OAK RIDGE, Tenn. Gently fingering his operation-scarred neck, Steve Heiser considered how his damaged health was seemingly linked to a war fought years before he was born.

"They didn't only drop the atom bomb on Japan," he said, keeping up a smile even as his soft, twangy voice faltered. "It dropped here too, but it didn't explode--it just opened up."

Shades of the past are rising from the rippling East Tennessee hills around the nuclear weapons and research complex in Oak Ridge, spreading out to Chicago and elsewhere around the country.

Heiser, 49, who had his thyroid removed after being diagnosed with cancer about four years ago, is suing the University of Chicago and other contractors involved with the Oak Ridge operations that helped create the first atomic bombs and still continue today to work on weapons and do nuclear research.

He is part of a new class action suit that claims contaminants released from the Oak Ridge plants--radioactive iodine in particular--sickened people in a broad area extending for miles around.

A few miles away, Fannie Ball, 60, also a victim of thyroid cancer, wheezed as she spoke of noxious fogs settling on her neighborhood and of the strange smell of the creek where her children played.

Ball is suing the University of Chicago and other contractors in a separate action, claiming that racial discrimination caused African-Americans to be isolated in a section of Oak Ridge called Scarboro that was particularly exposed to contamination.

The black community is nestled against a ridge that separates modest, squat homes from an atomic weapons plant, only a half mile away, that government documents say has poisoned the water and air in past years. Scarboro is closer than any other area of town to the factory.

Along with the University of Chicago, the two class action suits, filed last month in federal court in Tennessee, target a roster of some of America's top corporations involved at Oak Ridge over the years.

In some ways the suits seem to be a complaint against history itself--against World War II, against the atomic era, against the segregated society of the South half a century ago. But to the victims of disease, the issues are anything but abstract: They are sick, they blame the people who ran the complex, and, in Ball's words, they want "recognition and compensation."

The suits stem in part from the Clinton administration's moves in recent years to open up the annals of the nation's nuclear weapons programs, long shrouded in secrecy.

Recently the government released a list of sites--including the University of Chicago and other area locations--where workers on hush-hush projects may have been exposed to toxic and radioactive materials.

The Oak Ridge suits are being filed largely in reaction to a federally underwritten Tennessee state study that came out last year, which itself was sparked by releases of data early in the Clinton years. The study said pollutants from the complex could well have caused abnormally high rates of cancer and other diseases, though there is no ironclad evidence to show that they did.

A challenging case

Winning the suits likely will be tough. Linking the plaintiffs' sicknesses directly to the Oak Ridge contamination will be difficult, and in any case, the defendants typically would have had clauses in their government contracts exempting them from liability. Oak Ridge has been a government-funded enterprise from the beginning.

But the plaintiffs are represented by law firms around the country experienced in suits over radiation poisoning, and the attorneys are well aware of such contract clauses.

The University of Chicago's involvement starts in the frantic months in the early 1940s when America was racing Nazi Germany to build the weapon that could determine the outcome of World War II.

After scientists led by Enrico Fermi created the world's first controlled chain reaction in 1942 on the Hyde Park campus, the Army began a Herculean building program on a 59,000-acre site in Tennessee to construct facilities to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for the bomb. Two other centers for what was called the Manhattan Project were at Los Alamos, N.M., and Hanford, Wash.

The Army persuaded a team of University of Chicago scientists to operate the first pilot plutonium plant at Oak Ridge, although the scientists would have preferred to do the work at what became Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont instead of in the backwoods 500 miles from their campus.

Laboring day and night, the scientists and thousands of construction workers got the plant, called X-10, up and running in only nine months. It began producing plutonium from irradiated uranium in November 1943.

At the plant's center was a graphite reactor, designed and operated by the University of Chicago team, that still stands today as an attraction for visitors to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The University of Chicago withdrew as the contract operator in 1945--about a month before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan--and the management was taken over by Monsanto Corp., one of a series of operators at the Oak Ridge complex over the years.

Though the university relinquished its oversight more than 55 years ago and contamination from the X-10 plant and two others (which the school didn't supervise) called K-25 and Y-12 has occurred over a long time, the institution is central to the case, contends one of the plaintiff's attorneys.

"They committed the original sin," said George Barrett, a Nashville lawyer who has successfully sued Vanderbilt University in an unconnected case involving radiation poisoning.

The university was in charge when the X-10 plant began running, and it was there when black workers were originally put in segregated compounds, Barrett said.

There is little doubt that the Oak Ridge complex posed a possible health risk to its workers and area residents from the very beginning. The seven-year, $14 million study released last year by the Tennessee Department of Health stated flatly that "environmental contamination of the region by the U.S. government's industrial operations on the Oak Ridge Reservation has occurred since 1943."

