The Plutonium Files (40 page)

On the afternoon of September 3, 1949, Washington, D.C., resembled the sleepy southern town it once had been.
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It was a Saturday, and nearly everyone had left for the Labor Day weekend. In the hot stillness, a teletype machine began clattering in a nearly deserted Air Force building. A weather reconnaissance plane on patrol from Japan to Alaska had picked up some unexplained radioactivity. One filter paper read 85 counts per minute; another showed 153 counts per minute.
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Over the next couple of days, the Air Force dispatched as many planes as it could in the direction of the Soviet Union to gather samples. Then they were analyzed in utmost secrecy by numerous experts. Eleven days later, on September 14, the experts had completed their analysis. The radioactivity could mean only one thing: The Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb. The news spread quickly among those with top security clearances. In a panic, Edward Teller called Robert Oppenheimer. Talking in his thick Hungarian accent, he asked Oppenheimer what he should do. “Keep your shirt on,” Oppenheimer counseled.
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The detonation of “Joe I,” named after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, spelled the end to America’s brief monopoly of atomic weapons. The Soviet bomb did not surprise many Manhattan Project veterans, but caught several military men by surprise, including Leslie Groves, who had predicted it would take the Soviets twenty years to build an atomic bomb.
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Soon after the detonation was announced to the American people, a profound debate began in military and scientific circles over whether the United States should move ahead with the development of the hydrogen bomb, or “Super,” as it was then called.

Edward Teller, who had been toying with the idea of the hydrogen bomb since the earliest days of the bomb-building project, believed an all-out effort was essential. But Oppenheimer and other scientific members of the AEC’s prestigious General Advisory Committee were morally opposed to building such an immensely destructive weapon. Oppenheimer considered the hydrogen bomb a “weapon of genocide.” Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, also members of the committee, declared it “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”
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Echoing the doomed aspirations of the Baruch plan, the General Advisory Committee held out the hope that perhaps the United States might be able to work out an agreement with the Soviet Union so that both countries would forego the building of the H-bomb. But that hope faded quickly in Washington’s anti-Communist atmosphere. Ernest Lawrence lined up behind Edward Teller. So did Lewis Strauss, who had been appointed by President Truman to the first AEC Commission. The State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brien McMahon, and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy also felt that the United States had no choice but to build the weapon. (McMahon, who had aspired to the presidency, said on his deathbed in 1952 that if he were president, he would direct the AEC to produce “hydrogen bombs by the thousands.”) On January 31, 1950, President Truman reluctantly gave the new weapon the green light.
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The president believed the United States should never use thermonuclear bombs but felt it was in the nation’s best interests to have them in its atomic arsenal.

Just days after President Truman made his decision, the United States learned that physicist Klaus Fuchs, a quiet bachelor who baby-sat children at Los Alamos, had been spying for the Soviet Union. Fuchs was a German-born scientist who had fled to England in the 1930s and eventually became part of the British bomb-building effort. He was a member of the British team sent to Los Alamos during the war and consequently knew nearly everything there was to know about the atomic bomb. He had even participated in high-level discussions at Los Alamos in 1946 about the H-bomb. His treason, many scientists and politicians believed, made it all the more imperative that the United States move as quickly as possible to develop the hydrogen bomb. Reflecting on the controversy years later, Teller said that three men had helped to overrule the opinion of Robert Oppenheimer and the General Advisory Committee: Lewis Strauss, Brien McMahon, and Klaus Fuchs.
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The creation of a successful thermonuclear weapon required prodigious mathematical calculations. Since the computer age had not yet
arrived, initially this meant slide rules and long, tedious hours of work. As the early months of 1950 wore on, it appeared as if the technical hurdles were too great to be overcome. Edward Teller blamed the stalled effort on the lack of theoreticians and dearth of imagination among his peers. But the bomb-building effort was soon to be intensified.

While Teller and his colleagues continued their work, North Korean Communist forces, equipped with Soviet-made weapons, invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. President Truman immediately ordered U.S. troops into Korea and thus began a bloody war in a distant country, a war few Americans wanted. Truce negotiations began a year later, on July 10, 1951, and would continue for two more years amid charges and countercharges of inhumane practices. In all, the brief conflict claimed the lives of a total of 2 million men.

The Korean War gave an even greater sense of urgency to the bombbuilding program and ultimately led to a huge buildup in weapons and a vastly expanded budget. Truman vowed that the United States would go to any lengths to resist the Chinese Communists, who had intervened when the United States and U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel, the demarcation line between North and South Korea. “Will that include the atomic bomb?” asked one reporter.
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“That includes every weapon we have,” the president responded.

Since the 1946 Crossroads extravaganza, only one additional nuclear test series had been conducted. In the spring of 1948, another huge armada of men, ships, and airplanes converged on Enewetak Atoll, a small ring of islands about 200 miles from the still-contaminated Bikini Atoll. There three atomic bombs with yields of 37, 49, and 18 kilotons were detonated from April 15 to May 15, 1948, in a test series called Operation Sandstone. This time the responsibilities for radiological safety fell to Colonel James Cooney, the career Army officer who had assisted Stafford Warren at Crossroads and served as Warren’s replacement in the Manhattan Project’s Medical Section before the project was dissolved.

