¡Colores!; 610; Trinity: Getting the Job Done

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Mr. Mr.

Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. I stepped back a little in awe and said, my God, it's beautiful. And Julian came back instantly and said, no, it's terrible. The bomb was not a mistake. Next, Uncle Dennis. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake. The bomb was not a mistake.

Well, Oppenheimer, as I say, as a theoretical physicist, was more of a mathematician than anything else. In fact, I don't think he knew one end of a screwdriver from the other. We did a lot of the, I call it dog work. And it was a work that was, had to be done. And it was work that we thought was important. So we hung in there until the job was done. So Oppenheimer and the physicists were ones who could dream up and design a weapon, but we were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work.

We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work.

We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones that could make it work. We were the ones who were the people of Barcelona and Barcelona. We were the people who were the people of Barcelona and Barcelona. We were the people who were the people to make it work. We were the people who were the people of Barcelona and Barcelona. The movements are too hard. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Their floor is up roaring. Our floor is up roaring. Our floor is up bronored. Their floor is up roaring. Our floor is upellened. Our floor is up�slow. and through, through the full product of anyone who has neither mercy nor domain nor honor to US

Rising true Rising true Rising Higher Rising true Rising Higher Rising Higher Rising Rising Higher He thought he was a madman, and he was a madman. You say to yourself, well, how did he have the right to do those kinds of things? And nobody was able to stop him. We were risking against time. We thought we knew what the Germans were doing, and it turned out later we didn't, that they were way behind where we thought they were, but we didn't know that. And we were scared to death that they would get the answer before we did. Yesterday, December 7, 1941,

a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Absolutely disgusting. I could not believe that our military could be so dead on its feet for whatever never should have happened. No matter how long it may take us, it will overcome this premeditated invasion.

The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. When I got to Berkeley, right off the bat, Ernest Lawrence put me in charge of the design of the Electromagnets for the pilot plant, for the big production plant that was going to be built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Okay, I was doing that when Lawrence came in one day, and he said, Bob, he said, I want to warn you that this is Monday, that on Wednesday, there's a couple of high-pressure artists that want to talk to you about doing something else. Well, he called me up Wednesday morning, and I got down to his office about 10 o'clock and walked in and they were sitting where Robert Oppenheimer and George Kistiackowski. And about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, Oppenheimer said, Bob,

he says, do you subscribe to the National Geographic magazine? And I said, yeah, I do. And he said, well, do you read those ads in the back of the magazine that you have to do with boarding schools? And he said, well, he says, there's one of them back there called the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys, which is located in the mountains up back of Santa Fe in Mexico. I've got something down there I'd like to show you. So I said, well, I'm right up to my ears now in a job for Oak Ridge that I'll be through within about a week. And I'd be very happy to come down and see you at that time. And with that, he reached an East Court Puckett. I have here a TWA ticket in your name on an airplane leaving San Francisco in three hours. Can you get ready? So I guess I got the message that I've been Shanghai. I think I was the only person to get off of the train as I recall.

And I did telephone number that was given to me. And so I was sitting on the steps of the general store there in Lehme and been there for quite a while waiting for these guys or waiting for some transportation. And this black Buick showed up with two civilians in it, which I knew couldn't be for me. I didn't deal with civilians. I dealt with military people. These guys pulled up right beside me and rolled down the window. And the guy said, are you Benjamin? And I said, yeah. And he said, okay, get in. We'll take you. And I, of course, tried to get information from them on what goes on. And they started giving me a hard time. I'm going up there, and I'll never be seen or heard from again, because the place is so classified. And once you get inside the third fence, that's where I was going, that there would never be seen again.

We did it before. And we did it again. And we did it again. It almost itself was a typical Army camp, a two-story, four-unit apartment building. It's been built out of green plasterboard. It was a military installation, and a lot of people don't realize that. It was strictly military. Everybody was in uniform, except this cadre of civilians who were running the laboratory under Oppenheimer. I knew absolutely nothing when I arrived there. I mean, it was... I had a hard time understanding the fact that I was in the Manhattan District Engineers. The SED acronym was a special engineer detachment, which was a part of the Manhattan District. This was an interesting arrangement.

These were very bright young lads. They were all engineering graduates, a strange thing about them. Some of them had doctors degrees, and they'd be working for a buck private. But nobody worried about these things. Totally nobody paid any attention to rank. I was taken aside by my boss, right? I think it was the same day I met him. And he was very frank with me, and told me what was going on up there. They were going to build a weapon that could end the war. And we had the photographic, the technophotographic group, and were involved in many aspects of the fabrication, or the design of the weapon. ... Kistia Kowsky was the headman in the area that I was working in.

