without the human element - the thousands of workers totally unaware of the Tubealloy project they were working on. Imagine an entire book filled with just the scientific detail we're reading in the TUBEALLOY sections - who would read it? :D
It's true - it's getting easier to recognize the "the girls" - as we continue in these chapters. No longer need to keep my finger in the Introductory chapter where the author describes each of those she interviews. Keep reminding myself that
many of these women are still living...and actually lived these years of secrecy described here.
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Marcie - I'm not really trying to follow all the detail of the various processes described in this Tubealloy chapter - the one titled "the Quest for Product." But I am amazed at reading the extent of the whole project - and in awe of the fact that it was kept secret! The 55 gallon drums which from all over - and then put on trains to the CEW in Tennessee - from all Canada, New Jersey, Iowa...to CEW - and from there sent on to Los Alamos. ALL in SECRET! How many people must have been involved with this!
And while at CEW - those four plants which handled all the Tubealloy - The size of them! Cannot not even imagine the size of the K-25 plant - even with the visual provided - the size of 44 football fields!
When the fission reaction in X-10 "went critical" - the great Enrico Fermi made the trip to CEW under an assumed name - and stayed at the Guest House! The Guest House, ursa! Your future home, perhaps?
I appreciate reading such detail - even though I have no idea what it meant that the reaction went critical - right there in Tennessee. Will rely on those of you who understood to explain - but I do enjoy reading the Tubealloy chapters - for the contrast...back and forth between the scientific explanations and the girls who are working to make the Project a reality!
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Those are great points, Joan. The detailed descriptions of the processes emphasize the serious work involved... and the fact that it was "work in progress." The government put many millions into the Project and was not ensured of the outcome.
I too think that the descriptions of the people involved and the conditions they worked under make the book interesting. In Chapter 6 the author reiterates some of the traits of young women recruited for the Project that made them successful. We can talk about that some more and some of the challenges that faced some of the women. What struck you?
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The people involved, the conditions they worked under, how this changed their lives, how they coped--this is the point of the book. The scientific side is a necessary part of the story, but it's the subtext.
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PatH., I agree. As far as Tubealloy the Quest For Product, I again found myself bogged down. I just feel while there is some importance to understand the process, this is just more information than necessary. I suppose if you were writing a book on the process, it would seem of interest, especially to those with some scientific knowledge. D.K. seems to be repeating herself a lot. Although I did read the chapter, I had to skip pages once again for redundancy, and uninterest. I so want to hear more about the women, their feelings, their lives not just inside the plants, but more about outside the plants. D.K. only gives us tidbits, and then back to the process.
I did find this rather interesting, and gives a bit of an insight to the psychological effect, working in and under these conditions they dealt with.
pg. 96 "For some residents, however, life on the Reservation was too trying. Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Eric Kent Clarke, who had just arrived several months earlier in March 1944, found himself challenged by what he soon realized was a very unique community. Combine, cramped quarters with isolation and secrecy and he discovered that a lot of people were in a perpetual state of edgy exhaustion. The kind of rehashing of a day's work with a spouse or roommate that most adults took for granted was not permitted. Relieving stress by talking about what was worrying you was not an option, since most worries were related to work, and off-limits topic.
Residents had left familiar traditions and support networks behind, and there was little to replace them. Clarke reported that it had for some time been suspected that there were many psychiatric problems plaguing the residents of Oak Ridge, but that these situations were neither recognized nor well-defined . That's where he came in.
":By March, 1944, the need for specialized service to cope with the personality disturbance became apparent and psychiatric service was established," Clark wrote in one of his early reports.
From the beginning the residents have been subjected to many additional stresses absent in the usual community which have created tensions. Material necessities were still in embryo form, and it required a true pioneer spirit, that was often lacking, to make an easy transition to a community still in the making.
This was an eye opener as well:
pg. 97 "Despite all the planning the military did with regard to Townsites and homes and religious groups and softball leagues, there was no real plan for Oak Ridge beyond the timetable of the war itself. CEW had a single goal: to enrich Tubealloy for the Gadget.
But whether the Project had intended it or not, CEW was a social experiment of sorts.
After reading a ton of reviews at Amazon.com, written by many relatives of these women who worked at CEW, they mention how they never talked about their years working there, even though they were no longer under the secrecy act. Some felt they never dealt or got over the fact they played a part in killing innocent lives, especially children. I would venture to guess back in the 40's and 50's, getting counseling, therapy or any type of psychological help, to learn to deal with all they lived through was not readily available to them, after the war ended. Soldiers returning home from wars deal with PTS, trying to deal with everything, including their guilt and struggle with the moral issue of killing others. Yes, they know it's a part of war, but their human instincts, and their moral compass does not always align with, "It had to be done, kill or be killed." We see what effects it has on their lives. This project, these women worked on, was just as troubling, I am sure, once they learned what they were doing, not to discount the living conditions, and prejudices they had to live with on a daily basis.
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"Tubealloy:the quest for product" is kind of confusing, even for a chemist.
What did it mean "the reaction went critical"? (JoanP). This is the same thing that happened under the football field in Chicago. They are bombarding the tubealloy (uranium) with neutrons. Some of these neutrons split uranium atoms to give more neutrons, and some of them are captured. The end result of capture is 49 (plutonium). The mixture becomes "critical" when you have enough uranium close enough together to produce significantly more neutrons than are fed into it. It can then keep going on it's own--it's self-sustaining, as each split leads to more than one further split.
This is important because it's what you need in order to manufacture 49. Now you can do things on a big scale.
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OK, so what is going on in X-10 is NOT on a BIG SCALE...not a big explosion? Would those working in the plant be aware of it?
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The entire project from the splitting of atoms to create the alloys for the Gadget to get a bigger boom, from the living conditions, using humans for testing, exposing workers to the risk of uranium, etc., etc., etc. Aware or not aware, the government was determined to create and use this bomb, at all costs. I have no doubt we would have won the war with or without it.
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Thanks very much for the help with our technical questions, Pat.
Bellamarie, I too found the information about the stress factors very interesting. You quoted:
"The kind of rehashing of a day's work with a spouse or roommate that most adults took for granted was not permitted. Relieving stress by talking about what was worrying you was not an option, since most worries were related to work, and off-limits topic.....
By March, 1944, the need for specialized service to cope with the personality disturbance became apparent and psychiatric service was established," Clark wrote in one of his early reports.
"From the beginning the residents have been subjected to many additional stresses absent in the usual community which have created tensions. Material necessities were still in embryo form, and it required a true pioneer spirit, that was often lacking, to make an easy transition to a community still in the making."
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Bellemarie's interest in the mental health issues at Oak Ridge got me to looking at attitudes toward mental illness in the 40s. That would take a lot more time than I care to spend. I did discover that The National Mental Health Act, signed by President Truman, created the National Institute of Mental Health in 1946. It was a result of growing concerns over the number of people rejected for military service for mental health issues and the number of veterans returning with PTSD.
I remember the impression, early on, and reinforced my Dad's own attitude, that having mental health issues and seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist something shameful. It was something you didn't admit to if you didn't want to be gossiped about, passed over for jobs or promotion, or didn't want to be excluded from "normal" life events. I wonder how many of the women avoided seeing a mental health worker because of the stigma attached. Were women's mental health issues taken as seriously as the men?
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Frybabe, I think those attitudes still apply even today for many people.
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Fry - It seems that the patients Dr. Clarke saw were mostly men - am I wrong? Do you get the impression that the secrecy issue was harder on the married women? I can see why they wouldn't seek help - knowing they would put their husband's job in jeopardy. I can't imagine being married in this situation - and yet there were many babies being born during these years. Our single "girls" seem to be having such a good time, they are able to take it all in stride.
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Frybabe, I think those attitudes still apply even today for many people.
Yes, unfortunately, but it's not as bad as it was. My memory tracks Frybabe's. Mental health problems were shameful, something one didn't admit to, and women's problems were treated more dismissively than men's. It must have been hard, when you were already fighting demons, to be ashamed and have to hide your problems.
Diagnosis, treatment, and attitudes have come a long way since then, but there's still a long way to go.
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Fry, and PatH., (we were posting at the same time) you are so right about the attitudes of people who may have needed psychological help for a mental disorder, yet refusing to get it back in the 40's and 50's. The stigma of shame and gossip, I am certain held many back from getting the help they needed. Mental illness awareness, and treatment has been something this nation doesn't like dealing with. My daughter was diagnosed with bipolar/manic depressant, along with auditory hallucinations, and paranoia disorders back in 1998, and I was shocked at learning how families were embarrassed a member of their family was being treated for a mental disorder. Family, friends, even co workers seemed as if I should keep that part of my life private. Yet, some approached me in confidence, to reveal they too had a family member with a mental disorder, and until now had never felt they could let anyone know. The awareness and shame that is attached to mental illness has advanced since Tipper Gore, and celebrities have come out to address it, because they or a loved one was diagnosed, but we still have so far to go. I can only imagine how lost, depressed, and confused many of these women felt after the project/war was over. Transitioning out of this life, into the mainstream with no help from the government, and knowing they were considered outsiders by mainstream, had to be mentally taxing.
These paragraphs really jumped out at me:
pg. 146 Celia got the mud off her shoes as best she could, scraping here, knocking there. She didn't want anyone in Knoxville to be able to tell that she had come from behind the fence.
pg. 146 The relationship between the Clinton Engineer Works and their immediate neighbors was a testy one. Things hadn't exactly gotten off on the right foot, with nearly 60,000 acres of land being taken from people whose families had lived there for ages. Though many people from surrounding areas worked at CEW, the suspicious and condescending "you're one of those people from that place" strained the fabric that tenuously held this hodgepodge of communities together. Socializing did occur, professionally and personally, as the communities forged a reluctant yet unavoidable partnership. Still, locals complained about the outsiders who lived and worked at CEW. Some were sure the CEW was getting more than their fair share of rationed goods, for example. What else could all those trains be carrying in there all the time?
pg. 147 Celia would often walk into stores like Miller's or George's and stand at the counter, waiting to be helped. She grew more and more annoyed as she watched other customers stroll up after her only to be served first. The first time it happened she didn't think too much of it. Just a fluke, she thought. But now it seemed to be turning into a pattern. When she finally mentioned it to her friends, other women complained of being turned down for service entirely when requesting a particular item, especially one that was rationed. "Do you have...?" they'd ask. "We're saving them for civilians," the shopkeeper might say.
No matter the pains Celia took to wash the mud off her shoes __her civilian shoes__she never surmounted this obstacle. Maybe it was her accent. Maybe it was her friends. Somehow the shopkeepers always knew she was one of those people from that government place.
As wrong and sad as it is, I can actually understand the animosity the Knoxville people had toward the CEW people. They see them as a part played in the government relocating families, and not paying a fair price for their land. They are assuming the CEW workers are being given special treatment/rations. They had no idea how difficult the living conditions were for the CEW workers. They did see the money the women were able to spend in their stores, during rationing/wartime.
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Bellamarie, that is a tough illness to deal with. Over the years, I've known three families who were affected. All three of the family members were women. Two of the women tried to kill their daughters, the other one's husband couldn't deal with it and got a divorce. I haven't been following the most current treatments. Some of the drugs they had been treating manic/depressive disorder with had nasty side effects. I certainly hope they've come up with better ones.
I am continually surprised by the size of this project overall. How in the world did they keep it all so quiet? there seemed to be plenty of workers who left. Where did they go? Other government jobs, to the private sector? How did they manage to keep quiet after leaving?
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Fry, Yes, during research and talking with my daughter's psychiatrists, I learned the gene for this illness is predominantly in the maternal gene, although men have it too. For centuries, lithium was the choice of drug to use to manage the symptoms, but as you probably know, there have been so many others to follow. Many have had nasty side effects, and my daughter now suffers with diabetes, they feel was linked to taking one of her drugs for years. There was a class action suit filed, and patients were compensated for at least two of her drugs for treating her illness. No drug yet has been successful with managing her outbursts and paranoia. There have been times different doctors have tried new drugs and we have seen improvement in her mood swings and outbursts, but so far nothing that gives her the quality of life we so wish for. Her husband is a saint, and I tell him there is a special place reserved for him in Heaven for the love and support he has given her. She did move back home for a couple of years due to a separation, and the responsibility was on her Dad and myself. It was almost unbearable at times, and thankfully we were able to get her into an apartment within walking distance from our home, so we could have time apart, yet monitor and visit her daily. I commend anyone who works in the mental illness field at any capacity. The two of them got back together and she moved back to Florida where the weather I feel helps her deal on a day to day basis, much better than our Ohio weather. Cold, gloomy, and long winters can affect the serotonin, and cause her to have more depression. We keep hoping for just the right drugs to give her the life she so deserves, confusion and outburst free.
To answer your questions about the people who left. I assumed many returned home. It did mention the enormous turn around in employees, so all of them could not possibly have been placed in other government jobs to keep them quiet. I know the people had the fear of revealing anything, but I often wondered myself how they managed to return to their homes and go on with their lives and not slip and tell anyone. They have mentioned a couple of times about loose lips. Does anyone remember the saying, "Loose lips, sink ships." I wonder if it came from this particular time of the war. Well, I will answer my own question.
Loose lips sink ships is an American English idiom meaning "beware of unguarded talk".
The phrase originated on propaganda posters during World War II.[1] The phrase was created by the War Advertising Council[2] and used on posters by the United States Office of War Information.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_lips_sink_ships
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Loose_lips_might_sink_ships.jpg/220px-Loose_lips_might_sink_ships.jpg)
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All I can say is that the rudeness experienced by Celia had disappeared by 1953. Many, many of the people employed by the project never left Oak Ridge and are there to this day. There was a black woman who cleaned for me for many years who came to Oak Ridge to clean the dormitories. I went to her funeral; she is buried in a big cemetery just outisde the old gates. Of the women interviewed at least two have stayed in Oak Ridge. Colleen Black lives in a retirement community called Greenfields and Virginia Spivey Coleman lived in her own house in Oak Ridge until a few months ago, when she moved to an assisted living facility near her daughter.
Oak Ridge was a great place to bring up children in the sixties and seventies. The schools were excellent and the school population was enough different from the surrounding communities that the school system usde an "Oak Ridge curve" to contrast with the "normal curve" used in achievement testing. It was a comparatively safe environment for the time and it was a pleasant community. It is close enough to Knoxville to benefit from the cultural offerings of a city, and there are in Oak Ridge a community orchestra and a playhouse that uses local talent to produce very good plays. In addition there many civic groups interested in other aspects of the community.
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Many thanks, Ursamajor, for the update on those women.
I could imagine the resentment or resistance to the "insiders" from the "outsiders." The CEW people must have seemed unfriendly at the least in their refusal to answer questions about what they were doing or answer any questions at all about where they lived.
I too was wondering if/how people who left before the Project was completed kept all of their doings at the CEW secret from their families/ spouses/friends. Most didn't know much if anything about what was actually taking place or being created. Do you think that some of those people told something to someone?
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I've been thinking of what life would have been like for those who left CEW because of the living conditions there. Thinking of the patriotism throughout the country...everyone was involved. I don't think any of those who left were less patriotic after their experience at CEW. I don't think they wanted their "loose lips" to sink ships..or to give advantage to the enemy.
