The Plutonium Files (4 page)

Hempelmann gave the young chemist a couple of breakfast waffles for his empty stomach and some Sippy alkaline powders to be taken during the day.
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Then he turned and handed him the four-liter beaker of murky liquid.

Go, he said, retrieve the plutonium.

Mastick returned to his lab with the beaker and opened his textbooks. It took a “little rapid-fire research,” as he put it, to figure out how to separate the plutonium from the organic matter. But he didn’t flinch from the task, despite the ordeal he had just been through. “Since I was the plutonium chemist at that point, I was the logical choice to recover it.” From Mastick’s perspective, the mood in which all these events took place was calm, deliberate, and “almost humorous.” But other people did not feel nearly so relaxed about what had occurred.

The day after the accident, Hempelmann sat down and wrote Stafford Warren a thank-you note. “I was sorry to bother you but was anxious to have your help and moral support.
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In retrospect, I think that the chances of the fellow’s having swallowed a dangerous amount of material are slight.” Hempelmann told Warren that he believed about ten micro-grams of plutonium had entered Mastick’s mouth. The mouth washings had removed all but one microgram, an infinitesimal but nevertheless hazardous amount. More important, Hempelmann thought the chemist had not inhaled any plutonium. At that time scientists knew that plutonium was extremely hazardous if it was breathed in and deposited in lung tissue. But they also were discovering that the radioactive material was not readily absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract and that it could not penetrate beyond the outer layer of human skin. Thus, most of the microgram of plutonium in Mastick’s mouth undoubtedly would have passed through his digestive system and out of his body without being absorbed.

A catastrophe had been avoided, but the accident was a vivid reminder of the invisible dangers that scientists and workers were confronted with at “Site Y,” the code name for Los Alamos. The responsibilities seemed overwhelming to Hempelmann, who was only twenty-nine years old and a neophyte when it came to understanding radiation. He had been working with radioactive materials for three years. As for plutonium, he had only about six months of hands-on experience. “There were all sorts of problems,” he admitted years later, “which I just couldn’t handle because of limited experience.”
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Research into the atomic bomb had begun in piecemeal fashion at various U.S. college campuses in 1939 when news reached America that two chemists in Nazi Germany had split the uranium atom. But an all-out effort to build the bomb did not really get under way until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was brought in and a newly promoted brigadier general named Leslie Groves took charge in September of 1942. With Groves at the helm, the Manhattan Project, or Manhattan Engineer District, as it was more formally known, began the frenetic race to build an atomic bomb.

By then Nazi Germany controlled much of Europe. Many of the scientists working on the bomb project were European refugees who believed Adolf Hitler’s scientists were working on a similar bomb. With such a weapon, they feared it would only be a matter of time before Hitler controlled the world.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been selected by General Groves to head the Los Alamos laboratory, had crisscrossed the country in early 1943 trying to lure the nation’s most eminent scientists to the remote outpost. His charisma was so great that his opponents claimed he had the uncanny ability to turn bright men, even geniuses, into slavish followers. But, in fact, he had to use all of his persuasiveness to get experienced chemists, physicists, engineers, metallurgists, and explosives experts to go to the remote laboratory.

Many were already engaged in important war work. Others thought the project was preposterous and wanted no part of it. But younger, less established men such as Don Mastick leapt at the chance to do something
exciting that would also contribute to the war effort. Mastick was one of the many scientists recruited for the atomic bomb project who had been educated or worked at the premier center for nuclear physics in the United States: the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.

In the early 1930s, when the “Rad Lab” was just beginning to make a name for itself in the European-dominated world of physics, the young, idealistic scientists working in its sunny classrooms and laboratories dreamed not of weapons of mass destruction but of unlocking the secrets of the universe. From the atom, they sought to learn more about the enormous energy that binds protons and neutrons together, hoping that energy could somehow be used to benefit humankind and perhaps even cure cancer. Dressed in the uniform of their generation—unpressed suits, ties, and clean white shirts—they labored from dawn until dusk, sustained only by an encouraging word from one of their revered leaders, Ernest Lawrence or J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Lawrence, an experimental physicist who was only twenty-seven years old when he first arrived in Berkeley, and Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist three years younger, were transforming what had been a second-rate school into one of the most renowned institutions in the world for nuclear physics. Both scientists were tall, blue-eyed, ambitious, and inspired a cultlike following among their students. Beneath the surface, though, were distinct differences in their personalities that would emerge over time.

Lawrence was vigorous looking, with his blond hair swept back from his forehead and his face tanned and regular as the Great Plains upon which he was raised. Save for the wire-rimmed glasses, which gave him an intellectual appearance, he could easily have been mistaken for a businessman or football coach. His father was the president of a small teachers’ college in Springfield, South Dakota; his mother, a practical matron who taught him to save water and not to swear. He worked his way through the University of South Dakota selling kitchenware from farm to farm. He continued his studies at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and finally, Yale, where he was offered an assistant professorship.
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Dissatisfied with the complacency of the students and the snail’s pace of his career, Lawrence packed up a bright red coupe in 1928 and headed West.
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He picked up his mother and father in South Dakota, stashed his younger brother, John, in the rumble seat, and drove on to Berkeley.

Lawrence had an infectious enthusiasm and the quirky, imaginative
mind of an inventor. He was convinced from work being done in England that the next great frontier was the atomic nucleus, a dense speck of matter composed of protons and neutrons surrounded by a protective cloud of negatively charged electrons. The atomic nucleus, Lawrence observed in one lecture, was like a “fly inside a cathedral.” The only hope of entering the hallowed ground was to pierce the barrier with a particle moving at an enormous speed.
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In 1929, while he was flipping through foreign publications at the library, Lawrence hit upon the idea of the cyclotron, a contraption that would use a magnetic field to accelerate particles in a circular pattern. With each loop, an electric field would give the particles another push, making them go even faster. When the particles were going fast enough, they would be directed off the circular field and hurled onto targets, which could then become radioactive and eject other particles. With the help of a graduate student named M. Stanley Livingston, Lawrence had his cyclotron, or “atom smasher” as it was called in the popular press, up and running two years later. By the early 1930s, Lawrence had become one of America’s best-known physicists. Eventually he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his invention.

Driving a gray battleship of a car, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, known as “Oppie” or “Opje” to friends, arrived in Berkeley the year after Lawrence. He was slender, almost emaciated looking from a long string of illnesses, which included appendicitis, dysentery, and colitis. He had a dreamy, choirboy face and a cloud of black hair when he was young. As he matured, the years wore the softness away and he came to resemble a gaunt medieval scholar.

Oppenheimer was a chain-smoker, his teeth and fingers stained with nicotine. He liked hot, spicy food and ice-cold martinis, and refused to teach a class before 11:00
A.M.
The nights, he said, were for thinking and physics. On campus, he wore a gray suit and round-toed black shoes, at home a blue work shirt and faded blue jeans.
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He was the son of a wealthy New York merchant, but his voice had a strange, slightly foreign accent.

Absorbed in his science and free from financial worries, Oppenheimer was initially so detached from world affairs that he didn’t learn of the 1929 stock market crash until after the event. Through a girlfriend, he became sensitized to the plight of the masses and began contributing funds to Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and migrant workers in California. His ex-girlfriend, his future wife, and even his brother, Frank, became members of the Communist party. Oppenheimer’s political activities,
which were common among liberal intellectuals of that time, would come to be viewed with deep suspicion by the Manhattan Project’s intelligence agents years later.

Oppenheimer was a brilliant though erratic student. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, where he floundered badly when he tried his hand at experimental work. Eventually he found his calling in quantum mechanics, a branch of physics dealing with the interaction of radiation and matter, the structure of the atom, the motion of atomic particles, and related phenomena. By the time he reached Berkeley, he had developed a solid international reputation as a theoretical physicist. He predicted the existence of black holes and neutron stars long before astronomers had the instruments to confirm their existence.

