The Half-Life of Genius Physicist Raemer Schreiber (2016) - full transcript
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 9 a.m. 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
"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
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?
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.
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 9 a.m. 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
"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
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?
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.