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I hold in my hand a thin piece of 1 1/8- by 2-inch molded aluminum. As I stare at the letters that are pressed into the plate, my mind returns to my first-grade classroom in Halls Elementary School north of Knoxville, Tenn.
"Curtis Hutchison."
"Sammy McManus."
Mrs. Zachary, my first-grade teacher, was calling each student's name in turn, reading from the little aluminum plates. Each child went forward as his or her name was called, took the plate from the teacher, and returned to his or her desk, examining the unusual object closely and almost proudly.
Finally, my name was called. I walked shyly to the front of the room to Mrs. Zachary's big wooden desk. I smelled the perfume she was wearing, a smell I always enjoyed. But that day I didn't notice the aroma; I was too busy concentrating on that little plate that was being distributed to us.
The piece of aluminum reminded me of the "dog tags" I'd seen soldiers wearing in photos from books about World War II. I read the words inscribed on the metal plate:
Dennis L. Peterson
Ralph Peterson
Fort Sumpter Rd
Knoxville 18 Tenn
11-20-54 P
I recognized many of the words immediately. They were my name, my father's name, our address and my birth date. The P, however, was a mystery to me.
With the aluminum tag was a long chain. Mrs. Zachary told us to thread the chain through the hole on the right end of the plate, fasten it, and wear it around our necks each day when we came to school. She gave no further instructions.
Only years later did we come to realize what this ritual was all about. We were required to wear the dog tags because we lived in the shadow of Oak Ridge, the "Atomic City." I never dreamed that one day I would work in those very facilities.
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High security, 1944.
A soldier points out some of the buildings at the nuclear weapons plant in 1944, at the height of U.S. preparations for war.
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The city of Oak Ridge was born in secrecy shortly after the start of World War II as part of the supersecret Manhattan Project. In September 1942, a group led by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose the Oak Ridge area to become the U.S. Army Manhattan Engineering District, the site for the plants that would produce uranium-235 for an atomic bomb. The land was cheap, the area was sparsely populated, and the ridges and valleys isolated it from the outside world. Yet the area offered a good water supply, truck and railroad access, a supply of hard-working laborers, and low-cost power, which was being produced by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The federal government bought, for $45 an acre, 60,000 acres of wooded ridges and hilly farmland, dislocating about 3,000 people -- 1,000 families -- living in the region and effectively ending the existence of the tiny communities of Wheat, Scarboro, Robertsville and Elza. Residents were ordered out by January 1, 1943. A team of engineers and planners then drew up, in only 72 hours, a master plan for the Manhattan District, which would encompass a town and three industrial plants.
Next, a huge work force -- from top research scientists to soldiers to common laborers --was moved into the area under a cloud of secrecy that is still unsurpassed. Construction began on three secret plants, each code-named for its location on the map. The first facility, a research plant code-named X-10, was built in 1943. The next facility was code-named Y-12, and a huge electromagnetic plant was built there. The final of the three facilities was named K-25, and scientists began separating uranium-235 by gaseous diffusion there. These three sites, known collectively as the Clinton Engineer Works, employed 82,000 people by mid-1945 and operated around the clock, seven days a week. In two and a half years, the city of Oak Ridge became the fifth largest city in Tennessee.
Hardly any of the workers in Oak Ridge knew why they were there or on what they were working. Those who did know were not allowed to talk about it.
Dr. John Googin was hired to work at the Y-12 plant shortly after he graduated from college in May 1944 (and he continued to work there until his death in 1994). He recalled that his earliest experiences were of being "in some unknown group, working on some unknown process" for which "all the tanks and lines were labeled in number codes, and no one could, or would, say what was being processed or the real name of anything of significance." Periodically, security officers would appear and question workers about what they knew about the project, what they were doing, and how well work was progressing.
"The emphasis," Googin related, "was on not revealing what was being worked on to anyone who did not need to know, even when that person could be expected to deduce it eventually themselves."
