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  An official AEC photographer captured the next bizarre phase of the operation in a snapshot taken near the checkpoint at about 12:45 A.M. on January 9. The photograph shows a soldier wearing an anticontamination suit and a respirator sitting in the passenger seat of a white Studebaker. His right arm is extended out the window, and his hand grasps a long pole with a sharp hook on the end. He looks like a space-age knight preparing for a joust.

  He and seven other soldiers similarly garbed and bearing long hooks were shuttled from the checkpoint to the reactor's stairway. Each one took a turn clambering up the stairway and into the reactor room. Each had sixty-five seconds to try to free the body from the ceiling, using the hooks to pull human flesh away from the metal that had impaled it. It took several attempts, but the volunteers were finally able to free the body; it dropped onto the makeshift stretcher positioned over the reactor head at 2:37 A.M.

  With that ghastly task completed, supervisors decided to stop for the night; the recovery operation was suspended and the soldiers were sent for extensive decontamination. At 2:27 P.M. on January 10, the crane eased its long boom out of the reactor and slowly lowered its contaminated cargo—the third and final casualty of the SL-1 disaster—into a large cask with four-inch-thick lead lining that was waiting on a semi-trailer. The site's roads closed to traffic, security officers, their patrol cars flashing emergency lights, escorted the truck to the chemical plant.

  The makeshift stretcher used in the recovery of the third body.

  One of the men assigned to help move the body from the truck recalls the transfer: “When they brought the third guy over, they brought him over in a big lead cask on the back of an International Harvester semi-truck. They gift-wrapped him in a tarp, as a matter of fact, and it was hard to get him out of the tarp because that was radioactive.”

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  On the night of January 3, 1961, Jack Byrnes, Dick Legg, and Richard McKinley became nuclear pioneers. The three men killed on January 3, 1961, became the first humans to die in a nuclear reactor explosion. Forty-one years later, they retain the unwanted distinction of being the only humans to die in an American nuclear reactor accident.

  Sickening. Shocking. Unprecedented. For the people gathered at the checkpoint at the intersection of Highway 20 and Fillmore Avenue, there didn't seem to be words adequate to describe what had happened. Nor did they suspect that the weird tale of SL-1 was just beginning.

  5. “Caution: Radioactive Materials”

  In the days immediately following the world's first nuclear reactor deaths, army, navy, and Testing Station officials were being asked some tough questions by politicians and the press. But perhaps the toughest question was coming from the families of the three servicemen who were killed in the reactor silo: When will the bodies be returned to us for burial? Initially, the only reply was a collection of pained and embarrassed looks from those heading up the recovery operations.

  No one wanted to give the families the gory details of their loved ones' demise. Atomic death isn't pretty, and radiation doesn't die with its host. Just one look at the bodies soaking in the chemical plant's stainless steel sinks made it painfully clear that the men's remains wouldn't receive one last, lingering touch from their young wives. The alcohol and ice-water bath the men had been placed in was failing to lower the high radiation levels their bodies were emitting. Many officials suspected that the bodies were so “hot” they could never be returned to the families for a traditional burial. The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission had even suggested the bodies be disposed of in the Testing Station's high-radiation waste pits and a small memorial be put up somewhere in the Lost River Desert to commemorate the men.

  But the military's top officials at the Idaho site, reacting to growing pressure from the victims' families and with an eye toward public opinion, wanted the men returned to their families. They prevailed: traditional burials it would be—if the radiation emanating from the men's bodies could be contained. But before releasing the bodies to the families, the military wanted one last thing from its servicemen: answers. The bodies would first have to undergo autopsies.

