Stories from Behind the Fence

On April 20, 1943, the University of California signed a contract with the United States Army Corps of Engineers to operate a secret laboratory hidden away in the mountains of northern New Mexico. This laboratory soon became home to some of the most revolutionary science in US history. Led by scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the staff at this secret Manhattan Project location called Los Alamos was responsible for the development and testing of nuclear weapons.

The plutonium production process at Hanford was developed from what Enrico Fermi and his team proved when they constructed the world’s first, albeit small-scale, nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942. If a reactor could be built sufficiently large, the intense flow of neutrons within it could, almost magically, change uranium into plutonium. This process of transmutation would not be creating gold from straw or lead but would be creating something much more valuable.

The creation of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, called Kingston Demolition Range and Clinton Engineer Works during the Manhattan Project, centered around one main goal- the development of enriched uranium for atomic weapons. The three facilities that achieved this goal, the Y-12 Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant, the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and the S-50 Liquid Thermal Diffusion Plant, did so in markedly different ways.

The Calutron Girls operated the arrays, or racetracks, at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. These young women, many of whom were just out of high school, did not know that their work involved separating uranium for use in an atomic bomb.

With the pressing demands of feeding the nation’s fighting forces and the nationwide rationing of canned foods there was a desire and need for people to grow locally. Victory Gardens could be found all over the country during WWII, from the backyards in Oak Ridge to the rooftops in New York City.

In September, 1942 United States Army General Leslie R. Groves was assigned to manage the Manhattan Project. He acquired funding, mobilized a diverse workforce including attracting top scientists, and selected the ideal locations for the project to ensure secrecy and success in this new, top-secret undertaking. Ultimately, Groves approved three locations for this new clandestine project: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The future of White Sands, and for that matter the nation as a whole, reached a watershed in the spring of 1945. The sequence of events in the Tularosa basin from April to August 1945 created the "atomic age" tensions that bedeviled the monument for the next five decades.

On December 2, 1949, the Atomic Energy Commission and the United States Air Force conducted the “Green Run” experiment at the Hanford Nuclear production complex outside Richland, WA. It was the largest single release of radioactive iodine-131 in Hanford’s history, covering vegetation as far north as Kettle Falls, WA and as far south as Klamath Falls, OR.

On March 26, 1943, Dorothy McKibbin reported to work at 109 East Palace in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and learned that their employer was the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in the nearby mountains, part of the covert Manhattan Project. From her modest office, Dorothy became “gatekeeper” to Los Alamos since all civilian employees and many of the military personnel checked in through her office.