Ch. 4. General Groves's Problem: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

General Groves's Problem 



On the edge of the marsh water, near the monumental K-25 factory at Oak 
Ridge, Tennessee, stands a solitary blue heron, its head angling for prey. 
"Danger. No Fishing Radiation," reads a sign. Across the pond, the gray 
walls of the plant glitter in the late evening sun. The smokestacks are cold 
now, the big machines silent and patient as the heron, waiting to be 
dismantled and hauled away. Close your eyes and the ghosts return. 
Mausoleum now, this half-mile-long steel colossus was once among the 
biggest industrial buildings in the world. Here, in the spring and summer 
of 1945 and throughout the cold war, tens of thousands of women and 
men worked through the night in a cacophony of heat and smoke, their 
backs bent to the purpose of a nation. Here, in the shade of Tennessee's 
Black Oak Ridge, lay America's biggest wartime secret, where nature was 
rendered in man's image more powerfully than ever before. Here, on the 
banks of the Clinch River, exotic ore and minerals from the corners of the 
globe were transfigured with an elemental genius by scientists, farm 
laborers, and migrants from across the United States, punching time 
clocks, sculpting the future, and enriching uranium for the Hiroshima 
atomic bomb. 

I T WAS A cold December morning in 1943 in northwest Washington, 
DC, and Brigadier General Leslie C. Groves had another problem on his 
desk. The portly, tough-talking engineer was in charge of the United 
States biggest and best-kept wartime secret. He was the army s chief of the 
Manhattan Project, and its staff was 



CHAPTER FOUR 



building an industrial infrastructure to manufacture the world s first atomic 
bomb. 

It was a gargantuan task. In complete secrecy Groves and the Army 
Corps of Engineers were overseeing the work of tens of thousands of 
laborers, scientists, and engineers who in just three years would create 
factories and laboratories rivaling the size of the entire U.S. automobile 
industry. The budget of the Manhattan Engineer District, as the project was 
officially known, eventually would run to over $2 billion and would be 
concealed almost entirely from the U.S. Congress.' 

The Generals days were a blur of covert action. There were secret 
flights to mysterious giant new factories being carved from virgin sites in 
Tennessee, New Mexico, and Washington State; huddled conferences in 
the Manhattan Projects New York and Washing-ton, DC, offices; and 
endless telephone calls, troubleshooting with top military lieutenants. The 
United States was in a nuclear arms race with Germany, Groves believed. 
Yet some of the key industrial processes needed to make the U.S. weapon 
had not even reached pilot-plant stage. Much of the nations atomic 
program, he knew, was still mired in laboratory development. 

Groves had a new headache that December morning. There were 
disturbing reports of workers and scientists being gassed and burned in the 
bomb project's laboratories and factories. Colonel Stafford L. Warren, 
chief of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section, needed help. He wanted 
General Groves to use his authority to pry loose some secret information 
from the army's Chemical Warfare Service. Warren wanted to know what 
the military's poison-gas experts could tell the Manhattan Project about the 
toxicity of fluoride.' 

General Groves immediately agreed to help. Getting more information 
about fluoride toxicity was vital. Despite the many uncertainties facing the 
Manhattan Project that bleak winter of 1943, Groves was sure of one thing: 
fluoride was going to be essential in making the United States' atomic 
bomb. Manhattan Project scientists were planning to use a "gaseous 
diffusion" technology to refine uranium. In that process uranium is mixed 
with elemental fluorine, forming a volatile gas called uranium hexafluoride, 
which is then "enriched" by diffusing that gas through a fine barrier, or 
membrane. The lighter molecules containing fissionable uranium 



GENER AL GROVES S PROBLEM 



47 



needed for a nuclear explosion pass though the membrane more 
quickly and are captured on the other side. But because only a handful 
of the lighter molecules make it through the membrane each time, 
many hundreds of tons of fluorine, and thousands of stages of 
progressive enrichment, would be needed to produce enough uranium 
for a single atomic bomb. By January 20, 1945 when the K- 
25 gaseous diffusion plant on the banks of the Clinch River was loaded 
with fluoride for the first time, the plant's fantastic appetite would 
include a work force of 12,000, a hunger for electricity that rivaled the 
city of New York, and a diet of some 33 tons of uranium hexafluoride 
each month. 4 

The hunger for fluorine was one of the most closely guarded 
military secrets of World War II. A special office of the Manhattan 
Project in New York City, known as the Madison Square Area, 
coordinated much of the fluoride work. Elemental fluorine was 
designated simply the gas or fresh air. Scientists at the University of 
Chicago were advised in a secret 1942 memo that all fluorides are to 
be disguised ... in that they give definite clues to the chemistry 
involved. ' 

Dragooning fluoride into military service was also one of the cen- 
tral technological challenges of the war, requiring the full resources of 
academia and industry.' While the idea behind gaseous diffusion was 
simple, elemental fluorine and uranium hexafluoride were 
extraordinarily corrosive and toxic: Fluorine was easily the Earths 
most reactive element, scientists knew, often combining violently with 
other chemicals even at room temperature, vaporizing steel in a flash 
of white heat, for example, and presenting bomb-program engineers 
with extraordinary challenges and nightmarish hazards. So dangerous 
was the pure element that industry had avoided fluorine before the war, 
regarding it as "a laboratory curiosity." 8 