Besides, each individual knew so little about what was actually going on in the plants, as you said, Marcie ...what would they have to say about their work there? Unless they got together with others who left...and compared notes? It is my understanding that they would have a hard time getting jobs elsewhere when they left...unless they left in good standing with CEW. I think there were a number of reasons those who left would keep quiet about what they knew.
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Ursa - I have to say again how important it is having you with us, telling of your life at CEW - from the early 50's on...and the fact that you knew so many of these girls who chose to continue to live in CEW after the war, after they learned what they had been doing there. It couldn't have been traumatic if they stayed on.
So far, I'm not seeing negative responses from any of the "girls" DK chose to interview for this book. Maybe things will change. Right now, they seem to be enjoying themselves, the dances on the tennis courts, the never-ending line of young, eligible (for the most part) young men. We're not hearing from those who were married and having problems with the restrictions on their conversations with their husbands. Do you think there is a reason for that? If one of the girls married, did she automatically stop working in one of the plants? That would make her even more cut off from socializing. No wonder the wives began to gather...
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One more quick note - and then off for the day -
I had wondered if all the chemists assessed the tubealloy were men...and then read more about Virginia Spivey (Coleman) - the chemist. When she learned her supervisors were giving her "D" ratings to prevent her from getting a raise and asked about it, she learned she wasn't getting promoted because she wasn't in "her designated field" - so she requested the lab. That's all it took? They let her into the lab simply because she requested it?
Once in the lab - "she knew precisely what the Product was - not where it came from - or where it was going." "Even those who knew what it was, agreed never to mention it."
If Virginia Spivey had decided to leave, she certainly would have had some information to spread. But she didn't.
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JoanP.,
Right now, they seem to be enjoying themselves, the dances on the tennis courts, the never-ending line of young, eligible (for the most part) young men. We're not hearing from those who were married and having problems with the restrictions on their conversations with their husbands.
With all due respect JoanP., I am a bit confused with your statements, unless you have not yet gotten to the end of the pages of our assigned chapters this week. My post with page #s and quotes from the book, clearly showed the psychiatrist had much concern for the state of mind these women had from working and living in these conditions. I don't think patriotism is in question, as to how this affected these people in CEW, while or after the project. Patriotism does not prevent the mind from being altered. Imagine all the soldiers who have fought in wars and came home with PTSD, their patriotism should never be questioned because their state of mind was altered for the service they provided their country.
Ursa, I don't think anyone is calling the town of Oak Ridge's reputation into question after the war, when the conditions became better. I am sure it is a fine town.
All I can say is that the rudeness experienced by Celia had disappeared by 1953.
I am interested in how you were aware the attitudes of the "insiders" changed toward the "outsiders" by 1953. Is that when you moved there, and you were not aware it existed before you moved to Oak Ridge? My hope is that you are correct, and these CEW workers were not treated with the prejudice and rudeness, they experienced while working for CEW. It would be my hope they were able to mainstream into society, and would feel a part of the community enough to remain there the rest of their lives. It is so beneficial to have you with us, able to give us such insight and knowledge. Thank you for any and all information you can provide us with.
Oh how I would love to have been able to sit with any of these women as D.K. did, and gotten their first hand word. I am hoping these next chapters can give us even more insight to the humanistic life vs. the technical process of alloys.
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What would have happened to the men that left? There was a tremendous manpower shortage during the war. I'm guessing they would have been quickly snapped up to work somewhere, maybe not so top- secret. Or they might have been drafted, if fit. I wonder if the workers got deferred to work at Oak Ridge, or if they weren't draftable for reasons that wouldn't matter for factory work.
It's not surprising that Virginia Spivey could get transferred to a lab job once things really got going. They were probably really short of chemists by then. She figured out exactly what chemicals she was working on. I wonder if she guessed that this must be leading to a bomb?
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PatH., You are the scientist, and the best person to answer your question. Would you have guessed it was leading to a bomb? My suspicion is, yes! ;)
I would imagine the healthy young men from CEW was drafted once the war ended. Back then we still needed them.
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My Uncle Lou was deemed more valuable to the war effort as a civilian. His expertise was in the new field of radar technology. He would have been one of the men installing, tweaking, repairing and training military people how to use it. He stayed with it until his retirement, traveling the world. I still have a few of the goodies he brought back as gifts. And oh how wonderful that big old world broadcast radio was that he let us use for a few years on one of his overseas assignments.
Anyhow, I expect that a few, not many probably, of those who left CEW also found themselves in such civilian positions.
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I agree, Fry - There was plenty of opportunity for Uncle Lou and others like him to contribute to the war effort...other than in CEW. So who was working in CEW? For some, it was because the pay was better...but growing numbers of enlisted men found themselves rerouted to TN. Could they refuse? Did they have an option?
This was a good question, Marcie.
"In this chapter, (Chapter 6) what are some of the traits of young women recruited for the Project that made them successful?"
This begins to answer the question here - why some of the young women were able to adapt to life at CEW. These are probably the women you knew, Ursa - those who chose to stay in Oak Ridge for the rest of their lives.
Everyone doesn't seem to be suffering under these circumstances. When we get to next week's chapters, Bella, we'll see more of those traits Dr. Clarke found important to explain why some succeeded and others did not - their sense of humor and positive attitude. But for now, DK cites their ability to complete their tasks with little difficulty, not ask questions - and then really enjoy their social time. Clearly the married women at home alone - or with babies, are going to need more than bowling alleys to boast their spirits. Has anyone seen any of the "girls" interviewed - (those nine introduced in the beginning of the book )show signs of discontent?
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The one who really ought to show discontent is Kattie. She's separated from her children, for who knows how long, she can't live with her husband even though he's at Oak Ridge too, and segregation cuts her out of a lot of the off-duty relaxation. She can't even do her beloved cooking until she gets a stranger to make her some baking pans from scrap metal. I wonder where she'll get the stove? The only good side is they're making good money and helping the war effort. But if she's despondent it doesn't show here.
When a committee of blacks wrote pleading for equal housing for married couples, all they got was an extra background check! ::)
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That's awful. I missed that, Pat. Kattie seems to have adapted to the situation though. I can't wait to find out what she did after the war. I know she doesn't like the cold winters in TN...I doubt she'll be one who opts to stay. Trying not to read ahead. My fear is that she"ll get caught breaking rules.
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I thought that I read somewhere that men who left were drafted into the Army. I can't find it right now. Maybe it was the men who WERE soldiers, and who were reassigned to CEW, who were sent back to the Army if they left CEW.
Pat, you're right that Kattie would have a right to to be discontent for all of the reasons you state. I think that being able to send most of her paycheck home to support her kids made everything bearable. Good point about what the Blacks got for trying to get the housing they were promised. Complaints seem to be met by the authorities with additional scrutiny of those who expressed dissatisfaction.
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My, all the problems with makeup and clothes bring back old memories. I wasn't old enough to wear stockings, but what you did when you didn't have any was put suntan makeup on your legs, then fake the seams with eyebrow pencil. Come to think of it, at least you didn't have to worry about crooked seams.
And parachute nylon: did any of you ever try to sew with it? Its threads are slithery, so it doesn't hold stitches well--your seams pull right out. I can't imagine making anything as complicated as a wedding dress with it.
There's a Miller shop in the town. I assume this is I. Miller shoes. The pair Celia bought to make a big impression cost her $23. $35 a week was a good wage. I remember them from after the war--classic simple black pumps and dressy flats, the shoes to impress. They were expensive, but I don't think they were THAT expensive. I never had any.
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents Chicken Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ TUBEALLOY, 1938
Chapters 4,5
Sept. 29- Oct. 5 ~ TUBEALLOY, The Quest for Product
Chapters 6, TUBEALLOY, The Couriers, Chapter 7
Oct 6-12 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 151) Security, Censorship, The Press
Chapters 8, TUBEALLOY, Pumkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup; Chapter 9,
TUBEALLOY, Combining Efforts in the New Year; Chapter 10 (to pg. 204)
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1); Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan);
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview); Interview with Kattie Strickland, resident of Oak Ridge in 2005 (http://cdm16107.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15388coll1/id/422)
For Your Consideration
October 6-12
TUBEALLOY (p151) ~ Security, Censorship, The Press
1. Do you think it is a bit odd that scientists were already battling over the use of atomic energy once the war is over? Are they that confident in the power and the success of the Gadget?
2. The General believes in compartmentalization for security. "Each man should know everything he needs to know to do his job - and nothing else." Can you understand this? How did President Roosevelt assist the General in his belief?
Chapter 8 ~ The One about the Fireflies
1. Do the whimsical replies to questions about what went on in Oak Ridge sound as if the girls were taking the secrecy and censorship in stride?
2. How did Oak Ridge inspire secrecy among the thousands of workers?
TUBEALLOY ~ Pumkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup
1. A clogged alloy tube in the Philadelphia Navy yard led to the death of two men- a third survived. How did the General silence the coroner's office on the cause of death?
2. Was security a bigger problem than anticipated? If spies had infiltrated CEW and the Project's scientists, had they also known of Lt. Col Paul Tibbits' involvement? Is his name familiar to you?
Chapter 9 ~ The Unspoken
1. What were some of the serious problems D. Clark encountered among the women in his 10 page report? Do you see the single girls DK interviewed having these same problems?
2. What did Dr.Clark mean when he said attitude and a sense of humor made a difference in how people managed? Is there any indication of how many suffered severe problems? Why did they remain?
TUBEALLOY ~ Combining Efforts in the New Year
1. What effect did the 1944 election have on the productijon of the Gadget?
2. How did they decide the Gadget would be ready in August, 1945? Maybe even 2 of them?
Chapter 10 ~ Curiosity and Silence (to pg.204)
1. Was the army colonel in Manhattan giving Celia Szapka a lie detector test? What were they looking for? Did she seem unhappy as a married woman in Oak Ridge? Did you listen to her interview in the heading yet?
2. What did you think happened to the young Navy man who required electroshock treatment?
What did he want to warn the Japanese emperor about?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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Pat, that's such great first-hand information. I was wondering what the leg makup reference was about. Now I get it that it was to make the women look like they had on the darker stockings. Didn't it rub off on clothes?
My mother was married at the end of the War to an American soldier stationed in Germany. Her "honeymoon" skirt and jacket was made out of Army uniform material.
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I want to comment on the fact that the "PRODUCT" was carried in a briefcase locked onto the arm of a courier. We got descriptions of the football-length facilities and photos of the tons of material that Enrico Fermi blew up. I was very surprised that the final Product was so small.
I found some images of wedding dresses made from parachute material at https://www.google.com/search?q=parachute+wedding+dress&client=firefox-a&hs=ZwD&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=tC4vVOTjN4a6yQTXz4Eo&ved=0CDAQ7Ak&biw=1426&bih=833#imgdii=_
I can imagine that it was difficult to sew because of its "slipperyness" but there must have been a technique that worked in order to sew the original parachute.
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These dresses are amazing! Thank you for the link Marcie.
PatH., I had to giggle when I read drawing the line up the back of the leg so it appeared to be a seam. Imagine if someone did that today. And skin coloring, or selfless tanner as I think it's called. I remember my first time ever using it in 1970, I looked like a pumpkin. :o
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I read in these last chapters that Dr.Clark notes homesickness, morale and depression growing as time goes on. Something more is needed to counter this "drab existence." So "more" is added- game nights, dances, clubs, jazz...sports leagues. Oak Ridge is slowly turning into a town, a community.
When reading of the liberation of Italy in June, 1944...and the storming of the beaches in Normandy, I wondered what those "inside" thought the Gadget was going to be used for? Has all their work to win the war with this Gadget been for nothing? Have any concluded the new weapon is planned for use in Japan, rather than in France or Germany?
Marcie - I wondered how many couriers made the trip to Los Alamos with those little briefcases of Product handcuffed to their wrists before there was enough sufficient for the Gadget? Must have been a site! Didn't anyone think it odd? Did spies take note?
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Joan, I would think that those who actually knew what the GADGET was, would have thought, at least initially, that it was intended for Germany. I'm watching the TV series MANHATTAN that's about the scientists at the New Mexico site. It is fictional - not a documentary but based on history. Most of the scientists think in terms of a race against Germany to build an atomic bomb. In the series, it's not so much a race to actually bomb an enemy but to prevent the Enemy from creating the bomb first. I don't know if that was the actual motivation.
LOL, yes, Joan. I was wondering the same thing. How many people boarded trains with briefcases handcuffed to their arms? It would have seemed that it would attract a lot of notice to do that.
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. Most of the scientists think in terms of a race against Germany to build an atomic bomb. In the series, it's not so much a race to actually bomb an enemy but to prevent the Enemy from creating the bomb first. I don't know if that was the actual motivation.
My impression is that was definitely the thinking--to beat the enemy in this race, not to be at a weapons disadvantage. Of course they realized that meant a possibility it would actually be used.
Handcuffing a briefcase to a courier's wrist was a standard procedure for important dispatches, so the "product" carriers wouldn't be unique.
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Thanks, Pat, for that confirmation about the likely motivation of the U.S. in trying to be first in building the bomb.
I know I've seen movies with briefcases handcuffed to couriers. It seems to me, if the information was important enough, that the courier would be at risk for losing his hand to an adversary, if not his life.
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If there is anything more anyone wants to bring up on these chapters or any that we've already discussed, we can do that today and then move on to the next Tubealloy section and Chapter 8 starting tomorrow.
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PatH.,
My impression is that was definitely the thinking--to beat the enemy in this race, not to be at a weapons disadvantage. Of course they realized that meant a possibility it would actually be used.
I have to agree, I feel it was about the United States getting the first atomic bomb. Once they created it, and had it why did Truman decide to use it on Japan, when it was clear that Japan was ready to surrender. I have read many articles that have proof Japan wanted to surrender with only one condition, the U.S. allow them to keep their Emperor. After the two bombs were dropped killing thousands of civilians, Truman agrees to the surrender, and allows Japan to keep their Emperor. So why? Surely not to end the war or save American soldiers from being killed. Japan was no longer a threat, we had decimated them before the bombs.
This is one article of many that states the United States was well aware Japan was beaten and ready to surrender.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
This article shows, General MAcArthur and Eisenhower disagreed with dropping the bombs, along with, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use, General Curtis LeMay, along with Joseph Kennedy.
After studying this matter in great detail, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey rejected the notion that Japan gave up because of the atomic bombings. In its authoritative 1946 report, the Survey concluded: Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the date of the planned American invasion], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
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The actual bombings continue to be a controversial issue with various arguments about the reasons and timing for dropping the bombs and the moral implications. As far as I've gotten in the book, the speculation about the strategic value of actually using the bombs doesn't seem to be part of the scope of this book so it doesn't seem that we'll find answers or even theories in our reading.
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I remember reading a much later interview with Truman in which he said that was the most difficult decision he had to make during his presidency. He didn't say what his reasoning was--it wouldn't have fitted the scope of the interview. I do remember reading that when he took over as president in the spring he hadn't yet been briefed on the bomb, didn't even know of its existence. It would be good to know what information he had when he had to make the decision.
