AlexKeto.com

(Travis Erwin said we should write about the towns we live in. I deliberately misread that to mean the towns we have lived in at some point.)  

If West Berlin is a place that no longer exists, then Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is a city that the federal government once claimed never existed even when 45,000 people worked there around the clock.

After some intervening months after I left West Berlin, a place many residents boasted was ground zero in the Cold War, I moved to Oak Ridge where people helped make the devices that would create ground zero where ever they detonated.

Oak Ridge called itself the "atomic city" but in reality it was part of a large archipelago of sites across the country where the U.S. built its nuclear arsenal that eventually numbered in the tens of thousands of warheads. Alongside Oak Ridge, these islands included Savannah; Hanford, Washington; Rocky Flats, Colorado; Paducah, Kentucky; Livermore, California; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Each of the islands in the archipelago provided an essential part for a nuclear weapon and the components were all brought together in Amarillo, Texas, to be assembled at the Pantex Plant. I say were because the U.S. is largely out of the business of making bombs any longer having manufactured so many tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium we could probably detonate the sun, much less the earth, if we put our minds to it.

But this is getting ahead of things because when I moved to Oak Ridge to take on my first job as a reporter all I knew was that Oak Ridge had been somehow connected to the Manhattan Project and had two manufacturing plants with the rather peculiar names of K-25 and Y-12. It was only after a couple of years that I actually was able to piece together the whole nuclear archipelago and understand just how vast the system was that created our bombs.

Oak Ridge's genesis, if a city can have one, can probably be traced to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to FDR in which he vouched that not only was an atomic bomb conceivable but it could be built. Furthermore, the Nazis were dabbling around in the subject and, God knows, but they might figure it out for themselves. And based on that letter, FDR said we'll do it and do it first.

When I first drove into Oak Ridge ridge, the one salient point was the fact that the city had a peculiar layout in a valley with two main highways that joined to form a rough "Y" of sorts. Each end of the letter led through a draw with two outlets plunging deep into the Tennessee coalfields and the last one being a four lane highway to Knoxville, Tennessee. The other thing I noticed was that there were a hell of a lot of clapboard houses and buildings in town and they all looked fairly similar as if the local architects didn't have much imagination. I didn't really think I had put my finger on two important points.

Later on, I realized Oak Ridge was tucked away in a valley very deliberately. When the U.S. government decided it wanted to enrich uranium for the first atomic bombs, it had two criteria. First, it needed massive amounts of electric power and second, it had to be able to hide the enrichment plant as well as the whole city that it would take to run it. TVA supplied the power, and the poverty of East Tennessee supplied the obscurity. And when the government built the city literally overnight, it didn't have time for niceties and the housing went up cookie cutter style. Scientists of the highest caliber poured into Oak Ridge to solve the problem of gaseous diffusion uranium separation at the K-25 plant and electro-magnetic separation at Y-12. Gaseous diffusions worked while the electro-magnetic process failed.

The bomb that exploded at Hiroshima, the Little Boy bomb, was fueled with uranium from K-25.

A replica of Little Boy is the blue one on the left.   

When I moved to Oak Ridge, the population had dropped from 45,000 at its height to about 28,000. The K-25 plant was regarded as obsolete and was being decommissioned. Y-12 no longer fiddled around with electro-magnetic separation but instead built things people euphemistically called "nuclear triggers." And a third major facility had been built, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was and is the country's center in its quest for the energy holy grail: fusion.

But as a cub reporter, my job at first took me to neighboring Clinton, Tennessee, the county seat and a world apart where coal was still king nearly a century after the first big strikes opened up the Kentucky and Tennessee fields. Later on, when I moved to New York City, I tried to talk about the coalfields but found no one could really understand much of anything I said. Then while watching "Coalminer's Daughter" on video with some friends, I got over excited and said, "There, that's what it was like." The New Yorkers didn't really believe me.

East Tennessee may be beautiful, but it is a cursed land. Central and Western Tennessee have flat land for farming and East Tennessee has the hollers. Kentucky has coal seams five feet thick or more. East Tennessee's seams pinched out at a measly two feet thick. Getting the Tennessee coal was always going to be more expensive than the high quality Kentucky coal and more dangerous. As a result, the Tennessee mines were swing producers and poured out the coal when the prices were high and shut down when they dropped. For four or five years at a time, the boys that came out of the Oliver Springs High School close by got jobs that paid them more money than they had ever seen. Mustangs and shiny pick ups lined the drive ways. Then the bust would come and the mines shut down and the Mustangs got repossessed.

