ABSTRACT
On 20 May 1984, Reverend William Harper Houff, a Unitarian minister in the city of Spokane in Washington State in the USA, delivered a sermon on the ‘Silent Holocaust’. The holocaust of which Houff warned was, he claimed, taking place just 150 miles southwest of Spokane, at the Hanford nuclear facility, the huge industrial complex where plutonium for US nuclear weapons had been manufactured since World War II. Houff accused US officials of having ‘uttered almost no words of alarm’ about the site, despite copious evidence of health problems caused by the radiation released there. Not only were officials silent themselves, Houff complained, but they had ‘frequently taken extravagant measures to silence those who do sound a warning’ (Ratliff and Salvador, 1994: pp. 4-5). Houff’s sermon was to spark a local campaign which eventually contributed to the release, in February 1986, of about 19,000 pages of classified information about the early history of the site and the radioactive and chemical wastes released during its operation (Gerber, 1992: p. 2; Zwinger and Smith, 2004: pp. 49-50). The facility was decommissioned shortly afterwards. Today, governments and military bureaucracies often still withhold sensi-
tive information from the public in their attempt to protect law enforcement or to uphold national security (Glazer and Glazer, 1998: p. xiii; see also the Introduction to this volume). In an open society, however, there is also an expectation that people should be able to access information pertaining to possible health hazards. This chapter focuses on the contrasting imperatives of openness and secrecy at Hanford in the decades following the Second World War.1 By examining the media coverage of the various nuclear accidents that occurred at the facility, I show that the secrecy of Hanford was not the outcome of absolute silence; rather, the silences that surrounded Hanford were partial and context dependent. Newspaper reports reveal that journalists occupied an ambiguous role in their construction: initially consolidating the culture of secrecy through the dissemination of partial silences, but later working with local activists to break the silence. By the early 1980s, I suggest, local journalists writing about Hanford had recast their role from that of local drivers of secrecy to drivers of publicity. Located in southeast Washington State, about 200 miles from Seattle,
Hanford was the plutonium production complex that fuelled the atomic bomb
employed in the world’s first nuclear explosion, tested in 1945 at the Trinity Site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It also produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945. The facility was built in March 1943 on a 640-square-mile desert site and was bordered on the east side by the Columbia River, which flows southeast into the Tri-Cities, a midsized metropolitan area composed of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco (Gerber, 1992: p. 2). Operating in great secrecy throughout its active period, Hanford was created to address the threat represented by Nazi expansion and, later, to counter the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons and military programmes during the Cold War. The site produced more than 67 metric tons of plutonium and supplied most of the 60,000 nuclear weapons produced in the United States from 1945 to 1987 (Gephart, 2003b: p. 5; Anon., 1987). For more than four decades, Hanford had a significant impact on people
and ecosystems and polluted a large portion of the Pacific Northwest (Steele, 1988: p. 17).2 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, high levels of radioactive waste were released into the air, into the water of the Columbia River and into the ground. Contaminants reached the local human population through environmental pathways such as inhalation, ingestion of wildlife and drinking of contaminated water. The heaviest releases occurred shortly after World War II, but contamination continued all through the Cold War era, possibly causing significant long-term health effects for people living downwind and downstream of the production reactors (Steele, 1988: p. 17). The public was not directly warned about the offsite contamination and
records of contamination incidents were kept secret in classified documents. It was only with the declassification of these documents in 1986 that the world learned about the immense radioactive and chemical discharges from the facility. It now became apparent that decades of continuous manufacturing had left behind 177 single and double-shelled tanks containing about 200,000 m3
of high-level, radioactive, hazardous waste and 710,000 m3 of solid radioactive waste, in addition to 520 km2 of contaminated groundwater beneath the site that is migrating to the Columbia River – all of which has had, and continues to have, a huge impact on US political, economic and ecological programmes.3 As Congressman Ron Wyden (Democrat) of Oregon remarked in 1988, Hanford was ‘the largest, most ultra-hazardous industry of its kind in the world’ (Steele, 1988: p. 17). In some of the most detailed analyses of the history of the Hanford Site, it
