A Proud Nuclear Town Grapples With How to Remember the Bomb

A high school in Richland, Washington is adorned with a mushroom cloud. But some are asking for better ways to see the city’s history-changing past.

WHY WE ARE HERE

We examine how America defines itself from place to place. In Richland, Washington, residents wrestle with their ties to the atomic bomb and World War II.

RICHLAND, Wash. – In the arid scrubland of southeastern Washington state, a small farming outpost was covertly transformed during World War II. Thousands of workers gathered beside the Columbia River and rushed to craft the materials needed for the ultimate weapon.

Today, decades after an atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki, Japan, the engineers and scientists who enriched the radioactive material for it have a legacy. Diners at a brewpub in this company town can wash down a Reactor Core Pizza with a Plutonium Porter. When I was there recently, teenagers were mingling at the Atomic Bowl bowling alley. Across the street is Richland High School, home of the Bombers, where flags, walls and the school’s basketball court are decorated with a mushroom cloud.

“Proud of the cloud,” declare many students.

This boisterous civic pride has at times become a bone of contention between those who see the city’s storied heritage as one that deserves open celebration and those who find current motifs far too light-hearted to commemorate an event that killed tens of thousands of people. Those conversations have resurfaced as communities across the country consider how best to display history without alienating residents and visitors who don’t view the past with the same reverence.

Last month I walked down the street from the high school to a ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing. There Adrienne Fletcher stood to tell her family story: Her grandmother was at a boarding school just outside of Nagasaki when the bombing took place, and she saw the mushroom cloud from her classroom window.

Ms Fletcher, who now lives in Richland, said her grandmother survived but dealt with lifelong health problems.

“Tonight I ask you to remember the people – the people – who have lost their lives or have suffered excruciating daily pain from exposure to radiation,” she told attendees, some of whom worked in the region’s nuclear industry. “I ask you to remember the children who were taken away from their parents. I ask you to remember the families who were uprooted from their homes. I ask you, as you move through this community with its numerous memories of radioactive destruction, to take time to reflect – to reflect on the aftermath of war and violence, to consider the impact that these daily memories have on them Violence means a whole group of people and how it affects them.”

Before the Manhattan Project, the secret US plan that produced the first nuclear weapons, Richland was a village of about 250 residents who had settled to farm alongside the Columbia River. But the federal government stepped in to acquire the land, forcing residents from homes and farms in the area to use the remote location to build nuclear reactors and hundreds of associated buildings on what is now known as the Hanford Site, along with neighborhoods in Richland to accommodate the many workers. The city soon had 11,000 inhabitants.

By 1945, the United States and its allies were preparing for a grueling invasion of Japan that was expected to result in mass casualties on both sides of the conflict. But as the Manhattan Project proved successful, President Harry Truman opted instead to use the nation’s new nuclear weapon.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima (with enriched uranium in Oak Ridge, Tennessee) and Nagasaki in August of that year killed an estimated 200,000 people, many instantly and many others from exposure to radiation in the days and decades that followed. Shortly after the Nagasaki bombing and after the Soviet Union also declared war on Japan, the Japanese government said it would surrender.

While the making of the bomb was central to the creation of Richland, it is also at the heart of the community today. (The population is now about 60,000.) The Hanford Project, which enriched the plutonium, was also critical during the Cold War era before ceasing production in the late 1980s. The site remains a major employer but is now focused on massive decommissioning and decontamination efforts.

Del Ballard, 92, a longtime Hanford worker who started at the site in 1951, said employees take great pride in their technological achievements and their role in supporting national security. And when the US government shut down the Hanford Buildings, Mr. Ballard helped lead efforts to preserve the reactor that produced the Nagasaki plutonium. Today you can visit the reactor site.

“It was so important to the nation and world history,” he said. “It was the beginning of the nuclear age and the end of World War II.”

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Parjot Pawar, who recently graduated as a Salutatorian from Richland High, said she’s never liked the mushroom cloud logo or the phrase “cloud proud.” Last year, she said the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee held a meeting with the principal to push for the school’s logo to be replaced. But many people remained proud of the symbol and its representation of the city’s heritage.

“However, I have found that as the years have passed and discussions of monuments and statues have become more popular, there has been increasing support for changing the image of this school,” Ms. Pawar said.

Ms. Fletcher said she first had a harrowing encounter with Richland’s pride when she arrived in town and went to high school to audition for a job with the local symphony, founded primarily by Hanford workers in 1945. The school’s name “Bombers” was emblazoned on a building.

At the recent Lights for Peace program to commemorate the anniversary, Ms. Fletcher’s choral group, the Mid-Columbia Mastersingers, sang a Japanese children’s song. Then a National Park Service organizer invited people to ring a bell and walk down a path lined with lighted paper bags bearing messages of peace and remembrance.

As people circled the park and rang the bell, Ms Fletcher said in an interview that the community was in many ways disconnected from another side of this story: the bomb’s impact. But as the nation has had more conversations in recent years about how to view its past, it’s found that people in Richland are also more willing to hear their family’s story, and more willing to hear why the emblems of the nuclear-themed city make them think about death and suffering.

She also learned that some of the students in her youth symphony had advocated for change in the high school.

“I think that’s just the beginning of the process,” she said. “There are many ways to go. It’s such a big part of this community and has been for so long. I think there are many more talks to be had.”