The Girls of Atomic City (50 page)

9. From ordinary workers to brilliant scientists, there are plenty of women from this period who have been forgotten in popular history. Why do you think these stories are important to tell? Do you think readers today are fully receptive to women’s histories?

I think women’s roles, big and small, provide an added perspective to any historical event, and if history is to be as completely and accurately told as possible, all possible perspectives and experiences must be included. Their stories also serve as an inspiration to young women making decisions about careers and choices available to them today. I think readers are more receptive today than they were in the past, but I look forward to the day when women’s roles in history are not looked at as anything unusual or extraordinary.
A woman helped discover fission? So what? Of course she did. What’s so unusual about that?
That’s the reaction I still look forward to.

10. You previously published books about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. What was it like to write about a much more recent period of history in
The Girls of Atomic City
?

There are certainly more documents I can get my hands on writing a book about World War II. The biggest plus is being able to speak directly to the people I’m writing about, and not rely on interviews conducted by others. Being in the same room with someone makes a big difference; conversations with the people who actually lived through what you’re trying to describe cannot be beat.

11. “ ‘All in the same boat” is possibly the most oft repeated phrase I heard while conducting interviews for this book, from both men and women.” (418) Why do you think the men and women you interviewed used that phrase so frequently? What does it capture about that time and place?

What’s interesting about that phrase is that it’s not entirely accurate. Certainly Kattie was not in the same boat as the others. Those living in the trailers and huts—white and black—were not in the same domestic boat as those in the prefab houses or even dorms. But they were all subject to rations, they were all riding the same buses, they were all trudging through the mud, and they were all waiting for the war to end. The war was the biggest boat of all.

12. Imagine you were a worker at the Clinton Engineer Works. What job do you think you’d be best suited for? What kinds of work do you think you would have enjoyed the most and least?

I think I would have liked to be one of the dorm marms. I imagine it would have been fantastic to watch all the different comings and goings of so many young women on their own for the first time. Any job featuring rote repetition, where I would have had to suppress my curiosity—the majority of factory work—would not have been a good fit for me.

13. What is the significance of this story today, in your view? What can we learn from the workers, scientists, and politicians behind the atomic bomb?

Many people know very little about the development of the atomic bomb, despite the fact that nuclear weapons and nuclear energy play a significant role in our lives today. I hope presenting this story in an accessible manner will help fill some gaps in people’s knowledge about that period and that particular scientific development. I think it is interesting to examine the willingness of most Americans, from factory workers to members of the media, to get on board with whatever the American government asked of them. There was a trust in our leaders that is hard to find today. I am not saying one era is better than the other, but that the difference in and of itself is interesting to explore. Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time—just under three years—is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went to the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?

DENISE KIERNAN
is the author of
Signing Their Lives Away
and
Signing Their Rights Away
. Her work has appeared in
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Discover, Ms
., and other national publications.

www.denisekiernan.com

See videos, photos, maps, and more at

www.girlsofatomiccity.com

authors.simonandschuster.com/DeniseKiernan

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Notes

I cannot come close to expressing how challenging it was to decide which women I was going to feature most prominently in this book, and how difficult it was to leave the others on the cutting room floor (or in digital research folders, as it were). There were many interviews that I found extremely helpful in writing this book, even if the people who shared their stories with me were not featured in its pages. A list of primary individuals interviewed follows these notes.

Where not otherwise noted, information regarding Celia (Szapka) Klemski, Toni (Peters) Schmitt, Kattie Strickland, Jane (Greer) Puckett, Helen (Hall) Brown, Virginia (Spivey) Coleman, Dot (Jones) Wilkinson, Colleen (Rowan) Black, and Rosemary (Maiers) Lane comes from author interviews conducted between 2009 and 2012.

A note about dialogue: The use and/or creation of dialogue is based on either author interviews, oral histories, or meeting minutes.

A number of texts, original documents, and audio and video resources were consulted during the researching and writing of this book. In addition to the primary works cited here, a suggested “reading, watching, and listening” list is available at
girlsofatomiccity.com
.

Introduction, Cast of Characters

Description of the region from author’s visits to the area, interviews with longtime residents, and from the “History and Architectural Resources of Oak Ridge, Tennessee” (National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, January 1987) and from “Report on Proposed Site for Plant Eastern Tennessee,” Formerly Declassified Correspondence, 1942–1947; Records of the Atomic Energy Commission, Record Group 326, National Archives at Atlanta; National Archives and Records Administration.

More specific details regarding the arrival of the Manhattan Project to the East Tennessee area come from numerous sources and original documentation, many of which will be cited throughout the book. H. G. Wells’s book
The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind
was originally published in 1914 (London: MacMillan). It is available in the public domain from the Project Gutenberg and other sources. The book eventually fascinated many scientists, including Manhattan Project physicist Leo Szilard, as mentioned in Richard Rhodes’s
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), among others. Wells’s prediction of the atomic bomb is still referenced today, in places like
Wired
(“Rise of the Machines: Why We Keep Coming Back to H. G. Wells’ Visions of a Dystopian Future,” by Matthew Lasar, October 8, 2011). Chris Keim, who worked at Y-12 during the war and went on to be division director of technical information at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, shared a wonderful anecdote about Wells’s book in his essay, “A Scientist and His Secrets” from
These Are Our Voices: The Story of Oak Ridge, 1942–1970
(Oak Ridge: Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge, 1987). He and other scientists bought out all the copies of
The World Set Free
from a Berkeley, CA, bookstore until the store owner got curious about the popularity of the title. Military intelligence approached the shop owner, asked him to keep quiet, and then unsuccessfully tried to find out who had bought the books. On August 18, 1945, just 12 days after the Hiroshima bombing,
The Nation
’s Freda Kirchwey wrote a fantastic essay for that magazine, titled “When H. G. Wells Split the Atom.” Wells died in 1946, just one year after the bombs he foresaw were used to end World War II. Information regarding code names: The origin of the word “tubealloy” or “tuballoy” comes from the “Tube Alloys” project, which was the code name the British used for their early work on the atomic bomb. Both “tubealloy” and “Tube Alloy” are also mentioned in several texts, including Rhodes (previously cited). Both spellings are also used in various memos and declassified material, and were used repeatedly by a variety of individuals interviewed by the author. I have chosen the spelling “tubealloy” as opposed to “tuballoy” to reflect the name’s origin and its pronunciation (TOOB-uh-loy). 49 and 94 were for plutonium, as was “copper,” though that presented some confusion. Both 49 and 94 can be found in various declassified materials and are referenced in
The Plutonium Story: The Journals of Professor Glenn T. Seaborg, 1939–1946,
by Glenn T. Seaborg, edited by Ronald L. Kathren, Jerry B. Gough, Gary T. Benefiel (Columbus: Battelle Press, 1994), and in
The Plutonium Files,
by Eileen Welsome (New York: Random House, 1995).