Original subtitles

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.