The Girls of Atomic City

Site X is renamed the “Kingston Demolition Range” (23) and current residents are ordered to vacate the area at short notice and with incomplete reimbursement. It is estimated that “around 1,000 families and 3,000 people” are moved from the homes but “the real number of the displaced may have been much higher” (25). Construction begins in late 1942 and “construction workers and scavengers make their way through vacated lands, finding books, photos, shoes, pans, tools, and more lying abandoned in the dust” (28). Within a year, three plants code-named Y-12, X-10, and K-25 are being built at what is then dubbed Clinton Engineering Works (CEW).

Those evicted from their homes now have to “compete with new workers arriving to the area in droves, drawn from other big regions in the South by news of upcoming construction jobs” and many find themselves “applying for work at the project that had evicted them in the first place” (28). Toni Peters, a young woman influenced by the cultural shift encouraging women to enter the workforce, is a local determined to get a job at Site X. She suspects that “something big” is happening and is determined to learn what (20). Like the other locals, Toni knows that this is “not your run-of-the-mill wartime factory … not with the nonstop comings and goings” (20). Although “packed train cars” and “convoys of overloaded trucks” make deliveries to the site, it doesn’t seem as if any wartime commodity (“no tanks, no munitions, no jeeps”) ever come out (20).

An official photographer, James Edward “Ed” Westcott, captures the life of the town in photographs that reflect a “pioneering spirit and the expressions of newfound camaraderie among those for whom family and home [are] far away” (31). For Toni, it feels as though “adventure could be right around the corner” (31).

In 1934, German geochemist Ida Noddack questions the conclusions of an academic paper by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi had been doing work “bombarding elements all the way up the periodic table with neutrons to see how they behaved” (33). Noddack believes that his work is inconclusive and does not go far enough, and she writes a paper in response. This paper is “both ignored and on occasion mocked,” but Noddack is prescient in proposing that it is possible to split the nucleus of an atom (34).

Kattie’s husband had moved from their home in Alabama to work Clinton Engineering Works (CEW), sending money home for their family. He learns that there is a job for Kattie, too, at the ever-expanding Project. She lands work as a janitor, and she is upset to leave her children behind—she had been told that they “were not welcome at this new place, not if your skin was black, anyway” (37). When she arrives, Celia is horrified by the mud which is “like a raw pit of gummy earth” (37). Determined not to ruin her new shoes, Celia refuses to leave the car and is carried across the “a sopping sea of mud” by the driver (37). She is given two identification cards to be worn at all times and finds a place in to stay in dormitory W-1.

When Toni attends her interview, she tells Mr. Diamond that she can take dictation, but they soon discover that their respective accents make it difficult to understand each other. Despite this, she gets the job. Jane also finally receives word that her application to work as a statistician has been approved. The process has been long: aside from the interview, there had been an investigation in which men, possibly from the FBI, conducted a thorough background check. Jane had wanted to study engineering at the University of Tennessee but was told that “We don’t matriculate engineering as a major for females” (44), and she ended up the studying statistics. She aced the course and had any number of job offers, settling on the position at CEW so she could stay close to her widower father.

Executive Order 8802, passed in 1942, declared that there would be no racial discrimination in the defense industries and the Fair Employment Practices Committee was established to “address discrimination in wartime industries” (46). However, Tennessee is still a Jim Crow state and, while the federal government could have established the town as “a completely desegregated zone,” it didn’t, and black residents are “primarily laborers, janitors, and domestics” living in segregated areas (47). This policy prevents J. Ernest Wilkins Jr, a respected University of Chicago scientist from working at the Project. Kattie moves into the black area of the town, and as a black resident she is not permitted to live with her husband.

White and unmarried, Celia is in a different position. The town is full of “many, many, oh-so-many young, single men” (51) and decides to play the field. Bringing in all these young workers is a challenge since job advertisements have to be so secretive, but the “excellent pay, dorms, cafeterias, and low rent” are enough to entice workers and educated soldiers. Celia’s days are filled with work, including covering for Lieutenant Colonel Vanden Bulck’s personal secretary. In this role she meets General Leslie Grove. He is head of the Project, although Celia does not know this and is warmly invited to call him GG.

In 1938, scientist Lise Meitner, exiled from an increasingly hostile Germany, receives a letter from her colleague Otto Hahn still working in Berlin. The letter requests help understanding data from the experiments Hahn and Fritz Strassman have been carrying out with Tubealloy. Analyzing the data, Lise effectively discovers nuclear fission. The US government and military soon begin “an ‘all-out’ effort to work on unleashing this new power” (62) which will shortly result in the formation of the Project. In this way, “Ida Noddack’s theories and Lise Meitner’s explanations had resulted in a chain reaction of their own….” (62)

Although new employees are allowed to move into housing, they cannot start their jobs until all clearances and tests have been passed, which, depending on the job, can take some time. While they wait, many of them spend their time in a common area known as the “bull pen.” Virginia’s paperwork has been misplaced so she spends her time in the bull pen where she is “thrust into the unexpected role of teacher” (66), trying to “come up with interesting and impromptu lessons” (67) for the other new employees. Eventually one of the regulars reveals that he will be head of a division of workers at Y-12, and he offers her a new job in human resources rather than the lab to which she was originally assigned. She accepts in order to finally leave the bull pen.

