Part 9 (2/2)

J. Laurence Kulp, a scientist at Columbia Universityas Lamont Observatory, rea.s.sured Libby that researchers could obtain bone and tissue samples from humans of all ages in Houston and other cities. aDown in Houston they donat have all these rules,a he said.13 aThey intend to get virtually every death in the age range we are interested in that occurs in the city of Houston. They have a lot of poverty cases and so on.a (Kulp told a reporter in 1995 that the term abody s.n.a.t.c.hinga was ameant to be a joke.a)14 With a casualness most people reserve for the weather, the Sun-s.h.i.+ners often talked about the number of bombs that could be detonated before mankind would be wiped out. One scientist had calculated that 100,000 weapons the size of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki could be detonated before the adoomsdaya level was reached. But AEC scientist Forest Western told fellow Suns.h.i.+ners he didnat believe fallout would kill everyone: I think you will find a few Eskimos or a few Patagonians or a few people in some isolated part of the earth who will keep the race going.15 They might not populate the earth with just the descendants we would like to see. They might not be highly civilized like we are. They might not know anything about atomic warfare, for example. But I think the concept of wiping the race out with nuclear weapons is a little bit far-fetched.

The Suns.h.i.+ners focused on strontium-90, one of the hundreds of fission products released during an atomic detonation. Strontium-90 was considered a abad actora because it is deposited in human bone and has a half-life of twenty-eight years.16 In other words, half of the radioactive strontium released during the 1954 tests would have decayed by 1982; half the remaining radioactive strontium would decay by 2010; and so on.

Strontium-90 is chemically similar to calcium and is readily a.s.similated in the bones of growing children who drink contaminated milk. For that reason, the Suns.h.i.+ners were particularly interested in procuring the body parts of young children. Eventually they learned that children on average had three to four times more strontium-90 in their bones than adults.17 Scientists soon realized that other fission products could cause biological damage. One was radioactive iodine. The British were the first to detect radioiodine in the urine of children. Then it was discovered in animals near the Nevada Test Site. The military found radioiodine in their personnel in Hawaii and Was.h.i.+ngton. And finally Lester Van Middlesworth, a former student of Joseph Hamiltonas, detected it in cattle thyroids.

Van Middlesworth, an enterprising scientist, was working in his laboratory in Memphis, Tennessee, in the spring of 1954 when a Geiger counter began ticking frantically. The device had picked up radioactivity from the thyroid gland still in the head of a slaughtered steer that had been grazing on Tennessee gra.s.s. Van Middlesworth suspected immediately that the radioactivity in the steeras thyroid came from the fallout from the 1954 Pacific tests. Hundreds, then thousands of thyroid glands begged from packing plants confirmed his hypothesis. aWe knew in one week the entire country was contaminated,a Van Middles-worth said.18 an.o.body believed you could contaminate the world from one spot. It was like Columbus when no one believed the world was round.a Van Middlesworth informed his mentor, Joseph Hamilton, of his suspicions.19 Instead of sharing Van Middlesworthas alarm, the older man attempted to throw his former student off the track. aDr. Van Middles-worth is a very energetic and enterprising young man with a penchant for rather abruptly making decisions,a Hamilton told an AEC official in a June 18, 1954, letter. aI saw the possible implications of what he brought to my attention and attempted to subdue his marked degree of enthusiasm by suggesting the traces of radioiodine in the Memphis area might have arisen from airborne contamination from the Oak Ridge National Laboratories.a Hamilton thought he had successfully diverted Van Middlesworthas attention but later learned his former student had obtained some thyroid glands from the Armour Packing Co. in San Francisco. aAgain I indicated a lack of interest in the topic feeling that this was probably the best way such matters should be handled,a Hamilton wrote.

An AEC official thanked Hamilton for aplaying downa the matter with Van Middlesworth.20 But the AEC eventually embraced Van Middles-worthas findings and began sending him thyroid glands from throughout the world. From those thyroids, Van Middlesworth could not only detect above-ground atomic blasts set off anywhere in the world but could also estimate the size of the explosions. aIt was not as helpful as high-alt.i.tude airplanes, but it was a biological indication of what was going on,a Van Middlesworth said.21 Although the weapons scientists admitted the atomic tests carried some health risks, they invariably underestimated the danger. Los Alamos chemist Wright Langham, in a paper apparently written sometime after the 1956 presidential elections, calculated that fallout might produce an additional thirty cases of leukemia and ten cases of bone cancer per year.22 aThere is no doubt but that the world population is receiving a small exposure to radioactive materials originating from nuclear weapons testing.23 Fission products from bomb detonations have and are depositing over the surface of the earth.a these effects may result in an increase in genetic mutations, shortening of life expectancy and increased incidence of leukemia and bone sarcoma,a he wrote. The paper said nothing about the hundreds of other radioisotopes released by the bomb, including radioiodine.