Wartime necessity became the mother of invention. Thousands of 
researchers in crowded laboratories worked to enlist fluoride in the 
fight against fascism. Scientists from Columbia, Princeton, Johns 
Hopkins, Purdue, Ohio State, Penn State, Duke, the University of 
Virginia, MIT, Cornell, and Iowa State studied the chemical, along- 
side engineers from some of the biggest industrial companies in 
wartime America. The companies included DuPont, Chrysler, 
Allis-Chalmers, Westinghouse, Standard Oil, the American 
Telephone 



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and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Mallinckrodt, Eastman Kodak, the 
Electro Metallurgical Company, Linde Air Products, Hooker Chemical, 
Union Carbide, and Harshaw Chemical.' 

Columbia University scientists made an early technological 
breakthrough. In December 1940 a tiny two-cubic-centimeter capsule of a 
liquid, code-named "Joe's Stuff," was delivered to the campus in New York 
City. Researchers handled it with care. Inside was virtually the entire 
world s existing supply of a radical new chemical compound known as a 
"fluorocarbon" — in which carbon atoms were bonded not with hydrogen, 
as in conventional "hydrocarbon" oil, but entirely with fluorine atoms. 10 
The Columbia researchers soon confirmed that the liquid had Herculean 
strengths. The fluoride atom was bound to the carbon atom so tightly that 
even the hyperaggressive elemental fluorine gas was held at bay. The 
discovery was crucial. Inside the Oak Ridge gaseous-diffusion plant, hun- 
dreds of huge compressors and blowers would be needed to push the 
uranium hexafluoride gas through the multiple enrichment stages. If 
regular oils were used to grease these engines, however, the predatory 
fluorine atom stripped the hydrogen from the hydrocarbon, destroying the 
lubricant and the machinery." 

The bomb-program scientists could now fight fire with fire. Fluoride, 
bonded to carbon atoms in fluorocarbons, would protect the machinery 
from the fluoride in the uranium hexafluoride gas. In other words, fluoride 
would protect the machinery from fluoride's uniquely corrosive powers. A 
crash research program at Columbia — led by a brilliant Russian immigrant, 
Aristide V. Grosse — soon found a way of mass-producing the top-secret 
compounds. 12 By 1945 thousands of pounds of fluorocarbon oils and seals 
were being delivered to Oak Ridge. 13 

DuPont mass-produced the fluorocarbons. Their prewar expertise in 
manufacturing Freon was vital to the U.S. nuclear program. Thousands of 
pounds of similar refrigerants were now needed to cool the K-25 diffusion 
plant. DuPont's fluoride-based plastic called Teflon also gave the United 
States a key wartime advantage. Japan's atomic scientists had struggled to 
manufacture and handle small amounts of the corrosive uranium 
hexafluoride. But Teflon — which had been first fabricated in a DuPont lab 
in 1938 — allowed U.S. companies to move enormous quantities of fluoride 
around the country.' 



GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 



49 



"The basic problem in making the bomb, General Groves wrote, 
"was to arrive at an industrial process that would produce kilograms of 
a substance that had never been isolated before in greater than 
sub-microscopic problems. ' 

Solving that problem required fluorine scientists. Without their 
inventions, the United States atomic bomb would have been impos- 
sible, noted the Manchester University scientist and historian Eric 
Banks. Most historians have focused on the physics of the atomic 
bomb, chronicling how the atom was split. The vast contribution of 
chemical engineers to the Manhattan Project — and the radical debut of 
a powerful chemical element onto the global stage — has largely been 
ignored. It is a striking omission, pointed out Banks. " American 
fluorine chemists had a huge impact on the production of the bomb." 

But exploiting fluoride was a double-edged sword, as the bomb 
programs scientists soon discovered. On January 20, 1943, the senior 
Manhattan Project doctor, Captain Hymer L. Friedell, paid a visit to the 
sprawling New York campus of Columbia University, where a 
small-scale gaseous diffusion plant had already been built. Almost a 
thousand researchers would eventually work on bomb-related projects 
at Columbia's War Research Laboratory. 16 After his visit Captain 
Friedell warned of possible health problems: The primary potential 
sources of difficulty may be present in the handling of uranium 
compounds, as noted above, and the coincident use of fluorides which 
are an integral part of the process.'" 

His warning was accurate. A fluoride-gas release at Columbia 
later that year produced "nausea, vomiting and some mental con- 
fusion"; in 1944 another researcher, Christian Spelton, developed 
pulmonary fibrosis after repeatedly fleeing clouds of uranium 
hexa-fluoride gas.' Other health problems were also reported. Dr. 
Homer Priest, a leading Columbia University fluoride scientist, 
complained that his "teeth seemed to be deteriorating rapidly." Dr. 
Priest told a doctor that he bled more freely and that "there has been a 
progressive increase in the degree of slowness of healing and of pain 
in the period he has been doing this work.'" 

