Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West

Three: The Politics of Hanford: Warfare and Welfare

137 in 1951, on tHe floor of tHe House of representatives, Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, a young congressman from western Washington State, urged his colleagues to support a proposal for a six- to tenfold increase in spending on atomic weapons. His reasoning was simple: The nation faced a grave challenge from the Soviet Union, which not only possessed formidable conventional forces but was also steadily increasing its own nuclear capabilities, and to meet this threat, America had to massproduce nuclear bombs: I confess to being struck by the irony of having to advance complicated and detailed arguments in support of an all-out atomic program. This is the best weapon we have—it is our one real hope of deterring Stalin. It is the natural weapon of a country weak in brute manpower but superlatively strong in science and technology. How can we conceivably afford not to go all out? How can we conceivably not want to make every possible atomic weapon we can? I believe that reasonable men can differ only on the degree of expansion that is now physically possible. In my own mind I am positive that we can immediately undertake to quintuple our expenditures on the atom—to spend the Politics of hAnford Warfare and Welfare Three 138 c hAP ter thre e six billions annually. But it may well turn out that we should now increase our spending to 10 billions a year. I cannot, however, imagine any Member of this House going before his constituents and saying that he is not in favor of making every single atomic weapon it is within our power to produce.1 Just as Americans committed themselves to the enormous program of mobilization against communism, as spelled out in the National Security Council’s policy paper number 68 (NSC 68), Jackson’s statement summed up the thinking behind the development of Hanford and America’s nuclear weapons complex: mass-production of nuclear weapons represented essential protection of American democracy. Moreover, in the context of politics, making an adequate number of bombs was both a requirement and an achievement of American government. At the height of the Cold War it was simply assumed that the nation, expressing its will through the democratic system, stood virtually unanimous in its support for the rapid, large-scale manufacture of nuclear weapons. Certainly the Truman administration had held to this policy, which in different ways also resonated with political conditions in Washington State. Jackson’s view of the necessity of urgent, high-volume production of bombs stands in sharp contrast to more recent sentiments. Since 1980 or so we have been much more likely to wonder about the extent to which widespread production of nuclear weapons affected the public health and surrounding environment, and to wonder whether the nation will ever manage to clean up the wastes generated in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. In these more recent contexts, Cold War production of nuclear weapons represents not only a crisis for American democracy but also the failure of it. Regarding Hanford, this line of thinking emerged particularly during the late 1980s after the public release of previously classified documents detailing the legacy of radioactive emissions from nuclear weapon facilities . People increasingly construed the risks presented by those emissions as something the government had imposed upon its own people without consultation or consent. “It sounds like something done in Russia,” commented Tom Bailie, a farmer born and raised just downwind from Hanford who attributes lifelong health problems to his childhood exposure to radioactive emissions.2 What a difference forty years make. Jackson called for as many new WArfAre An d W e lfAre 139 nuclear weapons as the nation could produce, and for him the nation’s response represented a triumph for democracy. For Tom Bailie, the nation’s response to international threats represented a failure of the political system . A truly democratic government would never have poisoned its own people—at least not without consulting or warning them about the danger they faced. That it appeared to have done so suggested to Bailie that the United States had come to imitate the very enemy that Jackson had meant to keep at bay. The contrast between Scoop Jackson’s and Tom Bailie’s sentiments exemplifies the polarization characterizing much of the discussion surrounding America’s nuclear weapons program.3 If the history of Hanford has become polarized, it is partly due to the...