In 1935 John Lawrence, the kid brother Ernest had stashed in his rumble seat, went to Berkeley for a visit.
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Having acquired a medical degree from Harvard, he was a little startled to discover that the men working around the cyclotron appeared to have no inkling of the dangers of radiation—or of the potential medical benefits from the radioisotopes produced on the cyclotron. With the enthusiastic support of his famous brother, John Lawrence and a small group of medical doctors began exploring whether neutrons and radioisotopes could be used to treat cancer patients. (Scientists at that time used the word “radioisotope” to refer to any radioactive element. But technically speaking, a “radioisotope” refers to the radioactive isotopes of one specific element. A “radionuclide” refers to any kind of radioactive isotope and is the term used by contemporary scientists.)

In the cyclotron, radioisotopes were created by bombarding ordinary elements such as iron, phosphorous, and iodine with fast-moving particles. When the speeding particles crashed into a nonradioactive element, the element absorbed the moving particle, lost one of its own subatomic particles, or broke into pieces, thus becoming radioactive. The radioactive version of the element, known as a radioisotope, would “decay,” or return to a stable condition after it had rid itself of the energy it had absorbed from the collision, in a process that would take place over minutes, days, or even years. The energy was released in the form of X rays, gamma rays, alpha particles, and beta particles.

Radioisotopes are chemically identical to their stable counterparts. In other words, radioactive iron, phosphorous, carbon, and sodium are metabolized in the human body in exactly the same way as their
nonradioactive counterparts. Since radioisotopes emit energy when they decay, they can be easily followed, or “traced,” through the body with a Geiger counter.

Many doctors at the time compared radioisotopes to microscopes, hoping they could be used to unlock the hidden, biochemical processes of the human body. By administering a tracer dose of radioactive sodium to a patient, for example, a doctor could follow the path of sodium with a Geiger counter and uncover blockages in the circulatory system. The same principle could be applied to animals, plants, or even industrial processes.

The diagnostic potential of radioisotopes had long been recognized. But Ernest and John Lawrence, as well as other scientists throughout the world, also hoped that radioisotopes might have an even more important function: They dreamed that one of the new radioisotopes might become a “magic bullet” that would find its way to malignant cells and destroy them.

A couple of years after Ernest Lawrence had his first cyclotron operating, he decided that it was time to build a bigger machine that could accelerate particles at an even faster rate. But to build a new cyclotron, he needed money. And what better way to get money than to tout the medical applications of materials made by the cyclotron? Waldo Cohn, a graduate student in Berkeley at the time, remembered dryly, “Lawrence, with his cyclotron, was very anxious to get money to support not only the building of the cyclotron and its maintenance, but also to continue the running of the laboratory.
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Any possible use of radioactive materials, [any] practical use, he [would] use as a gimmick to convince donors to contribute money to his project.”

A masterly salesman, Lawrence began holding a series of public lectures in Berkeley on the medical benefits of the cyclotron-produced materials. As Nuell Pharr Davis, one of the more colorful chroniclers of the Lawrence-Oppenheimer years tells it, Lawrence was up on stage one afternoon with a bottle of liquid containing sodium-24 and a Geiger counter. With a flourish, Lawrence put the counter next to the bottle. Then came an embarrassing moment of silence. One of his assistants had apparently made the solution so radioactive that it swamped the counter’s detection abilities. Without losing a beat, Lawrence scanned the audience and saw his tall, blue-eyed friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer, slumped in one of the chairs. “He got me on the platform and used me as a guinea pig,” Oppenheimer recalled.
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“He had me put my hand around a Geiger counter and gave me a glass of water in which part of the salt had
radioactive sodium in it. For the first half minute all was quiet, but about fifty seconds after I drank, there was a great chattering of the Geiger counter. This was supposed to show that in at least one complex physi-ochemical system, the salt had diffused from my mouth through my bloodstream to the tip of my fingers and that the time scale for this was fifty seconds.”