“Down Wind of Morality”
Beyond Oppenheimer–The Cost of Lies on the Road to Nuclear Superiority
By Greg O’Brien, William Turpie, Brad Ball
“Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger”—Albert Einstein
The epic film “Oppenheimer,” celebrated winner of seven Oscars at the 96th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director Chris Nolan, Best Leading Actor Cillian Murphy, and Best Supporting Actor Robert Downey Jr., took viewers to the chilling brink of the nuclear age—a threshold in years to come of treacherous government lies and deceits worldwide that over time cost millions of innocent lies. Read More
At the Los Alamos, New Mexico Manhattan Project “Trinity” blast of July 16, 1945—the first successful atomic blast—beckoning the annihilation of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and fears of what’s to come, J. Robert Oppenheimer, brilliant director of the Manhattan Project and acclaimed “Father of the atomic bomb,” is quoted as referencing a Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Observed then Harvard physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, Director of the Trinity blast: “A foul and awesome display…Now we are all sons of bitches!” Read More
The race for nuclear superiority began with an August 2, 1939 letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from Albert Einstein, co-authored by distinguished physicist Leó Szilárd, advising Roosevelt that nuclear fission could potentially be used to produce powerful nuclear bombs, and warning that Hitler’s Germany may be working on a fission bomb. Read More
The Germans ultimately failed to produce an atomic bomb, though the Soviets were testing in earnest.
Roosevelt responded to Einstein on October 19, 1939, “My dear professor, I found this data of such importance that I have convened a Board consisting of the head of the Bureau of Standards and a chosen representative of the Army and Navy to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium.” Read More
The Einstein-Szilard letter to Roosevelt changed the course of history by prompting American government involvement in nuclear research. The letter led to the creation of the Manhattan Project. By the summer of 1945, the United States had built the world’s first atomic bomb. Read More
And thus, the Manhattan Project was underway, and the race for nuclear superiority, engaged on a parallel track with harrowing nuclear power plant calamities over time—the result of failure and inadequate security. And so, the promising word then “nuclear,” born of a promise to make a better world, was incinerated in the race for superiority and in lies.
Chernobyl Tragedy: “What is the Cost of Lies”
Such was the case with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant tragedy near the city of Pripyat in the Ukraine that erupted on April 26, 1986. It is deemed the gravest nuclear disaster in the world. The devastation was all but hidden from the public in dense secrecy until the airing of the prize-winning 2019 historical drama television miniseries, Chernobyl, created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck. Read More
The opening scene in the miniseries sets the tone for this horrific disaster and for the courageous work of the late Valery Legasov, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, who is credited with mitigating the magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster. In the process, Legasov ultimately committed suicide, fearing KGBs efforts to stop him from exposing Soviet lies.Wrote Legasov, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. So where we once would fear the cost of truth, now we only ask: what is the cost of lies” Read More
The day after the Chernobyl explosion, “phone lines were cut to prevent information about the disaster from reaching the outside world. Unaware of the danger of radiation, the people of Pripyat went about their daily lives. Children walked to school. Housewives went shopping at the market. Officials later boasted that 16 weddings were held that day, showing how ‘normal’ everything was,” reported Michael Dobbs in a 1991 Washington Post piece. Read More
The impacts at Chernobyl are shattering; we live in a minefield of deceit.
Lost in the headlines of today are the “downwinders”— the forgotten victims, the road kill, of atomic testing programs of the 1950s and 60s for nuclear superiority after the end of World War II. Read More
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a surfeit of nuclear secrecy and deceptions at the hands of the United States and the former Soviet Union. Elements within each government, in essence, lost their morality and made war on segments of their own populations in the testing of nuclear weapons and ensuing radiation poisonings. In the case of the United States, it was an American Hiroshima. In the Soviet Union, an apocalyptic nightmare, as detailed in the 1990 documentary “Down Wind of Morality” that aired on the Hallmark Channel (Producer William Turpie; script writer and assistant Field Producer Greg O’Brien.) Watch Here
In some ways, it is difficult to discern who was the worst offender—the Soviets or the United States.
