I purchased The Traitors by Alan Moorehead during my last visit to the Strand Bookstore in early December. Originally published in 1952 and updated in 1963, the book is about three spies – Allan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, and Bruno Pontecorvo – who passed on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during and just after World War II, potentially (questionably) allowing the Soviet Union to build an atomic bomb more quickly.
While I’m definitely learning more about these men and the atomic research going on at the time, most interesting is the author describing Harwell, more formally the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, which the UK started just after World War II ended.
After a little, you overcome your fear; an engineer will explain all the many safeguards against explosion – making his points on a transparent model of the pile – and you believe him. You can advance, if you wish, to the pile itself and touch it. You can pick up a rod of uranium in your hand. The notice about smoking is explained. It has no importance any more; it was put there simply to prevent workmen from dropping their cigarette butts into the graphite while the pile was being built, since the graphite must be as pure as possible. In other words, the impediment is not smoke but dirt and no normal earthly heat could affect this experiment.
Alan Moorehead, The Traitors, p112
So let me get this straight: an untrained civilian with no understanding of proper handling of radioactive metals can just reach out and touch the uranium being used to create bombs? And the bigger concern is not the construction team smoking but more their litter?
…This building is constructed on the same principles (though not perhaps with the same grace) as the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with all the mass of masonry at the top and window below. The whole of the second storey is filled with brightly coloured machinery, for sucking out the radioactive air from the laboratories below. This air is roasted and purified, and then released harmlessly through a tall chimney into the Berkshire sky. Outside, there are radioactive water tanks where the water also is purified before it is returned to the River Thames and the sea. The waste from the experiments is collected in movable concrete buckets, which are eventually dumped into the ocean.
Alan Moorehead, The Traitors, p113
I doubt their techniques for purifying air and water sufficed to protect the the local population – if you didn’t know, nuclear tourism was popular until they realized the dangers – and for the actual waste to be in buckets and then just dumped at sea like ordinary garbage seems questionable at best.
As far as I know there was no accidents at Harwell, but nevertheless sounds really, really scary…
