¡Colores!; 610; Trinity: Getting the Job Done; Doug Ballard Interview 2

You just seem to be a Bob and Henderson. Bob! I'm not trying about that, I don't know, but this is exactly what I want. I'm really glad we did it, and this will be the last interview so because it's weird because I'll get a whole series of interviews set up and then I'll go to do it and then I'll be leading towards editing. It's really hard for me to come out of editing and shift gears that come back to the interview because my mind's in a different place than all together, so. I think the fact that I was able to work at three of the national laboratories or three of the atomic sites is something that I like to somewhere get in there because it's unusual that I worked and contributed at Oak Ridge, transferred to Los Alamos and worked there on plutonium metallurgy. I did get contaminated on plutonium with plutonium and I worked at San Diego laboratories you know for 35 years, so at an unusual career from that standpoint. You know, I might not have you say that, but I'm clearly training on impetus.

I want you to end it for me and it's maybe the most dramatic term she might think of such as this was really, I mean Pete, my family was dying or something like that, it really motivated me to work harder and get this thing done just so that we can wait for it. You ready ready? I'm rolling. Anytime. I'm not great. You ready? You ready? You start a project. I'm not quite sure how to lead into this, I'm ready. Well we've already said what we needed, I just wanted to end that, I can edit it together. Okay. So if you just said this was really important because like family dying, yeah, something alive. Yeah. Family lives on the line. Okay. From a personal standpoint, this was an extremely important part of my life. My family was fighting, possibly going to die in Italy and in the Pacific. There I was at Oak Ridge trying to contribute something to the war effort, knowing that

if we succeeded, that we might end the war and end it quite quickly. I, my girlfriend at the time, who became my wife, was working at Oak Ridge. She had lost two brothers. This was really gut-wraiting effort on our part to try to get this done as quickly as possible. Okay. Perfect. Okay. I'm rolling. And you're in the movie. I'm in the movie again. Okay. I got a little guy. See how lean you're doing. You know what I love it. This is great. What was the most memorable part of working at Oak Ridge? I think the long hours that we worked at Oak Ridge and the, we worked for example. We worked seven days and get one day off.

We work another seven days and get two days off and another seven days straight and maybe get three days off for a three day pass. It was a continual effort to try to complete the job. We knew the government was spending millions and millions of dollars, actually bigens, it turned out. And we could not see the end product. We could not, did not know how much was being produced. There were classification requirements up there. There were five grades of classification, for example. We were in classification three, which meant we knew what we were making, but we didn't know how much of it we were making. So it was a, I think the, the thing that got us more than anything else was the frustration that we had for not knowing how well we were doing or how poorly we were doing, except everybody kept saying you're not doing good enough. And we consequently drove ourselves, I mean really, essentially drove ourselves. We worked 24 hours a day, it had to keep the process going.

And many times we worked double shifts in order to make up for an experiment that we were running or design change we were trying to incorporate. So that was really memorable, I mean that's what sticks out in your mind. Just the dog work that had to go into this, it was, it was not as tough as it was for the troops overseas. We knew we had a, what we call a plush assignment, but it was not plush from a standpoint of the number of hours that we put in. We were working alongside civilians, we would see eyes, they were making six times as much as we were, for example, for doing the same work. And there was some frustration from the fact that we had to work with civilians and still be a member of the Corps of Engineers. What was the, that was the most memorable, that hard work, that dog work? What was the hardest problem that you encountered?

What really just drove you crazy? I was in charge of mechanical inspection on the track. And we had daily leaks in the vacuum systems. This magnetic field had to be operated at a nearly a perfect vacuum in order to get the type of control we wanted. So one of the jobs that I had was to do the mass spectrograph examination of all the piping. And we continually got leaks in the piping, vacuum leaks in the piping. And so part of our job, my main job was to determine how to fix the leaks and how to measure them and how to calibrate the equipment and so on. So it was a continued battle in one leak after another, one vacuum leak, which would actually stop the whole process. And how many miles of tubing were you checking? There were miles of tubing.

We had diffusion pumps and vacuum pumps. We had probably, I don't know, I would say in each unit, we had 40 or 50 feet of high vacuum tubing that we had to ensure would not fail. So you're talking about earlier, I'm like, I'm rolling. Okay, come up just to touch for me. There we go, thanks. It was dog work. What did they, what did they tell you? Did they ever tell you that it was good? This is a bomb. I mean, you deduced it, but on your own, but didn't. Did they, this is a bomb or did they tell you don't say anything or what was going on? Seekercy was very important. In fact, there were signs and posters all around, don't talk about what you do, even if you don't know what you're doing.

