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Calutron Girls

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A long corridor with many consoles with dials and switches, attended by women seated on high stools.
Calutron Girls, photographed by Ed Westcott, at their calutron control panels at Y-12.

The Calutron Girls were a group of young women, mostly high school graduates, who joined the World War II efforts to develop nuclear weapons at the United States government facility located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, between 1943 and 1945. Although they were not allowed to know at the time, they were monitoring dials and watching meters for calutrons, mass spectrometers adapted for separation of uranium isotopes. The enriched uranium was used to make the "Little Boy" atomic bomb for the Hiroshima nuclear bombing on August 6, 1945.

Background

Main articles: Manhattan Project and Calutron

During World War II, the United States established the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons. In order to create these nuclear weapons, they needed uranium-235, the fissionable isotope of uranium. However, the vast majority of uranium mined from the ground is uranium-238, while only 0.7% is U-235. Scientists developed several processes for separating the isotopes of uranium, including electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion.[1]

The Y-12 factory was built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to house 1,152 calutrons, a machine used for isotope separation.[2] The word "calutron" is a portmanteau of California University Cyclotron.[2] Calutrons, a variation on mass spectrometers, work by combining uranium with chlorine to make uranium tetrachloride, which is then ionized and put in a vacuum chamber. This chamber has a magnetic field. When the charged particles move through the magnetic field, they move in a curve, the radius of which is proportional to the weight of the particles. Thus, the isotopes can be separated.[1]

The operation was relatively simple, but it required people to constantly monitor the calutrons.[2] Due to a labor shortage, there were not enough scientists to operate all of them, and many young men were fighting in the war overseas, so the government recruited farm girls to operate the calutrons instead.[2][3] Local women were recruited because they were readily available, used to hard work, and were expected not to ask too many questions and to be loyal and docile.[4]

Recruitment and training

The Tennessee Eastman Company, which ran the Y-12 site, recruited around 10,000 local women between 1943 and 1945 to operate the calutrons. They used a large local advertising campaign to recruit workers. One ad read, "When you're a grandmother you'll brag about working at Tennessee Eastman".[4] Several workers heard about the jobs from friends.[5][6] Reasons for applying included needing the money, having few other employment opportunities, and wanting to help the war effort.[7][8][6] Training for the job lasted three weeks.[4]

Life at work

Billboard reading "What you see here / what you do here / what you hear here / when you leave here / let it stay here", with three wise monkeys to demonstrate "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil."
A billboard at Oak Ridge encouraging secrecy among workers.
Close-up of a calutron operator.

Secrecy and confidentiality were a strict requirement of their employment.[9] According to Gladys Owens, who was one of the Calutron Girls, a manager at the facility once told them: "We can train you how to do what is needed, but cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us!"[10] Testimonies said girls who talked about what they were doing disappeared.[8] One girl who disappeared was said to have "died from drinking some poison moonshine".[10] If they were too nosy about what they were working on, they were replaced.[3] Cars going in and out were searched, and letters were opened and read.[6]

The workers sat on high stools for 8-hour shifts, seven days a week, monitoring gauges and adjusting knobs to keep the needles where they were supposed to be and recording readings.[5][6] The knobs were labeled with cryptic letters. The girls didn't know what the letters stood for, but they learned rules such as "if you got your M voltage up and your G voltage up, then Product would hit the birdcage in the E box at the top of the unit and if that happened, you'd get the Q and R you wanted".[11] They had to make sure the machine remained at the correct temperature; if it got too hot, they used liquid nitrogen to cool it down.[6] If the needles reached a point where they could not control them, they had to call someone else to come help.[2]

Former Calutron Girl Wynona Arrington Butler said, "We all wore little fountain-pen-sized dosimeters. Part of signing out of the plant was to check the amount of radiation that you had absorbed every day."[6]