The epidemic spread. At Princeton leaking fluoride gas left sci- 
entists feeling more easily fatigued. There were multiple reports of 
illness at Iowa State and of fluoride acid burns at Purdue, where 



50 



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two researchers were badly gassed with carbonyl fluoride in 1944. Health 
problems hit industry scientists too. At DuPont rather severe weakness 
was reported in 1943 by three chemists who had received "heavy 
exposures to fluorine. The symptoms were ascribed by them to the 
oxyfluorides formed, a report said' 

Accounts of fluoride injury mushroomed as the laboratory work moved 
into full-scale industrial production. At Oak Ridge in September 1944, 190 
pounds of hexafluoride gas escaped into a room, drifted outdoors, and 
formed a chemical cloud 20 yards by 20 yards." Nine workers were 
exposed "for periods of twenty seconds to five minutes, injuring the 
mouth, salivary organs, pharynx, skin, eyes and lungs.' The news got 
worse: that same year, '944, General Groves got shocking new reports of 
multiple deaths in the nuclear program. Details of those fatalities and 
fluorides role have remained hidden, often for a half-century or more. 

The stories of the DuPont workers, who may have been fluorides first 
wartime fatalities, have not been made public until now. (And they remain 
anonymous: once-secret military documents describing the deaths do not 
record their names.) On January 15, 1944, a laboratory assistant, a chemist, 
and a girl technician producing the fluorinated plastic Teflon for the bomb 
program were exposed to waste gases. Shortness of breath followed twelve 
hours later and by the end of 36 hours, all three were in the hospital, 
Colonel Warren was informed.-' 3 The chemist recovered but the other two 
died terrible deaths, turning purple and unable to breathe." When the 
twenty-three-year-old female "expired at the end of ten days," her 
autopsied lungs resembled a victim of a World War I poison gas attack. 
Colonel Warren s deputy, Captain John L. Ferry, suspected that the DuPont 
fumes contained "certain oxyfluorides" and suggested the military 
investigate the possibilities of this material being used as a poisonous gas. 

Although the army ordered up fresh toxicity studies, fearing " similar 
compounds may be formed in some of the other fluoride manufacturing 
operations," DuPont dragged its feet, investigators suggested, perhaps 
seeking to protect Teflon s postwar commercial potential. The 
manufacturer considers that we were buying a pack -aged product and is 
not interested in our investigating the toxicity of the materials involved, 
reported Captain Ferry. Several of the 



GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 



components thus far identified give good promise for commercial uses 
other than that contemplated here, explained a second army official. 
(Subsequently there were additional reports of sickness associated with 
Teflon. British scientists visiting a DuPont factory just after the war 
confirmed that heated Teflon fumes were linked with "excessive 
weakness, tiredness, nausea and sore throat.")" 

A Philadelphia Story 

THE SECRET DEATHS continued. Arnold Kramish is tormented by 
injuries sustained in perhaps the worst fluoride accident of World War II. 
Sitting in a New York hotel eating breakfast one October 2001 morning, 
pastry crumbs sprinkling his shirt, Kramish described how he still endures 
painful fluoride skin eruptions on his legs — fifty-seven years after 
surviving an explosion that killed two of his colleagues. In the 1970s he 
sought medical help for the recurring sores. A Navy doctor explained to 
him that fluoride stalks you the rest of your life. 

He is stalked, too, by memories of the chemical hell that erupted in 
South Philadelphia in September 1944. After the war Kramish became a 
top nuclear scientist and government diplomat, well-versed in the ways of 
government secrecy. But half a century after the fluoride accident, in a bid 
to gain recognition for the victims, Kramish broke his silence and revealed 
details of that disaster, including the names of the men who were killed and 
why General Groves kept the deaths secret. 28 

On the morning of September 2, 1944, twenty-one-year-old Private 
Kramish and engineers Peter Bragg and Douglas Meigs reported for duty at 
the sprawling Philadelphia Navy Yard. The Yard housed a super-secret 
facility using hot liquid fluoride and pressurized steam to enrich uranium 
for the atomic bomb. 29 Kramish was one of ten volunteers who had arrived 
to train on the new equipment. Just three days earlier, at the Manhattan 
Project's vast construction site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Harvard 
University president James Conant had gathered the men and asked for 
volunteers. Conant warned them that their work in Philadelphia would be 
one of the more dangerous parts of the Project, remembers Kramish. 

James Conant was acutely aware of the dangers the men faced from 
fluoride. The chemist was one of President Roosevelt s top atomic 



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advisers. He knew about the DuPont Teflon deaths. And he had seen the 
secret army reports on fluoride toxicity that General Groves had requested 
in December 1943. 10 The reports explained that the military was carrying 
out wartime human experiments with fluoride gases at the armys 
Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, searching for chemical warfare agents." 
The army had received data about fluoride experiments on humans in 
England that had produced powerful central-nervous-system effects. 12 And 
there were reports from captured prisoners of war suggesting that the Nazis, 
too, were investigating fluoride as a war gas. 33 Harvard's president was so 
disturbed by the extraordinary toxicity of certain fluoride 
compounds, especially those used in the human experiments, that he issued 
a secret warning to a senior U.S scientist about the atomic industrial 
fluoride work. As an organic chemist, Conant wrote, I think I should 
point out to you ... it is conceivable that similar effects would occur with 
any fluorinated organic acid, although probably the compounds would be 
less striking in their action. It is further conceivable that these compounds 
could be formed in small amounts by the action of fluorine gas on the acids 
or related compounds.' 