Kistia Kowsky was responsible for the implosion weapon, the high explosive system, the weapon we dropped on, like a socket. As contrasted to the bomb that we dropped on our Russian, the gun type gadget, which was nothing more than a gun. They project on the target, and the two of them became super critical and made an explosion, but very, very inefficient. The little boy, the gun gadget, was being handled strictly by Captain Parsons. Kisties was much more sophisticated, and nobody knew that we would even work, and that was the big question mark. We had to test it. We knew we had to test it. We did not have to test the one that we were going to drop on our Russian. I was worked on what we call the racetrack,

and that was where we had the big tanks that separated the U-235 and the U-238. We had lots of problems. There was a continual change in design, and we had to incorporate all of these designs into the production of the U-235. And we were accumulating one atom at a time. So we had these huge tracks. Some of them were 250 feet in diameter, and with a magnetic field that was 100 times stronger than any other magnetic field that had been generated at that time. In fact, we used 14,000 tons of silver in the bus bar that created the magnetic field. Kishti Akarski could not live with Parsons, Captain Parsons. They came from different worlds. Parsons was Navy from way back, and to him a weapon was a gun. Anything else was not a weapon.

It drove Kishti absolutely insane, because he was a physical chemist and highly scientific. And he was attempting to do something that Parsons, way beyond them. It takes a lot of U-235 to make a gun type weapon. Gun type weapons, you know, from past experiences, are very inefficient. When we came up with the implosion weapons, they were about 16 times as efficient as a gun type weapon. The showdown on this implosion weapon came in Oppenheimer's office. I don't think there was any doubt in anyone's mind when the engineers and physicists that if we got enough U-235, we could make a bomb. But could we make a second one? The problem was that it took so long to accumulate the material for the first bomb that it was practically impossible to come up with a second bomb.

That's why the emphasis went on to plutonium. And plutonium could be generated at hand foot, and if the implosion weapon worked as it was demonstrated at Trinity, then we had a possibility of producing weapons very rapidly. Actually, we didn't have that capability. We only had one of the bombs ready to go at the end of the war. And when Truman said we're going to blast a Japan from one end to the other, it was a big bluff. Parsons sort of took over, and he said, Opie, he says, I want you to put an end to the implosion weapon project. The thing that Kishti and Coffees were going to say, total waste of time and money. There's no way on God's green earth that Kishti can ever get the moles necessary to produce those HE castings to the quality that are required in the time that's available. It can't be done.

It's a total waste of effort. I want you to assign all of his technical staff to me to work on the gun project. Of course, Kishti got very serious about that, and I couldn't take it so I spoke up, and I said, Opie, that's not true. I know how to build those moles, and I know where to get the help to do it. And, of course, General Groves was sitting against the wall, which is what he always did. He took the chair up against the wall, and just listened to the fight. And so Opie looked at me, he said, you know what you're talking about? And I said, I sure do. So there's only one place in the United States where I can get the help that I need to build those moles and the quantities that are required. And that's the Chrysler Corporation in Detroit. It was a very intense period of time. Los Alamos kept setting deadlines. We couldn't meet the deadlines. We had Secretary of War Stimpson come by and go through our plant

and tell us how important it was to get the production up. We had 75,000 people working on this project, and nothing was being turned out in terms of visible results. In fact, they used to say we bring in trained loads of equipment to Oak Ridge, and nothing went out. Truly, it went out, but it went out in micrograms, milligrams, grand quantities, and eventually kilograms of U-235. Got into Detroit. It didn't even stop for breakfast. Went right into Chrysler, and got up in Keller's office and his production people said, yeah, we can do this. But Keller says, Leslie, he says, tell you, you're going to close down the entire Chrysler Corporation, and he says, we are the only producers of the Pratt & Whitney 4360 engine for the B-29 production line.

So you're going to close down the B-29 production line for two days while we convert over to do this job. And that's asking an awful lot, and is it worth it? And Groves turned to me, and I said, yes. So... We consequently drove ourselves. I mean, really, essentially drove ourselves. We worked 24 hours a day, 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 a design change we were trying to incorporate. We did everything we could to increase the production, and it wasn't until about three months before the end of the war that our production lines were really running. On the airplane, as we were riding to Detroit, I said, General, I don't understand you. You're a civil engineer,

you are working with all these world famous physicists and chemists, metallurgists. I don't know how you do it. And he said, Bob, you don't watch carefully. He said, don't you watch how I start fights all the time? And he said, everybody hates my guts. And he said, I'm probably the most hated guy in the whole US Army Corps of Engineers. And he says, all I do is, we're at a stumbling block. In an argument, he says, I start a fight between guys that I know collectively, what the answer ought to be, or at least the best bet. I let these guys solve their own problems. He says, hell, I don't know a damn thing about what they're talking about. But I listen to them, and out of what they're saying, I can get a feeling for where the strength of the argument may lie. And then I make up my mind as to which horse I'm going to ride for the next week. And then we'll go through the whole process again. He says, I get so I hate myself. But he says, it is affecting.

