After the Allies had triumphed – helped by the deployment of those very atomic bombs that the Manhattan Project built – the debt the country owed to the radium girls was acknowledged in full. An official of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) wrote: ‘If it hadn’t been for those dial-painters, the [Manhattan] project’s management could have reasonably rejected the extreme precautions that were urged on it and thousands of workers might well have been, and might still be, in great danger.’ The women had been, officials said, ‘invaluable’.
Even after the war was over, the dial-painters’ legacy continued to save lives, as the world entered the age of atomic energy. ‘We were going to live in an era of plutonium,’ enthused one man who grew up in 1950s America. ‘We’d have plutonium cars, planes . . . It was infinite.’ The large-scale production of radioactive materials seemed inevitable. ‘In the foreseeable future,’ wrote the Consumers League, ‘millions of workers may be affected by ionising radiations.’
The League was right. Almost immediately, however, it became clear that it was not just employees in the new atomic industries who were at risk: the whole planet was. Less than five years after the Second World War ended, the nuclear arms race began: over the next decade, hundreds of above-ground atomic tests were conducted across the globe.
Each blast, mushroom-clouding bomb debris into the sky, eventually resulted in radioactive fallout drifting back to earth: landing not only on the test site, but raining down upon fields of green grass, wheat and cereal – through which the radioactive isotopes in the fallout entered the human food chain. Just like radium had done in the dial-painters, these isotopes, especially a particularly dangerous, newly created one called strontium-90, began to deposit in human bones. ‘Every one of us,’ wrote the Consumers League in alarm, ‘is a potential victim.’
The AEC dismissed the concerns: the risks, it said, were very small when compared to ‘the terrible future we might face if we fell behind in our nuclear defence effort’. Yet their words were not sufficient to calm the troubled public; after all, ‘the radium dial-painters’ agony [had] alerted the world to the hazards of internal radiation’. ‘[They] serve as a warning,’ railed the Consumers League, ‘of the results of carelessness and ignorance . . . a cloud on the horizon, no larger than a man’s hand.’
In 1956, growing public unease led the AEC to establish a committee to examine the long-term health risks of atomic tests, specifically the effects of strontium-90. But how, the researchers thought, could they possibly begin this study for the future health of humanity when they were dealing with such an unknown substance? All they really knew was that strontium-90 was chemically similar to radium . . .
‘There is only a limited pool of people that have had exposure to internal radiation,’ a radioactivity specialist said. ‘If anything happens in our up-and-coming nuclear age, these [people] are about the only starting point that anyone has.’
The dial-painters were needed to help once more.
They seemed Cassandra-like in their powers: able to predict for scientists the likely long-term health effects of this new radioactive danger. ‘Something that happened far in the past,’ an AEC official said, ‘is going to give us a look far into the future.’ He termed the women of ‘incalculable value’: their suffering would provide ‘vital insight, with implications for hundreds of millions of people all over the world’. In a spookily prophetic letter, Pearl Payne had once written, ‘My history is unusual and may be of interest to medical men of the future.’ She could never have anticipated just how right she was.
Medical studies began immediately, including in New Jersey and Illinois; later, the research would be amalgamated into the Center for Human Radiobiology (CHR), which was located in a multi-million-dollar clinic called the Argonne National Laboratory, based 75 miles from Ottawa. Here, special lead-lined vaults were constructed, buried under three feet of concrete and ten feet of earth, in which the dial-painters’ body burdens (the amount of radium inside them) were measured. The research was designed to help future generations and called ‘essential to the security of the nation’. ‘If we can determine the long-term effects of radium,’ one of the scientists said, ‘we’re quite sure we can predict the long-term, low-level effects of fallout.’ Scientists were seeking to ‘give the world an exact guide on safe radioactivity by studying all dial-painters who can be found’.
There were dial-painters still living – albeit with a time bomb ticking in their bones. Dr Martland had already explained why they had survived thus far. Radium was known to settle in the girls’ bones and known to cause late-onset sarcomas, but when such deadly tumours might begin to grow was the factor that remained mysterious, like a dark trick. Radium had not given away all its secrets just yet.
The hunt to find those living dial-painters now began in earnest: WANTED: RADIUM WORKERS OF THE ROARING TWENTIES read the headlines. Employment records were procured and snapshots of those long-ago USRC picnics unearthed; the company photograph taken on the steps of Radium Dial became a vital source of clues. The scientists pronounced, ‘Each of these persons is worth [her] weight in gold to science’; the girls were termed ‘a reservoir of scientific information’. In an eerie echo of the women’s treatment when they sued their former firms, private investigators were hired to track them down.
Those they found, they often found willing. ‘She said she would be very happy to do it (anything for science),’ a memo recorded. Those dial-painters who were still working for USRC participated anonymously, for fear of jeopardising their jobs.
There were some who didn’t want to stir things up. ‘Miss Anna Callaghan does not know she has radium poisoning and her family does not want her to know,’ read one note. Another woman was reluctant to be measured for radium as the scientists ‘couldn’t do anything about it anyway’.
Even family members of the girls took part. Grace Fryer’s little brother Art was one. They tested him ‘because he spent so much time with her and basically she was radioactive,’ said his son. ‘I guess the government was trying to figure out if he was going to suffer any ill effects.’
Though Art was fine, it was a concern that was not exaggerated. Swen Kjaer’s notes minuted the death of a dial-painter’s sister: she had ‘reportedly died from radiation exposure, but had never worked at the [USRC] plant. The source of contamination appears to have been her sister, the dial-painter, with whom she shared a bed’.
Many of the original girls, of course, were no longer alive to help with the study. Edna Hussman had died on 30 March 1939; she was said to have ‘maintained her good spirits and courage until the last’. She died of a sarcoma of the femur, leaving her husband, Louis, a widower at the age of forty.