Nuclear Bombs in the Backyard

Photo by Cynthia Jones

Nuclear Bombs
in the Backyard

by Cynthia Jones

        Richland, Washington, is the kind of place where the wind blows so hard it bends trees in an arc against the gray sky and tosses tumbleweeds across the road and under cars. There they finally stick in wheel wells as if glued. But Richland is also the kind of place where the air can be calm and the blue sky clear as far as the eye can see in a flat landscape the color of a russet potato, a landscape dotted by groupings of Russian Olive trees and swatches of sagebrush. Gazing at the edges far off into the distance, one can view horizontal interruptions in the flatness where bare hills with names like Rattle Snake Mountain or Jump-Off Joe rise up. Beyond are orchards of apples, cherries, and peaches sustained by irrigation supplied by the Columbia River. The river itself flows in the middle of the southeast Washington State desert, its cold water reflecting a blue sky one day or a gray sky the next but always cooling Richland’s residents, cooling the atmosphere of the flat desert, and cooling the once-active reactors that manufactured plutonium for nuclear bombs.
        The site of the plutonium production, dubbed Hanford, took its name from a small town that existed on the site long before anyone knew the word “plutonium” or “nuclear bomb.” Back in 1907, the land hosted a little community of farmers named for the judge and irrigation company president Cornelius Hanford who owned the local utility and water company. For decades, farmers sowed their crops undisturbed alongside the Columbia River until the 1940s when the United States government picked the site for its Manhattan Project. Then, the little community, its bank, hotel, and elementary and high schools closed seemingly overnight. The farmers were given thirty days to evacuate their homes, to abandon their life’s work, and to move on. My father was hired in the 1960s during a boom cycle in plutonium production. A few years later, I was running around the playground of my elementary school clueless that our hometown kept growing because Hanford kept hiring to keep up with the Cold War and its demand to use plutonium in bomb fabrication.
        We didn’t know it by the 1980’s, but decades of bomb manufacturing that put my hometown on the map were nearing their end. Not just any bomb but the nuclear bomb. Hanford produced the plutonium for the infamous Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. It shipped the plutonium to New Mexico where Fat Man was born, the first bomb of its kind. Much more of Hanford’s plutonium followed. We lived in the post-World War II years and had to keep the Russians in check. Therefore production, and the resulting waste of manufacturing plutonium, had continued from the 1940s right up to the 1980s. No one foresaw that the end of the Cold War would direct the world’s attention again to my hometown, which now had to reckon with the largest nuclear waste site on earth.
        I attended Richland High School then, home of the Richland Bombers. I remember that in 1981, my junior year, everyone in town was riled up about our high school football team. We had quite a team, contenders for the Washington State championship. After we beat the Mead Panthers in the Class AAA State Playoffs 33 to 0, the national sports news took notice. But no one gave a second thought to our school’s mascot, a mushroom cloud. By 1983, a short drive from those long-forsaken farms, I was barely out of high school and waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant. Richland did not offer many opportunities for girls like me. Girls, that is, who harbored no interest in the sciences. And even less interest in working as a well-paid blue collar laborer like Dad who maintained the buildings and roads inside the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I wanted to move on.
        I started to think there must be more to life than serving up hot enchilada plates to Hanford’s scientists, white men in perfectly creased khaki pants and button down shirts with pocket protectors holding ballpoint pens standing at attention. I envied these white-collar workers; they emitted security and stability. On reflection, they probably emitted radiation carried from Hanford to Richland during the thirty-minute drive to eat at one of the plentiful restaurants, such as the one where I worked. I imagined the scientists talked to their children about life, about college, and about all those things meant for children born to white-collar parents. They didn’t mean children like me.
        Only later did I consider the monotonous drive for the workers at Hanford where the water from the Columbia River had cooled the reactors. Only later did I understand the gravity of what it meant to live with the thought of plutonium production for a bomb dropped on Nagasaki, a bomb that ended so many lives and a world war. Only later did I think that the same water that cooled those reactors also nourished an industry where my parents earned paychecks to put food on the table.
        To put that food on the table, to earn those paychecks required a security clearance. It didn’t matter whether someone was a top scientist or a lowly maintenance worker like my father. Whatever the position one applied for, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would knock on the doors of all neighbors, take one’s fingerprints for safe keeping, and check under the fingernails for any dirt from the past that might make a person susceptible to blackmail, or worse, reveal that the applicant had been a communist. And while one arm of the government scrutinized the lives of the blue collar locals and frightened them with demands for personal information—the kind of information about which the locals dared not even talk to their wives—another arm of the same government worked hard to keep under wraps the big secret that millions of gallons of radioactive waste from the plutonium plants were threatening to seep into the Columbia River.
