The news of Europe as it occurs the world is
now awaiting the arrival
in Berlin of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
America must keep out
of this war the President
the Congress should be
supported in their every effort to keep us out.
At 9AM this morning his Majesties Ambassador
in Berlin informed the German
government a state of war would exist between the
two countries as from that hour
Now we are at
war and we are going to make war
and persevere in making war
until the other side
has had enough of it.
My great uncle Raemer Schreiber was born
in 1910, in Yamhill County, Oregon.
He got up and did chores early before school
everyday I know he played with his cousins
he'd go out and build a campfire for lunch and
play for the
afternoon and then return just before dinner.
He attended McMinnville High School
and then on to undergrad at Linfield College
he did Masters work at the University of Oregon
and completed a doctorate in physics at
Purdue University.
He was a teaching assistant they had to have
a summer job
so Uncle Raemer and Aunt Marge would come back
to Oregon
where he worked on my grandfathers farm.
I think it said of Uncle Raemer to
have an amazing
work ethic for the rest of his life.
He had opportunity and a place to come back
too, they put up some vegetables,
that they could take back with them for
the school year
and it was a chance to see family.
My dad and his farming days in
McMinnville were long and tedious and tiring
it was certainly pre- gasoline powered engine
even for the threshing machine
because when he was ten, they were threshing
with a steam powered thresher which had a
belt on it that
looked like it could wrap up a building
he did not like farming, and in fact he
thought he was going to be an electrician
when he was ten
electricity came to the valley
he spent some period of time
wiring the houses
it might have been at Linfield ,
but Im inclined
to think it was more at the University of Oregon
where he got diverted to physics,
and it was a result of a professors intervention
and it was a very fortuitous decision on his
part needless to say.
My mom decided to come for my
graduation then in June of '41
we spent several pleasant weeks together
graduation was the usual thing
she probably only stayed two or three weeks because
pop wasn't in good health at that time.
I think the
physicists that came of age
in the 1930's and early 40's, represented
American society as a whole there were a fair
number including
Scheib, who grew up on farms, some like
Oppenheimer and
Teller came from well to do families so I would
say the physicists
represented American society at the time, you
had a little bit of everything
all kinds of backgrounds all kinds of religions.
Schreiber epitomised physics
and physicist
out of the first era of modernization they were
exploring new territory.
E is equal MC squared showed
that very amount of mass may be
converted into a very large amount of energy.
If Germany was going to build an atomic bomb
Heisenberg was going to be the
Oppenheimer of Germany
Heisenberg collaborating with others
in Germany and Denmark
elucidated the structure of complex atoms and
announced the principle of
indeterminacy of physical measurements.
Heisenberg was an internationally renowned
physicist he came for a
physics conference and I know lectured
around the country
Uncle Raemer took pictures of him and
listened to his lectures this was
a brilliant man who had every possibility
of developing the
bomb before we got it done in America.
One day a knock at the door and there was
Dr Oppenheimer coming to see him
he'd remembered that Raemer had taken
photos in those
lectures at Purdue and he asked if he
still have the negatives?
We'll Percival and I put in that summer
and fall getting the Cyclotron
physically removed into the new laboratory,
expected to take me all the next year
with the help of several graduate students
in doing this.
This was a very important tool in early
nuclear research a lot of people who
got started in the Manhattan Project had
a background in in some topic
related to particle accelerator technology of
the day, Cyclotrons were an important
emerging tool in the study of nuclear
scattering and nuclear reactions
he was really in an ideal place at Purdue
with that Cyclotron, to jump off
the precipice of the new Nuclear physics
as it became important
for national security.
We'll that summer after I did a
couple more things to wind up my thesis
for publication, which I never did quite get
wound up for.
For my dads thesis, my mom typed it,
I know is an act of intense activity
because it was submitted 5 hours before
it was due and I don't know
how many times my mother typed it?
I would guess at the end of the year that
she probably knew as much about what dad did
as dad did because
she had learn how to spell all that stuff.
Schreib was truly unique at Los Alamos
during the war there were 6 or 7
thousand scientists, technicians but there
really were only 2 or 3
people who could actually build an atomic
bomb actually put it together
handle the parts, Schreib was one
of those people,
Outside of Holloway and one other person
these are the only guys
who could really build an atomic bomb Oppenheimer
could conceive it,
Teller could conceive it, Bethe could conceive
it, but those guys
really couldn't build it they couldn't put their
hands on it, they couldnt' assemble it
and so this was the role that Schreib played
both at Trinity and again
with Fatman on Tinian later on.
1938 brought the startling discovery of
fission of the Uranium Nucleus by
Neutron bombardment, leading names in this
research carried on in Germany
were Dr Otto Hahn and Dr Fritz Strassmann.
The discovery of nuclear fission was like
the discovery of fire.
It was the first major form of
energy that does not depend upon ultimately
the sun so it was a turning point for
humankind when that discovery was made
Lise Meitner, working at Copenhagen soon
demonstrated that fission of the
nucleus was accompanied by a release of enormous
amounts of energy.
Time was short the inevitable entry of the
United States was accepted one reason
for the decision to concentrate forces against
the Germans was recognition
that German scientists could produce weapons
of great devastation.
through the cunard ladies and
gentlemen we interrupt this broadcast to bring you
an important bulletin from United Press flash
Washington the White House
announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
stay tuned to WOR for
further developments...
On December 7th, 1941 there
was Pearl Harbor
we'll we weren't sure what to do, research came
to a grinding halt as what was there for a
nuclear physicist to do?
Oppenheimer and a number of others were
recruiting extensively across the
United States would raid universities for graduate
talent if Oppenheimer couldn't
convince say a mentor directly he would call on
James Conant at Harvard
to intervene on his behalf and so these
people were released very often reluctantly
and with some animosity during the early
part of the war.
There's a continuing question of
what did I do to help out the war effort
and periodically somebody would come in
recruiting for these other war related
research jobs and every time I'd be
interviewed I'd go and tell
Dr Lark-Horovitz about it and he'd raise my
salary a little bit and say
"stick it out, don't want you to go, do
the work here".
Marshall Holloway showed up
approached Perc and myself the
deal was worked out that we were to
work on a secret project that we
couldn't be told about until we had agreed that
we would indeed work on it,
and of course we did agree our contacts
we're through either
Marshall or through Hans Bethe who was
our theoretical consultant
and we then worked our tails off morning,
afternoon and evening
and most Saturdays, we did did try to take
Sundays off keep our
wives happy, We'll in May of '43 we were
invited to come out to Project Y.
We finally convinced Hans Bethe that the large
cross-section for the
Deuterium/Tritium reaction we've been
measuring all summer was
for real and so, we closed out the
project in September
I well remember Schreiber coming home
at noon, Paula was a baby
and he sort of mysteriously, swished me
back to the back of the house
and then portentously said what would you think
of going to New Mexico?
all I knew about New Mexico was the Capital
was Santa Fe and I had no idea
what sort of a place it was, I thought it was
all desert, rattlesnakes and things
like that and actually it didn't sound to
interesting but this was wartime and
I said, its alright with me if you want
to go Ill go
Everybody was suppose to go and
take whatever vacation they wanted to take
for the duration and Marge and Paula got on
the train and went out to Oregon
Traveling in wartime is something you
don't attempt unless you're strong and
I wasn't strong but I was ignorant, I didn't
realize how difficult it was going to
be to take a baby and our luggage, my 70 plus
year old mother and change trains
and all of the soldiers traveling everyone
traveling, the soldiers were
a help they helped me any number of times
when I got in a bind.
And I had the car of course, I got to
Santa Fe a day early and decided to
follow my nose and see if I couldn't get up here
to Los Alamos. So I knew the
general direction to take and I then saw a
rather broad road that showed
a lot of signs of traffic turning off there, so I
followed it came right up
to the guard gate much to the consternation
of the MPs. I asked
for the gentleman whom I had been corresponding
with here and they
didn't know what quite what to do? But finally
an MP got in the car with
me and brought me in and I found the man
in question
and talked to him a little bit and he was a
little surprised that
I got in without any passes being arranged.
but he started to to talk
and I said we finished up work on the Cyclotron
and he said shhh! because
the MP was standing outside and he had to keep
me in his sight,
because MPs didn't know what Cyclotrons were
or why they were of
interest there. Anyhow, having accomplished
my mission essentially,
mostly curiosity and I eventually got out to
Oregon spent about 10 days there
and then after many farewells Marge and Paula
and I came back same
route via Denver, well the time the bus hauled
us into Santa Fe it was pushing on
toward 5 I went roaring over to 109 East Palace
for our passes and they said
I hope we can get you through because they won't
let you in up there after 6 o'clock
well in the meantime we hadn't had any lunch,
so on the way to or from 109 East
Palace I'd seen a bakery and popped in there
and got some sweet rolls.
We started for Los Alamos gave Paula a sweet roll
and shortly afterwards
when we were going up the winding and dusty
and hot mountainside she
preceded to urrp everything up and
of course Marge had just put her
in fresh clothes so she would be pretty for the
arrival, she arrived in the old
Indian blanket which we still carry around
in the back of the car.