No doubt history buffs know the answers to these questions, but I sure don't.
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Marcie, you were posting while I was writing. I agree, that's outside the area this book is going to cover.
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:-)
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Last stop on the trip home. Third motel - this one has a great breakfast - and then we're off...
I can't say enough how much I appreciate the stories of the "girls" - and the details that make the period come alive. You feel so badly for the blacks - I remember my uncles and aunts referring to them as the "Colored" -we read here of the "Colored Camp Council" created for a change in the living conditions at CEW... there was segregation everywhere, pools, movie theaters.
Things were slow to change, but World War II marked the beginning...in the military.
Today we move on to the TUBEALLOY chapter beginning on page 151 in the hard cover - right before Chapter 8.
August, 1944 - the Allies are in Paris - the scientists are already battling on how to use atomic energy in the future. Didn't you think it odd that they would be planning for the future - and the Gadget hasn't even been tested yet? Are they that certain it will be a success - that there will not be unexpected results?
In 1943, the project needed its own security staff to take over the War Department's Counterintelligence. This project is top secret - as someone pointed out here - even the vice presidential candidate was not informed. Of all the things I read about President Roosevelt, this "secret" kept from HTS him until Roosevelt's death was the hardest to comprehend. What was he thinking?
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Joan, I was wondering why some of the group was focusing on the future. Of course, they couldn't know how long it might take them to develop the Product and Project. Some of the group were probably quite optimistic. I looked up a bio of Zay Jeffries who wrote the initial memo about future uses of the technology. I noted in the book that he was a consultant with General Electric. The online bio says "His skills were not limited to those of a scientist; he had more than adequate administrative skills and was exceptionally perceptive in recognizing business opportunities." See http://home.frognet.net/~ejcov/jeffries10.html
He was likely using his "business hat" with General Electric to think about ways to make money for the corporation.
Something else that struck me in this Tubealloy section was that the new Office of Censorship sent a memo in 1943 to 20,000 news outlets. It outlined the topics that they couldn't write about, including "radioactive materials ...cyclotrons.... and Polonium (tubealloy) ....
I would think that memo could have been discovered by the "enemy" who would then know alot about the science that the U.S. was working on.
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BellaMarie's article regarding the use of the atomic weapons is at variance with most historical accounts. The fact remains that if Japan had surrendered after Hiroshima Nagasaki would not have been destroyed.
The Institute for Historical Review"s main interest is denial of the Holocaust, which brings its credibility into question as far as I am concerned.
Institute for Historical Review
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Institute of Historical Research.
Institute of Historical Review
Logo banner
Abbreviation IHR
Formation 1978
Location
Newport Beach, California[1]
Key people
David McCalden, founder
Willis Carto, co-founder
Mark Weber, director
Website ihr.org
The Institute for Historical Review (IHR), founded in 1978, is an organization primarily devoted to publishing and promoting books and essays that deny established facts concerning the Nazi genocide of Jews.[2][3][4][5][6] It is considered by many scholars as the world's leading Holocaust denial organization.[2][7][8] Critics have accused the Institute of antisemitism and having links to neo-Nazi organizations. The Institute published the non-peer-reviewed Journal of Historical Review until 2002, but now disseminates its materials through its website and via email. The Institute is affiliated with the Legion for the Survival of Freedom and Noontide Press.[9]
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Let's stick to DK's book - there are many differing viewpoints on justifying the use of the Gadget. There have been many books written on the subject - after the bomb was detonated. Let's stay with this book - the creation of the bomb and the money and magnitude that went into it..
Denise Kiernan doesn't make it easy by skipping around in the years '44-'45. Or maybe it's me.
All I can see right now - the bomb has not yet been tested - no one is exactly sure how powerful this Gadget will be. It does seem premature for the scientists to be arguing how to use the technology after the war is over, doesn't it?
We know the Gadget must be getting BIGGER, more powerful - as more and more of the Product is being sent on to the New Mexican desert. And the bigger the project, the more people are involved - and I would imagine SECRECY is becoming more and more difficult and patrolled.
I do like the way DK interspersed the whimsical girls' stories with the sobering TUBEALLOY chapters. Which of the responses in the Fireflies chapter,Chapter 8, amused you? Besides being amusing, there is much in this chapter that reveals the conditions within as the work continues, did you notice?
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While these chapters were redundant on how important it was to keep this top secret, we can now see that "the product" is indeed progressing along to satisfaction/completion.
pg. 204 Virginia continued analyzing the material that came in the lab door__from where, she did not know. Dr. Larson oversaw her lab's activities, and Virgina quite liked him...........he would occasionally stop by the lab to say hello and to check on progress and the all-important percentages.
Dr. Larson was waiting until he had a group of bigwigs in his office to make that call. Saying it out loud must have had more impact than passing around a number on a scrap of paper. Whoever he was trying to impress and whatever those percentages meant to them, one thing was becoming clear to people like Dr. Larson: The percentages were, compared to a year earlier, much better.
This was very interesting and an eye opener....
pg. 199 Even if the patient were to be transferred to another medical facility, even a military hospital, elsewhere in the country, it would present too much of a security risk, too much of a potential leak of secure information. Clarke knew that releasing the young Navy man from Y-12 to another facility was never going to be an option, not while the war was going on, and not while this man was spouting information about what he was doing at work. Not only was he talking out of turn, he also wanted to travel to Japan and warn the emperor about what was going on here at CEW.
I felt so bad for this young Navy man. He sounds like he has had a complete, mental breakdown, from working and learning about what they were creating, and how the government planned on using it. D.K. has given us our first insight, of how participating in this project and learning what it is affected someone. Imagine the thousands that worked here, and later found out the truth. Living under these conditions, and secrecy was not bad enough, but to learn about what they took part in. I can only reiterate as I have in earlier posts, the mental stress these workers faced, later/after the war, had to be incredibly devastating for some. These people were used by our government, enticing them with good wages, to create something their moral fiber may have been completely against. They were not given the knowledge to choose if they would be okay with participating in such a project, that would go against the grain of who they are. I didn't expect the government to inform them of "the product", but they could have asked them in the interviews for the job, if they would be uncomfortable with working on something that could potentially go against any moral or Christian beliefs, regardless of their patriotism. I just wonder how many would have been so anxious to take these jobs given that information/choice. Money can't always buy a person's soul. Soldiers weren't even given a choice to choose to take these jobs, they were redirected with no choice.
War is ugly, sacrifices must be made, freedom comes at a cost, we all have to look the other way at times when we don't agree with the policies or methods our government uses to keep us safe. I understand all of this, but, these people were treated like lab rats. I know I am younger than most here, and I have the luxury of not even being born during this time, so I can't relate to the attitudes of those who lived through this time, but I can say, it does not negate me having an opinion. We can say, oh at least they were given activities, dances, movie theaters and bowling alleys, etc.,(under surveillance by the "creepers"), but from a mental standpoint, this is just horrible, in my opinion. These chapters only expressed more and more of how this affected these people. More mental health facilities were needed, more mental health workers, more psychiatrists were brought in, and more wings needed to be built in the hospital.
Whatever fun these women were allowed to have was interrupted with "the creepers" approaching them, reminding them they are being watched at all times. I seriously was creeped out reading how "the creeper" showed up on Dot's date, knowing her name, and interrupting them on a quiet country road inside their car. It was disheartening when Rosemary and her roommate had gotten their apartment, had it all fixed up and were happy, only to be told it was being taken from them. Intrusion was everywhere, Helen playing basketball, only to see the two men watching. Celia being given a lie detector test without her knowledge, and being scared her letters back home was revealing something because they were being blacked out. Kattie being happy to clean the tanks and floors for privacy.
These chapters left me with a heavy, hurting heart. :(
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I think it is a miracle that labor and, especially, African Americans have not precipitated a major revolution in this country. The stories in this book are just a hyper example of how badly most have been treated. Excuses about profitting or winning a war are used to take away the majority of rights of INNOCENT people. How many spies did they catch watching people whispering in a movie theater??? Ridiculous! What was the reasoning for keeping married African-Americam couples separated and women curfued? Insane!
The people in power so often use power just because they can and exaggerate dangers just so they can takemore control - just as now people talk of "shutting down our borders" to protect us from ebola, when all of ONE ebola patient has "breeched" our shores.
Scare mongers are disgusting, making statements about how Isis is going to come here and kill EVERYONE. the British learned in 1780 that tha's an impossible task. Sometimes the powers-that-be loose all rationale. But then it benefits their hold over us.
Obviously i wouldn't be one of the people working at CEW! ;D I might not be able to even finish the book it makes me so angry and depressed. I have studied enough history to know these things happened, but i'm not sure i want to read any more of such disgusting behavior of human beings to each other. Maybe i've had too much of it at once having just read Fall of Giants.
Jean
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The titles to these chapters have me just shaking my head:
SECURITY, CENSORSHIP, AND THE PRESS (More like...The Gestapo)
The One about the Fireflies... (Where in this chapter is there anything remotely in touch with a Firefly, it should have been labeled THE CREEPERS)
PUMPKINS, SPIES, AND CHICKEN SOUP, FALL 1944 (More like... project compromised)
The Unspoken Sweethearts and Secrets (More like, "Don't Ask and Sexism")
Curiosity and Silence " A three-year concentration of curiosity should be quite a potent brew for the average woman." __Vi Warren, Oak Ridge Journal
(This is more like, a three year concentration camp for the average woman.)
I am trying to understand how D.K was able to write this book, and use such titles as if there were a light hearted attitude among the living conditions while working at CEW, . This was no less or more, than a Gestapo mentality. The titles are as if D.K. is not in reality of what she is writing. These conditions were physically, mentally and emotionally abusive, not to mention unconstitutional. How does one equate these titles, to what is really happening in these chapters? ::) ::)
Jean, I am feeling your anger and disgust.
All the fear mongering, brainwashing, subliminal messages everywhere, in letters, posters, ads "creepers", etc., and constantly being told to keep quiet, are ways of just controlling these people, so the government can use them to accomplish their goal. It is a difficult book to read. I'm just not sure the author even understands the material she has been given. I get the feel the author sees this story as giving the reader the inside knowledge of women seen as heroes, helping to end the war. Maybe I am ahead of myself, maybe D.K. will surprise me in the last chapters, so far, I see her writing these chapters so sterile, so matter of fact. I am finding them incredibly upsetting. Whether you agree or disagree to the use of the atomic bomb, I don't think anyone would argue this was a social experiment gone bad.
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"I have studied enough history to know these things happened."
I know what you are saying, Jean - I just wish we knew where to turn for more explanation of WHY they happened. The segregated housing for blacks - I understand, sort of. Segregation was the way it was in the US back then. But separating the husbands from the wives? Whose idea was that? Why? I'm wondering if the black children were kept out of Oak Ridge because there would have to be separate schools for them - and teachers too.
Oak Ridge is in Eastern Tenn....hilly, no fields, no plantations - so probably no blacks or facilities for them either. Except those who came seeking the high paying jobs at Oak Ridge.
I'll bet they didn't stay on once the war was over...their families were elsewhere, not here.
Ursa - when you arrived in 1953, were there any black families staying on?
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Oh my - I was wrong! Kattie Strickland stayed in Oak Ridge after the war. I found this interview with her - in which she said she lives now in Oak Ridge, Tenn. (the interview took place in 2005) It's quite an interview...right now she's describing the huts in which they lived.
I thought sure she'd have gone back to Alabama once the war was over - I'm looking forward to hearing the rest of the story...
Here's the Interview if you'd like to listen to it yourself. A great sense of humor.
Interview with Kattie Strickland, resident of Oak Ridge in 2005 (http://cdm16107.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15388coll1/id/422)
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It seems that American society was more authoritarian before WWII. People seemed less likely to question the authority of the government and more willing to sacrifice personal "freedoms" for the sake of their country. It's so different reading about all of the secrecy and the "creeps" from our point of view now.
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Thank you JoanP., for the link to the interview with Kattie Strickland. It is nice to see when this interview was done she looked fairly healthy and nicely dressed, so it appears her life was good after the war.
Listening to the interview I hear times where Kattie contradicts things that are in the book. She states she knew what the Manhattan project was, that they talked about it in the plant. She said they knew what they were working on. She also denies they were told NOT to talk about it, but mentions the signs that says not to talk about it outside the plant. She says she wanted to be out cleaning with the others because she likes being with people, but she cleaned the bathrooms because no one else wanted to. In the book it says she liked cleaning them because she wanted her privacy. She also talks about how she and her husband would sneak and buy cigarettes and beer and then sell them for a dollar a piece to people every Saturday night, they made $75.00 each week, which was a lot of money considering her paycheck was only $12.00 per week. She states that after the war many of the blacks returned to Miss., and the place thinned out because so many people left Oak Ridge. It was interesting how when the interviewer asks how she felt after knowing the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, her response was, "I was sick, the bomb killed so many people", you can see the anguish in her face, then she goes on to say, "it wasn't any worse than what Japan did to them." ("Them" referring to those who dropped the bomb.)
When listening to the interviewer, it is clear they had a pre interview, and he coaxes her for answers, and reminds her of them talking before. I suspect she has some memory loss, and she also says she was hard of hearing before she worked in the plant, and then the loud running of the machines caused her to go deaf. I was a bit surprised to hear the interviewer give his opinion early on in the interview, how he thought the bomb was a good thing.
Overall, it is a good interview, and it was good to put a face to the name in the book.
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I couldn't tell from what Kattie said in that interview if she had just forgotten the secrecy requirements - or if, as she said, she "just didn't pay it no mind."
Reading Chapter 8, she certainly didn't seem to fear the guards - did seem to be enjoying herself getting away with so much.
Here's the poster she spoke of - the first thing she'd see when she entered the gates. Did she think it didn't apply to her? She says she saw it.
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/amse/2965051856/
Kattie seemed to be taking a lot of chances - while others seemed afraid of being watched.
DK writes that soldiers who were rumored to be immediately drafted to the South Pacific. What would have happened to one of the girls - like Kattie for example?
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Yes, it does seem to me, in Kattie's interview she did not pay any mind to the guards, rules, restrictions, or other things D.K. mentions about how strict living in Oak Ridge and working at CEW was, and how others were afraid. Kattie being black, and a woman sure does not seem the least bit concerned about much, which surprises me.
In Kattie's interview she said, they talked about what they were working on inside the plant, outside the signs reminded them not to talk about it. The fact she mentions they talked about what they were working on in the plant, gives better understanding as to how the young Navy man knew what was going on. I was a bit surprised to hear her talk about her husband sneaking in beer and cigarettes, and how much money the two of them would make each Saturday night. Back then $75 was a huge amount of money, that is six times more than their weekly paycheck, and back then that paycheck was considered good money. Today cigarettes cost around $5.50 a pack with 20 cigarettes in a pack. That averages out to be about twenty seven cents a cigarette, and they were selling one cigarette for a dollar. That is one hefty income back then, it's no wonder she says she missed her kids, but she stayed because she couldn't make this kind of money back in Alabama, and she would send their money back home to her parents, to help take care of her kids.
