Word: pilings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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During the frantic race to build the atomic bomb, many incidental discoveries were made and put on ice. Among the most important: the radioactive by-products of the uranium-graphite pile. Almost any substance, stuck in the pile's atomic furnace, comes out brimming with radioactivity...
...Stettinius had redecorated the high-ceilinged walls and put two telephones in the Secretary's private bathroom. Jimmy Byrnes left the old, grey pile of masonry on Pennsylvania Avenue alone, but he changed the topside of the staff. It is now extraordinarily varied...
...second by-product was pure horror. In the ordinary operation of a large-scale pile, calculated Dr. Smyth, enough radioactive poisons could be produced every day to make "large areas uninhabitable...
...studied to make them run, another team of physicists was colonizing still another desert. In March 1943, a group led by Professor J. R. Oppenheimer of the University of California, gathered at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Their job was to design, assemble and test the atomic bomb itself. The pile constructors had struggled to keep their brain child from blowing up. The bomb men had the more deadly mission of finally blowing up theirs at the time and place that war demanded...
...water was dripping from their fingers and their scorched and hairless heads. . . . Men, both living and dead, were terribly mangled. .... We found one worker pinned under a twisted column. There was a piece of steel reinforcement through his neck. . . . There was another chap [whose legs were] buried under a pile of bricks and debris. ... He told us to get him out and never mind his legs, 'leave them there...