That fall day at Oak Ridge, however, as he asked for volunteers, Conant 
did not mention fluoride. All ten men raised their hands. Any mildly 
inquisitive guy was not going to opt out, said Kramish. 

At first the Philadelphia mission was more Keystone Kops than cloak 
and dagger. When they arrived at the Thirtieth Street train station, a 
military official in street clothes ordered them into Wana-makers 
department store to replace their uniforms with anonymous civilian garb. 
But the Navy did not give them enough money, and all the men could find 
were cheap Hawaiian shirts, says Kramish. He remembers ten men 
furtively changing into their new outfits in a nearby subway station, 
emerging into the sunlight wearing brightly colored shirts and GI boots. 

Two days later Kramish, Bragg, and Meigs were at the Navy Yard, 
working on the secret machinery. At lunch Kramish received a two-dollar 
bill in his change. "Give it back," his friend told him, warning that it was an 
omen of bad luck. Kramish pushed the bill into his pocket. 

That afternoon, back at the plant, at 1:20 PM a massive explosion 
suddenly tore at the machinery. Boiling steam and fluoride jetted 



GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 



53 



onto Kramishs legs and back, clawing at his lungs and eyes. He fell 
backward, temporarily blinded. A trained scuba diver, Private John 
Hoffman ran into the smoking chaos holding his breath, pulling the injured 
men from the room and slicing Kramishs clothes from his burned body. 
This act of bravery would win Hoffman a Soldiers Medal, although the 
award was kept secret. I pulled three guys out. Everybody was 
shell-shocked, Hoffman told me. Fluorine gas had gotten loose — it was 
pretty pungent. I had to watch what the hell I was doing." 35 

The afternoon detonation echoed across South Philadelphia. A giant 
white plume of uranium hexafluoride gas drifted over the dockyard and 
into the nearby battleship USS Wisconsin. Douglas Meigs and Peter 
Bragg lay in their death throes. A priest attempted last rites on Kramish, 
whose wife was told that he had been killed. A once secret report of the 
disaster makes gruesome reading: twenty -six men had been exposed to 
460 pounds of fluoride and uranium in a huge chemical cloud. Douglas 
Meigs was sprayed with live steam containing liquid, solid and gaseous 
material in large quantities ; he died after sixteen minutes. Peter Bragg 
expired an hour later with third-degree burns over most of his body. He 
seemed in a great deal of pain, the report noted, and became violent 
shortly before death and resisted all attention." 

The remaining men survived, although many had serious and 
slow-healing wounds. Some experienced intense pain in the scrotum, 
penis, or about the anus, probably because of the hydrolysis of the 
chemicals in these moist areas, the report notes. Survivors also suffered 
unusual "nervous system" effects. One man was temporarily rendered 
"almost incoherent." This "altered mental state" was "more than could be 
explained on a purely fear reaction basis," the report said. "In all 
probability the injurious effects observed on the skin, eye, mucous 
membranes of upper respiratory tract, esophagus, larynx and bronchi were 
all directly caused by the action of the fluoride ion on the exposed tissues," 
concluded a military doctor." 

Kramish reports that at a closed wartime inquiry, he learned that part of 
his suffering had been unnecessary. The head of the Navy project, Dr. 
Philip H. Abelson, had known how to treat fluoride burns, according to 
Kramish. But fluoride and uranium were 



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CHAPTER FOUR 



considered so secret that Abelson refused to give the medical facts to the 
arriving doctors, telling them, I m not sure you guys are cleared, Kramish 
recalls. As a result, he adds, the doctors walked among the injured and 
dying men that afternoon guessing what the burns might be. (Fifty years 
after the accident, Kramish reports he cornered Abelson one lunchtime in 
the Cosmos Club in Washington. Abelson refused to talk about the 
accident, Kramish says. " It was clearly a trauma for him.") 

The Philadelphia explosion traumatized the entire Manhattan Project. 
In addition to the fluoride strewn over south Philadelphia, it was perhaps 
the largest release of man-made radiation that had ever occurred. General 
Groves feared that a nuclear fission accident had taken place. The military 
quickly suppressed media coverage. The Philadelphia coroner was not 
told the cause of the men's 
death. 37 

That disaster night, roused by Groves, the Manhattan Project's top 
doctor, Colonel Stafford Warren, drove through the darkness from Oak 
Ridge, Tennessee. He arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital in time to 
seize the organs of the dead men, stuffing the heart and lungs of Meigs and 
Bragg into his briefcase before returning home, he later told Kramish. 
(Warren and Kramish became friends after the war.) Warren explained to 
him that the organs had become classified material, Kramish recalled, 
and that they were sent to the University of Rochester for examination. 
The deceased were buried without them," Kramish added. 
Family members, such as Elizabeth Meigs, who was on her way to meet 
her husband in Philadelphia for Labor Day, would never learn that fluoride 
may have killed their relatives. General Groves kept silent about the 
fatalities. In his book about the Manhattan Project, Now It Can Be Told, 
Groves tells only that several persons " were injured" in Philadelphia and 
that the investigation "held up the work for a while." Groves's fear of 
admitting the deaths, Kra-mish says, was "not only that the atomic bomb 
project might be compromised, but that if project workers learned of the 
true hazards of working with uranium, they might balk. 39 Suppressing 
toxicity information "would extend to fluoride," added Kramish. Working 
with it was dangerous. 

