¡Colores!; 1301; A Commitment to Peace; Harold M. Agnew, Interview 1

I'm really interested in maybe setting a little bit of context at first for the whole 1946 to say 63 period. That late. Yeah, I go from 46 to 60. Okay, fine. Bob was very fond of telling me when he was working on Trinity, the darn thing was like a scientific oddity. But after you get into the war and you get into the postwar era, things move pretty quickly, as far as weapons design and development goes. Is there any way you can kind of somehow articulate how quickly things changed now, how sophisticated things became? Well, after we were successful at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, clearly the military had an insatiable hunger for as many weapons as they could possibly get. And of course, the number was constrained by the amount of material, Uranium, Rich, Uranium, and plutonium that we could get.

And they would say what yields they wanted, and many as they could get of the various yields. And we essentially would mix and match depending on the quantity of fissile materials that were coming either from Oak Ridge or from Hanford in order to make the number of weapons that they wanted. And as technology improved, we could get more bang with less materials. And that was the main drive to maximize the number of bombs. There were all bombs, and we didn't have any warheads until later on, no missiles. Maximize the number and the technology is what allowed us to do that. Van Nomen had pointed out very early, which is why we went to the Nagasaki, or what we call a Christie design, was that if you can compress the material, it takes less to get a critical mass. So the whole effort was figuring out how to improve hydrodynamics to do that. And at the same time, the military was saying, gosh, can't you make these things a little smaller or a little lighter?

You know, 5, 10,000 pounds is a little heavy for us. So we went from the old Mark IV to the Mark Vs, and really the first tactical weapon was the Mark VII, which we deployed over in Europe early on, externally carried on F-84Fs. I think that's heading more into direction, not necessarily as the weapon, but just right now, the whole sense of this almost amazing time in physics and science and breakthroughs right from day one of us. The real effort, the real, to me, the amazing thing was what the metallurgists in the chemist did. Starting out is if you were going from the stone age to the steel age, there was an absolutely new element. We knew nothing about its metallurgy, subsequently found out it's a plutonium

is a very complicated material. There's like seven different face compositions, and people had to learn how to handle these material. Uranium, at the time when we were at Chicago in the early 40s, someone had ever made uranium metal, and that was a real coup de gras when we finally figured out how to make uranium metal. Both uranium and plutonium are pyrophoric, so they had to devise vacuum furnaces in order to develop the technology to make these materials. To me, what they did was just amazing, and of course they had to make it very pure in order to prevent the light elements being present from an alpha-n reaction producing an intolerable neutron background. So the real work that complemented the theoretical design people was the effort done by the metallurgists

and the people who learned how to fabricate these brand new materials, which were pyrophoric as one example. They oxidized immediately, had to develop the dry boxes, glove boxes. They were also... They're not toxic in spite of what Mr. Caldecott or other, let me call the... What do I call it? I call it the sea students revenge who are against everything nuclear, no matter what it is. These materials are not toxic in the sense of poisons. You can actually eat plutonium, you could eat uranium. It isn't absorbed in the gut. It is radioactive, and if you have it in an aerosol form, it can be dangerous. We also had to work a lot with brilium in the early days. We didn't know at the time about briliosis, and several people lost their lives as a result of that.

It's not an immediate thing, it's sort of like emphysema. It also seems to be unique to individuals. Some people are allergic to brilium, some people aren't. But the real effort, which went hand in hand with the people developing codes, developing better computers. I think one of the things that the weapons program really contributed was the development of high-speed computers. We funded, starting with IBM. We jumped in just a second, I'm sorry to interrupt. That's okay. Well, we were talking about just this whole sense of amazing science, so to speak. The things are changing so quickly. You're talking about just the sheer sense of how the metal are just taking us from the iron age into a more modern thing. How about as the weapon itself evolved? How did you see it say from, if you would compare a 46 weapon to the kind of things that were happening just prior to the limited test band treating? Well, the main event, which took place at really changed things,

was a concept of boosting, using deuterium-tridium gas to enhance the number of neutrons at the appropriate time. And we got much more yield with using much less material. That was a real breakthrough, and a person that was... One of the leaders in conceiving that was... Conrad Longwire. Conrad Longwire was one of the leading individuals to pose the concept of boosting. Longest martial Rosenblut. And that really changed everything because that made us... made us possible to go from relatively large devices to small devices. It also made a complication logistically because in the old days and the original days we used to keep the fissomaterial separate from the explosives that compress the material. And so at that time there was a...

