"Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands."
- The World Set Free, HG Wells, 1913
Excerpt from "The PBS 5 O'Clock Newshour, June 20th, 1986", aired on PBS-5, June 20th, 1986.
RONALD REAGAN (host): Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the atomic bomb in the Korean Straits, which not only helped bring an end to the World Revolutionary War, but with the Moruroa test only two months before, the beginning of the Cold War. The anniversary comes as a growing global movement is protesting the increasing number of nuclear weapons that the superpowers have amassed, the recent nuclear attacks undertaken by them, and the resulting environmental and humanitarian disasters. However, in the Dinétah Federation1, this Atomic Age anniversary is bittersweet for some. From KOB in Albuquerque, Dilyéhé Martinez has more.
(CUT TO: the sculpting workshop of PAUL GONZALEZ in the Dinétah Federation. 69 year old, bald, thin Navajo man in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, chiseling a horse statue.)
DILYÉHÉ MARTINEZ: Paul Gonzalez is a sculptor.
(Paul shows off a clay hand)
PAUL GONZALEZ: This is my hand, I just modeled it on my hand. (laughs)
(Paul walks around the workshop, with other sculptors working in the background)
DM: He is a popular local artist. In fact, he had served 15 years as a delegate in the Congress of Soviets for the Apache and Navajo Artists Federation and as a councilman on the Sculptor's Soviet.
(Paul sits in front of a sculpture of a sheep)
PG: I'm not really someone hit with some divine power of art. I'm just a guy who likes to work with his hands. And with some clay. I just found I was good at it and kept doing it.
DM: Which he has kept doing since 1953. However, Paul is worried that he may not have much more time with his hands.
(Paul visits a doctors office, before a cut back to Paul sitting)
PG: 'Bout three years ago, I received a diagnosis of lung cancer.
(Back to Paul sitting while the doctor talks to him)
PG (VO): It's been hard. I can't (coughs) do a lot of things now. I get tired often. I don't even spend time in the workshop anymore. Hell, at home, I can't even get down the stairs without coughing.
(CUT TO: Paul's home, where he sits on a couch, watching TV.)
DM: Paul's case is not unusual in the Dinétah.
(CUT TO: Chart showing the cancer rates for several Republics. The Dinétah is highest)
DM: In fact, cancer rates in the Dinétah are 20% higher than the rest of the country.
(Paul pulls out a photo album from his shelf and begins looking through it.)
DM: For Paul, he can pinpoint when exactly his life was endangered.
(Paul pulls out a black and white photo, showing him, with long wavy hair. at age 26, smiling with a canyon in the background. A date at the bottom says "18.5.43")
PG: This is me, back when I was a uranium miner for the Daisy Bell Project.
(Close-up of the photo around Paul's face)
DM: During the World Revolutionary War, Paul was one of many young Navajo, Apache, and Hopi, who, in lieu of serving overseas, instead signed up with a government program that was advertised as providing "an indispensable service for the war effort". That being to extract the uranium that was plentiful in the region.
(CUT TO: Archive footage of the Southwest, flowing grass with a backdrop of great rock structures)
DM: While the Union government had gotten some uranium from the USSR and had purchased some more from the Belgian Congo for Project Daisy Bell, it was not enough to get the new project off the ground. However, then came a great discovery. Kele Johnson is a professor of history at Santa Fe State University.
(Historian KELE JOHNSON sits at her desk, a few Kachina dolls in the background)
KELE JOHNSON (Historian, Santa Fe State University): The Union government found uranium deposits in and around the Great Apache Federation, as it was known then. This would be enough to get the project really going. So, the Union government made a deal with the local Soviets of all three tribes in the Federation2 to open mines and "co-manage" them.
DM: And subsequently, a call was made out for miners. With many young men and women out fighting in the war, most recruits were either conscientious objectors funneled into the program via the "Alternative Service" program or those who were rejected by the draft. People like Paul.
(Cut back to Paul sitting)
PG: I had some breathing problems that prevented me from being drafted, but when I left the office, there was someone there recruiting for the mines to those rejected to "serve the workers." So, I took the chance.
(Archive footage of Indigenous miners working in the Southwest mines. Inside the mineshafts and outside carrying it back)
DM: The local miners unions were partially involved, but to avoid any strikes during wartime, they were kept in the dark about the purpose of the project- and some of the effects of it.
