Hanford's B Reactor: The Plutonium Factory That Won the War

The Town That Didn't Exist

Before you knew what Hanford was, it was just a bend in the Columbia River. A quiet stretch of high desert in eastern Washington state.

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The Problem That Needed Solving

To understand why Hanford mattered, you need to understand the problem the scientists had run into by early nineteen forty-three. Fermi's reactor under the University of Chicago squash court had proven the principle.

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Building the Impossible Town

The Army Corps of Engineers condemned the land in early nineteen forty-three. The farming families in the small towns of Hanford and White Bluffs were given sixty days to leave.

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The B Reactor Goes Critical

The B Reactor reached criticality in September nineteen forty-four. That's the technical term for the moment a reactor sustains a chain reaction on its own.

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The Implosion Problem

Here's where the Hanford story and the Los Alamos story converge on a technical crisis that nearly derailed everything. The original gun-type bomb design was straightforward.

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The Secret City Behind the Fence

But Hanford wasn't only reactors and plutonium. It was also a place where people lived.

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The Spies in the Perimeter

The security was elaborate and, in at least one significant sense, it failed. Klaus Fuchs had joined the British scientific mission to Los Alamos in late nineteen forty-four.

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Trinity and the Reckoning

The plutonium from Hanford's B Reactor, processed and shaped by the implosion team at Los Alamos, became the device detonated at Trinity on July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five. They called it the Gadget.

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What They Built and What They Knew

Einstein, the man whose letter to Roosevelt had set the whole enterprise in motion, spent the rest of his life campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He called the Roosevelt letter the one great mistake of his life.

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