Cold War Ends, History Begins

Gene Weisskopf
Past President, BRMA

B Reactor’s 24 years in service span two major wars in which it played a significant role. The first one is identified by the participation of virtually every major national power on the planet, invasion, bloodshed, the loss of millions of lives throughout the world, and the introduction of a new, history-changing weapon that destroyed two cities and helped bring the war to a decisive end. This war had a beginning in time and place: Poland in 1939; Mukden, China, in 1931; or Pearl Harbor in 1941, depending on where you lived. It also had a clear ending, marked by peace treaties being signed, losing countries being occupied by the winners, and lucky soldiers returning home. It was such a globe-encompassing conflict that it was called the World War. Except there had already been such a war some 25 years earlier, so this one was named World War II.

The second war in B Reactor’s lifetime is not so easily defined. Even establishing its starting and ending dates requires a decent bottle of wine for the ensuing lively discussion. We call it the "cold war" because much of it was fought more as a game of chess than with deadly "hot" battles, with suits and ties replacing military fatigues. It was a war of ideologies, seen as pitting western, capitalistic, free societies against repressive, nation-grabbing communist ones (at least, that’s the view from a western society).

While the cold war was marked by military skirmishes, invasions, and loss of life, there was never a globe-engulfing conflict that would settle the war one way or the other. And thank goodness for that, because the weapon that was introduced at the end of World War II—nuclear weapons for which B Reactor contributed plutonium—came to dominate all aspects of the cold war.

It might be said that because these unimaginably powerful weapons of mass destruction were never used, the resulting conflict seemed very cold by comparison. In other words, if the cold war had ever really flared up to a "hot" war, the resulting global conflagration could have made World War II look amateurish by comparison. And it was this immutable threat that seemed to hold the world’s superpowers at bay. Each side was armed to the teeth, and the world hung in a tender, delicate balance.

The telephone call came from the highest level of authority in the B Reactor Museum Association. In case you weren’t aware that we had such a thing, I’m referring to our president, Del Ballard, who called me several months ago and asked if I’d be interested in going to Washington, D.C. to attend a conference on cold war history. Although the BRMA corporate jet was evidently not available, the group would pay for the plane ticket, hotel, and daily essentials.

After looking into the conference, I realized that Del wasn’t just dumping some chore on me, but that the conference would make for an interesting trip that might also spread the word about B Reactor’s role in the cold war. So out of retirement I came, back into active duty for the BRMA (I only use that word because so many in the BRMA are retired; I’m just practicing for real retirement).

The two-day conference (September 8-9, 2003) was being arranged and hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS), http://wwics.si.edu/. Its namesake is the only president to have had a PhD. In the world we live in today, where knowledge, understanding, and planning play such critical roles, the need for such an institute is unmistakable. Here’s a description from their Web site:

Congress established the Center in 1968 as the official, national memorial to President Wilson. Unlike the physical monuments in the nation’s capital, it is a living memorial whose work and scholarship commemorates "the ideals and concerns of Woodrow Wilson." As both a distinguished scholar and national leader, President Wilson felt strongly that the scholar and the policymaker were "engaged in a common enterprise". Today the Center takes seriously his views on the need to bridge the gap between the world of ideas and the world of policy, bringing them into creative contact, enriching the work of both, and enabling each to learn from the other.

Within the Center is a group named the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), http://cwihp.si.edu/, which was organizing the conference named Cold War Memory: Interpreting the Physical Legacy of the Cold War. About 100 people attended from various places and organizations—museums, government agencies, universities, the Navy, the Air Force, NASA, and some smaller groups including the BRMA and Cindy Kelly from the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Most were from the U.S., but a small contingency came representing cold war history projects in eastern Europe and Russia.

Many of the attendees were blessed with the "scholar" designation. I’m not sure I could pass muster under that title for very long, but all the attendees were interested, bright, and happy to be sharing information with others. I took along a sufficient supply of B Reactor refrigerator magnets (our buttons, but with a magnet on the back instead of a pin), BRMA brochures, and the B Reactor brochures we hand out on tours of the reactor. (Thanks to Lyle for helping with the button-making, a chore I think Charlie Chaplin could’ve immortalized in his Modern Times film.)