Arnold Kramish still has the two-dollar bill he received that lunchtime. 
He keeps it wrapped in lead; it remains contaminated. 



GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 



55 



Although fluoride played a nearly fatal part in Arnold Kramishs 
wartime experiences, he believes that few people have any idea of the 
chemicals wartime importance. It is not as exotic as the atom, he 
says. For most historians, radiation is all they want to talk about. 

The Fear Mounts 

FEAR NOW GRIPPED wartime fluoride workers across the U.S. 
atomic complex, and with good reason. 40 Thousands of them were 
entering an abominable work environment, beyond even Victorian 
horror, with daily exposure to a witch's brew of fluoride chemicals 
— including, for the first time in human history, the ferociously reac 
tive elemental fluorine gas. 41 

"When a jet of pure fluorine strikes most non-metallic materials," 
began one 1946 secret memo detailing occupational hazards, " the 
surface of the material is instantly raised to an incandescent white heat. 
Personnel may be severely burned by heat radiated from the surface 
even when they are not directly exposed to fluorine at all.... NO 

PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT HAS BEEN DEVISED TO DATE 
WHICH WILL RELIABLY AFFORD EVEN TEMPORARY PROTECTION 

AGAINST A HIGH PRESSURE JET OF PURE FLUORINE, emphasized 

the memorandum. 42 

Incredibly, fluorine was not the most toxic gas to which workers 
risked exposure. When excess fluorine was vented to the 
atmosphere (a common procedure, as we shall see) a truly 
venomous family of even deadlier 

compounds — "oxy fluorides" — were formed. One of these 
chemicals, oxygen fluoride, a bi-product of fluorine disposal, was 
probably "the most toxic substance known," bomb program 
researchers bluntly reported. 43 

Another common workplace hazard was hydrogen fluoride acid 
( HF), which had the fiendish property, if splashed on skin, of ini- 
tially escaping detection but then slowly and painfully eating into a 
victim's bones. 44 One especially fearsome compound called chlorine 
trifluoride, which was used to "condition" or clean machinery, was 
so reactive that Allied intelligence agents suspected Hitlers SS had 
also experimented with it, as an incendiary agent. 45 U.S. atomic 
worker Joe Harding, who used chlorine trifluoride at the Paducah 
gaseous diffusion plant in Kentucky, described the compound as a 
violent monster that makes [pure] fluorine look mild by its side. 



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CHAPTER FOUR 



Working with chlorine trifluoride was more dangerous than handling TNT 
while you was climbing a tree, said Harding.' 

Fluoride posed another hazard. It dramatically boosted the tox-icity of 
other cold war chemicals. The biological havoc wreaked by beryllium, for 
example — a key metal that makes nuclear weapons more powerful — was at 
least doubled by the synergistic presence of fluoride, bomb program 
scientists found. By 1947 there had been nineteen or more deaths reported 
in the nation s beryllium plants, with the carnage spreading rapidly. (When 
newspaper reporters got wind of the fact that families living near the 
beryllium plants were also getting sick, the Atomic Energy Commission 
tried to suppress the story.) 

Beryllium smelters were felled with an especially devastating one 
-two punch, said the Manhattan Project scientist Robert Turner. Men 
became ill with a foundry fever marked by shivering, high tempera tures, 
and profuse perspiration. The knockout blow from fluoride fumes 
followed sometimes days later, the scientist noted, with workers turning 
purple, gasping for breath, and coughing up blood. Turner was critical of 
other scientists. Investigators studying fluoride had shown a disregard of 
the fundamental principles of modern toxicology. Discovering how 
workers were being hurt required considering a range of factors, including 
the size of the particles involved, ways the poison entered the body, and 
awareness that the action of a compound is not equivalent to the sum of 
the action of its component parts," he wrote" Turner described the 
pathways by which tiny fume-sized particles of beryllium oxyfluoride 
penetrated deep into lungs with missile-like force. When the molecules 
arrived inside the alveoli, the atoms of fluorine and beryllium separated 
"like a charge bursting." Both beryllium and fluoride were poisonous, the 
scientist said, but it was the liberation of fluoride deep inside the lung that 
produced the most catastrophic health problems, destroying tissue, 
choking breath, and leaving permanent lung scarring." 

Similarly, when uranium was converted into hexafluoride gas, that 
poisonous metal also got a deadly new punch. This enhanced toxicity of 
uranium presented nuclear planners with perhaps their most diabolical 
quandary. Enormous quantities of uranium hexa-fluoride process gas 
were required for even a single atomic bomb. But when the hex was 
exposed to air, it rapidly formed a dense 



GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 57 



white cloud of HF gas and fume-sized particles of a highly toxic 
compound known as uranyl fluoride or uranium oxyfluoride 
( chemical symbol UOF z ). The compound injured laboratory 
animals in microscopic quantities, while even a few milligrams 
ingested daily proved fatal, bomb program doctors reported. 