The rules were that the atomic energy commission, they controlled the fissomaterial, the military controlled the bombs and the high explosive and everything. And if and when they thought they had a mission, then the two would mate, the material would be transferred over to the military. Well, once we started boosting, the fissomaterial had to be in the explosive mechanism all the time. So at that time there was a transition, and essentially the totality of the weapon system was handed over to the military. There you go. Let's change the tune a little bit. What was it like working under front lines of the Cold War? What were the kinds of things running through your mind? Well I think we were dedicated, we knew what our objectives were, we knew what our mission was.

And it was really exciting, there was no question about why we were doing what we were doing. Of course we're always concerned that the Soviets might be ahead of us in their technologies. They certainly were ahead as far as developing a deliverable thermonuclear weapon. They were ahead of us in that aspect. Maybe we were, you might say, doing a little more science, a little more experiments before we finally actually fielded a thermonuclear weapon. But they did develop the first deliverable, at least when they tested it for a dropping from an airplane. So that to me, man, it was deliverable. But I think our concern all the time was the progress that the Soviets were making. When you say the mission, near my, what was the mission? The mission was to develop the best, safest, that's one issue, absolutely safe.

We have a term we call an inherently one point safe. So if there were to be an accident, an explosive were to go out, there'd be no nuclear yield or if there was to be a nuclear yield, there'd be a few pounds at the most. So it's relatively easy to make a nuclear weapon that isn't inherently safe. But to combine getting the yield that one requires in the size and still have it inherently safe took a bit of doing. And we had those restraints on us. We never knew whether the Russians had that sort of capability or not. Well, it's a spirit like working in those early days. All right, the spur was always great. Always high everybody, whether you were in the physics division or the chemistry division or in the weapons division, which would be the explosives and the people who did the design of the hardware and handle the fist on material. We're all motivated.

We all knew what we were doing. Our overall mission was, which was to provide the department of defense with the safest, most efficient, nuclear packages, so to speak, that we could develop. You make it sound kind of easy. Well, it seemed to be easy. We had failures. We had, fortunately, we could test. And you learn more from failures than you do from successes because sometimes when you have a success, you really don't know why. When you have a failure, it makes you think a bit. What kind of job did Bradbury have to do? I just wrote, says in his books, that Los Alamos is a ghost town in 46. Well, a lot of us left. I left in 46, most people. See, during the war, a lot of people came from universities. A lot of people who were in their graduate years at universities also came. We had our special engineering detachment, who were actually technical people, either a bachelor's degree or a master's degree or a doctor's degree, who had been drafted. Unfortunately, finally, not at the beginning, but finally, the department of defense had a common sense.

We can use these people in the various complexes, whether it was at Hanford or Oak Ridge or Chicago or Los Alamos. Eventually, Sandia, we can use them better. Sandia wasn't involved in the role using their technical expertise. So we had all these people there, but came to the end of the war. They all wanted to go back either to their, if they were the professors and wanted to go back to the university, pick up there. The students wanted to go back and continue their education. So a lot of people did leave. But many of us who left, especially get to advanced degrees, clearly we liked the laboratory, what was going on there, the way there was no compartmentalization. And we wanted to come back. That was certainly my case. As I got my doctor, I came back. What was interesting about the work you were doing? Oh, just the excitement, the discovery of finding out new things.

And the camaraderie that went with the way everything worked. And I was in the physics division when I came back. And we were all essentially the same age, and we knew what we wanted to do. And it was just a total excitement, especially when we went and did a test, and it was successful. Now what about the fear of communism? Did that figure in any of this? It may have. It never bothered me one way or the other, whether the business was spies and everything. We, having been sort of brought up in the beginning, I have some interesting documents from Chicago where the concept of secrecy in science was developed. It was done by the scientists, not by the military, not by general growth. The scientists put their own restrictions on secrecy as far as the science that we were doing. And I sort of was brought up that way, so it never, never, it wasn't a problem of wondering.

