Engineer Memoirs
When they announced the list of who was going, I wasn't on the list. I don't remember
what I did. Maybe I told my father; maybe I told Ken Cooper who was working for
Groves. Anyway, I got the word to General Groves that I wanted to go to school.
His reaction was immediate. He said, "I didn't even know you wanted to go. We will
add you to the list." Dorland, of course, was upset about that. But then somebody on
the list said he didn't want to go. So then Dorland could nominate me to replace the
guy that dropped out.
Q:
Did you know by then that you wanted to go into physics?
A:
Yes. The concept of that program was that we would study half engineering and half
physics. Most of us went with the idea that we'd get our degrees in civil engineering,
but that we would have a lot of physics. After I reached MIT [Massachusetts Institute
of Technology], they looked at my course work after the first summer and said that they
wanted me to become a candidate for a doctorate in physics.
That raised my sights. I hadn't really seriously considered it up to that point. I took
their initial exam, the qualifying exam for the doctoral program. That was a written
exam. It was extraordinarily tough and I didn't think I had done well. But evidently I
did quite well, by their standards.
I think it was a test with so many tough problems that you weren't supposed to get
more than half of them. I'm not sure how they graded it. But they were very pleased
with the results of my exam. Then they had to go back to the Army because they
wanted me to stay longer than the allotted time. That got into the Office of the Chief
of Engineers. Most of the people there were against it. I told my father that I heard that
they were going to recommend against it. [Lieutenant] General [Lewis A.] Pick was the
Chief of Engineers. My father went down to see him and asked him if he would let me
do this, and he did.
General Wheeler was involved in an earlier decision about this schooling. General
Groves had started the program. His concept was that we would study half civil
engineering and half nuclear physics. In that way the Army would have people who
were qualified to grow with the nuclear weapons program and fulfill the Army's portion
of it.
Then Groves retired. The minute he left OCE, they looked at the fact that we were
scheduled to go to school for three years, and said, "That's too long." So they wanted
to kill the program.
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