  Autopsies on bodies that had undergone such violent trauma would be, one AEC doctor warned officials, an “ugly job”—not to mention a dangerous one, considering the degree of contamination. That didn't leave the men in charge many options. In 1961, there were only a handful of pathologists in America who were even remotely experienced with radioactive bodies. Calls were made, including one by an army general, and red tape was cut. At noon on Sunday, January 8, an AEC official stood in Don Petersen's horse pasture outside Los Alamos, New Mexico. Petersen, a radiation biologist, was a top pick for the team that would dissect what remained of the last crew to work on the SL-1 reactor. The official sent to New Mexico wasted no time in convincing Petersen of the gravity and importance of the job that lay ahead. “By three o'clock I was on a DC-3 to Idaho,” recalls Petersen.

  Joining him were five health physicists and two other doctors, one of whom was Petersen's close friend and neighbor, Clarence Lushbaugh. All the men worked at Los Alamos Laboratory, a classified research site where America's first atomic bombs had been assembled. The eight men on board that flight had carved out careers exploring the promises and perils of the atom. They were the closest things to what could be considered “pros” in such a young and untried field. And they were about to perform three of the most bizarre and hazardous autopsies in modern medical history.

  A pathologist by trade, Lushbaugh—or “Lush” as everyone called him in Los Alamos—was the official head of the autopsy team. Approaching midlife, Lushbaugh had developed a reputation as a complex, self-made man. He was a “joker,” says Petersen, a man who didn't demand ubiquitous deference to his medical degree. But if you worked for him, you'd better be prepared to deliver nothing short of excellence. A female colleague later recalled Lush's wilder, more playful side, remembering a man who had a bit of a “potty mouth” and a mischievous sense of humor. Others remembered him as being extremely sure of himself, possessing a confidence that bordered on arrogance. Perhaps that air of self-assurance came from Lushbaugh's having hauled himself up by his own bootstraps. His father died in the 1919 influenza outbreak. His mother struggled financially for years afterward, and Lushbaugh relied on scholarships and part-time jobs to put himself through the prestigious University of Chicago Medical School. “He was a very active and very curious guy with a broad range of interests—essentially unbridled curiosity, very undisciplined in that regard,” says Petersen.

  Lushbaugh, forty-four years old when SL-1 exploded, had already made a name for himself as a “Johnny on the Spot” at radiation accidents by serving as an adviser in early, nonfatal radiation exposure cases among atomic workers. And a year earlier, Lushbaugh had participated in the autopsy of a technician at Los Alamos Labs who had clung to life for thirty-five hours after absorbing a massive amount of radiation; he had inadvertently brought together nitric acid and plutonium in a tank used to clean lab equipment, with disastrous results. But Lushbaugh seemed most proud of one of his early accomplishments, a piece of equipment he developed when working as pathologist for the Los Alamos Medical Center. One evening, as he told the story years later, he was summoned to the scene of a homicide. “A woman had been killed by her husband, who was a security policeman at Los Alamos [Laboratory],” Lushbaugh said. “He parked his revolvers in a bedside table. After a tryst in the bed one evening, he decided that she wasn't measuring up somehow or another. So, he let her have a blast in one shoulder blade that went through her heart. He became overwhelmed by his actions and he got another pistol from his bedside table and shot himself in the stomach. This bullet . . . penetrated his spinal cord and gave him paralysis of the lower extremities. He threw his wife across the bedroom onto a floor furnace . . . and called the police. They opened the door and they found all this stench and a newborn baby crawling through the blood. The open door caused the floor furnace to turn on and the woman . . . began to cook.�
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  After the woman was removed from the furnace, Lushbaugh recorded her falling body temperature with a mercury thermometer but couldn't determine the exact time of death. Intrigued with the problem, he took the data he had collected to the Los Alamos Physics Lab, where technicians helped him invent the “thermistor death probe,” which could be pushed far into the rectum of a body to record the central body temperature. From that reading, an exact time of death could be determined.

  “Because Los Alamos was a sequestered town and had a fence around it,” Lushbaugh recalled, “there were a lot of people that should not have been [there] and they subsequently killed themselves. We had a lot of murders and suicides that allowed me to use this thermistor probe as a way of finding the time of death.” Lushbaugh's invention later became a regular tool for coroners.