The study homes in on airborne radioactive iodine, intentionally released from X-10, and mercury from the Y-12 weapons plant as the substances most likely to have affected the health of people living around the complex.

Radioactive iodine tends to concentrate in the thyroid gland, and the study concluded that up to 150 cases of thyroid cancer beyond the normal rate may have occurred because of the Oak Ridge pollution. There have been no epidemiological surveys to determine the actual number of cases that have occurred, however.

In addition, the study estimated that 350,000 pounds of mercury were released from 1950 to 1982, mostly into a creek that runs through the Y-12 site and then ambles not far from the Scarboro community.

A visible contamination

Children from Scarboro as well as other areas used to swim and play at the creek during those years, residents say. The study said central nervous system and kidney damage could have resulted from that kind of exposure. It added that fish from waterways that the creek fed into could have damaged fetuses carried by women who ate significant amounts.

The mercury so saturated the Scarboro area that residents almost treated it as part of the natural environment, they said. "The kids caught it in bottles, and you saw these little bubbles and beads and stuff," said R.L. Ayres, a 77-year-old Scarboro plaintiff who has lived there since the first houses were built in the early 1950s.

Even today, Scarboro children get sick at an alarming rate. A 1998 survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a third of the community's children have potentially severe respiratory problems. Some 13 percent have been diagnosed with asthma, compared with a national average of 7 percent.

"Had we not been put over here, we'd have a better chance of not getting the first dose of everything," Ball said.

Black workers who had been segregated in huts during the war were given the Scarboro area to live in starting in the early 1950s. It was located in a valley previously containing trailers for whites.

The University of Chicago's policy is not to comment on pending litigation, but Alvin Weinberg, a Chicago scientist who led the design team for the first Oak Ridge reactor, called it "ridiculous" to connect the school with segregation of blacks.

University scientists basically did what the government told them to do, said Weinberg, 85, who became director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory after the war and still lives in the town.

"It was a Southern, segregated town, and the Army wasn't interested in social experiments," he said. In any case, no one at the time thought the area that became Scarboro would be contaminated, he said.

"What they were mainly interested in was winning the ---damn war. That's something people lose sight of," he said.

Both Ball and Heiser, however, said they appreciate the crucial work that went on at Oak Ridge but are angry at being kept in the dark about the risks for decades afterward. "Any of us would have worked for our country, because they needed us, but they could have told us after the war," Ball said.

The lawsuits charge that the Oak Ridge managers failed to warn the public about the dangers of radioactive and other harmful emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy began to declassify information on the problem in the early 1990s, though contamination warnings were posted on waterways around Oak Ridge about 10 years before that.

A `haunting' backdrop

Heiser, who grew up about 10 miles east of Oak Ridge and has always lived in the area, said the plants were "always there, haunting everybody" because of vague fears about radiation.

But when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1997, he said he didn't make the connection because--unlike so many in surrounding counties--he hadn't worked there. The doctors asked him whether he ever had radiation treatments for acne or excessive dental X-rays, he said.

It was only when the state study came out detailing risks from the radioactive iodine emissions that he came to believe Oak Ridge was responsible for the event that he said has changed his life and put him into "a different category."

He is undergoing regular medical treatment, is weaker than he used to be and suffers sudden chills, he said. A mechanic who has been athletic all his life, he continues to play softball and basketball, "but I'm good for just so much. It's like a light switch going off," he said.

His wife, Darlene, 46, a lifelong area resident who also is a party to the suit, said doctors say she has an enlarged thyroid, though she hasn't been diagnosed with cancer.

In addition to money damages, their suit asks for an admission of wrongdoing, a public apology and a court-supervised fund to pay for medical and biological monitoring of people who may have been affected. It also seeks a fund for scientific research on the issues involved.

Ball, who became disabled and stopped working at Oak Ridge in 1989, takes 14 pills a day for asthma and diabetes as well as her thyroid condition, and she said she has been tested for lung and bladder cancer.

A Scarboro resident since 1954, she has a 42-year-old daughter who never worked at the Oak Ridge plants but who also has been diagnosed with thyroid problems, she said.

She doesn't know much about the University of Chicago, whose supervision at Oak Ridge ended long before she got there, but she said she believes the finger should point somewhere for Scarboro's ills.

"Whoever was here, whether it was Chicago or whoever, they should clean what they messed up."

     Here again we have the issue of toxic metals and radiation played up over the more pressing issue of high HF and fluorides in air that damage the thyroid gland and lead to cancer.    It always originates from a particular loose alliance of persons.   These lawsuits appear more a public PR stage act to help suppress the HF issues.