The Building of the First Atomic Bombs Impacted Workers and Residents, Too

Eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, workers who mined the uranium and people who lived near the test sites are still dying from exposure to radiation.

by Jim Carrier, August 7, 2025, https://progressive.org/magazine/the-building-of-the-first-atomic-bombs-impacted-workers-and-residents-too-carrier-20250807/

The road to Nagasaki was littered with radiation.

Eighty years after an atomic bomb called Fat Man was dropped, killing and poisoning about 100,000 people in Nagasaki, at least a dozen sites around the world—sites that contributed to the bomb’s creation—are still dealing with its deadly legacy.

Under the pressure to win World War II, U.S. military leaders pulled out all stops to prioritize the creation and testing of an atomic bomb, indifferent to the cost on the lives and livelihood of everyday people. Landscapes were polluted, workers were exposed to radiation, and civilian neighbors to the nuclear test sites—the first “downwinders”—were ignored or lied to.

The Manhattan Project—a top-secret research and development program created by the U.S. government during World War II to develop a nuclear bomb—sourced nearly all of its much-needed uranium from the Belgian Congo’s Shinkolobwe mine. Located in the modern-day Haut-Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Shinkolonwe mine was the world’s richest source of high-grade uranium, radium, and other valuable minerals. First opened in 1921, the Belgian-owned mine employed artisanal miners who dug the radioactive ore with handheld tools and carried it out in sacks on their shoulders, further exposing them to the toxic substance. While the environmental impact was visible and more difficult to conceal, any known records of lasting health impacts were disappeared by the authorities or never recorded at all.

In 1939, fearing Adolf Hitler and the German discovery of nuclear fission in uranium—with its potential to create a bomb—the mine’s manager shipped more than 1,000 tons of ore from Katanga to a warehouse on Staten Island, New York. Spilled ore contaminated a portion of the site where it sat for three years. A 1980 study later determined that the site might harm trespassers beneath the Bayonne Bridge, but by that time the site had already been demolished.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s January 19, 1942, decision to build an atomic bomb touched off the $2 billion Manhattan Project with its extraordinary mix of secret research at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and massive construction projects at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington. All of these needed hundreds of tons of uranium to make a few pounds of plutonium.

In November 1942, the U.S. Army discovered and bought the Staten Island uranium stockpile and shipped 1,823 drums by barge and railroad to the Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, New York, where it was put into large concrete igloos before being shipped to various refineries. Now part of an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site, the depot stored all kinds of munitions and even some classified military equipment that was burned and buried. Most of the site was cleaned up in the early 2000s and opened for recreation and industrial warehousing.

The Army’s search for uranium ore also uncovered 500 tons among vanadium tailings in western Colorado, and 300 tons at Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, where the Eldorado Gold Mines refinery processed ore into more pure concentrations. Eldorado’s own mine, on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada, employed First Nations Dene workers who would later suffer cancers and die from handling sacks of ore. Their community of Délı̨nę became known as a “village of widows.” Without contemporary health records, a re-created exposure study found that overall cancer rates for Délı̨nę were “not statistically significantly different from the Northwest Territories.”

Port Hope, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, which processed all the African and North American uranium ore for the Manhattan Project, spread tailings in neighborhoods and in the lake, eventually requiring a $1.3 billion cleanup that did not begin until 2018. Residents blame the contamination for cancers, although a 2013 study found no statistical evidence of greater radiosensitive cancers.

An enduring and poetic legend links the labors of Délı̨nę villagers to the Japanese bombs, a story told in A Village of Widows, a documentary film that followed ten Dine to Hiroshima in 1998 where they paid their respects and shared mutual sorrow with hibakusha, the Japanese word for the survivors of the atomic bombs. The uranium ore from Great Bear Lake did, in fact, contribute to the Manhattan Project—a U.S. government history found that Great Bear Lake ore amounted to one-sixth of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project, Colorado ore contributed one-seventh, and the rest came from the Belgian Congo. However, a detailed 2008 analysis of the ore’s movements concluded that “the fissile material in the Nagasaki weapon was almost certainly derived from oxide processed by Eldorado which would have been mostly of Belgian Congo origin. The same is probably true for the Hiroshima weapon. It is also possible that there was some uranium of U.S. origin in both of these weapons.”

After Port Hope, the uranium was further refined at nineteen industrial sites including: Linde Air in Tonawanda, New York; Dupont’s Deepwater Works in New Jersey; Metal Hydrides Inc. in Beverly, Massachusetts; Harshaw Chemical in Cleveland, Ohio; and at Mallinckrodt Chemical Company in St. Louis, Missouri. All of these sites have undergone expensive remediation. Mallinckrodt, whose radiation contamination caused numerous cancers in children and adults, has yet to be scrubbed clean.

Uranium salts were then delivered to either Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the Y-12 refinery produced enriched uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or to Hanford, Washington, where refineries produced the plutonium used in both the Trinity test bomb and the Nagasaki bomb. Both reactor sites deliberately released radioactive material into the air and water. Cleaning the mess has cost much more than the original Manhattan Project. The cost to clean Hanford, considered the most radioactive spot in the world, is estimated at $640 billion. Oak Ridge’s cleanup won’t be finished until 2050. Hanford’s effort to meld radioactive sludge into glass containers and bury them in salt caves is only beginning.

The first atomic bomb blast in history, the Trinity test of the plutonium implosion “gadget” in the Alamogordo, New Mexico, desert on July 16, 1945, left permanent marks on the land and the people downwind. The airborne plume from Trinity drifted across the Tularosa Basin, landing on vegetables, cattle, and water, poisoning residents who would later report leukemia, cancers, and heart disease. Subsequent studies have found Trinity fallout reached forty-six states, Canada, and Mexico. After five years of lobbying, the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium won a two-year window—until December 31, 2028—to be included in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act which covers U.S. uranium workers and downwinders exposed at the Nevada Test Site during the Cold War. As of June 24, 2025, 42,575 people have received $2.7 billion dollars. Tourists can visit the test site one day a year, on the third Saturday in October. Radiation at ground zero is ten times the region’s natural radiation.

The area around Los Alamos, where brilliant physicists and world-class machinists created the bombs that fell on Japan eighty years ago, has realized that the work of those scientists also left plutonium contamination close to home. Wartime practices that dumped raw radioactive waste into Acid Canyon continued until 1951, and despite several cleanup efforts, measurable plutonium remains. The Los Alamos National Laboratory says the risks to humans walking the canyon are “tiny.” However, plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years.

For more on the story of Nagasaki, Japan, today, see Jim Carrier’s article “The Bombs Still Ticking” from the August/September 2025 issue of The Progressive.