And it was true, 99% of the people that were working at Oak Ridge did not know that we were making a bomb. There were all sorts of rumors of what we were doing, but none of them made sense. You know, there were the weird things like we were making windshield wipers for submarines or we were making wookie buttons or something like this, but it was not, we were not told what we were doing other than the fact that some of us knew we were working with radioactive material. And knowing that we were making radioactive material led us to either two thoughts. One is we were going to make nuclear power, which is what the Germans eventually tried to do, make nuclear power rather than a bomb. The other one was that we were going to make a bomb. Now the bomb, as we anticipated, would involve the release of a tremendous amount of energy. And that was ultimately what came out.

And fortunately we had two materials we could work with, uranium and plutonium. From what your physics professor I told you and from your engineering knowledge, did you know what you were doing? Did you know you're working on a bomb? I knew that I was working on the separation of U-235, that's as far as I knew. I knew that Los Alamos was demanding more material. I had no idea, I had never been to Los Alamos until I was transferred there, right after we dropped the bomb. In fact, I went to Los Alamos before they changed over from Oppenheimer to Bradbury. And so I had no idea of what the actual bomb would look like and the power. All of that I knew it was going to be powerful and that it would probably have a strong deterrent to stop in the Japanese, which at that time the Germans were already gone. And we still had the Japanese to force, to continue with.

So you knew it was going to be a deterrent to the Japanese war? You knew it was going to be a war. Public relations officers that we had in our core engineers told us that what we were working on could end the war. That's what all they told us. They didn't tell us it was going to be a bomb. It could have been very well, it had been something else. But we knew those of us that were working, had taken nuclear physics courses, you were working on something radioactive. And logic alone or engineering knowledge alone told us that it was going to be a powerful exclusive. And as I pointed out by a textbook that we used, it was confirmed. And this textbook was written in April of 1945, more than five years before we set off the bomb at Trinity. Okay. Good. Let's get back to the tubing, I wanted you to kind of sum up, we can go back in for a tighter shot.

Okay. There you go. I wanted you to kind of sum up for me, that's where we left off and we didn't finalize it. But I want you to tell me, in just real simple terms, I probably checked a million miles of tubes or something, a day just to look for these things, it was such a pain in the ass. You can hold on saying that, dude, I'm sure you can, I wish you would, I mean, like I said, you know, that's the kind of dialogue I like, so whatever boss suits you in your mood, but if you could tell me about that. As my assignment is processed in junior, the real pain in the ass was trying to find all the leaks in the vacuum systems that were necessary for the electromagnetic separation process. We worked for days and nights trying to develop the best method to detect these leaks and then to redesign the units so that we would not have additional leaks because a leak in

the vacuum system would completely shut down the tank. And when the tank shut down, we've got no production, we had no output. Now, how many miles of tubes did you have to check in order to... Oh, over the period of time that I worked there, I probably checked 100 miles or more tubing. Each unit had numerous vacuum outlets that had to be checked. So we had problems with a lot of the electronic tubes that we used in there. We had some tubes that cost about $800, which is a lot of money at that time. And those tubes would pop periodically and have to be replaced. I'm saying just a bit impossible. How did you get it done? It was done with lots of money, anything that we needed in a way of supplies we had the top priority on.

GE, Westinghouse, all of the major supplies and equipment broke their backs getting us equipment that we needed or improving the equipment that they had already supplied. I worked on a mass spectrograph leak detector, the first one, the first ones that were developed, now they used all around the world for checking vacuum systems. It must have been just hard work, too. That's really how you got it done. You had the money, but somebody had to stay in there. A lot of it was trial and error. A lot of our work was trial and error. A lot of our design improvements were things that somebody said, why do we try this? And we would. Then if that worked, we tried to incorporate it in the rest of the system. There were several hundred of these tanks, separations tanks that had to be maintained 24 hours a day, and it was not just having the priority to get the materials. It was trying one thing after another and eliminating all the possible errors or problems

that we had. Okay, let's go back to that wider shot again, please. We're doing great. I know exactly what I want to ask you now, a little more headroom, just a touch, and let's a little bit less of that lamp on the left, so bring him a little more center. There. Good. I'm porting with SEDs. What was the real job? I'm porting with SEDs. You guys. Okay. I don't know if this is going to dream it up, but somebody else can do it right. It became very apparent that there was a great shortage of technicians and engineers. Dreft was taking most of the people. They were going into the Army, the Air Corps, the Navy, and everything. So they set up a special engineering detachment. General Green girls did. And it was composed of about 4,000 GIS.

