Covering topics from nuclear activism, testing, science and education, to health physics, environmental cleanup, and kitsch, essays and research collected by the Hanford History Project illuminate unexplored facets of the Manhattan Project and demonstrate how its legacy lives on.

The Hanford History Project held the “Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years” conference in March 2017. Its Richland, Washington, meeting venue was a stone’s throw from the southern-most edge of the Hanford Nuclear Site--the place where workers produced the plutonium that fueled the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

The symposium’s appeal extended well beyond local interest. Professionals from a broad array of backgrounds--working scientists, government employees, retired health physicists, downwinders, representatives from community groups, impassioned lay people, as well as scholars working in a host of different academic fields--attended and gave presentations. The diverse gathering, with its wide range of expertise, stimulated a genuinely remarkable exchange of ideas.

In Legacies of the Manhattan Project, Hanford Histories series editor Michael Mays combines extensively revised essays first presented at the conference with newly commissioned research. Together, they provide a timely reevaluation of the Manhattan Project and its many complex repercussions, as well as some beneficial innovations. Covering topics from print journalism, activism, nuclear testing, and science and education to health physics, environmental cleanup, and kitsch, the compositions delve deep into familiar matters, but also illuminate historical crevices left unexplored by earlier generations of scholars. In the process, they demonstrate how the Manhattan Project lives on.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Michael Mays

Section I: Truth is the First Casualty of War
1. Atomic Legacies in Censored Print: Newspapers and the Meaning of Nuclear War by Hilary Dickerson
2. Borrowed Chronicles: William L. “Atomic Bill” Laurence and the Reports of a Hiroshima Survivor by Susan E. Swanberg

Section II: Necessity is the Mother of Invention
3. Casting Shadows, Capturing Images: The History and Legacy of Implosion Physics at Los Alamos by Ellen D. McGehee
4. Herbert M. Parker, Health Physics, and Hanford by Ronald L. Kathren
5. “The Atom Goes to College”: The Teaching Reactors that Trained the Atomic Age by David P.D. Munns
6. Political Scientists: The Atomic Scientists and the Emergence of a Politically Engaged Scientific Community by Ian Graig

Section III: Facts and Fictions
7. Pursuing the Cancellation of the Apocalypse: Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams by Daisy Henwood
8. “We Can’t Relocate the World”: Activists, Doctors, and a Radiation-Exposed Identity by Laura J. Harkewicz
9. Hanford Production Reactor Operations and Contamination in the Columbia River by M. S. Gerber

Section IV: Looking Back, Looking Forward
10. Atomicalia: Collecting and Exhibiting Manhattan Project Material Culture by Mick Broderick
11. Future Directions in Scholarship and Interpretation: A Roundtable Discussion

Afterword
Michael Mays

Contributors
Index