Diary of a Cold War Patriot

Diary of A Cold War Patriot

By

Thomas Bullock

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Published by Smashwords. Inc.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Bullock

ISBN: 978-1-4659-3341-6

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Diary Of A Cold War Patriot

Chapter 1 Introduction To The Cold War Patriots

In August 1949 the Soviet Union lit off its first atomic bomb, Joe 1, based on atmospheric fallout it was determined to be a plutonium device. The experts were stunned. The nascent Cold War had stunningly escalated to a new and more dangerous level. It was obvious that the Soviets were producing plutonium, but how much and how fast?

In December 1949, about 8,000 curies of radioactive iodine and about 20,000 curies of radioactive xenon were intentionally released from a plutonium processing plant’s stack on the Hanford Plant in southeast Washington. It was called the Green Run undertaken by the Air Force shortly after the first Soviet atomic bomb denotation. The purpose of the test, releasing highly radioactive isotopes from green fuel, was to obtain information for monitoring Soviet nuclear activities in order to determine how much and how fast they were producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The Soviet detonation of a nuclear weapon startled the experts who believed our Cold War adversary was several years from attaining this critical milestone. This astonishing accomplishment was facilitated by the fact that communist spies had infiltrated the United State’s nuclear weapons complex during and after World War II stealing secret plans for the design of nuclear weapons.

An odd quirk of fate regarding the espionage involving the atomic bomb secrets was that it was suspected that much of the data pilfered from the United States’ emerging weapons complex, especially from the super secret laboratory at Los Alamos, NM, was routed through two air bases, Gore Field and East Base, near Great Falls, MT, my home town. This was done under the lend lease program wherein the United States was sending airplanes and other strategic war materials to Russia via the city’s airport on the way to Fairbanks, AK, then on to destinations in Siberia.

According to Richard Rhodes in his book, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the plans for the atomic bomb, plus tons of nuclear weapons materials, strategic intelligence reports, and the plans for much of the most advanced aviation, electronic, and heavy industrial technology passed through Gore Field and East Base in sealed diplomatic containers. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Soviet agents also entered the U.S. through Great Falls as part of the Soviet Lend-lease delegation and staff.

I can vividly recall seeing uniformed Soviet military officers at local hockey games, and strolling along the streets in my neighborhood. They were billeted in the Pennsylvania apartments on lower third-avenue north, a short walk from our house, and to the Civic Center housing the hockey rink where as a youth we watched the games and later my brother and I played for the Great Falls Americans hockey team.

The Cold War was heating up and for the next 40 some years the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in a world wide struggle between ideologies; communism versus democracy, socialism versus capitalism. The conflict involved a massive buildup of arms by both nations including the development, production and deployment of nuclear weapons resulting in the potential of mutual assured destruction (MAD).

MAD was a strategy espoused by Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson. Under this scenario the explicit threat to the Soviet Union was that even though the United States would suffer a crippling blow from a first strike of Soviet nuclear weapons targeting our missile silos, our submarine launched ballistic missiles would still have the capability to annihilate the Soviet Union.

The world was witnessing a colossal Mexican Stand Off, and those of us in grade school during these uncertain times practiced Duck and Cover. The anxiety caused many families to build buried fallout shelters in their back yards equipped with survival kits that were popular items in the hardware and war surplus stores.

Then there were those of us who during the Cold War dedicated our lives to the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons, and the fabrication and testing of nuclear warheads.

The Cold War wasn’t a shooting war in the sense that the USSR and USA didn’t come to head to head armed conflicts, although wars of containment were fought in a number of countries including Korea and Vietnam against communist forces supported by the USSR.

The nation faced an aggressive and dangerous adversary. It was a time when both the United States and the Soviet Union were producing nuclear weapons at an alarming rate with enough destructive power to destroy each other’s nation with colossal collateral damage to their neighbors. In other words, an all out nuclear war had the potential to destroy the entire world’s population. This dire state of unease was dramatically portrayed in Nevil Shute’s novel, On The Beach.

During the Cold War thousands of military personnel were the B 52 flight crews on alerts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, missileers in control of the nuclear tipped ICBMs, soldiers with boots on ground, submariners hauling around ballistic missiles deep beneath in the oceans; In support of these courageous warriors was a large contingent of Cold War Patriots. The 700,000 or more Americans who have worked since 1942 to maintain our nation’s nuclear deterrent. In the process, many of us contracted illnesses from radiation or toxic exposures

We patriots toiled away in the far-flung weapons complex. Nuclear scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore designed the weapons; engineers, designers, construction workers, and production personnel designed, built and operated the facilities producing the nuclear and non-nuclear materials, fabricating the bomb components, and performing the final assembly of the weapons. Other engineers, scientists, technicians and construction workers conducted thousands of tests to ensure the darn things would work as designed.

Our battlefields were on the sage covered desert of eastern Washington, the piney forests of South Carolina, the windswept high plateau along the Rocky Mountain Front Range near Boulder, Colorado, on the ancient lava fields in a remote region in central Idaho, in the valleys of the rugged terrain of east Tennessee, at a high aerie in the Santa Inez Mountains in New Mexico and in a bucolic valley in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We fought in skirmishes in the vast Nevada and New Mexico deserts and in the South Pacific risking our lives and health testing the frightening bombs we had produced. We had secret outposts in the wide-open spaces of Texas and in the wooded hills of Ohio and Kentucky.