Exposure to these two chemicals would be a daily fact of life in the 
diffusion plants.' In the hidden chambers of the massive K-25 plant, 
where precious uranium for the Hiroshima atomic bomb was first 
captured, "there will be a continuous escape of U0 2 F in the cold trap 
rooms," officials warned. Those workers would be exposed 8 hours 
per day regularly, explained Medical Captain John Ferry in a secret 
June 16, 1944 letter to an Oak Ridge contractor." 

"Just Watch Anyone That Has a Tie On" 

AS PREDICTED, WHITE fluoride smoke became a familiar sight and 
smell to generations of workers in Americas gaseous diffusion plants. 
I have never seen it that there wasnt a thick haze of process gas smoke 
in the air, said Joe Harding, remembering his almost thirty years 
inside the gaseous diffusion plant at Paducah, 
Kentucky. 

It does have a pungent odor, confirmed another worker, Sam Vest, 
who in 1970 followed his father and two uncles into the Oak Ridge 
nuclear factories. In a 2001 interview in his home near Oak Ridge the 
fifty-four-year-old Vest tugged on a never-ending cigarette, recalling 
his own three decades at America's first gaseous diffusion plant. His 
soft Tennessee drawl transported a visiting writer back inside the 
cacophonous K-25 building and to the apprentice electrician's first 
encounter with uranium hexafluoride gas. Vest watched one morning 
as clouds of smoke belched from equipment he was replacing. He 
asked a more experienced worker about the strange white fogs' "I said, 
"What is that stuff?' And he said, "That is process gas.' And I said, 
"Should we be here? I don't see anybody with respirators on. - The 
older worker explained an Oak Ridge safety rule: "Just watch anyone 
that has a tie on." He added, And if he leaves hurriedly, you leave 
behind him. That was my first indoctrination," Vest said. "I was just a 
kid." 

Medical advice given to men who had been in a chemical release, 
said Vest, was to go home and drink a six pack of beer.'" Vest 



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remembered thinking, "I dont know anything about chemicals or uranium 
hexafluoride or anything like that. But none of this looks on the level to me. 
These men are standing in this fog with no respirators. I thought "My God, 
what kind of a place is this? 

On another occasion Vest found himself high above the plant in the 
pipe gallery, replacing electrical heaters. We were wading though this 
yellow powder," he recalled. "I asked [a colleague] Clyde, I said, "Clyde, 
what is all this yellow lying around here?' And he said, That is product. I 
said, What do you mean? And he said, "Well, that is UO F 2 . After it cools 
down, it solidifies and that is enriched uranium.' And I said, "Shouldn't we 
have some kind of breathing apparatus or something? And he said, Hell no, 
we work in this all the time. It wont hurt you.'" 

Similar official safety reassurances, from the highest levels of the 
United States government, were given to tens of thousands of fluoride 
workers throughout the cold war. The assurances were false. Fluoride was 
a state secret. Workers were neither told what chemicals they were 
handling nor of the warned dangers. "The people hired by the contractors 
were not, because of security, told of the hazards involved in their work," 
Colonel Stafford Warren wrote to a deputy, Dr. Fred Bryan, in September 
24, 1947. 60 

Despite an early awareness that cancer and occupational injuries were 
extraordinarily frequent at the gaseous diffusion plants, work ers could 
never prove that such was the case. "All medico-legal and insurance 
statistics which refer directly to process hazards" were classified "secret," 
an AEC document noted. 61 In data that were declassified only in 1997, for 
example, it was revealed that during the earliest months of the K-25 plants 
operation, from June 1945 to October 1946, there were 392 chemical 
injuries from uranium hexafluoride, 58 injuries from fluorine, 21 from 
hydrogen fluoride, and six injuries from fluorocarbons. 62 

Area C 

WORKERS QUICKLY GREW suspicious at the endless medical testing. 
Behind a barbed wire fence at a secret plant in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, 
known as Area C, segregated young African Americans — who loaded a 
chalky green salt into furnaces — gave regular urine samples to 
government doctors. 



GENE RA I, GROVES S PROBLEM 



59 



"You had to be tested all the time, said Allen Hurt, an employee of 
the Harshaw Chemical Company, which ran the secret plant under 
contract for the Manhattan Project. He was one of five former workers 
who agreed to talk about his experiences. 

The industrial complex on the Cuyahoga River was one of the 
Manhattan Projects most important sites. Harshaw engineers had 
invented a way to add extra fluoride molecules to uranium tetra 
fluoride — the green salt the workers were handling — 
manufacturing the vital hexafluoride process gas needed for 
uranium enrichment. ( Hex means six and tetra means four.) By 
June 1944 the plant was capable of producing a ton of hex each day 
for shipment by truck to Oak Ridge for the K-25 gaseous diffusion 
plant. 

The government reassured the workers about the tests. In a 1948 
visit to Cleveland, for example, a Manhattan Project senior doctor, 
Bernard Wolf, gathered the workers together to tell them that all our 
records indicate that no unusual hazard existed. The truth was very 
different. Secretly, on August 5,1947, the AECs W. E. Kelly had 
informed Harshaw s senior manager, K. E. Long, that the status of 
health protection at Area C is unsatisfactory is several respects. He 
cited in particular: 

1 . Contamination of the Area C plant, Harshaw plant 
area and an unknown amount of contamination of the 
surrounding neighborhood with uranium and fluoride 
compounds. 

