Peter Eisler's series revealed that the federal government secretly contracted with hundreds of private companies to process vast amounts of radioactive and toxic materials during the 1940s and '50s. The contracting program led to the pollution of sites across the country and put the health of thousands of Americans at risk. Eisler's stories also showed that the government and the companies it hired were aware of the threats that the contracting work posed to employees and neighbors, but chose to keep the information secret.

The series detailed the work done by more than 150 companies involved in nuclear weapons work — the most extensive listing of nuclear weapons production sites ever made available to the public. Previously, only a handful of the companies had been identified as playing a role in the weapons program, in most cases as a result of investigations by local newspapers. The existence of a large, nationwide network of contractors had remained a government secret.

The year-long investigation began with a tip about the processing of nuclear weapons fuel at a single site. As the paper's examination of that site progressed, evidence of a massive contracting program gradually came to light. Eisler then set about documenting the program's scope and identifying the companies that were involved.

The story was based largely on a review of more than 100,000 pages of declassified federal records, many of which had never been examined before. Most of the documents were housed at various federal archives in Washington, Atlanta, New York, Las Vegas and Hanford, Wash. Others were obtained through a half-dozen Freedom of Information Act requests requesting batches of records from federal agencies.

Human sources consisted chiefly of former officials with the nuclear weapons program, particularly health and safety supervisors; former workers and managers at contracting sites; union officials; academic and medical experts; historians specializing in nuclear weapons development; and current federal, state and local officials.

The House Judiciary Committee, which had blocked legislation to compensate nuclear weapons workers with illnesses linked to radioactive and toxic exposures, cited the USA Today findings as cause for a hearing. After the hearing, in which the series was repeatedly praised, a bill was passed with language to ensure coverage of workers at private contracting sites.

The voluminous material was built into a database using an Excel spreadsheet. Details were poured into the spreadsheet. "We created fields listing information on materials handled, any documented health risks, names of former workers and neighbors, location and content of pertinent records. In the end, the list of sites published in the paper was a condensed version of the database we'd created," Eisler says.

Here is how Eisler's series began:

From mom-and-pop machine shops to big-name chemical firms, private manufacturing facilities across the nation were quietly converted to the risky business of handling uranium, thorium, polonium, beryllium and other radioactive and toxic substances. Few of the contractors were prepared for the hazards of their government-sponsored missions.

Thousands of workers were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, often hundreds of times stronger than the limits of the time. Dozens of communities were contaminated, their air, ground and water fouled by toxic and radioactive waste.

The risks were kept hidden. In some cases, they have remained so.

A USA Today investigation found that the government's reliance on a vast network of private plants, mills and shops to build America's early nuclear arsenal had grave health and environmental consequences. Federal officials knew of severe hazards to the companies employees and surrounding neighborhoods, but reports detailing the problems were classified and locked away.

The full story of the secret contracting effort has never been told. Many of the companies that were involved have been forgotten, the impact of their operations unexamined for half a century. Yet their history carries profound implications for the thousands of people they employed, as well as for the thousands who lived — and still live — near the factories.

At a time when the nation is reassessing the worker ills and ecological damage wrought by large, government-owned nuclear weapons plants, the record of the private companies that did the work before those facilities were built has had little scrutiny.

Most of the contracting sites were in the industrial belt: through New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, around the Great Lakes and down the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. They were in big cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. And they were in much smaller communities, such as Lockport, N.Y., Carnegie, Pa., and Joliet, Ill. Some did only minor work for the weapons program, but dozens of private facilities handled large quantities of radioactive and toxic material.

"These places just fell off the map," says Dan Guttman, former director of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, set up in 1994 to investigate revelations that government-funded scientists exposed unknowing subjects to dangerous isotopes in secret Cold War studies.

"People were put at serious risk. It appears (the government) knew full well that (safety) standards were being violated, but there's been no effort to maintain contact with these people (and) look at the effects," says Guttman, a lawyer and weapons program watchdog who returned to private practice after the committee finished its work in 1995. "There's no legitimate reason for this neglect."