The Soviet Union scrambled after Hiroshima and Nagasaki to join the nuclear age, and four years later tested its first atomic bomb. Now there were two superpowers capable of pulling a nuclear trigger. The Soviet Union had its secret Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as “The Polygon,” located on the steppe in northeast Kazakhstan, south of the valley of the Irtysh River, then part of the USSR. When the Soviet testing began about 400,000 people lived in the area. Stalin’s Soviet Union was hellbent on surpassing the U.S. on the nuclear front. The August 29, 1949 test blast at the Kremlin’s secret site was the first of 456 atomic explosions conducted there during the next 40 years—with devasting effects on downwinders. Read More
The U.S. tested at the secluded United States Department of Energy Nevada Test Site about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. From 1951 until 1992, a total of 1,021 nuclear tests were conducted—100 above and 921 below ground. In the early 1950s mushroom clouds from above ground tests could be seen for almost 100 miles, and westerly winds carried lethal fallout throughout parts of Utah and Northern Arizona and beyond. Read More
In the 1950s, school children in remote Littlefield, Arizona in the isolated northwest corner of the state, a Mormon community, were dazzled as they looked up from the playground to see pink flecks, the size of snowflakes, falling from the sky, and in the distance stunning fireballs and rising mushroom clouds. The pink flecks were stinging. The mushroom clouds could be seen from about 100 miles away.
“That cloud, (it was) pretty; it’s got a lot of color to it,” recalls Beth Wright in Down Wind of Morality. At the time, she was principal of the former Littlefield Regional School, one of the nation’s most rural schools. “It’s amazing that there’s dark and then all of a sudden the whole sky just lights up, and then you just see this thing rise it. It’s an amazing powerful thing to watch…“(But) they lied to us, and they told us we were safe, and they knew we weren’t!”
Said downwinder Elmer Pickett in the documentary, “They (Atomic Energy Commission) fought us every inch of the way…they knew very well what they were doing to us. There’s no doubt in my mind…They very well knew that they were murdering us.” Pickett said he lost 14 family members to cancer.
Claudia Peterson—who grew up on a farm outside St. George, Utah and became a downwind activist—said, “My country considered me a small sacrifice to make considered my child a small sacrifice, considered my sister, my father. That’s probably been the hardest part for me to accept is that we didn’t matter.”
American soldiers in the 1950s, the documentary reports, were guinea pigs as well. Hundreds of soldiers were ordered to set up camps, march and maneuver near nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site. “These tests were done partly in the name of science, partly in the name of tactics,” writes Nicholas Slayton in a Task & Purpose article. “The military was concerned about…how units would be able to move near a nuclear detonation and how equipment and fortifications would withstand the effects.” Read More
The late Stewart Udall, former Arizona congressman and Secretary of Interior in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and related to many downwinders, became a lawyer for the downwinders, who eventually won their case in federal court, only to have the verdict overturned by the Supreme Court on grounds that the federal government has the discretionary function to protect all people, presumably even if it means sacrificing a small number for the greater good.
“I was reluctant to believe my government would do these things,” said Udall in a Down Wind of Morality interview and author of “The Myths of August,” published in 1998. Amazon called his book: “A courageous and noble exploration of the cause and consequences of one of the most fateful acts in human history.”
Udall’s discoveries revealed that Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) officials had lied about the health effects of the atmospheric bomb tests from the Nevada test site in the 1950s. Public health service films informed residents they would be told if radiation levels in the area became too high from the tests.
Hanaford, Washington Plutonium Site: Deadly Radiation Releases
And then there were deadly radiation releases in the 1950s and ’60s from the isolated Hanford, Washington plutonium plant that fueled nuclear weapons. Government lies kept a lid on the deadly radiation releases until area residents fought back. Hanford is now considered the most toxic site in the Western Hemisphere—some call it “an underground Chernobyl waiting to happen.” Read More
Reactors at Hanford, now called the Hanford Site, first produced plutonium for the Manhattan Project to fuel the initial atomic test and the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Plutonium production was intensified in 1947 to stockpile nuclear weapons during the Cold War and then persisted until 1987 when the last reactor was shut down.
In its time, the Hanford plutonium plant was one of the most extensive, yet secretive, construction projects in the history of the world—located on about a thousand square miles of eastern Washington with the Columbia River flowing through much of it. To build the plant, the small town of Hanford was closed down, residents were relocated, and about 60,000 construction workers were brought in to build three nuclear reactors, which were cooled directly from the Columbia River. Three huge plutonium processing plants also were built.