As the fallout controversy raged, the scientists continued to collect their human samples, often covertly. Some 1,165 human thyroid glands were collected during autopsies around the world and sent to the Oak Ridge Inst.i.tute for Nuclear Studies for a.n.a.lysis.24 A human finger, which had been amputated after being pierced with plutonium metal, also was sent to Oak Ridge. With the help of a cooperative local pathologist, scientists at the Hanford Reservation a.n.a.lyzed the plutonium in the tissues and organs of nearly 350 people who lived near Hanford or worked at the nuclear facility. University of Utah researchers examined the tissues of some 75 residents to determine radioactivity from the weapons tests. At a uranium processing plant in Cincinnati, Ohio, the kidneys, livers, and spleens of workers were taken during autopsy and a.n.a.lyzed for uranium deposition. But one of the most extensive and long-lived body parts collection programs of the Cold War began at Los Alamos in 1959 after a plutonium worker named Cecil Kelley was fatally injured in a criticality accident.

Cecil was on his way to a New Yearas Eve party on December 30, 1958, when someone called and asked him to fill in at the DP West Site, a facility where plutonium was chemically separated and recovered from waste products. Reluctantly he agreed. Snowy footprints crisscrossed the technical area and the Sangre de Cristos were beginning to take on their luminous, other-worldly color. From somewhere came the spicy scent of burning pin on wood. The building where Cecil worked resembled a huge boiler room. Large steel tanks containing varying amounts of plutonium in solution stood about the room and hundreds of pipes crossed the ceiling.

Just ten minutes earlier there had been about a half-dozen maintenance workers in Room 218, but they had left when their 4:30 P.M. s.h.i.+ft ended. Cecil pulled on a pair of shapeless coveralls. He was thirty-eight years old, an ex-paratrooper and infantryman who had worked as a ski guide and instructor in Sun Valley, Idaho, before joining the Army in 1940. Afterward he had worked as a plutonium processing operator from 1946 to 1949, and again from 1955 through 1958.

Cecil mounted a small stepladder and looked down through a viewing window into one of the tanks.25 Normally the tank contained only a small amount of plutonium, but for some reason approximately seven and one-half pounds of plutonium had been washed into the vessel.26 The plutonium was sitting in a layer of organic solvents at the top of the tank.

Still looking through the viewing window, Cecil reached out and flicked a switch on the side of the tank that rotated a paddle inside the vessel. It was a simple, mechanical movement, which he had performed at least seventy-five times before. As the stirrer began turning, the liquids on the bottom were pushed outward and up the walls of the tank.27 A bowllike depression formed in the middle of the tank and the plutonium solvent rushed into the bowl. With a lot more plutonium molecules jostling each other, the solvent suddenly went critical. A chain reaction had begun.

A blue haloa”the same blue halo that had anointed the brows of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin when they were fatally injureda”filled the room. A m.u.f.fled thump was heard as the 225-gallon tank jumped about three-eighths of an inch. Cecil either fell or was knocked to the floor. He got up, turned the stirrer motor off, then turned it on again. A rumbling noise came from the tank and he ran outside into the snow screaming, aIam burning up. Iam burning up.a28 Scientists later calculated that between 10,000 and 12,000 rad struck Cecilas head and chest area.29 The neutrons and gamma rays ripped through his body, turning the sodium in his blood, the phosphorous in his hair, the calcium in his bones, and the silver-mercury fillings in his mouth radioactive. Two men working nearby took Cecil to a shower, pa.s.sing by the tank where the chain reaction had occurred. One of them turned off the stirrer. By then Cecil could no longer stand. The workers laid him on the floor while they waited for an ambulance. A lab nurse observed he was in shock and unconscious but awith a nice pink skin.a Cecil was almost dead when he arrived at Los Alamos Medical Center a few minutes later.30 His eyes were so red they looked as if they had been damaged by a welderas arc. His lips were dusky blue. aThe skin of the chest and abdomen was reddened as though it had been exposed to sunlight and received a first degree burn,a his medical records state.31 The strange sunburn also covered his back.

