60 years later, some justice for his work on the A-bomb
For Ed and Helen Halluska, the Second World War ended a few weeks shy of this Christmas.
Sixty years after Mr. Halluska left Los Alamos, where he machined a block of uranium into what would become the Hiroshima bomb, the letter arrived at his Monroeville home.
Yes, the government said, he should have been given more than a pair of rubber gloves to protect himself and yes, more than likely uranium was the source of the cancer that almost stopped him in 1976 and 1993 and yes, he's going to be compensated for a wartime wound that took 30 years to make itself known.
The check's in the mail.
He's giving it away.
On the day before he and Helen planned to celebrate the birth of someone born in a stable, Mr. Halluska was thanking the one who sent that child.
"Listen, God has really blessed us," he said.
The money? He's sending much of it to his church. Then there are the grandchildren. Maybe some new linoleum for the kitchen, but two months from his 89th birthday, he's not much for big spending.
"I guess if I was about 40 years younger I'd have more plans," he grinned.
More than 19,000 veterans of the Cold War -- people who worked at Los Alamos or other nuclear sites, maybe at the uranium processing plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn. -- are waiting for the federal government to sort through their health claims. In the days when Mr. Halluska was sent to the hills outside Santa Fe, where teams assembled the atom bombs that ended the war, the health effects of exposure to radiation weren't fully known.
On the dining room table, just next to the framed letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer, thanking him personally for his role in making the bomb, Mr. Halluska laid out a form. Dated Dec. 10, 2003, the document is essentially a list of questions trying to reconstruct the dose of radiation absorbed by a young machinist who left for the war thinking, at first, that he was being sent to New York. The papers said he was being assigned to the Manhattan Project.
Was he regularly tested for radiation? Was he ever held back from work because he'd absorbed too much radiation? Was the air at his workplace monitored for radiation? To every question, he checked the box reading "no."
"I was handling uranium. I had rubber gloves on and sometimes they'd tear," he said.
Just establishing his work at Los Alamos took years.
"The records were very sketchy, I guess."
When he learned of the program to compensate nuclear workers six years ago, he submitted his claim and waited. And waited.
He was number 9,978 on the list of applicants.
"You'd think they should be able to streamline their process for these claims," Mr. Halluska said.
So far, roughly 65 percent of applicants have been turned down for compensation, according to The New York Times.
Mr. Halluska said he nearly became one of those people, by choice.
"I kind of gave up after so many years," he said. "I told them 'Forget about it. Don't write me anymore. I'm done.' They'd say, 'Oh, no, don't do that.'"
After surviving cancer, Mr. Halluska went on with his life. In retirement, he and Helen took seasonal jobs directing the bridge tournaments on cruise ships. His scrapbook is a catalogue of celebrities: Walter Cronkite, Debbie Reynolds, Vincent Price.
Next month, they have something new in the offing.
On the table, next to the records detailing his service building the bomb that ended the war, amid the pile of forms that record a six-year struggle to convince the federal government that he suffered a war wound that kept its secret for decades, are the tickets.
"We're going on the Queen Victoria," he said. It's a world cruise. "This time, we're not working."
Gregor Gable
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