The Plutonium Files (13 page)

Hempelmann had several discussions with Mastick and other chemists, including Joseph Kennedy and Arthur Wahl. Then he recommended to Oppenheimer that the biological research program be expanded. The program initially called for more animal experiments and the development of a chemical method to detect plutonium in urine, stools, and lungs. “It would not seem out of place to raise this question now as accidents similar to [Mastick’s] are bound to happen again despite the most elaborate precautions.”
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Oppenheimer, who had little use for medical doctors, immediately agreed. He made it clear, though, that he didn’t want the work done at Los Alamos. “As for the biological sides of the work, which may involve animal or even human experimentation, I feel that it is desirable if these can in any way be handled elsewhere not to undertake them here,” he wrote Hempelmann.
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Practical considerations, rather than moral or ethical questions, undoubtedly dictated Oppenheimer’s decision. In a telegram written several months earlier to the Met Lab’s Arthur Compton, Oppenheimer noted that the Los Alamos lab was “not equipped for biological experiments.” With its clutter of houses, barracks, trailers, and huts, Los Alamos was
bursting at the seams.
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In January 1943 the population was 1,500. By the end of 1944 it had nearly quadrupled to 5,675. (By 1945 it would be 8,200.)
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Louis Hempelmann, Stafford Warren, Joseph Kennedy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer met on August 25, 1944, to further discuss the medical research program on plutonium. At Warren’s suggestion, Hempelmann summarized the program in an August 29 memo to Oppenheimer. The project was to have three parts: the development of chemical methods to determine the amount of plutonium in urine, feces, tissues, and lungs; animal experiments to cross-check the chemical methods; and “tracer experiments on humans to determine the percentage of plutonium excreted daily.”
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After Los Alamos had developed “satisfactory analytical methods,” Hempelmann added, further metabolic studies would be turned over to another medical group, presumably the Manhattan Annex at Rochester.

Los Alamos scientists plunged into the project and, by January of 1945, had completed the first step—the development of a chemical process that could detect one ten-thousandth of a microgram of plutonium in urine and stool samples. The detection method was a long, tedious process that involved drying the sample and converting it to ash before dissolving it in acid. Although several people were involved in the effort, Wright Langham, a young chemist from Oklahoma, received the credit for developing the process. Scientists in Chicago and Berkeley also developed their own detection methods.

The Los Alamos group could not try out their approach until a contamination-free laboratory was ready in February.
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The test was first used on Los Alamos employees in March of 1945, and the initial results shocked Hempelmann. “They were just frightfully high. My God, we were just terrified because they suggested—I mean, if they were true—if that much plutonium was being excreted, the workers would have God knows how much plutonium.…”
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The lab began sending employees home for two days. Then the workers reported back to the hospital, where they showered and washed their hair, changed into hospital garments, and provided urine specimens for the next twenty-four hours. With those procedures in place, the plutonium detected in the urine dropped dramatically, suggesting the contamination was coming from the workers’ hands and clothes.

Still, the Langham test was inconclusive. With the process, the Manhattan Project doctors could measure the level of plutonium in urine or stools. But what fraction of the total body burden did the excreted
amount represent? To answer that question, they needed a human being in whom they could inject a known amount of plutonium and measure the rate at which the material was excreted. If scientists knew the excretion rate, they would then be able to extrapolate from urine and stool samples how much plutonium remained in the body of a worker who had suffered an accidental exposure.

The time had come to take the inevitable next step—a step that would cast its shadow over the Manhattan District and its successor agencies for the next five decades. Only a human experiment would confirm the usefulness of Langham’s test. “It was not until the first human tracer experiment had been performed in April 1945 (with the help of the medical section of the Manhattan District) that the above tests could be evaluated with any degree of certainty,” Hempelmann later wrote.
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In late March of 1945, Louis Hempelmann checked out a sedan from the motor pool and drove down to Santa Fe to pick up Hymer Friedell. The trip down the canyon was harrowing even for those scientists who didn’t have Hempelmann’s delicate constitution: thirty-five miles of dust and curves and one swooping bridge, ten feet wide and two hundred fifty feet long, to cross.

