answer your question. >> you mentioned at the beginning of the talk how america had been on its paranoid stance with people and i'm i was sort of put in mind of the great reason and tv video -- i think it was 2010 talking about vitriol and politics. and back in 1800 or whatever, people are calling each other even more names. and i'm wondering if the conspiracy theories that you saw were even more outrageous or less credible or anything like that? >> i will not try to quantify. but if you want to hear that, the jeffersonians and the federalists had such complicated conspiracy theories about vitriolic ones about each other.

there is one that is part of john adams administration. he planned to unite his family with the warehouse of great britain and i would say there certainly was no shortage of that sort of vitriolic fear. >> education, etc., that would dampen that a little bit. >> i don't know. it's not like people writing pamphlets in this area. >> recently there has been a release of government archives that have conspiracy theories and looking for people being true over the years about the

cia and also sort of saying that that is someone that does exist. and not that i'm starting a new conspiracy theory, but it should do you think there is a reason why things are happening and if there is an attempt to get attention away from prison -- >> i don't know why the cia chose this moment to reveal it. they may well have said why they did it. i just read the headline. but i don't know what the source of these are. but i will say the british government is part of a regular interval and that is sometimes a couple of things that are not part of this. i hope that i am remembering it right. but there is a ufo cover-up that

was not that they were covering up the existence but the failure and each i shouldn't be saying this extempore nearly. this bureaucratic covering that could spiral into suspicions later. >> anyone? >> okay, so the last sentence of c-span. okay. i should have insisted that you call me the honorable speaker and i guess that that is that. thank you. [applause] >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2 we beat booktv.

>> from the 13th annual national book festival on the national mall in washington dc, denise kiernan presents her book, the goals of atomic city, the women who helped win world war ii. this book is about 45 minutes. >> hello. thank you for coming. and i will take a picture of everybody. [laughter] >> and the count of three, everyone say uranium. one to three. [inaudible conversations] >> well, that's a good one. last. thank you to jamie and organizing and maintaining and library congress for maintaining what i consider to be what we

can do to celebrate a wonderful books are an important they are in our life, in a very busy library of congress. also all the sponsors as well. in my book, i will talk a little bit about it and i believe time for questions. in my book, "the goals of atomic city" came out in march. the true story of a young women group living in a secret city during world war ii working on the manhattan project, however they did not know that at the time. just so everyone is on the same page, the manhattan project was a top secret government project during world war ii designed to harness the power of the atom and the power of fusion. the manhattan project resulted in the first-ever nuclear weapons. it's okay if you don't know that. that is what it is. that is what we are talking about.

it there were three main sites, los alamos, new mexico, which is the one that pops into her head when we think about the manhattan project, hanford, washington state, oak ridge tennessee, and where the majority of my book takes place. now that we have the basics, i will tell you a little bit about how i found the story that is one of the questions and how did you come across this idea. the answer is complete and utter dumb luck. i was working on a completely different book and i came across this picture that grabbed my attention. and you may have seen the picture and the little picture well out there. it was a long room line from floor to ceiling with these huge panels that were covered in these knobs and dials. this gauntlet of technology. sitting on stools in front of all these different panels were these very young girls.

at first i was looking at the image and i read this accompanying text, this was a doe newsletter and it's that these young women, many of them recent high school graduates from rural areas and tennessee are enriching uranium for the world's first atomic bomb, only they don't know that. and i thought, well, that is interesting. once i got past that's interesting, my immediate thought was oh, maybe i'm just an idiot and everyone knows this story and i slept through that moment in history class. and i asked many people who are here, very prominent universities and my husband and i think is very smart, all sorts of people, did you know about this and everyone seems to have the same kind of response that i did. i have read a lot about the manhattan project and my