USA Today reviewed 100,000 pages of government records, many recently declassified and never before subject to public review, to assess the scope and impact of nuclear weapons work done at private facilities in the 1940s and '50s. Reporters visited archives and former contracting sites in ten states, interviewing scores of former employees, neighbors and government officials.

Key Findings:

• Beginning with the development of the first atomic bombs during Word War II, the government secretly hired about 300 private companies to process and produce material used in nuclear weapons production. At least a third of them handled hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pounds of radioactive and toxic material, often without the equipment or knowledge to protect the health and safety of workers or nearby communities.

The contracting wound down in the mid-1950s as government facilities were built to take over most weapons-building operations — a move spurred partly by hazards at contracting sites.

• The government regularly documented worker health risks at many of the private facilities doing weapons work, producing highly classified reports that detailed radiation exposure rates hundreds of times above its safety standards.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, hired by USA Today to provide an expert review of old radiation data on three contracting operations, estimates that workers in the riskiest jobs had a 40% chance of dying from cancer — an increase of 200% over the general population — as well as higher odds for respiratory and kidney ills. But there's no telling how many, if any, workers have gotten sick or died from their exposures; they've gotten virtually no medical study.

• Dozens of companies doing weapons work contaminated the air, soil and water with toxic and radioactive waste. Studies done at the time documented some operations pumping hundreds of pounds of uranium dust into the sky each month and others dumping thousands of pounds of solid and liquid wastes on the ground or into creeks, rivers and sewers.

Federal officials sometimes endorsed such practices as cheap, easy ways to get rid of hazardous byproducts that in many cases left contaminations that persist today. As with the worker's health, there's been no effort to assess whether the hazards made anyone ill.

• Both the government and executives at the companies it hired for weapons work hid the health and environmental problems.

Federal officials misled workers, insisting their jobs were safe despite having evidence to the contrary. Surviving employees still have not been told of their risks, though screening and early treatment could boost their odds for surviving some illnesses they might face as a result of their work.

"It was a different time, the Cold War was on," says Arthur Piccot, 81, a health and safety monitor with the weapons program in the late '40s and '50s.

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Eisler then tells the story of Lewis Malcolm, one of the workers at a plant that performed work for the government's nuclear weapons program from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s. In March 1948, when the first rail cars of uranium and thorium began arriving at the Simonds Saw and Steel Co. in Lockport, N.Y., Lewis Malcolm felt lucky to have a job on the plant's big steel rolling mills. In the weeks before he died of kidney failure this June, Malcolm wasn't so sure. At 79, his once strapping frame was so withered that his wife had to help him to the car and then drive him 30 miles to a Niagara Falls hospital for the weekly dialysis treatments that kept him alive these past few years.

He wasn't bitter about his illness — one of several linked to the kind of uranium dust exposures he incurred during his years at Simonds. Just curious.

"I've wondered whether something like that could be the cause of this," he said in an interview before he died. "There was a lot of dust. We thought there might be problems. They took urine samples. Sometimes they sent us to the doctor (for exams). They always assured us there was no danger."

On the Job at Age 18

Malcolm started at the steel mill in the late '30s, at age 18. He left to serve in the Army during World War II, returned in 1945 and stayed 30 years until he retired.

In 1948, workers were told they would be rolling a new metal, a government job they would work part time each month. The shipments arrived with armed guards who stayed until the metal billets all had been heated and milled into long rods of a precise diameter, often 1.45 inches.

"I told (a guard) one time that I stole a piece, and I really got chewed out, almost got fired," recalls Ed Cook, 84, another Simonds retiree. "I was just kidding. The billets weighed 200 pounds. What was I going to do, carry one out in my lunch bucket?"

The workers learned that this was serious — and secret — business. Many recall federal agents visiting their homes to do background checks and warn them not to discuss the plant's activities. This was standard fare at private facilities hired for weapons work.