Fresh out of high school, Dot spends six weeks “back in class again,” being trained to work “those darn machines” (68). The Project is particularly keen to employ high school girls from rural areas, “feeling young women were easy to instruct” and “did what they were told” (69). At first Dot finds the security protocol daunting. When she first spies “the guards and the fences and the Wild West-looking, mud-covered, half-built town that had sprung up in the Cumberland Foothills, she [thinks], If I had enough money I would turn around and go back home!” (70). She works through these feelings, however. Having recently learned that her brother Shorty is missing in action while serving in the Navy, she finds her job to be “a way to help end the war that [has] taken Shorty from her” (71).

Security is certainly tight. There are the guards and fences that intimidate Dot and the background checks and clearances that hold up Virginia and the others in the Bull Pen. There is a prevailing sense that “someone [is] always watching” (65) and “empty chairs routinely [appear] with no explanations given” (64). Rumors circulate about people being dismissed simply for telling outsiders insignificant details about the town and that there are undercover FBI agents throughout the populace. Helen actually meets some of these undercover officers. Returning home after another day in the bull pen, she is visited by two men in dark suits who ask her to play close attention to what people around her are doing and saying and to write down “names, dates, locations,” and topics of discussion. Helen realizes that she is “being recruited to spy” (73).

Meanwhile, scientists manage to cause “the world’s first ever self-sustaining nuclear reaction” (76) and the Project builds “a reactor that [will] use Tubealloy to produce another new and highly fissionable element, Element 94” (78).  

The Rowan family move to CEW believing it to be “a land of opportunity and of purpose” (81). Colleen is not impressed by the conditions—the mud, the lack of sidewalks, the endless queues for showers, food, entertainment—though her mother insists that “this is where we need to be” and encourages an attitude of self-sacrifice for the war effort. The Rowans stay in Happy Valley, a late residential addition that sprung up next to K-25 to house its thousands of workers.

Constructing a residential area like Happy Valley is difficult. The construction company is given limited information about the scale of the project and the work conditions result in a “25 percent turnover rate” (85). Accommodation ranges from three-bedroom houses to small communal hutments, though housing is still in short supply. Colleen’s immediate family divide themselves among the houses of extended family members already working at CEW before eventually securing a place in one of thousands of identical trailers. Although it has only a double bed at each end and a kitchen in the middle, the trailer sometimes houses eleven people and has no toilets or running water. Work continues on housing; it is estimated that a house is built every 30 minutes.

Kattie is woken by a flashlight as a guard enters her hut yet again. The guards are “a very regular presence in the black hutments” and man the barbed wire fences around “the Pen” (90), the area where the black women are housed separate from black men. Black men are never allowed into the Pen, and although women are allowed to visit the men’s huts, there is a 10pm curfew. There were originally plans for “an entire Negro Village, one that would have resembled the main Townsite with construction like the white homes, separate but essentially equal” (91). However, as demand for houses grew, the area was requisitioned for white families. The Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the program justifies this by claiming that “Negroes didn’t want the nice houses […] Negroes felt more comfortable in the huts, that was what was familiar to them” (91). Facing poor housing conditions, spousal separation, and discrimination, black people also receive terrible food in the canteen. Since food poisoning is not unusual, Kattie is determined to “figure out a way to cook in her hut, out of sight of the guards, rules or no” (93).

Elsewhere, thousands of single white women are closely monitored in their dorms with no cooking, gambling, alcohol, or male visitors allowed. Any sexual activity is severely punished. However, for those who had attended college, these dorms have a “familiar feeling” (95). The College Women’s Club organizes socials and provides a babysitting service for the town’s families, which also gives them a chance to “sit in a real living room and play a game of bridge or relax in mixed company without fear of running afoul of dorm regulations” (95). In this respect, CEW is “in many ways an outpost best suited to the young, those for whom enthusiasm trump[s] exhaustion and the sense of adventure [outruns] hardship” (96). For others, the environment is extremely difficult and the Chief Psychiatrist finds a lot of people “in a perpetual state of edgy exhaustion” (96), exacerbated by the fact that workers cannot discuss their worries or their workday with spouses or roommates. It is difficult to “foster community from scratch amid nonstop deadlines, round-the-clock work schedules, and a high turnover of residents and laborers” but “women [bring] a sense of permanence. Social connectivity. Home” (97).

The challenge for the Project is “not securing enough raw Tubealloy; it [is] transforming that raw Tubealloy into fuel for two different models of the Gadget” (99). This process takes place across different sites, and CEW is a key part of the process, eventually housing four plants responsible for handling Tubealloy. Three of these plants concentrate on enriching Tubealloy by separating Tubealloy 235 from Tubealloy 238 through three different processes: electromagnetism, gaseous diffusion, and liquid thermal diffusion.