The conference consisted of a series of panel discussions each day, with a half-dozen or so speakers on each panel. The topics ranged far and wide, giving evidence to the fact that the cold war affected practically every aspect of life in the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and all the countries in between. I’ll summarize some of the talks here, which will give you an idea of the range and scope of the conference, and perhaps whet your appetite for more (as it did for me).

The first day started with a welcome from the director of the WWICS, Lee Hamilton, former Congressman from Indiana for 34 years, and well-known in the Capital for the many positions he has held during his long career. One of his points was that a Congressional bill is pending that would fund a "theme study" by the National Park Service (NPS) of cold war resources in the United States. Not unlike the study being promoted for historic sites of the Manhattan Project. B Reactor would fit nicely into both.

Following Mr. Hamilton’s welcome came Craig Manson, an Assistant Secretary in the Department of the Interior. He pointed out that the NPS is in the process of preparing a Minuteman silo and control center for public access in South Dakota (see the Winter 2000 issue of The Moderator, available on our Web site). This is the same site where he spent many years in missile operations, so he was well acquainted with the realties of the cold war.

He emphasized that the cold war affected everyone in the U.S. and throughout the world, and that the sites and resources deserve preservation, very much for the same reasons that we have preserved our Civil War history. Although unlike the Civil War, it’s not always easy to define cold war resources, since the "war" itself was mainly a state of mind, not actual battles.

In terms of cold war history, one problem with preservation is that almost no time has gone by since the end of the cold war (by the way, many people are happy to define the end as the crumbling of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991). For example, some sites and resources are still in service. On the plus side, many of the people involved are still alive today. On the minus side (in terms of making work more difficult for historians), their stories come from their own perspectives and range far and wide. The Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian in 1994 comes to mind. Nonetheless, things move very quickly these days, so that even sites from the 9/11 atrocity are being remembered and preserved. He concluded by saying that young people need to understand the effect the cold war had on the world, and that the Park Service will be supporting preservation efforts.

Carol Shull, who has the exalted title Keeper, National Register of Historic Places for the NPS, explained that the register has some 75,000 entries in it (including B Reactor, which was added in 1992). There are about 2,500 sites that have been given the status of National Historic Landmark, which we are hoping to get for B Reactor. Paul Lusignan of the NPS pointed out the difference between the two designations. An "historic place" might be important unto itself or its local region, and is an honorary designation that helps to promotes awareness of the site. A "landmark," however, must have national significance and play an important role in national history. Obviously, B Reactor is (or should be) a shoo-in for landmark status. By he way, a site that gains landmark status is automatically added to the Register of Historic Places, sort of a two-for-one.

Later on, Congressman Joel Hefley (R-CO) stopped in to thank the Center and attendees for their efforts in working to preserve cold war history. He’s been in Congress since 1986, and a member of the House Armed Services Committee for 16 years. He helped sponsor a directive to inventory cold war resources, and pointed out that of the 2,500 National Historic Landmarks, only five refer to the cold war period, as do a mere 17 of the 75,000 properties on the historic places registry.

The first panel was named International Scholarship in the Making: Toward a New Cold War History, and was chaired by Melvyn Leffler of the University of Virginia, who is a well-respected author, lecturer, and governmental advisor on cold war history.

He mused about the debate over exactly when the cold war started and ended. Some argue that it started when Truman met with Molotov at the 1945 U.N. meeting in San Francisco to plan for post-war peacekeeping. There’s also the impact of the Marshall Plan (the European Recovery Program) on U.S. and Soviet relations. The point being that the cold war started as the world settled in with new power bases after World War II. One side note he made was that more people visit historic sites than read books about them, so it’s important to preserve sites if you want people to learn about them. Presenting a site is never an easy job, and he described a new appreciation of the cold war story that is developing as archives become available from Russia, East Germany and eastern Europe, and China.

An interesting look at China in the cold war was made by panelist Chen Jian, also from the University of Virginia. He noted that the cold war ended much earlier for China, although the story is still alive there because the war was a battle between ways of life, with each side trying to prove the legitimacy of their own system. The Korean War was the first "hot war" during the cold war. General MacArthur had not expected China to jump into the fray, and Chairman Mao and his government may have miscalculated—over-estimated their chances of winning the war—when they sent in 250,000 troops in October 1950, against a huge coalition of western powers. Although peace talks began in July 1951, two years passed before the war ended. Like the cold war itself, the Korean conflict ended in a more of a stalemate than a victory for anyone.

