Founded during World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a vital link in the U.S. military's atomic bomb assembly line--the site where scientists worked at a breakneck pace to turn tons of uranium into a few grams of the artificial element plutonium. To construct and operate the plants needed for this effort, thousands of workers, both skilled and unskilled, converged on the "city behind a fence" tucked between two ridges of sparsely populated farmland in the Tennessee hills. At Work in the Atomic City explores the world of those workers and their efforts to form unions, create a community, and gain political rights over their city. It follows them from their arrival at Oak Ridge, to the places where they lived, and to their experiences in a dangerous and secretive workplace. Lured by promises of housing, plentiful work, and schooling for their children, they were often exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity, harmful chemicals, and other hazards. Although scientists and doctors intended to protect workers, the pressure to produce materials for the bomb often overrode safety considerations. After the war, as the military sought to reduce services and jobs in Oak Ridge, workers organized unions at two plants to demand higher wages and job security. However, the new Taft-Hartley Act limited defense workers' ability to strike and thus curbed union influence. The book examines the ongoing debates over workers' rights at Oak Ridge--notably the controversy surrounding the new federal program intended to compensate workers and their families for injuries sustained on the job. Because of faulty record keeping at the facilities and confusion over exposure levels, many have been denied payment to this day. Drawing on extensive research into oral history collections, transcripts of government proceedings, and other primary sources, At Work in the Atomic City is the first detailed account of the workers who built and labored in the facilities that helped ensure the success of the Manhattan Project--a story known, heretofore, only in broad outline. Russell Olwell, an assistant professor of history at Eastern Michigan University, has published articles in ISIS, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and Technology and Culture.
Looks at the contributions of the thousands of women who worked at a secret uranium-enriching facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II.
"The Atomic City Girls is a fascinating and compelling novel about a little-known piece of WWII history."—Maggie Leffler, international bestselling author of The Secrets of Flight In the bestselling tradition of Hidden Figures and The ...
From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the story of the three-thousand people who lived together in near confinement for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer and the world's best scientists to produce the atomic bomb ...
On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero.
In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium.
Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day.
"A new edition with a final chapter written forty years after the explosion."
This Atom Bomb in Me traces what it felt like to grow up suffused with American nuclear culture in and around the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Much has been written about scientific developments at Los Alamos, but until this book little has been said about the community that fostered them.
Together with the Astonishers, a somewhat reluctant gang of superheroes, Big Bang foils evil and saves the galaxy on a semi-regular basis. Author Jay Stephens tags along as Big Bang's personal cartoonist.