The “Little Boy” atomic bomb used on Hiroshima was designed and built at Los Alamos, NM. The Clinton Engineer Works adjacent to Oak Ridge, TN, produced the enriched uranium used in the device but none of the actual weapon development was done there, and in fact the majority of the workforce including engineers working on the gaseous diffusion process for enrichment only had a very rough idea of the weapon that the enriched uranium being produced there would be used for.
Well, if we’re going down that creepy lane, Times Beach, MO deserves a look:
The answer to the question of how dioxin came to cover the town in the first place lies in its sleepy roots. Lots in the town were originally given away as part of a publicity stunt by the St. Louis Times and marketed as a weekend getaway, and the resulting year-round population wasn’t huge. By 1972, “the town didn’t have the funds to properly pave their dusty dirt roads,” writes Raphael Orlove for Jalopnik , “so they struck up a deal with local waste hauler Russell Bliss to glue the dust to the ground with motor oil at a cost of six cents a gallon.”
Bliss was sure it would work, because he’d done the same thing for a stable nearby, he writes. And he knew he’d make a profit, because he got the materials for his road spray by mixing one tankload of oil with six truckloads of waste from a chemical manufacturer. “This chemical manufacturer made its money manufacturing Agent Orange during the Vietnam War,” he writes. “Their waste turned out to be hexachlorophene tainted with dioxin.”
Stranger