The announcement has been made in
Athens tonight that the Greek armies
in Albania have begun a general advance along
the middle northern front the
second big Italian counterattack has been
thrown back and the fascists
Athens says have again suffered heavy loses
and that's all for tonight, listen to
our regular news broadcasts and keep
abreast of history in the making.
I on the next day. after we arrived,
went over with Marshall and Perce
and was duly sworn in given a badge and
taken in to read LA1
which was the primer, told me for the first time
what was really suppose
to be going on.
Groves wanted it to be isolated not only
for safety but also for security he
was kind of obsessed with security and Oppenheimer
wanted a place where
people could be free to talk to each other,
The whole system of the Manhattan Project was
built around no one knowing more than they
needed to know, to do the specific part of the
work they were engaged
in Oppenheimer understood that science does work
that way it works
by people talking to each other. He remembered that
there was a ranch
school so called, it was a private school a
prep school for boys located on a
mesa and that ranch school with its cluster of
dormitories and cottages
for the teachers and one big central hall could
serve as a kind of a starting
point for a laboratory. Where people could be
all inside the fence if you
will barbed wire fencing blocking them away from
the rest of the world,
but they can talk to each other and as soon as
General Groves saw the
place he knew that was the right place
Oppenheimer thought maybe 30 men
would be all they need they ended up with
about 5000.
Because Los Alamos was isolated you didn't
have people coming and
going. Your social life was really the people you
work with or your neighbors
there was some very large functions that were
carried out at Fuller Lodge,
and so you dressed up, you danced, you had music
you drank, you had
a good time and they were stress relievers for the
laboratory as well,
because the men in particular and a few
women were working long
shifts, long weeks and these parties when they
came along were a great opportunity
to relieve stress and to really laugh and have
a good time, if only for a few hours.
Parties at the lab during the war were very
segregated, Mom and dad certainly
partied with the Oppenheimer's and with the
Jetties and with the Holloways and all
the people they knew during the war, it was
always fun I can tell you that.
You didn't talk to the people who came to
the parties about what they did because
you just didn't do that so you had to have some
other way of having a conversation
with them which was certainly more about
family and hobbies and what did you
read lately, rather than what do you do for
a living? You didn't ask that question.
I do remember my parents stories of the
gatherings at the lodge and this was
usually the place where the Saturday night
parties happened.
There were skits and my dad was a
rascal about that he was
quite good about writing up skits that were
good parodies.
we played charades a lot in the family
and he would get a absolutely goofy,
and it was so in contrast to the professional
man of the lab
I totally enjoyed him on that part of it, he and
mom both got the giggles
and had a great time and they had some
very good memories
I know of parties. The women in particular
had a very strong
interrelationship and bonding.
Your mom and dad weren't there when
children were born
because Los Alamos is closed and they weren't
allowed to come in.
So you did develop very strong relationships
with your neighbors
and those carried over I know my mom had
lifelong friends after that
I kind have duality as far as my recollections
of her her main position and the way
that she needed to be, specially early on, she
was Miss Dr RE Schreiber, so she in a
lot of ways was the social coordinator and
social aspect of my grandfather and would
also keep Paula and Sara in-line Theres very much
the attitude, we cannot do this because
your father is who he so especially as he
started working his way up as head of the
W Division, it was you need to act befitting
the children of an Associate Director.
We got a television soon as they were
available in black and white, as children
we werent allowed to turn on the TV and watch it
by ourselves, it was evening
and it was after dinner when it was on my
neighbors on the other hand we could
go over and watch Roy Rogers and Gene Autry
shows on their television set.
In the house, lots of reading, there
was always reading, Dad would usually get
us up on Sunday morning with some symphony on his
stereo system that he
had cranked up so we knew we werent going to
stay in bed any longer, so culture
was part of the environment always.
My Grandma absolutely loved that
every now and then and I say loved sarcastically
there, that my grandfather would say so and so is
coming into town on Friday we
need to host em and this was Thursday afternoon
late, so now my grandmother
gets to completely re-organize the entire
house, figure out how shes going
to host these people which sometimes could
have been another scientist, it could
have been somebody from Washington, it could
have been dignitary from another
country, she got to deal with it sometimes
a little begrudgingly she had a lot of good
friends, the other wives would help out and pitch
in as needed and they all kind of had
a tight knit club, It was a kind of funny
duality because my grandmother was kind of
little bit more the rigid one on the exterior side
because she very much wanted to make
sure they had an image where my grandfather at
the same time was much
more laid back and casual about it was you know,
well this just happens to be the job
Im doing I'm not somebody special, it just happens to
be where I've gotten, heres the
entire hierarchy of nuclear physics as you
know It today back then, it was. you know
these are just the people who are working & they're
working together and so
theyre going to blow off steam together.
He worked in Omega he and Perc King with
Enrico Fermi doing the
Water Boiler Experiments and I still dont know
for sure what the Water Boiler is?
I've seen it.
New discoveries were being made everyday
so on a Monday or Tuesday
they would be learning about it because the
theoreticians finally figured
this part out and it was, this is the way we
think it is, lets go prove it.
It's amazing that the five of us
didn't seem to think it particularly odd that
we were being asked to build something we just
heard of a few days before
So when my Grandpa first got to Los Alamos one
of the first projects he was
on was the Water Boiler Project, code named to not
give away what it really
was but it did have meaning to it it became
one of the first aqueous
homogeneous reactions using Uranium.
What we did. was to keep adding
Uranium to the solution as it became
available, so we had the world's supply of
separated U235 down in Omega, and this
led to certain complications because it
was a heavily guarded site you went out
to the woods around there at your own risk
because there were MPs stationed
around this fence and there was at least
one machine gun post.
As it got further and further along they
finally got to the point where they were
predicting criticality.
Guessing at how many grams it would
go critical, I think we were we
were all within 15 or 20 grams out of some 700.
Fermi took the controls and almost
on the exact spot where they predicted
it was going to go critical, it went critical
I remember my Grandpa making a
comment on it really kind of awe inspiring this thing
is living and breathing on its
own self-sustaining reaction. very early on.
very bleeding edge.
Well there was always a problem of a
few bugs here and there we hadnt
realized that the solution would give off so called
Radiolytic gas, there were
also radioactive products being carried off, next
thing was to run a copper tube
up one of the tallest pine trees there
and discharge the gas up there
and hope that it would dissipate, well that
didn't seem to work, as we
found out because we were running the reactor
and running around with
radiation instruments to see what was happening
and the instruments started
going off the scale. So Fermi and I went outside
as we got closer to this pipe
that went up the tree the hotter it got, then we
came back in, the instruments
still read very high until we put them down and
walked away from them.
So we found out that we were contaminated,
our clothes were
contaminated. Fermi said "well now, that isnt
too bad that's all
short life stuff and it's soft, but Schreib
you and I better go home
and change our clothes and take a shower",
so we did, I just hung the
clothes in the closet, a couple of days later I
got em out took em down
and checked them and they were alright,
little bit more casual
about that then we are now
They understood as healthy young men
and a few women that they
would otherwise be out fighting on the front
lines somewhere that they
were being protected from the risk of death in
battle in order to perfect
this new weapon of war, If they had to cut some
corners take a little
more radiation than might be best for them
that they should go
ahead and do so in the interests of potentially
shortening the war
and saving lives.
Water Boiler had two purposes. Uranium
is going to be used at least one
atomic bomb and that bomb was Little Boy, and so
if youre going to use Uranium
or Plutonium in an atomic bomb you need to know
what is the critical state is? that
is, how much material you can amass before it
blows itself apart, and
so the purpose of the Water Boiler reactors of
which there were three
variations was to find out the critical mass of
Uranium how much could be put together.
About June, the decision was made
that the Water Boiler should be rebuilt
the first one could run possibly up to 100
watts if everybody stayed behind
the wall because we had no shielding, and about
the same time Marshall and
Charlie and Don Kerst were reassigned to other
jobs and it was left
up to Perce King and myself Perce was the
group leader and I was his deputy we
were to then build this HYPO high-powered reactor
along with designing the shielding
and supervising all of this building
primarily involving being down there
everyday with old clothes on and I learned
how to run an acetylene torch and burn
out pieces of lead brick to fit around control
rods and that sort of thing.
Enrico Fermi was a very important figure
in physics I think the main reason was
because he was equally adept as a theoretician
and an experimentalist
he was competent with the theory of nuclear
scattering and nuclear reactions
and did a lot to develop the ideas behind how
we understand the nucleus and
he was also phenomenal as an experimentalist.
Fermi would come down in the
afternoons he was busy mornings with the more
serious affairs of bomb design, but then the
HYPO was his play thing so he would come down
after lunch, call us in all around and say
"what do we do today?"
and then he would
answer his own question because he knew exactly
what he wanted to do, but then we
would all go out and work in the shop if there
was something to be built and then we would
jointly operate the experiment It was a very
meaningful learning process for me
because he had almost phenomenal intuition for
what things ought to be. If the answers
didnt come up the way he thought they should be
he would patiently go back and
repeat the experiment and he was usually
right It was very
interesting to work with him.
There was a terrible and almost
devastating discovery made about Plutonium.
