Haden: "Radioactive Cows"

The atomic flash that lit the New Mexico sky on July 16, 1945 illuminated not just a group of the world’s leading physicists, but also several hundred Hereford cattle. Annamaria Haden traces the story of this “Alamogordo herd” in the years that followed, reminding us that—even in the atomic age—we can never fully control the nonhuman world.

Annamaria Haden is a PhD student at the University of Tennessee studying environmental, agricultural, and animal history. Her master’s thesis, titled “Atomic Cows: The Alamogordo Herd at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1945-1965,” examines the place of animals in nuclear research.

We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty (ampetty@wm.edu), Shane Hamilton (shane.hamilton@york.ac.uk) , or Cherisse Jones-Branch (crjones@astate.edu). This post should be cited as: Annamaria Haden, “Radioactive Cows: What Oppenheimer Didn’t Tell You About the Atomic Bomb,” The Short Rows, 6 November 2023. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/haden-radioactive-cows

“Radioactive Cows: What Oppenheimer Didn’t Tell You About the Atomic Bomb”

Annamaria Haden 

The highly-anticipated Christopher Nolan film of July 2023, Oppenheimer, explores the life of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy. Oppenheimer narrates the development of the world’s first atomic bomb at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, site of the Manhattan Project. In the movie’s scene where Oppenheimer agrees to run the Manhattan Project, he explains the strategically located project sites with a blackboard sketch of laboratories scattered across the country. From the refining laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the research laboratories at Berkeley and Chicago, Oppenheimer draws a cross in the middle of the diagram. Oppenheimer explains to Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Engineer District and played by Matt Damon, the need for a “secret laboratory in the middle of nowhere. Self-sufficient. Secure. Equipment, housing, the works, we keep everyone there till it’s done.”[1] When Groves asks where to construct this secret town and laboratory to build the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer suggests New Mexico.

Oppenheimer was familiar with the region because he owned a ranch with his brother outside of Santa Fe. It is a place that holds deep meaning to Oppenheimer; when away in Europe, he waxes nostalgic about New Mexico as “the America I miss right now.” In another scene, Oppenheimer brings his soon-to-be wife, Kitty, to the New Mexico ranch on horseback. The movie depicts the region as an untouched wilderness in the middle of nowhere. Kitty even ends a monologue about her life while at the ranch by stating, “Now here I am, wherever the hell this is.”[2] This theme of New Mexico as a remote wilderness continues as Oppenheimer shows Groves the site for Los Alamos. Oppenheimer briefly mentions that the region around the Los Alamos site included a boys’ school that the army would need to take over and that local Native Americans used the site for burial rituals. But, “other than that,” Oppenheimer claims, “nothing for forty miles any direction.”[3] Yet an inconvenient fact contradicted this blanket statement. All around them were cows, and lots of them. Ranches were scattered across this region of northern New Mexico.[4]

The film suggests that the Trinity blast took place in an empty desert. Yet, the movie fails to mention that the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico had a profound impact on all living creatures exposed to it. Nearby grazing cattle were the immediate victims of the world’s first atomic bomb. About thirty miles away from the Trinity test site, over three hundred cattle were dosed with radiation from the bomb. The impact of this accidental exposure was significant. These radioactive cows from the Trinity test spurred a vast effort to understand the consequences of radiation and justify the continuation of Cold War development of nuclear technology despite growing atomic anxieties in the country.

After the Trinity test, the U.S. Army purchased the radioactive cattle from Alamogordo ranchers to use the herd for research purposes. Of the more than three hundred Hereford cattle exposed to radiation from the Trinity test, the Army sent a group of about sixty severely burned cattle to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, another “secret city” of the Manhattan Project.[5] Special stickers placed on their bodies before shipment stated “these cattle are not diseased. They have been burned by the atomic bomb.”[6] The shipment of this group of cattle, now called the Alamogordo herd, to Oak Ridge initiated a collaboration between the Atomic Energy Commission and the University of Tennessee in May 1948, which established the University of Tennessee-Atomic Energy Commission Agricultural Research Laboratory (UT-AEC). This laboratory studied the Alamogordo herd’s general health, growth, breeding efficiency, offspring and fertility, and the effects of radioactivity on the cattle’s tissue, organs, and coats.[7]

Figure 1 Oak Ridge scientists using a Geiger counter on cow to measure radiation; "Experimentation on livestock by the Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge, Tennessee," Westcott, Edward, RG 82, Box 49, File 114, 20804, Tennessee Virtual Archive. Courtesy of the Tennessee State Library & Archives.