Another calutron device existed at the time in a laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, led by physicist Ernest O. Lawrence. The facility there was operated by trained professional physicists. As the Y-12 calutron facility at Oak Ridge became operational, Lawrence desired that it be also run by physicists. Because of the labor shortage during World War II, the staffing went to farm girls instead.[3] In a weeklong contest, the girls outperformed the scientists in efficiency of calutron operation.[4] The better performance of the girls was attributed to their intense focus to maintaining precise control, as opposed to the physicists, who were distracted by chasing operational problems.[3]

Some Calutron Girls had more of a sense of what they were working on than others. Wynona Arrington Butler, who had a chemistry background, said she and others with a similar background had some sense of what they were doing. They knew they were producing "the Product", and they guessed it was somewhere near the bottom of the periodic table.[6] Willie Baker, on the other hand, said, "Even when somebody let it slip that we were building a bomb, I didn’t know what they meant. I was just a country girl. I had no understanding of what an atomic bomb was."[4]

Bombing and aftermath

Over two years, the calutrons at Y-12 had produced about 140 pounds of U-235. This was enough to make the first atomic bomb.[12] On August 6, 1945, when the US dropped the first bomb, "Little Boy," on Hiroshima, Japan, the Calutron Girls were finally told what they had been working on.[5] Some girls were working and others were in their dorm rooms when someone came and told them that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, and everyone there had played a part in making it.[13][5]

Several Calutron Girls had mixed feelings about their part in the bomb. Ruth Huddleston said she was really happy at the time, because her boyfriend was fighting in Germany, and this would bring him back. It bothered her that she had a part in killing so many people, but she accepted that "if the bomb hadn’t been dropped, then probably more people would have been killed. ... But even today, if I think too much about it, it bothers me."[12] Wynona Arrington Butler had a similar experience: at the time, she was happy that the war was over and people she knew in the service could come home, but over time, she began to question whether it was the right thing to do.[6]

As of 2020, only a few elderly Calutron Girls remained. Some, such as Ruth Huddleston, regularly shared their stories with the public, often alongside Oak Ridge historian Ray Smith.[2] The girls have also been the subject of two books: the nonfiction book The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan and the novel The Atomic City Girls by Janet Beard.[3][14]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Duane S. Nickell (2010). Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler: Visiting Physics and Chemistry Sites Across America. Rutgers University Press. pp. 141–142. ISBN 978-0-8135-4730-5.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Henderson, Nancy. "Girl Power, Circa 1940: Building The Bomb (and Not Knowing It) in East Tennessee". blueridgecountry.com. LeisureMedia360. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  3. ^ a b c d e Huxen, Keith (March 25, 2020). "A Book Review of The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan". nationalww2museum.org. National World War II Museum. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
  4. ^ a b c d e Lindsey A. Freeman (13 April 2015). Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 71–73. ISBN 978-1-4696-2238-5.
  5. ^ a b c d Lee, Tena (July 24, 2021). "County honors 96-year-old 'Calutron Girl'". Hendersonville Standard. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h Smith, Ray (August 17, 2016). "Wynona Arrington Butner – Calutron Girl". Oak Ridger. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
  7. ^ Inman, Katie (January 12, 2022). "A Century of Stories: Oak Ridge calutron girl turning 100 years old". WBIR. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
  8. ^ a b "Calutron Girls". Tennessee Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
  9. ^ "Who Were the Calutron Girls of Oak Ridge?". exploreoakridge.com. Oak Ridge CVB. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  10. ^ a b Smith, Ray. "The Calutron Girls". smithdray1.net. Ray Smith. Retrieved August 22, 2021.
  11. ^ Kiernan, Denise (2013). The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women who Helped Win World War II. New York, NY: Simon and Shuster. p. 115. ISBN 9781451617542.
  12. ^ a b Smith, Ray (June 15, 2020). "Atomic bombs dropped 75 years ago: A 'Calutron Girl' remembers". Oak Ridger. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
  13. ^ "Short Circuit: Ruth's Story". Energy.gov. June 5, 2017. Retrieved February 19, 2022.
  14. ^ Lida, Gretchen (January 12, 2018). "The Atomic City Girls: A Novel". Washington Independent Review of Books. Retrieved February 21, 2022.

Further reading

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