The hospital doctors and nurses tried to make Cecil as comfortable as they could. aI was on call at the time.32 I had never seen anything like it before,a said John S. Benson, a physician who still lives in Los Alamos. aHe was miserable and scared. We were unhappy that he was in such a sad state. We were trying to make him comfortable.a The emergency room nurses were initially unable to check Cecilas blood pressure because he was so restless and agitated. Dr. Benson later wrote in his admission note, aWhen seen in the E.R. physical examination was impossible due to the fact that the pt. retched violently every few moments and was hyperventilating to the extreme, was quite restless and very agitated.33 His lungs were clear but pulse and blood pressure were not obtained. He was pale, moist, although he had taken a cold shower prior to being brought over.a As Cecil thrashed wildly in the emergency room, a contingent of Los Alamos scientists arrived at the hospital and hurriedly began gathering the adata.a Using a tongue depressor, chemist Don Petersen, a friend of Wright Langhamas, sc.r.a.ped Cecilas vomit from the floor and his explosive diarrhea from the walls.34 aWe werenat going to lose anything but the groans,a Petersen recalled in a deposition taken in 1997 by an attorney representing Cecilas family in a lawsuit.35 Numerous blood samples were taken and all of his urine was saved, including three ccs squeezed from his bladder after death. A portable Geiger counter placed next to him showed that he was emitting some 15 millirad per hour.

The ma.s.sive irradiation of Cecil Kelley provided Los Alamos scientists with their third aexperiment of opportunity.a36 Once again they could chronicle what happens to the human body when a bomb was exploded without the confounding effects of burn and blast. But there was an even more intriguing experiment they could pursue once Cecil was dead. They planned to harvest his organs to find out whether the plutonium he had acc.u.mulated in his body matched the predictions derived from exposure records and Wright Langhamas mathematical equations extrapolated from the plutonium injectees.

Langham, who had risen from his lowly Manhattan Project status to become one of the movers and shakers in Operation Suns.h.i.+ne and the worldas authority on plutonium, coordinated the collection and a.n.a.lysis of data. When Cecilas wife, Doris, got to the hospital, Langham met her at the doors to the emergency room.37 Do you know anything about this? he asked her.

Yes, she knew a lot, she responded.

Then you know heas not going to live, she recalled Langham telling her.

aI knew from the very beginning that he wasnat going to live,a Doris said in an interview in 1994. aHe was retching in the hospital emergency room. They wouldnat let me in. I was right outside the door. I donat know what they gave him. Morphine, I suppose. They settled him down and took him upstairs.a Cecil was taken to a private room where he was laid in a bed supported by ashock blocksa and enclosed in an oxygen tent. A saline solution dripped into his veins. Thorazine was administered to curb the nausea. Hot water bottles were placed on his swelling arms. Still, the pain and restlessness continued. At 6:30 P.M. Dr. Benson noted that Cecil was suffering from asevere chillsa”still retching, shocky, restless, moaning.a38 Gradually the vomiting and nausea subsided. Cecil began taking small sips of water but could not urinate and complained of severe pain in his right upper abdomen. A nurse wrote, aHe described it as a hard knot in his lowest rib which wouldnat relax.a By midnight Cecil was coherent enough to give his group leader a description of what had happened. He described the heavenly blue glow that had filled the room and the rumbling sound he heard from the tank. Sometime after the interview, he vomited on the floor. The floor was measured for radioactivity. Wrote Benson, aVomitus area monitored and is aO.K.a a Don Petersen, who retired from the laboratory in 1990 but still serves as an advisor to the Armyas chemical and biological warfare programs, said in his deposition that doctors were having trouble stabilizing Cecilas blood pressure. The only way they could keep the blood pressure up was to administer fluids. But as Cecilas body began to shut down and his kidneys failed, the infusion of liquids began creating other problems.

Doris, who was allowed into Cecilas room after he had been stabilized, remained at his bedside through most of the ordeal. She said her husband knew he was dying. He told her to take good care of their two children, a seven-year-old daughter and a boy about eighteen months old. His brother from Indiana arrived about 3:00 A.M. and they talked quietly for an hour or so.

Cecil occasionally napped or dozed as the hours ticked away. His right arm, then his left arm, began to swell from the I.V.as. About 7:00 A.M. the next morning, a nurse rubbed his back and changed his linen. She noticed that an inflamed area had appeared on his right arm.

At 5:00 P.M., some twenty-four hours after the accident, the doctors decided to do a sternal bone marrow biopsy. Several physicians said the biopsy probably was done to determine whether Cecil was a candidate for a bone marrow transplant, which was still a new procedure in the late 1950s. But a doc.u.ment provided to his wife and daughter during the discovery stage of their lawsuit suggests the procedure was simply another way to collect data on the effects of radiation. Writing to a colleague a week after the accident, Los Alamos doctor Thomas s.h.i.+pman observed: From the very beginning it was obvious that this man had received a ma.s.sive dose.39 We are currently estimating it in excess of 12,000 rem. He died in thirty-five hours, but I am sure would have died in two or three hours had we not treated his shock. He was in a state of profound shock on admission to the hospital and this was the princ.i.p.al problem as far as treatment was concerned. Because of the size of the dose, it seemed obvious that he would die a central nervous system death, so we never seriously considered bone marrow transfusions.