They were split between Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hanford, some and other locations. We did a lot of the work and received some high credits for it later on. The important people, of course, were the top physicists and the top engineers. People that I worked for later on at Sandier Laboratories, for example, were extremely knowledgeable and important people. But for every one of those, there were several hundred GIS that worked intensely and on either at Oak Ridge in the separation, or at Los Alamos or at Hanford, Washington. So it was no longer a physicist job. It became important that we have the backup. That's why the special engineering detachment, which consisted of a lot of fellows that had already had the PhDs, some had the master's degrees, some had the bachelor's degrees.

I had only three years of engineering when I was tapped for the job to go to Oak Ridge. How important were the SCDs overall to the project? The SCDs overall to the project to an SCD were extremely important. And I think most of the physicists demanded and required SCDs to get their jobs done. We did a lot of the things which I don't think the physicists would want to do. We did a lot of the, I call it dog work. And it was a work that had to be done and it was work that we thought was important. The physicists told us it was important. So we hung in there till the job was done. And a lot of the SCDs stayed on after the war, like I did when I was discharged in March of 1946.

I went right back to Los Alamos to work on plutonium separation and prepare the bombs for the kidney operation in the spring of 1946. Do you think Oppenheimer could have, or a teller or some of these guys could have done all that fabrication to them? Because Bob says Oppenheimer didn't know what to end of the screwdriver use. Well, could you, is there a little more layman's term you could use to help us understand the role of the SCD in making this thing work? The role of the SCD was a support role, we all recognize it as a support role. But without us, I believe it would have been impossible to do some of the things that we did. We did, for example, the drafting, the engineering, the, a lot of the fabrication was done by the SCDs. We felt at the time that we were an elite group and we still do.

We hold our reunions every five years at Los Alamos, we'll hold another one at Los Alamos in August to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Trinity. We think that without us, it would have been an almost impossible job for the physicists alone. And I think the physicists will back us up on that. Okay, um, let's stand this shut, cut for a second, Randy. Ready? Go for it. How physics professor at the City College in New York, when he found out that we were going to be transferred to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, said, take the textbook we used and read a particular passage, which was near the end of the text. And the text said this, should uranium atoms of weight 235 be responsible for the observations just described, it seems reasonable to suspect that a small piece of uranium metal composed

entirely of U-235 alone should act like a bomb and explode with far greater violence than any known explosive. This was a clue to us. He didn't come right out and say, we were going to be working on an atomic bomb. But all he says was, keep this without further comment to keep this information in mind. Okay, and you did keep it in mind, right? Cool, I think we're done for. Tell us about that young, the ideal guy, and let me see how I can do that. You can't see it. We'll come around to the other side to see it. You can flash it to the camera if you want, but we'll see it at some point. Yeah. Who's that guy? This is a snapshot taken right after we were allowed to wear this patch, the famous atomic bomb patch.

This was a snapshot of me at Oak Ridge before I was transferred to Los Alamos. This was the actual badge that I wore at Los Alamos. He doesn't say anything about being in the military. All it says is Clinton Engineering Works, Tennessee Eastman Corporation. This was the badge that we had to wear to get on to the reservation. And then we had an exchange badge which gave all the information they needed as the number amount of classification that we could handle. I think you said this is the badge we wore at Los Alamos. You got a little nervous. I'm sorry. You're right. It was the badge award. Let's do that over again. Yeah. I don't know. You don't have to do that. This is the badge that we used at Oak Ridge. This was to give us access to the Oak Ridge reservation. Then we had to exchange this badge at Y-12 or the electromagnetic separation plant.

That badge had numbers on it. Roman Newborns had told us the degree of classification that we could respond to or that we could discuss. This young guy here, remember him? What did he believe in? What did he want to see? What was the atmosphere like for him for the war going on? This young guy at the age of 22 felt like the war was bypassing me. I was trained as a combat engineer. I was trained to build pontoon bridges and explosives and things like this. There they moved me to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which nobody knew what was going on. There nobody, my family at home wondered why I was there, for example, but I knew what I was doing primarily because I had the knowledge that we were working on it in public and explosive