Our enemy was time. Our commanders, driven by demands of the Department of Defense (DOD), dictated inflexible production demands for nuclear weapons. We were fighting the clock in order to maintain parity with the Soviet bomb makers. The dangers we faced were not bullets and bombs, but the deadly radiation emitted from the atomic bomb ingredients. We faced the constant threat of radiation sickness that many of us continue battle.

We weren’t in foxholes or trenches, but bellied up to gloveboxes handling and processing the exceedingly dangerous and hazardous bomb ingredients; plutonium, high-enriched uranium, tritium, and beryllium. Not only were these materials extremely toxic with the potential of causing years of debilitating cancers and berylliosis, but also fissionable plutonium and high-enriched uranium could cause instant death and long term radiation sickness resulting from accidental criticalities. The high-level radioactive waste generated during the production of the weapons also posed a serious threat to the production workers as well as to the nearby residents.

Hand in hand with the development of nuclear weapons was the development of nuclear energy for ship propulsion and electrical power. Many of the same engineers and scientists who designed nuclear warheads, built and operated weapon production facilities, also contributed to the advancement of peaceful uses of the atom, it in its self not without many of the same hazards.

The efforts of the Cold War Patriots not only provided the nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union, but the entire world benefited from our dedication, ingenuity, and inventions for the peaceful uses of the atom. Reactor concepts developed during the Cold War have been exported to foreign countries, such as France, England, Canada, Japan, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Sweden and a host of others where the technology is being utilized to provide cheap, clean energy.

However, the distressing fact is that while foreign countries, such as France and Japan, pushed forward with the nuclear technology greatly expanded their nuclear power capacity and fuel reprocessing technology, the US nuclear energy program suffered from a combination of changes in administrative policies, a lack of standardized design hindering the ability of licensing of reactors, inadequate control of construction cost due in part to the rapidly changing regulations, soaring interest rates brought about by the interminable delays in construction and the inability to develop a safe and cost effective method for the permanent disposal of spent reactor fuel.

A clear-cut example of our pioneering efforts in nuclear energy was the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR 1). In 1951 EBR 1, located near the small community of Arco, Idaho. It was the first in world to successfully generate electrical power from the atom. The reactor was the first to use plutonium as its fuel and demonstrated the ability of a nuclear reactor to breed its own fuel. The plant was shut down in 1964 and is now a national monument.

Now we not only continue to import oil but also nuclear technology. The excess plutonium from weapons production will be blended with uranium and burned in nuclear reactor and although we developed this technology over forty-years ago, we will now rely on French nuclear expertise for the fabrication of the mixed oxide fuel (MOX).

In other words we are buying back the technology we invented.

The 34 tonnes of excess US plutonium represents an enormous amount of stored energy. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an autonomous part of the Department of Energy responsible for the security and maintenance of the weapons stockpile, said the amount of excess plutonium would be enough for 8,500 nuclear weapons or for 200 billion kWh of electricity—approximately equivalent to a large nuclear reactor’s total output over twenty-years.

The MOX will be produced at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, but the fuel assembles themselves will probably be fabricated abroad by the AREVA company in France.

The legacy of the Cold War and the rush to build and deploy thousands of nuclear weapons invoke mixed reactions; on one hand the deterrence held at bay the Soviet Union and the probable prevention of worldwide devastation. While on the other hand left behind are vast volumes of deadly radioactive waste spread out across the nation at the numerous production and manufacturing sites. The cost for cleaning up these areas is running into billions of dollars.

I was a working hand in hand with the weapons designers, plant operators, and engineers designing the plants for the production of weapons materials. I supervised the production of plutonium metals as feed for the fabrication of triggers, or pits, I led decontamination teams following spills of plutonium, and I managed the engineering efforts in support of a new tritium supply decision by the Secretary of Energy.

This book is my story.

Chapter 2 The Cold War Weapons Complex

From it’s humble beginnings in a squash court beneath Stagg Field in Chicago, where Enrico Fermi with a crew of scientists first demonstrated and controlled a nuclear chain reaction in an array of graphite blocks interspersed with natural uranium, the weapons complex expanded to include a profusion of far flung facilities across the entire United States.

The crew of scientists assembled hundreds of blocks of graphite, all of which contained a little ball of uranium, in a pile, thus the name pile reactor, under the direction of Fermi.

During the demonstration, physicists carefully drew out control rods made of cadmium, a neutron-absorbing element, while others monitored instruments measuring neutron multiplications as the pile reactor neared criticality.

The rough and ready emergency control system was actually a man standing above the pile of graphite with an axe ready to cut a rope holding a cadmium control rod to stop the nuclear reaction. In honor of this man the emergency shut down systems of reactors are still today called SCRAM, which stands for Safety Control Reserve Axe Man.

During the Cold War the United States’ nuclear weapons complex spanned the entire continental United States and beyond, considering the weapons testing in Alaska and the South Pacific.