perspective had always been a very top-down perspective. it had always been less with the points of view of the scientists of the decision-makers of the people in the know and those are great perspectives and very interesting and certainly worthy. but we are talking about tens of thousands of other people who also played a role in what considered to be the most significant event in the 20th century. when you think about an event that continues to have such an impact on our lives, nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine, nuclear energy, don't we all to ourselves to examine this from everyone's point of view. so i kept sitting at the picture and thinking, i want to know what the manhattan project project look like through their eyes. what was there manhattan project like. so then happily i realized that oak ridge was only about two hours from my home in asheville,

north carolina. and i got in my car to see if it was still there. i knew it was still there, but to see if i could find anyone. the person was actually in that very photo, 101 and sharp as a tack, an amazing man. and i thought i have to start tracking these people down because we do not have access to these stories for much longer. happily every person that i met seemed rather excited to share their view of their experience living and working in the manhattan project. again by luck i was in the lobby of connie's assisted living facility when i ran into a very spunky young woman of 84 years old at the time named colleen. she went on to be one of the main characters in my book. and she introduced me and they

have invited me to a historic preservation meeting i basically talked to anyone that was still around that would give me time and perspective. and that included blue assisted-living facility. like where you hear during the war, i'm 65, i'm sorry, you look great, you look fantastic. and that is how i tried to track people down. and what i wanted to do track this through the lens of oak ridge. and then i wanted to openness through the eyes of people i was able to interview. the women i was able to focus on have very different engagements with the projects and different

backgrounds and exploring different aspects and always through their eyes because it was there voices that are bush wanted to come through. so i ended up with some girls from tennessee and april from pennsylvania via new york city and the coast of north carolina. and i also ended up with a nurse who came down from chicago and that nurses here today. rosemary is here. [applause] >> rosary will be signing books later. and all these people that allowed me to go into oak ridge through a different door. the woman i chose to kind of describe getting to oak ridge was a woman named celia. and this includes she was actually working in 1942 for the

manhattan project in manhattan but she didn't know that. and she was doing a great job at work, actually if your boss says, we are moving headquarters and i would love you to come with us. are you open to moving and taking this promotion. and, i can't really get into any specifics about that. and she said, okay. but i'm going to be doing. oh, you're going to be doing what you're doing here, but that could change. and how long are we going for? well, maybe six months, possibly nine. okay, six to nine months. so i'm going to get there, which

is a fair question. they said to not worry, i will take care of everything. we will take you to your house and take it to the train station. the tickets will be waiting for you. and someone will meet you at the platform and take you somewhere else. and she says, okay. sign me up. and she buys a new dress and packed a suitcase and there she goes. and how could she do that, just go without knowing, didn't she want to know and she was curious. but one of the things that i realize it is those who realize that unless you lived through it, i realized that i have no idea what it was like to go through world war ii. in the early touched everyone's lives and everybody knew someone who was awaiting fighting.

everyone knew someone who had been lost, most people. celia was no different today that she got taken off on the crazy train ride. her brother was shipped off to italy and your other brother was going off to the pacific. so in her mind you cannot know exactly where you are you're going or what you will be doing. but it will be in support of world war ii and that was fine with her. she very much wanted to do her part. this is something that i found echoed in a lot of interviews i did with people. when she arrived, it was a little bit of a rude awakening. the first things she saw was the gates and guards and barb wire and all of those were a part of security. you could not enter into oakridge unless you had a residence pass or a guest pass

otherwise he would be shuffled off somewhere else. in order to live there you have at one particular passage if you work there you have a patch specific to where you were. you could not even give on a bus, there were security forces everywhere that would shine lights on their badges and make sure that you are going where you were supposed to go. you could live and never even see or know about some of the facilities that were there because you are not permitted to be there. badges would have number codes that would indicate everything from a floor you are loved beyond to a cafeteria were allowed to eat on what patterns are allowed to use. so there was a lot of control about people were able to go where they were not able to go. the first things she sees is a ton of money because oak ridge