KJ: They had classified any knowledge of the health effects of uranium, and kept most local officials out of the loop. They told the workers it was like lead, and issued protective equipment that proved wholly inadequate, particularly due to the radioactive nature of uranium. They were exposed to dangerous materials without much prior warnings.
DM: While the contract did briefly invoke the idea of "health risks", the specifics were kept out, and many didn't read the entire contract.
KJ: Many miners went in without knowing the risks. They were exposed to this dangerous element without being warned or much protection. Miners were told that this ore would be used for armor inserts on heavy tanks, a disinformation campaign that was only half-way taken seriously by the Axis.
DM: And this didn't just affect the miners or during their work. After the war ended, some mines were closed without being properly monitored and cleansed. Further mines closed following the Congo Wars and more open trade with the newly-communist Congo.
(Archive footage of doctors examining patients)
DM: In the 60's, studies were conducted by the Labor Health Secretariat in Dinétah to determine the cause of higher cancer rates and the mysterious sickness for local sheep.
KJ: And what they found was that the radioactive waste had just been dumped into local rivers, and people had been using material from the mines in building new housing.
DM: While there were clean-ups and reforms to address these concerns, they were mostly localized. Still, the studies and their results would spark a larger movement.
(Photo of various Indigenous students c. late 1960's, holding a banner "Reparations Now!")
DM: In 1968, a group of Native students from Arizona, New Mexico, and Dinétah formed the "Union for Reparations for the Uranium Miners in the Southwest". Kele Johnson was one of those students.
KJ: We felt that we were owed an apology, and some reparations for our exposure to this kind of health risk, and we wanted more responsibility from the government in how they handled this.
DM: The movement would gain slow traction through the early 1970's. Then, in 1978, deputies from the newly formed Social Ecology Union would create a Congressional sub-committee to investigate the uranium mining and the lack of transparency in the government. The resulting report would bring attention to the issue. James Carter, a former nuclear engineer himself, was one of the deputies involved in the sub-committee.
(CUT TO: JAMES E. CARTER, Deputy, at his desk in the Congress of Soviets.)
JAMES CARTER (Deputy, Peanut Farmers Union/Georgia Delegate (Labor, 1972-)): What we found was that there was a plausible cause for reparations and a formal apology by the union for the treatment of these workers. Documents, hidden well beyond the statutory limits, revealed that the Defense Secretariat not only knew of the health risks from radioactivity, had worked with native leaders to conceal this through extraordinary appropriations.
OFF CAMERA: Extraordinary appropriations?
JC: There is substantial documentary proof of financial and in-kind developmental programs, at the behest of Dinétah leaders, as quid pro quo for concealing the awareness of the public health crisis in the Federation.
(Montage of meetings, protests, and votes centering on the issue)
DM: Since the release of the report, the movement has received wider attention, and has become a key cause of the Social Ecology Union. Philip Morrison, former Daisy Bell scientist and later the first General Secretary of the SEU, currently a deputy representing the physicists at the University of America, Cornell.
(PHILIP MORRISON in the rotunda of the Congress of Soviets)
PHILIP MORRISON (Deputy, Physics Union, University of America, Cornell (Social Ecology Union, 1980-)): To address the larger issue of nuclear disarmament, there is serious concern about the health effects that uranium mining has, and the case of the Navajo miners is probably the biggest, and the one that requires attention.
DM: Morrison has been part of efforts to get reparations and a formal apology from the government for their treatment. However, such efforts were stymied under the previous Liberation and Labor administrations, including the most recent Liberation government and its supporters. Jesse Helms, Deputy Chief Whip for the Congress of Soviets, expresses his concerns.
(JESSE HELMS at the Rotunda)
JESSE HELMS (Deputy Chief Whip of the Congress of Soviets, (Liberation, 1980-)): I don't see the particular need for reparations for these miners, anymore than what veterans receive. They have healthcare, they have support. There's no real need for such reparations. I don't think an apology is needed, either. I will say that there should be an acknowledgment of their contributions to the war effort. It should be a point of pride for them.
(Cut back to Paul at his studio)
DM: For his part, Paul Gonzalez actually agrees with Helms' last point.