The operating room equipment was taken to Cecilas bedside. His chest was scrubbed with soap, water, alcohol, and draped in a sterile cloth. Then an incision was made over what was thought to be his sternum. A agood deala of material was removed, but it did not seem to include any bone marrow.40 The doctor suddenly realized he had made the incision in the wrong place. That wound was closed with fine silk sutures and another incision made. Cartilage, a small piece of muscle, and aa great deal of red marrow was obtained for slides,a physician W. R. Oakes later wrote.

Dorisas stomach churned as she witnessed the procedure: aWhat they pulled out was slop.41 They put a syringe in his chest and pulled it out. It was just mush.a Cecil lived another ten hours. The nausea and cramping came and went. His arms and legs continue to swell. Six hours before his death he mumbled to a nurse his chest felt as if ait was beginning to thaw out.a But then the restlessness and thras.h.i.+ng set in again. He complained of pains in his chest, abdomen, and arms and finally grew so agitated that he pulled the intravenous needles from his arms. He was sedated with morphine and luminal. He began having afrog typea respirations, which gradually became slower over the next fifteen minutes. aPulse un.o.btainablea”heart tones quite distant a respiration had ceaseda”no responsea”p.r.o.nounced dead at 3:15 A.M.,a Benson wrote in Cecilas medical chart.42 It was New Yearas Day of 1959, exactly thirty-four hours and forty-five minutes since the accident occurred. In the hospital room at the time of Cecilas death were physicians John Benson, Robert Grier, and Clarence Lushbaugh, a laboratory pathologist who would soon perform the autopsy. Several visitors who were en route to Los Alamos, including Louis Hempelmann, who had overseen the medical care of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, were contacted and told to go back home.43 Hempelmann said he would be available for consultations by telephone if anyone needed him.

After his death, Cecilas corpse was dragged by sled through the snow to a steel-lined building that contained a whole-body counter. aHe was so loaded with everything, the counter just went berserk,a recalled Earl Kinsley, an Air Force health physicist a.s.signed to the lab at the time of the accident.44 At 6:00 A.M. on Newas Year Day, Clarence Lushbaugh began an autopsy.45 Lushbaugh was struck by the waterlogged appearance of Cecilas tissues. (The physicians had been pumping fluids into him to keep up his blood pressure and had anearly drowneda him in their efforts, Thomas s.h.i.+pman would later write.46) Lushbaugh dutifully recorded the two incisions on Cecilas chest and the anumerous needle puncture marksa on his forearms and lower legs. Not surprisingly, he found some of the same kind of hemorrhages that Stafford Warren and s.h.i.+elds Warren had observed years earlier on the j.a.panese atomic bombing victims. The abdominal cavity, the gastrointestinal tract, and the heart were covered with small hemorrhages. aRigor mortis is exceptionally strong and the muscles more contracted than usual,a Lushbaugh wrote. Cecilas heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, stomach, colon, lymph nodes, gonads, and brain were removed and stored for later a.n.a.lysis.

Following the accident, telegrams poured into Los Alamos from all over the world. They were not sympathy messages but requests from researchers who wanted bits and pieces of Cecilas body for study. Clarence Lushbaugh s.h.i.+pped Cecilas brain in a wide-mouthed mayonnaise jar to the Armed Forces Inst.i.tute of Pathology.47 When Lushbaugh was asked in a deposition who gave him authority to send the brain there, he responded, aG.o.d did.a Scientists at the Armed Forces Inst.i.tute of Pathology compared Cecilas brain to the brains of monkeys that were also being blasted with huge doses of radiation.48 The findings were so interesting that one of the scientists, Webb Haymaker, asked Lushbaugh for permission to discuss the case at a meeting at Walter Reed Hospital.49 Pieces of Cecilas frozen liver and lymph nodes were mailed to Hanford. Twenty-five ccs of his urine were sent to Oak Ridge. For many months after the accident, Los Alamos scientists churned out biomedical and dosimetry reports based on data from the deceased manas body parts and his clothing, including the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons on his coveralls.

But the most important postmortem study was the one to find out if the plutonium in Kelleyas body matched what scientists had predicted. Using nose counts, urinalyses, and Wright Langhamas formula, the group predicted that Cecil had eighteen nanocuries, or a little less than half of the so-called maximum permissible body burden.50 When they reduced his organs to solution, they found his body content was nineteen nanocuries. The agreement was so close that Wright Langham considered it aundoubtedly fortuitous.a But the scientists were nevertheless disturbed because the amount of plutonium in the lungs and pulmonary lymph nodes was much greater than they had predicted.