By the time the contracting wrapped up at Simonds, in the mid-1950s, the company had heated and limed 25 million to 30 million pounds of uranium and 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of thorium. Much of it was rolled into fuel rods for the government's plutonium-producing nuclear reactors in Hanford, Wash.

Federal officials suspected soon after the operation began that it was putting workers in danger.

In October 1948 the medical section of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) found "hazardous concentrations" of airborne uranium dust in a site study. The most highly exposed workers were, on average, breathing dust levels up to 190 times the "maximum allowable concentration" of the time.

"This operation results in profuse atmospheric contamination," AEC medical experts warned in another report in 1949. "To satisfy Hanford's urgent need for rolled metal, it was necessary to begin (the work) before suitable (safety) controls could be installed."

Over the next few years, the AEC medical section urged Simonds repeatedly to boost safety. The company implemented some orders, building new ventilation systems and issuing coveralls that were laundered each day. Others, such as demands that the plant install a vacuum system to clean radioactive dust, never were implemented.

Still, the changes had an impact. Site studies into the early '50s found uranium dust levels had declined markedly, though in some spots they still hovered at several times the AEC limit.

But thorium, which continued to be rolled on mills without ventilators, remained a problem. In 1954, an AEC survey at Simonds found that levels of thorium dust, which poses far greater radiation hazards than uranium, reached 40 times the federal limit — "too high, even for intermittent operations."

AEC staff pointed out to Simond's management in a follow-up letter that recommendations for safety upgrades, including mandatory respirator use, "were not followed." A later memo reported that the mill superintendent resisted such ideas and "intimated that if it became necessary to install elaborate dust eliminating equipment, further work of this nature would have to be abandoned."

As was often the case, the AEC backed off, too dependent on Simonds' work to risk having the company call it quits.

'Horrible' Exposures

Based on the worker exposures documented in the old AEC reports, during Simonds' peak years of operation, workers in the most dangerous jobs suffered annual lung doses of radiation well over 130 rem (a unit of radiation measurement), according to estimates by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a non-profit think tank that specializes in assessing radiological risks. The doses ranged up to 10 times the federal safety standards of the day.

"These exposures are horrible. They were unconscionably high. They violated legal and ethical norms," says Arjun Makhijani, the institute's director, who has written several books on radiation risks and provided expert testimony on the subject for Congress and various court proceedings. "At the high end of the (estimated) doses, workers' risk of dying from cancer was increased by more than 20%. Many of the workers would also be expected to have kidney damage."

Most of the surviving workers have no idea of the risks they faced: Neither the government nor Simonds management ever informed them on the plant's radioactive dust problems.

"They never told us any more than they had to," says Charles Leavitt, 71, a Simonds retiree with kidney trouble. "I think there were respirators around, but I don't ever remember seeing anyone wear one. They never gave us a reason, never said there was a health risk."

In fact, an AEC information sheet for workers at contracting sites stated that, "there will be no danger to anyone's health." The 1947 memo told workers they might "hear the word 'radiation'" mentioned on the job, but it assured them that the level would be "so slight that special instruments must be used to detect it."

Even extreme doses of radiation can't be detected without special instruments.

Studies Never Done

There's no way to know whether the health problems later suffered by some Simonds workers are the result of the uranium and thorium work. The sort of epidemiological study that might conclusively link illnesses to their exposures have never been done.

Congress and the Clinton administration are considering legislation to compensate people who did the same sort of work at government-owned weapons plants and later contracted certain cancers and other ailments tied to their jobs. But the bill makes no promises to compensate people who worked at Simonds or most other private facilities. It notes only that workers at commercial sites can be added to the eligibility list in the future.

"It sure would help," Malcolm said of the compensation idea in the interview before his death.

By that time, he was spending about $550 a month on medication and private insurance he'd had to buy since his health benefits at Simonds disappeared with the company's demise 20 years ago. His monthly pension from the steel mill totaled about $580.

A few years back, he and his wife, who also collected Social Security, sold the little farm where they ran a roadside produce stand and moved into a tidy mobile home.

