Ernest Graves
porter came down out of the Pullman car. He looked at us and asked if he could help
us with our luggage. We said yes, but we would carry the footlocker.
And he said, "I'll bet you've got an atomic bomb in there." Well, nobody said anything,
and that guy's eyes got bigger and bigger and bigger. He realized that we might have
an atomic bomb in there. I don't know that he was frightened, but he was really
surprised.
Q:
That is very funny.
A:
That is a funny story.
Q:
Well, how does it feel, traveling with an atomic bomb?
A:
We had worked with it so much we weren't worried. We wanted to be sure about the
argon and the heat. The plutonium is radioactive. It is continually emitting alpha
particles. They don't go anywhere. They just stay right there. They are heavy compared
to other radiation. And the nickel kept them in.
But the radioactive decay generated heat all the time, and the container had to be set
where it would cool. In the footlocker, it was next to metal, and that tended to carry
the heat away. When we got it aboard ship, we set it right on the metal deck of the ship
and by that mechanism, the heat would be carried away.
But the aluminum case was warm to feel as a result of the radioactivity in the core.
There was no danger from this radioactivity, but it was going on. That was one of the
reasons for having a thermometer to read the temperature.
There were maybe a dozen of us who had to sleep with these things all the time. We
had a plan in case the ship sank. We had a buoy on the deck right outside the stateroom.
We were to attach the aluminum container to this big buoy so that it would float. The
buoy was painted bright orange, and it could be recovered. The United States didn't
have very much plutonium in those days, and these things were invaluable.
I don't know what amount of money it might have cost to produce them, but that
wasn't the issue. The issue was we didn't have very much.
We stayed with these. We had two cores for each of the three tests. So there were six
out there. They had them distributed around, and somebody was staying with each of
them the whole way. I wasn't doing that the whole time, but I spent a lot of time at it.
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