Originally the laboratory was going to
build one type of an atomic bomb what
we know as Little Boy and it was going to shoot
one piece of Uranium at a second
piece or was going to shoot one piece of
Plutonium at a second piece of Plutonium
In the spring of 1944 all the Plutonium
that had been used in measurements
in Los Alamos up to that time had come from an
linear accelerator, It was very
different from the production Plutonium that
began flowing from Hanford Washington
where Plutonium in large amounts comparatively
speaking meaning grams
rather than micrograms was bombarded heavily
inside of a reactor with neutrons
when that happens you not only make the
kind of Plutonium they wanted which
was PU-239, but also PU-240, another isotope
241, yet another isotope 242
yet another isotope were so intensely
fissionable that they tended to pre-detonate
the gun-bomb that was designed to handle the
Plutonium would have fired
one piece up the barrel of the cannon but it
would have actually melted down
this was a disaster, Los Alamos was thinking
they would only have one bomb
by the end of the war and that had not been
what their intention had been they
spent the summer of 1944, everybody in the
lab who was working on the Plutonium
bomb was busy trying to think of alternatives,
and what they came up with an idea for
a whole new way of detonating fissionable
materials that they called implosion. It
Involved having a sphere of the Plutonium at the
center of a large spherical weapon
surrounded by some Uranium tamper to hold
it together a little longer and then
around that would be big blocks of
high-explosive.
To use high- explosives in such a
precision manner because you would
have to crush this ball of Plutonium
symmetrically was a very iffy thing
high-explosives have been used a little bit
to sculpt Mount Rushmore but
that was about the extent of the knowledge
of using high-explosives,
These separate blocks would bring the
converging shock wave down to fit a
little ball of Plutonium in the middle and
actually squeeze it to twice its previous
density, making it supercritical and setting
off a chain reaction in the
Plutonium so fast, that it didnt have time to
pre-detonate so everything
in the lab, the Uranium bomb was basically done,
everybody in the lab turned to
dealing with this new problem of inventing
this new way of detonating
nuclear weapons.
Trinity first and foremost was simply going
to see if high- explosives could be
used to crush a ball of Plutonium.
By February '45 the design for Fat Man
was pretty much complete, but there
was still a lot of anxiety about not only would
it work but how well would it work
and so there was a search for one across the country
for a site to detonate what
could be a very large bomb and it was decided to go
to the Jornada Del Muerto
in southern New Mexico.
In March of 1945, the plans for the
bomb test at Trinity and the overseas operation
had been firmed up and Marshall asked me if I
would join him in working under
Bob Bacher for the field tests.
If youre going to invent an entirely
new way to detonate a weapon especially
when its complicated as pieces of high-
explosive that are shaping the charge
in an entirely different direction and so forth,
youre probably going to have to
test this system and of course it was tested in
various ways without a nuclear
core, but ultimately the only test that was going
to satisfy everyone was a test at full-yield.
We'll the job was to get all the
procedures and the instrumentation, the
tools and so
on worked out for the Alamogordo test the
Trinity test and to set up identical kits to ship
overseas they had to go out by ship to
the Marianas Islands Tinian and there
was a very tight time scale for that so we had
top priority all over the place and my
djob in particular was to assemble these kits and
check out the tools and then
we went on with the preparations for
the Trinity test.
No one was quite sure how much explosion
you get out of this device and there was
even a betting pool that was put together by the
scientists ranging from zero to blows
up the world, and everybody took a bet
and put in some money
You would choose a yield. in kilotons of what
you thought the blast might be and
the winner was a man by the name of Isidore Rabi
II Rabi he was a
Nobelist actually in physics from Columbia
and he won not because
he calculated anything but he got to Trinity late
the train was delayed
at Lamy, and he took the last number in the
betting pool and his number
was the closest to the actual yield.
No one has ever seen such a thing before
one of the physicists who was there
I interviewed Philip Morrison said I was 10
miles away and it was as if someone
had opened the door on an oven, thats how much
heat was coming off the
fireball even that far away.
Teller put on sunscreen, sun lotion to
protect against the sunburn and in fact Fermi
anticipating the wind tore up small pieces of
paper so when the blast wave
or the wind passed by him he measured the
lateral dispersion of the paper.
So they built a tower about a hundred feet
high out of steel and they put a shot cab as
they came to be called a little cabin up on top
where the bomb could be could sit and
all the wiring and all the testing & everything
else could be run off from that tower in every
direction, out to bunkers that were built in
the desert. Out farther to an old ranch that
was used as an assembly site for the weapon.
My grandfather was actually back at the
McDonald ranch house which is where they
did all the early assembly theres a few pictures
of him around.
The shot was getting ready storms are
rolling in that night, and theyre afraid
of electricity
setting off the device, they actually left a poor
guy up there to monitor the entire device
in the electrical storm, as my grandpa put it he
wasnt quite sure what he was supposed
to do because lightning struck it he wasnt going
to do anything, but they wanted
somebody up there monitoring device anyway.
General Groves running around insisting
that the weather change he was after all a
General in the Army and he ordered the weather
to change dammit the
weather should change and it did!
My grandpa had my grandma pack lunches for
him and said OK were going to run some
more tests, didn't say anything beyond that my
grandma that point in time also knew
not to ask because my grandpa wasn't
going to say.
Oppenheimer at that point down to 115
pounds, this man of six feet
one inches in height, from a bout of Chickenpox
over the last two weeks, leaning against the
post in the bunker saying: "I must stay conscious,
I must stay conscious", worried that his weapon
wouldn't work, they pushed the button and it worked.
At the five minute warning we were
supposed to lie down, and we had to keep
our heads covered turned away from the blast,
and the light of course that was the longest
five-minutes I ever went through in my life, we
could see some eleven miles away where the
tower was the light that was on top of the tower
just a little tiny candle flame essentially,
and then
all of a sudden the whole world was lighted up very
brilliantly, I had some welders goggles which
I put on and turned to look at the blast and
the fireball had faded enough that the welders
goggles we're too faint, so I snatched them off
and then it was too bright for my eyes
didn't blind me
accept momentarily as a bright light would, and
then after long time why here came the
sound of the bomb itself, which was more concussion
than any noise and wasn't half
as impressive as the light, but we certainly
knew something had happened.
A lot of people in town actually knew
about it, not necessarily exactly what was
going to happen
some of the scientists and told her wives okay
on this such a date, this time roughly, you
might want to go over here and look this
direction, we'll that's wasn't my grandpa's style.
And we came home later that day of
course we were forbidden to tell anyone what had
happened except by the time we got back here,
everybody at the site practically including
the wives knew something had happened.
The night that the test went off my grandma
was sleeping soundly because she wasn't
told to go out, and all her neighbors, everyone
else up on a mountain looking
the correct direction and the next day through
the wives clubs & whatnot
hear chatter of did you see this did you see that?
and my grandma was a little at a time,
perturbed to my grandpa of "why didn't you tell me?"
If it was secret he kept it
secret and thats the way it was, don't
bother asking.
Trinity while it was a big deal and a
consumed a lot of time and energy, it came
and went quickly, and the people at the laboratory
had to move on because the
bigger mission was to build the combat bombs.
Admiral Nimitz recently pointed
out at Okinawa that the Pacific forces welcome
the help of United States airmen employed
in Europe, they know it will require months to
shift Yank power across the Atlantic.
The materials for the Uranium core for the
Little Boy bomb was delivered by ship,
Groves did not want to lose these cores so he
preferred to deliver them by ship thinking
that a plane would be a riskier way to carry
these billion dollar pieces of metal to this
little island where they were going to be
assembled into the weapon. But there really
wasn't time with the Pu core, it was delivered
just a couple days before it was actually used and
therefore had to be delivered by plane and
Schreib was the one who carried the thing out.
I was picked for that job by a flip
of a quarter, Boyce McDaniel and
I we're both logical candidates for the
position Marshall wasn't willing to make
the choice and either was Bob Bacher, so we finally
flipped a coin and I won.
Tinian is one of the islands in the
Marianas group in the central Pacific
very hot, very humid, lots of jungle, it was
a big air base being used by
the 20th Air Force to bomb Japan.
Ordered enough GI clothes to wear out
there because we went out as pseudo
officers civilians working with the military.
Combat troops are very quick to point
out people who who don't fight and so
for people like Schreiber and others who were
there they were seen as a
special class of citizen they were getting some
special treatment but worst of all
they weren't really fighting, and so people
really did wonder what their
value was to the war effort.
Some security officers came by the house
with a GI car waited while I told
Marge goodbye and off we went driving to
Albuquerque, the convoy included
the core for the bomb, and I was the quote
technical courier for the bomb we
drove to Albuquerque and got on the train the
three of us together with the
little case that carried the core got out to
Oakland and met with the automobiles
and taken to the base where I was told to go
into the ditching briefing where
you were told what you were supposed to do if
the plane had to go down and I
was right in the middle of it when somebody tapped
me on the shoulder and said come on we're
going, so we got on the airplane and
we started out.
He stuck the core in the back of plane
and went up front with the crew which
evidently made the crew rather nervous asked him
to go back and strap it down
back there in case it rolled around, it
would not have done anything it was
subcritical, but but he did.