It now appears that Mao was looking to Korea not so much to fight a noble battle, but for a military victory that would energize national spirit and mobilize its citizens. In other words, it would serve as an uplifting diversion that would foster patriotic enthusiasm against a foreign enemy. At the same time, international focus shifted from eastern Europe (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) to eastern Asia.

Hope Harrison, of George Washington University, described how she had been working on her thesis about the building of the Berlin wall when she flew to Germany on 11/9/89 to do more research. As she arrived, the wall was already starting to come down. Nonetheless, the good news for her studies was that the opening of the wall provided far greater access to records from both sides of the wall.

One surprisingly interesting talk was given by Roger Lotchin, an urban historian from the University of North Carolina. He looked at the way local support (communities) often boosted efforts to "fight" the cold war. Cities and other social entities competed against one another for cold war "pork," such as highways, military bases, contracts, and so on. In terms of the distribution of industrial wealth, he remarked that California actually came rather late to the game, because most of the country’s industrial wealth had already been distributed as California started to grow. But two ground swells of the 20^th century got California into the game—the two world wars, where government became a major source of industry, and the aerospace (and airplane) industry. It wasn’t just the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961, it was the military-industrial-metropolitan complex, in which cities played a role in the direction of defense policies.

The quest for new economic resources brought cities into a very close relationship with government spending. Just as WW II ended and that financial pipeline was about to dry up, the cold war got going and spending started to flow again. Lotchin said that the cities were highly competitive and often became a pressure on the government and military to emphasize one aspect or another of national defense, such as air power, over others. Although the points in his lecture seem obvious and almost mundane on the one hand, they were almost revelatory in the way they showed the tremendous economic and patriotic impact the cold war had on local economies. And that was a wonderful way to illustrate some of the effects the cold war had throughout the entire United States.

In another panel entitled "Preservation and Interpretation of Department of Defense and NASA Properties," Roger Launius told how he does preservation work for NASA from his job at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. He quipped that many in NASA still don’t think of that agency as an institution of the cold war. I think he meant that almost everyone else sees direct connections between the establishment of NASA and the "space race" with the U.S.S.R in the 1950s and 60s, and our need for a missile-based delivery system for nuclear weapons.

He noted that every major NASA center has a visitor center (unlike some Department of Energy sites we won’t mention). The one at the Kennedy Space Center (http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/) in Florida is contracted to a private company (http://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/). They charge very hefty entry fees compared to typical museums ($28 for a standard pass for an adult), but not when compared to all-day attractions, such as Disneyland and the like. In response to a question, Launius said that NASA keeps a close eye on the running of the site, and the entry fees were agreed upon by NASA and the contractor. The center gets a huge volume of visitors.

One thought that came to mind during his talk was that the space program has a lot going for it in terms of public interest. Most important is the fact that it was NASA that made it possible for humanity to set foot on the moon, which was the most important event in human history since, since. . .well, you decide. So anything connected with the space program is also connected, directly or indirectly, to that milestone in human evolution. You can’t go wrong with that combination.

But in that same vein, our own little B Reactor has the same drawing capacity—tapping the energy within the nucleus, a new industry based on the transmutation of matter, atomic bombs, helping to end WW II, power-generating reactors, and all the rest. B Reactor is another major milestone in human evolution but, unlike the lunar lander from Apollo 11, we actually have both the winning story and the original artifact itself, not just a later edition or replica.

Another related thought that arose during the conference was that some of the cold war sites that were being discussed were simply collections of cold war artifacts and information—museums, in general. For example, the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas is not actually on the test site itself. Others, though, were the real thing, such as the Kennedy Space Center or a museum at the Berlin wall. These not only tell the story but actually are the story, and B Reactor falls into that category. The site is of educational interest, but also allows people to experience the landmark itself, something of incalculable value.