bomb. What was that back in your hands? I'm not telling you yet. Well, you believe in it. I mean, what did you want to see happen? You were trained as a combat engineer, were you ready to go to war for your country? Were you ready to get, were you patriotic? In fact, I was trained as a combat engineer and anticipated being assigned for the invasion force when they eventually went over. I was going to be assigned to the 104th Timberwolf Division as part of the combat engineers. I was ready to go, although it wasn't a desirable assignment, when I got assigned to Oak Ridge and realized how important this assignment was, I really felt like I was making a major contribution. But before you got there, Oak Ridge, what did you believe in? What were you ready to do? I was trying to get you to say, I was ready to fight for my country. Well, after getting trained as a combat engineer, I fully expected to go overseas and I was

ready to fight, to do whatever they asked me to do, anticipated that we would be going to Europe and I was trained to do the job that they wanted me to do. Yet, they were so short on technical people in the Manhattan Project that they pulled me out of the combat engineers and moved me right to Oak Ridge where I wound up working on the Manhattan Project. This I thought was an even more important and more exciting, more dynamic, a really important assignment. We're done. Great. Okay. Let's see. How did you learn about the bomb work? Did you learn anything about what happened to Trinity? Did you get any results about what happened to Trinity? Did somebody say, hey, Trinity worked with Tonyums the way to go or what, okay. At Oak Ridge, we had no news of Trinity.

We didn't even know that the plutonium bomb had been tested. All that we were working on was a U-235. We knew that U-235 would work if we got enough material, but we had no idea of how the plutonium work was going on. Therefore, we were low men on the totem pole as far as that goes in terms of knowledge about Trinity. So when did you find out then that it was a bomb and it had worked and it was used in war? Was it in the newspapers or what? I found out about the actual Hiroshima bomb on the day that it exploded. I did not know at that time when the drop would be. I did not know whether I, I, for sure, there was going to be a U-235 bomb because I did not know what success they were having with plutonium work at Hanford and Los Alamos. We were compartmentalized. It was extremely difficult to learn what was going on at the other sites.

We knew we had a relationship, but we didn't know exactly what that relationship was, but we knew it was extremely urgent in this damn war. And that was the whole intent of the group was to try to end it with what type of bomb we could come up with, whether it be a U-235 or plutonium. I had friends working at Oak Ridge working on the plutonium bomb because we had a reactor at X-10, which was a prototype of the Hanford reactor. But I did not know what success they were having. What was your reaction when you heard about the bomb being used in Hiroshima? There was immense, intense joy that came to my mind. The fact that we were successful, that all this effort was, we had come to an end. I could see the end, we ended the war immediately. It took a few days for the Japanese to do that to see it.

But I could see the end of the war and that what we had done was right and justifiable. When you say it was intense, I mean, you're like, we're going to leave. Like, God, these guys are going to be coming home. My brothers are going to stop fighting. I mean, could we explain a little bit more about that? My feeling was that the war was over. That there would be no more in outlands skipping and jumping and invading. The Japanese could not survive. I didn't think without sacrificing their entire population. So we had a belief that we were saving Japanese lives as well as American lives. And the important thing was to get the job done. And it was done quickly as a result of the dropping of Hiroshima. The important thing was to get the job done to do it as fast as we could, to do it as quick

as we could, so that we could end the damn war. And the only way we could do that in my mind was to drop the bomb on the Japanese city. All right, here's the tough one. It's a pretty tough bomb. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the films of the victims and things like that. What's your reaction to that? People are going to want to know this document and they're not going to say, hey, it's great to listen to these guys' stories, but what are their feelings about the actual use of this weapon?

That's one of the questions I've been asking everybody. Well, I had the opportunity to look at a lot of the photographs taken of the both Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bomb. It was devastating. It was intimidating, sorry, messed up that. Let's just don't want to go right in and start over again now. I had the opportunity to look at a lot of photographs, hear a lot of, get a lot of information about the results of the bomb bombing at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It was sickening to some extent. I felt like a terrible tragedy had occurred, but I could also see a bigger tragedy if we had not dropped the bomb. I can see Japanese still destroyed by fire bombs like we did in Tokyo, which destroyed almost as many people or more than we did at Hiroshima.

So I was not surprised at the effect. I would not like to see it used again, but I think the fact that we didn't use it for the last 40 years, 50 years now, tells us that we know how to use it or not to use it. And I think no, I don't know how to put it in words, no way of seeing how happy I was to see that we ended the war as quickly as we did. No doubt in my mind that we would have still been fighting in 1946 and perhaps even later than that. That's what I was hoping you'd tell me. That's what I was hoping you'd tell me.

That's what I was hoping you'd tell me. That's what I was hoping you'd tell me.