was, and it's interesting to look about the origin of this, it was not a repurposed town. a lot of things were repurposed during the war. people who had pots and pans were making shell casings and things of that nature. it did not exist before 1942. that is when they created what is considered oakridge today. and how they did that was there was about 56 to 58,000 acres, roughly 1000 families living there. these families were moved off the land by eminent domain. some had as little as two weeks to completely move off their farms and find someone else somewhere else to go. very trying for a lot of people. some had been off their land by the tva for the big dam that they built there and they were some times i'm lucky to be moved three times, by the smoky national park, by that tva dam

and then by oak ridge. there was a lot of upheaval in that area. from the moment that they broke ground in 1942, to the middle of 1945, less than three years. oakridge wherefrom, you know, pretty much nothing to close at 75,000 or 80 residents using more electricity to than new york city and one of the nation's largest bus systems and it was not on a map. and it would not be on the map until 1949, several years after the end of world war ii. this is why security was so tight. there's a lot of security about having your car off and check. and it reduces those in their a list of things you're not supposed to bring inside.

cameras, and there was also prohibited alcohol. this was tennessee in the 1940s, which was like moonshine central. sort of the biggest activities that people have is trying to figure out ways to sneak the local moonshine into oak ridge. and they came up with different ways and everyone can't have these stories. the thing that seemed to work best in the end was actually hiding at the bottom of the bag of dirty diapers because that is the one place that the guards would refuse to go. it was kind of time for them and they would get used to it. one of the women that i interviewed had had their land

taken with tony. it was from the nearby town of clinton about 10 miles down the road. his aunt lost her farm when they came in to create oak ridge. and he had grown up, she was always very curious about it brought high school. but it wasn't invisible. you could not help but notice all the trains and trucks and deliveries and those who were showing up. so everyone -- tony graduated in 1943, her graduating class was like i'm going to get over there and find out what is going on and i'm going to figure it out. whenever someone would give us a job, they would say, okay, you have a pass, what are they doing in there. people would say that i don't know. i don't know, but what are you doing. i am hanging sheet rock, but

what is the building for. they wouldn't tell me. and funny rumor started and they kept saying that everything is going in and nothing is coming out. because he would see office equipment and supplies go in and every train car that came out was empty everything that came out was empty and because it was occasionally a thermos about this big in eight briefcase handcuffed to a guys wrist. and you had this 24 hours a day in the mystery was quite intense, even for people who live there. they could not quite figured out. tony helped me to examine that aspect of the story. the woman that i have mentioned

earlier and in the lobby of the assisted living facility. she helped me to examine what life is like for families. she was from a very large family when she went to nashville. there were about nine of them and housing is very tight when they first decided to create oak ridge. at first they decided we should plan for about 13,000 people. they blew past that very quickly. so the doors kept getting filled and the houses were -- there was a long waiting list and they would bring in these giant trailers and dump them on the mud and dust it and they had this enormous trailer camps, one that we notice was happy valley. normally only you can see a picture of happy valley in the book. but it doesn't really say happy valley.

it says old rusty trailer on a pile of dirt is what it looks like. and at one point they were living in this trailer with nine family members. and there were round-the-clock shifts and they would arrange the work schedules so that the working shifts -- they could sleep in shifts and someone would always be around if the kids need to go to school. and that is how they made it work. when calling was working, she actually worked for her mother during a period of time. her mother went to work as well. this was a very good thing for women at this moment in time. and world war ii created this opportunity for women. not normally to do different things, but to make money that they have never made before. and calling his father could not

get a job because you need something called a certificate of availability, some of you might know what this is. during world war ii, they didn't want people job hopping or constantly putting a job to get a better job because all of that movement would create problems for production. if you had a job that was considered to be important to the war effort, if you quit, you could not get what was called a certificate of availability and be hired on elsewhere. you have to wait it out for several months. calling his father really wanted to work in oak ridge which is considered important to the war effort for three months. during this period of time, calling his mother was the bread earner for her entire family and though she wanted to get a proper house for all of them, they would actually not let her because she was a woman. it didn't matter that she was the only one earning money in the family and a woman in a

