Once again, my history teachers have failed me. If you've been reading the blog for a while, you know that this has been a point of outrage in the past. I was never told about the notorious Smith lynching, which was witnessed by nearly a third of my hometown's population. They neglected to inform me about the battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. Now I find out that a top secret nuclear facility, right across the border in Tennessee, developed the plutonium that powered the bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Virginia public schools, could you miss any more opportunities to bring history to life?
This means that the entire trajectory of the 20th century--the world changing destruction in Japan, the rise of nuclear arms, the entire cold war--started in our neck of the woods, in a little town called Oak Ridge.
Beginning in October 1942, the United States Army Corps of Engineers began seizing land in Tennessee's Anderson County, an area about 25 miles West of Knoxville. Within five short months, the corps had removed all residents, raised protective fences, and began construction on Oak Ridge, a top secret town that appeared on no maps. Even local residents didn't realize that they lived next to a production facility for the Manhattan Project, the legendary effort to develop the world's first nuclear weapon.
Fissionable plutonium for bombs would prove to be the facilities greatest accomplishment, but weapons weren't the only products in development at Oak Ridge. With thousands of scientists on staff, the facility pursued a number of projects, including the creation of a nuclear powered airplane.
This was the exclusive focus of one Millicent G. Dillon. In a riveting essay published by the literary magazine The Believer, Dillon describes her experience in the Tennessee mountains. By the time she arrived in 1947, the nuclear bombs had already been dropped; the war was over; and the Red Scare was growing. She recounts how she lived in the secret city--dodging cockroaches and scrounging for toilet paper--and how she left following a political firestorm that could have been lifted from a Cold War thriller.

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IN THE ATOMIC CITY: LIFE IN A SECRET NUCLEAR FACILITY AT THE DAWN OF THE ARMS RACE
BY MILLICENT G. DILLON
In January 1947, when I was twenty-one, I went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to work as a low-level physicist on a secret project, NEPA. I knew nothing about NEPA except that it was an acronym for Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft. As for Oak Ridge, I knew from accounts after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, only that the project had produced fissionable material for the atom bomb.
I had accepted the Oak Ridge job after a single telephone call from an official at NEPA. My name had apparently been plucked from a roster of junior physicists who had worked on defense contracts during the war. My employment background was not a sterling one, as I had a history of rebelling against my supervisors. But the caller seemed to know no more about me than I knew about him, so I supposed he just needed to recruit bodies. I had run out of money, and my projected salary, two hundred dollars a month, sounded like untold prosperity to me. Uncertain and confused as I was about my future, perhaps I thought chance was showing me the way.
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