Atomic Doctors

Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

James L. Nolan Jr.

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674249424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

An unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan Project. After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the "Little Boy" bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan's instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity.A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.

1

Life at Los Alamos

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

—Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities

The youngest of three brothers, James Findley Nolan was born in Chicago on September 5, 1915, to Joseph and Bernice Nolan. When he was five years old, the family moved to St. Louis, where he would reside until leaving for college in 1931. For high school, my grandfather attended the John Burroughs School, where he met his future wife, my grandmother, Ann Lawry. Nolan spent his undergraduate years at the University of Missouri, from which he graduated in 1935, and attended the Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he completed his MD in 1938. His parents, who were not wealthy, dedicated what resources they had to helping their youngest son complete medical school. Nolan’s two older brothers, Joe Jr. and Eugene, would instead enter the military.

James Nolan married Ann Lawry in August 1936. Two years later and just a couple of months after Nolan graduated from medical school, they welcomed a son, my father, James Lawry Nolan, into the world. Following medical school, Dr. Nolan completed a one-year internship in surgery, followed by three years of residency and assistantships in obstetrics and gynecology, all in St. Louis–area hospitals. In 1942, Nolan moved with his young family to New York City to take up a fellowship at Memorial Hospital for more specialized training in physics and radiation therapy for the purposes of treating gynecologic cancer. This particular specialty had been a growing interest of Nolan’s since encountering the reputable radiology department at Washington University.¹

Nolan’s fellowship at Memorial Hospital was cut short in February 1943 when he received a life-changing phone call from Louis Hempelmann, a good friend and medical school classmate. Hempelmann, who graduated the same year as did Nolan, had spent six months at Berkeley in 1941 on a Commonwealth Fellowship, during which time he met Robert Oppenheimer. A few weeks before calling Nolan, Hempelmann had met with Oppenheimer in Chicago. The new scientific director of the Manhattan Project very candidly briefed Hempelmann on the purpose of the project and invited him to lead the Health Group at Los Alamos. “He was very open about it,” Hempelmann recollected. “He said they were going to try to make an atomic bomb.”² Hempelmann, however, wasn’t Oppenheimer’s first choice. Oppenheimer had originally invited John Lawrence, brother of Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence, to head up the “medical and health aspects” of the work in Los Alamos. When John declined because of other commitments, Oppenheimer asked him to suggest someone else. He recommended his friend and squash partner, Louis Hempelmann.³

Nolan also wasn’t Oppenheimer’s first choice. He had initially invited Hannah Peters, a close friend and the wife of Bernard Peters, one of Oppenheimer’s doctoral students at Berkeley, “to take care of the health of the community.” It’s not entirely clear why the Peters ultimately did not go to Los Alamos. “They were coming out there,” said Hempelmann. “Then they didn’t, or couldn’t or something. I don’t know the exact story there.”⁴ Hempelmann probably knew more than he was willing to admit in this instance, as it’s likely the Peters didn’t go to Los Alamos because of their communist affiliations and their failure to pass the security clearance.⁵

When things didn’t work out with Hannah Peters, Hempelmann recommended Nolan instead, an outcome Hempelmann regarded as very fortunate. “And I say fortunately, because I met her [Peters], when I moved to Rochester in 1950. She had the laboratory next to me. And she was the nicest person in the world and very bright. She could no more handle the surgery and the obstetrics here than I could. And I know that I would have had to do all of this and I am not very good at this sort of thing. So, fortunately, when she dropped out, Oppie asked me if I knew of anybody.”⁶ At this point he turned to Nolan. “My friend Nolan,” explained Hempelmann, “had been trained as a surgeon, as an obstetrician, and he had also been involved in using radium to treat cancer patients. He was a very down-to-earth, practical, person and an excellent doctor.”⁷

After accepting the offer to join the nascent Manhattan Project in late February 1943, Nolan, as he recounted, was taken “on a strange secret mission to Washington to meet Dr. Oppenheimer and General Groves, where I was filled in on the idea of the Manhattan District and was, of course, briefed on secrecy.”⁸ It’s significant and telling that secrecy was the memorable idea communicated to Nolan in this very first meeting with Groves and Oppenheimer, as secrecy would be an oft-repeated theme that would define and have serious consequences for the Manhattan Project and for Nolan’s participation on it.

At this initial meeting, Oppenheimer asked Nolan to recruit several nurses to join him in working at the hospital to be built on the mesa. Oppie, as he was commonly called, thought that having medical facilities in place would aid his efforts in recruiting top physicists to the project. “I think that it will be reassuring to the people who come in,” Oppenheimer wrote to Nolan in early March, “that we have a doctor and a nurse or two available.”⁹ A few days later, Nolan confirmed with Oppenheimer the good news that he had successfully recruited two “willing and able” nurses from St. Louis—Harriet “Petey” Peterson and Sara Dawson. St. Louis would serve as the primary recruiting place for most of the medical staff who worked at the Los Alamos Hospital during the war.¹⁰ Nolan was pleased not only that Peterson and Dawson were prepared to relocate quickly but also that both had training in pediatrics, an expertise, as would soon become clear, that would prove invaluable for work in the remote military hospital.¹¹

In late March, Nolan and Hempelmann joined Oppenheimer in Los Alamos to survey the mesa at the base of the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico.¹² At the time, though construction was already under way, no one was living at the site except one soldier whose quarters were furnished with little more than a sleeping bag. The only functional buildings on the property were from the former Los Alamos Ranch School, an institution that had been in operation since 1917 but that had just been forced off the mesa by the military in order to build the secret wartime lab. The members of the school’s 1943 graduating class were made to accelerate their studies in order to participate in a late January graduation ceremony.