A panel on "Approaches to Cold War Museums" was chaired by Francis Gary Powers, Jr., the son of the history-making U-2 pilot who was shot down while on a spying mission (or "reconnaissance mission," if you please) for the CIA, over the Soviet Union in 1960. The senior Powers has passed away, but the father’s notable role in the cold war has imbued his son with a fiery and earnest love for cold war history. He’s one of the founders of the Cold War Museum—currently a Web site, http://www.coldwar.org/, but plans for a real museum are in the works.

On this panel was Dan Holt of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, http://eisenhower.archives.gov/. He said one of the difficulties of an Eisenhower museum is that the cold war played a key part in those eight presidential years, and yet it’s just a small part of the history the museum would like to cover. They still have some 350,000 pages of classified presidential documents, many of which relate to cold war history.

At one point he mused that the head-to-head encounters between the two superpowers that was the cold war actually started during WW II, when the Soviets pressured the U.S. over decisions about how to execute the war. He also pointed out that one of the reasons the U.S. pushed for civil rights on a national level was in response to the pressure of international opinion—the "land of the free" didn’t look so free at the beginning of Ike’s first term in office. Finally, he discussed the cultural impact of the cold war, such as in popular nuclear war-related books and movies, including Fail Safe, On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, and countless others.

On that same panel were two representatives from the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota, http://www.nps.gov/mimi/. Sue Lamie of the NPS is based at the site and is involved in turning it into a publicly accessible historic site ("Don’t touch that button!"). The site was decommissioned in 1991, but she noted that many visitors to the site (it’s not yet officially open) assume that all the thousand-plus Minuteman missiles have been decommissioned, but that’s not the case. There are still about 550 of them on active duty, although in a lowered state of readiness than in years past, when they could be launched within five minutes of getting the order. They can hit their targets within 30 minutes. (With today’s TV-induced short attention spans, that’s probably just about right for WW III.)

Jeffrey Engel of the University of Pennsylvania, is working on collecting the history of the site. He remarked that citizens often feel as though they had been active participants in the cold war, almost like military veterans. Two examples are ranchers and farmers whose land was purchased for military bases, and peace and antinuclear activists who "served" in the cold war on many fronts. He also pointed out the problem for historians in telling a balanced story when there’s so many points of view.

The microphone was then given to Doug Lantry, of the U.S. Air Force Museum at the Wright-Patterson air base in Dayton, OH, http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/. He told how the museum has tens of millions of dollars to gather a huge collection of airplanes and rockets and tell the Air Force’s story in a series of connected, hanger-style buildings.

Telling the story from the "working end" of the cold war missiles (the contents of their nosecones) was Art Wolf from the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, http://ntshf.org/. This museum "goes public" in October, but won’t be completely open until later in 2004. This is a private effort that sits not on the bomb-testing site, which is 100 miles away, but on a high-traffic highway from the airport into downtown Las Vegas. They expect lots of visitors, especially since Las Vegas has such a high number of tourists. (But will the museum serve free cocktails?) In the future, it is hoped that bus tours to the atomic testing site could originate from the museum.

Another panel was on International Museum Projects, specifically in eastern Europe and Russia. Two dealt with examples of the oppression that closed in the U.S.S.R. and the communist countries of eastern Europe. The first was an example of the Gulag prisons in the Soviet Union, essentially a vast system of forced labor camps that housed countless political and social prisoners. Leonid Obukhov came to the conference from the Gulag Museum at Perm-36 in Perm, Russia. You can read about their museum at http://www.sitesofconscience.org/gulag.html. This is the only Gulag prison still standing and, I supposed, it wouldn’t need much refurbishing to bring back its bleakness and sense of desperation. Obukhov pointed out that in the Soviet Union, domestic oppression was one sign that the cold war was in progress, when real and virtual walls were put up around the country and its people. Like B Reactor, this museum is at the actual prison site, so the site itself is the historical story, with exhibits being added to tell the story.

Romulus Rusan represented the Sighet Memorial Museum in Sighet, Romania (you can read about it at http://www.enzia.com/Pages/Rev6.html). This resides in the Prison of the Ministers in Sighet, which housed many political prisoners in the 1950s. It’s a memorial to the two million victims of communist oppression in Romania, although adding in those who were imprisoned or dispossessed swells that number to 10 million. Sighet is of particular historical importance because in April, 1944, 38000 Jews were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Poland. Among them was Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor (and reminder) and human rights activist, who was born in Sighet in 1928. Rusan closed his remarks by saying that many children visit Sighet, a sign that the museum and memorial is doing its job.