Friedell, clad in a brown Army uniform, had come from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Warren had come to rely heavily on Friedell: “I used him for my ‘crying wall,’ you might say,” Warren remembered years later.
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“I tried my ideas out on him and if he thought they were good, fine; if he didn’t then I’d look for the problem.”

Hempelmann and Friedell rumbled past the Indians hawking their wares on the Santa Fe Plaza and then headed in a northwesterly direction back toward Los Alamos. Despite the Corps of Engineers’ efforts to smooth the road, it was so narrow and bumpy from rainstorms and heavy traffic that the sedans often had to be sent to the motor pool for repairs following the punishing trips. The two doctors stopped once to fix a flat tire somewhere between the bosque, the lush cottonwood forest that outlines the Rio Grande, and the bone-colored cliffs that mark the last dusty miles into Los Alamos.
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Above them, hawks rode the spring thermals, their eyes probing the powdery red vistas for prey. The air was dry enough to cause nosebleeds.

As the dark sedan inched up the switchbacks, climbing higher and higher into the sky, now a vast blue, the two doctors may have talked of the upcoming meeting. Or they may have judged the matter too sensitive
and stuck to chitchat about the war. The nation’s attention had been riveted on Iwo Jima, a small island in the Pacific, where one of the bloodiest battles of the war was winding down. The Fourth and Fifth Marine divisions had gone from hole to hole and from cave to cave trying to wrest the small island from the Japanese. They had succeeded, but at a heavy price: 5,885 Marines had been killed and 17,272 wounded. Using Iwo Jima as a forward air base, Major General Curtis LeMay’s B-29s began their devastating, nightly firebomb raids on Tokyo and other major Japanese cities. Although Japan soon realized it was doomed to be defeated militarily, its troops fought on ferociously, determined to take as many Americans to the grave with them as they could.

In Europe, the war was drawing to a close. The Allies were massing at the Rhine River, Germany’s traditional western frontier. Staring defeat in the face, Hitler vowed to continue the war and ordered that anything which might be of use to the enemies of Germany be destroyed. Fortunately, Albert Speer, his minister of armaments and war, and a handful of Army officers were able to convince industrialists and politicians to ignore Hitler’s scorched-earth instructions.

In Los Alamos, the atomic bomb project was moving forward at a relentless pace. Beginning on February 2, 1945, the first kilogram amounts of plutonium had begun arriving from Hanford.
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The bomb material, which was in the form of a thick, jellylike mixture, was placed into shielded, wooden boxes and transported by Army ambulances. Ambulances were chosen because they were seen all over the country and raised no suspicions.
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As an added precaution, the drivers, who did not know what they were transporting, were instructed to take different routes and avoid stopping at the same places to eat. Occasionally Colonel Franklin Matthias, the military officer in charge of Hanford, would have counterintelligence officers tail the ambulances to make sure the drivers weren’t developing habits that might endanger their precious cargoes. At Fort Douglas, Utah, the ambulance drivers would deposit their boxes with a military officer and drive back to Hanford. Los Alamos drivers then would pick up the boxes and take them on to the lab. There were usually two trips per week.

The deliveries, Hempelmann admitted in a sworn deposition taken in 1979 on behalf of a former worker who was suing the lab, were about ten times what the laboratory could handle safely. The contamination grew so severe, he added, that “if it had not been that we had to get the bomb made as soon as possible, all work would have stopped.”
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The plutonium quickly spread beyond the confines of the technical
area. The wind, always an unpredictable companion in the desert, undoubtedly picked up a few stray atoms and scattered them beyond the fences. But most of the plutonium that slipped beyond the site came from the lab’s waste water, which initially was dumped into the streams and canyons that angled down from the mesa. Los Alamos and Pueblo creeks were crackling with radioactivity.
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It was highest where the water from the contaminated laundry drained into Los Alamos Creek. Along the laundry ditch, plutonium measured 144,000 disintegrations per minute per liter, about 325 times the allowable amount of plutonium that can be released into sewers today.
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Hempelmann warned that the contaminated canyons, while not a health hazard, presented the lab with serious legal problems:

