Holy Shit

Anyone of you Iowans know there had been a secret nuclear weapons facility near Burlington? I certainly missed the news, though it's hard to penetrate New England's foggy veil. I learned this old news from one of my bosses who is originally from the area and who has two relatives sick from cancer, possibly caused by the "radioactive uranium clouds routinely floating above the military compound released by the plant." Oh yeah. Those clouds of uranium. In southeastern Iowa.

Damn our government can do shitty things for crappy reasons. Apparently we should kill hundreds or thousands of Americans over decades to protect them from the Soviet threat of total instant annihilation. Blech. And of course, we should lie to them for decades, provide them with no safety gear, and then fight tooth and nail not to compensate them for their horrible terminal illnesses. Jesus Christ on toast.

This is a couple year old news story.

“Forgotten” nuclear weapons factory poisons Iowa town

By Dennis J. Carroll

Middletown, Iowa, May 29— The assignment in an environmental issues class at Southeastern Community College seemed innocuous: Write a letter to a local official about the environment.

So Bob Anderson, 60 years old, wrote to US Senator Tom Harkin. In seven paragraphs, Anderson told about his experiences as a security guard at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant from 1968 to 1973, and suggested that exposure to radioactive materials may have given him and others cancer.

The letter, and the off-and-on inquiry it triggered, ultimately unleashed a stream of startling disclosures in recent months from federal officials and former plant workers who broke decades of silence to talk about the plant.

Radioactive uranium clouds routinely floated above the military compound, while workers, often unprotected by safety gear, probably came into contact with plutonium and other radioactive and hazardous materials. A few weeks ago, a groundwater well test at the plant showed radiation far above the levels considered safe for drinking.

The inquiry also found a huge institutional memory loss at the US Department of Energy, which had forgotten that the plant was once the nation’s only producer of nuclear weapons, and had completely lost track of plant records. OOPS

At the peak of production, almost 10,000 workers toiled around the clock at the 19,000-acre plant, making everything from bullets to atomic bombs. Almost anyone who lived in southeastern Iowa for any length of time, it seemed, either worked at the plant or knows some continued from page 1 one who did.

The Department of Energy and the University of Iowa have begun a survey of health problems among the plant’s nuclear workers, and the department recently began testing workers for possible exposure to beryllium, a toxic metal used in constructing nuclear weapons.

Harkin said he never knew the plant produced nuclear weapons. When he received Anderson’s letter in the fall of 1997, he asked the Energy Department about it and was told that the plant never produced nuclear weapons. So he sent Anderson a letter thanking him for his interest, and let the matter drop.

But last August, after a Harkin aide touring the plant learned of its nuclear-weapons history, the senator’s office contacted Anderson and asked for more information. In the meantime, Harkin stepped up his questioning of the Energy Department and the US Army. But finding answers was difficult because workers’ health had never been monitored, as it was at designated nuclear arms plants.

On top of that, the records of plant operations and working conditions were in cardboard boxes scattered among Energy Department facilities and archives across the country. Many of the records turned up in boxes at the Pantex nuclear weapons facility near Amarillo, Texas, where Middletown’s nuclear operations were moved in the mid-1970s.

Finally, Energy Department officials confirmed for Harkin and themselves that the Atomic Energy Commission did indeed make nuclear weapons in Middletown from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. In fact, from 1949 to 1951, the facility was the nation’s only nuclear weapons assembly plant.

“When I learned the extent of IAAP’s role in creating the US nuclear arsenal, I was astonished to learn that some key federal officials knew little or nothing of its history,” Harkin told the Hawk Eye, a daily newspaper in Burlington, Iowa. “In other words, the IAAP’s nuclear history fell between some big bureaucratic cracks,” Harkin said.

“Senator Harkin was correct when he said that the plant fell through the cracks,’’ said Earl Whiteman, an official at the Energy Department’s office in Albuquerque. “Many people outside of [southeast Iowa] forgot about the important work that was done there.”

Anderson said he and the guards he supervised often boarded train cars loaded with metal barrels of radioactive materials. He said that at the time, he wasn’t sure just exactly what was in the drums that he walked among and touched. “I just knew that it must be pretty important ... to have people with machine guns guarding a railroad car,” Anderson said.

Fifteen years after Anderson left the plant, doctors diagnosed his non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system that they suspected was caused by exposure to radiation.

Several of his friends, who had also worked at the plant, had died of similar diseases, Anderson told Harkin.

“We always prided ourselves on following everything by the rules,’’ Anderson said of his work on the nuclear production line. “Little did I know that we didn’t have a rule book. We were writing it as we went along.’’

Anderson’s account and the subsequent disclosures have prompted dozens of other workers or their relatives to come forward with stories of health problems and unsafe conditions.

“Is there anything the government is going to do to find out what’s going on with these people?’’ asked Terri Bailey, whose parents worked at the plant. She said her stepfather has throat cancer and her mother suffers from brain aneurysms.

“She carried live powder,’’ Bailey said of her mother’s work in the plant. “If she dropped it, she’d blow up.’’

For decades, workers, sworn to secrecy about what they did at the plant, had been reluctant -- even fearful -- about coming forward with their stories.

Vaughn Moore, a former guard at the plant, painted a dark picture of conditions at the plant.

“Talking about your work was strictly taboo. Back in them days, they would tell you, ‘Run your mouth and you’re going to Leavenworth Penitentiary,’” said Moore.

“They had 15 FBI agents stationed in this town,’’ he said. “All they did was run around in bars listening, grocery stores listening. They knew what clubs you belonged to, they knew where you ate, they knew where you went fishing.

“They knew all about you,’’ Moore said. “They knew more about you than you knew about yourself.’’

Harkin has been pushing the Defense Department to lift its secrecy about the plant so workers will feel free to tell their stories. Even now, the Army refuses either to confirm or deny that nuclear weapons were assembled there.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in January traveled to the area to talk to former workers, calling them Cold War heroes. He promised to conduct a radiological review of the nuclear arms production line at the plant and to explore ways of compensating former workers for their health problems.

Last month, Richardson announced a nearly $500 million proposal to compensate the nation’s nuclear weapons workers for their medical expenses and lost wages. It will not be easy to attribute health problems to nuclear arms production specifically. The plant is already part of a $110 million Superfund cleanup supervised by the Environmental Protection Agency. The cleanup generally does not involve former Atomic Energy Commission areas of the plant, and is focused on restoring soil and groundwater contaminated by decades of producing conventional weapons and improper disposal and burning of hazardous wastes.

But Energy Department officials have said that if workers can show they were exposed to certain hazardous materials, they will be given the benefit of the doubt in determining compensation.

As for his reaction to all that has happened since his letter to Harkin, Anderson said: “All of my life [as a policeman or security guard] has been one of observation and reporting if something is wrong, and basically that’s what I wanted to do.’’