We just didn't talk to people at that early on in our mail, of course, with censored coming in, going out. And we never talked about where we worked. Even today, people ask, where did I live in New Mexico? I always say, Santa Fe. I just don't want to get involved in a conversation with them. Not that I'm ashamed of it in any way. It just doesn't, it just, we don't talk about it. But you're talking a little bit about losing secrets, but I thought there was a genuine concern of the red scare, I mean, the communists on the march, they're in Berlin, they're in Czechoslovakia. There was no question that we were concerned about what was happening when they started gobbling up territory in Europe. And that's why we sent over a B-47 squadron. It was one of the first things sent them to England. And as soon as we deployed weapons in Europe, that gobbling up a territory really quit. That was a formation of NATO, of course, what was that? 49. But the backbone of NATO was really our nuclear deterrent,

because all of US troops, you know, everybody came home. There was not much of an army left in Europe at the time, and of course the devastation was just terrible. The thing that always impressed me about the Soviet work was how they were able to accomplish all that they did, considering the mess their country was in at the end of the war, the devastation. And it just, that, that has always amazed me. And of course, they didn't have even the little computers that we had at the time. They've always been extremely strong in mathematics and in metallurgy. And they do, you know, talk to some of the original people, not the people now that do their weapons program. They're pretty much like we are. But the original guys who can tell you wonderful stories about how they got involved in the business. Whereas we were anxious to get involved, there was a man named Emilianoff who told me a story. He's the man that developed the technology to make a tank turret in one piece in the Soviet.

And he evidently was a close friend of Stalin. And he tells the story that when they were going to start their program, he was called into Stalin in high comrade. And, and Stalin said he wanted him to be in charge of one particular aspect. He was really a, a fairest metallurgist. And he said, you know, comrade, I don't know anything about this. You know, I don't know any part of this. I don't understand it. I don't get involved in something. He said, Stalin said, well, you go home and you think about it. And, and then we'll talk again. He said he got home. He wasn't there more than an hour and he got a telephone call. And the person that I was talking with, that we were talking together with Emilianoff was a man named Bernie Feld, who ran Pugwash for many years. And of course, Bernie and I both said, I was Stalin. He says, no, Berea. And he said, yes, comrade, I'm delighted to work on the program.

So they were, they were, I would say, at least in his instance, they weren't, they didn't volunteer. They assembled their best minds and put them on him and it was that or the gulag. Whereas ours was different, I think. Let me ask you, what's your personal opinion of Stalin? Obviously, a very ruthless guy. You know, same as Hitler. Those guys were a little bit nuts. They wasted an awful lot of talent. One of the things that really bothers me, or I think how lucky we are, see the neutron wasn't discovered till 32. The fission wasn't discovered to really 39. It's a seven year gap. Although experiments that had been done, Fermi, for instance, had a radiated uranium with neutrons, but he didn't do any chemical analysis. He just watched the induced radioactivity. It wasn't until stront at hospital. Stront at hospital in 38, December 38.

All the subsequent, really, with Lisa Meitner and Otto Frisch came up with the idea of fission. Now, if you think about it in the early 30s, Hitler decreed maybe 33, something like that. That nobody with a Jewish background could be hired by the state. Now, all the universities and research institutes were state. So, you'll find that the people like beta, vice-coff, all these people left. Not because Hitler was on their back, the way it was later on with people with Jewish ancestry, but they left because they couldn't earn a living. Now, if you think of what might have happened at that time, a fission had been discovered. You'll find all these people that were the leaders of our project studied in Germany, even Fermi studied in Germany. If you think about it, if he hadn't kicked them all out, they could have developed a nuclear program.

They had the brains, they had access to uranium. They clearly could have kept it secret. And at that time, in the early 30s, our military was nothing. Our science, as far as working with the military, was very limited. The whole world could have changed. There'd been no Britain today. There'd been no invasion on our part. So, it was sort of lucky that there was a seven-year gap, and he kicked out these people. It could have changed the whole world. I was kind of heading towards the Russian program a little bit, and we were saying Stalin and Hitler kind of really screwed things up, but you said Stalin was... Well, he had a lot of... Well, early on, there were a lot of Germans who were sort of friendly at the time. And as soon as the Hitler then invaded, Stalin wasn't very nice to those. There were a lot of science and technical people.

So, I think it... Well, you take people like Sakharov and so on who were sent off. He just didn't utilize all the people he had. But nevertheless, I'm still amazed that they were able to do what they did in the time that they did it under the circumstances, which they were left after the war. Cindy, do you do our medium? A Russian historian recently published some findings where he thought Stalin had killed over 20 million Russians, which is about half of what was lost during the war, right? That's what history books say. I have no idea whether he did or he didn't. But he certainly was ruthless. Well, Tony, if you had any knowledge of that at the time... No, no, no. The only knowledge I had was when I was working with Fermi in 42, our concern was Germans, not the Russians. And we were very much worried about what the Germans might be doing, especially because all the people who were involved in nuclear physics at the time had studied in Germany.