PG: I may be sick now because of it, but I'm proud of what I did in the fight against fascism. My small contribution to ending the scourge. But, I feel an apology and reparations is the best way to acknowledge that. To show that I fought for the right cause, for people who can understand and learn from their mistakes. My hope is that this never happens again, anywhere. And I feel more than ever that goal is achievable.
DM: Dilyéhé Martinez, KOB, Albuquerque.
(Back to RONALD REAGAN at his desk, shuffling papers.)
RR: A declassification council and Congressional subcommittee are both currently in the process of compiling reports to show the full extent of uranium contamination, which is expected in the next month. The Hampton government has declined comment on the matter.
-------------------------------
Excerpts from The Race for the Atom: Daisy Bell, Tube Alloys, and the Coming of the Atomic Age by Gregory Benford, 2001
Project Daisy Bell went from a relatively minor research project to the highest importance to the war effort over the course of the spring of 1942. With the Axis yoke extending across the entirety of continental Europe, the Battle of the Atlantic seriously imperiled by surface and u-boat convoy raiding, and the opening of the Pacific War against Imperial Japan closing the Vladivostok convoy route, the whole of the war effort against fascism was seriously imperiled.
With renewed German offensives, and now being unable to support existing forces adequately in Eurasia, the danger of a Soviet capitulation loomed heavily over the meetings of the Revolutionary Military Council. Faced with the prospect of continuing the war effort alone, the Red Army needed a trump card. The hushed whisperings of an atomic bomb from the Daisy Bell researchers promised something too good to be true: a true superweapon, capable of not only winning the war unto itself, but perhaps
all war itself.
The starting gun had already been fired in the race for the bomb. The German and Japanese programs had been moving in fits and starts, and work was beginning in Britain and Australasia on the secretive "Tube Alloys" project as well. On 12 May 1942, a select delegation of physicists connected with Daisy Bell briefed a secret closed session of the RevMil Council's presidium. Two facts were emphasized: an atomic bomb was feasible, and the enemy had a head start.
Chairman Browder seemed receptive, but wanted more than just vague estimates. Reed, though nominally the vice-chair, was more directly involved in the operations of the war effort, and proved more sanguine. It was enough that the Nazis devoted resources to studying chain fission reactions, even while deriding the underlying quantum science as
Judenphysik. "Hitler called it Jewish physics, communist physics. Well, I for one would like to prove him right."
[...]
Project Daisy Bell soon be rehomed under the Joint Army/Navy Corps of Engineers, and given the nominative camouflage of "Substitute Materials Project". Commodore Chaim Rykower
3, a respected naval engineer and early proponent of the development of nuclear power, was placed in command of the project, with the Army's Colonel Leslie Groves as his deputy commander.
The immediate task of the project was construction. Immense facilities for the processing and refinement of radioisotopes into weapons-grade materiel was fully uncharted territory, and in this respect the close cooperation of scientist recruits was actively sought by Rykower. To streamline this process and the chain of command, scientists directly working on the project were commissioned into the reserves of the Army or Navy, and rated as restricted line officers in accordance with their station in the project.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose brief military service in the revolution was wholly uninspired and was regarded by fellow California Workers' Party cadrists as something of a dilettante, would helm the development of the device itself as a lieutenant colonel. While something of a surprise choice and initially disfavored by Rykower despite Groves' lobbying, Oppenheimer's commanding respect as the man who brought quantum mechanics to America, as well as his multidisciplinary (or unfocused, as his critics would say) genius proved vital into helming the complicated process of turning theory into a practical weapon.
[...]
The acquisition of the raw materials for the atomic bomb would bring strange bedfellows together. Early geologic surveys had identified uranium ore deposits in the southwest, concentrated in the territory in and around the then Greater Apachean Autonomous Socialist Republic.
Enter Sam Akheah, then chairman of the Navajo Tribal Republic
4 and deputy premier of the Apachean Federation. Akheah would serve as the main representative in secret conferences about the project, and baffled the military by initially giving a flat refusal to mining development programs for the project.
Before war powers could be invoked, Akheah offered a counterproposal. Having met with Oppenheimer, Akheah took the physicist's words to heart that they were not building merely a new weapon, but one that would remake the world itself. Akheah's proposal was simple: the Navajo Nation and the Apache Federation as a whole would share in that new world. The autonomous republic had been formed on a compromised basis, with significant portions of their populations residing outside its borders. Akheah wished to press maximum territorial claims, transferring lands from the bordering republics.