I was met by the usual crew of MP's we
had our Quonset which was air
conditioned for our workshop and this was
two or three miles away from
camp toward the airfield and that was in another
heavily guarded compound,
we'll it was nice to have air conditioning in fact
we became quite popular with the
rest of the crew that was out there Los Alamos
because I think there
were only two such places and the other one had
the high-explosives in it so people
weren't quite as happy sitting there as they
were in our cozy quarters. We'll the first
operation was Little Boy the gun type assembly
and I had nothing to do with
that work, there was a whole separate crew which
took care of putting that one
together. The plane took off alright and the drop
was made on Hiroshima, we were
so remote from the explosion
that it was a little hard to realize the tragic
loss of life which actually occurred, one of
the greatest damages was due to the
fact that the city was just built out of paper
and bamboo and the intense
heat from the bomb started a firestorm which
swept across the city.
Most of the damage from atomic bombs
about 95+ percent comes from
explosive force, when they were looking at
where to drop an atomic bomb and
then how to drop an atomic bomb one of
the issues became at what altitude
and so ideally to maximize he destructive portion
of the atomic bomb
you would detonate it at some number feet above
ground in this case it was about
1800 feet plus or minus 100 feet, it also helps
to minimize the amount of radiation
and amount of residual radiation that you get,
so if you explode something close to
the ground, and the explosion and entrains
dirt, steel, concrete, whatever, it can irradiate
some of those materials and make them radioactive
and so you would have an
environmental wasteland if you will and so one of
the benefits and its a marginal
benefit I think is that if you detonate an a
atomic bomb at altitude you don't get the
environmental damage you would if it were detonated
closer to the to the ground.
Then we waited to see if anything would
happen, I believe thats when the ultimatum
was sent out for Japan to surrender in fact there
had been surrender leaflets
dropped, while nothing did happen and so on August
9th Fatman was dropped and
we had gone to work assembling our part of
the bomb, that is the core and capsule
that fitted into the high-explosives.
A fairly complicated process, you
have a little half-piece of the Plutonium Core
and the little initiator
thats put very carefully in the hole in
the middle, and the next piece of Plutonium
on top, then the tamper of Uranium which is in
several pieces, and you're working down
inside this huge explosive lens system which is about
4 or 5 feet in diameter
with these huge blocks of waxy high-explosive
around it, and you're reaching over down into it
hooking things together putting pieces in,
someone who assembled the weapon.
It might have been Schreiber I don't recall
remembered that when the
thing was supposedly finished he noticed that
some of the wires were reversed
and stayed up all night reversing them back the
way they were supposed to be
or the thing might not have worked at all, and
it was General Groves horror that the
bomb might not work, the material would land on the
ground and the Japanese would sweep
it all up and use it to make a bomb themselves,
not a very likely scenario but General Groves
worried a lot about making sure these things
actually worked when and how
they were supposed to work.
This plane had a target which was
obscured by clouds and they picked Nagasaki as a
secondary target we're a little low on gas when
they dropped the bomb they made it
back to Iwo Jima refueled there and then returned
back to Tinian later that afternoon
surrender was finally arranged and we thought
we thought we would of come home,
generals decided that we would have to stay
there until Japan was occupied
so we did stay there until first week in
September and we finally given orders
to return home, and they were busily making another
core back here in Los
Alamos and it could have delivered out there
if there had been any hanky-panky
about a fake surrender.
This was not only the blockade, but it was
the invasion force, almost every single ship
was a landing craft landing ship there was
thousands upon thousands of
people that were getting ready to invade, he knew
his job was to stop this, the very
specific action that he's helping out with has to
work, they wanted to end the war
and as quickly as they could.
Harold Agnew who helped build atomic bomb,
flew the Hiroshima mission
and later became a director here Los Alamos
says that the hospital
facilities being built on Tinian
and Saipan were massive, they were anticipating
casualties far beyond what we had seen and
so had we invaded Japan rather than drop the
atomic bombs there would
have been a lot of deaths on both sides and it
would have been a horrific scene
with no good outcome for anybody.
One of the things which I've always
remembered when people ask me, "we'll you
know, wasn't this a terrible thing to do and
don't you regret awfully having been involved",
and so on, is one morning I got up and was walking
around the camp and looked out
on the leeward side of the island and all I could
see were landing craft from clear out to the
horizon, these were landing craft that were
being worked up the coast along the Mariana
Islands for the invasion of Japan, because that
was the plan which was the backup in case the
bombs did not get delivered, or they didn't
work as promised and when you stop
to consider how many hundreds of thousands of
troops that would of been involved in that
sort of an operation, what sort of massacre
there would of been on both sides,
they would of had to make an amphibious landing, and
I think that there was a net
saving of both Japanese and American lives by
dropping the bomb.
We're just told that Wednesday & Thursday
have been declared legal, federal holidays
VJ. day, maybe you can hear the people screaming
down there ladies and
gentlemen let's give a listen...
I think they're will always questions,
strong opinions about the use of the
atomic bombs during World War II,
by the summer of 1945, in total
had claimed about 70M lives, if you figure that
World War II started as early as 1932 in China
and certainly in the 30's with
Nazi Germany by the time 1945 the war
was over 10 years old
and in a war that killed 70 million people
it was time for it to end, and the atomic bomb
certainly did that.
The Japanese Emperor having been
apprised of what happened at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did an absolutely
historically unique thing he stepped out
of his role as the spiritual leader of the
country into politics he said a new and
most terrible weapon of war has forced us to
think the unthinkable and asked his
people to lay down their arms which remarkably
enough they did with very little debate.
All we can see is a sea of humanity people
in every color costume people
from all the nations of world have assembled
here today to celebrate
this truly great victory over the Japanese.
The war was over I'd returned from
Tinian and the place was in a fair turmoil
there was another group of senior personnel who
were much concerned about the laboratory
and they stayed on to help plan a strategy for
whatever was to come at this time
Oppenheimer resigned to return to academic
career and Norris Bradbury was
selected to replace him.
Bradbury just ended up sending out a message
to everyone saying its time
to make the decision if your'e going to leave
leave but if you're going to stay
stay so we can start actually figuring out
who's here what we have to work with
and start going forward.
There was of course, a great deal
of uncertainty on the civilians who had been
brought in for the duration and there were
about 2000 GI's all they wanted to do was to get
out, not to mention all the housewives and
families that didn't know if they should pack
up and get ready to move or what was to happen.
Bradbury develops this philosophy that the
laboratory would become a scientific laboratory
he changes the name from its wartime designation
which is basically just
Los Alamos. He undertakes programs and basic
science and weapons work. He makes it a
meaningful place for scientists to come and
practice their craft and many and Schreib is
one of these that does stay and makes a
major contribution,
The war was over, mission
accomplished, what next
Schreib comes to Los Alamos during the
war as a relatively junior scientist but at the end
of the war he becomes a senior scientist he
becomes one of those people who stays who
takes on management responsibilities who's
responsible for providing scientific
leadership and he along with Bradbury for whom
he develops a very close relationship
over the years really do save the laboratory
intellectually after the war.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen
we're speaking to you from the site
of the laboratory
of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos
New Mexico where in a moment we'll bring
you the ceremonies of the Army-Navy E Award Colonel
Kenneth B Nichols will act as
ceremonies for the afternoon.
Dr. Oppenheimer was giving his speech
everybody was gathered on the lawn at
Fuller Lodge I was in the car with my parents
listening to the speech and at some point I
moved from my mothers lap to my fathers lap and
then I sat on the horn, it was recorded
on the radio,
my mom wrote a letter to her parents and told
them that I had had achieved posterity
because I in fact, had been
recorded and they
had heard the horn on the radio broadcast.
My sister was almost 3 at that
point I was a year old and it was much
more important for
her to see him and of course my mother,
she was just grinning from ear-to-ear
My sister was my best friend my mentor
she was very significant part of my
life all the time,
we were enough different that we didn't actually
compete for people or attention at all we got
along quite well, she was a very delightful person
to grow up with and she took good care of me.
A Lot of scientists started
packing up and leaving going back to the
different colleges the
colleges needed them to teach.
Dr, Lark Harovitz called me several
times and urged me to come back to
Purdue, Marge and I talked about this and we just
decided that was going to be a pretty
dull life, so we turned him off.
My grandfather already had his PhD
really liked the area and decided at
least for a short term to stick around.
I went and talked to Bob Bacher
who was my division leader and he said
we'll what are they offering you and I told
him he says we'll we'll match
that offer if you'll stay, and I think it was
in that winter when all the pipes
froze up, the captain in charge of the water
supply threatened to shoot himself
if it froze again, but it froze again but he
didn't shoot himself, then in
January of '46 Norris got a letter from General
Groves which essentially said hold
everything together as best you can, we're
going to plan to do something about the water
do something about the houses, you should
plan to continue at least for the next several
years, and then it was about in February of
that year that the Navy decided to
hold a test of the effects of Nuclear
bombs on Navy vessels.
The joint chiefs of staff approved the code
name suggested by Admiral Blandy and
the venture was christened
Operation Crossroads.
With so little Plutonium and Uranium
available for the first bombs, the scientist had
to devise ways to see if they would work the way
they thought they would work but without actually
blowing them up, the way they did that
was basically to surround a bomb core with
stacks of material that would reflect neutrons
coming from the bomb core
back into the core and increase the chain
reaction, if theres enough material it's
basically infinite in which case the material
blows up if there's not enough material the
chain reaction fizzles out at some point along
the way and slowly dies down so because of this
two different facts it's possible to determine
whether you have the right sized bomb core.