A lover of epic poetry and sad Irish ballads, Cooney was born in Parnell, Iowa, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1903. He attended public schools in Iowa, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1925 and his medical degree in 1927. That same year he joined the Army Medical Corps and was commissioned as a first lieutenant twelve months later.
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Cooney missed out on combat during World War II but leapfrogged through the ranks after the war was over.

After Crossroads, Cooney was sent on a special mission to Japan to study the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Years later he said one reason the bombs did so much damage was because the Japanese were not prepared, a ludicrous statement given the fact the United States had deliberately chosen not to warn the Japanese.
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Following his stint with the Manhattan Project, Cooney returned to the Army Office of the Surgeon General, where he became chief of Special Projects Division in 1947 and also served as chief of the medical section of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. In 1948 he served briefly as chief of the radiological branch of the AEC’s Division of Military Applications.

With the thunderous crack of each atomic detonation, Cooney’s military career advanced. His personnel file grew thick with commendations from President Truman, James Forrestal, Leslie Groves, Kenneth Nichols, and other top military officers. Even J. Edgar Hoover dropped him a note, thanking him for permission to reprint Cooney’s article on the psychological factors in atomic warfare in the FBI’s monthly bulletin.
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By 1955 he had been promoted to major general and was deputy surgeon general of the Army.

“He was a wonderful doctor, a great radiologist,” recalled retired Army Major General Charles Gingles.
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“I called him every St. Patrick’s Day to wish him happy birthday.” Cooney kept his pockets filled with change, which he doled out liberally to small children, and often showed up at parties with a puppet. “Friends remember him for singing those wonderful songs and having the jumping jack [puppet] on his knee. He could manipulate it and make it tap dance,” Gingles recalled. “He always brought it to every party. And he had it colored, you see. A black man.”

During Operation Sandstone, fallout was heavy, but the tests were completed safely due largely to good luck and good weather. The most serious accident involved four men who suffered severe beta burns to their hands while trying to remove filter paper from the unmanned drone planes that had flown through the mushroom clouds. Huge blisters appeared and over the next decade several of the men had to undergo skin grafts and plastic surgery.
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Like Stafford Warren, James Cooney also went on the lecture circuit when he returned home from the Pacific. Instead of warning of the dangers of radiation, Cooney took the opposite position, arguing that there was no reason for the public to be so afraid of atomic bombs. He also began calling for psychological training for the troops in future atomic tests.
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The idea had come to him during Crossroads when he spotted two soldiers with rosary beads around their necks. “An Irishman
is no good when you frighten him to that extent,” he said several years later.
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Before a Boston audience, Cooney noted:

Following the 1948 Sandstone tests, military and civilian officials began looking for a place closer to home where they could explode nuclear weapons. The cost of mounting the huge operations at the Pacific Proving Ground was prohibitive, and weapons scientists wanted to speed up the development of the hydrogen bomb. Concerned that the Korean War might interfere with testing, the Pentagon was also worried that the Soviets might try to kidnap U.S. nuclear scientists or sabotage the tests in the Pacific.
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The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, in a 1948 top-secret study called “Nutmeg,”
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narrowed the possible continental test sites to five locations: the White Sands Guided Missile Range in Alamagordo, New Mexico, which included the Trinity site; Dugway Proving Ground at the Wendover Bombing Range in Utah; the Tonopah Bombing and Gunnery Range near Las Vegas, Nevada; another area in Nevada extending from Fallon to Eureka; and the Pamlico Sound—Camp Lejeune area in North Carolina.

Although the Nutmeg study did not specifically recommend any one site, a portion of the Las Vegas gunnery range came closest to fulfilling the criteria set out by the weaponeers. The land was already controlled by the government and would not require any tedious acquisition process; the site had a relatively low population density and favorable weather conditions; and most important, it was reasonably close to Los Alamos.

The future continental test site lay in a transitional zone between the Mojave and the Great Basin deserts and had been written off by many officials as useless real estate. “A good place to throw used razor blades,”
Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1950 to 1953, once observed.
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In truth, the region was a thriving ecosystem that was home to many species of mammals, reptiles, birds, and waterfowl.
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Gray-headed juncos, buffleheads, and great yellowlegs swooped through the blue vastness. Tortoises, lizards, and snakes made their homes in the shade of sagebrush and four-winged saltbush. Mule deer, coyotes, bobcat, wild horses, mountain lions, and bighorn sheep roamed the higher elevations.

The plans for a continental test site were put on a back burner after the Nutmeg study was completed. Sumner Pike, one of the AEC commissioners, remarked in 1949 that atomic tests could be justified on the North American continent only in the event of a national emergency.
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The Korean War provided just such an emergency.

On August 1, 1950, some five weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, some of the elder statesmen of the Manhattan Project and the boosters of the burgeoning nuclear weapons program gathered in Los Alamos to discuss the “radiological hazards” associated with such a test site.
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Among those present were Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Joseph Kennedy, and Wright Langham.

Shields Warren did not attend the meeting, nor did any of his representatives from AEC headquarters. Warren’s absence was conspicuous given the enormity of the pending event and the fact that the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine was charged with overseeing the health and safety of the nuclear weapons program. Warren’s exclusion probably was deliberate; he had not yet come around to the idea that atomic bombs could be detonated with impunity within the continental United States and may have argued against such a program. But shortly before his death, in an interview with Stewart Udall, who was representing people who lived downwind of the test site in a class-action lawsuit, Warren refused to concede that his absence was a “serious oversight” by those who convened the meeting.
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