In the mid 1970s the Department of Energy (DOE) assumed the overall management of the complex including the responsibility for the design and development of experimental reactors for both military and commercial use, safeguarding and maintenance of the stockpile of existing weapons, design and manufacturing new weapons, and the permanent disposal of millions of tons of radioactive waste products produced during the production of nuclear weapons, and spent nuclear fuel from both commercial and experimental reactors.

The origins of the Department of Energy (DOE) can be traced to the ultra secret Manhattan Project established during the race to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. Based on information from German-Jewish physicists, escapees from the Nazi’s pogroms; the Hitler régime was proceeding with plans to develop a nuclear bomb. This theory was advanced by Germany’s efforts to obtain heavy water, a key component in the production of plutonium, from plants in German occupied Norway.

Germany’s efforts to attain nuclear weapons was dealt a sever blow when Norwegian saboteurs and British bombers damaged the heavy water production plant at Rjukan, Norway. However, it was postulated that this did not deter them from pursing work on the atomic bomb.

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had fled Nazi Germany, compelled Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to authorize a project to develop the atomic bomb and the race was on.

In 1942, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers established the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) to manage this super secret project. It was so secret that Vice President Truman didn’t find out about it until after he was sworn in as President following the death of President Roosevelt in 1945.

Following the war, Congress engaged in a vigorous and contentious debate over civilian versus military control of the atom. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 settled the debate by creating the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which took over the Manhattan Engineer District's sprawling scientific and industrial complex.

The AEC was specifically established to maintain civilian government control over the field of atomic research and development. During the early Cold War Years, the Commission focused on designing and producing nuclear weapons and developing nuclear reactors for naval propulsion. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 ended the exclusive government use of the atom and initiated the commercial nuclear power industry and bestowed on the AEC the authority to regulate the new industry.

In response to changing needs in the mid 1970's the AEC was abolished and the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 created two new agencies: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) to manage the nuclear weapon, naval reactor, and energy development programs.

However, the extended energy crisis of the 1970's soon demonstrated the need for a more unified energy organization and planning. The Department of Energy Organization Act brought several federal government's agencies and programs into a single cabinet level department. The Department of Energy (DOE), activated on October 1, 1977, assumed the responsibilities of the Federal Energy Administration, ERDA, the Federal Power Commission, and parts and programs of several other agencies.

It is important to note that Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), created by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, did not apply to the DOE production facilities or laboratories thus creating a double standard for safety oversight for nuclear processing and power production facilities in the U. S. Commercial nuclear power and processing plants were required to undergo stringent licensing processes, while a separate organization provides oversight of DOE operations through the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB).

The NRC regulations are embodied in the Code of Federal Regulations and are legally binding under federal statues whereas the DNFSB safety oversight does not carry the same lawful authority as the NRC. The DNFSB only has the authority to review operations, practices and occurrences at DOE facilities and make recommendations to the Secretary of Energy concerning protection of public health and safety.

The DNFSB wasn’t established until 1988. Up until that time DOE and its predecessor agencies provided their own safety oversight, in other words, the fox was guarding the hen house such that during the height of the Cold War, production was the driving force at times to the detriment of safety and ignoring the vast amounts of radioactive waste being generated thus leaving a legacy of today’s monumental task of cleaning up the radioactive waste left over from the nuclear weapons manufacturing processes in several states.

With the enduring and escalating Cold War, the production of nuclear weapons increased on both sides numbering in thousands of warheads. The weapons complex expanded to meet the need, as did the bureaucracy responsible for its management. Headquartered in Washington, DC, DOE and its predecessor agencies oversaw, or attempted to oversee, the multitude of laboratories and production facilities scattered from one end of the nation to the other and beyond to include nuclear weapons testing in the south pacific.

The sites were operated under a concept of Government Owned Contractor Operator or GOCOs under the direction of the DOE. The contractors normally referred to as the Maintenance and Operations contractor (M&O) responsible to the local DOE manager. Adding to the burgeoning cast of site M&O employees were the onsite DOE bureaucrats.

Each site was like a fiefdom competing against one another for funding. These competing domains relied on their state’s congressional representatives and well positioned lobbyists to pry money from the national treasury, and wield their imposing influence on DOE decisions for new and costly programs.

This rivalry to maintain the enormous GOCO staffs at each site was so intense that cooperation between the various sites was, in my humble opinion, iffy at best. The not invented here syndrome prevailed as each fiefdom firmly believed they could do better than their competition thus leading to extensive and uncalled for inefficiencies within the overall complex.

The tremendous challenges faced by the DOE headquarters in Washington, DC, seemed at times unmanageable leading to one Secretary of Energy to voice his opinion that managing the sprawling complex with all its diverse companies, technologies and political priorities was like herding mice.

It is also important to note that the work, especially involving "special nuclear materials (SNM), plutonium and high-enriched uranium (HEU), was carried out behind a veil of secrecy such that many of the neighboring communities were unaware of what was actually happening behind the security barriers even though accidental releases of radioactive isotopes and other hazardous materials posed potential health problems and long term environmental impacts. Engineering and