2. Exposure of operating personnel to uranium and 

fluorine compounds by direct contact and inhala-tion. 64 

Harshaw workers knew something was in the air. The moment you 
stepped out of the time clock office, there would be an odor, a burning 
sensation, recalled Henry Pointer. It would sting your face, you 
would inhale it too. Union organizer John L. Smith was sick one day 
after repairing a pipe. It was the fumes — next thing I felt breathing 
difficulty and started vomiting and went to the first aid and started 
shitting in front of them at the same time, he said. ( Although he never 
knew what had poisoned him, Smiths symptoms were of acute 
fluoride poisoning.)" 



60 



CHAPTER POUR 



There were fluoride fatalities at Harshaw as well. Young black women 
made up about half of the Area C workforce. Twenty-two-year-old Gloria 
Porter started at the Cleveland works in 1943, filling hydrogen fluoride 
tanks. On October 9, 1945, she saw a man eaten alive by the fluoride acid 
when a storage tank at Area C exploded." I heard this rumble, remembers 
Porter, who had just finished her shift. All of a sudden this cast iron 
[storage tank] just burst open and the smoke, the fumes from the acid, you 
just couldnt see nothing, and that stuff was rolling and the more it rolled 
the further we would run." 

A male worker helped Porter to scramble over the barbed wire fence that 
surrounded Area C. As she stared back, a horrific image was seared in her 
mind. She watched men struggling through a giant cloud of hydrofluoric 
acid. I saw all of them coming out with hunks of flesh just falling off of 
them, and the stomach, and their arms, and I said "My God, I cant look at 
that. That man cant live. He looked just liked bone, but he fell right then. 
Two men were killed in the accident, and a good friend was badly burned, 
recalls Porter, who left Area C the following year." After the explosion, I 
just wanted to get out, she added 

African Americans may have been hired for fluoride work in order to 
conceal the chemical s toxic effects. Most fair complexioned men could 
not be employed in the production plant, reported a once classified 
wartime study of Harshaw fluoride workers. 68 Acid fumes produced skin 
that was dehydrated, roughened and irritated, the report noted. Some 
workers had "hyperemia" or acute reddening of the face. When that report 
was published, however, the black- and-white language of segregation had 
grown less stark. The chemical sensitivity to the fluoride was now more 
subtly described as "more severe in fair complexioned men." 69 

Harshaw veterans confirmed that only African Americans were 
employed inside the heavily guarded Area C plant. Outside, white male 
supervisors oversaw the big cylinders being hoisted onto trucks for the 
journey to Oak Ridge, remembered a former worker, James Southern. 
Yeah, but they werent pulling, interjected worker Henry Pointer, the 
labor people were all black. 

One young white laborer, John Fedor, who joined the company in 1939 
with a tenth-grade education, was never permitted to enter the 



GENER AL GROVES S PROBLEM 



61 



Area C complex. He had no idea that the plant was performing secret 
war work for the government. To work there you had to be cleared 
and I was not cleared to go in, he explained. Nevertheless Fedor grew 
worried about fluoride exposure at Harshaws big hydrogen fluoride 
(HF) plant, which supplied Area C, and about the terrible conditions 
those workers endured. (He became a union organizer after the war.) 
His Safety Committee invited state inspectors inside the HF plant. 
Inside, fluoride levels as high as 18 parts per million were measured, 
six times the permitted safety standard. 70 "There were men walking 
around with rags over their noses, there were no respirators, there 
was no safety program," Fedor remembered. Burns and acid 
splashes were common. "The good Lord knows what it did to the 
inside of a person's body. How many people may have suffered 
fatalities over the years I have no idea, he added?' 

Allen Hurt carries visible reminders of his years at Harshaw 
Chemical. He pulled a trouser leg up to reveal fifty-year-old scars he 
blamed on fluoride. They didnt give you protection, he said. It 
would eat the clothes and it would do the same thing to your skin. 
Sickness has stalked former employees, survivors claim. By the time 
the plant closed in 1952, an estimated 400 to 60o workers had been 
employed at the Area C plant. Cancer and heart ailments have been 
especially frequent among former workers, John L. Smith claims. The 
people who worked there are dead. Those that ain't dead, there's five of 
them in the nursing home." The remaining veterans smolder with 
anger. Mostly, they wish they had been given the dignity of choosing 
their wartime fate. "At least we should have been properly informed," 
said Smith. "What few is left is as pissed off as they can be." 72 

Hazards to the local population could occur" 

WHEN HE WAS shown several declassified documents describing 
how fluoride and uranium were regularly vented from the Harshaw 
smokestacks, union organizer John Fedor was suddenly concerned. 
"I wonder about the immediate area," he remarked, "whether there 
were illnesses caused by that, or whether it just dissipated when it 
got in the air?" 

