Racing Toward Destruction : The nuclear weapons industry worked feverishly during the Cold War in the belief that its dangerous experiments would save the Free World. : ATOMIC HARVEST: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America’s Nuclear Arsenal, <i> By Michael D’Antonio (Crown: $22.50; 304 pp.)</i>

Now that the Cold War is over, we hear very little of that once-furious argument about moral equivalence: that for every heinous crime the Soviet regime committed one could cite a Vietnam or a coup in Chile or an El Salvador to argue that the good guys, too, could play ruthless Realpolitik .

But here is a new twist to the argument. One dreadful characteristic that the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States have shared is a dismaying readiness to expose their own citizens to nuclear radiation, and then to cover up the evidence.

Just last week, for instance, U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced that she was “appalled, shocked and deeply saddened” to discover that the U.S. government had concealed the existence of more than 200 nuclear weapons tests since the 1940s, including some where radiation had been released into the environment, and some where humans deliberately had been exposed to radioactive plutonium.

The Soviets employed a similar strategy in 1954, dispatching troops into a nuclear test site in the Urals while the earth was still molten, to see if military units could still be deployed successfully in a nuclear battlefield. And in 1957, British national servicemen were stationed in the radiation plume at the Australian test sites in 1957 like so many guinea pigs.

As Michael D’Antonio shows in “Atomic Harvest,” one of the biggest cover-ups ever affected American civilians in Oregon, who were also unknowingly deployed in the front line of this nastiest of Cold War battlefields.

Between 1945 and 1947, in the first desperate rush to mass-produce plutonium and build the basic nuclear arsenal, American children in the Columbia River valley were exposed to twice as much radiation as the children of Chernobyl. In 1949, a bizarre experiment was staged at the Hanford nuclear reservation called the “Green Run”--the deliberate emission of 5,050 curies of radioactive Iodine 131 and 4,750 curies of Xenon 133.(To put this in perspective, the nuclearaccident at Three Mile Island released about 15 curies.)

The U.S. Air Force was at the time sending monitoring flights over the Soviet Union to assess, on the basis of pollution and radiation measurements, the progress of the Soviet nuclear bomb project. The Soviets used “green” uranium and a distinctive manufacturing process, which involved a shorter cooling period and more pollution. One of the Hanford plants was reconfigured in order to emulate the Soviet process, and the Green Run was released so that the U.S. monitors could estimate how much pollution would produce how many Soviet bombs. Simple, really.

But nobody ever told Hanford’s neighbors.

Think of it as the Manhattan Project that never stopped, as the wartime emergency crash project that never had to be house-trained. The American nuclear weapons industry went from laboratory prototypes to mass production in three racing years, and then worked flat out for a generation, firmly and proudly believing that the fate of the Free World rested on its performance. Their mission was not just national security, but national survival. And being at war, even a Cold War, means never having to say you’re sorry, even if governments were in the habit of expressing regrets to its citizens who get inconveniently in the way of a grand official purpose.

But some sort of apology seems due to the people of the Columbia Valley in Oregon, the neighbors of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. They share with the people of Hiroshima and the victims of Chernobyl the dreadful distinction of being the most irradiated humans on the planet. Hiroshima was an enemy city in wartime. Chernobyl was the tragic symbol of a society which maintained that the ends justified any means at all, from terror to gulag to using people as pawns in a game. The Free World and the U.S.A. were supposed to be defined by our revulsion at that kind of state arrogance. We were the good guys.

Or were we? Each and every day in 1959, Hanford released more radioactive iodine into the air--some 20 curies--than the Three Mile Island accident released in total. And that was a year when Hanford was on its best behavior.

Racing to build the first bombs, Hanford emitted over 500,000 curies in 1945 alone. By the 1950s, with over 150,000 employees, and plants and real estate worth more than $24 billion, the U.S. government’s vast, far-flung and largely secret manufacturing network for making nuclear weapons was one of the biggest industrial enterprises in history. The Hanford reservation alone stretched over 570 square miles and employed more than 13,000 people.

The first gravity bombs were relatively easy. But how do you invent a nuclear warhead that will stand up to the mechanical trauma of ballistic launch? How do you make it so stable that it can go to sea, or sit in a silo, for months and years at a time, and then suddenly be punched into the stratosphere at a speed faster than any other human artifact has achieved, survive the burning heat of re-entry, and still explode on time? How do you miniaturize the warheads so that 10 can be placed atop a single missile? How do you set up a production line that can produce city-killers as well as small tactical nuclear weapons that will destroy a tank regiment of an army’s command bunker?

In engineering terms, these were challenges that the U.S. nuclear weapons industry solved with dedication and even genius. But they were up against a different kind of genius, the determination and the ability of people in a free society to find out, slowly but surely, what was being done to them by the government they sustained with their taxes.

In “Atomic Harvest,” D’Antonio tells the riveting and tragic story not just of the radiation and the cover-up, but of the people who unearthed the government’s crimes against them. There are heroes here. Casey Ruud was the safety inspector at Hanford who would not take no for an answer. Tom Baillie was the Columbia Valley farmer who lived downwind from Hanford, convinced that his childhood paralysis and his adult sterility had been caused by radiation. Karen Dorn Steele of the Spokane Spokesman-Review was the reporter who first brought the resources of a free press to pry open the closed and secretive system.

Baillie was seen as a troublemaker. He was threatened by his fellow farmers, who feared his alarms might damage the export market for their foodstuffs, and had his loans foreclosed by a local banker who told him it was a warning to stop undermining the community.

Casey Ruud risked his job to insist that his employers, Rockwell, follow their own safety rules. He found illegal waste dumps, design and production faults that would have required instant closure had Hanford been a civilian facility following the rules of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and worse. He found 55-gallon drums of plutonium nitrate scattered in hallways, with no trace of the records that should have shown where they came from or where they were going. The special copper seals, crucial to the security system controlling the most dangerous industrial product in the world, were kept in an open drawer. Hanford was a terrorist’s dream target.

Karen Steele did her job well. She found sources such as Ruud and Baillie, who took her to farmers such as Don Warsham, who showed her his file of local obituaries. Nearly everyone who had settled in his locality in the 1950s had died, except him and his wife, and she had contracted breast cancer at the age of 35. Another Hanford neighbor, Juanita Andrewjeski, who began to worry after her third miscarriage, showed the reporter her own research, a local map with 35 crosses for heart attacks and 32 circles for cancer victims.

We now know that 440 billion gallons of chemical and radioactive liquid waste were poured into the ground at Hanford, including enough plutonium to make 24 nuclear warheads. At Rocky Flats in Colorado, at Oak Ridge, Tenn., Savannah River in South Carolina and at Fernald in Ohio, the steaming, poisonous legacy of the Nuclear Age will burden the U.S. economy for decades to come. The cleanup will cost over $200 billion.

In 1989, as the Bush Administration was taking over from the Reagan team, Bush’s new budget director Richard Darman went to see John Herrington, Reagan’s Energy Secretary.

“Just how bad is this thing?” Darman asked. “How much is it going to cost?”

“Dick,” came the reply, “it’s going to take everything you’ve got.”

For the people of the Columbia Valley, like the victims of Chernobyl and the other unwitting combatants of the nuclear age, it already had.