managerial position she was not allowed to be declared head of household and get the kind of housing that would've been available to someone who is the head of household. psychotic kind of interesting how was an interesting way to look at this and the increased opportunities for women, but they were still different. so calling some allow me allowed me to look at back, which was very intet. so calling some allow me allowed me to look at back, which was very interesting. calling worked in a building called key 25. it was the home of the diffusion process and the majority of the two main plants in the oak ridge, k-25 and y-12 were dedicated to enriching uranium and separating physical isotopes away from the ones as well and that is what enrichment greens. so k-25, when it was built was the largest building in the entire world.

it remained the largest in the world for many years after. it was more than 44 acres of floor space under one roof and it took people that wrote on bicycles to get from one part of the plant to another. what cracks me up is if you see, there is a picture of it in the book, if you see this in an aerial view, it is shaped like a giant letter u. so i don't think that the seeker for those who are enriching uranium that they create the biggest building in the world, that could practically be seen from space and it's shaped like a u. calling worked as an inspector on pikes and she spent all day checking pipes and very little

pipes were put overturned it would present these to her and she had a probe and she would run that probe over the and then she did not know what was something that would beat and it would go off to be prepared and it went out another door. when i said, did you wonder what this was for and she said, i knew that my whole view of the project was pipes. and i thought what is behind that door, that is where the pipes go, probably more pipes, but i'm not sure because i'm not allowed to know what's behind the door. i found it so interesting that people's relationship to their job would often kind of color that they thought the manhattan project was all about. but this bit mysterious town is all about. you know, for her it was pipes and one of the other women in my book talked about working at

y-12. it was managed by tennessee eastman who at the time had something to do with film development. so she got herself, well, i bet these machines, these styles were turning and this has something to do with developing those little newsreels that we see before all of the movies at the movie house. so that is what she thought because she had these with tennessee and al-shabaab seasonal day. her friend took her aside one day and convinced her that she had figured out the secret of this entire place. she said i know what is going on. it has something to do with urine. and now, when he got hired on to the manhattan project, there were many things to do. you have to sign the espionage act on the went through security and abuse from inside a lot of stuff. you also got a physical. during a physical her height and

weight and you gave a urine sample. this woman labeled everybody's urine samples. so that was her view of the projects and she was convinced that they had weaponize the urine. [laughter] and that is what was going on there. but everyone would come up with their own sort of ideas of what was happening. a lot of jokes, you know, they weren't supposed to talk about it. people tried not to get too into the conversations. but while this is an interesting way to look at what was referred to as content type, part metallization, and everybody was trained exceptionally well to do that one thing as best as they could. they were never given an ounce more information than they needed ever. because if you didn't know what was going on, you could not go

on what was going on and you couldn't even talk about what you were doing. what this did is they was they were chemists who had ideas that they were working with uranium and were not allowed to call it uranium. they were said in the you know what this says. you can call it that anymore. you can call it product, you can call it to boy, you can call that stuff. but you cannot call it uranium. that is what it is for now. so this idea of only giving people information that they needed to do their job well, this compartmentalization was one of the keys to the entire manhattan project. another key to this was having this security force that was in place, not just to make sure people weren't going where they once was to going and to also make sure that they were talking about this business to talk about. in addition to what i would call the official security force,

people that were actually possibly armed, those that would come up and ask you for your credentials or badge, there was also a sea of informants and one of the women that i featured, helen was an 18-year-old that was recruited out of a diner and she was working at a diner in tennessee. within two weeks of arriving in oak ridge, she gets a visit at her dorm from a couple of guys, but she said that hats in the dark suit, and took her outside and said ms. brown, we are wondering if you would mind just when you are in the cafeteria or at work or in your dorm room, just pay close attention to the conversations around you. and if you think someone is being a little too curious for asking too many questions are getting too chatty about what they are doing, would you please fill out these forms and they