is not uncommon to read that the government ‘kept the public in the dark’ about what was going on at the site, that ‘major Hanford decisions were made without public awareness or involvement’, and that ‘Hanford was busy and noisy and industrious, and yet, to the outside world, it was silent’ (Gerber, 1992: p. 53).4 We know that the Manhattan Project maintained a top-secret classification about Hanford’s activity and its operational history; even after the end of World War II, less than 1 per cent of Hanford’s workers knew they were employed in a nuclear weapons project (Hanford Cultural Resources Program, 2002: p. 1.22; see also Findlay, 2004; Hughes, 2002; Hevly and
Findlay, 1998; Macuglia, 2013b). ‘We made certain that each member of the project thoroughly understood his part in the total effort; that, and nothing more’, declared Manhattan Project director General Leslie R. Groves (18961970) in his memoirs, published in 1962 (Groves, 1983: p. 15). In addition to this, as Michele Gerber noted in 1992, until recent years area residents were not informed of the discharges nor warned of any potential dangers, even when releases far exceeded the tolerable limits and ‘maximum permissible concentrations’ defined as safe at the time. In fact, Hanford scientists and managers, on numerous occasions throughout the first four decades of operation, specifically told the public that the plant’s workings and wastes were all controlled and harmless (Gerber, 1992: p. 3). We should note, however, that it is one thing to say that people were not
directly informed about major Hanford policies and decisions; it is another to say that the facility was silent to the outside world and that the public was kept in the dark about what was going on inside it. Connections between radioactivity and certain forms of cancer were already known by the late 1920s and it seems that some citizens long suspected that something was wrong with safety conditions at the Hanford Site (see, for example, Belton, 2010: p. 74; Mullner, 1999). As discussed by J. Samuel Walker (2009) in his book The Road to Yucca Mountain, there were many stories about accidents and waste issues at Hanford and most of the US nuclear facilities operated in an intermediate state of secrecy and publicity. Yet how precisely this ambiguous status was attained and what it actually meant at different times during the Cold War remains unclear (Macuglia, 2013a). How were secrecy and silence experienced by those involved – including employees and local residents – through the Cold War era? A consistent body of scholarly work on the public understanding of the
Hanford Site has focused on the twisted relationships of trust, uncertainty and economic reliance. In addition, studies of lay expertise have examined the dissimilarities, hierarchies and various intersections involved in differently situated types of knowledge. John Findlay and Bruce Hevly, for example, have drawn on local newspapers such as the Columbia Basin Herald, The Villager, the Sage Sentinel and the Tri-City Herald, as well as larger regional newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, theOregonian, the SpokesmanReview and the Seattle Times, to explore Hanford’s role as an industrial – as opposed to a scientific – facility located in a specific regional context (Findlay and Hevly, 2011; see also Pope, 2008). In what follows, I present an in-depth analysis of coverage in the Seattle Times in the period from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, to demonstrate the ways in which the Hanford Site existed in a communicative context of partial silence whose qualities and meanings altered over time. The Seattle Times is a privileged vantage point for such an investigation.
As the largest and most important newspaper in Washington State, it offers an appropriate perspective from which to shed light on the local dynamics within Washington State, where readers were directly affected by nuclear
issues. Having looked at hundreds of articles and letters to the editors from the early 1940s to the early 1980s, I focus on those pieces that clearly addressed issues of potential danger posed to local communities showing that, despite Hanford’s institutional silence, there was a localized, discontinuous dissemination of partial information about radioactive threats posed by the nuclear facility to the local people and ecosystems. This murky local knowledge created a peculiar state of secrecy, a sort of middle ground between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ influenced by instances of personal interests and various protocols of national security.