He recalled one incident in which he and a coworker decided to go home early one night. About 10 p.m., they boarded a bus that would take them from inside the plant to their dormitory outside the fences. The only other person aboard was the driver. Googin and his colleague carried on a conversation in their own personal code about their ongoing work in the plant. The driver, however, was apparently an FBI informant. A few days later, Googin was confronted by security personnel and questioned about the conversation on the bus. He complained about the security system not allowing workers to get their job done efficiently and hinted not too subtly that "if those who ran [the security operations] worked as long hours as those getting the real job done things would be better all over." That comment didn't set too well, and the officer "offered the alternative of less loose talk or a job in the army fighting the Japanese hand-to-hand in the South Pacific."
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Pre-fab housing for war workers.
The houses arrived in two sections on flat-bed trucks, and went up daily in an effort to provide living space for workers at Oak Ridge.
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Talk about the work was even more restricted when it went outside of Oak Ridge. When workers wrote letters to the outside, Googin recalled, "you could not say much, beyond that you were working on something big and it might keep [your friends] out of Japan."
Access into and out of the area was also strictly controlled. Armed guards were everywhere. Guardhouses blocked all of the entrances into not only the plants but also the city itself. Even deliverymen bringing milk and other food items into the residential areas of the city had to have special passes. Even within the facilities movement was restricted between areas.
"The badge worn by everyone," Googin related, "had a series of letters on it, up and down the sides, which gave permission to enter a limited number of related areas. Each area was fenced in and there were guard portals for entry. Special permission had to be gained to visit other areas."
The government refused to acknowledge that any of Oak Ridge even existed. Not until August 1945, after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, did President Harry Truman acknowledge its existence. Then he announced that Oak Ridge had developed and produced many of the components for "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," the bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. The city of Oak Ridge itself was not opened to the public, however, until March 19, 1949, when the fences around the city were removed. Each of the three plants remained a high-security area.
In 1947, the Manhattan Project was turned over to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which contracted with the Union Carbide Corporation Nuclear Division to operate the three plants. In the 1980s, this responsibility was transferred to Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc., which later merged with Lockheed to become Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, Inc.
Many people, myself included, have lived an entire lifetime in the shadow of the Atomic City. Although the city of Oak Ridge itself is now open to the public, the federal research and production facilities are still closely guarded. As a child, I remember adults who worked there saying, when someone asked where they worked, merely, "Oh, out at Oak Ridge." None of them elaborated on specifically where they worked or what they did or even what their job titles were. In spite of an unprecedented relaxation of security since the end of the Cold War and ongoing efforts to share former defense technology with private industry, secrecy is still the norm within the gates of the individual plants even today.
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The Y-12 plant in 1947.
Note how the west-to-east ridges isolate the valley.
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Looking back on the day in first grade when Mrs. Zachary and all of the other teachers in the school distributed those personalized dog tags to each student, I now see clearly the reason behind such an unusual event. Amid the tension of the Cold War, many officials feared that a Soviet nuclear attack was an imminent possibility. Because of its atomic research and development work and its production of nuclear fuels and weapon components, Oak Ridge was considered a likely target for any planned Soviet first strike. Therefore, plans had to be in place to protect civilians within the zone of danger around the plants.
If such an attack occurred, anyone living within 25 miles or so of the city would be in grave danger of sudden death or serious injury. Physical damage to buildings would be great. Local school and Civil Defense officials wanted everyone, including the youngest school student, to be prepared for the worst. I remember feeling a cold chill in my backbone when someone first explained to me that the P on my dog tag meant that I was a Protestant and that, that information was on the tag so that, upon my death, officials would know what kind of burial to give me.
Civil Defense teams came to the school and showed films about how destructive an atomic weapon could be. The seemingly endless stream of statistics -- the TNT equivalency of "the Bomb," how many square miles of land would be vaporized by an atomic explosion, and the various types of radiation hazards that could be expected from such a blast -- were meaningless to me at the time. But the motion pictures of entire structures being blown away like autumn leaves in a breeze left an indelible impression on my young mind. And such information apparently made an impression on some adults, too, for many of them went home and built underground bomb shelters and stocked them with supplies.