are premade for you if you know the person's name, write the name down. what happened, what they were talking about. then we have these pre-addressed envelopes for you and it's anonymous dropbox that no one will ever know it's you. in the envelopes were addressed to the acme insurance company in knoxville. and they said that this is it. could you please do this. we live and work there you knew that at any moment that anything you are saying might very well be reported back to someone else. so for some people this was a lot of encouragement not to get too curious and not to get too chatty. so worked for the most part. and those who talk out of turn were not at work the next day.

and i remember so-and-so used to do this or that, she talked a lot, one day she just wasn't there anymore and you would just be given your papers and that would be and you would be moved out of the dorm and you have to eat. there was a tremendous amount of self-censorship going on as well, which was interesting. because no one really wanted to be responsible for screwing up the war effort. so people said do not talk about this, we don't want us to this to get out and people didn't talk about it. and it certainly wasn't exclusive to the manhattan project either. we have all heard the phrase loose lips sink ships and the idea of not talking about the movements or where your kid was going overseas or things like that. that was very common in the united states during that time. a lot of posters that encouraged silence and definitely keeping quite about anything you might know or any factory might work in. parking on the manhattan project, this was taken to be kind of a more extreme length.

so with this resulted in for some people was it could be quite stressful and this is a town that operated 24 hours a day. and you were working many people for very long hours were told it was important. but you didn't know what it was. and he can say that this is finished and we shipped out his planes. in oak ridge you are working hard but didn't know specifically what you are doing. this could cause a lot of stress. so in 1934 they brought in a psychiatrist who could deal with this he describes described some of the people that he interviewed. it was almost similar to those dramatic stress disorder. and especially scientists that do the same thing over and over

again. without knowing what they were working on in order to keep morale up with leave and then they wanted to keep people as happy as possible and they created this vast recreation system. and they have sports teams for everything but this would do and they had a breeders club and they had bowling, you could go bowling almost anytime of the day or not. they had 824 hour roller rink. drama clubs, orchestras, anything you could think of and the idea was that when people had to work so hard, they wanted them to also be able to play hard as well.

they had dances almost every night of the week as well. so a lot of the stories i would hear from some of these people in addition to the very serious kind of work that they were doing. how much dating there was. the average age was 27 years older. old they are. they are all locked up behind a fence going to dances every night of the week. so there were definitely a lot of marriages and eventual babies that resulted from the spheres. when you met people, the thing you'd ask you would ask would have to be where are you from. because what you're used you are used to is what you do, what plant the work at any work allowed to ask any of those questions. so the questions became quickly about what part of the country you are from. what kind of music did that you like and things of that nature. because no one was from oak ridge and it hadn't existed before come everyone is kind of a newcomer. so people made bonds rather

quickly. and some said that they felt like it was what they thought college might have been like if they had a chance to go. so when was this veil of mystery lifted? the vast majority of people who worked on the manhattan project and in oak ridge realized what they were working on on august 6, 1945 when the first nuclear bomb ever used in combat was detonated over hiroshima. i say, because a month before there had been tests in trinity in new mexico. it was no television. people either found out by word-of-mouth and newspaper or by by the radio. at first it was interesting. i was trying to get everyone to tell me sort of where they were and how they found out and how they found out and at first the big news was there has been some big war development, something vague is occurring. we have to get to a radio.

