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With this article, Christian History begins a new feature that shows how the Christian faith has affected, and been affected by, recent events.

This year many people are remembering, and debating, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago. In the following piece, historian Richard Pierard takes a personal look at the beginning of the atomic era and Christians’ involvement in it.

In early 1944, I was a few months shy of 10 years old when my father took a defense job at the Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) in Washington State. This was part of something known as the Manhattan Engineer District, an enterprise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Having never ventured much more than 250 miles from Chicago, I could not conceive such a distance. The journey in an aging car that towed a tiny house trailer seemed like a pioneer odyssey. The wartime conditions imposed a maximum 35 miles per hour speed limit and gasoline rationing; our poor quality tires and frequent breakdowns added to the adventure.

Eventually we reached our destination, an arid, bleak, windswept place in the Columbia River Valley of eastern Washington. The foliage was sagebrush and dry range grass, the wildlife was jackrabbits and coyotes, and sandstorms were a regular feature. After being ordered to turn over cameras, binoculars, and two-way radios, we passed through a guarded fence and drove several miles until we arrived at Hanford, a sprawling construction camp.

From there nearly 50,000 people went out daily to labor at various sites in the surrounding region, where they built mysterious factories with meaningless names and no clear purpose. The workers were instructed simply to follow the blueprints, do what they were told, ask no questions, and discuss their jobs with nobody.

When autumn set in, the plant was completed and put into operation. Those who continued working on the project (like my father) were relocated in Richland, a government town that had been under construction since mid-1943. It lay at the edge of the 600-square mile reservation that had been sealed off from the outside world.

The 13,000 residents of Richland hailed from all around the United States, and they quickly formed a unique community of active, outgoing, generous, neighborly, and optimistic people. The populace was well-educated and relatively young; kinship ties were virtually nonexistent; birthrates were high; a premium was placed on family life, and voluntary societies flourished.

Single employees lived in apartment-style dormitories, and married couples in look-alike houses located on streets named after army engineers. All the amenities of life were available—a hospital, stores, banks, filling stations, cinemas, sports and recreation facilities.

We even had army-style churches, one for the Catholics and one for the Protestants. In the American spirit of pluralism, other communions who wished to hold services were permitted to rent space in schoolhouses.

For the most part, Christian faith and unquestioned patriotism went hand-in-hand to church on Sunday and to work on Monday. No one, not even the church, could foresee any moral problems or human tragedy on the horizon.

People traveled by bus to their jobs in the “areas”—three reactor and two separation complexes, which were from 35 to 50 miles from Richland. Naturally, they were forbidden to talk about what they were doing. They only knew they were helping to win the war. In fact, they were manufacturing plutonium, the primary component of nuclear weapons.

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