The Plutonium Files (11 page)

General Groves’s next choice to head up the Medical Section was Stafford Warren, who was then a professor of radiology at the University of Rochester medical school. Warren was a man’s man, garrulous and full of bravado, just the kind of doctor Groves was looking for. He had a handsome, square face that was just beginning to loosen, a small brushy mustache, and a large, well-shaped nose. He was an extraordinary blend of contradictions: flamboyant and cautious, amiable and shrewd, a storyteller who kept secrets.

After some negotiation, Warren agreed to serve as a consultant to the project, but said he would not join officially unless he was given the rank of colonel. With Hymer Friedell as his guide, over the spring and summer of 1943 he gradually learned more about the bomb-building effort. At that time, Los Alamos still resembled a crude military encampment; Oak Ridge was little more than a muddy construction site filled with lumber and bulldozers; and Hanford, struggling with labor shortages and sandstorms, had yet to drive a stake for its first nuclear reactor.

On November 3, 1943, Warren received his commission as a colonel
in the Army, at which time he moved his family to Oak Ridge and became a full-time member of the project. According to one written account, he showed up for work on his first day wearing combat boots and a .45 revolver strapped to his waist.
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Like the crackpots and prima donnas at Los Alamos, Warren was also a scientist, but he clearly saw himself as a military officer whose loyalty belonged to General Groves.

Although Stafford Warren was living in Rochester when Groves recruited him, he was actually another member of the ever-increasing tribe of Berkeley-trained scientists working on the bomb project. His California roots were deep, dating back to his adventurous grandfather, for whom he was named, who had lit out with his brother from Wellsville, New York, to join the California gold rush. The two brothers made about sixty-five dollars panning for gold before they turned their attention to more practical ways to earn a living: burning charcoal and tanning hides. Eventually they purchased a small ranch in Hayward, a little town near Oakland, California, and planted cherry, apricot, and pear trees. Warren grew up on that ranch, digging stumps, milking the family cow, and listening to his grandfather’s stories—tall and uncomplicated tales of the frontier. Later he breezed through the University of California at Berkeley and just as effortlessly sailed through four years of medical school at the University of California at San Francisco. After obtaining his medical degree in 1922, he spent three years doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Then he was offered an assistant professorship in radiology at the new medical school being built at the University of Rochester. Before settling into Rochester, where he remained from 1925 to 1943, he toured the famous radiation laboratories in Europe with his wife, Viola.

In Paris, he met Madame Marie Curie, the recipient of two Nobel Prizes. The first, awarded in 1903, was a joint prize given to Curie, her husband, Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, for the discovery of radioactivity. The second, awarded in 1911, was for the isolation of pure radium. Marie Curie died of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934. By the time Warren met her, “She was very anemic and yellowish looking,” he recalled.
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“She had some burns on her hands and her skin was very rough.” The memory of her appearance would haunt him during his Manhattan Project days.

At the Rochester medical school, Stafford Warren had pursued several lines of experimentation, including “fever therapy” to treat gonorrhea. In a 1937 paper, he reported that fever therapy had shown some promise but warned that it should be undertaken only in a hospital
setting and under close medical supervision.
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When the gonorrhea sufferers checked into the hospital for treatment, they were given lots of water, salt, and a sedative. Then they were taken to a “radiant energy cabinet,” where they were put into restraints and a thermometer was inserted in their rectums. The subjects were periodically examined by nurses and given additional water and salt when it was needed. When the sedatives wore off, they were given whiskey.

By increasing the patients’ body heat, the doctors hoped they could kill the infection. But some patients died first. Warren reported that a twenty-two-year-old boxer (“normal except for the presence on the right temple of an unhealed wound produced by a blow received during a recent boxing match”) was comatose after spending twenty-four hours in the radiant heat closet.
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Twenty-two hours later he died.

When the Army surgeon general learned that Warren was to be in charge of the MED’s health and safety programs, he asked Colonel Nichols, “Why do you want that clap doctor?” Nichols, unwilling to explain why they wanted a radiologist, responded stiffly that they had chosen Warren “for good and sufficient reasons.”
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Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell were in charge of all matters relating to health and safety for the Manhattan Project. In Oak Ridge itself, a town of some 70,000 people that sprang up overnight, that meant overseeing everything from fly control to toxicology studies. Warren was particularly dismayed by the diet of the “colored people” who worked in Oak Ridge. Many drank Coca-Cola and ate potato chips and chocolate bars for breakfast, a menu so intolerable to Warren that he sent some of his men out to lecture on the advantages of drinking milk. On the subject of their diet, he recalled:

General Groves enforced a policy of strict compartmentalization in order to protect the secrecy of the project: “My rule was simple and not capable of misinterpretation—each man should know everything he
needed to know to do his job and nothing else.
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Adherence to this rule not only provided an adequate measure of security, but it greatly improved overall efficiency by making our people stick to their knitting.”

But Warren and Friedell were not required to adhere as rigidly to their “knitting” and actually knew more of what was going on than many senior scientists. Recalled Friedell, “When the general decided that the Army would keep its finger on everything, we really didn’t have operational authority, but we had, if you will, informational authority.
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That is, we found out everything that was going on, and we became aware of it, and every once in a while he would ask us what was going on.” Groves seemed to have a soft spot for the doctors, Friedell added. “He thought we had some special secret, the laying on of hands or whatever.”
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But the doctors often fell to squabbling among themselves. Louis Hempelmann didn’t get along with Joseph Hamilton. And Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell were forced to handle Robert Stone with kid gloves. Aware of Stone’s prickly and stubborn nature, they attempted to guide his research program by gentle suggestions rather than outright orders. “We wouldn’t go and say, ‘Hey, don’t do work on these rats—do this.’
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We wouldn’t do it that way. We would really have to go and say, ‘We think there is more need to do this, or our basic problems are as follows …” ’ Friedell once told a colleague.

Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell traveled freely to the Met Lab, to Berkeley, and to Hanford. But they had to get permission to go to Los Alamos. “The rest of the places really were at our discretion,” Friedell recalled, “but if you wanted to go to Los Alamos that was not easily done.”
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In Los Alamos, Stafford Warren occasionally stopped in to say hello or drink a cup of coffee with Oppenheimer. But most of the time he simply checked in with Oppenheimer’s secretary and then went off with Louis Hempelmann or James Nolan. Oppenheimer, who could be as cruel and condescending as General Groves, didn’t share the general’s soft spot for doctors; in fact, he didn’t like having a hospital on the laboratory grounds and didn’t even like to acknowledge that disease existed. His distrust extended to the most basic medical precautions. Oppenheimer refused to have his dog vaccinated for rabies, even though it was official policy and all the other dogs had been inoculated. Recalled Warren: “We didn’t know what to do; so finally I made a special trip out there.
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Oppie told Hempelmann he just wouldn’t do it. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t want to risk his dog, and it wasn’t necessary. So we decided the best thing to do under the circumstances was to ignore this
one dog. We didn’t want to have Oppie upset by this emotional hassle, since it was only this one dog …”

Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell also went frequently to Rochester, New York, to confer with scientists at a top-secret biomedical research facility called the “Manhattan Department” or “Manhattan Annex.” Located at the University of Rochester medical school and formally established in April of 1943 by the Manhattan Project, this laboratory had a large experimental animal colony. Many of the scientists who worked there were Warren’s former students or colleagues. Scientists at the Manhattan Annex in Rochester focused some of their first experiments on the toxicological effects of uranium. This effort was no doubt spurred by the vast uranium plants in Oak Ridge that were about to begin operating. Other radioactive isotopes, including plutonium, were also investigated. Unlike the other sites, the Rochester facility was not involved in the design or production of the bomb. Its concerns were strictly health-related.

All the medical doctors knew that plutonium would be extremely hazardous, but it really didn’t pose much of a problem throughout most of 1943 because there was so little of it. In the beginning, most of the cyclotron-produced material was going to Chicago. Los Alamos scientists were forced to use “stand-in” isotopes, such as uranium, for their chemical studies while they waited for the graphite reactor in Oak Ridge to come on line.
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Tired of waiting, Oppenheimer finally took a trip to Berkeley in the fall of 1943 and demanded that the chemists make him half a milligram of plutonium on the cyclotron. John Gofman, then a young Berkeley scientist, asked Oppenheimer why he needed it. “You’re going to have grams of it in a half-year to a year from Oak Ridge,” he argued.
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“Yes, I know,” he quoted Oppenheimer as saying. “But right now we need half a milligram and there’s only a twentieth of a milligram in existence.”

During September and October of 1943, scientists at Berkeley bombarded a ton of a uranium compound in the cyclotron. When they were finished, they had produced about 1.2 milligrams of plutonium—little more than one-tenth of the amount Don Mastick had in his vial a year later. Remembered Gofman, “After about three weeks of around-the-clock work, we had it down to about a quarter of a teaspoon of liquid.”
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Oppenheimer took one milligram back to Los Alamos and left the Berkeley group with the remaining two-tenths to use in their chemistry experiments.

At about the same time the Berkeley group was bombarding the uranium compound, Robley Evans published a follow-up study on the
radium dial painters in the September 1943 issue of the
Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology.
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The paper sent a ripple of fear through the bomb complex. Evans had included in his article a horrifying photograph of a female radium dial painter who had developed a grapefruit-size tumor in her chin from only 1.5 micrograms and died soon thereafter. He compared the alpha particles emitted by radium to the “first bullet of a repeating gun,” warning that so-called bullets could strike the human body not only through ingestion but also through inhalation.
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Evans assured his readers that not all radium dial painters were condemned to such a fate. With proper precautions, such as spotlessly clean rooms and elaborate ventilation systems, radium could be handled safely.
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The Manhattan Project doctors, who had yet to conduct their first animal experiment with plutonium, knew from its chemical makeup that it might pose the same dangers as radium. Like radium, plutonium was a heavy metal with a long half-life and was expected to deposit in human bone. Most important, it emitted alpha particles—the same kind of atomic bullets that radium emitted. Once an alpha emitter such as plutonium lodges in human tissue or bone, three or four cells in the immediate area get an enormous blast of energy for a very long time. Whether an alpha particle produces cancer is a chance event. It may be the first or the millionth particle that produces the crucial mutation that leads to cancer; or such a mutation may never occur.

Glenn Seaborg became aware of Robley Evans’s paper soon after it was published. He said it was “quite likely” that Joseph Hamilton brought it to his attention.
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“I’m pretty sure that even without that article I would have realized the danger of working with alpha particles of plutonium. I had been working with radioactivity ever since 1934 and wasn’t a neophyte.”

There were probably no more than two milligrams of plutonium in existence by the end of 1943. But Seaborg knew that that situation was about to change.
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As he looked around the Chicago laboratory, he recognized the grave hazards his discovery would soon pose to workers. “It was only when the plutonium appeared, and I could see it, or see solutions, you know, where people are stirring the solution and beginning to work with it, that it shook me like a thunderclap,” Seaborg recalled many years later.
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As 1943 gave way to 1944, a year that would lay the groundwork for the final Allied victories in Europe and in the Pacific, Glenn Seaborg wrote a brief note to Robert Stone. “It has occurred to me,” he began in the January 5, 1944, memo: