By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer
Sixty years ago today, a B-29 bomber took off from the Pacific island of Tinian toward Japan, armed with a 10,000-pound bomb holding Hanford plutonium at its heart.
By the end of the day, 40,000 residents of Nagasaki would be dead, and within five days Japan would surrender, ending a horrific war that had claimed more than 40 million lives.
In the streets of Richland, horns honked, church bells rang and sirens blared.
World War II was over, and the mysterious Hanford project had played a major role. Sons, husbands and sweethearts -- at least those who had survived the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific -- would be coming home.
There would be no bloody land invasion of Japan to end the war.
Watson Warriner remembers his wife, who had been listening to the radio, telling him she thought she knew what he had been working on at Hanford. A huge bomb had been dropped on Japan that had wiped a city out, she said.
"The first thing I said was, 'Thank God. The damned thing worked,' " Warriner remembered. "From day one, the whole thing was so damn complicated. So many things could go wrong."
Hanford workers had been in a race to create the plutonium needed to cause an atomic explosion. The United States also was making a bomb armed with uranium 235, which was used in the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, three days before the plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
But fissionable uranium is rare and difficult to separate from nonfissionable isotopes of uranium. It would be more practical to bombard the uranium 238 with neutrons to produce manmade plutonium.
But could it be done?
When Hanford was picked as the site of a huge weapons project, cyclotrons had produced only enough plutonium to form the head of a pin. The technology to separate plutonium from other isotopes had been done on only a microscopic scale.
Construction on the B Reactor to make plutonium at the production scale began in August 1943. Thirteen months later, the reactor began producing plutonium, and by the summer of 1945, enough had been produced for three bombs, including the one used over Nagasaki.
Richland had changed from a tiny farm village to the third-largest city in Washington to house the workers on the largest construction project of World War II.
Workers remember secrecy
Some 150,000 workers would take part in the effort, with the peak work force reaching about 50,000 in 1944. Over 30 months, workers built 554 buildings, 386 miles of road, 158 miles of railroad, three massive plutonium extraction plants and the world's first three production-scale nuclear reactors.
"On my first trip to B Reactor, both sides of the road as far as you could see were filled with construction equipment," said Dee McCullough, an instrument supervisor at Hanford during the war. "Both sides had piles of piping and material."
Conditions were so primitive that many workers stayed only a day or two.
"God, it was practically a wilderness," said Warriner, now 88 and living in Wilmington, Del., back where his career started. He came to Hanford in 1944 as a system division engineer in charge of construction of B Plant, which would separate plutonium from irradiated uranium.
He got off the train in Pasco at 12:30 a.m. and walked down the platform with tumbleweeds rolling up behind him and past him. "What are those?" asked a friend who had traveled out on the same train.
A normal work week was 10 hours a day, six days a week.
But there was a sense of urgency, as the United States raced to develop an atomic bomb before Germany.
"When you would get in a jam, you would work seven days a week," Warriner said.
The worst for many workers were the winds that roared across the desert, picking up sand that had little to hold it to the ground. Workers called them the termination winds because so many workers would line up for what would be their final paychecks the day after a bad storm.
Lawrence Denton, at 18 and used to the West from living in northern Idaho, adjusted better than most. He lived in tents, Quonset huts and barracks as a worker in charge of issuing welding gases for construction of the reactors and processing plants starting in September 1943.
While the rest of the nation was on wartime rations, the food was plentiful and good, he said.
But "the winds bothered everyone," he said. "I would watch outdoor movies with safety goggles on."
The project was top secret. Facilities were spread over an area half the size of Rhode Island and workers were not allowed to move from one work area to another. Only a couple dozen top scientists and engineers were told what was being made.
Warriner remembers witnesses watching as he signed an oath that he would not talk about what he saw at Hanford under punishment of death.
But he suspected that Hanford was working toward an atomic explosion, he said. He'd previously worked on a project to build a heavy water plant because Nazis were known to be working toward a heavy water design to moderate the neutron reaction in a reactor, he said. Ultimately, B reactor used carbon blocks to slow down neutrons in the reactor so they would not bounce off the Uranium 238 atoms without producing plutonium.
"This is no chemical plant," Roger Rohrbacher, 85, of Kennewick, remembers thinking. He had worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago where the chemistry was developed to separate plutonium from the irradiated fuel rods before he was assigned to Hanford to work in the instrument department.
Every once in a while, some information would slip out. He remembers someone directing that a "neutron monitor" be moved under the reactor. In addition, he wore a device to detect radiation and was required to give regular blood and urine samples.
Denton, of Kennewick, hadn't a clue until he heard news reports.
"I was in awe that we had made such a terrible weapon," Denton said. "I felt sorry for the Japanese, but I was hoping there was not going to be any more killing."