It's a tricky business, one version
of this kind of testing the
physicist Richard Feynman
called it, tickling the tail of a Dragon,
because of course if you get things
wrong you can actually
start a chain reaction going so fast that
it's very difficult to stop it.
Then it goes supercritical, you get
high levels of radiation that's not the soft
radiation, its not alpha
you're talking beta, you're talking gamma,
it's the stuff that will kill you, they
also tried to keep it away
from the general population so if it
did happen nobody else was going to get
injured from it.
Only twice in the course of those years
did it actually happen where someone
was actually fatally irradiated in the process,
once just at the end of the war and then after
the war at a rather famous or notorious
event when Louis Slotin who loved to do these bomb
core tests, because they were tickling
the Dragons tail they had the
breath of danger on them.
The upper part of that reflector shell
slammed shut around that
critical assembly and caused it to become
supercritical, what you have is a
runaway chain reaction that just produces
huge numbers, you know billions of of Neutrons
almost instantaneously, faster than a human
being can react within a millisecond there
many generations of neutrons that have evolved
in this assembly and the neutron
population is huge, and this manifests itself
in some interesting physical phenomena
that you really don't see unless you're in
real trouble, for example theres a flash
of light as the air is ionized, these neutrons
run out into the air and and hit
things and and cause them to become radioactive
and so the counters in the
room all of the radiation detectors just go wild
you have heat from the release of this
nuclear energy its a phenomenon that very
few people experience and and those
who do tend to have serious health problems
or in the case of Louis Slotin you know,
a fatal bout with radiation illness, I think
he was actually probably fully
aware of the dangers and and yet probably felt
a little too safe because he had done
it many times before, had done it successfully.
Enrico Fermi was so concerned about
Slotin's testing that whenever there
was a criticality
test going on Fermi would move his entire team to
another building far away so that if something
happened he wouldn't be there to be irradiated
with Slotin so he was indeed concerned about
this guy in the way he was running these tests.
I was down at Parjito site checking
things out at the time of the Slotin accident
He was testing to be sure it
was working properly with a setup of
materials around it
And while I as not a participant at
all in the experiment which led to this I was in
the room and this of course led to Louis
Slotin's death and Al Graves having a very
heavy dosage of radiation from which he recovered.
He was holding the two pieces of the
core apart, and the pieces fell together and
there was a burst of blue light in the room,
irradiated everyone including Schreib.
When the screwdriver slipped
Slotin's instant reaction was to
break the pieces apart
so he reached over with his bare hands of
course which also increased his exposure.
There was enough tamper around it
reflecting neutrons in that it started
a chain reaction.
And I was stuck in the hospital
for two days I think while observing me, and finally
decided that there was nothing wrong, I had
been far enough away that I
only got about 25R of exposure.
They got a pretty good dose although
nobody was was seriously affected most
of the people in the room except for poor
Slotin lived to a ripe old age Slotin however was
fatally irradiated and died a slow and rather
agonizing death over the next 8 days.
We were there, knowing how he and my
mother interacted he probably said something
about, theres been an accident, I need to
change of clothes, you cant get close to me,
I'm going to the hospital and I think everything's
going to be fine and that was probably
pretty much the conversation, she had
to find Harriet Holloway probably to
take care the kids
so she can go, but she couldn't get to dad
because he was radioactive and so they
weren't letting the family close, and I get this
from what my dad wrote not from what
he said, that Louie was a very bright physicist
and really his loss was significant because he
had a lot to contribute, but he didn't do it
he didn't play by the rules entirely
and it cost him.
The accident itself plus the
evaluations that Schreib and others conducted
led to remote
handling of nuclear materials, and this is
really the beginning of formal safety practices
dealing with critical materials here at
the laboratory, and we go to remote handling
the use of televisions and just
staying away from the stuff, being able
to to say if there's
an accident it won't kill anybody but certainly
Schreib's work in the accident contributed
mightily to moving to that regime.
At the 50th anniversary we went
down there with my grandfather to visit
around Parijito site
and went out and saw some of the Kivas, well
you could see him from a distance you
couldn't actually get into him because they
were being used and she was asked multiple
questions one of them about going into
building one well, after a little bit of
calm my grandfather
decided yes, under the requirements of while
he was in there, no questions are
asked, no films
taken, he would go in there and say whatever
he wanted to say but I think the really the
only reason why I agreed to it was
because myself and my
mother was there, so we went in it was a very
solemn occasion it was kind of eerie in ways
so my grandfather pointed out where, where he
was roughly, where he was standing, where the
table was. I think a couple of benches
were actually still in there from around
that time, it was
calm and surreal, you can tell it had an effect
on my grandfather, we got out of the building there
was a few people asking if he thought that that
was a really reckless thing to do he got very
taunt very short with his response and you could
tell it set him off, this was a friend, it was a
guy that he worked with his not going to say
he wasn't reckless, he was doing things he
shouldn't have done the way, my grandfather
put it was it was a stupid act, somebody
died you had to say was stupid but to criticize
a co-worker and a criticize somebody that's
now dead that was ground he didn't want to
tread on unfortunately its also the thing that
almost everyone interviewed my grandpa
wanted to know so it became kind of a bit
of sore subject for him, it was something that yes
it happened, it was a mistake, we learned
from it, we've moved on, we completely redid
everything for to keep everyone else safe not
just Los Alamos but everyplace that did
critical assemblies.
I was at lunch one day with Schreib
talked about the accident with tears in his eyes
he felt badly about it, he felt that Slotin I
think had gotten kind of a raw deal over the years
he very much respected him and the accident
and the outcome troubled him
many many years later
The decision had been made that we
we're going to keep the laboratory
going, we we're
to develop new bombs and there was going to
be a nuclear bomb stockpiling effort
by the laboratory.
These two men Schreib and Bradbury
were in many ways very similar men, you
know they were both experimental physicists
and people who haven't been around
physicists possibly don't realize how
different theoretical physicist are the ones
do the calculations from the guys who actually
do the hands-on experiments on
the lab bench or in the field. Experimentalists
a totally different breed as far as Ive been
able to tell often politically more conservative
strangely enough, they tend to be intensely
practical people they've learned to think
clearly about how you manipulate objects to make
a certain outcome occur, whereas theoreticians
are often into literature and
art, often politically quite liberal,
Robert Oppenheimer was perhaps an extreme
example but he was a rather neurotic man,
a chain smoker troubled in some ways,
troubled certainly about who he was, you never
had a sense with Bradbury or Schreib
that they ever had any doubt about who they
were and what their place was in the
world and how they went about doing their work.
In the fall of '47 Holloway asked
me if I would like to come up and work in
the division offices as an associate division
leader because I was quite interested
in the overall
work of the division and was showing some signs
of interest in organization
and management.
Schreib and Norris Bradbury were
kindred spirits similar training, similar
education, and
they meshed well they worked well together,
they were both nose-to-the-grindstone
let's make the laboratory work, lets advance
the science and technology, they weren't politicians
Bradbury could run the laboratory from his
directors slot, he could take care of the overall
picture, as Technical Associate Director.
Schreiber could handle all the technical
details he could look at individual programs and
analyze them for what they
were in there worth technically.
He ended up being in charge of the W Division
the cores the criticality experiments the high
explosive sides of it, the chemistry side of it.
as well as metallurgy side of it everything that
was the entire weapons program.
It's said of Oppenheimer that he built
the laboratory, but it's said of Bradbury that he
made the laboratory of permanent entity, and
certainly if that's true Schreiber was
Bradbury's right right hand
man making that so.
A crucial change that came in '48 was
what was called levitation, the first bomb
had a solid ball of Plutonium, actually two
hemispheres at the center of a massive
assembly of high explosives and the
high explosives squeezed that ball to
double its previous density and about
half it's previous size, they made an air
gap from between the ball and the explosives
so that the explosive
shockwave had time to accelerate before it
hit the core and therefore
could hit it a lot harder that meant for example
that you could make
a smaller core, you didn't need as much Plutonium
if you could hit it
harder because you could squeeze it to a greater
density than the
other system, so when Schreib and the others
developed this first generation
of levitated cores they basically doubled the
United States of supply of bombs
you could make a bomb with half the material you
made the previous bomb with
that you could double the
number of bombs, this turned out to be very important
because in August of 1949 the Soviet Union
tested its first atomic bomb which was a carbon
copy gotten from espionage in Los Alamos during
the War, I interviewed some of the Soviet
scientists who worked on those first weapons,
they said, and I
have no reason to disbelieve them, that
by 1947 they had already figured out a levitated
design and had a design for a weapon that would
have been twice the yield
and half the weight of the Fatman bomb and then
I said so why didn't you
use it in your tests?
and they said well are bomb program was run
by the notorious KGB guy
Lavrenti Beria who was notorious for being a
brute. And he told them when they
took their levitated core design to him in '47,
comrades I don't care about you or damn
design. I want the American bomb, we know it works
give me the American bomb or I will
turn you into camp dust, meaning he would send
them off to the gulag, the leader of the
Soviet program told me after the end of the Soviet
Union in '92, he said we were concerned
for our families and our children and each other
and we gave Beria the weapon that
he wanted, but the 2nd Soviet test a year later
was of a weapon that was half the weight,
and twice the yield as the Fatman bomb so clearly
they moved on to levitated
weapons by then of course Schreib and his team had
already done the same thing
and doubled the US arsenal and then when the Soviets
tested their first bomb we
already understood that we had an answer to that
if you believe that there's
such a thing as deterrence and certainly at some
level the fact that a country that's
your enemy has nuclear weapons would certainly
deter you from deciding to attack
them without a good deal of thought at least and
of course, there never was a war between
the United States and the Soviet Union probably
for exactly that reason, nevertheless
there was a great hurrying and scurrying in Washington
among the politicians about
what are we going to do? what are we going to do?
the Russians have the bomb shouldn't
we go for a hydrogen bomb, what should we do?
and the calm
answer from people like Schreib and Robert
Oppenheimer and others was
look we've got a lot more atomic bombs than they
do, a lot more fission weapons
than they do and were turning them out at a
great rate now we've got the reactors
going in Washington where were making good bombs
they're reliable off-the-shelf
wooden bombs, now hold your horses as
Oppenheimer said to Teller
hold your horses, keep your shirt on.