She also says she was allowed to go back home and visit her kids a lot. She would leave on a Friday, and stay Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes call and say she won't be in to work on Monday, to stay an extra day. This sure does NOT sound like there was a lot of strict rules to me. That is lenient to be able to call off back then, and not get fired. Today, I wouldn't even consider calling off an extra day.
I don't see that Kattie was taking a lot of chances back then, just listening to her and watching her, she was relaxed and comfortable, she was matter of fact. She never once mentions fear of anything. Isn't this odd, considering how much time and effort D.K. has taken in the book to emphasize how strict and guarded things were?
I wonder what was going on in the bathrooms, she said she would let two people in, and they stayed in there for so long, then she would have them come out, and let two more in. She said the bathrooms inside the plant were not segregated.
This interview seems so contradictory, to the picture D.K. has given us in the book. I am a bit puzzled. ::)
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Thanks for that link to Kattie's interview, Joan. I read the transcribed text version of it. It does seem that she's somewhat forgetful. It was so long ago. I don't think that I'd correctly remember all the details of my experiences.
It is interesting to hear of her ingenuity in making money... selling sugar packets from the cafeteria and also the items (beer, whiskey, soda, cigarettes) she bought off site.
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There was a good sized black community in Oak Ridge in 1953. I have no idea how many people left after the war, but many of the low level jobs disappeared and both white and black workers with them. It was in a section of the city known as Gamble valley, because the original people who lived there were named Gamble. The city was still completely segregated, but soon after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision the schools were integrated, long before the rest of the state. The black kids were parceled out among the schools to lessen the impact on any one school. The swimming pool was integrated the summer before. The school psychologist told me that was done purposefully so if there was trouble it would be dealth with outside the school system. If there were any major incidents they were not publicized and I don't know of them.
I believe there is still a fair sized black community in Gamble Valley, but blacks live all over the city now. There was some grumbling when a black family moved into our neighborhood at the time, which was moderately upscale, but it never went past grumbling.
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Thanks, Ursa. an interesting post - to see that the city of Oak Ridge was still completely segregated in 1953 - though the schools were integrated long before the rest of the state.. ..and the swimming pools before that. Would you say that the city of Oak Ridge had an easier time with integration than other cities in the south?
Marcie, I wouldn't remember the details from over 50 years ago either...except the events and circumstances that affected me - and my family directly. Kattie seems to tell her memories of those days with relish - more animated when she tells those stories.
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"I am trying to understand how D.K was able to write this book, and use such titles as if there were a light hearted attitude among the living conditions while working at CEW... The titles are as if D.K. is not in reality of what she is writing. These conditions were physically, mentally and emotionally abusive, not to mention unconstitutional. How does one equate these titles, to what is really happening in these chapters?" Bellamarie
Bella - the only answer I can think of - you may have read more into "the reality of what DK is writing than what she has intended. Of course there were missteps, there were those who cracked under the need for secrecy - but DK is writing of the experience for many (the majority) of those who voluntarily came to Oak Ridge - agreeing to abide by the requirements which were spelled out for them. They were free to leave if the conditions got to be too difficult.
In the firefly chapter - I think it was Chapter 8, she writes -
"These disparate residents (Oak Ridgers) had come together to work, to love, to get married, and plant Victory Gardens...they fought to smile through the lines, the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government - an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world."
Do you think these titles were intended to represent their attempt to make the best of a difficult situation? From the number of those interviewed who decided to stay on in Oak Ridge after the war, they succeeded. Did you notice Dr. Clark's comments in his report - that attitude and a sense of humor had a lot to do with managing the mud, the secrecy? From Chapter 8, our girls indicated that they had the sense of humor - no?
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JoanP., Thank you for reminding me they could leave if they wanted to. Indeed they could. Yes, maybe the titles were to try to show they attempted to take a very bad situation, and do the best they could with it.....even under the surveillance of the "creepers." These people wanted to make LOTS of money. Some did have the choice, others did NOT. This book has troubled me on many different levels, so it's hard for me to see the fireflies, but just maybe these people were able to.
After watching Kattie's interview, for some reason I just am not seeing the doom and gloom that D.K. has written so much into this book. Kattie had much humor in her interview when she spoke of things they did. Her memory seemed more lacking, when she was asked dates, and ages. I am early 60's and have a heck of a hard time when it comes to those as well. She had great recollection of her events though. Marcie, I agree, I like how Kattie and her husband took their ingenuity, and turned it into ways of making more income. She would have made a great business woman. She talked about how she joked around with the guards, and how they had such fun. I wish D.K. could have shared some of this personal, lightheartedness with us. It would make things a bit more humanistic, rather than so sterile and restrictive.
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Just a note about fireflies - The children of Oak Ridge collected lightning bugs (fireflies) every summer for many years for some kind of scientific research (probably cold light). They were paid a little bit for a hundred. We never did know of any results.
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I've been thinking through these last few chapters about the effect of the secrecy and the surveillance would have on all of a person's relationships and how that would impact on your own psyche. D.K. has mentioned some, but i think having to be careful about what you say 24/7 must be enormously anxiety producing. How could you have any mental intimacy with anybody. You can't talk to your family about your work, that must create terrible frustation which could lead to other negative behavior. Having to skirt questions from family and strangers; worrying about the creepers, where are they? who are they? Who is this person popping up in the dark who knows my name? Who can you trust? How do you have any peace of mind, ever.
Kattie's breaking the rules must have felt like she and her husband were taking some control of their lives. I wonder if that was a coping mechanism for many others. ......... We need Robbie here to give us the psychologist's perspective. :)
I have to return my book to the library, there's a hold on it. So i'll just follow along and respond to your comments.
Jean
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Just a note about fireflies - The children of Oak Ridge collected lightning bugs (fireflies) every summer for many years for some kind of scientific research (probably cold light). They were paid a little bit for a hundred. We never did know of any results.
That's interesting, ursamajor, when were they doing the collection? Indeed, the fireflies were probably used in the efforts to get the chemical that causes the firefly light, firefly luciferin. Scientists at Johns Hopkins figured out what it was, I think mostly in the 1950s, and they needed 15,000 fireflies to get enough to start figuring out what it was. Now it's made artificially, and used in biological assays.
I assume the title of the chapter refers to one of the amusing smart-alec answers scattered through the chapter:
Q: What are you all doing over there?
A: Pinning diapers onto fireflies.
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Jean, I feel the same as you about the people not being able to live their lives in a normalcy, due to the "creepers" being everywhere. I have no doubt this had to cause an effect on their psychic. But I am questioning if it really was as bad as the book is saying, considering Kattie is very matter of fact with how not just she didn't follow the rules, but others as well. I don't know what to make of the contradictions between the book and Kattie's interview. According to the book, anyone getting caught talking in or outside the plants could lose their jobs.
I am reading a book called "Things That Matter" by Charles Krauthammer, and lo and behold, he mentions the Manhattan Project, and I found this interesting. He writes: Herman Lisco, a gifted scientist and legendary teacher, German-born, he received his medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1936, came to the United States to teach pathology at John Hopkins University and was recruited to the Manhattan Project. In secret, he worked with a team of scientists at the University of Chicago studying the biological effects of a strange new human creation: plutonium. Later, he was flown to Los Alamos to study the first person to be killed by acute radiation poisoning. Lisco performed the autopsy and, later, those of eight other victims of accidents at Los Alamos. His findings were a scientific milestone, the first published account of the effects of acute radiation, exposure on the human organism. A decade later, he was instrumental in producing a landmark United Nations report on the effects of radiation on humans and on the environment.
Regardless, if Kattie's account is less restrictive than D.K.'s accounts in the book, one conclusion I can make through the book, reviews of relatives of the people who lived and worked in Oak Ridge, and the plants, and many documented articles.....the government had no regard for the lives of the people they hired, or recruited to live and work in Oak Ridge. The mere fact they were exposing thousands with radiation/plutonium, not to mention the mental effects the situations living and working there had on these people, shows me our government will do and say anything for the sake of their political goals.
It really is NO different today. Everyday we hear yet one more scandal where things were done, and hidden for the sake of elections/politics. Charles Krauthammer deduces: "The uniqueness of the 20th century lies not in its science but in its politics. the 20th century was no more scientifically gifted than the 19th, with its Gauss, Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell and Mendell__all plowing, by the way, less-broken scientific ground than the 20th. No. The originality of the 20th surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda mechanized murder and routinized terror__a breathtaking catalog of political creativity.
I heard last night in the most recent poll, 84% of Americans believe this president lies to us on major issues. I can honestly say, I don't think this government today would find enough people to fill one hutment, to work on a Manhattan project today. The trust in the government, and the knowledge of their disregard for safety to the American people is no longer there. These people flocked to Oak Ridge for money, no questions asked, and they remained for money, even in the worst of conditions. You could say today we are better off as far as the economy, so of course people wouldn't flock to a secret place, to work on a secret project. The difference today for me is the level of trust. NOT patriotism, I believe Americans have as much patriotism today as those in the 40's, they just have far less blind trust, and with good cause.
PatH., That is so interesting about the fireflies. I remember as a kid catching them and putting them in a mason jar just to watch it illuminate. Today, me and my grandchildren still enjoy catching them and making their light into a diamond ring on our finger. Some things never change. Fireflies, what fun!!! ;)
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In the section, TUBEALLOY ~ Pumkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup, I was astounded that the third of three men trying to unclog a tube that exploded had survived the leak of radioactive materials. Maybe because it was in the form of steam (though Kramish credits his mother's chicken soup which she gave him in the hospital)? I looked up Arnold Kramish and he didn't die until 2010. I can understand the General stepping in and keeping the cause of death of the other two men from the coroner's office. I think those would be public records and, if everything about the Project was secret, he couldn't let that information out.
I didn't recognize the name, Paul Tibbits, but I've seen the film, Twelve O'Clock High, a 1949 American war film starring Gregory Peck about aircrews in the United States Army's Eighth Air Force who flew daylight bombing missions against Nazi Germany and occupied France during the early days of American involvement in World War II. The film is loosely based on Tibbits.
Wikipedia says that the Enola Gay was named for Tibbit's mother. Throughout his life, Tibbits seemed to think that the bombings were necessary to defeat Japan which. In a 1975 interview he said: "I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did ... I sleep clearly every night." "I knew when I got the assignment," he told a reporter in 2005, "it was going to be an emotional thing. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets#War_against_Japan
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Yes, I still like to catch them too.
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I've never seen an actual firefly :-(
There is some info about the lack of fireflies in California at http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2872/why-arent-there-any-fireflies-in-california
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Marcie, I'd never heard that there were no lightning bugs in CA, until this summer. Our grandson-in-law has just moved to MD, after growing up and living his life in San Diego. He was fascinated by them when he got a chance to see them. :D
On topic, this article was in our paper this morning - about demolishing one of the old buildings at the Oak Ridge site.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2014/oct/10/giant-uranium-processing-building-will-be/?local
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents Chicken Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ TUBEALLOY, 1938
Chapters 4,5
Sept. 29- Oct. 5 ~ TUBEALLOY, The Quest for Product
Chapters 6, TUBEALLOY, The Couriers, Chapter 7
Oct 6-12 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 151) Security, Censorship, The Press
Chapters 8, TUBEALLOY, Pumkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup; Chapter 9,
TUBEALLOY, Combining Efforts in the New Year; Chapter 10 (to pg. 204)
Oct 13-19 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 205) The Project's Crucial Spring;
Chapter 11; TUBEALLOY, Hope and the Haberdasher, April-May, 1945; Chapter 12,
Chapter 13 (to pg. 268)
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1); Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan);
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview); Interview with Kattie Strickland, resident of Oak Ridge in 2005 (http://cdm16107.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15388coll1/id/422)
For Your Consideration
October 13-19
TUBEALLOY (p151) ~ The Project's Crucial Spring
1. In Spring of 1945, the improvements in the production process and the rapid pace maintained by all of the workers meant more Product. What were some of the health and safety concerns you noticed in this section?
Chapter 11 ~ Innocence Lost
1. What details of Ebbe Cade's experience disturbed you most?
2. What conjectures about the products being used or the purpose of the Project at the CEW did you notice in this chapter?
TUBEALLOY ~ Hope and the Haberdasher, April-May, 1945
1. What did you learn about the secrecy related to the Project at the highest levels of government?
2. What was Truman's reaction when he finally found out about the Project?
Chapter 12 ~ Sand Jumps in the Desert, July 1945
1. What facts about the testing of the Gadget did you find interesting?
2. What do you know about the Potsdam Conference and President Truman's dealings with the other heads of countries?
3. Were you surprised at the letters sent to the President by scientists involved in the Project?
4. What do you think about Truman's decision?
Chapter 13 ~ The Gadget Revealed
1. What are your thoughts about the radio announcement made by President Truman? Did any of the wording stand out for you?
2. Had you heard about the leaflets that were dropped on Japanese cities?
3. What were the reactions by workers at CEW? What happened to the secrecy surrounding their work?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
FRYBABE:
How sad, Marci. They are not anything to look at in the daytime. But at night? Oh, they are just so magical.
I found a YouTube video of fireflies. This one is short, just plain old backyard, no time lapse, nothing doctored, no commentary or documentary stuff. It does come with a bird singing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6QiKnTht3s
Thanks for the article Mary. I saw something about that a few weeks back but don't remember that it said when. I think I saw it on the schedule for supersite cleanup along with other plants that were involved in uranium enrichment. It amazed me that so many of them were actually in downtown areas of cities rather that outside major population areas like Oak Ridge. But then, Oak Ridge when and built its own town right close to the plants too.
I got to the page where she talked about the unwitting patient being turned into an experiment. Disgusting. And they left the guy with unset bones for 20 days? I think that upset me just as much. What ever happened to the Hippocratic Oath?
"First, do no harm."
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I've never seen an actual firefly :-(
That's sad, Marcie. They're such fun. It's easy to catch them without hurting them, and they aren't afraid, but will crawl around your hand, flashing on and off for some time before taking off. I never knew what your link says, that they only feed on snails in damp locations. Goodness knows it's damp enough around here in summer.
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I am sure many feel as Tibbit, and there are generals and others who feel Japan was ready and willing to surrender, which means the war was at its end, and the bombs were not necessary. I suppose this controversy, will forever be discussed.
No fireflies in Ca., that is astounding to learn!
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We used to spend so much time catching fireflies in a glass jar - with holes punched in the lid - so many of them, thinking surely we'd be able to read by their light after lights-out. It never worked. They seemed to turn off as soon as we got them inside. Who knows - maybe they were happily mating in the dark, no longer needing to attract mates.
I've spent the last half hour researching those fireflies in Oak Ridge - trying to learn if they are any different from others.
This from Time magazine in 1950 -
"The kids of atomic Oak Ridge, Tenn. (which swarms with children) were busy this week on a new enterprise: collecting fireflies for Dr. Bernard L. Strehler of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dr. Strehler wants 100,000 lightning bugs and will pay 25¢ a 100 for living, healthy specimens.
When Dr. Strehler finally gets his fireflies collected, they will not be allowed to sparkle for long. He intends to detach their luminous posteriors and extract from them luciferin—a substance which fascinates many scientists.
Luciferin (an enzyme or organic catalyst) is responsible for the firefly's luminescence."
