The Plutonium Files (18 page)

The fallout from the Trinity test spread much farther than even an alarmist like Warren had dared to imagine. Some was discovered 1,100 miles away in the Wabash River in Vincennes, Indiana.
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When infuriated Eastman Kodak officials reported that radioactive particles from the river water had been absorbed into paper used in packaging and made tiny black spots on film, atomic scientists got their first hard data about how far fallout could travel.

Following the Trinity explosion, the action shifted to Tinian in the Mariana Islands, some 1,300 miles southeast of Tokyo. Tinian, along with Guam and Saipan, had been captured in August of 1944 from the Japanese, and the three were being used as air bases for America’s newest long-range bomber, the B-29 Superfortress. Six runways, each two miles long and as wide as a ten-lane highway, had been constructed. Next to the runways were rows of glittering silver planes. For an hour and a half each evening at roughly fifteen-second intervals, the bombers would roll down the runway and lift off for Japan with bellies full of incendiary bombs.

Leslie Groves had sent a thirty-seven-member team of civilians and military officials to Tinian to help assemble and load the atomic bombs onto specially modified B-29s. One of the people at Tinian was Don Mastick, who had been assigned the job of analyzing urine samples after his accident. The task was so revolting that one day he stormed into J. Robert Oppenheimer’s office and said, “I can’t stand what I’m doing.
¹
It stinks.” Oppenheimer was sympathetic; it seems the smell of the boiling urine was going up Mastick’s ventilating hood and then blowing back down into Oppenheimer’s office. He agreed to transfer Mastick to the crew in charge of dropping the bombs. Another Manhattan Project scientist at Tinian was Philip Morrison, one of Oppenheimer’s former students. In the evenings, Morrison would sit on a coral ridge overlooking Tinian and watch the planes take off.
²
Every so often he would see one of the bombers go careening into the sea or onto the beach where it burned
like a torch. The implications of such a disaster happening to an airplane loaded with atomic bombs were almost too horrible to contemplate.

The components for two types of atomic weapons, a uranium and a plutonium bomb, were being shipped to Tinian at about the same time the Potsdam Declaration was issued. That document called upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” When the Japanese vowed to continue fighting, the United States moved ahead with preparations to drop the two bombs.
³

On the morning of August 6, the
Enola Gay,
one of the specially modified B-29s, lumbered down the runway with its payload. At 8:15, it dropped the payload—a uranium bomb—on Hiroshima. The city was immediately engulfed in roiling clouds of smoke and flames. “The mushroom itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside,” recalled Robert Caron, a tail gunner on the
Enola Gay.
⁴

Below the veil of clouds and smoke was an inferno of unimaginable proportions. At the hypocenter, the place on the ground directly below where the bomb was detonated, thousands of Japanese citizens were instantly incinerated. Those who were not killed on the spot suffered grotesque injuries. Their skin, burned by the flash and torn loose by the blast, hung like rags from their bodies. In an effort to ease the agony of burned flesh touching burned flesh, they walked through the city like sleepwalkers with their arms and hands held out in front of them, their skin hanging from their fingertips and chins. Many were killed by material from collapsing buildings or were impaled by flying debris. Injured residents who were pinned beneath roofs and walls were soon burned alive by firestorms that engulfed the city.

P. Siemes, a German Jesuit priest who lived in a novitiate about a mile from Hiroshima, later organized a nightmarish trip into the city to rescue two injured priests. When the sun came up the morning after the bombing, he saw a wasteland of ashes and rubble that extended as far as the eye could see: “The banks of the river are covered with dead and wounded, and the rising waters have here and there covered some of the corpses.
⁵
On the broad street in the Hakushima district, naked burned cadavers are particularly numerous. Among them are the wounded who still live. A few have crawled under the burnt-out autos and trains. Frightfully injured forms beckon to us and then collapse.”

Although the Japanese did not yet know what kind of a weapon had caused such destruction, Manhattan Project scientists had a pretty good idea of what they had unleashed. It was as if “a small piece of the sun”
had descended upon the city, Philip Morrison told members of the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, which began meeting in the fall of 1945:

Although communication with Hiroshima was severed and it would take the Japanese government several days to figure out what had happened, the U.S. military decided that a “one-two” punch was the only way to defeat Japan. On August 9, three days later, another B-29 named
Bock’s Car
rolled down the runway at Tinian carrying a plutonium implosion bomb. It exploded over Nagasaki at 11:02
A.M.

Once again the roiling clouds quickly obliterated a city. The destruction was so unbelievable that the bombing victims could find no words to describe it. Many compared the devastation to the agonies of hell depicted in Buddhist paintings. The survivors made their way to air raid shelters where in the stifling gloom amid the groans and screams, they died. Thousands of others plunged into rivers. “A human dam!
⁷
A human dam!” survivor Chie Setoguchi remembers thinking when she saw thousands
of corpses bobbing in a river. “Who masterminded the atrocity of blocking a river with the corpses of human beings?”