This herd grew famous as both local and national media covered the Alamogordo herd at Oak Ridge as an exemplar of America’s confident control of nuclear power. Some of these cows received names such as Granny and Atom. Press coverage of this famous herd primarily remained upbeat and optimistic, celebrating the herd’s “normal behavior” and efficient, healthy reproduction after their exposure.[8] However, scientific experiments and technical manuals from the UT-AEC laboratory revealed that the victims of the world’s first nuclear weapon endured many negative consequences. The Alamogordo herd suffered beta burns, tissue sensitivity, vascular changes, and skin cancer.[9] The cattle never fully conformed to the optimistic and reassuring expectations that sought to ease atomic anxieties. Instead, the inconsistency of coverage and findings about the herd reveals thwarted American efforts to conquer the non-human world. The fame of the Alamogordo herd concluded in 1964 when the laboratory euthanized Granny, the last surviving member of the herd.

Figure 2 Granny and one of her calves; Edward R. Ricciuti, “Animals in Atomic Research,” U.S. Atomic Energy Commission: Division of Technical Information, 1967, 8.

Oppenheimer’s complete omission of animal agriculture and its depiction of the environment at Los Alamos as a blank canvas misses an opportunity to showcase the central role of the non-human world in history. The race to develop the atomic bomb aligned with other human efforts to harness the non-human world. Research and marketing efforts using the Alamogordo herd aimed to control the consequences of nuclear technology by controlling both animals’ bodies and media coverage. American agricultural systems throughout the twentieth century made similar attempts to achieve human superiority over the natural world.

The Alamogordo herd lived within the historical context of a changing America that increasingly relied on science and technology to improve not only military weapons development but also to sustain everyday elements of life, such as agriculture and food production. By the Cold War period, American agriculture had become increasingly mechanized and industrialized. This included changes on the farm throughout the twentieth century, such as tractors and mechanical pickers, hybrid corn, pesticides, antibiotics, genetic modification, and breeding innovations. The industrial agricultural systems of the twentieth century, despite illusions of control and certainty, were highly vulnerable to detrimental consequences of science and technology, similar to the Alamogordo herd’s vulnerability to the atomic bomb.

Factory-like farming operations disrupted small farms and expanded the unsustainable practice of monoculture.[10] Synthetic chemicals increasingly used in industrial agriculture, such as DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and DES (diethylstilbestrol orstilbestro), posed significant danger to human health.[11] Additionally, attempts to “mechanize” the complex bodies of livestock also caused disease outbreaks, as seen in the post-WWII broiler industry with the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and food-borne illnesses.[12] Entrance into the atomic age after Trinity actually undermined human mastery over the natural world because threats of a nuclear attack or the hazards of radioactive fallout could pose significant disruptions to American systems of agriculture and food supply chains. Overall, despite Oppenheimer’s depiction of humanity’s domination over the non-human world, studying the history of industrial agriculture reveals numerous dangerous consequences of advancing science and technology, and examples of the limitations of human superiority when nature responds in complex, unanticipated ways.[13]

While the movie centers on the biographical, scientific, and political elements of the development of the atomic bomb, the history that took place was far richer. Examining the roles of the environment, agriculture, and animals in history helps to uncover larger dilemmas of America’s entrance into the atomic age and speaks to the American obsession with control over the non-human world, which included the atom, radiation, the environment, and animals. It is essential to acknowledge that history is something that happened to both humans and non-humans.[14]

[1] Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2023).

[2] Ibid.

[3] This sweeping statement from the movie diminishes the presence of Native Americans. For further reading on Native Americans impacted by nuclear technology and radiation view: Myrriah Gómez, Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2022); Gabriele Schwab, Radioactive Ghosts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Laurel Morales, “For The Navajo Nation, Uranium Mining's Deadly Legacy Lingers,” NPR, April 10, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/473547227/for-the-navajo-nation-uranium-minings-deadly-legacy-lingers.

[4] Gómez, Nuclear Nuevo México, 38.

[5] Carl L. Tessmer, “Radioactive Fallout Effects on Skin: Effects of Radioactive Fallout on Skin of

Alamogordo Cattle,” Archives of Pathology 72, no. 2 (1961): 176; Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson, City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), xx.

[6] Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 133.

[7] Thomas J. Whatley, A History of the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1994), 55.

[8] “‘Radioactive’ Calves Look and Act Normal,” The Washington Post, July 12, 1947, 5.

[9] Tessmer, “Radioactive Fallout Effects on Skin,” 189; “Cow in A-Bomb Test Shows Skin Cancer,” The Nashville Tennessean, January 24, 1962, 2.

[10] Adrienne Monteith Petty, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina since the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5; Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 316.

[11] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 22; Alan I. Marcus, Cancer from Beef: DES, Federal Food Regulation, and Consumer Confidence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1; Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), x.

[12] William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Culture 42, no. 4 (2001): 651.

[13] Carson, Silent Spring, 245.

[14] Parts of this piece are excerpted from my master’s thesis: Annamaria Haden, “Atomic Cows: The Alamogordo Herd at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1945-1965” (MA thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dec. 2023).