Hanford was chosen for its isolation, access to water to cool the reactors, and access to electricity from the Grand Cooley Dam to run the plant. Hanford became one of the most contaminated places on the planet. Upstream from the Columbia River, Hanford released deadly radiation into the atmosphere and into the Columbia River where it traveled downstream, then up and down the coast.
The plutonium production at Hanford created vast amounts of radioactive and chemical waste, ultimately contaminating the 560-square-mile desert site in south-central Washington that today has as many as 177 underground storage tanks with about 56 million lethal gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste. Two of the tanks are leaking today. The first, Tank B-109, currently holds roughly 123,000 gallons of waste, with about 13,000 gallons of residual liquid, and is estimated to be leaking 560 gallons per year. The other, Tank T-111 contains about 397,000 gallons, with 37,000 gallons of residual liquid, with about 300 gallons leaking each year.
As a result, the adjacent Columbia River still flows for 50 miles past widely contaminated soil, polluted groundwater, and radioactive Hanford reactors that have been shut down. Efforts to clean up the site have failed. The fact remains that it still could take thousands of years, experts say, for this waste to decay.
Hanford is now considered the most toxic site in the Western Hemisphere—some call it “an underground Chernobyl waiting to happen.” Previously, a permanent disposal site had been earmarked for Nevada’s Yucca Mountain where nuclear waste from other sites from across the country also would be stored, but politics and concern for the contamination has held all this up. The first step of the cleanup at Hanford is expected to take as many as 75 years, after which the site will be still too polluted ever to return to public use.
Hanford is “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet,” writes journalist Joshua Frank in his book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. Cleanup is estimated to cost $100 billion.
The contamination crisis at Hanford is far from being solved. “The government now appears to be seriously considering whether it will be necessary to leave thousands of gallons of leftover waste buried forever in Hanford’s shallow underground tanks, according to some of those familiar with the negotiations, according to a New York Times piece last spring written by Ralph Vartabedian.
(In all) “it’s estimated that the United States produced more than 70,000 nuclear warheads since 1945” at several processing plants, Vartabedian writes. “And unlike nuclear power plants, whose waste consists of dry uranium pellets locked away in metal tubes, the weapons facilities are dealing with millions of gallons of a peanut butter-like sludge stored in aging underground tanks.”
A Wizard of Oz Strategy
Just as with the Nevada Test Site, government officials flat-out denied there was any danger to the public from the Hanford site. Like a scene that resonates from the Wizard of Oz where the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy slipped into the Wizard’s castle to speak to him and view the extraordinary light show, the Wizard declares, “Pay no attention to the man behind the Curtain!”
In this case, declarations of public safety came from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
But it was all lies. The release of radioactive iodine caused an estimated thousands of innocent lives, high levels of cancer, and birth deformities.
Tom Bailey, then a farmer who lived about eight miles from the Hanford Reservation, described the pink clouds of radiation from Hanford plant in a “Down Wind of Morality” interview.
“The contaminants used to roll in us when we were kids, only the clouds were pink, and we thought it was really neat that we had pink clouds, and sometimes we’d have pink snow,” he said, detailing his family’s health issues. Bailey said the pink clouds were from the release of radioactive iodine and other elements from the Hanford stacks. (Iodine 131 when injected can lead to birth defects and other lethal illnesses.)
Bailey blames a litany of family illnesses on Hanford.
“Our family has had a long time of serious health problems,” he said in the interview. “We were a very healthy, hearty, rural stock. “(Then) all of my father’s brothers died with cancer. My father’s sister died with cancer. All of my grandparents on both sides died with cancer. My oldest brother was born dead. I was born with birth defects. And one of my sisters was born with birth defects.”
In 1945, Beverly Walker’s family moved to the town of Pasco next to Hanford. Her father was a pharmacist. She believed the radiation releases deeply affected her family. “Did my daughter get nine holes in her heart because of where we grew up?” Walker said in a 1990 interview, “They didn’t have the right to do that to me…It should never happen. Don’t make me a guinea pig. Don’t make my children or my grandchildren guinea pigs.” Walker and others became highly active in getting documented answers to the Hanford radiation releases. Walker’s husband, Joe, a retired United Methodist pastor, headed up an office of the Hanford Health Information Network that a placed ads to connect with individuals with similar health issues. The ad received 5,000 replies.