Fedor is right to be concerned about the effects of fluoride on the 
area around Harshaw. It was not, of course, just the atomic 



62 



CHAPTER FOUR 



workers who were secretly at risk from fluoride. From the beginning of the 
nation s nuclear program, officials worried about families living near bomb 
factories. Hazards to the local population could occur if large amounts of 
fluorine or if fluorides were to be discharged in effluents, wrote the 
medical director Colonel Stafford Warren. 73 

Again, the fears proved accurate. Fluoride was secretly vented, and it 
spilled across communities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, 
Tennessee, and Ohio. 74 Those releases increased as the United States 
expanded its cold war atomic arsenal and built two mammoth new gaseous 
diffusion plants, at Paducah, Kentucky, and Portsmouth, Ohio. 75 

Environmentalists often cite Cleveland s Cuyahoga River — which burst 
into flames in June 1969 — as the lurid spectacle that helped bring about 
the Clean Water Act. The shocking sight of a waterway ablaze 
precipitated a moment of national clarity, focusing attention on the 
dumping of chemical wastes into the environment. Less well remembered, 
however, is a $9 million lawsuit brought in 1971 by the local Sierra Club 
against the Harshaw Chemical Company for fluoride pollution, which, the 
organization charged, had eaten and corroded the main Harvard Dennison 
Bridge over the same Cuyahoga river." That bridge had to be rebuilt. 

The government had watched the situation in Cleveland nervously. 
Following complaints in 1947, a team from the University of Rochester s 
Atomic Energy Project was quietly dispatched to measure fluoride 
pollution. The scientist Frank Smith secretly reported levels of 143 parts 
per million of HF venting from the Harshaw smoke stacks. (By contrast, 3 
parts per million is the stan dard considered safe today for workplace 
exposure.) The results are on the low side, Smith wrote, since the 
efficiency of the sampling procedure we used is not too good for 
[elemental] fluorine and oxygen fluoride; if considerable quantities of 
these two gases were present in the air, we probably missed a part of 
them. 77 The AEC was worried about lawsuits. Dr. Smith pointed to several 
lower fluoride readings in his data. Those measurements, he said, might 
prove the most valuable ... [as they] in no case exceed the level declared 
legally permissible in Massachusetts, California and 
Connecticut. 



GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM G 



63 



Storm clouds continued to gather over Cleveland. A July 1949 AEC 
report warned that although the complaints from civic organizations have 
been concerned with general atmospheric pollution, and neither fluoride 
nor uranium have been mentioned specifically, it is likely that as time 
progresses, the extent of air pollution by fluorides will receive attention " 78 
The AEC ran more secret tests after a consultant, Philip Sadtler, was hired 
in 1949 by the local community to investigate Cleveland air pollution. 
While uranium releases were within permissible levels, they concluded 
that the fluoride data, however, satisfied none of the criteria.'" 

Several of the former Area C workers confirmed that pollution was 
rampant. Allen Hurt parked his car downwind from the plant whenever he 
worked the night shift. Overnight, fallout would come, and my black car 
was full of gray dust, and I washed if off and I could see little fine pits 
where it had ate into the paint. If it does that in metal, what would it do to 
us? he wondered. Hurt recalled that local residents complained: They had 
a problem with the people up on the hill, because it was coming up there 
and bothering their homes. 

Environmental damage around atomic bomb plants was often 
widespread. At Oak Ridge, officials planned, in 1945, to dump 500 pounds 
of fluorides each day into the nearby Poplar Creek; a decade later, airborne 
fluoride emissions had scarred a fifty-square-mile area of wounded and 
dying trees, officials stated, and posed a clear threat to grazing animals. 
And in 1955, some 615,000 pounds of fluorine was "lost in the vent gases" 
from a single in-house plant making uranium hexafluoride at Oak Ridge. 80 

Lawsuits alleging fluoride human injury and destruction of crops and 
farm animals were sparked against DuPont's Chamber Works in New 
Jersey and the Pennsylvania Salt Company's plants in the Pennsylvania 
towns of Easton and Natrona.' At a second gaseous diffusion plant in 
Portsmouth, Ohio, which began operations in 1954, fluoride exposure was 
immediately declared a "significant liability" for both employees and the 
general public," a document noted. 82 - At the AECs giant Feed Materials 
Production Center in Fernald, Ohio, waste fluorides were the biggest 
single problem, where some 15,000 pounds of fluorides were being 
disposed of each month in the nearby Miami River, according to a pollution 
expert, 

Arthur Stern. 83 



64 



CHAPTER FOUR 



And as late as the mid-1980s, thirty years after it began operation, the 
gaseous diffusion plant at Portsmouth, Ohio, was still dumping 15.6 tons 
of fluorides each year into the atmosphere." 

Darkness hid fluoride releases at the K-25 plant in Tennessee, 
according to former supervisor Sam Vest. "I could pull into the parking lot 
at night and smell it. I could tell they were releasing fluo rine from the 
fluorine plant. They waited until after dark to release it, because it was just 
a horrendous cloud." Some workers found a strange beauty in the 
nighttime releases at Oak Ridge, Vest added. "Operators described it as 
being just beautiful, to just stand there and watch crystals on a clear cold 
night go up [into the air]." 



5 



General Groves's Solution 

Dr. Harold Hodge and 

the University of Rochester