  Even as they checked into the White Horse Motel in Idaho Falls on the evening of January 8, Lushbaugh and his team knew they would have no need for the rectal probe. They knew exactly when the three men they were to autopsy had died: at 9:01 P.M. five days earlier. But they would need the kind of curiosity that had led Lushbaugh to invent the probe. They would have to positively identify the victims and determine their cause of death—had it been radiation or trauma? They would try, employing the art of forensic pathology, to reconstruct what the men had been doing and where they were doing it at the exact moment of the reactor explosion. And perhaps their most daunting task would be reducing the lethal amounts of radiation coming off the bodies. If they couldn't, there was no way the men could be returned to their families for burials.

  Petersen, now in his mid-seventies and one of the last surviving members of the autopsy team, still carries the memories of the nightmarish few days it took to get the job done. The morning after their arrival, the day before the third body was removed from the reactor silo, the team was shuttled west, past frozen farm fields and into the desolation of the Lost River Desert. After going through the checkpoint near the SL-1 reactor and through the main guard station into the site itself, the men were taken into the chemical plant's decontamination bay. It was not a typical morgue, Petersen says. It was more like a big garage, seventy-five feet long and twenty-five feet high. But it had sinks that drained to contamination tanks. It also contained an overhead crane, one that could be controlled from outside the room. It would be used to move the bodies to and from the autopsy table. And there, in two large stainless steel sinks, lay two of the atomic workers, their bodies covered in crushed ice and alcohol. Shortly, they would be joined by the third victim. It had to have been a surreal sight.

  On their first full day in the Lost River Desert, team members made plans for shielding themselves from horrifically high levels of radiation. There was no point in putting a Geiger counter near any of the bodies to count the ionizing particles, giving a measure of radioactivity: “It would just go wild,” Petersen recalls.

  Volunteers from the chemical plant helped construct a rudimentary autopsy table: a wooden plank laid across two sawhorses. Then they set about building head-high shields of lead and brick a short distance away, for the autopsy team to hide behind. “One over R squared is a marvelous thing that simply means if you can work from ten feet out, your dose is significantly lower than if you were standing right next to the body,” Petersen explains. The autopsy team made hasty sketches of the tools they would need to complete their task—tools not found in a conventional medical bag or on the equipment tray in a regular morgue. The doctors would need such implements as snares, probes, shears, and cutting blades, all of which had to be attached to long steel pipes so they could be manipulated from a distance. The site's welding shop constructed the required tools “from 1½ in. wide hack saw blades, metal rod, and pipe,” according to the autopsy report, in just a few hours. The finished collection resembled medieval torture devices.

  On the morning of January 10, the team suited up. Their precautions hinted at the danger they faced: each man wore two pairs of anticontamination coveralls and two pairs of rubber boots, all openings taped shut. Then each donned a surgeon's cap, a full-face respirator, and two pairs of rubber gloves. Just before they entered the big bay, they slipped plastic booties over their footwear. The five health physicists were the first to enter the room, approaching the industrial sinks where the first two bodies removed from the reactor were submerged in ice and alcohol. After melting the ice with warm water and moving the bodies to an empty sink, they began to chart in an initial survey the most radioactive parts of each crewman. They then calculated how long each autopsy would take, and whether one doctor could perform it safely or whether the three physicians would need to work in shifts to avoid overexposure.

  The health physicists' findings gave pause even to Lushbaugh and his assembled medical team, men who took a fairly relaxed approach to the dangers of radiation—an attitude quite typical of most nuclear workers of that era. But this was different. Flecks of uranium 235, bits of the control rods, and shards of the pressure vessel had burrowed their way into the flesh of the men, and the blast had torn their bodies into pieces.

  Radiologic survey diagrams of each of the men's bodies from the final autopsy report. The outlined figures represent, from left to right, McKinley, Byrnes, and Legg.