        But Hanford was a federal government project and it seemed the local economy could rise up or go down depending on how much money the White House tapped for Hanford in its budget. Every time a new president was elected, as far as my parents were concerned, the fortunes of our home town rose or fell accordingly. I know my father heard about the impact of weapons-grade plutonium waste on the land at Hanford. The stories he told, though rare, revealed that laborers like him, who carried lunch pails to work, knew as much about the waste as the scientists who preferred to dine in town. Either way, they all knew more than the government wished.
        Dad shared a story once about numerous deer roaming wild inside the nearly 600 square miles of Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Out there in “the area,” dad worked side-by-side with deer hunters, hardened men who looked forward to their weekends off, to wake early on cold mornings, and to kill deer so they could pack their home freezers with venison. Dad didn’t hunt, but his work buddies did, and they always brought him gifts of venison wrapped in white butcher paper. But, Dad said, none of these men, seasoned hunters, would dare touch a deer at Hanford.
        It’s curious to me that the farther away I get from my hometown the clearer the story becomes. Today, the nearer to Richland I am, the focus remains on World War II and the imminent danger of a then-imperial Japan and infamous Cold War. The Reach, a museum on the bank of the Columbia River just a few miles from Hanford, tells an optimistic version of the then-heroic and the now-clean-up efforts. But venture out to where Hanford’s materials turned Fat Man into a deadly explosive and you will see that the Smithsonian affiliate museum in New Mexico lays bare the environmental disaster that is the Hanford site. That disaster, according to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, is the “worst on earth.” And that’s a quote.
        Another curiosity that haunts me is the circumstance of my birth date. I was born near Hanford on the day Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki—August 9—only nineteen years later. I remember learning about this after reading an old newspaper headline for a history class. Oddly enough, I remember thinking about it from the pilot’s perspective. I imagined the birds-eye view of the city from the cockpit of Bockscar, the B-29 bomber that unleashed Fat Man to the ground below. Our teachers drew attention to details such as the name chosen for the aircraft, a pun on the name of the aircraft commander, Captain Frederick C. Bock.
        Many years passed before I thought about Fat Man from the perspective of the people in the factories below, the ones caught unaware while walking on a sidewalk, or sitting in an office, or preparing the day’s lunch at home. Nearly two minutes after eleven o’clock on August 9, those people felt the concussion and heard the blast of glass; they felt the winds estimated at 624 miles per hour and the 7,050 degrees of Fahrenheit. What the survivors would not hear, nor see, nor feel for months to come was the spewing of radiation into the atmosphere, the unleashing of the plutonium. And the production of that plutonium is what put food on my family’s table for decades.
        As I said before, I, too, was putting food on restaurant tables back in the 1980s, serving Hanford workers, first after high school and then as a full time job. Finally, when I was twenty-one, the restaurant manager asked me to consider moving to Seattle to work in his new restaurant. At first, I shook my head. Me? Where would I live? Could I make enough money? What about my friends? It wasn’t easy to leave Richland, to leave the high winds, the tumbleweeds, and everything I’d ever known.
        In 1985, with a belly full of nerves, I finally moved to Seattle. Yet, a lingering fear followed me over the mountains: the idea the world could end any minute in a mushroom cloud if the Russians decided to strike us with bombs from their arsenal. To me, it felt as if Ronald Reagan dominated the news, sitting in the White House calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Plutonium production soared as the Cold War raged.
        Around this time, I first had “the dream.” It always started and ended in the same way: I’m riding in a baby blue convertible with the top down. My dad is behind the wheel, and I am in the passenger seat. We are on the outskirts of Richland when we spy a mushroom cloud over the town. The cloud, capped like a giant Cremini mushroom, billows thick and trails a dark grayish substance in its mushroom stem. It looms dark against a clear sky over Richland. My Dad and I look at each other and without saying a word we know everyone is gone.
        In 1985, during waking hours, collectively we fantasized that Hanford, and therefore Richland, was the number one target for the USSR. So we made more plutonium and more bombs. And ultimately more waste. When I took a chance and left Richland that December of 1985, I hoped there was more to life than serving enchiladas to the folks manufacturing the bomb.
        I discovered, yes, there certainly is more to life. For one, there are more people in Seattle. Another bonus, there are certainly more opportunities. I found my way into college, a journalism degree, and finally a law degree. I’ve settled down to a comfortable life in a house that sits more than two hundred miles away from Richland, my home town, and a safe distance from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. At least I like to tell myself it’s a safe distance.
        Unlike the river water in Richland, the salt water surrounding Seattle does not cool nuclear reactors. And unlike the flat landscape of Hanford, the sky here is outlined with tall buildings, evergreen trees, and distant snow-capped mountains. Those mountains rise up into the heavens, and along their steep sides, I’m confident, the deer roaming their forest floors are uncontaminated.
        But sometimes at night, when I lay my head on the pillow and fall asleep, I dream I’m in a baby blue convertible, riding with my dad at the outskirts of Richland, and suddenly we see a mushroom cloud.