According to Sullivan the fireflies will be used this year for public health concern by testing food. The biochemical enzyme in a firefly's tail that makes it glow is called luciferase. This enzyme when added to a certain solution will glow.
Scientists can test the presence of bacteria in meat by adding the luciferase. If the solution glows there is bacteria and the meat is spoiled.
The enzyme is also used as a genetic marker. Geneticists can measure the amount of light produced when the luciferase is added to the gene they are working on to tell them what they need to know. http://www.greenevillesun.com/news/article_ee8e4081-154d-59f8-979e-3670dbb00d0f.html
From an Oak Ridge news article -
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/gallatin/2014/07/07/collect-fireflies-watch-wallet-light/12308965/
"Calling all lightning bug collectors. Scientists are caJling for help. And the price is going up. This year the price for fireflies has jumped to the all time hlgh of 42 cents per gram or $12 per ounce for a fresh supply of insects.
Read more: http://www.oakridger.com/article/20080619/Ne
In the search, I came across a looong scientific article which spoke of the uranium deposits found in the soil in Eastern Tennessee. If I had the patience to read the article, I might have found the connection between the special fireflies and uranium...which I suspect is there. Here's the article if you are so inclined -
http://books.google.com/books?id=v2ZXAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA48&lpg=RA1-PA48&dq=fireflies+collected+in+Oak+Ridge+TN&source=bl&ots=v5YszsN079&sig=FTZ8BjT8L35_4QQr95HxAbxxKYA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Zf03VIizFe7IsASK04GICQ&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=fireflies%20collected%20in%20Oak%20Ridge%20TN&f=false
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Back and forth - between the whimsical comments from the girls working on this "gadget" about which they knew nothing about - (except the rumors) and the Tubealloy chapter which indicates it is nearly ready.
Thank you for that article on Paul Tibbets, Marcie.
Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, Tibbets was "the best flier in the Army Air Force."
He claimed that he saw the real effects of bombing civilians and the trauma of losing of his brothers in arms. In January 1943, Tibbets, who had now flown 43 combat missions,[
It is clear why the young colonel was selsected for the mission.
In February 1943. At the time, the B-29 program was beset by a host of technical problems, and the chief test pilot, Edmund T. Allen, had been killed in a crash of the prototype aircraft.
Working with the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, Tibbets test flew the B-29, and soon accumulated more flight time in it than any other pilot."
From the same article -
"He was seen as a national hero who had ended the war with Japan."
(http://cdnph.upi.com/collection/fp/upi/2172/c6c934fd297f4fbcb158168687d62a74/Enola-Gay-Drops-Bomb-on-Hiroshima_1_1.jpg)
The ground crew of the B-29 "Enola Gay" which atom-bombed Hiroshima, Japan. Col. Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot is the center.
But I'm getting ahead of the book...
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The matter of secrecy took its toll on quite a few people - Paul Tibbets - and the young women Dr. Clark saw as patients. It seems to have been hardest on the married workers -
"Tibbets, who received promotion to colonel in January 1945,[34] brought his wife and family along with him to Wendover. He felt that allowing married men in the group to bring their families would improve morale, although it put a strain on his own marriage. To explain all the civilian engineers on base who were working on the Manhattan Project, he had to lie to his wife, telling her that the engineers were "sanitary workers. " (This couple divorced shortly after the war.}
Was Dr. Clark able to help the married couples deal with the matter of secrecy - unable to communicate to one another?
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Good question Joan about whether Dr Clark helped the couples. Maybe later in the book she will give us that info, but he just seems to be reporting the problem at this point. What kind of paranoia would lead the creepers to suspect a group of wives meeting for morning coffee? Of course, i think men, particularly of that era, were less likely then women to like to meet just to chat. Men seemed to need a reason, a goal, to get together, going hunting, playing golf or cards, doing business. Even today i think men are less likely to get together just to be social and to "connect." So, the creepers might be suspicious of women gathering, although, what protected info could they have to share?
Ironic that we're talking about the fireflies, my son and i mentioned this summer that there seemed to be so many more this summer at our house and at his ( about 8 miles away). Both of us live near water, but i doubt there are any snails in either the creek by our house or the river by his. We have woods behind our house, so it is very dark when we walk out our back door and they just lit up the backyard this summer. It was so beautiful. When they said they were paying by the 100s, i wondered who was counting them. ;) But then they changed to grams or ounces, so much easier, i would think.
If one had any thing to do with the atomic bomb drop on the Japanese, i think you would have to rationalize it as a necessary action. Harry Truman is said to have never questioned a decision after he made it, so that seemed to be his typical behavior, but for the pilots and crews and the other decision-makers, it may have been harrowing to think about what they had done.
I think it's interesting how DK talks a little bit about the differing language and accents of language that come together from the different parts of the country. She mentions Virginia learns that a "poke" was a paperbag. When i was doing training for Dept of Army on Effective Communication i started with a list of ten words and asked the participants to identify what they were. One of them was "poke". Some of the answers were "to hit", "a salad", a "bag to carry something in", etc. it was a fun exercise to recognize our different "languages" and how we might misunderstand each other even though we all spoke English.
Jean
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Maryz, that article is so timely related to our reading. I wonder if the grounds around those big buildings are contaminated by radiation?
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I think that the psychological toll on married couples would have been enormous. The husbands had to not only withhold the truth but likely they had to lie if they communicated at all with their wives. The husbands were under a lot of stress to get their work done in a hurry and they couldn't even communicate with members of their work team and certainly not with their families.
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Many people nowadays work in jobs that are secret and they are unable to share things with their spouses. I imagine it is tough, and definitely not easy.
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I really enjoyed Celia's interview. She, very much like Kattie, does not give me any indication things were as doom and gloom as D.K. has written in her book. Both ladies are very likeable, and seem to have very good memories of their time in Oak Ridge.
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I really think Kattie was pulling the interviewer's leg. Most of the black people working on the project had almost no education - in the 1930s a black in the South was lucky to get as far as sixth grade - and surely had no conception of physics. I don't find it credible that they figured out what was being done in the project. Virginia was college educated and a chemist - not hard to believe she knew what was going on. She is also a remarkably bright woman.
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I don't think Kattie gave anyone the impression she was intelligent enough to figure out what they were doing on her own. She said in her interview that "people" talked. So I took that as those who did know, were leaking information. That would make sense considering the young Navy man knowing about the atomic bomb being built to use on Japan, and he wanted to warn Japan of it. I didn't get the sense Kattie was pulling the interviewer's leg, more so I felt the interviewer was coaxing her.
After seeing both interviews, I am taking this book with a grain of salt. It appears D.K., like other authors and also movie producers took information collected, along with research, and compiled a story "she" wanted to tell. I don't dispute the history of this story, no one could possibly, I am just beginning to see it reading more like an historical fiction, especially after listening to both ladies interviews. This is in no way criticism to D.K. I feel she has taken liberties in telling the events of these women, to capture more drama, suspense and worsened conditions. These two women are very lighter hearted when telling about their lives and work in Oak Ridge. The interviewers seem to be trying to gear them in a direction to fit the narrative of the book written.
The one thing I do find indisputable, is how the government played a part in the treatment, or lack there of, for the American people.
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It seems this interviewer had taped conversations with the "girls" an an earlier date. Does anyone remember how long before? in this later interview, the way I saw it - he was simply urging Kattie to recall and retell some of the stories she had told him in the earlier interview. I don't think he was trying to shape the interview in any way. He was simply trying to communicate with an elderly woman whose story was a little bit different from what she had originally told him. (Maybe she was "pulling his leg." :D)
Denise Kiernan has selected women who lived those war years in Oak Ridge - and were accessible to answer her questions. For the most part, these women had fond memories of their time there; many chose to live there after the war. I think she was fair when portraying those for whom secrecy was problematic - describing how the government provided them counsel and other opportunities to socialize.
Dr. Clarke, the head of psychiatric services for the Project, submitted a report in which he considered the unique challenges for those who lived there.
I think this is a good summary of his findings:
"Attitudes at Oak Ridge were as varied as the people themselves. There were those who thought the Reservation was an absolute "hellhole" with no redeeming qualities. There were those who could take it or leave it. But that was okay, it was only temporary...and finally, there were those who thought that this odd new place they had come to know as Oak Ridge was the best thing that had ever happened to them"
Do you think these women, Denise Keirnan's "girls" who decided to stay on at Oak Ridge, were in that last group?
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Frybabe, I was scrolling up to find something and I just saw your post with a link to fireflies on youtube. Thank you very much. . They look like shooting stars but near the earth. I'd really love to see them in person.
Bellamarie, I agree that the author, like all authors, is selecting from the interviews to tell what happened in a compelling way. I don't think that the interviews linked in the heading were the only conversations with the women that she had or listened to. I think that memories get confabulated over time and it's probably only by talking to many people who had a common experience that one could get an adequate picture of what took place.
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Kiernan had an advantage that someone doing a taped interview doesn't. She could chat away with her subjects, often many times, and let things come out gradually. Something not remembered at first might pop up later. Some random digression might produce important facts.
I suspect that with time and nostalgia the memories of most of the women softened a bit.
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We're moving to the next chapters this week, although we can continue to talk about anything we've read so far.
In the TUBEALLOY section on "The Project's Crucial Spring," we learn that in the Spring of 1945, the improvements in the production process and the rapid pace maintained by all of the workers meant more Product. But workers were paying a price in terms of their health. What were some of the health and safety concerns you noticed in this section that seemed to result from the hectic pace and work with those substances and technologies?
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"What were some of the health and safety concerns you noticed in this section that seemed to result from the hectic pace and work with those substances and technologies?"
Speed and exhaustion - contribute to accidents always. Considering the high voltage electricity coursing through the plants and the workers putting in overtime as the end is in site, I'm surprised we aren't hearing of more incidents like that maintenance man who forgot to hang the grounding on his unit. One lapse like that, the man was electrocuted on the spot. Was this an isolated accident? I've noticed that most of the problems at the CEW site were dealt with speedily so they wouldn't recur.
There were the medical reports stating that more testing of the radioactive material carried by the couriers needed to be tested. Good intentions - wanted to protect the couriers and others who came in contact with radiation. I think it was Dr. Friedell who recommended the need for monitoring, for blood analysis - and research on animals and humans to see the effect of radiation in the blood, urine, feces. It seems that this recommendation was carried too far on Ebb Cade, following a vehicle accident. Am I mistaken - was that injection of plutonium administered following Dr. Friedll's direction? Was he ever held responsible? Prosecuted?
What if Ebb Cade had signed consent papers - would that have been a whole different ballgame?
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Safety seems not to have been a top priority. I am probably thinking about it from our current 21st Century view of building safety features into everything. I would have thought that scientists could have figured out an automatic grounding system but I'm remembering that things we consider "unsafe" today were accepted in the 1940s and 50s and beyond. Kids could play with toys that were sharp; no seatbelts in cars, etc. If the Project was in a race against German scientists, and if it was thought to bring about the end of the War, it seems that some casualities were acceptable.
Joan, they didn't ask Cade for permission. And they didn't set his bones for several so that they could inject him before they set the bones. The way they were doing the research seems as if they didn't consider Cade to be a human being.
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There were people who didn't consider blacks to be human beings. That doctor should have been working with the Nazis - they would have given him a wider variety of people to experiment on. It is unforgivable that he was never called to account.
I guess Cade should be considered one of the casualties of war. It would be interesting to know what happened to him after he walked out of the hospital and how his life was affected by the treatment he received.
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Reading these chapters sent chills down me, and brought tears to my eyes. I am so depressed after reading these chapters. Some can accept all of this because "it was to help end the war." I can't seem to get my head to go there. Maybe because I know there could have been a surrender, with only one condition stopping it, their emperor could stay, which ultimately they agreed upon.
I won't argue my points, or revisit all the reasons I can't accept this attitude as others do. I just know in my heart using such a bomb of this magnitude seemed so careless. To do an experiment, putting Americans at such a risk, in the explosion of this product was for me unfathomable. Our B-29s had decimated Japan. So for me the use of the atomic bomb was more about General Groves and Secretary Stimson wanting to use this bomb, because they could. They withheld documents from President Truman that may have had an affect on his decision. I know Truman said, he had no regrets, but in my opinion, I am certain he lived with many, as we now see the workers realizing their involvement, and their own mixed, confused feelings.
There is no confirmed proof, Cade walked out of that hospital of his own free will. Knowing our government, my guess is he was disposed of and it was covered up.
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I had to take the book back today, but I did skim through the rest of the book before doing so. Now, to remember what I read. Will follow along.
I had always thought (or hoped) until recently, that the US held itself to a higher level of moral/ethical standard than many other countries. It appears that I was mistaken.
The military does like its toys. Of course they would have wanted to try it out in real time. The whole thing, including the bombing itself, was experimental. They really did not have a good handle on what radiation would or could do to a body. Who approved this testing on humans without their knowledge? I kind of understand the mentality of the doctor actually giving the injections. He was military and under direct order. He might have pointed out to his superior that it was unethical, but if the direct order stood, he would have to obey it. I don't think, in the middle of a war, too many people would have refused a direct order.
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Frybabe,
I had always thought (or hoped) until recently, that the US held itself to a higher level of moral/ethical standard than many other countries. It appears that I was mistaken.
I too had hoped our government held the U.S. to a higher standard. It never will, as long as politics and power come before the safety and best interest of people. They use fear, emotions, and what is the most dear to us, to convince Americans that what they are doing is in our best interest, when most of the time it turns out to be lies, and all about politics and power. I don't see myself as a cynic, I see myself as a realist.
My book is due back to the library as well, so I may pay a few cents of late fees, to keep it a few more days to take a few notes to end our discussion. Not sure if I can renew it.
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In the Tubealloy section after Chapter 11, we learn that Vice President Truman had very little knowledge about the Project and had to be briefed after President Roosevelt died and he took office. What did you learn about the secrecy related to the Project at the highest levels of government? What was Truman's reaction when he finally found out about the Project?
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One of my earliest memories - in the backyard with my grandmother as she was hanging out the wash. A neighbor called over to her with the news that the President had died. I remember being really frightened - had never seen her crying before. Everyone was crying. My favorite young uncle (23) was getting ready to ship out for Japan. The end of the war was nowhere in sight .and now the President who had guided us through the war to date...was no longer at the helm.
Can anyone explain what FDR had been thinking when he kept the A-bomb from the Vice President? I have never heard a good explanation of that.. The Congress had no idea either. HST - next in command, had been Vice President for 82 days, we're told! And the President had been quite ill. This was wreckless and irresponsible in my opinion. Can anyone explain this?
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Joan, that's a great question. I hope someone here has read something about why Roosevelt might not have communicated with Truman about the Project. Was it because Roosevelt was sick and not thinking clearly?
In Chapter 12, we learn about the testing of the bomb and Truman's ultimate decision regarding its use. What facts about the testing of the Gadget did you find interesting?
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Maybe FDR didn't want Truman to know about it until tests were completed. At this time, weren't scientists the only ones to know how destructive it was? Maybe he didn't trust him.