Bikini Atoll a dot on the map in the mid
Pacific was destined to become a focal
point for the eyes of the world.
There was discussion among some
politicians and military people about
further demonstrating the destructive capacity
of atomic bombs, and it was a
little bit of a controversy particularly
here at Los Alamos because Bradbury among
others thought that Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
provided more than ample
proof about the destructive capability
of atomic bombs, but the military particularly
the Navy wanted to test the atomic bombs
against ships.
The summer of '46 the Navy assembled what
remained of the Japanese battle fleet,
there was the German cruiser the Prinz
Eugen and then a number of United
States warships that were becoming obsolete,
and they sailed all these
ships into Bikini Lagoon in the Marshall Islands
and detonated two atomic bombs
to test the effects.
There was actually three, so there was going
a be a deep water shot, a shallow water
shot and then airburst shot, the airburst was
going to be another almost exactly like a
Fatman shot, then there was going to be the
deep water which was going to be
about a mile down and they we're going to
try and do a shallow water they ended up
only doing the shallow and the air burst
because they couldn't quite figure out how
to anchor it down low to be actually get data
from it, and they don't want to just
blow something up and not
get data from it.
Schreib had kind of an interesting part
in Crossroads, he was again a courier
as he had been for the Nagasaki bomb.
We got an Army knapsack, it's one I still
carry around for hauling rocks
and that sort of thing and stuffed the carrying
case in it.
He was carrying at least one of the cores
again like he'd done over to
Tinian the boats we're pitching around in water
and as they were getting
ready for the shot and he's bringing the core
with him and all the sudden
he gets grabbed by one of the military officers
he hands a rope down and tells
him to tie it off, and at first grandpa was a little
ike "tie what off?", the officer said
tie the knapsack you can go into the water
but I don't want that going into the water.
The Albemarle was converted into the bomb
carrying and assembly vessel.
They had to find a way to both keep the
Plutonium secure and secret and protecting
anybody from knowing what it is, so they made a big
deal about putting backpacks
in bolted strong boxes on the ships deck and then
they surrounded the strong boxes
with a company of soldiers with rifles and machine
guns and made a big deal about
protecting it, but the truth is that the real
backpack was taken below put on a
bunk and one of the one of the army guys quarters
and Schreib slept with it
all the way out to Bikini.
The Plutonium Core was actually in a
stateroom next to my stateroom
with our local MP security officers living with it
I went in everyday or so to pat it
take it's temperature and sniff around I don't know
what I would done if anything
had gone wrong and I had to go through the act.
He was responsible at Bikini for building
the two bombs that were used
they were codenamed Able and Baker.
My assembly crew, Neil Davis and
Roy Thompson, Ted Perlman
and Harold Hammel
was my team, we'll they'd gotten out there
beforehand and had our little
laboratory all set up we had our own private
Marine guard in front of the door
people we're only let in on showing their badge
identifying themselves.
Modifications to prepare a Daves Dream
for the bomb were made by technicians
assigned by Manhattan Engineer District.
In due course, we then had the time for
the loading of the aircraft went through
all of the assembly procedures offloaded the
assembled bomb onto the pier and
it was trundled away on it's trailer behind
a truck and loaded into the
B-29 which was to drop it.
The laboratory unit of this group delivered
the first bomb to the crew of the plane a
minimum period before takeoff, two-weaponers
were assigned to ride in the plane
and arm the bomb after the aircraft was a safe
distance from Kwajalein, all was
ready for Able Day and at eight-forty nine,
Admiral Blandy signals for the start of
the bombing run, on
the cry "bomb away" the world's 4th atomic bomb
plummets earthward about five-hundred
feet above the surface of the lagoon the
bomb explodes.
Well the bomb is dropped unfortunately
the bombardier missed the center of the target
array by about 1500 feet and then a few days
after everything settled down again we
disembarked from Kwajalein and went down and
anchored in the Bikini Lagoon outside the
target array for the underwater test they had
a landing barge which had been specially
adapted, what they had done is cut right down
through the hull and put in a well and suspended
it underneath this landing craft and I have a series
of shots that I took in 35 millimeter
slides of that bomb blast, I got up on the
searchlight platform and we could hear the
countdown, so at zero I just started shooting
pictures as fast as I could and I got about
eight or ten before the cloud chamber effect
obscured the whole target array
one....
fire...
Then over the next few days we were able
to go and take a small boat and go
around and see what happened.
Of course, the effects as Bradbury
predicted were the same, theres no
defense against atomic bombs ships are never
rugged enough and if you
don't sink him you make them radioactive so that
the crews can't survive or sail them.
We had something like 10 days
to 2 weeks just to loaf around
It's a pretty humdrum existence there
was an editor from all places the canning & food
freezing magazine who was invited out as part of
the press contingent and he basically
was bored to death, and I think that
epitomizes sort of the life at Bikini was you had
several seconds of intense excitement as these
bombs went off and you saw the
mushroom clouds, but the day-to-day life was
pretty tedious you could swim you
could read maybe watch a movie on the ships
deck of it didn't rain, you can drink a little
beer but beyond that it was pretty humdrum
and fairly tedious.
We did an awful lot of sunning & we
also went off on junkets and it
was very annoying
that the smoking lamp was out about half the
time aboard ship, we finally learned to
take care of that situation by retiring to
our laboratory where not even the ships captain
could come and having our smokes there and we
returned on the Able Mable blessed
captain decided he was going to make an economy
run and so we chugged along
I think it took us twelve days to come back
at 10 knots and it was awfully dull.
He not knowing it probably not really
appreciating it and in knowing Schreib
not putting much stock in it, he probably and I
think in all reality, the summer
of '45-'46 he was one of the three most
important people in the world when it came
to atomic bombs, not even the Soviets had a
Schreiber who could to build
an atomic bomb at that point.
The time is ten forty-seven, this is a
Conelrad radio alert normal broadcasting
will be discontinued for an indefinite period.
Ladies and gentlemen you've heard
the reports of enemy planes are
approaching in less than 3 hours an H Bomb might
fall over Portland .
Edward Teller a Hungarian-American
scientist who had come up with the idea
of a hydrogen weapon in 1941 talking with the
great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
Teller was one of those people that
chafed at what he called pedestrian work during
World War II He was originally in charge of
the Theoretical Division but he didn't like
it he felt like developing the atomic bomb was a done
deal certainly theres a lot of
work to do he never denied that but he knew
it was a done deal and his mind
was fertile enough and active enough that he
was looking for the next challenge.
And so Oppenheimer rather
wisely decided, well alright
if Edward wants to work on the Hydrogen
bomb were going to work on
that someday, so let him get started and he turned
Teller over to that task rather
than the task of doing some of the very
complicated mathematics that had to be
done one of the outcomes of that decision was
that Oppenheimer was short on
mathematicians who could do calculations, that's
what they substituted in those
days for the computers,
that did not yet exist and called on the British
to send over their team to
supplement the calculating team in Los Alamos
among the people in the
British team was one of the Soviet spies Klaus
Fuchs so it's possible
to blame Teller to some degree for the
appearance in Los Alamos
of Klaus Fuchs.
The ring was first uncovered following
the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in England Greenglass
Mrs Rosenberg's brother confessed theft of the
secrets while stationed at the
Los Alamos atomic project.
Teller acquired a small team to help
him including a Polish
mathematician of great gifts whose name
was Stanislaw Ulam
Stan Ulam a bit reluctantly joined in
working with Teller the two men really
did not get along they were very different
personality types nevertheless they worked
together on this problem and then the question
as I said came up of whether or not the
United States should start a crash program
to build a Hydrogen bomb and the Oppenheimer
lead committee of the Atomic Energy Commission
voted no! Teller and his rather
politically conservative
friends were immensely incensed decided that
someone was trying to let
the Soviets get a head of us.
There's a lot of emotions that started
running high about that time.
Teller notoriously said in his
distinctive Hungarian a accent
"if we don't build a
Hydrogen bomb, I will be prisoner of the Soviet
Union in the United States within
five years", thats an amazing thing for someone
to say but I think Teller had
a longstanding fear of the Russian colossus that
played into his sense and
remember the Hydrogen bomb in his mind
was his idea.
