Calutron Girls

By JANET BEARD 

March 8, 2018

Calutron operators at their panels, in the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge during World War II. 1944. The calutrons were used to refine uranium ore into fissile material. During the Manhattan Project effort to construct an atomic explosive, workers toiled in secrecy, with no idea to what end their labors were directed. Gladys Owens, the woman seated in the foreground, did not realize what she had been doing until seeing this photo in a public tour of the facility fifty years later. Tennessee, USA.  (Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)

 

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

Growing up near Oak Ridge, Tenn., I thought I knew what went on there. Not many people did in the beginning. In 1942, the U.S. government began building a secret city in East Tennessee as part of the Manhattan Project. By 1945, though Oak Ridge still wasn’t on any maps, 75,000 people were living and working there, most unaware that the town’s sprawling plants were designed to enrich uranium to be used in an atomic bomb. The secrecy of that ominous goal intrigued me as a kid. But what I didn’t fully appreciate back then was that most of the people working in those plants were women./.../