The Plutonium Files (50 page)

J. Laurence Kulp, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Observatory, reassured Libby that researchers could obtain bone and tissue samples from humans of all ages in Houston and other cities. “Down in Houston they don’t have all these rules,” he said.
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“They intend to get virtually every death in the age range we are interested in that occurs in the city of Houston. They have a lot of poverty cases and so on.” (Kulp told a reporter in 1995 that the term “body snatching” was “meant to be a joke.”)
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With a casualness most people reserve for the weather, the Sun-shiners often talked about the number of bombs that could be detonated before mankind would be wiped out. One scientist had calculated that 100,000 weapons the size of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki could be detonated before the “doomsday” level was reached. But AEC scientist Forest Western told fellow Sunshiners he didn’t believe fallout would kill everyone:

The Sunshiners focused on strontium-90, one of the hundreds of fission products released during an atomic detonation. Strontium-90 was considered a “bad actor” because it is deposited in human bone and has a half-life of twenty-eight years.
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In other words, half of the radioactive strontium released during the 1954 tests would have decayed by 1982; half the remaining radioactive strontium would decay by 2010; and so on.

Strontium-90 is chemically similar to calcium and is readily assimilated in the bones of growing children who drink contaminated milk. For that reason, the Sunshiners were particularly interested in procuring the body parts of young children. Eventually they learned that children on average had three to four times more strontium-90 in their bones than adults.
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Scientists soon realized that other fission products could cause biological damage. One was radioactive iodine. The British were the first to detect radioiodine in the urine of children. Then it was discovered in animals near the Nevada Test Site. The military found radioiodine in their personnel in Hawaii and Washington. And finally Lester Van Middlesworth, a former student of Joseph Hamilton’s, detected it in cattle thyroids.

Van Middlesworth, an enterprising scientist, was working in his laboratory in Memphis, Tennessee, in the spring of 1954 when a Geiger counter began ticking frantically. The device had picked up radioactivity from the thyroid gland still in the head of a slaughtered steer that had been grazing on Tennessee grass. Van Middlesworth suspected immediately that the radioactivity in the steer’s thyroid came from the fallout from the 1954 Pacific tests. Hundreds, then thousands of thyroid glands begged from packing plants confirmed his hypothesis. “We knew in one week the entire country was contaminated,” Van Middles-worth said.
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“Nobody believed you could contaminate the world from one spot. It was like Columbus when no one believed the world was round.”

Van Middlesworth informed his mentor, Joseph Hamilton, of his suspicions.
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Instead of sharing Van Middlesworth’s alarm, the older man attempted to throw his former student off the track. “Dr. Van Middles-worth is a very energetic and enterprising young man with a penchant for rather abruptly making decisions,” Hamilton told an AEC official in a June 18, 1954, letter. “I saw the possible implications of what he brought to my attention and attempted to subdue his marked degree of enthusiasm by suggesting the traces of radioiodine in the Memphis area might
have arisen from airborne contamination from the Oak Ridge National Laboratories.”

Hamilton thought he had successfully diverted Van Middlesworth’s attention but later learned his former student had obtained some thyroid glands from the Armour Packing Co. in San Francisco. “Again I indicated a lack of interest in the topic feeling that this was probably the best way such matters should be handled,” Hamilton wrote.

An AEC official thanked Hamilton for “playing down” the matter with Van Middlesworth.
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But the AEC eventually embraced Van Middles-worth’s findings and began sending him thyroid glands from throughout the world. From those thyroids, Van Middlesworth could not only detect above-ground atomic blasts set off anywhere in the world but could also estimate the size of the explosions. “It was not as helpful as high-altitude airplanes, but it was a biological indication of what was going on,” Van Middlesworth said.
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Although the weapons scientists admitted the atomic tests carried some health risks, they invariably underestimated the danger. Los Alamos chemist Wright Langham, in a paper apparently written sometime after the 1956 presidential elections, calculated that fallout might produce an additional thirty cases of leukemia and ten cases of bone cancer per year.
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“There is no doubt but that the world population is receiving a small exposure to radioactive materials originating from nuclear weapons testing.
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Fission products from bomb detonations have and are depositing over the surface of the earth.… these effects may result in an increase in genetic mutations, shortening of life expectancy and increased incidence of leukemia and bone sarcoma,” he wrote. The paper said nothing about the hundreds of other radioisotopes released by the bomb, including radioiodine.

As the fallout controversy raged, the scientists continued to collect their human samples, often covertly. Some 1,165 human thyroid glands were collected during autopsies around the world and sent to the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies for analysis.
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A human finger, which had been amputated after being pierced with plutonium metal, also was sent to Oak Ridge. With the help of a cooperative local pathologist, scientists at the Hanford Reservation analyzed the plutonium in the tissues and organs of nearly 350 people who lived near Hanford or worked at the nuclear facility. University of Utah researchers examined the tissues of some 75 residents to determine radioactivity from the weapons tests. At a uranium processing plant in Cincinnati, Ohio, the kidneys, livers, and spleens of workers were taken during autopsy and analyzed for
uranium deposition. But one of the most extensive and long-lived body parts collection programs of the Cold War began at Los Alamos in 1959 after a plutonium worker named Cecil Kelley was fatally injured in a criticality accident.

Cecil was on his way to a New Year’s Eve party on December 30, 1958, when someone called and asked him to fill in at the DP West Site, a facility where plutonium was chemically separated and recovered from waste products. Reluctantly he agreed. Snowy footprints crisscrossed the technical area and the Sangre de Cristos were beginning to take on their luminous, other-worldly color. From somewhere came the spicy scent of burning pin on wood. The building where Cecil worked resembled a huge boiler room. Large steel tanks containing varying amounts of plutonium in solution stood about the room and hundreds of pipes crossed the ceiling.