We were very much in the Cold War and
the arms race at that point, there was a lot of
consternation including Teller pretty much
stomping out in the laboratory, going over
to Lawrence Livermore to continue developing
it instead of being at the lab.
When the Soviet Union tested its first
atomic bomb, the scientific advisory
committee to the Atomic Energy Commission
met in an important
meeting in October of 1949 and basically said we
don't know how to build a
Hydrogen bomb yet, if you want us to go that route
there are some reasons why its not
a good idea we do know how to build smaller,
lighter weight, more efficient
atomic bombs, so we think we should do what we're
already doing because
President Truman ordered us to do this
last summer which is increase the
production of fission weapons that should
be our response to the Soviet development of
a fission weapon of it's own.
There had been debates going on in
the upper circles for sometime
about the possibility
of building a Hydrogen bomb so called and finally
there was the top level decision
that the laboratory should go into an all out effort
to develop this if it could be developed
and this decision was made I believe in
November of 1950.
Up to now the laboratory has had
sufficient time to compile information
and revise weapon
design before a field test of the weapon
as of now the situation has changed we
must take risks calculated risks is true but
risks nevertheless.
Almost immediately went onto
a six day work week a year to the day of the
decision to start, we made the first test,
of the so called Mike shot.
Unlike Little Boy and Fatman Mike was
about 80 tons had this liquid fuel that
had to be maintained at extraordinary low
temperatures in hot humid Pacific
where was tested and it stood about three or
four stories tall so it was it was
not a weapon of war it was certainly a bomb
but it was not a weapon of war.
We'll Marshall was chosen by Norris
Bradbury to take charge of that
whole operation and he had essentially top
priority on all of the
laboratory facilities and personal I was put
in as acting N Division leader
our job there was to follow up with the
experimental work the design and
fabrication of the test devices but we we're
supposed to be following up with some
reasonable designs which could actually be used and
shoehorned into an airplane.
When then everything was shipped
out to Enewetak they were testing
everything out in the last days before the
thing was going to be exploded
he discovered that the core that was used in
this really hot atomic bomb
might have a tendency to pre-detonate, which
would mean it would melt down
instead of exploding properly and the whole
test would be wasted and this
was a big test, I mean this was a tank of
Deuterium with gallons and gallons
of a material that previously in been made
by the gram, this was really
a heroic test that was involved so Schreib took
the responsibility the night
before the test of changing out the core,
for another core that they knew was
reliable so that he was quite confident that it
wouldn't pre-detonate thats the
kind of thing that sounds easy to do but if you
think about it the risk that he
had to take in terms of his personal
responsibility, his confidence, in his
numbers, his confidence in the physics of what
he was doing it probably
required all those previous years of work
that he had done, intimate
hands on work for him to be prepared to make
such a momentous decision.
I was out for the Mike shot and it was
truly impressive we were about 30 miles
away on a ship and it still scared the hell
out of me when it went off
The previous explosions were large,
but the Mike shot was awe inspiring, as he put it
it truly defined the word awesome as how big the
shot was, kept on going and going and going
We'll this successful test brought
on another flurry of
activity to develop stockpileable
devices, and over the next 18 months there were about
5 or 6 different variations
designed and tested, the interesting thing was
they all worked including some that
were regarded as being of very marginal design
on a theoretical basis.
So all of that was going on the lab
was thriving they were recruiting young scientist
to come work there they were turning out bombs
and fast, we were turning on bombs
by the thousands the United States by the
height of the Cold War had
some 40,000 Hydrogen and Uranium and Plutonium
weapons in its storehouses and
the Soviet Union which always cranked out
more than it needed had some 75,000 enough
to destroy the world many times over, I'm
happy to say were now down to about a
total in the world of about 13,000
still enough to destroy the world many times
over but perhaps not as many times as in the 1980's
With the extraordinary
ingenuity and real
genius that was involved in taking a physical
reaction discovered on a bench top in Nazi
Germany in 1938, and turning it into this
whole new field of energy, for power,
for medicine
for all sorts of humane uses, but also
for terrible weapons, it's easy to shrug and
say those were terrible things we should of
never of done that, as an historian I feel
that it's real Monday morning quarterbacking
to look back on the past and say, those
people shouldn't have done that, they were
not nice people, I think instead the way to think
about the past had its own principles and rules
and it's own challenges and fears
One has to say why? Why did they do that?
What was it that lead them to make the
decisions they made, what can we learn from what
they did and what they thought and
what they said about what they did, all of that
is part of what we call history
and it's much more helpful I think to us now,
looking at the future were looking forward to
to try to understand what happened not simply
to condemn them out of hand and
say, well we wouldn't have done that were
better people than that
Would we not have? What would we have done?
They're are really two applications
for nuclear energy, one of course is atomic
bombs or Hydrogen bombs, but the second is
power production you can produce a whole
lot of power that you can use to drive machines or
Industries, the electrical industry for instance
with the nuclear energy, It can also be used
for propulsive power & so in the late 50's there was
a lot of interest at the laboratory and developing
power systems and so the laboratory inaugurated
what became project ROVER, which was to use nuclear
power to drive space rockets
for interstellar flight.
My grandfather was getting tired of being
on the weapons side and he was given the
ability to rise a little further up, start get a
little more of the culture of the lab that was
when the Rover project started coming on.
The moon, closest neighbor to earth,
presently the focus of man's
greatest scientific adventure, landing men
on the moon will be a truly great
achievement but only
the beginning of a new era in space exploration,
no one can predict the exact missions that will
follow in the years and decades ahead, but the
most exciting possibilities will require the
acceleration and deceleration of very
heavy loads nuclear rockets when perfected,
can provide the
same propulsion energy, with less overall weight
they will expand our ability to explore space
this is the story.
During the space race in the 60s and early
70's through Dr Schreiber's work at Los Alamos a
tremendous amount of work was done to develop
these nuclear thermal rockets and they were
almost ready to go, if they're had been a Mars
mission, I have a great degree of
confidence that they would
have been involved in that architecture.
In early '55 when Darol who was then
the associate Director came around one evening
and says how would you like to get together a
small group to see if you can build a nuclear
rocket, we'll I knew nothing about nuclear
rockets I knew there had been a
study committee set up
and I even sat in on a few of those,
frankly, I didn't think the thing could be made
to work at the time, but I said sure
I'll give it a whirl.
We tend to live in a world that's
dominated by energy that's available from
the Sun, most of
our chemical energy comes indirectly from the Sun,
our wind power, solar power come from the Sun
when we burn coal we're burning the remains
of plants that grew from photosynthesis
millions of
years ago, but were still using an energy
source thats dependent on the sun.
Nothing humans have discovered up into
this point can match the energy density contained
in the binding of nucleons the the atomic energy
locked in the nucleus of literally all of the
atoms around us.
Why is the nuclear rocket so much better
than the chemical rocket? It's lightweight,
high-velocity exhaust will use propellant about
twice as efficiently as chemical rockets.
The less material you have to take up in
the form of traditional chemical propulsion the
farther you can go, the less expensive,
and for some applications nuclear power
is all we've got basically, deep space
missions traditionally rely on a technology
known as an
RTG or Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator,
and those have powered our deep space
probes, our Pioneer, our Voyager, the Mars Curiosity
Rover for example has a very large
Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators
on-board, but if were going to go and were going
to take humans and were going to go farther
with more payload, we need to improve the
technology, solar and chemical while they are
good technologies for certain places,
the farther
you get away the less effective or not
effective at all, they become.
We were given any amount of money
that we wanted and I was asked well how much
money will it take for construction to build
a test site and build any additional
structures we needed
here and I guessed maybe 10 million, and Norris
said you really don't know so let's
ask for 15, Louie
Strauss says we'll let's put you down for 25
million and that ought to run you for awhile,
so different from now that it seems unreal and
finally it was resolved yes
indeed we would go
we LASL would go ahead with the nuclear rocket
this was all done in complete secrecy
even the fact
the program was going was a secret, It was January
of '57 before we really got going.
It was pursued simultaneously with
other elements of Kennedy's vision
for space which
included putting a person on the moon, some of
this was motivated by the space race with
the Soviet Union, some of it was motivated by
Kennedy's vision for a technocracy a society
that was really you know developed on a firm
foundation of science and technology.
The purpose of President Kennedy's visit
to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory
was a briefing
on the details of project ROVER the laboratories
program to develop nuclear rocket engines for
space travel President John F Kennedy the first
President of the United States to visit Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory has arrived, Dr Norris E
Bradbury Laboratory, Director Dr Raemer
Schreiber, Associate
Director, Mr Charles C. Campbell, AEC manager of the
Los Alamos area office and other officials
met the visitors as they arrived.
Grandpa had a little of a downside that
Bradbury and President Kennedy and a
couple others talking
about budget it ended up rather than a big
presentation and ended up being, okay
here's the rocket
here's what it does, here's how we do it,
and a quick overview and then the next thing you
know President Kennedys heading out the door
waving to everyone & he's gone and
thats the end of it
The President spent approximately an hour
in the ROVER briefing and meeting
the staff at the
laboratory here President Kennedy and Dr Bradbury
leave the classified area to pose
for the photographers.
It was at the AEC's Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory high in the mountains of New Mexico
that the first steps were taken, here in the mid
50's scientists set about to determine if nuclear
energy really could be used to
provide rocket propulsion.