Furthermore, the development of this new technology would last far beyond the first bomb and the present war. The natives of the republic would not merely dig the uranium. Their children would be sent to modern schools and universities built in their territory, and they would learn the science that their fathers dug for. This would be a generations-long commitment, and in exchange, they would lend their lands to the development of this terrible new weapon.
[...]
Following the formation of the Franco-British Union, the burgeoning "Tube Alloys" program (which had largely been a preemptive low priority measure by the British military, which hadn't gotten much support) was reorganized into a joint British-French atomic weapons program, with much more funding and more resources. The program was bolstered by the inclusion of numerous Continental exile scientists, notably Otto Robert Frisch, Niels Bohr, and Edward Teller.
Leading Tube Alloys would be a committee, with William Penney (representing the British) and Francis Perrin (representing the French) serving as joint secretaries. Research for the project would be carried out at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge (where committee member James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, setting the chain of events that led to the two separate programs).
[...]
There were discussions to make a joint American-Franco-British program in the spirit of wartime cooperation (especially advocated by Rudolph Peierls, who had been involved with the preliminary work of Tube Alloys before his recruitment by the Americans), but security concerns ultimately disallowed any direct collaboration. Both sides entered into negotiations in bad faith, carefully concealing the extent of their programs. Instead, diplomats couched research cooperation in terms of threat assessment of the known German and Japanese nuclear programs: whether the weapons were considered feasible, materials and industrial installations needed for its construction, and means by which to attack their programs.
However, Tube Alloys would get another partner in addition to Britain and France: With the concerns raised by the possibility of a Luftwaffe attack and with much of the scientific power of the FBU focused on more immediate ventures like radar, and despite continuing security concerns, it was decided that the Cavendish heavy water group was to be moved across the Atlantic to Canada.
In September of 1942, the Entente High Commissioner to Canada, Malcolm McDonald, met with Canadian Prime Minister RB Bennett and Minister of Munitions and Supply CD Howe to discuss the program. Extremely impressed with the possibility of atomic energy, and wanting to build closer ties with the newly formed Franco-British Union, Bennett and Howe agreed to direct the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC) to form a new laboratory at McGill University in Montreal to continue the work of the Cavendish group as well as access to uranium from the Eldorado mine in the Northwest Territories (which had also supplied some of the uranium for the American program).
By the end of 1942, Tube Alloys was effectively a Franco-British-Canadian program. George Laurence, the main radium and X-ray scientist for the NRCC, was appointed as a third secretary representing the Canadian contributions to the program.
[...]
American intelligence had already known that Britain had a nuclear weapons program since 1938, since both Leo Szilard and Rudolph Peierls, who had urged the British government to build the weapon, immigrated to the United Republics when they failed to convince them to make it a high priority. However, close monitoring of Tube Alloys wasn't initiated until Daisy Bell became a high priority.
Public Safety Secretary J. Edgar Hoover, while shut out of the inner workings of the program, knew the proposed power of the bomb, and was paranoid about the potential for the capitalists to catch up. He also sought to "check" the work of the physicists by comparing it with their counterparts and "correcting" it.
When Kim Philby (a GUGB mole within MI6) informed Hoover that the program was moving to Montreal, Hoover saw an opportunity with some high level GRU spies already in the program. Most notable amongst them were Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who worked in the reactor division. The daughter and son-in-law of famed scientists and Nobel Prize winners Marie and Pierre Curie, they themselves won the Nobel Prize in Physics together in 1935, much like Marie and Pierre themselves had in 1903.
The two had become increasingly sympathetic to anti-fascism, and for Frédéric, this would eventually lead him to join the French Communist Party in 1941. Subsequently, following the formation of the FBU, they were both approached to join Tube Alloys. While declining at first because of their staunch pacifism, OMS agents within the Party convinced Frédéric to join the program to help "the Americans and Soviets break a potential nuclear monopoly", by supplying information to the American program. Frédéric convinced an extremely reluctant Irène to follow along.
