Ernest Graves
strength in these two areas to ask them to offer such a program for engineer officers.
I ran into all kinds of problems.
I flew all the way out to Caltech, flew on the red eye all night--that was before the time
of jets--spent the day with them, and then flew all night the following night. But I
couldn't persuade them to do it.
Q:
Why?
A:
They said that their ideas on nuclear engineering had not matured sufficiently. They had
no courses that were called nuclear engineering at that particular time. That would have
been 1955, probably. They had courses in materials and physics and so forth, but they
did not have a nuclear engineering program. I tried to persuade them that they ought
to have one, and that I would be glad to send an Army officer to it.
The other problem was they had just abandoned summer classes. They had had them,
of course, but they had abandoned the idea of having any course work in the summer.
They were very polite, and we had Army officers there studying civil engineering. That
was no problem. The problem was they weren't ready to offer the kind of curriculum
I was looking for, lasting probably 18 months and including possibly two summers.
Q:
Did you ever find a place that was willing?
A:
Yes. MIT was no problem. They already had the courses. Princeton did it. The
University of Michigan did it. The University of Illinois did it. We had these programs,
and we got some terrific men into them.
Q:
Did you pick them?
A:
By and large, yes. We would go over who were the guys that were academically
talented and had good military records. Then we would make contact with them and
try to persuade them to volunteer for this type of schooling.
Q:
When you were at Eniwetok, was that the Sandstone series of tests?
A:
Yes. That was the first nuclear series they did at Eniwetok. There were three tests.
[Lieutenant] General [John S.] Hull was the task force commander. At the time, if I
remember correctly, he was a lieutenant general. The task force had four ships. The
flagship was the McKinley, a Navy command ship. Two ships, the Albemarle and the
Curtis, were former seaplane tenders that had been converted specifically to support
nuclear test operations. The fourth ship was the Byroko, a baby flattop.
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