The Manhattan Project
Although several radium-dial workers won compensation claims in court, publicity of the primitive conditions in which they worked did little to better the lot of workers elsewhere in the nascent nuclear industry. While the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most obvious victims of the atomic attack, Americans also died from those bombs—many from the work of producing them.
Part of the problem was a cavalier attitude among scientists toward the potential dangers of radiation. In the 1930s, for example, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer would occasionally drink a solution of highly radioactive sodium 24 and then, to the amazement of onlooking graduate students, send a Geiger counter off-scale with his hand.55 In 1944 Dr. John Gofman, then a young graduate student working on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb, was heavily dosed when he was ordered to perform by hand a highly dangerous task involving plutonium that should have been handled only by machine. Gofman told us that in another instance the chief concern of safety personnel at the Berkeley Laboratory in California was the stacking of cardboard boxes that "might fall and hit someone." The room in which they were stacked, however, was highly radioactive, and the people in it were being severely exposed—with no particular concern on the part of the safety teams.56 In another case Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, an original member of the Manhattan Project Health Physics Group, could not convince plant engineers to separate the workers’ drinking-water system from the industrial-process system. Thus a leak or a mistaken turn of a valve could result in plant workers drinking radioactive water.57
Another Los Alamos scientist named Harry Daglian caused his own death in a process he called "tickling the dragon’s tail." By arranging a wall of tungsten-carbide bricks around a uranium or plutonium source, Daglian could determine how much material was needed to cause a chain reaction. But on August 21, 1945, Daglian accidentally caused a plutonium source to go critical. The air in his laboratory turned blue and radiation seared Daglian’s flesh. He died a horrifying death. Less than a year later Daglian’s boss, Louis Slotin, suffered a similar fate.58
The haphazard practices inevitably carried over to the workers at Los Alamos, many of them enlisted GIs. One, a GI named Ted Lombard, remembered that he and his coworkers often handled dangerous materials with their bare
hands, and without proper monitoring. "Contamination was rampant," he said. In certain shops "the fumes and dust were constantly in the air . . . The dust was on the floor. Uranium chips would be in your shoes. You went to eat with the same clothes and sat on the beds."59
By the summer of 1945 Lombard was complaining of stomach problems. In December the Army gave him a medical discharge. His health deteriorated, with the tissue in his lungs becoming fibrous and his skin developing sores that would not heal. The worst of it, however, came with his children and grandchildren. "I have a daughter, 31 [who] appeared to be healthy until we looked back," Lombard said to the 1980 Citizens’ Hearings for Radiation Victims in Washington. "It’s a slow, insidious thing. Now she’s in a wheel chair with neuromuscular, undiagnosed, multi-type seizures, lack of antibodies, lack of digestive enzymes. . . . My youngest son is a deaf mute, subject to multiple seizures, blood conditions and other undiagnosed problems. He’s mentally retarded too. Another son has migraine headaches . . . is aphasic and has blood problems. The two grandchildren are starting to show signs of digestive problems and blood conditions."60 Lombard has filed a claim with the Veterans Administration. The VA has acknowledged his exposures at Los Alamos but refuses to provide his medical records.
Evidence has also surfaced that operation of Los Alamos may have harmed the entire community. A 1979 study by the New Mexico tumor registry showed that from 1969 to 1974, breast cancer in white females in Los Alamos County was more than twice the national average. Cancers of the stomach, pancreas, bladder, and rectum were three times the state average. Cancer of the colon was more than double the state average.61 The only long-term health survey of Manhattan Project workers at Los Alamos was conducted by Dr. George Voeltz, director of Health Effects Research at Los Alamos. Voeltz concluded, after contacting twenty-six employees, that "no medical findings were reported which could be attributed definitely to plutonium."62 But his findings have been disputed. Dr. Edward Martell, a
radiation researcher for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, examined Voeltz’s data and concluded that "with equal justification one may state that most of the serious medical findings in this group can be attributed to plutonium."63
In 1974 Voeltz began a larger study of 224 workers exposed to plutonium at Los Alamos. Ted Lombard was not in either of Voeltz’s samples. But in a form letter to prospective participants for his second study, Voeltz revealed the results he anticipated: he asked former workers to "please cooperate to help us prove that exposures to low-levels of plutonium are not harmful."64
55. Rapoport, The Great American Bomb Machine, p. 122.
56. Gofman interview.
57. Karl Z. Morgan, interview, October 1980.
58. Karl F. Hubner and Shirley Fry, "The Medical Basis for Radiation Accident Preparedness," Proceedings of the REAC/TS International Conference, Oak
Ridge, Tenn., October 1979, p. 17.
59. "Statement of Ted Lombard," Citizens’ Hearings.
60. Ibid.
61. "Cancer Rate Elevated in Los Alamos County," Albuquerque Journal, October 12, 1979.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.