Once the two were in Canada, they were transferred from the GRU to the American MRD. Frédéric would copy schematics of enrichment technology (particularly the gas centrifuge) and even some preliminary designs for the explosive lens of the plutonium implosion design. These materials would then be delivered via dead drop and courier to Edward Cecil-Smith, a former Canadian member of the International Brigades turned mole within the Canadian Army, who would convey the plans to Harry Gold, a scientific attaché at the American consulate in Toronto, using official intelligence exchanges as cover. Gold, in his capacity as one of Hoover's Section 1 legals
5, would transmit them via CANT cipher machine to agents in Buffalo, who would send them to DeLeon-Debs.
[...]
Ironically, Rykower and Oppenheimer declined to use most of the materials procured by atomic spies. Partially because both mistrusted Hoover as a bureaucrat attempting to exert his own influence over the program, but mostly because they were already moving along at a decent pace without very much need for revisions.
[...]
While having been convinced to start a nuclear weapons program thanks to [Georgy] Flyorov's letter, it was considered a low priority by Stalin until he was informed by John Reed of an American program shortly before the Battle of Moscow. Stalin had made the program a higher priority shortly before his death.
Molotov decided to send the nuclear scientists (along with other technicians and important scientists) to America to keep them and their knowledge from the frontlines. The so-called "Vavilov Mission" (named for geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who was sent to help relocate his seed bank from Leningrad to Alaska) landed in Juneau in early 1942, bringing a number of Soviet scientists and technicians. Among them were the leaders of the Soviet nuclear program, led by Flyorov and Igor Kurchatov. In July of 1942, an agreement was struck to effectively merge the Soviet nuclear program into Project Daisy Bell, with the remainder of Soviet nuclear scientists still in the country being reassigned to Los Alamos.
Soon, Los Alamos would grow from an obscure ranch region into a small town of sorts with accommodations, like houses, restaurants, cafeterias, movie theaters, and parks for the scientists living there. However, there were also strict rules, including authorizations to enter or leave and censorship of outgoing letters, phone calls and telegrams.
Andrei Sakharov (who came to Los Alamos in 1948) recalled:
"We were closely monitored. Any letters were checked, any phone calls were bugged. We couldn't talk about the project except to other scientists. Worst yet, there was nothing for miles. It was… isolating."
Los Alamos would later provide the template for the larger, mostly closed American-Soviet Naukograds, or science cities that would emerge in the post-war period, including Akademgorodok, Siberia; Cañon City, Colorado; Epcot, Florida; and Las Vegas, Nevada.
[....]
Former Daisy Bell scientist and later two time Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman
6 would recount a peculiar incident when I spoke to him at a conference in 1981, confirming another story I had heard from author Morris Hilquit Rubenstein in the mid-1970's:
The May, 1943 issue of
Speculative Worlds featured the story "Destruction Imminent" by Morrie Rubenstein, then a writer living in New York after getting rejected for the draft. The story centered on the distant future, where a world socialist government was battling against a sinister alien empire that emphasized "destruction, death, and conformity". To scare them into submission, a secret government project is undertaken to build a "superweapon as powerful as a thousand suns". The weapon uses the splitting of an atom to create a chain reaction resulting in a massive burst of energy. However, the story ends with so many bombs being used, the universe itself is destroyed by them.
Morrie had mostly relied on publicly available, pre-war material to craft the story, but the accuracy with which he noted the production of the weapon and the parallels between it and the ongoing effort caused discussions at the Los Alamos lunch tables, and more urgently, an investigation.
Public Safety agents detained Morrie for several days, while interviewing associates like Robert Heinlein and SpecWorld's temporary editor Don Woldheim. After ascertaining that he had gotten the information from public sources, they released Morrie, and got assurances from Woldheim that no stories involving nuclear technology would be published for the remainder of the war.
Woldheim suspected that a big scientific project had been underway in New Mexico, given there was a sudden rise in subscription changes to that particular state and location.
Feynman related the story with a laugh. Morrie blamed it for his later troubles.
---------------------
1 Formerly known as the Greater Apache Federation, renamed after the demonym of the Navajo people.
2 The Hopi, Navajo, and Apache tribes
3 Known OTL as Hyman Rickover
4 A constituent republic of the GAF, alongside the Apache and Hopi republics, constituted on the principle of national personal autonomy.
5 A "legal" is an intelligence officer who operates under an official diplomatic cover, as opposed to "illegals" such as double-agents and moles, whose true allegiance is concealed and who have no legal protections.
6 The 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in Quantum Electrodynamics, as OTL, and the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Andrei Sakharov for nuclear disarmament