"I asked my doctor whether my (lung and kidney) problems could be related to the work we did, and he said, 'Could be; you just can't know for sure,'" Malcolm said. "You just have to go along with it."

Other Sites

There were sites like Simonds all over the country.

After World War II, U.S. officials decided to build on the Manhattan Project, the top-secret military project that yielded the first atomic bombs, and launch a full-blown nuclear weapons production effort.

The Atomic Energy Commission, a civilian agency set up by Congress in 1946 to run the program, recognized that the government lacked the manufacturing facilities and expertise to do the job alone.

Initially, the AEC simply renewed contracts with a small group of companies that had been hired to do the work for the Manhattan Project, where the practice of using private firms to do nuclear weapons work was born. But with the Soviet Union's detonation of its first atomic bomb in 1949, the Cold War arms race was on, and the AEC, made up of political appointees of various stripes, moved to a far more aggressive weapons-production schedule. The number of private companies hired to work for the weapons program multiplied.

"Not all contractors are safety-conscious, since in every case they are chosen primarily because of (production) capabilities," warned a 1947 memo to AEC officials from Bernard Wolf, medical director in the commission's New York office. "Hazards to public health of AEC operations have been given inadequate consideration."

Wolf, who is now dead, advocated a strong "regulatory" program to see that contractors ensured worker safety; he also noted the need for "studying the waste disposal problem." His recommendations, like those of many health and safety officials in the coming years, were not fully implemented. The commissions main goal was to get a lot of weapons built quickly.

"It was almost like being on a war-time footing," says Richard Hewlett, official historian for the weapons program from 1957 to 1980. Production, "was done almost on a crisis basis. The commission approved (operations) that in a normal, peacetime atmosphere would not have been approved."

Most of the AEC's contracting involved uranium, used in various forms as a fissionable explosive for weapons and as a raw material to make plutonium, the core of most nuclear weapons. But there were plenty of other toxic and radioactive jobs given to private companies.

Hazardous Duty

Some examples of the types of operations — and risks — that defined the contracting effort:

• Big uranium-refining and -producing plants in Cleveland; St. Louis; Cannonsburg, Pa.; Deepwater, N.J.; and outside Boston and Buffalo handled some of the most dangerous operations. At Harshaw Chemical Co. in Cleveland, for example, classified AEC studies in the late '40s and early '50s found that employees faced "severe exposures" to uranium dust and beta radiation, and workers' kidneys regularly showed signs of uranium poisoning. During that time, records show, the plant also pumped 350 to 500 pounds of uranium dust from its stacks each month, spewing it over nearby areas. The site remains contaminated.
• Steel mills and metalworking shops cut and forged uranium, thorium, beryllium and other hazardous material. At Vulcan Crucible Tool and Steel in Aliquippa, Pa., some workers breathed uranium dust at 200 times the AEC's safety limit, records show. At Revere Copper and Brass in Detroit dust levels of uranium and beryllium, a chemical that causes lung disease, hit 20 times the maximum safety level at that time. Residual pollution was common. A 1980 federal survey of the Carnegie, Pa., site where Superior Steel rolled uranium for the weapons program found radiation in scrap pits and floor areas well above safety standards. Plant owners later had the areas cemented over; federal officials saw no reason to check the fix.
• Chemical and metallurgical companies produced an array of specialized metals, compounds and solvents with radioactive and toxic properties. Workers making polonium at plants run by Monsanto Chemical in Dayton, Ohio, routinely were found to be excreting high levels of the radioactive element in their urine, records show. At Carborundum Metals in Akron, N.Y., where hafnium and zirconium were refined for weapons use, federal officials endorsed the dumping of hundreds of thousands of gallons of ammonium thiocyanate waste into a sewer that ran into the Niagara River.

At Linde Air Products in Tonawanda, N.Y., weapons programs officials endorsed the dumping of millions of gallons of radioactive chemical wastes generated by contracting operations into underground wells.

The contracting network set up by the weapons program was "like a root system spreading into all different sectors of (American) industry. The companies were really diverse," says Timothy Karpin, an industrial historian who has spent the last five years doing research for a "traveler's guide" to nuclear weapons production sites.