And I know Fermi was concerned about the heavy water in Norway. And I remember at lunch one day we started talking about this and he said, I'm going to talk to the military and say they really ought to make sure that the Germans don't get that heavy water. And I think that lunch conversation is what led to the amazing raids by those courageous Norwegians that indeed blew up the plant and then sank the shipment of heavy water that was going to Germany. Let's move on a little bit. I read some accounts for Stalin's reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to just try to get his country back on the ground and start getting some industrial light. And that's kind of... It's almost as if he was alluding to the fact that the Russians better get their act together if they're going to be able to protect themselves.

I have no idea what about Russian activity and what they were doing after the war. I know that immediately our concern was Germany was out of the picture. Now our problem was Russia. I can remember Los Alamos in probably early 50s. Maybe it was in 46. Some of us were abdicating bombing Russia once a month. We had limited stockpile. So what we got to do was get rid of their industrial capability. Just keep them on their knees. We knew they were in bad shape. But we thought, interesting, the people who thought this were people who had ancestry in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, the border to the Soviet Union. They were taken over but they were very anti-Soviet at the time. But it was an interesting idea that once a month or whenever we had any bombs, we could spare. That was our own enemy.

We perceived our own potential threat down the road was to keep them on their knees and make sure that their industrial capability wasn't resurrected. The joint chiefs, after Crossroads, basically wrote a blueprint for the Cold War. It was called, I forget the name of the act. Since they talked about building a stockpile, they talked about having a strong offense as a best defense. I mean, what I'd just say is that certain world peace was really important too. I guess what I'm asking, the question I'm asking you then is, what do you think, how would you typify our country's policy during this early time? Was it really a good offense as a best defense? Well, at the time, as soon as we developed the nuclear weapons, the concept of a defense really didn't exist. We had no defense, although we put up a lot of anti-aircraft systems, even with nuclear warheads.

Here in Albuquerque, we had an air defense squadron. In fact, unfortunately, on one of their training missions, they shot down a B-52 over Mount Taylor. They were all armed and they played games with these B-52s that would make transcontinental flights. We had no capability for defense, other than air defense, which we, well, that was the only threat. There was no missile threat. I think the concept was that a credible offense was, as a deterrent, was probably extremely worthwhile as a stabilizing factor in the powers. That's clearly in Europe, although we did have some air defense capability there too. The main thing was our F-84Fs in the early days was Mark VII's on what we call the QRA Quick Reaction Alert. For a long time, we had four aircraft and many airfields in Europe, all they allies, all the NATO, on a five-menal alert, with crews ready to take off with a mission.

Actually, some of us from the lab, when we got involved in that Leon Smith, Don Carter, and myself, I made a trip over there and came back and said, you know, I was amazed. There's a squadron of German aircraft with our bombs on them and what's going to prevent them from taking off and using them. Well, what was supposed to prevent them was one single US private soldier standing there with a rifle, which was sort of nonsense. Instead of that, we have developed what we call permissive action link and that has really progressed at Sandia to where it's really worthwhile. Some of us have argued that when some of these new nations that proliferates will call whether it's India or Pakistan, instead of putting sanctions on them, should sit down on them and say, now your problem is to prevent unauthorized use. We should help them in the technology to prevent unauthorized use because in some of these countries, there are radicals and they could really, to me, could cause a real lot of damage.

I think any of them can come as far as we are, but just starting things in Europe or they're surrounding neighbors if they were to have a crazy kernel or even a major that has access. If there's no way that the leadership of a country can prevent unauthorized use other than by saying, don't do it. You have to have an electronic mechanical ways of doing this. So I've argued then, instead of sanctions, you should say, okay, you're now a member of the nuclear club. You have to take the responsibility. And I felt the same way with regard to China. In fact, China, I was told at one time when they first developed their systems, they realized that it was important to have make certain that there was no unauthorized use. They actually asked the Atomic Energy Commission or the DOE for assistance and they were turned down, so they went to the Russians.

Now, the Russians presumably helped them develop this type of electronic or whatever they have. I don't know what they have, but I thought, again, that was not very wise on part of our people. I think they don't understand what secrets are and what secrets aren't. We can stop for just a second.