While Los Alamos scientists performed their mathematical calculations and began preparing their findings for publication, officials at AEC headquarters in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., were in a dither about whom to blame. Not surprisingly, Cecil Kelley became the scapegoat. It is difficult to reconstruct from doc.u.ments exactly how the criticality accident occurred, but apparently three aimproper transfersa of solutions were made that resulted in the excess of plutonium in the tank.51 Itas not clear whether the transfers were made by Kelley or by workers on the preceding s.h.i.+ft. Ironically, the lab was in the process of reviewing the safety aspects of its plutonium recovery program when the criticality occurred.

To his credit, lab director Norris Bradbury informed the Atomic Energy Commission that ano single causea triggered the accident.52 aIt was made possible by a complicated set of circ.u.mstances and coincidences, no one of which can be considered wholly responsible.a But the AEC nevertheless went ahead and issued a press release blaming the entire incident on Cecil. aThe accident was directly attributable to errors on the part of the deceased operator.a53 The AEC press release didnat sit well with Thomas s.h.i.+pman. aI feel quite strongly that the statement as given is manifestly unfair to Kelley himself and does not give a true picture of the whole affair,a he told Bradbury.54 s.h.i.+pman also strongly protested the AECas statement in a letter to Charles Dunham, who by then was in charge of all the AECas biomedical programs: In stating that the accident was adirectlya attributable to mistakes made by Kelley it was untrue.55 I am sure that you are sufficiently familiar with the facts to realize that Kelley could have continued to do all of the things he did had it not been for things beyond his control and beyond the knowledge of anyone concerned.a On the whole, the people around here know pretty well what had happened, and this new publicity has left them quite bewildered, and they feel that a man who is unable to defend himselfa”and who possibly could have defended himselfa”has been very unjustly treated.

Cecil was given a military burial and a twenty-one-gun salute. A three-cornered American flag went to Doris. His daughter, Katie, then a small girl clad in a navy-blue sailor suit and a blue hat, tossed a handful of dirt on the casket. Doris received $7,000 from Los Alamos; another $3,000 went to Kelleyas first wife. Doris, who worked as a secretary at the lab for forty-seven years, said lab officials also promised to pay for her childrenas college education, buy her a house, and give her a salary increase.56 But none of those promises were kept. With two fatherless children to raise, the family gradually slipped into poverty.

The laboratory also returned to Doris her husbandas gold Bulova wrist.w.a.tch, and his wallet. In the wallet was Cecilas 1958 Los Alamos Golf a.s.sociation members.h.i.+p card, his Eight b.a.l.l.s Bowling League card, a New Mexico hunting and fis.h.i.+ng license, and a charge card to Pfluegeras Smart Footwear in Santa Fe. Behind the bright-red Atomic Energy Commission identification card, Cecil kept a one-dollar bill, soft as tissue paper and dated May 18, 1914. The dollar bill was given to him by his father-in-law and was supposed to have been his good-luck charm.

With the death of Cecil Kelley, Los Alamosas human tissue program began in earnest. Between 1959 and 1985 the body parts of 1,712 human beings, including nearly a dozen whole cadavers, were s.h.i.+pped to Los Alamos and a.n.a.lyzed for their plutonium content.57 The original objective of the program was to see if the amount of plutonium in deceased nuclear workers agreed with predicted amounts derived from exposure records.

The Los Alamos investigators obtained organs and cadavers from people who died in other parts of the country for a acontrol group.a Those a.n.a.lyses also helped scientists estimate how much plutonium the American people were acc.u.mulating from the bomb tests. The human organs were dried in ovens, converted into ash, then dissolved in an acid solution so they could be a.n.a.lyzed. For many years, anyone who died in the town of Los Alamos was autopsied, including visitors, whom pathologist Clarence Lushbaugh called aextras.a58

PART FOUR.

aThe Buchenwald Toucha

33.

aMICE OR MEN?a

One by one the doctors crossed the lobby of the Carlton Hotel and took a right toward the big ballroom.1 With its gilded ceilings and elegant furnis.h.i.+ngs, the hotel resembled an Italian Renaissance palace. Just two blocks away was the White House. The spring sun poured through the tall windows, showering light on the stragglers making their way toward the smell of coffee and the unmistakable hubbub of a meeting about to begin. When they were a.s.sembled, with steaming cups of coffee in hand, there were twenty-six of th

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