Just ten minutes earlier there had been about a half-dozen maintenance workers in Room 218, but they had left when their 4:30
P.M.
shift ended. Cecil pulled on a pair of shapeless coveralls. He was thirty-eight years old, an ex-paratrooper and infantryman who had worked as a ski guide and instructor in Sun Valley, Idaho, before joining the Army in 1940. Afterward he had worked as a plutonium processing operator from 1946 to 1949, and again from 1955 through 1958.

Cecil mounted a small stepladder and looked down through a viewing window into one of the tanks.
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Normally the tank contained only a small amount of plutonium, but for some reason approximately seven and one-half pounds of plutonium had been washed into the vessel.
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The plutonium was sitting in a layer of organic solvents at the top of the tank.

Still looking through the viewing window, Cecil reached out and flicked a switch on the side of the tank that rotated a paddle inside the vessel. It was a simple, mechanical movement, which he had performed at least seventy-five times before. As the stirrer began turning, the liquids on the bottom were pushed outward and up the walls of the tank.
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A bowllike depression formed in the middle of the tank and the plutonium solvent rushed into the bowl. With a lot more plutonium molecules jostling each other, the solvent suddenly went critical. A chain reaction had begun.

A blue halo—the same blue halo that had anointed the brows of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin when they were fatally injured—filled
the room. A muffled
thump
was heard as the 225-gallon tank jumped about three-eighths of an inch. Cecil either fell or was knocked to the floor. He got up, turned the stirrer motor off, then turned it on again. A rumbling noise came from the tank and he ran outside into the snow screaming, “I’m burning up. I’m burning up.”
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Scientists later calculated that between 10,000 and 12,000 rad struck Cecil’s head and chest area.
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The neutrons and gamma rays ripped through his body, turning the sodium in his blood, the phosphorous in his hair, the calcium in his bones, and the silver-mercury fillings in his mouth radioactive. Two men working nearby took Cecil to a shower, passing by the tank where the chain reaction had occurred. One of them turned off the stirrer. By then Cecil could no longer stand. The workers laid him on the floor while they waited for an ambulance. A lab nurse observed he was in shock and unconscious but “with a nice pink skin.”

Cecil was almost dead when he arrived at Los Alamos Medical Center a few minutes later.
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His eyes were so red they looked as if they had been damaged by a welder’s arc. His lips were dusky blue. “The skin of the chest and abdomen was reddened as though it had been exposed to sunlight and received a first degree burn,” his medical records state.
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The strange sunburn also covered his back.

The hospital doctors and nurses tried to make Cecil as comfortable as they could. “I was on call at the time.
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I had never seen anything like it before,” said John S. Benson, a physician who still lives in Los Alamos. “He was miserable and scared. We were unhappy that he was in such a sad state. We were trying to make him comfortable.”

The emergency room nurses were initially unable to check Cecil’s blood pressure because he was so restless and agitated. Dr. Benson later wrote in his admission note, “When seen in the E.R. physical examination was impossible due to the fact that the pt. retched violently every few moments and was hyperventilating to the extreme, was quite restless and very agitated.
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His lungs were clear but pulse and blood pressure were not obtained. He was pale, moist, although he had taken a cold shower prior to being brought over.”

As Cecil thrashed wildly in the emergency room, a contingent of Los Alamos scientists arrived at the hospital and hurriedly began gathering the “data.” Using a tongue depressor, chemist Don Petersen, a friend of Wright Langham’s, scraped Cecil’s vomit from the floor and his explosive diarrhea from the walls.
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“We weren’t going to lose anything but the groans,” Petersen recalled in a deposition taken in 1997 by an attorney representing Cecil’s family in a lawsuit.
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Numerous blood samples were
taken and all of his urine was saved, including three ccs squeezed from his bladder after death. A portable Geiger counter placed next to him showed that he was emitting some 15 millirad per hour.

The massive irradiation of Cecil Kelley provided Los Alamos scientists with their third “experiment of opportunity.”
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Once again they could chronicle what happens to the human body when a bomb was exploded without the confounding effects of burn and blast. But there was an even more intriguing experiment they could pursue once Cecil was dead. They planned to harvest his organs to find out whether the plutonium he had accumulated in his body matched the predictions derived from exposure records and Wright Langham’s mathematical equations extrapolated from the plutonium injectees.

Langham, who had risen from his lowly Manhattan Project status to become one of the movers and shakers in Operation Sunshine and the world’s authority on plutonium, coordinated the collection and analysis of data. When Cecil’s wife, Doris, got to the hospital, Langham met her at the doors to the emergency room.
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Do you know anything about this? he asked her.

Yes, she knew a lot, she responded.

Then you know he’s not going to live, she recalled Langham telling her.

“I knew from the very beginning that he wasn’t going to live,” Doris said in an interview in 1994. “He was retching in the hospital emergency room. They wouldn’t let me in. I was right outside the door. I don’t know what they gave him. Morphine, I suppose. They settled him down and took him upstairs.”

Cecil was taken to a private room where he was laid in a bed supported by “shock blocks” and enclosed in an oxygen tent. A saline solution dripped into his veins. Thorazine was administered to curb the nausea. Hot water bottles were placed on his swelling arms. Still, the pain and restlessness continued. At 6:30
P.M.
Dr. Benson noted that Cecil was suffering from “severe chills—still retching, shocky, restless, moaning.”
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