The Plutonium Files (30 page)

Although the atomic scientists and many other lay groups favored keeping the military out of the AEC altogether, the compromise legislation provided for ample input from the armed forces. First, there was the Military Liaison Committee, which was to become an extremely powerful force in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Second, there was the Military Applications Division, one of the AEC’s major headquarter divisions, which would be headed by a military flag officer and coordinate military planning with the AEC’s production programs.

On August 1, with members of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy looking on, President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. With the president’s signature, the AEC was officially born. But the factories and laboratories and equipment belonging to the Manhattan Project would not be transferred into civilian hands until January of 1947. During those five months, there would be more political battles over appointments to the new commission and last-minute arguments with Leslie Groves.

Although he had been much maligned by the scientists, Groves had acted quickly in the transition period after the war to prevent scientists
and doctors from leaving the Manhattan Project by offering them new equipment and an opportunity to spend part of their time on fundamental research. “That is part, as far as I am concerned, of their salary,” he told the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy.
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“These men have very active minds, they border on the genius type and unless we do that, we just cannot keep these men.” Groves warned that it would be “national suicide” to close the bomb factories.
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Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford were not rifles that could be cleaned, put away, and then reassembled some day, he pointed out. “We cannot shut down the Los Alamos laboratory and ever assemble a laboratory like it again, except in time of war.”
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During the limbo period of 1945 and 1946, Groves had continued to run the Manhattan Project with his usual efficiency, shutting down some facilities in Oak Ridge and shoring up others in Los Alamos. With the signing of the Atomic Energy Act, however, it was clear that there would be no place in the civilian-run organization for the so-called “Atom General.” Consequently Groves found the waning months of 1946 among the most difficult of his career. “For I was no longer simply a caretaker awaiting a final decision—I was a caretaker who could make no major decisions during a period when decisions were vital.”
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Groves managed to stay involved with the nuclear weapons program for another year or so as the first director of a new interservice agency called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. Created from the military remnants of the Manhattan Project, AFSWP (pronounced af-swop) was in charge of all the Defense Department’s nuclear programs. With its field offices at Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, AFSWP was within driving distance of Los Alamos and flying distance of the Nevada Test Site. “The whole purpose of the operation,” recalled General Groves, “was to make absolutely certain that in case of war, or even the threat of war, the Defense Department would have at its instant disposal teams ready and trained to assemble atomic weapons.”
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AFSWP, which was staffed by officers and enlisted men from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, did much more than that. The agency coordinated the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons research, conducted troop maneuvers at the Nevada Test Site, and churned out reams of propaganda. AFSWP was one of the most secretive and powerful entities to emerge in the developing Cold War and most of its records are still classified.

Stafford Warren had stuck by Leslie Groves through 1945 and most of 1946. But by then the novelty of being in the Army had worn off, and he longed to return to civilian life. After he had recovered from Operation Crossroads, he hit the lecture circuit and began warning select audiences about the dangers of the atomic bomb. Having witnessed Trinity, the devastation in Japan, and the massive contamination from the Pacific tests, Warren seemed to have developed—at least temporarily—a dread of nuclear weapons. Some of his more candid speeches were reserved for scientists and military personnel with security clearances. But other talks were given to carefully selected groups of nonmilitary people: medical students at Massachusetts General Hospital—“no reporters”; the Rochester Medical Society—“students and MDs—no reporters”; the Chatterbox Club—“Women’s Semi-professional Club—no reporters.”
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Warren asked General Groves for permission to tell some of the lay groups about the hazards of plutonium, noting that when the medical research was declassified it would show that plutonium “is probably the most toxic metal known, and that extremely small amounts deposited in the marrow will eventually cause progressive anemia and death years later.”
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He continued, “I believe a frank statement of this sort should be made now to professional and intelligent lay groups as part of the general discussion on the effect of the bomb as a whole. Sooner or later one of your favorite columnists will focus attention on product [plutonium] alone and the effect on public relations will be difficult to combat. Merged with the rest, it does not appear so startling.”

During a classified speech given in “Building X” on a Sunday afternoon
in October 1946, Warren sketched the apocalypse he feared would come. “Soon the number of bombs which will have been let off will have made available so much radioactivity that it will seriously damage our food supplies and make serious changes in our world economy.
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This is not a figment of the imagination at all.” To the security-cleared audience, he added the following warning:

Warren’s dire pronouncements upset many scientists at the time and have continued to rankle researchers down to the present day who feel the hazards of plutonium have been exaggerated. One person who was particularly upset when the remarks were first made was Los Alamos chemist Don Mastick. In a letter to Louis Hempelmann, Mastick wrote:

Hempelmann dismissed Warren’s comments, saying that he was surprised that Mastick gave any serious consideration to what the colonel said. “You know Staff better than that.
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I think that the plutonium from the thousand bombs scattered universally over the earth would do us all good (stimulates the spermatocytes—not for publication),” he wrote.
“Plutonium, next to alcohol is probably one of the better things in life. We are using it for toothpowder out here.”

