Ernest Graves
I arrived at Sandia Base in September and was there until the following August. Then
I went up to Los Alamos. I am not sure about all these dates. In Los Alamos, I was
assigned to assembling the cores, the nuclear components, of these weapons. In the
spring of 1948 I was involved in the Sandstone nuclear tests. The earlier tests at Bikini
Atoll were effects tests.
Then they moved over to Eniwetok Atoll and had these three tests, which were
weapons development tests. Effects were secondary. The tests were mainly to see
whether these newer designs would work. I was on the assembly team for the second
of these three devices and put the nuclear components together.
Q:
You weren't exactly an expert in atomic energy at that time.
A:
No. I hadn't studied any more physics than my undergraduate course at West Point. We
got out the books. I still have half a dozen books on nuclear physics that I bought and
read at the time. I took a course in theoretical physics taught by one of the scientists at
Los Alamos. There was a lot of studying going on, but none of us had any graduate
training in nuclear physics.
We learned a lot about counting nuclear particles and about how these bombs worked.
At Los Alamos they had seminars at which people like [Enrico] Fermi and [Edward]
Teller would discuss their latest work, theoretical and experimental. [Robert]
Oppenheimer had left by then, but he came back and talked. Hans Bethe visited. All the
big guns in physics that you have heard of came there, but most of them were no longer
there permanently.
Many who had been there during the war would come back for a week for seminars.
The larger meetings were called the colloquia. We would all go and listen to them.
Q:
You had some incredible exposure to--
A:
Absolutely. They talked about all their ideas on how these things worked, and we tried
to understand this.
Q:
How did you find that?
A:
I was fascinated, and it was a fun place.
Q:
Was it?
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