Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia by Lindsey A. Freeman (review)

Rarely do Americans associate Appalachia with big science and the nation’s atomic legacy. However, in 1942, drawn by its seclusion and distance from the coast, the federal government built America’s first secret atomic city, Oak Ridge, in the mountains of Northeastern Tennessee. Workers employed by the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and at two other secret sites, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, helped create the atomic bomb. This was a huge and complex scientific and industrial project, and Oak Ridge, with three separate atomic plants and a workforce of over 125,000, was the largest and most diverse of the three sites. Ringed by barbed-wire fences for security and marked by an atmosphere of relentless surveillance, this planned community provided housing, schools, and recreation. Early Oak Ridgers boasted that its residents, who ranged from highly educated scientists to black and white unskilled laborers, “joined hands as strangers in a near classless society” to secretly “pull off one of the greatest scientific experiments in history” (43). With the dropping of the atomic bomb in August 1945 and the end of World War II, Oak Ridge’s future was initially unclear, and its population dropped significantly. The Cold War and the subsequent interest in peaceful uses of atomic energy ensured that the city would continue to thrive as a center for nuclear production and research, albeit no longer as an entirely closed federal military reservation.

Lindsey Freeman seeks to write a study of Oak Ridge from a cultural sociological perspective. She is particularly concerned with the myths and collective memories of Oak Ridge and how they were created, maintained, and changed. The granddaughter of founding Oak Ridgers, Freeman’s book is in part a social history of life in the atomic city that draws on her own family’s memories and oral histories of other residents. It is also an analysis of the public representations of Oak Ridge’s history and Freeman’s personal musings and reactions to the institutions of “atomic tourism” like the American Museum of Atomic Energy. As Freeman demonstrates, myths about the founding of Oak Ridge and life during the Manhattan Project years are ubiquitous and continue to be propagated by the various historical sites supported by powerful institutions like the Department of Energy. A generalized Appalachian frontier heritage is at times celebrated, but the forced removal of the four thousand preatomic residents, many with only fourteen days notice and no governmental assistance, is virtually ignored. Similarly, these sites depict the early years of Oak Ridge as a utopian society, an “island of culture, prestige, and intelligence,” where there were outstanding schools, free buses, universal health care, an endless array of cultural activities, and no unemployment (45). This nostalgic narrative ignores the class and racial segregation typified by unequal employment opportunities and substandard housing experienced by African Americans and the strain felt by all residents as a result of the Manhattan Project’s elaborate security system.

Freeman finds that in the postwar years the city embraced its atomic heritage, avoiding tough questions about the necessity of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan or the dangers associated with nuclear energy and nuclear waste. In the fifties and sixties, Oak Ridge’s American Museum of Atomic Energy promoted a utopian vision of deterrence through the stockpiling of atomic weapons that supposedly guaranteed world peace and security and limitless clean energy. In the late seventies, in the wake of Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl disaster, the museum changed its name to the American Museum of Science and Energy but still remained committed to the veneration of the Manhattan Project. Recent decades have seen the emergence of nuclear tourism, a form of heritage tourism, as communities ranging from Las Vegas to White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, to Los Alamos seek to use their nuclear histories to promote economic development. Oak Ridge has also sought to cash in on this phenomenon through...