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I spent a good portion of my evening trying to get an answer for you JoanP., on "why" didn't FDR inform Truman, knowing he was ill. There is nothing that I could find that gives a specific answer to "why" other than it was top secret, which makes no sense, because the Vice President should be in the loop. I read where he was kept out of meetings when it was being discussed.
I came away last night feeling just as frustrated and sickened as I did after reading the last couple of chapters of this book. Reading entries of Truman's diaries, Stimson's, and others who were in positions on the know of this atomic bomb, and the surrender negotiations Japan was attempting of making, using the Soviet Union as mediator, shows the bomb was not necessary.
I misspoke when I thought Stimson was for using the bomb. If anything after reading entries of conversations he discussed with Truman, after knowing Japan wanted to negotiate a surrender, Stimson suggested:
1. Inform Japan they could face the atomic bomb.
2. Allow them to keep their Emperor.
3. Make them aware that the Soviet Union would attack them.
Truman feeling this would not constitute an "unconditional surrender" appeared to reject it. These conditions could have prevented the use of the atomic bomb saving millions of lives, it would have prevented the Korean war, which resulted in even more lives lost, it would have ended WW11, and ultimately the Emperor remained anyway.
This is why it is so imperative we learn from our mistakes. Negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate, especially when you know the other side is ready and willing. Be clear on what you want, and what you are willing to give into. It appears all along Truman was willing to allow them to keep their Emperor, and as Stimson said, they could still call it an "unconditional surrender" which was to keep face for Truman. Just because you have the power to destroy another nation, does not mean you must use it. Just them knowing you have that power could make all the difference between war and peace.
Very worthwhile read:
http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm
http://www.doug-long.com/hst.htm
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I believe that it was said on Ken Burns' Roosevelt show that HST had only one lunch meeting with FDR after they were inaugurated and they didn't talk about anything substantial. FDR didn't know T very well and did not confide in him at all.
Jean
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I think the articles I gave links to will confirm this Jean. Something of this magnitude, and miscommunications and lack of communications, between our president and crucial government people, and other countries, failed to prevent this disaster.
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After Truman was kept out of the loop, it actually fell to him to make the final decision. What are your thoughts about the radio announcement made by President Truman after the bomb was dropped? Did any of the wording stand out for you?
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Here is the audio of Truman's radio announcement after dropping the bomb.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/heroesvillains/g5/cs2/g5cs2s1.htm
A Warning to Japan Urging Surrender: Excerpts from President Truman's radio address to the American people, August 9, 1945
The British, Chinese, and United States Governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Our warning went unheeded; our terms were rejected. Since then the Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do in the future.
The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.
I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.
Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster, which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.
That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.
We won the race of discovery against the Germans. Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/truman-japanwarn/
After hearing Truman's voice, and how he seems proud, to be the "first" to create, and use the atomic bomb, it makes me wonder if all along that was the goal? To be the "first". He sure seems more determined to brag about having, and using the bomb, before anyone else.
"We won the race of discovery against the Germans."
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"The Gadget Revealed!"
I'll say! Not only the gadget...but the people of Oak Ridge who had been working on it in secret through the years. I was shocked at the revelation of their identity...especially since they were expected to keep on working after the bomb was dropped.
I was not surprised at the jubilation in Harry's announcement! This meant the war was coming to an end. War, a race? Yes, I agree, an arms race. That's what war has always been. He who has the biggest, most powerful weapon, will be the survivor. The American people can finally breathe a sigh of relief and perhaps begin to recover from tremendous loss.
Note that the President said he wished to avoid the killing of civilians. Also he warned civilians to leave industrial cities to protect themselves. He was not out to kill civilians
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a "military base." That was because he wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Yes, I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb. I don't think any one is arguing about that. The realization of the tremendous toll of the war would come later.
Right now, relief and celebration! It's over!
"Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster, which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it.
We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. "
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I'm interpreting Truman's announcement that the U.S. was the "first" to successfully develop an atomic bomb, the same way as you are, JoanP. Both Germany and Japan were also trying to develop a nuclear bomb. We did not develop the bomb in a vacuum. "First" gives the correct impression that we were in competition with others. If we had not been first, then Germany or Japan (whichever was first) would have used the bomb (or used the threat of the bomb) on the U.S. or our allies to force OUR surrender.
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Seriously - let's consider Harry Truman's position before deciding to pin blame on him. He's the newly elected Vice President, the beloved US President is incommunicato - maybe because of his illness - or maybe it's because he just doesn't like his new Veep (one he has chosen.) The question that stands out in my mind - what did President Roosevelt plan to do with this bomb? Maybe he wanted to avoid using it? Maybe he hadn't decided what to do with it - after spending so many millions (billions of $$ on it!) Was he waiting for final test results in the desert? . Whatever the reason, he never bothered to mention the bomb to his vice president, who will have to make these decisions once FDR dies. How many knew what Harry does not? FDR must know he's in a bad way at this point. Didn't he communicate with anyone about what to tell Harry?
The President died on April 18, 1945. Harry doesn't know about the bomb yet. (He's been VP for 82 days!) "The majority of members of Congress" had no idea of the existance of the Project..."(WHO KNEW?)
The War Secretary contacted Truman on April 24 about an important meeting...Truman met with him the very next day, April 25. Now he knows.
April 30, Hitler died. May 6, 1945, the war in Europe is over.
Within 24 hours, of the official end of the war, Project representatives, chaired by the Secretary of War gathered for a first meeting with the President, followed by a meeting with Project scientists a week later. By May 31, Truman received a report with strong recommendations on the use of the Gadget. Do you envy his position? I've always marvelled at how calmly he accepted his role as president in these unsteady times.
"As for the final call, the buck stopped with President Truman." What swayed his final decision on whether to use this Gadget or put it in storage somewhere? I believe that he was convinced that the war would not be over until the Japanese were convinced that it was. It took the bomb!
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I suppose each individual will interpret, from their own personal feelings, and thoughts the words Truman used in his address. We can ONLY speculate, since of course we do not know HIS mindset. It's a bit like reading a passage from the Bible, depending on our own personal place, we will see something in passages, that others do not interpret at all the same way. But....we do have diaries and other written documents to give us truths, that can and does dispel the bomb was necessary.
It's very clear Stimson was trying to use other means to stop the war by his diary entries. My impression is Truman had the bomb, and was bragging he was the "first" to use it. Sorry if no one else sees it this way. HE DID NO NEED TO USE THE BOMB to end the war and save lives.
This articles shows Japan was willing to surrender:
A Secret Memorandum
It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:
Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):
The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a "military base." That was because he wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Again.....I see this as a means to justify the ends. This article shows differently:
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
Justifications
President Truman steadfastly defended his use of the atomic bomb, claiming that it "saved millions of lives" by bringing the war to a quick end. Justifying his decision, he went so far as to declare: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
This was a preposterous statement. In fact, almost all of the victims were civilians, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (issued in 1946) stated in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
If the atomic bomb was dropped to impress the Japanese leaders with the immense destructive power of a new weapon, this could have been accomplished by deploying it on an isolated military base. It was not necessary to destroy a large city. And whatever the justification for the Hiroshima blast, it is much more difficult to defend the second bombing of Nagasaki.
All the same, most Americans accepted, and continue to accept, the official justifications for the bombings. Accustomed to crude propagandistic portrayals of the "Japs" as virtually subhuman beasts, most Americans in 1945 heartily welcomed any new weapon that would wipe out more of the detested Asians, and help avenge the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the young Americans who were fighting the Japanese in bitter combat, the attitude was "Thank God for the atom bomb." Almost to a man, they were grateful for a weapon whose deployment seemed to end the war and thus allow them to return home.
After the July 1943 firestorm destruction of Hamburg, the mid-February 1945 holocaust of Dresden, and the fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, America's leaders -- as US Army General Leslie Groves later commented -- "were generally inured to the mass killing of civilians." For President Harry Truman, the killing of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians was simply not a consideration in his decision to use the atom bomb.
"Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster, which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first."
Why does he justify using the atomic bomb "first" as if because the U.S. did it before others, the destruction was not devastating?
Throughout all of history, the American people have wanted to trust their government. We want to believe they make decisions for the best interest and safety of our country. Throughout all of history, it has been repeated behavior, presidents past and present, use the trust of the American people to make political decisions, that deal more with their own personal agenda, political party, and power seeking. They use the media for their own cover ups. Special investigations and documents uncover truths, and reveal to the public sooner or later the reality. I for one am no longer choosing to be spoon fed by our government, and president for the sake of their agendas. The fact Roosevelt deemed it necessary to keep his Vice President Truman in the dark about the atomic bomb, gives me enough reason to believe the bomb was being created to be "the first to use it" as he so boldly and proudly states in his address. Both presidents refused to take the intelligent advice of their generals, secretary of State, and even allies, in using other productive methods to end the war. Arrogance gets in the way of many presidents and thank God, Kennedy had a calmer head, and was willing to take the time to listen to his advisors, before pressing that button!
To end the war, to save lives, and to kill the least amount of civilians......I think NOT. The women of Atomic City were duped, just as the American people were. This argument has gone on for centuries and will continue to go on for centuries. All we can do now, is pray no other leader will make the mistake of passing up a surrender, or even the chance of a surrender, before using such a devastating nuclear bomb in our future.
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If Germany had been "the first to use it", and they were well on the way to finishing the research, the Allies would have lost the war. Where would be today? I think we could look at occupied Europe and Manchuria to get some idea.
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I think you're right, ursamajor.
We're all just trying to put pieces together and figure out for ourselves what we think happened and why it happened the way it did, whether or not we agree with those who made the decisions. I'm wondering, if Japan was willing to surrender, even before our bombing, why they did not do so after the first bombing. We said that we were going to drop bombs until they did surrender. It seems it took TWO bombs (on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) before Japan surrendered.
It's probably the case the most Vice Presidents were used to not being consulted or even informed about a lot, however his being kept in the dark about this devastating weapon that the U.S. had been in a race to create must have been quite a shock to Truman when he was finally told about it. The General's argument of how could a country not use a weapon that they had created to bring an end to the War, was probably persuasive.
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I remember years ago that I read or saw a documentary (have no clue anymore what) in which it was stated that they were surprised by the actual devastation (short and long term) that the bombs caused. It would not be surprising to me if they also didn't yet know the full extent of the long-term damage that radiation did to humans and the environment.
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That's it, Frybabe - we have to remember that this bomb is experimental. No one knows now the effects of radiation on humans. We read with horror the attempts to learn of the experiments to find that out.
Also, there was no proof that the Japanese would surrender before more lives were lost. My uncle, a soldier, was on his way to Japan - when the bomb was detonated. Harry Truman was confronted by military advisors as soon as he learned of the bomb - These men had been working on this bomb for years. The bomb was promised to end the war...to bring the boys (and Uncle George) home. It did. It accomplished that. Harry made up his mind - there was no turning back at that point. Can you imagine the effect on the American people if they learned that their President Roosevelt had supported this weapon - and the new President declined to use it - to bring the war to an end.
The response of the Japanese people - the relief, the gratitude, the expressions of friendship, once their leadership conceded defeat, said it all.
I wonder how many of Denise Keirnan's readers believe she is using this book to express regret for the use of the bomb. Maybe we should get back to the book - consider the reaction of the girls who have just learned that they had been working on the bomb...remember the American people's reaction to the news. The "girls" at this point in time are her focus in the book, no?.
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
| (http://www.seniorlearn.org/bookclubs/girlsatomiccity/girlsatomiccover.jpg) |
Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents Chicken Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ TUBEALLOY, 1938
Chapters 4,5
Sept. 29- Oct. 5 ~ TUBEALLOY, The Quest for Product
Chapters 6, TUBEALLOY, The Couriers, Chapter 7
Oct 6-12 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 151) Security, Censorship, The Press
Chapters 8, TUBEALLOY, Pumkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup; Chapter 9,
TUBEALLOY, Combining Efforts in the New Year; Chapter 10 (to pg. 204)
Oct 13-19 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 205) The Project's Crucial Spring;
Chapter 11; TUBEALLOY, Hope and the Haberdasher, April-May, 1945; Chapter 12,
Chapter 13 (to pg. 268)
Oct 20-? Chapter 14, 15, Epilogue
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1); Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan);
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview); Interview with Kattie Strickland, resident of Oak Ridge in 2005 (http://cdm16107.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15388coll1/id/422)
For Your Consideration
October 20-?
Chapter14 ~ Dawn of a Thousand Suns
1. When the Oak Ridge mission was first disclosed, most of the workers were astonished. How are their reactions evolving as they process the news more fully?
2. What new uncertainties and life choices did the workers face now?
Chapter 15 ~ Life in the New Age
1. As the details of the bomb’s damage came out, people were horrified. How did that affect the workers’ final feelings about what they had done?
2. What changes were made to adapt atomic energy for peaceful purposes? What legislation was passed to control it?
3. How were the Black workers who stayed on at Oak Ridge treated?
4. Lise Meitner was passed over for the Nobel Prize. Was this fair? Does Kiernan give an accurate picture of the importance of the women scientists?
5. What finally happened to the people we’ve been following?
Epilogue
1. “The challenge in telling the story of the atomic bomb is one of nuance, requiring thought and sensitivity and walking a line between commemoration and celebration.” Has Kiernan done a good job of this?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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Frybabe, good point about the experimental nature of the bomb. No one knew the full effects of it. They had never even tested the second one, which used the implosion method.
Joan, yes we should get to the CEW worker's reactions. What does Kiernan say about the reactions of those we have come to know? After all of the secrecy surrounding their whereabouts, they heard their own site mentioned specifically in the radio announcement. What happened to the secrecy surrounding their work?
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It's easy to forget just how uncertain they were about how the bomb would work, and even whether it would work. Then New Mexico explosion showed them they could get it to explode. But it was 49 (Plutonium). The next one was tubealloy (Uranium) So, different material, and the mechanism for exploding a bomb would have to be different. The last one was Plutonium again. They really didn't know ahead of time if ANY of them would work or fail. And as Frybabe pointed out, they didn't realize just how much destruction the bomb would do. They certainly didn't have a good notion of the aftereffects of the radioactivity and the materials of the bomb.
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Those are helpful details, Pat. Thank you.
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My morning news cruise turned up this article about uranium on BBC. It is lengthy, some interesting photos.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29661615
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That's an interesting article, Frybabe. It covers some of the same stuff we're reading about and lots more.
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"Marie Curie never fully appreciated the health risks of radiation - this is a woman who is said to have kept a glowing phial of radioactive isotopes beside her bed as a nightlight. Yet she, and many of her colleagues, would die of illnesses related to their exposure."
Thanks for the article, Fry! Marie Curie and our CEW workers had something in common...though the girls of atomic city didn't know that they were working with radioactive parts. Maybe they weren't. Did anyone understand that there was implicit danger involved with handling the materials for this weapon.
I was interested in the puzzled reactions of the girls, when their contributions to the bomb was announced. Do you think the assembly of each little part was ever explained to them? I don't.
I'm trying to remember if anyone of the girls was exposed to radiation or in any danger. We've been reading of isolated accidents, but it seems that there was careful consideration for safety in the plant. Of course, so much of what was going on was new and unknown...
