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
48
CHAPTER FOUR
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
CHAPTER FOUR
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
52
CHAPTER FOUR
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
54
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.
5"
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
58
CHAPTER FOUR
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
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