The Plutonium Files (8 page)

Robert Stone accepted Compton’s offer but was slow to immerse himself in the bomb project. Initially he divided his time between Chicago and San Francisco, spending three weeks at the medical school and only one week at the Met Lab. As the pace at the Met Lab increased, Stone reversed his schedule, spending three weeks in Chicago and one week in San Francisco. Eventually he joined the Manhattan Project full time for the duration of the war.

Soon after Stone arrived in Chicago, he realized that a scientist of extraordinary skill would be needed to investigate the new fission products that Fermi’s pile would produce. Stone knew of no scientist better qualified for the job than his old partner, Joseph Hamilton. Two months after Stone was hired, Hamilton was put under contract by the Met Lab to do the biological studies on the fission products.

Unlike Robert Stone, Hamilton did not move to Chicago. Instead he remained in Berkeley, where he did his research and then forwarded his reports to Stone. Using the cyclotron, Hamilton produced micrograms of the same radioactive isotopes that would be cooked up in Fermi’s pile. Then he exposed rats to the isotopes, killed them, and studied how the radioactive materials were distributed in their bodies. A year or so into this assignment, Hamilton and Stone were among the scientists tapped by the bomb builders to investigate the possibilities of using the fission products as a weapon against the enemy. This investigation was known as radiological warfare, or RW. Hamilton advised Robert Stone in a May 26, 1943, report that radioactive isotopes sprayed from aircraft “offer the possibility of infecting to dangerous levels, large areas such as cities.”
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He added, “The poisoning of water supplies such as reservoirs, wells, etc., and food must be kept in mind.”

Radiological warfare was seriously considered by other Manhattan Project scientists and military officials early in the bomb-building effort, when there were still real doubts about whether a workable weapon could be made. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi once debated whether to use radioactive strontium to poison food supplies. “I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than
this,” Oppenheimer wrote in a May 25, 1943, letter to Fermi.
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Rad warfare was put on a back burner as the construction of the atomic bomb progressed, but Hamilton continued to nurse the idea for years.

While Joseph Hamilton conducted his rat experiments in Berkeley, Robert Stone was busy organizing the Met Lab’s Health Division. There were three major sections: the medical section, responsible for the health of the workers; the health physics section, which monitored the labs and developed new radiation measuring instruments; and the biological research section, which undertook a massive program to better understand the effects of external and internal radiation from materials inhaled or ingested.
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Each of these sections was working in uncharted territory and making decisions with potentially profound implications for the health of those they were charged with protecting.

The doctors working in the medical section performed routine pre-employment exams and regularly collected blood samples from employees. Generally speaking, low white-cell counts suggested that a worker had been overexposed to radiation, but Stone and his medical team soon suspected blood counts were not a reliable indicator because they varied so widely. He nevertheless ordered the Met Lab doctors to continue collecting blood samples because there was no other way to detect a possible overexposure. At the same time, he directed his staff to start looking for other biochemical changes in the blood, urine, or liver that might be indicators.
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This inquiry, begun legitimately enough, was the start of a long and ultimately fruitless search for a so-called biological dosimeter. The effort would cost millions of dollars and occupy scores of civilian and military researchers for the next thirty years.

The health physics section had the job not only of monitoring the labs for radiation but also translating what those results meant to exposed workers. This was not an easy task, given the fact that little or nothing was known about some of the different kinds of radiation they would encounter. To further complicate matters, the various forms of radiation differ greatly in the damage they can cause in human tissue.

As radioactive materials decay, energy is liberated in the form of X rays, gamma rays, alpha particles, or beta particles. When these rays and particles strike human cells, a tremendous transfer of energy occurs. The incoming energy can disrupt the delicate latticework of chemical bonds that hold atoms and molecules together and start a chain of events with several possible and quite distinct outcomes: a harmless dead cell, an impaired cell, or an altered cell that triggers the runaway growth known as cancer.

Alpha particles are ejected from radium, plutonium, uranium, and many fission products as they decay into another form. One milligram of plutonium, which was a tenth of the amount in Don Mastick’s vial, emits 140 million alpha particles per minute. Each alpha particle consists of two protons with two positive charges and two neutrons with two neutral charges. Although an alpha particle can travel only about three or four cell lengths, or about half the width of a strand of human hair, because of its large mass and charge, it can create extensive damage in a very small amount of human tissue through a process called ionization.

Beta particles are high-speed electrons that are 7,000 times smaller than alpha particles. They can penetrate human skin and cause burns, which are called beta burns, or cause damage within the body if they are inhaled or ingested.

Although their origins differ, X rays and gamma rays are essentially identical forms of energy. They are photons, or bundles of energy, moving at the speed of light. Traveling great distances, they can cause damage when they strike the body from the outside or from the inside, when radioactive materials are inhaled or ingested.

When Robert Stone’s team began their research at the Met Lab in the late summer of 1942, the basic unit of radiation was known as the roentgen. Named after Wilhelm Roentgen, the discover of X rays, the roentgen measures the ability of X rays to ionize air. Eventually the roentgen was supplanted by the “rem,” a term coined by Herbert Parker, one of Stone’s employees.
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The rem takes into account not only the amount of radiation but also its biological impact. (The roentgen, the rem, and the rad, another unit, were considered roughly identical and the terms were used interchangeably through the 1940s, 1950s, and even into the 1960s.)