Nagasaki not the first choice
It was partly by chance that the bomb with Hanford plutonium was dropped on Nagasaki. It was the second target picked that day.
Kokura, with one of Japan's largest munitions plants, was the assigned target on Aug. 9, 1945. But the skies were cloudy and filled with billowing smoke from a bombing raid on a nearby city. Bock's Car, the B-29 that carried the Fat Man plutonium bomb, made three bombing runs at 30,000 feet over Kokura but could not see through the haze.
Running short of fuel, the Bock's Car crew decided to head to Nagasaki, where the Japanese had the massive Mitsubishi shipyards, a steel works and two arms factories, including one that made some of the torpedoes used on Pearl Harbor.
Sumiteru Taniguchi, then 16, was riding his bicycle through the streets of Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. that morning. He was catapulted, bicycle and all, a dozen feet and slapped against the road by a blast the color of rainbows. "The ground seemed to quake, and I clung to it for dear life," he said in a Herald interview on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. When he raised his head, "bodies of children who had been playing at the roadside were scattered around me like clumps of garbage," he said.
He would spend three years and seven months in the hospital. About 40,000 people died immediately and 35,000 more Japanese were dead within months. The Japanese government now attributes 237,062 deaths through the years to the bomb dropped over Nagasaki.
But there also were those who lived because the bomb was dropped.
Millard Hileman, an American prisoner of war being held at Kokura, heard the motors of a B-29 approaching three times on Aug. 9. In 1942, he'd escaped from the Bataan death march and been hidden by Filipino villagers before surrendering to the Japanese for fear that those who helped him would be tortured and killed. He'd been a prisoner of war at Kokura for a year when he heard the drone of Bock's Car overhead.
The Japanese were prepared to kill prisoners of war if there was a land invasion, which the United States planned for late summer.
Instead, Japan surrendered Aug. 14. Hileman would return to the United States to settle in Prosser, raise a family and late in life write 1051-- An American POW's Remarkable Journey Through World War II.
Veterans believe bomb saved lives
Over the last decade, there's been renewed debate over whether the United States was right to use nuclear weapons and cause such unfathomable suffering and death to civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But many in the Greatest Generation, either those who were veterans or helped build the bomb at Hanford, believe it was a necessary evil to end the war.
"We were real relieved that what we did all this time was beneficial," said McCullough, of Richland. "It killed a lot of Japanese at the time, but it saved a lot of Americans and other Japanese."
Rohrbacher's brother was in Europe in the 101st Airborne. Without the atomic bombs, Rohrbacher believes his brother would have been headed to Japan where casualties would have been heavy.
Michele Gerber, Hanford historian and president of the B Reactor Museum Association, agrees with the veterans.
She discounts the argument that a bomb should have been dropped first in the ocean or a sparsely populated area of Japan as a demonstration. Who would be there to see it, she asked. And with the poor communications in Japan during World War II, would people believe reports of a demonstration bomb?
"We didn't have a lot of bomb material to spare," she said. "We had to be sure not to make some statement and then not follow through."
Others have argued that Japan was close to defeat in 1945 and its people were starving.
"But that does not mean they wanted to give up," Gerber said. An imperialistic code had been imposed on the Japanese people, and military leaders had vowed to fight to the death of every man, woman and child.
"I think they wouldn't give up" without the atomic bomb, Gerber said.
Some workers did have the devastation the bomb would wreak on their minds as they raced to produce plutonium.
Gerber remembers Bill McCue, a young scientist on the Hanford project, telling her before his death in 2001 that he and his roommate were taken to a secret location during World War II and told what was being built at Hanford.
He and his roommate talked all night, asking "Should be we doing this? Isn't this God's work?"
They concluded, "If God didn't want us to do it, it will fail," Gerber said.
"Someone helped us out in this," Warriner said, a belief he holds to even though he does not participate in organized religion.
The B-29 was developed just in time for the atomic bombs. The weather was clear enough to drop the bombs in an age long before weather satellites. And every part of such a complicated and fledgling technology worked to develop the bombs, he said.
"The U.S. had its back against the wall," he said. The Nazis had killed an estimated 5 million to 6 million Jews, and the "Japanese were the biggest butchers in Asia," Warriner said. He remembers accounts of Japanese soldiers walking through hospitals, sticking bayonets into patients, adults and babies alike.
The veterans of World War II do have regrets, Gerber said.
They regret that Pearl Harbor was bombed. That an entire generation all over the world was plunged into war. That families endured the horrible anxiety that they would never see their loved ones again.
"But they don't regret the ending," she said. "The bomb made it possible for peace and to spend 60 years as friends and trading partners (with Japan)."
© 2005 Tri-City Herald, Associated Press & Other Wire Services