After getting permission from General Groves, Stafford Warren mustered out of uniform on November 3, 1946. He had spent three years and two days in the Army.
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Homesick for his native state of California, Warren accepted a job as the first dean of the still-to-be-built medical school at the University of California at Los Angeles.

At UCLA, Warren maintained close ties to the Atomic Energy Commission, using his wartime connections to bring lucrative AEC contracts and researchers to the university. In fact, Warren disclosed in his oral history, all of the start-up medical school faculty that he hired were funded by the AEC. He also established a classified Atomic Energy Project at UCLA modeled after Rochester’s Manhattan Annex.
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One of the first tasks undertaken by the UCLA group was an investigation of how the radioactive fission products at Trinity were moving into the food chain, a study that AEC attorneys were initially reluctant to fund. Recalled Warren, “They were afraid we might find something.
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And I said, ‘Well, you’ve got to look, because if there is something, you’d better find it and prevent further things, or pay off, and face it before there is some scandal.” ’

UCLA scientists also did yearly fallout studies at the Nevada Test Site and examined people who claimed to have been injured by the radioactive debris. How committed Warren was to the Atomic Energy Project is unclear. Years later one AEC official doing a field review noted bitterly the project’s
“extremely
low morale.” Warren, he was told, had used the Atomic Energy Project as a place to employ his staff until the medical center was built.
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“Those that are left are the unwanted leftovers.”

Hymer Friedell, Warren’s second in command, also returned to academic life in 1946. He, too, maintained close ties with both civilian and military officials involved in atomic energy issues. He participated in some of the secret debates that occurred in the late 1940s over whether healthy prisoners should be used in total-body irradiation experiments and served on a joint military-civilian panel that oversaw biomedical research at the bomb tests. In Cleveland, at what is today known as Case Western Reserve University, Friedell established another large program called the Atomic Energy Medical Research Project. Under an AEC contract, he brought together a team of researchers to study the toxic effects of internally deposited radioisotopes and their possible applications in medicine.
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Every once in a while he would get a letter or a phone
call from someone interested in Ebb Cade, the Oak Ridge patient injected with plutonium.

With both Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell gone, General Groves was forced to appoint an interim director of the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section for the few remaining months of its existence. He chose James Cooney, a career Army officer and radiologist who had been assigned to his staff in February of 1946. Cooney’s first experience with the atomic bomb had occurred at Crossroads, where he served as one of Stafford Warren’s assistants. Warren told an interviewer years later that Cooney would take off about 4:00
P.M.
every afternoon for the beach club. “He wasn’t about to stay up all night to see if anything was going to happen.”
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Ironically enough, James Cooney, a stout, middle-aged man from Iowa, would go on to become one of the most powerful military leaders in the Cold War testing program.

In the ensuing years, Cooney blamed Stafford Warren for much of the public hysteria about nuclear weapons. He believed Warren “was so conservative he was a disaster,” recalled Herbert Scoville, an employee in the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and later the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Cooney’s son, James P. Cooney Jr., said his father believed one of the biggest fear mongerers was David Bradley, the physician who wrote the 1948 book about Operations Crossroads. “He was tremendously upset about the misinformation,” the son recalled.
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Robert Stone returned to San Francisco, where he conducted additional human experiments with both radioisotopes and X rays. As irascible as ever, Stone locked horns with Shields Warren, the new director of the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine, over an experiment in which Stone was administering dangerously large amounts of radio-phosphorous to arthritis patients. Stone would also become a leading advocate of a controversial proposal put forth by a civilian-military group to perform total-body irradiation experiments on healthy prisoners. Lined up behind him would be many of his old allies from the Manhattan Project and the admirals and generals of the Army, Navy, and Air Force who were preparing to wage the next war on a nuclear battlefield.

The nuclear battlefield, an unthinkable Armageddon that Albert Einstein predicted would return civilization to the Stone Age, was uppermost on the minds of civilian and military war planners after Japan surrendered. How would the armed forces wage such a war? How could they defend against it? One of the scientists they turned to for advice was Joseph Hamilton, who had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of how radioactive materials unleashed in bombs behaved in the human
body. Hamilton maintained close links with the AEC and the military, frequently flying back and forth to meetings in Washington, D.C. He had become, according to his protégé, Patricia Durbin, a “walker in the corridors of power.”
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Hamilton’s old dream, radioactive warfare, had been revitalized by Shot Baker, the spectacular underwater atomic bomb detonated at Operation Crossroads. On New Year’s Eve of 1946, the day before the Manhattan Project’s sprawling factories and laboratories were transferred to the AEC, Hamilton wrote a long memo to Colonel Kenneth Nichols, who directed the daily operations of the Manhattan Engineer District, describing how radioactive materials could be used to destroy cities, poison food supplies, and render uninhabitable thousands of square miles. Trivial amounts of fission products absorbed in the body could irradiate the bone marrow and produce “lethal effects,” he wrote. Aerosols of radioactive materials mixed with smokes could be fatal when breathed into the lungs. “One of the principal strategic uses of fission products will probably be against the civilian population of large cities,” he continued.
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“It can be well imagined the degree of consternation, as well as fear and apprehension, that such an agent would produce upon a large urban population after its initial use.”