At a laboratory meeting more than two decades later, Thomas Ship-man said, “Everybody had his own contaminated dump.
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Today we think we know where all of these were, but I wouldn’t want to guarantee it.” The contamination drifted down the canyons, swept along in the raging waters that materialized suddenly when storms lashed the mesa. Scientists detected plutonium in the Rio Grande, one of the great rivers of the West, only four years after the material had been discovered by Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues in Berkeley.
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Friedell had made the long, arduous trip to Los Alamos to discuss the human plutonium experiment the laboratory had been moving toward even before the vial had exploded in Don Mastick’s face. Friedell, like the Los Alamos scientists, knew that human guinea pigs would be needed to learn more about how plutonium was metabolized and excreted in the body. In a memorandum written two months before the meeting, which was not declassified until 1994, Friedell stated: “In conjunction
with the experiments conducted on animals, it is expected that on selected human subjects tracer studies with product [plutonium] would be made.”
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On Friday, March 23, 1945, Friedell sat down with Louis Hempelmann and other Los Alamos doctors and scientists to hash out details of the proposed experiment.
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Oppenheimer, who had grown so anxious over the bomb project that he sometimes was forced to take sleeping pills, “occasionally” dropped in, recalled Friedell, who was one of the only people still alive in the 1990s who attended the meeting and had firsthand knowledge of the experiment.
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The animosity between Los Alamos and Manhattan Project headquarters in Oak Ridge had been increasing steadily, and the meeting undoubtedly was tense. Both Hempelmann and Oppenheimer felt the Manhattan Project had not come through with the help they had been promised. Originally Los Alamos had planned to leave the biological studies to other sites, but the lab was not getting the answers it needed quickly enough and had begun its own research program.
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Friedell told DOE interviewers in 1995 that he wasn’t “terribly enthusiastic” about the experiment but felt it needed to be done.
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“Now my own recollection is that Dr. Hempelmann was in favor of the program, but he wasn’t wildly enthusiastic.
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I would say that the one that was more enthusiastic, was pushing this more, was Wright Langham.”

Until the war intervened, Langham’s future had looked like an unbroken stream of quiet days on the plains, studying the swirling patterns of sun-parched soil and conferring with ranchers on improving the yield of their cattle herds. Born in Winsburro, Texas, in 1911, Langham graduated in 1934 from Oklahoma Panhandle A&M College in Goodwell and received a master’s in chemistry from Oklahoma A&M College in Still-water a year later.
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His “ingenious studies of patterns of soil drifting in the dust bowl,” wrote Louis Hempelmann, so impressed the head of the University of Colorado’s biochemistry department that Langham was invited to enroll as a Ph.D. candidate.
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After obtaining his doctoral degree in organic chemistry, Langham worked for a year as a research chemist at the Met Lab in Chicago and then transferred to Los Alamos in March of 1944 where he helped to develop the detection technique for plutonium. Over the next decades, he became one of the world’s leading experts in the toxicology of plutonium, earning him the nickname Mr. Plutonium from his colleagues.

Langham was extremely bright but unsuited for the delicate tasks of the laboratory. His hands trembled so much that once he accidentally pricked himself with a needle filled with plutonium while trying to inject a rat, Louis Hempelmann recalled. “He came over to see me, and he was the most embarrassed person I think I have seen in my life.”
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Langham was hard driving, immensely ambitious, and often impatient. But beneath the exterior, Hempelmann observed, was an “underlying gentleness and good will.”
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By the time Langham reached Los Alamos, the Oklahoma Panhandle, with its stench of feed lots and sound of bawling cattle, was a distant memory. Langham was a pipe-smoking scientist, all tweeds and bowties, with a thin mustache stenciled across his upper lip.