It’s been 15 years now since the University of Nebraska Press and I set off together on the venture of publishing a comprehensive, detailed, difficult, controversial and confounding history of the Hanford Site in southeast Washington.  We published the first hardback edition in autumn 1992, and it immediately became the best-selling book in the Hanford region.  I’m told that work nearly stood still on the vast desert site, as thousands of employees, subcontractors, site watchers and regulators, and site neighbors pored through the pages—in some cases scarcely believing what they were reading.    Some could not grasp that they had lived and labored at Hanford for many years and not known of the events taking place all around them.  Some were angry, some confused, some sad, some inspired to go out and work on cleanup and education, some in denial.  Some thought much of the material in the book must be classified.

I knew I had consulted only open sources, and had never tried to access secret information.  I had also been meticulously careful to check and re-check measurements and calculations taken from old documents, and I even took statistics and chemistry classes to understand the material I was reading.  I had made sure that every one of my thousands of references was scrupulously accurate.         

In the days before the Internet changed the face of research, I had painstakingly followed open but obscure leads, through sometimes labyrinthine paths, and found first-hand sources.  I had used birthday money from my parents when I could scarcely afford it to travel to meet retirees in their distant homes, sometimes recording their knowledge on napkins in their kitchens.  I had pored over newly-declassified documents in libraries, taking notes on index cards because I could not afford copying charges.  I had stayed awake all night reading—fascinated—when my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests brought newly declassified documents to my door.

In the meanwhile, I had fallen in love!  History—compelling, real, raw, important, genuinely and intensely American, only one generation old, and not plumbed in any depth yet by anyone else—was all around me.  In small, remote, lovely Richland, Washington, I found what I had not found in the vast Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, various prominent State Libraries, and other eminent places where I had researched my dissertation a dozen years earlier.  This dusty place was “ground zero” for me, and in this research I found what I have loved to do ever since—observe, chronicle, interact, research, and ultimately hope to understand the Hanford Site,  whose influence has been so immense.

In this deceptively quiet place, where the one-room Department of Energy library that launched my quest and my interest closed for lunch, evenings and weekends (!), I found grass-roots American history.  Diminutive Richland, and nearby gigantic Hanford, had influenced the world in profound ways.  As America’s main arsenal of defense and “battlefield” in the Cold War—this nation’s longest and most expensive war—Hanford stood as the backbone or “big stick” behind national policy and the words of Presidents.  Could President Dwight Eisenhower have realistically governed under a policy of “massive retaliation” without Hanford’s plutonium products backing up his words?  Could President John Kennedy have proclaimed that Americans would “pay any price and bear and burden” in defense of liberty without Hanford’s reactors and radiochemical separations facilities churning out record amounts of weapons-grade plutonium during his Presidency?  Clearly the answer is no, they could not.   

While doing my research for the book, I worried that, any day, I would enter the small library and find a phalanx of high-powered reporters on expense accounts—intense and skilled—who would surpass my independent, low-budget research capabilities in a week!  I couldn’t imagine that this powerful Hanford story was still not widely discovered—not a priority.  Yet, other committed researchers never came, and I continued and On the Home Front (1992) was the result.  The University of Nebraska Press published the first paperback edition in 1997; then new editions in 2002 and now in 2007.  Each has a new Epilogue about Hanford Site nuclear waste cleanup.  Each Epilogue has changed and become longer.

The cleanup is now more than 25 percent of Hanford’s history.  As it seeks to re-engineer the environment, it reverses yet mirrors and maintains the Hanford tradition of engineering nature.  Transmutation—whether of uranium into plutonium, or of contaminated into restored land and water—is so daring, so emblematically American, that our national character is reflected here in its most elemental state.  Hanford is not an anomaly, although it is unique.  With all of its dumfounding and daunting complexities and contradictions, it is home-grown and it is us.

Would a society whose beliefs were cyclically based—instead of focused straight ahead on a steadfast belief in “progress” — ever build Hanford?  Absolutely not.  This observation and others that tie Hanford to who we are at the core of our society, keep me here, spellbound, always asking questions, always engaged, always partially in a state of discovery.  Hanford has not yet revealed all of its secrets.

As Hanford has opened its doors to more public and other tours, it becomes clear that others are fascinated too.  The tours are always oversubscribed, with long waiting lists.  Why do people keep coming?  Well, why do they go to visit Appomattox Courthouse where the Civil War ended, or the White House, or the bridge and Lexington and Concord where the American Revolution essentially began?  I think it is because people like—and need—to stand in the presence of something that makes them feel connected.  These historical icons make us feel connected, and let us know that we are a nation—a tribe—an identifiable group.   

All of these symbolic places teach us something about the lengths to which people will stretch them themselves—the things they are capable of doing and can accomplish.  These places also teach us about loss and waste and unintended consequences.  Hanford has all these lessons to teach.  I will never stop learning and writing about it.  Where else would a historian of 20th century America want to be?

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Author Michele Stenehjem Gerber works in the Public Information Office of Fluor Hanford, Inc.  Click here for more information on the newest edition, Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site, Third Edition, which includes an introduction by John M. Findlay and a new epilogue by the author.