Axel Klausmeier, from the Brandenberg Technical University of Cottbus, spoke about his involvement in an archaeological study of the Berlin wall. The goal is to document the wall’s path through Berlin and preserve remaining evidence of it (the wall was torn down so quickly and thoroughly that little remains). Just about everyone agrees that the wall was one of the icons of the cold war, representing the divide between the west and communist east. He pointed out that the exodus from East Germany reached 2.7 million people by 1961, when the wall went up. It is documented that 255 escapees were killed trying to get over the wall (from east to west), but the number of actual deaths could be in the thousands.

Karl Kleve came from the Norwegian Aviation Museum, http://www.aviation-museum.com/. It resides in Bodø, Norway, on the west coast about halfway up the country, north of the Arctic circle. The museum is not cold war-related, but its location is. In the early 1950s, NATO found northern Norway to be of great strategic value, positioned close to the Soviet Union and on the primary sea route from the U.S.S.R. to the Atlantic. With much U.S. funding, this region in Norway sprouted air fields, harbors, roads, and military bases. In fact, the cold war reversed the population trend in the once lagging area, and brought work and people to the region. The cold war also brought globalization, including languages, concepts, culture, Burger Kings, etc. Kleve has written about this in papers and lectures, which are included in a recently published book, The Cold War, Military Power and the Civilian Society (see the Museum’s Web site).

Finally, the last session at the very end of a long but stimulating two days of talks, came the denouement: Preservation, Interpretation and Department of Energy Properties. The panel was chaired by Skip Gosling, the Chief Historian at the DOE in Washington, D.C, who we’ve seen here at Hanford on several occasions in regards to B Reactor and Hanford history. He knows what’s going on and the importance of it, although he’s not the one with the magic wand who can say "Museum, be open!"

But he made a very effective chairperson for the panel, giving a background of DOE’s heritage from the Manhattan Project to more recent projects that supported our nuclear weapons program during the cold war. He described the "signature properties" that the DOE has flagged for consideration for preservation, including Hanford’s B Reactor and T Plant (221-T).

The first two speakers were Gary Hartman from the Oak Ridge site in Tennessee, and Kris Mitchell, from the Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas. Each has a similar job defining and watching over cultural resources. In Gary’s case, much of the inventory has been out of commission for many years, like the X-10 reactor, the test bed for Hanford’s reactors.

In Kris’s case, however, the plant is still in operation and not at all heading toward preservation. Pantex is a weapons plant, where raw materials like plutonium are fashioned into the finished bombs. While the days of nuclear weapons proliferation have waned (at least, for now), Pantex is now being used to disassemble bombs that are being taken out of service due to nonproliferation treaties, and to rebuild and test (nondestructive) bombs that are still in the inventory. But the fact that much of the plant is still in use at least means he’s able to catalog, document, and mark for future interest any aspects of the plant deemed to be significant.

Finally it was my turn, as the final speaker on the final panel on the final day. I suppose they saved the best for last (I keep telling myself). I had slides of B Reactor and its history-changing story during WW II and on into the cold war, and some dealing with cleanup at the reactor and the need for a National Park Service survey before they can consider it as an NPS site. I talked a bit about the BRMA, and how we’ve been working for over 12 years as an organization to promote B’s preservation.

In my usual fashion, I was revved up and ready to speak for an hour, although I knew I only had 15 minutes. Turns out I really only had 10 minutes, and was asked to wind things up so there’d be time for questions before the conference adjourned. So to make a what could’ve been a very long story very short, I hope I left the audience with a feeling for the historical significance of B Reactor both in WW II and the cold war, and the immense importance of preserving it and opening it to the public.

I must say, I came to the conference almost gloating about the fact that I was going to speak about the one truly essential part of the cold war. But after listening to three dozen talks and the questions and discussions that surrounded them, I was somewhat humbled. I can see B Reactor not as the only key component of the cold war, but as one of many essential components, all of which had a tremendous impact on much of the world. Nonetheless, if I can brush off my humility just once more, I can say that nothing at the conference held more historical significance than B Reactor.

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