I grew up at Los Alamos New Mexico because my father was there to work on the development of the atomic bomb during WWII. How he got there is interesting in its own right, so here is a condensed
version. He joined the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was sent to boot camp. After he was in boot camp for a couple of weeks the Navy discovered that he had a technical college degree (BS Chemical Engineering) and sent him to Officers
Candidate School (OCS). After he was there for a few weeks the Navy sent him to Oak Ridge Tennessee to work on a secret project – the separation of uranium 235 from the much more common isotope U238. This was underway because the scientists
knew that U235 was a suitable material to make a fission weapon – that is, an atomic bomb. After they got that process working, he was selected to go to work at a super-secret site where the actual development of the weapon was to be done.
That was Los Alamos. It was the spring of 1944.
There was a second approach underway to make a fusion bomb using plutonium. Plutonium is generated in nuclear reactors, and
is a much more efficient way to make bomb material than was the gaseous diffusion way being used at Oak ridge, or in fact the centrifuge method that the Iranians are trying to use. However, plutonium is a much more difficult bomb material to explode
than is U235.
He arrived at Los Alamos at a dark point in the development because the scientists had discovered that the second approach to build a fission bomb using plutonium
would not work using the gun type of weapon where two sub-critical masses were fired together in gun barrel. This is because the plutonium that was created in nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington had a higher rate of neutron generation than was first
expected and it would not be possible to bring together two sub-critical masses quickly enough to get the critical mass to explode, rather, these masses would blow themselves apart in a fissile explosion, simply wasting the plutonium and contaminating everything
in close proximity to the attempt. There is lots of information on this issue on the web, including this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
So my father arrived at Los Alamos knowing nothing about these issues. He was ushered into Robert Oppenheimer’s office along with one other new Navy arrival and Oppenheimer
drew a circle on his black board with a smaller circle in the middle and told them that the smaller circle was plutonium and that the space between the small circle and the bigger circle was to be high explosives and their job was to engineer this high explosive
to serve as a lens to direct the explosion inward to compress the plutonium core such that it would become a critical mass and explode as a nuclear bomb.
This had to be one
of the more staggering meetings my father was ever in. Aside from Oak Ridge, his first and only job out of college, the University of Louisville, had been as a chemist in a brewery. He knew nothing about high explosives. Presumably, Oppie
said “learn”. So he and a small group of Navy engineers went to work under George Kistiakowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kistiakowsky to develop this lens out of high explosives. These so called explosives experts were military men because the work was considered to be too dangerous for civilians. The area
at Los Alamos that was picked for this high explosives (HE) work to be done was, and still is, called S Site because it was the site of an old saw mill. It is far enough from the Los Alamos population center so that a large accidental HE explosion would
not damage the rest of the laboratory or the population in the town.
As we all know, they were successful. There have been many books and a few pretty good
historical documentary film on the activities at Los Alamos. I am putting this together as it may be of interest to family and friends to be able to see what my father, along with many other engineers and scientists did to bring WWII to a sudden stop.
By the way, I knew a significant number of the top people at Los Alamos who did this work. In addition to working as a summer intern at The Lab as Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory was known, our next door neighbor on one side was the Technical Associate
Director of the Lab, and when he retired, our neighbor on the other side took that position. My sister married Norris Bradbury’s second son. Norris was the director of the Lab after Oppenheimer left. I knew Norris very well. No
one that I ever talked to about the decision to drop the bombs on Japan had any doubt that it was the right thing to do.
The photo at the top of this article is
my father standing on a casing for the implosion bomb, so called Fat Man. I don’t think this is the actual bomb that was dropped, but they had to have casings at Los Alamos to make sure that the device, or weapon, AKA “the Gadget” would
fit into the case. It has a picture of Bugs Bunny on it, but also if you look closely someone stenciled “HIGH EXPLOSIVES DANGEROUS”. Big understatement there. My father, as I said was in the Navy. We (family members) do
not know for sure how he got this picture. I suspect that one night he and a friend or two were messing around and one of them took the picture. But how was the film developed? Two possibilities – one is that my father smuggled
the undeveloped film out of the Lab and developed and printed the picture himself. He did do quite a bit of amateur photography himself at that time. But, I suspect that smuggling and developing and possessing the picture would have been considered
to be a serious breach of security, and he was not stupid, so that possibility doesn’t sit well with me. The second possibility I see is that the picture was taken, developed and printed by The Lab and classified Top Secret. The
lower right of the picture has had a section cut out of it. I think that was the security classification that was cut out when the picture was declassified and given to him when he retired from the Lab. The problem is that my sisters, I and even
my mother never saw the picture while he was alive. We found it in his papers after his death so we couldn’t ask him about it. Pretty interesting though. Note also that it has quite a resemblance to the final scene in Dr. Strange Love
when Slim Pickens rides the bomb as it is dropped. The film, of course was made in 1964, almost 20 years after the photo was taken.
The paper in the tab S-Site was written
by my father shortly after he retired from The Lab. There had not been much written about S-Site or the work that went on there, so he helped fill the void. It is from the book Manhattan District History
Nonscientific Aspects of Los Alamos Project Y 1942 through 1946 in an appendix. You can buy the book from the Los Alamos Historical Society. It was printed in 1997 by the Los Alamos Historical Society. I did minor edits on the
paper, deleating some of the building designations and a few technical details as they did not add to the the theam of the paper, which is how dangerous and difficult the high explosives work was.
The photo at the top of the paper is the Navy explosives team at Los Alamos. The man in the middle is my father. As a kid I knew several of these men.
The tab Bomb Costs is a summary of the cost to develop the atomic bombs compared to the other weapons used in WWII. Summary: in constant 1996 US$, the cost was $20 billion. The total cost to the US for WWII was approximately $3.3
trillion.
Here is a link to a dramatization documentary film about the Manhattan Project that may be of interest.
You might want to get popcorn – it is 1 ½ hours long.
https://vimeo.com/134423611
password:
gadget
The article here: http://thebulletin.org/harrowing-story-nagasaki-bombing-mission8592 was written by my sister Ellen Bradbury Reid. It concerns the second atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki. This mission did not go nearly
as well as did the Enola Gay Hiroshima mission.