After the survey trip in March, it was decided that Hempelmann would remain a civilian and work in the Technical Area, or Tech Area, as it was known, monitoring radiation hazards, while Nolan would enter the military and serve as post surgeon for the new hospital, providing for the general medical needs of the community. This particular division of labor was never strictly observed, as the two friends aided each other in their respective assignments. Particularly during the first year in Los Alamos, when radiation issues were less pressing in the lab, Hempelmann would help out at the hospital.¹³

Likewise, Nolan was never too far from the health and safety concerns of the lab. Even in Oppenheimer’s first letter to Nolan, he discussed not only matters related to setting up a hospital but also the need for medical personnel to help with blood counts. Oppenheimer wrote to Nolan, “Our whole radiological program will depend on having these counts made early in the game before there are any radiation hazards.”¹⁴ Oppenheimer thus conveyed both that he expected Nolan would be involved in some aspects of radiation safety and that he was keenly aware of the hazards to which workers would soon be exposed once the processed uranium and plutonium began to arrive at the lab. It was initially understood that the medical staff would serve a small community of several hundred people. However, the population at Los Alamos grew steadily and eventually surpassed, by a considerable margin, original estimates. Indeed, by the end of the war the population at Los Alamos exceeded 6,500 civilian and military personnel.

Also recruited to the Manhattan Project at this time was Stafford Warren, a 1922 graduate of the University of California Medical School, who had, since 1926, been on the faculty of the University of Rochester in the Department of Radiology. The older and more experienced Warren was recruited directly by Groves to serve as the chief medical officer for the Manhattan District. However, the forty-six-year-old Warren would be stationed not in Los Alamos but at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which had become the new official headquarters for the Manhattan Engineer District. At approximately the same time that Nolan and Hempelmann were visiting Los Alamos in March 1943, Warren and Hymer Friedell, another early medical recruit to the Manhattan Project, were surveying an expanse of land twenty-five miles outside Knoxville, Tennessee, which would become the home of Site X. Here, too, major construction was under way for the development of the enormous Clinton Engineer Works, which would ultimately produce the purified uranium (U-235) for the Little Boy bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima.

It was determined that Warren, like Nolan, should enter the military. Warren insisted that he be given the rank of colonel. Unlike Nolan, who was never really comfortable with military life, Warren relished his role as an army officer. According to one account, he showed up on his first day of work “in combat boots with a .45 revolver strapped to his waist.”¹⁵ Of these three primary Manhattan Project doctors—Nolan, Hempelmann, and Warren—the last identified most closely with the military character of the operation. As journalist Eileen Welsome observes, though “Warren was also a scientist … he clearly saw himself as a military officer whose loyalty belonged to General Groves.”¹⁶

This particular allegiance resulted in a bit of tension between Warren and some of the other doctors, including Robert Stone, who had become the head of the Health Division of the Metallurgical Lab, or Met Lab, in Chicago, though still in a civilian capacity. Friedell, who became Warren’s deputy at Oak Ridge, recalled that almost immediately after Warren became the chief medical officer of the Manhattan District, as an army colonel, “there was polarization between the army and the University of Chicago, particularly Dr. Stone.”¹⁷ The division, as such, was rooted in the essential differences between a scientific and a military perspective, a clash, as we will see, that was evident in a broader sense at Los Alamos as well.¹⁸

In keeping with Groves’s emphasis on compartmentalization—that is, that one should only be concerned with, and know about, one’s particular assignment—Warren was not, at first, allowed to visit Los Alamos. During the first year of the project, he did not even know about Los Alamos.¹⁹ Hempelmann acknowledged that “in the early days of the Manhattan Project, Staff Warren was not allowed to come out here. And the reason is known only to General Groves.”²⁰ After encountering Warren at a meeting (likely in Chicago), Hempelmann determined that it would be useful for Warren to visit Los Alamos. He and Nolan then successfully appealed to Oppenheimer to make this happen. As Nolan recalled, “We convinced Oppie to get SW [Stafford Warren] to come here so we could get things done!”²¹ Because Warren reported directly to Groves, the Los Alamos doctors thought that, with Warren more directly involved, they would have more of a voice with the general. Thereafter, the chief medical officer of the project would visit Site Y with some frequency.²² During these trips, Warren typically stopped by Oppenheimer’s office, chatted with his secretary, Priscilla Green, and sometimes had a cup of coffee with the director, though on these occasions he “was always accompanied by e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Life at Los Alamos
• 2. The Trinity Test
• 3. Delivering Little Boy
• 4. Hiroshima
• 5. Tokyo and Nagasaki
• 6. Managing Radiation and the Radiation Narrative
• 7. Bikini and Enewetak
• 8. Dr. Nolan and the Quandary of Technique
• 9. 1983
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index