Engineer Memoirs
The Curtis, in particular, had been modified to have all the assembly facilities for the
weapons, including an area for high explosive assembly, an area for nuclear assembly,
and shops to test all the electronics.
These ships sailed out of Long Beach. I was at Los Alamos at the time. We took the
train from Santa Fe and had an interesting experience.
We couriered the nuclear components for the weapons from Los Alamos down to the
Santa Fe station by car, then by train from there to Los Angeles, and then onto the
ships.
I was one of the keepers of these weapons. The nuclear components were sealed in
aluminum containers in an atmosphere of argon gas. This was to protect the plutonium
against corrosion. It's a very reactive metal. Each plutonium hemisphere was plated
with nickel to seal it from the air.
But to guard against any possible danger to the plutonium parts, they were sealed in
argon gas. We monitored the pressure of the gas and the temperature of the metal
container to make sure that things were normal. The pressure was mainly to make sure
that the gas had not leaked out because they didn't want any risk that any plutonium
would contaminate anything. So as long as the argon gas pressure was constant, you
knew that it was hermetically sealed.
The temperature would tell you if there was some chemical reaction or something going
on in there, or even a nuclear reaction, although that would have been very unlikely.
There is a certain amount of low-level radioactivity from this thing.
Well, in any event, they put with each of these cores somebody who was familiar with
the core, and that person or his relief had to stay with it all the time.
Q:
How big was the package?
A:
The package was about 8 by 8 inches and about 24 inches long. It was a rectangular
aluminum container.
This is an amusing story. We put this aluminum container in a normal footlocker, an
Army footlocker, and drove down to the train stop. There were myself, one other of
our group, and two security men from Los Alamos. We were all in civilian clothes. For
the trip from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, they had reserved a private compartment for us.
We were standing there waiting for the train to come. The station isn't right in Santa
Fe. It is a few miles away. The train came up the Santa Fe railroad and stopped, and the
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