  “The Jordans [radiation detectors] were pegging at fifteen hundred roentgens an hour. There was enough radiation around so there wasn't going to be a hell of a lot of monkey business,” recalls Petersen.

  Using long-handled snares—even broom handles at certain points—the team maneuvered a sling around the body of the first soldier recovered from the reactor. The overhead crane carried the body to the makeshift autopsy table. Petersen, who had taken medical school courses while receiving his doctorate in biology, was sent around the shield to perform preliminary procedures.

  “Since I speak anatomy without an accent, I was kind of an easy guy to do the job,” says Petersen. “These were preliminary preparations so they [the doctors] could go in and do exactly the critical thing, and it saved everybody's dose.”

  After he retreated to a safe position, one of the three physicians stepped around the barrier and made quick cuts to remove contaminated flesh and extract organs that scientists wanted to examine. In particular, samples of liver tissue could be tested for the presence and amounts of certain elements, which would help the team determine what had caused the blast and how much energy had been released.

  Lushbaugh and his team made notes on the wounds found on the first body, which were substantial. A semicircular laceration at the top of the head had penetrated the complete thickness of the scalp. The lower right portion of the face had been partially destroyed. Both eyeballs were flattened and contained no fluid. The skin of the nose had been blown upward and outward, revealing the right nasal cavity. The left arm was normal, except that the left hand was shredded, with only two fingers remaining intact. The lower portion of the left leg had numerous cuts and wounds. The left side of the face, neck, and chest were a dusky violet color. The right arm and leg were free of wounds. The health physicists, after using an electric clipper to remove all the hair on the body, had determined earlier where the greatest levels of radioactivity were. The doctors set about the task of removing it.

  Doctors call the surgical removal of devitalized or contaminated tissue “debridement,” but this doesn't accurately describe what happened there in the chemical plant bay. The flesh that covered the entire body was highly radioactive, peppered with fission products. Great sheets of skin—some small, some extensive, some shallow, some deep—simply had to be cut away if there was to be any hope of returning the body to the family. And the doctors hadn't the time to be gentle or particularly precise. “In a nonradiation field, I suppose you could argue that it would have been done with more artistry than we were able to do hurrying,” was Petersen's blunt assessment of the working conditions.

  After carving away the identified patches of radioactive flesh, the team of doctors—each taking a thirty-second to one-minute t
urn at the body—sawed off what remained of the left hand and most of the left arm, a decision prompted by the need to further reduce the radioactivity to what was hoped would be acceptable levels. The viscera of the body—including the brain, intestines, testicles, and heart—were removed and taken to a table thirty feet away, where each organ was autopsied individually. The body was then wrapped in two layers of heavy plastic sheeting and moved to a deep freeze box. This first autopsy—which took fifteen minutes and required dozens of cuts with a long-handled hacksaw blade—would prove the easiest and most gently performed of the three.

  The second body, belonging to the man found on the floor next to a concrete reactor shield, was then moved to the autopsy table. He had been far closer to the reactor than the first man when it exploded. His face had been blown inward upon impact, although there were only superficial cuts to the skin. Both eyeballs were collapsed, and the teeth were broken loose. The body's left arm was severely deformed: “The whole humerus had been shortened without breaking the skin to about half its length. The arm appeared to have been wound about this area once and then to have been unwound,” cites the autopsy report. The throat was a pulpy mess, and numerous broken ribs could be felt. The upper left part of the chest was unusually prominent, while the lower part had caved in. The right knee had been dislocated and was only loosely attached to the rest of the leg by skin and ligaments. The lower half of the left leg was partially missing, and ragged shreds of skin and muscle hung from the fractured tibia. The pelvis had been fractured and was pushed up and into the body. There was severe blast damage to the lower back and left buttock. The doctors, after stripping away patches of skin studded with radioactive particles, cut out the dislocated knee, a large portion of the left thigh, and the tattered remains of the lower left leg, again in an attempt to reduce the body's level of radioactivity. Like the first, the second body was wrapped in plastic and stored in the deep freeze.