For Stone and his team, the most challenging part of the job was the biological research into the hazards of radiation. While some knowledge had been gleaned from Berkeley’s medical experiments, Stone knew there was still little knowledge about the so-called tolerance dose for neutrons, alpha particles, and beta particles. “It must be remembered,” he wrote in a 1943 formerly secret report, “that the whole clinical study of the personnel is one vast experiment.
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Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much irradiation.”

That serious hazards existed had long been known. Soon after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X rays in 1895, the workers who handled the equipment began to exhibit injuries. The operators began noticing peculiar skin conditions, soreness around the eyes, strange muscle spasms,
and loss of hair. Within a few years, there were reports of anemia, tumors, and even several deaths. One of the most dramatic examples was the case of H. D. Hawks, an 1896 graduate of Columbia University. Mr. Hawks had been giving public demonstrations of his X-ray apparatus in the New York area until forced to stop work because of the physical effects of the X rays:

Within a year of Roentgen’s discovery, nearly every city in the United States had an X-ray center.
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The use of X rays increased dramatically in World War I. While the new equipment helped physicians locate bullets and bone fractures, the casualties were mounting among the men who operated the machines. By 1922 one researcher estimated that no less than a hundred radiation pioneers had succumbed to cancer caused by their occupation.
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In the mid-1920s, German physicist Arthur M. Mutscheller found injuries from X rays so appalling that he decided it was time to create scientifically valid protection standards. Mutscheller, like many scientists both before and after him, scoffed at the idea of absolute safety. Rather, the idea was to strike a balance between the amount of shielding needed to protect workers and a “tolerance dose” that, while not zero, would not harm X-ray operators.

Mutscheller then surveyed a few facilities and a couple of operators who seemed healthy. From this cursory examination, he concluded that workers could receive with impunity a dose that was translated by other scientists to be roughly the equivalent of six roentgens a month or 0.2 roentgens daily.

In 1934 the United States Advisory Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection recommended the daily tolerance dose be limited to 0.1 roentgen. Physicist Gioacchino Failla defined a tolerance dose as “that
dose of radiation which experience has shown to produce no permanent physiological changes in the average individual.”
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Stone and others used the concept of “tolerance dose” during the Manhattan Project. The concept evolved into what was called the “maximum permissible exposure” for external radiation or the “maximum permissible body burden” for internally absorbed materials. These concepts imply that there is some safe level of radiation, and they have since been discarded. Most scientists today generally agree that any amount of radiation, no matter how small, has the potential of causing harm.

Robert Stone knew the standard for external radiation was based upon “very sketchy” scientific data.
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In the 1943 report, he wrote, “It is our hope that the tolerance dose based on very scanty previous knowledge will be found correct—when we have the actual dose carefully followed by the physicists and the clinical conditions followed by the physicians.”
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Knowing that the standard for external radiation was built on such a shaky foundation must only have increased Stone’s worries. Added to this burden was the other half of the horrifying equation: The protection standards for radioactive materials absorbed internally were built on equally skimpy scientific data.

Much of what was known about internal exposure was based on the strange case of the radium dial painters. At about the same time the public began learning that X-ray workers were succumbing to fatal anemias and leukemias, reports began surfacing in New Jersey about young, seemingly healthy women who were dying from a strange affliction that first manifested itself with unhealed infections in the mouth. A New York oral surgeon named Theodore Blum was the first to recognize that something was amiss. In 1924 a young woman who painted luminous figures on watch dials had come to him because her jaw had failed to heal following some dental work. Blum took one look at her mouth and realized he was seeing something he had never seen before. “Clinically, I couldn’t diagnose a thing, but she told me where she worked, and I surmised that her jaw had been invaded—yes, and pervaded—by radioactivity.”
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Blum wrote up his findings in a medical journal, ascribing the young woman’s afflictions to “radium jaw.” His report caught the attention of Harrison Martland, a scrappy medical examiner in Orange, New Jersey, whose suspicions had been aroused by the unexplained deaths of several
young women living in the area.
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Family doctors had attributed the deaths to syphilis, Vincent’s angina, anemia, and other diseases. But Martland wasn’t satisfied with those explanations and began examining stricken dial painters himself.

The nation’s largest dial-painting company, the United States Radium Corporation, was located in Orange, New Jersey, where Martland worked. Other dial-painting companies were in Connecticut, Illinois, and New York City. The dial-painting industry began around 1915 and probably employed some 4,000 women, 800 of whom worked at the Orange plant.
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The dial painters applied a luminous paint mixture containing a phopshorescent zinc sulfide and minute amounts of radium to watch dials, buttons, military instruments, even religious artifacts. When the alpha particles emitted by the radium struck the zinc sulfide mixture, they caused tiny scintillations, or flashes.
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When there were large enough numbers of the flashes, the eye would see them as a uniform illumination.

The dial painters at the Orange plant, almost all of whom were working-class women, worked in a large, airy room on the second floor of the factory called the “Studio.” Wearing shirtwaists and skirts, they sat at heavy wooden benches, dipping their camel’s-hair brushes into pots of yellowish paint. Since they were paid piecemeal, they worked very rapidly, sometimes painting as many as 250 to 300 watch dials a day.
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The women often licked their paintbrushes into a point many times during the course of a work shift. This procedure, which was called tipping, allowed them to better follow the shaded script numbers on a finely made watch. Over the weeks and months, they would swallow many micrograms of radioactive material.