Awareness of Hanford continued to grow. Bill Houff, a minister of the Unitarian Church in Spokane, Washington preached a sermon called “The Silent Holocaust,” raising grave question about Hanford radiation releases. Said Houff in a Down Wind of Morality interview: “We knew about these facilities that had produced these weapons over that 40-year period, and knew they (authorities) suspected they had done great harm to human beings, and to the democratic process and to the scientific process.”
Reaction to the sermon led to the start of the Hanford Education Action League (HEAL), which caught the attention of then investigative reporter Karen Dorn Steele of the Spokesman Review. She was in the congregation and heard Houff’s sermon.
“It confirmed what I had already found out in my own reporting,” she said in the documentary an interview. Steele began a serious of damaging investigative reports, using the Freedom of Information Act to report on how Hanford handled radiation releases over the years.
Soon, Hanford announced it would release 21,000 pages of related documents that showed that the damage and deception were far worse than anyone at the time had imagined.
“The Green Run”—Release of Radioactive Iodine
One of the most damaging documents revealed a designed release of radioactive iodine in what was code-named “the Green Run.” In 1949, the Air Force ordered scientists at Hanford to release radioactive iodine up a T-stack into the atmosphere. The Air Force monitored the release. Citizens in the area were not told of the release. Over the years, Hanford continued to insist that there had not been one atom of radiation ever to get off the reservation. The released documents showed that time and again, officials had denied or ignored the gruesome truth.
“They have charts showing that the contamination went clear to the Canadian border and clear down almost to the California border,” Beverly Walker said at the time.
Some reports estimated that as many as 13,000 children may have been exposed to high doses of radiation to their thyroid glands.
Hanford also released documented radiation directly into the Columbia River, polluting hundreds of miles to the Oregon coast and then 60 miles up the Washington coast. Shellfish beds had to be closed from high levels of radiation.
Oak Ridge, TN. Laboratory—Plutonium Experiments on Terminal Patients
To its credit, the Department of Energy under the Clinton Administration took an active stance in making available thousands of formally classified documents to help victims of the radiation. Released documents uncovered a horrific trail of experiments using radioactive materials on patients in other parts of the country. For example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee at the time first extracted plutonium and then conducted experiments where terminal patients were given doses of radioactive materials.
Dr. Clarence Larson, who worked on the Manhattan Project and was later director of the Oak Ridge Laboratory and a former Atomic Energy Commissioner, said in a Down Wind of Morality interview: “They (patients) were not told what it was because people didn’t even use the word plutonium at the time. That was a forbidden word.” Read More
The cost of government lies is one of the darkest moments in U.S. history and in the world.
Reflecting on U.S. government fears of Soviet Union aggression in the arms race Udall observed in Down Wind of Morality,: “We found ourselves in a situation…that changed our nation… where high national leaders were saying: ‘This is so important that we have to take risks, and if we have to sacrifice some people, we may have to do that… and if it looks like we made a mistake, don’t tell the truth. Lie!’”
The remarkable films “Oppenheimer” and “Chernobyl” are gateways to this reality.
Thank you, Chris Nolan; thank you Craig Mazin and Johan Renck, for your vision, for your revelation down wind of morality…
(Greg O’Brien is a career journalist, an author, scriptwriter, and associate producer and scriptwriter of “Down Wind of Morality.” He has contributed over the years, among other media, to: Boston Magazine, Boston Herald American, Washington Post, Associated Press, USA Today, Arizona Republic, Providence Journal, National Public Radio, PBS/NOVA.)
(William Turpie is a former business correspondent for WCVB-TV, Boston’s ABC affiliate, and a former senior correspondent for “Today’s Business,” a joint venture of CBS and Buena Vista Television. In addition, he was a special correspondent for Wall Street Journal Reports. A minister earlier in life, he is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary with a Master of Theology degree and a major in Greek New Testament.)
(Brad Ball, Executive Producer is former President, Theatrical marketing for Warner Bros. He has worked on more than 100 films including The Matrix, Perfect Storm, Harry Potter, and many others. In addition, he was VP, Entertainment NASCAR with a focus on content development, worked for CMO/SVP McDonald’s/USA on new product launches for the National Football League, Olympics, National Basket Ball Association, and others. He is a lifetime member of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)