Oppenheimer. Collateral Damage

"Why would we go to the middle of nowhere for who knows how long?"

      Dialogue from the movie "Oppenheimer."

The nuclear bombs weren't developed in "the middle of nowhere." 

They were somewhere -- and upwind of somebody.

Jack Mullen had special reason to take three hours away from his ongoing passion for sports and politics to watch the movie Oppenheimer. In the years before Jack was born, his parents and older siblings lived downwind of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington state. Hanford, along with Los Alamos, New Mexico and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, were places where the materials for the bombs were created and tested. Although it did not become apparent until 14 years after WWII ended, Jack's brother became a casualty of that war. Jack Mullen grew up in Medford, worked alongside me in local orchards, and then as aides to U.S. Representative Jim Weaver. He now lives in Washington, D.C.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

Dos Equis ran a television ad featuring a handsome, Latin man referred to as “the most interesting man in the world.” I think J. Robert Oppenheimer is the world’s most interesting man in the past 100 years, and not because the “Oppenheimer Martini” served at his parties in Berkeley and Los Alamos was any better than a cool glass of Mexico’s finest cerveza. For years, I have had a running fascination with Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. I looked forward Christopher Nolan’s newly released blockbuster movie. For the most part, I was disappointed.

I realize that three hours is too short to do justice to the brilliant, tortured life of the father of the atomic bomb. BBC came the closest to capturing the nuances of Oppenheimer’s life in a 1980 seven-part series that will rerun starting on Saturday, August 15 on BBC. Nolan’s fast-paced movie seemed to resort to a bullet point presentation of Oppenheimer’s life. Perhaps those who attend the movie will be motivated to look more deeply into Oppenheimer’s life. If so, I recommend the BBC series, and hope PBS runs it again.

When I lived in the Bay Area, I felt a sense of awe whenever I set foot on Berkeley’s University of California campus. When friends from Oregon visited for Duck football games, I took them to the spots where scientists like Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Seaborg experimented, taught, partied, and loved. These young scholars were as emotionally engaged in the happenings in the Spanish Civil War as they were in their scientific experiments. The BBC series captured the charged emotions of that era in Berkeley. Soon Robert Oppenheimer and a brilliant group of scientists were called to save the world by manufacturing an atomic bomb.

The top-secret Manhattan Project kept many, including the Vice President of the United States, in the dark. Such secrecy was imperative to keep the nation’s adversaries at bay. The downside of strict secrecy was the coverup concerning the health hazards the spent radiation waste imposed on those living near nuclear sites. That was a point briefly mentioned at the end of the movie, but now is starting to appear in grim articles on the health effects on families that lived close to the Trinity site, where the first test bomb was detonated.

Unfortunately, the nation’s haste to develop the bomb had devastating effect on families far beyond New Mexico, including my own. Before my father was stationed aboard the USS Patuxent in the Pacific, he was a medical corpsman at the Farragut Naval Station in northern Idaho. The Navy allowed him to bring his wife and two of his young children to Farragut in 1944-45.

Jay Mullen, age 5, and older sister Marilyn

 At that time, in eastern Washington, the Hanford nuclear facility was secretly producing plutonium for a second atomic bomb, the bomb which the United States eventually would drop on Nagasaki. Apparently, little thought was given to handling Hanford’s nuclear waste. The plant belched forth its airborne nuclear waste, which contained Iodine-131. Later studies showed the nuclear waste was deposited over a wide swath of land in eastern Washington and Oregon, Idaho, and Utah. Cows munched on grass coated with radioactive Iodine. My brother Jay, age five at the time, drank milk and ate ice cream laced with the potent iodine.

Jay was a sophomore at the University of Oregon in the fall of 1959 when he started to feel sick, with his hands shaking and his body sweating profusely. He went to student health services and learned his thyroid was going berserk. U. of O. doctors sent him home to Medford, where he started experiencing bouts of paralysis. Medford doctors had no idea what to do about the paralysis and sent him south to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The intermittent paralysis baffled UCSF doctors to the point that they asked my father if he’d mind if they could study him, all expenses paid. With medical bills putting a burden on family finances, my dad agreed.

UCSF doctors induced paralysis by changing Jay’s serum potassium levels, then performed hundreds of tests over a month where they could observe the sequence of muscular paralysis. UCSF concluded that removal of his entire thyroid might be the cure. The thyroidectomy cured the paralysis.

Compared to all the high incidences of early cancer in areas downwind from Los Alamos and Hanford, my brother got off easy. The removal of his thyroid might have prevented him from developing thyroid cancer.

After the war, in opposition to Oppenheimer’s recommendation, America went ahead and developed the hydrogen bomb, which was tested in the Marshall Islands. A U.S. government study could not help but verify the ill health effects of the 23 nuclear weapons detonated around the Bikini Atoll. Government studies thereafter failed to prove any link between atmospheric radiation leaks and health problems for those living near nuclear facilities. Decades later, in 1990, the Department of Energy half-heartedly admitted the Hanford facility secretly released radiation throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Poster for the Hanford Downwind Association

 Oppenheimer told President Truman he felt he had blood on his hands after his creation was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did he also have regrets about the ordinary Americans who unknowingly paid a price for the development of the bomb?

 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com and subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]