Did you wonder about the plant in Hanford Washington when reading War Secretary Stimson's detailed report of the contributions of the plants and labs around the country working on the bomb? Could it have been anything like the plant in Tennessee? I'm curious enough to look it up, as soon as I can find some free time! Think of it, Denise Kiernan! Another book?
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Here's a start, JoanP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site)
I have the feeling it wasn't as big or complicated as Oak Ridge.
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Remember the laundry? The laundry workers had to run a geiger counter (or similar) over the washed clothing and rewash anything that registered. I bet they were not wearing any radiation protection. Did any of the workers even have radiation exposure badges to monitor how much radiation they were getting? I don't recall any mention of it in the book.
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Kiernan mentions them considering giving exposure badges to the couriers, but they don't seem to have done it. Radiation health science was truly in its infancy then. They didn't really have any idea what was a reasonable amount of exposure.
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It would be interesting to know if anyone has studied the population of workers at the site to find out if they died earlier, or had more instances of cancer, than the general population.
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I'd forgotten the laundry! So there were radioactive materials floating in the plants of Oak Ridge then! But so far, we've heard nothing of adverse effects on the workers, have we? Is that to come in the final chapters?
I checked out that link to the Hanford WA plant, Pat. The photos were interesting. You're right, it doesn't seem to be the same set-up as we saw in Oak Ridge. For one thing, there are no women - although I do see a few as payroll clerks in this photo -
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Hanford_workers.jpg/500px-Hanford_workers.jpg)
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Marcie, maybe these articles may help. This is a pretty lengthy article which has tables of the outcome of deaths, causes etc., on workers in the four plants in Oak Ridge. There are many other articles you can Google.
A Mortality Study of Employees of the Nuclear Industry in Oak Ridge, Tennessee
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~frome/ORMS/RadRes97ORMS.pdf
Here is yet one more lengthy article and I like how it breaks each chemical down and compartmentalizes each plant in Oak Ridge. PatH., you may be the only one among our group who has the knowledge and patience to break this down in simple layman's terms for us.
This article has some really great pictures of the plants and Oak Ridge in it.
Just one graph showing how the contaminates lasted years later:
(http://<embed width="100%" height="100%" name="plugin" src="http://health.state.tn.us/ceds/oakridge/ORHASP.pdf" type="application/pdf">)
Releases of Contaminants from Oak Ridge Facilities and Risks to Public Health final report of the Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Pa n e
http://health.state.tn.us/ceds/oakridge/ORHASP.pdf
Since so many workers, and residents left Oak Ridge, after the war ended, I wonder if they kept track of those families and their health.
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I think you just outlined my day for me, Bellamarie. That first article is pretty heavy going; I'll see if I can make sense of it. The second is easier reading, though long, and has some great pictures. It deals with the local populace, not specifically workers.
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Yes, PatH., The first link deals with the employees and the second deals with residents of Oak Ridge from the beginning of the reservation to years later. I think the colored graph of the different materials is quite interesting. I like how the report deals with MANY different elements not just radiation, uranium, plutonium. So interesting, but I just get a bit overwhelmed since science was never my strong subject. Thanks for any help you can provide. ;)
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In the meantime, we've added the last section of the book, though we still have things left to talk about in previous sections. When the purpose of the Project was made public, the workers' first reaction was amazement. Now they are chewing it over, and their thinking is more complex. And the war is over; what now? What are all the issues churning around in their minds?
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The celebration of learning the bombs have been dropped, Japan has surrendered, the war has come to an end, and family members can be expected to come home, is a jubilant mood for Oak Ridge, as well as all over the country. But, now they have decisions to make, will they still have their jobs, will they go back to their places, before coming to Oak Ridge, how will their lives change, and yes.....now they begin processing, and dealing with the knowledge of what they were actually doing in those plants.
Last night, I was watching a tv show, Madame Secretary. The Secretary of State,(played by Téa Leoni) has just averted a war with Iran. Her young son asks his father if we were going to war. The father says, not if your mother can avoid it. The young son questioned his father who flew fighter jets in desert storm, if he ever killed anyone. The father said, yes. The son asked how did you feel when you had to kill people, and do you think about it today? The father responded, (paraphrasing) "I was conditioned to do my job during my training, I spotted a target, released the bombs, and did what I was told to do. I didn't have time to think about how I felt about it, but yes, now I think about it all the time." They sat and looked at each other, and the young son got up, hugged his Dad, and said good-night. The father, just sat thinking.
I share this because while watching this, it made me think of our book. We are coming to the last chapters of the book. D.K. interviewed these ladies so many years later. The celebrations have wore off, the reality has set in, and now I suppose the women/workers all sat much like this father, and contemplated everything days, weeks, months and years later.
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Thanks for finding that article on mortality rates, Bellamarie. I'll try to read it later today.
Pat, the workers were amazed to hear Oak Ridge mentioned by name. Most seemed to have no idea what they were helping to create. Some are now thinking back over their work and over conversations they'd heard and seeing everything in a new light. Others still have no idea what exactly they were doing. Some seem ready to go back home and others have found a home there and would like to stay.
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My husband, a physicist, read the article and remarked that it was written by statisticians for statiisticians. The bottom line is that, with the exception of lung cancer, the cancer rates are below that of the general population. This can probably be partially explained by the fact that everyone who applied for a job received a physical; those not in good shape were not hired.
This study was done some time ago. I wonder if current results would be different as for the majority of people cancer develops late in life. I know that it is recognized that there was exposure to radiation in some areas and anyone who worked in those areas for some time and developed certain cancers is entitled to compensation of $150,000 almost automatically. I have no idea how many have been compensated but I know it is not uncommon.
Thank you for citing this, Bellamarie.
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Ursamajor, your husband just saved me. I was just about to tackle reading that article carefully. That was the same impression I got from skimming it, but you can't really skim something like that--too likely to get it wrong.
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I can't imagine the chaos in Oak Ridge when the role of CEW was announced in the bombing. Kiernan describes "their exuberance, the relief and the pride." But the inhabitants and workers aren't getting any information from the outside - or from the Oak Ridge Journal, which publishes only once a week...and even then, details are censored.
Once the "Fat Man," the implosion bomb was used in Nagasaki..I guess I was surprised to read that there was yet another bomb ready to go if Hirohito was not convinced and Japan would concede defeat. Kiernan writes it was ready for delivery August 24, but Japan surrendered August 14 - five days after Nagasaki.
If I ever knew about this third bomb, I forgot about it. What happened to it?
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Ursa...these last chapters are exciting - where YOU came onto the scene in Oak Ridge. Just finished reading the chapter in which Oak Ridge voted against incorporation at a town meeting in 1953. Were you there yet? Did you vote? By 19557 Kiernan writes that Oak Ridge had incorporated and became a "fully independent normal town." That must have made you happy! ;D
Were you aware of work-related health problems among friends and acquaintances in Oak Ridge in all those years you've lived there?
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Has anyone here been watching "Manhattan" on WGN? They are up to the final chapter in the series, and now I understand that there will be a season 2. Yes, I think the series is historical fiction but we might learn something more from its presentation of the history. I really feel that the best info is coming from this discussion since we have people who know so much more about the bomb and the emotions of the people at that time. (Yes, I do remember the surrender of Japan and going with neighbors to downtown Indianapolis where soldiers and sailors were dancing in the fountain around the Circle (center of city)). I have not watched "Manhattan" as I didn't know the series was available . WGN will be starting the 13 shows over on Saturday and I have a friend who has been watching. She now has our book and is also reading it. There will be Season 2 as they aren't done with all that happened yet. Last night, I tried to DVR the whole season but they were only letting one do the last 7 shows. My friend has DVR'd the whole thing so I might just watch the first 6 shows at her home. I am interested in her reaction to the non-fiction book we are reading. She already has a sour opinion of General Groves. I had a book held at the library about him(portraying him as hero) but may have lost to time they will hold it. Will check today.
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Ursa, Tell you husband thank for looking at the articles. I am not a scientist, nor physicist but I thought there were some very interesting results on the charts. It surely does shows people living during, and after the creation of the reservation, was indeed affected by many different chemicals. There were about 70,000 plus populated in Oak Ridge at the time of the war and when it ended, and after the war it appears only around 20,000 plus remained living there. I just wonder if they were even able to include those who moved away, not to mention their offsprings in the results. The graph shows these chemicals lasted as long as 20 years beyond the end of the war.
PatH., I don't blame you for not wanting to tackle this, although you might find it interesting in your spare time. I did spend awhile on it, and could decipher some interesting results. One conclusion, is I would not have felt comfortable swimming in, or drinking the water, nor would I have been comfortable with any products grown in the soil, or eating animal meat, especially fish, or drinking the milk from goats and cows, considering they would have drank from the water, and eaten grass, grains etc., that grew in the soil. I probably would have been one of those who chose to move away from any of these sites. The movie Erin Brockovich comes to mind, after reading the articles and seeing the test results.
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I happened to stumble across this article written by Jay Searcy, a young man who grew up in the "City Behind The Fence". He lived in Oak Ridge during the war, both his parents worked in the plants. His article was posted in The Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9, 1992.
A very informative read.
http://www.mphpa.org/classic/OR/OR_Story_1.htm
This site has fantastic pictures!
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/06/the-secret-city/100326/
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Bellamarie, the second health article you found, "Releases of Contamination from Oak Ridge Facilities and Risks to Public Health" is easy enough reading, just very long. I didn't finish the methodology section yet, but they summarize their conclusions, and your impression is correct. The main risks were from drinking contaminated milk from backyard cows, which would affect children, and from eating a lot of contaminated fish from several creeks, which would affect fetuses.
Someone who isn't interested in reading the article would still enjoy scrolling down to see the great pictures of Oak Ridge.
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Two more finds from Bellamarie. The first is charming and lighthearted; what it was like for a ten year old growing up in Oak Ridge. He had a ball. There's a paragraph of interest in our discussion about health hazards:
(In 1961, after working for most of 15 years in the "hottest" building at Y-12, mother was forced to transfer to a "clean" building because of her ''high body count." For months she was required to leave urine and feces samples on our front porch for lab pickups. Doctors were still getting a radioactive reading on her at her retirement in 1971 and as recently as five years ago when she was last checked. She is considered something of a phenomenon by researchers from the Department of Energy, and they have asked that she donate her body for research. In the spirit of her wartime youth, she signed the pledge.)
You notice that as of the time of writing, 1993, she was still alive.
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How interesting that the woman is a phenomenon with radioactive readings but no apparent side effects.
Annie, I've been watching the Manhattan TV series. It's very interesting with great actors. There are some video clips at http://wgnamerica.com/shows/manhattan
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I've been thinking how the women must have felt after hearing about the bombs and i don't think i can put myself in their place. From 2014, i think i would be appalled, but in 1945, i may be thinking "hallelujah! I helped win the war!" There was so much propaganda against the Japanese, i may have had trouble thinking of them as thousands of human beings had been killed. I wouldn't know the lingering horrible effects, so i think i would have been pleased to be a part of fighting the enemy. But i don't know.
Jean
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Yes, PatH., The young man's mother was still alive in 1993, and her urine was still testing positive for radiation. Makes one wonder how does radiation affect one's health. I know the article that covers health and risks, lists many different types of cancer and other health issues, not necessarily life threatening.
Jean, I agree, I think the first initial reaction back in 1945, would be jubilation, and rightfully so. It didn't take them long though to start processing what it really meant as far as what part they played in making the bomb. I think the reality for all workers would have been seeing pictures of the thousands of burnt bodies lying in the burnt surfaces in Japan. It truly sounds like these people kept much inside them for as long as they lived. Many articles I have read, and reviews at Amazon from relatives of those who worked at the plants say their loved ones never would talk about it. I suspect their silence was, part keeping the contract of secrecy, and part not wanting to talk at all about how they personally felt, in helping make the bomb that killed thousands, and they saw it never came to reality, that the chemicals came to be used in the ways in the future, they thought would be helpful to our environment and economy.
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There's a good example of the mixed feelings in the last chapter. Dot has taken a job as a docent in Oak Ridge's science museum. She enjoys it at first.
"Veterans and civilians alike were proud of their contribution to World War II. Why shouldn't she be?
But times had changed. She was never quite sure what to say when asked how she 'felt' about her work.
..........
...one woman in particular strode up to Dot, glaring, and asked, 'Aren't you ashamed you helped build a bomb that killed all those people?'
The truth was, Dot did have conflicting feelings. There was sadness at the loss of life, yes, but that wasn't the only thing she felt. They had all been so happy, so thrilled, when the war ended. Didn't any of these people remember that? And yes, Oak Ridgers felt horrible when they saw the pictures of the aftermath in Japan. Relief. Fear. Joy. Sadness. Decades later, how could she explain this to someone who had no experience with the Project, someone who hadn't lived through the war, let alone lived at Oak Ridge?
Dot knew the woman wanted a simple answer, so she gave her one.
'Well,' she said, 'they killed my brother.''
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Found this
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/03/172908135/secretly-working-to-win-the-war-in-atomic-city
I have a question. How did the people in Japan feel?
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Denise Kiernan describes the tightrope nature of emotions following the bombing. The period of celebration - the war was over at last and then the details of the extent of the damage the Gadget had caused.
Good find, bluebird - and good question too. It's interesting to hear the girls' reaction in the days following the bomb drops. It strikes me to read how much time actually elapsed between the bombing, the jubilation - and the time the devastation was made known. How much time, would you say? No one could have been prepared for that.
"How did the people of Japan feel?"
Relief that the war was finally over? Resentment that the bombs had been deployed? Were they even asked, or interviewed? I imagine they were tired of the war waged by the Emperor -
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I have a question. How did the people in Japan feel?
Bluebird, that's a really important question, and the book doesn't answer it. When Dot went to the Pacific to throw a lei over the place where her brother's ship went down, an old Japanese woman saw her crying and hugged her. They connected in a way you only can when you share something.
But how did most Japanese people feel? Everybody, what do you know about this?
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I think the answer to Bluebird's question would depend on who is asked...and at what point in time the question was asked...immediately after the war? Today?
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I think the answer to Bluebird's question would depend on who is asked...and at what point in time the question was asked...immediately after the war? Today?
Absolutely right. And that's the same answer we're trying to get about the Oak Ridge workers. There aren't going to be any easy answers, but what do any of you think about it?
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I can only imagine how Japan felt, seeing the devastation the bombs had done to their people, and their country. War is a time you will expect lives to be lost, but this method of winning the war was beyond what any country could have ever imagined in their lifetime.
I found this compelling:
pg. 278 (Rosemary) The bombings themselves were still hard for her to fathom, and she knew others who felt the same way. Anybody who had been working in Oak Ridge and had contributed to the development of something so tragic, so devastating, had to ask themselves the question whether it was the right thing to do. She felt incredibly relieved the war was over. She knew there were people who wondered if the death of so many thousands, so many civilians was too big a price to pay, but she didn't think most people who worked in Oak Ridge felt that it was. The devastation after the bomb was hard to get a handle on; it was so unclear. She could not imagine being in President Truman's shoes, having to make that kind of decision. What a horrible responsibility, she thought.