When this happened in the past, the miners turned to moonshining to make ends meet. There is a good reason the early stock car racers mostly came from the hard scrabble mountains in North Carolina-Tennessee because they had to drive their loads of white lightning faster than the Feds could chase them. But dope had long since replaced white lightning as the contraband of choice and the money in the drug business was unfathomable. At one point, we had seven sheriffs from the 11 East Tennessee counties picking peas in federal penitentiaries for trying to dip their fingers in that money pie. The most brazen was the sheriff of Roane County who got busted driving a semi-truck stuffed with marijuana bales. The most bizarre drug story involved a skydiver with night vision goggles and 75 pounds of cocaine on his back who splatted in someone's back yard in the middle of the night when his parachute didn't open. Who he was and where he came from was never determined. Our own sheriff of Anderson County, Dennis Trotter, made national news when ABC did a documentary of the drug trade and used an FBI sting film of him in Las Vegas lying on a bed with his shit kickers up on the rail muttering the immortal words, "I may be corrupt, but I ain't getting rich." We all took that as simply proving what we had suspected all along which was that he was also fairly stupid. I mean you gotta be stupid if you're a sheriff, you're dealing dope, and you're still poor.

The other curse over East Tennessee was the state government, and the state government of Tennessee hated its people with a passion. That's the only way you could explain what the government did to the people. Under Tennessee law, coal mining companies were supposed to pay royalties on their reserves in the ground but the companies found that an inconvenience so they bought the judges because it was cheaper. When a poverty-law group sued the companies on the issue, the judge wrote in his legal ruling, "Coal is like a beautiful women: you never know what you got until it's uncovered." The companies never paid their royalties. But when the companies decided to mine the coal, the same judges ruled they could strip mine a man's land up to the front porch of his house if his distant ancestors had sold the mineral rights. And at the turn of the last century, nearly all the mineral rights had been sold for a pittance. As the years passed, the fact the mineral rights had been severed was lost and people bought farms and land in good faith only to wake up to D-9 bulldozers one morning chewing through what the mining companies called the overburden and what the land owners called their front yard.

But Oak Ridge itself remained largely aloof of this chaotic life swirling around it. Instead, the city itself boasted more PhDs per capita than Harvard University as the scientists probed the secrets of the universe. But one thing hadn't changed from the 1940s and that was the prevailing aura of secrecy. One of our favorite photos at the newspaper showed the head of the Oak Ridge National Lab giving a group of reporters the finger. It pretty much expressed the opinion the nuclear boys had of outsiders.

But almost by osmosis, you picked up the nuclear trail and tracing it went something like this.

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and sometimes Los Alamos drew up the blue prints for the bombs while Paducah and Oak Ridge made the enriched uranium. Reactors at Hanford Washington produced the plutonium and Savannah made the Tritium, a perishable gas that boosted the "yield," or bang. The Y-12 plant and Rocky Flats made the "triggers" which in plain English would be the atomic fission bombs needed to produce a thermonuclear detonation from a fusion bomb. The pieces were trucked to Amarillo and put together. Los Alamos worked on fission research and Oak Ridge claimed fusion research.

But playing with nuclear weapons produces some bizarre stories and unintended consequences. One of them was that Oak Ridge made it into a surfing magazine after it won the "hottest beach" award when scientists figured out the shores of White Oak Lake contained enough Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 to light up Manhattan. But we didn't worry about this because White Oak Lake was in the middle of the 43,000 acres of land the feds took in World War II as a buffer zone around its plants. Actually, rather than worry about nuclear issues, most people in town voted to place a temporary nuclear waste dump known as the Nuclear Repository in Oak Ridge. Wags quickly dubbed it the Nuclear Suppository but even then the feds didn't bite.

Then there were the crazy stories like the one about the herd of cattle kept on the reservation that had been dosed to the gills with radiation just to see what happened. Or the guy in Los Alamos who had played with two hemisphere's of plutonium and used a screwdriver to let them come close enough together to make them glow in a chain reaction. Except one day he slipped and the hemispheres locked and flashed a brllliant blue before he knocked them apart. He died within a week from radiation poisoning. Or that the machinists were using the most precision machines in the world that normally were supposed to be used to make parts for bombs to make belt buckles. Or the deer that hunters brought in had to be checked with geiger counters if they came from the reservation.

But these things didn't faze the boys building the bombs or the folks in Oak Ridge in general. Hell, they were proud of it all. I guess that's why the local Holiday Inn called its bar The Reactor Room.