everyone goes to this, rosemary got to a raditohear he story. there is a long address about a new weapon and okay, there is a new weapon and he keeps talking and talking. and then truman actually mentions oak ridge. you would have thought that they were flabbergasted. many of them got used to not knowing what was going on. and it is a part of something that was significant and incredible mix of feelings for people, it looked like the war was going to be over, confusion about how big this might be, wondering what the exact goal was because nobody really went into that were set them aside and explain exactly said this is

what they are doing. there are still questions after that initial news came through. one of the other questions was will oak ridge continue to exist. a lot of people thought that they would just pull up stakes and everyone would be sent home. that was a concern for a lot of people. but for a lot of people it really started to feel like home for them. you the military put it together to put the ingredients together to create a unique community. but it turned out that there were so going to be jobs and there was going to be things for them to do, a lot of people decided to just stay. celia was told she would be there between six and nine months and i saw her two weeks ago and she's been there seven years. so much for six to nine months.

i will try to wrap this up because i want to leave time for questions in case we have any. so as we move forward, the story of many of these young women and young men really just hasn't been explored all that much. i've only been able to give you a teeny bit today. almost anything that i went to interview, one of the first things was you don't want to talk to me, i don't know anything. and it's like, of course, in one way was very true, or it least it had been true. but then when you got them talking it is a tremendous wealth of information and i cannot say enough about how important the oral history projects are and i would encourage anyone who has a family member to just get to your local library if you don't want to get involved with any of the larger oral history

organizations. another library congress has one for veterans. they are happy to help you get your story down. it's a tremendous gift for writers and researchers and teachers and students. and documents are important and i rely on them a lot. people are such a fascinating way and i would encourage any of you if you have anybody -- you should really just talk about your time and get their story down. and i think we have, how much time? i think we have seven minutes for questions. thank you. thank you. [applause] [applause] >> a fascinating story.

what we have is in a company town and am wondering for lack of a better word what the administrative infrastructure was to run this town. was it the department of defense or the army, how is that done? >> it was a mind-boggling group of government organizations and private contractors. everyone from tennessee ations d private contractors. everyone from tennessee eastman to kellogg to monsanto. to a tremendous number of private companies as well. and the birth of the military industrial complex. there was another great book written in the 60s about the manhattan project that really goes into a lot of detail about a lot of different companies that were involved.

while it was under the war department, they would contract out architectural firms, construction firms, they created a company called roan anderson that manage the day-to-day life of the city. making sure people had rooms in dorms and things like that. the size of it was just huge. and of course this is not just going on in order and trent oak ridge. they were the administrative headquarters, but there were two other major sites and then there were times -- many states the plate a little part of the project as well and hello. hello. thank you very much for your book. my late father, curtis nelson, was the chief civil engineer building a facility. and the whole thing. >> i was born there in the hospital inside the gate.

>> in a so there, i get the same new york all the time. yes, it is still there. >> my dad is personal sin and i'm curtis noss and dinner. my mother was there as well. obviously. [laughter] human sure, honestly. >> but she knew what he was doing. and they remember more about oak ridge than i do. >> did you go to school there? >> no, we went to -- let's see, three months after i was born, we were in deep river ontario. another atc facility. so i was only there three months. >> how interesting. i am always amazed wherever i go from san francisco to seattle to anywhere. there is someone who has a connection to the story. thank you for the your comments. >> what happened to the people who got caught with the

moonshine? [laughter] >> the biggest thing that happened was people in the guard house had a lot of parties. [laughter] that is the main thing that happened. there were definitely peppermints and they were sometimes drinking that night. >> yes, sir? >> i have to questions. one is the russians, where they or anyone else aware of what was going on during the war there? sumac oh, yes. >> we found that out later. >> could you elaborate on that. the second question is to describe a little bit about the process. are they bringing in uranium ore and refining it there through centrifuge and? >> it was actually process in various other facilities.

and they had this in the form -- when it went into and it started to go through the diffusion process and it was in the form of uranium tetrachloride and there were various compounds that were prepared elsewhere and then fed into the various plans to bring the process was going to be. and david green glass was one who made his way through oak ridge. then he was at los alamos and feeding information to the rosenbergs. >> the smithsonian magazine, one interesting article in 2009 about george kovar, who is considered one the most important atomic spies in russia's history and most of the people