A sixteen-year-old postal worker named Sumiteru Taniguchi was blown off his bicycle and knocked unconscious. When he came to, he realized the skin from his shoulder to his fingertips had been peeled off and was hanging down “like a tattered old rag.” He managed to survive the first chaotic days and eventually was taken to a hospital, where he spent the next twenty-one months lying facedown on his stomach.
⁸
He developed bedsores that penetrated to his bones and was in and out of the hospital for decades with mysterious skin lesions that would not heal.

Hisae Aoki, just eighteen years old, was pinned beneath the rubble of her house. As she felt the heat of the approaching fires, she struggled frantically to free herself.
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When her hair began burning, she managed to wrench herself free and ran from the house. She had been spared, only to watch as one after another of her family members died from radiation overexposure.

Within hours of the bombings of the two cities, surviving relatives began streaming back into the burning rubble looking for the remains of their loved ones. Japan is a predominantly Buddhist country, and dead family members are usually cremated and their ashes interred in a family grave. In the ensuing years the survivors offer prayers for the repose of their souls. One of the most anguishing experience for relatives of the bombing victims was the inability to find the remains of their loved ones.
¹⁰
If a person’s body is not found, the relatives feel the deceased person’s soul can never rest peacefully in the world of the dead.

On August 15—August 14 in the United States—the Japanese people heard the voice of Emperor Hirohito, the venerated symbol of supreme authority in Japan, broadcast over the radio. He told them that the country had surrendered. The enemy, he said, had begun to “employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives.…”
¹¹

Even before the people of Japan heard the lugubrious voice of their emperor, the United Press was reporting that Japan was preparing to surrender. On August 12 Stafford Warren and Louis Hempelmann were about to embark upon another round of interviews with ranchers near the Trinity site when Warren received an emergency call from Leslie Groves.
¹²
The general wanted Warren to go to Japan after the surrender to survey the radioactivity and damage from the weapons. Warren left
Hempelmann at Trinity and hurried back to Los Alamos. Eventually a team of about forty Manhattan Project officials, including Hymer Friedell and Joseph Howland, was assembled. They stripped nearly all the Manhattan Project sites of detection equipment and then boarded a plane in San Francisco for Tinian. Once on the island, the doctors joined up with the Manhattan Project scientists who had helped prepare the bombs for delivery. Then they split into two parties. Hymer Friedell was with one group; Stafford Warren with another. From Tinian, both teams went to Hiroshima, and then Warren’s group continued to Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, back at home, Louis Hempelmann, ever the diligent doctor, proceeded to interview the Raitliff family and then returned to Los Alamos to write up his findings. No doubt he felt disgruntled about being left behind, but soon he would have an opportunity to see at home the same dreadful stages of radiation sickness that Warren and Friedell were about to encounter on a grand scale in Japan.

At about 9:00
P.M.
on August 21, a young Los Alamos physicist named Harry K. Daghlian left the regular Tuesday evening colloquium and returned to the “49 Room” at Omega site, a building in a remote canyon where experiments with the cores of atomic bombs were conducted.
¹³
At one end of the twenty-five-foot by twenty-five-foot room was the critical assembly where Daghlian worked. At the other was a guard, Robert Hemmerly, sitting at a desk with his back turned to the apparatus.

Daghlian began to lower a brick onto the assembly with his left hand when his instruments began chattering. The clicking sound told him a chain reaction was about to begin, and he started to withdraw his hand. Suddenly the brick slipped from his grasp and fell into the center of the assembly.
¹⁴
Daghlian brushed the brick off with his right hand, but it was too late. A brief chain reaction was ignited, bathing the assembly in an unearthly blue glow.

It was the second time the blue glow had been seen at Omega site. On June 4, eight people were exposed to neutrons and gamma rays during an experiment to measure the critical mass of enriched uranium.
¹⁵
Although the doses were large, especially to the two experimenters standing closest to the assembly, they were much smaller than what Daghlian received.

After brushing the brick away, the young scientist felt a deep “tingling sensation” in his right hand but no immediate pain.
¹⁶
He was taken to the hospital by a companion, where he was examined by Louis Hempelmann and Paul Aebersold. Robert Stone is named as an “assistant”
in one report, indicating that he may have flown in to Los Alamos to help.

There wasn’t much the doctors could do to counteract the radiation damage, and Daghlian’s condition deteriorated quickly. Ice pads and “grease gauze dressings” were applied to his hands, but they didn’t stop his arms from swelling to painful proportions.
¹⁷
His hair fell out, he suffered intense abdominal pains, and eventually he slipped into a coma.

Even as Harry Daghlian’s physical condition was deteriorating, General Groves began receiving disquieting news reports based on broadcasts by Radio Tokyo: Mysterious “rays” were coming from the rubble; residents uninjured by the bomb were suddenly collapsing and dying; rescue workers were developing dangerously low blood counts. Fearful he would be yanked before Congress to explain why he had used such an inhumane weapon, Groves placed two phone calls on August 25 to Army Major Charles Rea, a surgeon in charge of the Oak Ridge hospital. He read line by line from one of the articles, trying to get the physician to explain to him the strange medical symptoms being reported by Radio Tokyo. The following is an excerpt from one of those phone calls: