Fat Man

Hanford Engineer Works
Christmas, 1944

Soon after a woman sold me an old menu online, she wrote to let me know something about it. Her father had been a machinist who rode the rails looking for work in the 1930s. He eventually landed at the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State where he worked for the Manhattan Project during World War II. In 1944, he enclosed the Christmas menu in a letter to his family in Chicago as a way of reassuring everyone back home that he was okay. She was comforted that the menu was now in a collection documenting American history. A small, hand-written notation on the back summarized its story—“atom bomb job.”

The Manhattan Project was a nationwide complex of laboratories and plants to manufacture atomic fuel and to fabricate the first atomic bombs. During the summer of 1943, Richland, a farming community of five hundred situated on the Columbia River, suddenly became one of the project’s boomtowns. Under the direction of the U.S. Army and several private contractors, over 50,000 workers hurriedly built a plant there to manufacture plutonium for the first nuclear bomb. Only a handful knew the true purpose of the facility.

Hanford was shrouded in secrecy. Margaret Hoffarth, a waitress in one of the eight large mess halls, later recalled, “All we were told was we were doing something for the war.” WAC corporeal Hope Sloan Amacker reminisced, “In 1944 everyone was young here, and it was heavenly. The experience was once in a lifetime. You knew you were doing something important but you didn’t know what.” It was not delightful for everyone. Despite patriotic appeals, workers sometimes left in droves, driven away by the dismal housing conditions, the bleak surroundings (made all the worse by severe dust storms), and the fact that they could not bring their families to live with them.

The cover of the Christmas menu features a jolly Santa Claus—an ironic image given that the codename for the deadly weapon was “Fat Man.” The traditional holiday meal is similar to those provided to millions of U.S. military personnel throughout the world that year.

An important milestone was achieved on that same Christmas Day in 1944 when the first irradiated slugs of plutonium were discharged from Hanford’s reactor. Within months, there was enough for a couple of bombs. (Concurrently, a sufficient amount of enriched uranium was produced at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee for one additional bomb.) In July 1945, the first nuclear weapon was tested in New Mexico using plutonium made at Hanford. The event marked the beginning of the Atomic Age.

A uranium-fission bomb, codenamed “Little Boy,” was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Three days later, the more powerful plutonium-based “Fat Man” was detonated over Nagasaki. By some estimates the two atomic bombs instantly killed over 75,000 people. The death toll rose to perhaps as many as a quarter of a million within four months after the bombings. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, thereby ending the Second World War.