I talked Norris into setting it
up as a division so they agreed to form a
division and I bummed
people from W Division and anyplace else that seemed
to be interested in this by that fall I think
we had about fifty people at work, and then we
had to go find a place to live, I stayed down at
Parjito for quite awhile and I even had my
headquarters there and we had people scattered
all over the place, and then we finally laid
hands on TA46 which is out on the Pajarito
Road and that
was our headquarters well throughout the duration
of the so called ROVER program.
They would test the reactor concepts
at Los Alamos they would do a lot of
development of the
test reactors using a number of critical
assembly stations that they assembled at
the Parijito site and
Raemer Schreiber lead this effort at Los Alamos
to develop these reactors for use in Project KIWI.
We had to start from scratch
essentially saying how would we test
all these reactors,
the normal way of doing reactor testing is to
put 'em inside a great big concrete vault
so if something goes wrong why we had some
protection, but when you're spewing
out enormous quantities of Hydrogen or other
hot gases why that isn't a very
practical system and so the decision was made
that we turn things around the
controls and the instrumentation would
be inside the concrete block house and the
people would be well removed from there at a
separate control area, and we also
selected the Jackass Flats area for
this test site for this testing.
If you turn one of these reactors on
your going from liquid hydrogen temperatures to
thousands of degrees very quickly and so
they were faced with these enormous
materials challenges, KIWI was really designed to
solve some of those problems
and there are number of reactors in the KIWI
series that progressed from essentially
zero power, which is what they would be able to
test at the Parjito site in Los Alamos,
all the way up to powered versions that that ran at,
you know hundreds of kilowatts,
hundreds of megawatts.
The technology that Dr Schreiber promoted
was a technology known as a nuclear
thermal rocket and basically what this is
is using a reactor is a big heat source, and
then you take a gas like hydrogen, you compress it
and force it through this nuclear reactor
and the nuclear reactor transfers heat it
expands and it exits the nozzle of the rocket
at Incredibly high-velocity.
It was a very interesting program in
that nobody had done anything of this general
nature before, we had to be extremely careful to
test everything we could without actually
firing up the reactor, when they decided they
wanted something like this, we were
under very heavy pressure to move as rapidly as
possible, the Russians had put up
Sputnik in the fall of '57 I believe, and the
United States wasn't doing too well in
regard to similar exploits and the Atlas Missile
which had been under development
for quite a few years, chemical rocket, was
having its problems, so in between
doing things here at the laboratory, I was always
rushing back to a congressional
hearing to assure
Senator Anderson and the other eager supporters
of the ROVER program that we were working
just as hard as we could and no we didn't
need anymore money, all we needed was to
solve a few technical problems.
With KIWI he spent so much time in
Washington D.C., I think he probably was
home half of every
month and traveling the rest of the time,
that was a part of that project he did not like
and that was all the politicking that had
to be done during that period of time, and
I was in high school
for lot of that, he just wasn't there, when he was
he was distracted and we we're all
being just a little
careful around him because he was very
tired, he didn't travel well .
Meantime we had designed a KIWI B,
which was looking much more like a rocket engine
and had a sizeable nozzle on it and I'd been getting
help from Aerojet and Rocketdyne on
pumps and nozzle design and fabrication, and
KIWI B then was run with liquid hydrogen
being pumped in and vaporized as it went
into the reactor, and a couple things
didn't go too smoothly for awhile because we
tried to run two or three reactors & we would
get going pretty well and then pieces would start
flying out the nozzle, which isn't exactly the
proper behavior for a nuclear rocket, supposed
to run for 20 to 25 minutes, to make a long
story short it was finally found out that we had
not properly considered all of the aerodynamic
forces that we're operating on the fuel
element bundles In blowing this enormous stream of
Hydrogen through there, and so it took a number
of tests and rather strenuous redesign work
under extreme pressure out of Washington to get
a reactor which would indeed hold itself
together and run for any extended period of time.
We'll we finally solved these problems and
we ran several reactors for periods of up
15-20 minutes, the mission was originally thought to
require a 10 minute burn by reactor but in the
meantime the targets we're set higher and
higher and we would get a reactor ready for
testing and for someone decided that
wasn't really quite good enough and so we had
to start redesigning and replanning for
even higher performance, longer times, ability
to restart in space and
all those sorts of things,
The Phoebus phase was actually the attempt
to build power plant scale reactors that could
actually be used in nuclear rockets, and
Phoebus really consisted of three large
scale reactors that were tested out at the Nevada
test site and they incorporated
some enormous power densities, if you think
of a 2 liter bottle, if you think of that volume
being used to generate 10 million watts that
was the power density that was found in the
highest power test with the Phoebus reactors,
even by todays standards have really not
been and not been matched.
By '69 NASA who had taken over and
become a great empire in itself, finally
decided that they we're not go for a manned man
in space beyond the moon
landing, so the ROVER program was phased out,
we'll we did have one triumph
before that, technical triumph at least, in that
we ran the Phoebus 2 reactor at
4000 megawatts, which I think was the world
record at that time, which may still stand
for a total power out of a single reactor which
translates into about a 200,000
pound thrust, which is nothing to be sneered at.
That was the apex of of work on Project
Rover that was the highest powers,
the highest power densities, the longest
duration tests, the largest reactors,
and it demonstrated a high level of technological
readiness to move
these systems into practical nuclear rocketry.
In the summer '61 Daryl Froman decided
that he was going to retire and so there
was a search put on for an associate technical
director to replace him, I was
selected to be that person and moved up to the 4th
floor in January of '62.
The reason I have talked about the ROVER program
so extensively is that
I continued to have the major responsibility for
that as far as the
division of work between Norris and myself was
concerned, my job there
was to keep on top of the number of different
programs and take care of
some of the administrative chores,
it's very complicated story if you start
writing a job description
to 5 or 6 pages I suspect.
Work at the laboratory continued we had the
ROVER program phased out but
by the time that was phasing out there were
other programs coming in. And then in 1970,
Norris decided he was going to retire and there
was a search for a director, my hat
was in the ring for at least a brief period of
time, the more I thought about it the less
I felt at that age I wanted to undertake the
job and furthermore, I felt that the demands
particularly in field of public relations in
Washington and in spearheading the
weapons program was
something that I just didn't want to get
involved in, of course Harold Agnew came out as a
selection no surprise to anyone I think and I
was given the job of keeping University
of California happy and I took over more and more
of the administrative duties and so
from that time up and including my time
before my retirement, I had the responsibility for
the 11 departments I think it was, in addition
to serving as the number two man to the
director, once the decisions we're made,
it was my job to see to that they were
carried out, meaning while that is fine once
you start slowing down, it's very difficult
to recognize
you got to run fast and can't keep up with the
younger people. My retirement was in
December of '74 and it was about that time also
that I got contacted by Jack Campbell, former
Governor Campbell, I guess is the more polite
way of putting it, to see if I would be interested
in going on to the energy resources board.
After my grandfather retired he
still very much involved with the lab, very much
involved with the
town, he was President American Nuclear Society
he was very much involved with a
lot of the nonproliferation.
My dad passed away in '98 when he was 88
we called Roger Meade to do the details of the
memorial service which was held 3 days later
at Fuller Lodge, to put together such a marvelous
celebration of my dads life, Roger was
just invaluable.
Approximately 6000 people jammed the football
field to welcome the President.
And lastly I think this country has
performed its great function because as
Senator Anderson
has said, it's people have had brains and we
have appreciated the cult of
excellence and we have developed that
talent in a way which is served our country and
served mankind and
there are no group of people in this country,
whose record over the last
20 years has been more preeminent in the service
of their country than all of
you here in this small community in New Mexico.
We want to express our thanks to you, its not
merely what was done during
the days of the second war, but what is been
done since then, not only in
developing weapons of destruction which by
and irony of fate help maintain
the peace and freedom, but also in medicine,
and in space and all the other
related fields which can mean so much to
mankind if we can maintain
the peace and protect our freedom.
I think Dr Schreiber's legacy is a
very important one, whether it was his work
with the Manhattan Project or his work with nuclear
rockets I mean this is a
person who had this hand in shaping the course
of human history.
The reason that nuclear thermal rockets
are particularly important at
this moment in history is that NASA is finally,
seriously considering a manned
Mars mission, any type of Mars mission involves a
long trip being constantly bathed
in Cosmic Rays and nuclear thermal rockets provide a
way of to get from point A
to point B, in space far faster for far less
fuel and we now know that with modern material
science we can make
these far better than there creators
ever imagined.
I think we can have that conversation now
I think culturally were able to appreciate
the benefits and the risks of nuclear
technology, I think we can competently
get back in the saddle on a project like this,
we already have done a lot of the
work necessary, this program was wildly
successful according to nuclear propulsion
folks at NASA, it was it was essentially ready
to go and you can say, well we can
leave those Curies in the desert and it can all be
in vain, or we can take that
knowledge and essentially use it and work
with it again.
We have climbed the tallest peaks on
earth, we have explored
basically on the land most places on the surface
of our planet,
but there is an infinite universe out there and
hopefully using nuclear technology including the
kind of reactor technology that Dr Schreiber
was a driving force
at Los Alamos, that technology, I have very
little doubt, will propel us to the planets
... and beyond.