I found it interesting how Rosemary's first instinct was to return to Chicago, but decided to stay and take the job as nursing supervisor for the plant's on-site facility. It makes me wonder if she felt the need to try to do some good here, after learning how much devastation the bomb had done.
pg. 279 In her new position, she would learn a lot more about radiation. She had of course heard about it when she was working in the hospital in Chicago, primarily associated with precautionary measures taken during the administrations of X-rays. The long-term effects of radiation on a large scale were not yet clearly understood. There were precautions that CEW workers coud take, film badges to measure exposure, blood tests. And X-10, home of the pilot plutonium plant, had already had its own share of exposures that needed to be dealt with.
Workers who found themselves exposed__either to plutonium or other damaging chemicals__would come to the clinic, at the plant, where they were showered and scrubbed down intensely. Sometimes they had to stay overnight, as Henry Klemski had, often leaving their spouses to wonder what had happened, and with little more than a phone call from a supervisor letting them know that their husbands wouldn't be home that night.
Rosemary met John in the clinic of a plant, they married, and after a few years John was transferred to Germantown, Maryland, and the couple moved their family to what would be their home for many years to come.
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/in-the-girls-of-atomic/
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Thanks, bluebird. That's a good interview.
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So, in the weeks following the August 6th bombing of Hiroshima, Kiernan writes that "the story of the bombing was controlled in the US - and in Japan too."
I thought the understated comment by the Japanese journalist said a lot:
"Two B29s caused a little damage."
Bluebird- does that give a clue how Japan felt? Denial, or unwillingness to face the power of such a weapon? Or maybe wanting to protect the Japanese from the realization of what the bomb had done to those two cities?
Kiernan reports that it wasn't until Bernard Hoffman, a Life Magazine photojournalist, documented the bomb sites in Japan on Oct. 15, that the world finally learned the power of this weapon.
Is this the right time to talk about future detonations of the atomic bomb? . We know that Russia had spies in the US in the early 50's and tested theirs in 1953. Makes you wonder how they accomplished this...
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The Book Club Online is the oldest book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone. We offer cordial discussions of one book a month, 24/7 and enjoy the company of readers from all over the world. Everyone is welcome to join in!
Everyone is welcome!
The Girls of Atomic City
by Denise Kiernan
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Based on first-person interviews with women who served at Oak Ridge, several of them now now in their eighties and nineties, Denise Kiernan tells the true story of young women during World War II who worked in a secret city dedicated to making fuel for the first atomic bomb—only they didn’t know that.
At the dawn of the atomic age, the community of Oak Ridge, Tenn., rose up around the secret work taking place there in support of the war effort. At the heart of those efforts were thousands of women from across the country who did their part to help secure the United States while maintaining a public silence.
They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents Chicken Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb. They had NO idea!
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DISCUSSION SCHEDULE:
September 15-21~ Introduction & Revelation, August 1945;
Chapters 1, 2, 3 (62 pages)
September 22-28 ~ TUBEALLOY, 1938
Chapters 4,5
Sept. 29- Oct. 5 ~ TUBEALLOY, The Quest for Product
Chapters 6, TUBEALLOY, The Couriers, Chapter 7
Oct 6-12 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 151) Security, Censorship, The Press
Chapters 8, TUBEALLOY, Pumkins, Spies, and Chicken Soup; Chapter 9,
TUBEALLOY, Combining Efforts in the New Year; Chapter 10 (to pg. 204)
Oct 13-19 ~ TUBEALLOY, (p 205) The Project's Crucial Spring;
Chapter 11; TUBEALLOY, Hope and the Haberdasher, April-May, 1945; Chapter 12,
Chapter 13 (to pg. 268)
Oct 20-? Chapter 14, 15, Epilogue
RELEVANT LINKS:
An Interview with Denise Kiernan about Atomic City girls (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/nl2krs/exclusive---denise-kiernan-extended-interview-pt--1); Part 2 Interview with Denise Kiernan (http://thedailyshow.cc.com/search?keywords=Kiernan);
2013 Interview with Celia Klemski (http://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/celia-szapka-klemskis-interview); Interview with Kattie Strickland, resident of Oak Ridge in 2005 (http://cdm16107.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15388coll1/id/422)
For Your Consideration
October 20-?
Chapter14 ~ Dawn of a Thousand Suns
1. When the Oak Ridge mission was first disclosed, most of the workers were astonished. How are their reactions evolving as they process the news more fully?
2. What new uncertainties and life choices did the workers face now?
Chapter 15 ~ Life in the New Age
1. As the details of the bomb’s damage came out, people were horrified. How did that affect the workers’ final feelings about what they had done?
2. What changes were made to adapt atomic energy for peaceful purposes? What legislation was passed to control it?
3. How were the Black workers who stayed on at Oak Ridge treated?
4. Lise Meitner was passed over for the Nobel Prize. Was this fair? Does Kiernan give an accurate picture of the importance of the women scientists?
5. What finally happened to the people we’ve been following?
Epilogue
1. “The challenge in telling the story of the atomic bomb is one of nuance, requiring thought and sensitivity and walking a line between commemoration and celebration.” Has Kiernan done a good job of this?
DLs: JoanP (jonkie@verizon.net), Marcie (marciel@aol.com), PatH (rjhighet@earthlink.net ),
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“The challenge in telling the story of the atomic bomb is one of nuance, requiring thought and sensitivity and walking a line between commemoration and celebration.” Has Kiernan done a good job of this?
I personally feel D.K. has done as good a job as any, to capture the feelings of the people at Oak Ridge, once they learned of what they were working on, and the destruction it caused. All over the country there were celebrations, because the war ended. I think the people in Oak Ridge probably dealt with the knowledge much more difficult than the average American, who had nothing to do with creating the bomb.
I really am glad I read this book, and was a part of the discussion. Whether we agree or disagree with what content was in the book, whether it seemed a bit redundant, D.K. gave us first hand knowledge from these women who survived working at the plants, and are still living, some seventy years later. This book took me on a Google search, to learn even more than was covered in this book. For that, I am thankful, I would never have picked this book up on my own to just read by myself.
I loved D.K.'s ending...... As I drive away from Oak Ridge, I cross back over the Clinch, the sheer curtain of pinkish-gray evening settling on the its waters, no pearls sleeping in the beds. I leave my dinner with Virginia behind, thinking of her and other women's journeys across the river in a much different time during a very different war. I have no answers as I head east deeper into the secret-shrouded shadow of the mountains. I roll down the window and wash my hands in the clouds.
I have traveled over Clinch mountain many times in my years being married, with my Mom sitting in the back seat of our small hornet wagon, with my three small children. That mountain before they blasted through it and made it much wider, was truly a scary time, with such a huge drop, and such a narrow road of nothing but curves that could not been seen to anticipate ahead of you. I remember as we drove through the mountain, my mother who talks non-stop while in the car would go silent. I knew she was a bit fearful. I always helped my hubby who was driving stay alert, and prayed silently, Our Father who art in Heaven........ I sense if D.K. is a prayerful person, she too would be saying a little prayer for all those women and residents of Oak Ridge, Tenn., as she washed her hands in the clouds.
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Does Kiernan give an accurate picture of the importance of the women scientists?
I might as well answer my own question. I think she is accurate. Kiernan wants to tell the story from the viewpoint of women, so she picks out women scientists to follow, but she doesn't fall into the trap of making them seem more important than they were. They were just as important as the men, not more or less. Lise Meitner's insight was a crucial part of the picture. Ida Noddack's work was important too. Leona was just one more person being mentored by Fermi.
It wasn't fair for Meitner not to share the Nobel Prize. It happens sometimes that when several people are responsible for a breakthrough, one of them gets left out of the prize. Scientists like to speculate on reasons, but somehow it seems to happen more to women.
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I was thinking too, that this sort of thing was more common in the 40's, Pat - when women did not have the voice, the support they (we) have now. I suppose you could say the same thing for the Blacks. Things slowly improved after the war years, didn't they? (okay, I said "slowly."
You asked about the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Reading of the 18 people who were imjected with with plutonium between 1945 and 47. What was that about? And the thousands of human radiation expericments in '45 and '46. That couldn't have had anything to do with the Gadget. I'm hoping it was to test the use of radiation for medical purposes. That would have been a beneficial use of atomic energy...
Still thinking about further use of the atomic bomb - and some questions coming about the H bomb. They are the ones we feared in elementary school in the late 40's. Remember hiding under your desk, protecting your head? Were we doing "Bert the Turtle" and Duck and Cover?
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JoanP, your remark about radiation experiments reminded me of a minor character who deserves an exit line--Ebb Cade. He's the Black worker injured in an automobile accident, with multiple fractures. They saw their chance, and injected him with Plutonium to see where it went. Then, although they set most of his fractures, they delayed on the legs, to give themselves options on how to proceed. Cade's teeth were bad, and they pulled 15 of them, no doubt some of them appropriately, but they were after seeing where the Plutonium went. (It does go to bones and teeth.) Finally they set his legs. Soon after that he disappeared--not in his room, not checked out. No one seems to know what happened, but 8 years later someone saw an obituary of an Ebb Cade who turned out to be the same man, died at age 61, cause of death listed as heart disease. Who knows if the Plutonium played a part, but at least he knew enough to make a break for it as soon as he could.
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You have to wonder how much freedom was given to those who conducted these experiments - as those conducted on Ebb Cade. It's almost as if they answered to no one.
But when I was reading of the radiation injections, I immediately thought of the care I received following my bout with breast cancer this past Spring. The radiation following surgery was over in five days...with just the right amount of radiation administered each day.
I wondered how many experiments were performed before the safe levels were determined.
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I too was wondering what objectives the plutonium injections were serving. Who was in charge of the experiments? The last chapter says that 18 people (that we know of) were injected with plutonium, including Ebb Cade and that "several thousand human radiation experiments were conducted between 1944 and 1974."
There is a brief history of radiation therapy at http://healthsciences.ucsd.edu/som/radiation-medicine/about/Pages/history-radiation-therapy.aspx
There is a very disturbing article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States#Human_radiation_experiments
These articles are far beyond the scope of the book we've been reading.
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Marcie, that Wikipedia article might be well outside the scope of the book, but it's important to know that this sort of thing happened. It's appalling to think of that sort of callousness toward people who, because they were poor, or ignorant, or Black, or prisoners were regarded as fair game.
Could that sort of thing happen now? I don't think it could. It's too far outside what anyone thinks of as decent or ethical. When I worked at NIH, nothing I did impacted patients in any way, but I still had to take a short medical ethics course which spelled out the rules, and used some of the things in the article as bad examples. They're all classics, Tuskegee and Willowbrook especially.
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Pat, I googled just to see if there is evidence of misleading (or illegal) human experimentation today and found an article at http://www.wncn.com/story/21750744/patient-seeking-2-million-in-epa-human-experimentation-case about an EPA case in 2013. I don't know if the case has been resolved. It was an ongoing investigation at the time.
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I get the impression that the experimentation that went on...and still goes on today - is not done with evil intentions - but rather with overzealous desire to use the results to cure illusive ills, the cure which always seemed to be just around the corner. Though the selection of subjects for experimentation - without their knowledge was reprehensible at any time. Somehow, I can't accept the fact that these scientists were aware of the extent of the damage they were doing. Am I being overly naive in the face of the evidence?
Thank you for all of the links. I'm finding some of them particularly interesting. Do you think it makes a difference if the patient consents to experimental treatments, knowing that the results, side effects, are unknown?
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Wasn't it interesting to read the follow-up stories of the Atomic City girls - all returning to Oak Ridge after the war. (Am I right?) They didn't flee once they learned what went on here, did they?
They married, settled here, had babies, without concerns for their health. Is it clear now why DK chose these particular girls for the subjects of her book? They are still here for interviews.
Ursa, hopefully you will come back to chat before we finish up here. Would love to hear a bit more from you about life in Oak Ridge when you arrived in 1953...and how the Plant is regarded today by residents of Oak Ridge - and how the renovation of the Guest House is coming along.
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There was in Oak Ridge for many years a hospital under the sponsorship of Oak Ridge Institue for Nucleat Science. (now Oak Ridge Associated Universities) that treated cancer patients with experimental methods, many of which included some kind of radiation. This was very much above board and the patients or their guardians all signed releases and statements that they were aware that these treatments were experimental. I never heard anything but good about it, except for one woman who claimed that the vermin in the buildings (she meant the experimental rats and other animals) had caused her child to die. This caused a lot of consternation among the then retired staff but nothing ever came of it.
The renovation of the Guest House continues apace. An acquaintance of mine has already signed up for an apartment; I mean to look into it further.
There was an earlier reference to the referendum as whether or not to incorporate the city. I can't remember how I voted but I know there were reasons to vote either way. There were some people who were sorry when the fence went down; after all, the fence kept out undesirables. Back in the 50s there was almost no poverty in Oak Ridge; everybody had a job. That is no longer true. there are a good number of poor families living in parts of Oak Ridge that have pretty much become slums.
Oak Ridge was a good place to live in the 50s and 60s. The schools were excellent and there was almost no crime. We had enough stores for pretty good shopping and Knoxville wasn't very far away.Kids ranged over the neighborhoods and we thought it perfectly safe. There were enough mothers at home so that there was somebody to keep an eye on things. Most of the daddies came home at 5:00 o'clock except for those scientists who had experiments running. My husband was in a carpool for thirty years. One of the members became unable to work because of illness and his wife got a job at the lab and took his place in the carpool. It was a good time.
I have a friend who came here during the war years. She now lives in a retirement home called Greenfield. Colleen Black lives across the hall, and another of the "girls" lived there until she died recently.
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I also enjoyed learning from the book what had happened to some of the people. Ursamajor, thank you for the interesting updates to add to what we learned.
Joan, I do think it makes a difference to get informed consent for health experiments. If you know what treatment you'll be getting and you think it's worth it, for the potential benefit to yourself or others (even if it is risky with no guarantee), I think that's okay.
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If you know what treatment you'll be getting and you think it's worth it, for the potential benefit to yourself or others (even if it is risky with no guarantee), I think that's okay.
Exactly. The other important thing is that there mustn't be any coercion. That's why Willowbrook (mentioned in the Wikipedia article) is such a horrible example. It was essentially the only New York residential facility for mentally handicapped children, and consent to the experiments was a prerequisite for admission, so parents who couldn't handle caring for their children didn't have much choice.
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Back in the 50s there was almost no poverty in Oak Ridge; everybody had a job.
No wonder it was such a good place to live. That's sure not true much of anywhere now.
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"Has Kiernan done a good job of telling the story of the atomic bomb with thought and sensitivity and walking a line between commemoration and celebration,” Pat asks. Some of us have already replied to this. Do you all agree?
We'll give everyone a chance to think about that question and rate the author's efforts before retiring this discussion to the Archives...Thanks everyone for your thoughts and insignts.
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Yes, I do agree. The story is told mostly from the views of the interviewed workers. I think that the author provided us with an interesting story of "atomic city" and the race for the development of the bomb from those points of view. I too appreciate everyone's insights and thoughts about this book and these events.
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I think she did an excellent job of showing what it felt like in the war years, and the varied and mixed emotions afterward. Thank goodness she did this work in time.