"The companies doing the work often weren't aware of the overall goal," adds James Maroncelli, another historian on the book project. "They were told just enough to do the job."

The AEC began to move away from using private facilities to do weapons work in the early '50s, building a network of large, government-owned complexes that gradually took over most operations. The federal plants typically were run by commercial contractors, which still employed some subcontractors to do certain jobs at private facilities. And a number of commercial firms also did radioactive and toxic work for the AEC Naval Reactor Program, which built power plants for nuclear ships and submarines. But most work at private sites ended by 1960.

The AEC "wanted to get things standardized and keep more control over the operations," says Maroncelli. "It was about efficiency and secrecy."

How the Series Developed

Here is Eisler's account:

Never assume a story is what it appears to be at first blush. This series began as a quick-hit investigation about work done by a single company. As we dug in, the project just kept growing, and our willingness to put aside our original thesis proved to be critical to getting the full story. Also, never assume that a document has been reviewed simply because it is in the public domain. In this case, the Department of Energy had released millions of pages of records, so the bones of the story were in the public domain. But no one had taken the time to look for it.

Finally, on this sort of historical, document-based project, it's important to build strong relationships with the government archivists and historians who maintain the records. In this case, there were more than a million pages of records available on the early years of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, spread across disparate archives, often with no index or finding aids. But the custodians of those records had at least general ideas about how to narrow our search and dig out the documents that might prove most helpful.

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After a few weeks of digging I hit on an old AEC report that made passing reference to concerns about workers' health at a dozen or so private plants that contracted with the weapons program to process radioactive and toxic material. That was the first clue that there was a substantial story out there. The next few months were frustrating. I'd begun pouring through old documents, but most of the federal records on the weapons program from the 1940s and '50s were not indexed. To make things worse, they were spread among a half-dozen archives at sites across the country, with no rhyme or reason to their distribution. The big turning point came when I was interviewing a community activist in Ohio who had raised a stink years earlier about government foot-dragging on the clean-up of an obscure plant in her neighborhood that had done some weapons work. During a series of meetings with federal officials in the late '80s, she'd been given a pile of documents from the early years of the weapons program. Buried in the papers were several references to major reports on the program's private contracting operation. For the first time, I had the titles I needed to narrow my search for records.

My other big break came just a few weeks later, when I found an archivist at the government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory who had spent years declassifying documents from the weapons program. No one had ever expressed much interest in the work he'd been doing, so he was eager to help me. He unearthed some of the reports I was seeking, introduced me to clerks at other federal archives and even helped me track down some of the health and safety inspectors who had worked for the weapons program during the period in question. They all were in their late 80s and early 90s, but several recalled important details about the contracting operation.

Ultimately, the power of the "Poisoned Workers & Poisoned Places" series came from the reporting. The documents we uncovered laid out the dangers of the contracting effort in a very powerful way — and it was the words in those records, as opposed to anything we wrote ourselves, that gave the project its strength. A flashy writer probably could have put this series together with a fraction of the information we gathered, but it wouldn't have had the same authority. In the end, we had the evidence to build an irrefutable case, and that's the only way to ensure that a story won't be picked apart. Even the tiniest hole in an investigation can be exploited by people looking for a reason to ignore its findings. Solid reporting is a reporter's only recourse.

Finally, I'd offer two lessons from all of this:

• First, never assume that a story is what it seems — and never give up on it until you're dead sure it's an empty well. We could have written a story when we knew about one contracting plant; we could have written one when we knew about a dozen. But by hanging in there, we ended up with a story about hundreds of facilities in dozens of states. Anything less wouldn't have had the same effect.
• Second, be resourceful. It's often the little guys — archivists, workers, low-level officials — who hold the keys to a story. In our case, it was tough to find those people half a century after the fact, and we had to use some unconventional sources, such as union records, local newspaper morgues and old-fashioned door-knocking to get to them. But we never would have gotten the story by relying on the folks in charge.