Engineer Memoirs
was most reliable. The most reliable method of all is by radio-chemical analysis of the
debris. They had planes that flew through the cloud and sampled the cloud after the
test. Then those radio-chemical samples could be analyzed.
Knowing the relative quantities of the residual plutonium and the various fission
products would even today be the most precise method. But that takes a long time, and
they wanted a lot of different techniques to develop their ability to determine the
efficiency of the weapons.
Q:
You weren't involved in the development of the test series? You were just involved in
the bomb assembly?
A:
Well, I had a minor role as far as preparing for it. I helped to prepare some of the
drawings for the nuclear core. At Los Alamos they were short of people to prepare the
drawings for the machine shop, and I worked for a short time as a mechanical
draftsman.
But no, I wasn't really involved with developing the plans. I was familiar with the plans,
and on the way home I got involved with preparing the report. Then Captain, later
Admiral, [J. S.] Russell, was the test director, and I was assigned to his staff and helped
to write the test report.
I remember that we had to write messages for him. I had not written very many
messages up to then, so I just wrote the messages in ordinary English. When I took it
to him, he looked at it and he said, "Where did you get all this Army jargon?" He
proceeded to rewrite it and put in phrases like "below decks," "belay that," and all these
Navy terms, and he said, "Now there's a true joint message."
Q:
Is it hard to maintain your scientific or analytical detachment from an experience like
this?
A:
No. You see, that's the difference between the way people feel about weapons today
and the way they did then. We perhaps didn't appreciate all the ramifications of nuclear
weapons, but there were really two things. We were military men. We thought these
were the weapons of the future. Granted, they were much more capable than the
weapons of the past, but you know, we had expended millions of tons of bombs in the
war, and I had seen Tokyo and Yokohama after the war.
You asked me whether I had been to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. No. I had been to Tokyo
and Yokohama, and they were just as flat as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The whole town
was gone. There were a few surviving buildings. This had been due to fire bombing. We
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