I also remember the Civil Defense drills. When the bells rang throughout the aging school building, we were ordered to line up calmly and to march, single file, into the interior hallways, away from doors and windows and behind the supposed protection of block and concrete walls. We were to squat down against the walls, pull our knees up toward our faces, and bury our head between our knees. There was to be no talking, no looking around. We were to be perfectly quiet and calm so that we could hear any special instructions the teachers or the principal might give. Sometimes we drilled for a more sudden emergency in which we had time only to climb under our wooden desks.
A few times, we had a more realistic drill in which we would actually go home. Those who lived within a specified distance from the school were told to walk directly home. Those of us who lived beyond that limit were to be delivered by bus. Again, we were to observe total silence. We were not to question. And we certainly were not to cry.
Now that the Cold War is apparently over (or so we're told), such drills seem almost humorous. Those of us who experienced them sometimes chuckle about our thoughts, our fears, our memories. Our children think we "were really weird back then" and stare at our dog tags with a bit of doubt and incredulity when we tell them our stories. But deep inside, we old-timers relive the fear and uncertainty of those years. That's why we hang on to the dog tags and yellowing newspaper clippings from that bygone era. That's why our voices take on a serious tone as we recount to our children the experiences of those days.
Over the years, our fears have changed. As tensions between the international atomic superpowers alternately surged and ebbed, according to the political climate of the moment, we sometimes feared terrorist attacks on one or more of the Oak Ridge plants. This fear was especially intense during the late 1960s and early 1970s as antiwar riots broke out all across the nation.
In November 1972, Oak Ridge was the object of a very real terrorist threat. Three hijackers armed with hand grenades and guns forced a Southern Airways jetliner to fly over and around the Atomic City. They threatened to crash the plane into one of the nuclear facilities when their demand for $10 million was not met. The plant was evacuated, and all of its nuclear reactors were shut down.
As recently as the Persian Gulf War, security was tight at the plants. Cars entering the plants were searched both visually and with bomb-detection devices. The briefcases, lunch boxes and personal items of anyone entering or leaving the plants were searched.
Shortly after the Persian Gulf War began, I was hired as an editor by Martin Marietta and was assigned to work at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant. My office was only a few doors down the hall from that of Dr. Googin. My initiation was nerve wracking and tense. I was so concerned about not violating any security procedures that I almost became paranoid. I never received or delivered a document -- regardless of size or apparent importance -- without first writing down the name of the other person involved, the date and time of the transaction, and the reason for the transaction.
Then, when the Gulf War ended and the Cold War was declared over, the mission of the plant suddenly changed from making weapons components to merely storing them. Later, the mission shifted to dismantlement of older versions of the weapons. More recently, a primary mission has become the transfer of the technology that was developed over the years to the private sector for industrial use.
Security measures were suddenly relaxed. No one had to receipt every document they transmitted or received. Visitors were allowed to tour areas of the plant that were never before opened to most employees, to say nothing of the general public. The number of political visits, including visits by foreigners, increased dramatically. Formerly classified and carefully guarded documents were suddenly declared unclassified. The "normal" security paranoia suffered by the average employee only intensified because now there was no apparent "paper trail." People were afraid to destroy anything. Official records were no longer required, but many employees, including myself, continued to keep personal, unofficial records of all their documents and actions.
In spite of the official declarations that the Cold War is over and we no longer must fear the communist world as we once did, uncertainties remain and troubling questions abound. Can we really trust the former communists who may tour the facilities? Will the former communists, who still control a substantial portion of the Russian parliament, once again come to power and threaten to rekindle the Cold War? And what of the unaccounted nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union? What if they end up in the hands of terrorist groups or rogue nations?
Other people are more concerned with the consequences of decades of unregulated, secretive, and often undocumented nuclear experimentation and industrial production. They fear the ongoing deterioration of tons of buried radioactive waste as it leaches into the soil and from there to local streams, rivers and lakes. They wonder if it's safe to eat the fish they catch, to swim in the lakes, or to drink the water from their kitchen faucets.
Yes, we still live in the shadow of the Atomic City. We no longer distribute dog tags to the elementary school children or practice air-raid drills, but as we reminisce of those early years, we wonder what lurks in the shadows of the future.
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