He's the hell of a way to run a railroad, but it does work. We're pushed not only by supervision, by military commanders, but also for personal reasons. Nearly all of us had somebody in the family overseas and we knew how the Japanese were fighting. One by one, the jobs were losing the islands they had grabbed. This was the island of Ottawa on November 20th, 1943. It was a hot fight bitter and deadly. I had personal concerns in that I had a brother fighting in the Fifth Army in Italy, and a younger brother in the Pacific in the Navy. My girlfriend at that time, and later became my wife, two brothers killed in the invasion in Adidas, and they were the only two brothers she had. If you try to detonate a ball of explosive

or any surface of explosive, the detonation wave rushes out in all directions, just like throwing a pebble into a pond of water, and that's the last thing we wanted. We wanted the opposite or we wanted the waves to come in. And you can design a geometry then that turns that expanding spherical wave into a converging spherical wave block by block. Underneath each detonator, that wave will get turned around from a diverging wave to a converging wave. If you get the detonators to all go at the same time, the waves all get at the same place at the same time. They were meant to squeeze the ball of plutonium in the center of the weapon, create the fishing reaction. Now, that ball had to be almost a critical mass, and then the explosive was what pushed it over the edge. It simply compressed it, that small additional amount necessary

to make it become super critical. With the implosion weapon, one had to have all the detonators go simultaneously. Yeah, it's a little difficult thing to do. In fact, a lot of people worked for long periods on that. But we had the camera that could resolve a microsecond. Early on, they had a problem here of recording the information on oscilloscope screens. So pretty soon, we built a special camera that just to photograph those screens, and they had to get resolving power like 10 to the minus eight seconds. That is a hundredth of a millionth of a second resolution of what that trace was doing on the screen, and they wanted clear pictures to do that. That was a primary instrument for determining do we have an electronic system

that will detonate these things simultaneously? Yeah, one of the more interesting things we did as GI's working in a well-equipped photo lab is the fact that Sergeant Debney said I had a rule that we couldn't leave the hill, Los Alamos, so being a photographic organization, we decided we'd make our own pass. And I don't think Debney knows to this day what happened. We kept out a secret of our own. So we had to get the box just right, and chemically just right. And they had to get the detonators just right, so there was no spread in their firing. They all had to fire exactly the same time. And how the detonators themselves were made and the power supply that fired the detonators. How did you do that? There were so many things that had to turn out just right

in order to make that thing perform that people were worried about. In fact, that was the only reason Jumbo was ever built. And they only decided not to use Jumbo about two weeks before the shot. We didn't have time to get sophisticated about anything. It was almost always what is on the market, what is available that we can modify or gang up with something else to do our job without getting into a lot of development work on some new untried component. Use what's available, and that philosophy prevailed through the design of the whole weapon. That's why we call the thing a gadget. It was certainly not a well-engineered affair. We got around to doing that after the war.

Something should be said about the fact that the bomb had to be delivered by an airplane. A different group of engineers were working on that to take the problem. Well, the young early on Smith had decided on the spur of the moment in 1938 to go to the University of Wisconsin to take electrical engineering and patent law. And this young man had essentially finished the engineering was ready to go into law school. When he got drafted rather quickly, he made the mistake earlier of trying to enlist in the Marines because people were very patriotic at that point in time. But the Marines took one look at that poor, miserable, physical misfits at Nah, go home. Just getting the wind over was difficult because since the orders were secret,

I couldn't show them to anyone. And without the military people seeing orders, you couldn't get a seat on an airplane. So our job really was to assist Los Alamos in designing and developing the fusing and firing system. The basic fuse was the proximity radar. You didn't, anyone on an airplane did not want the bomb to go off, it was underneath the airplane. And the radar saw the airplane as a target, just as it would have seen the ground as a target. So there were pressure sensing devices in the bomb to be sure that the radar was not armed until it was close to a desired altitude. I designed the flight desk box used to check out the atomic bombs. We particularly wanted the North of batteries were working. We wanted the North of radars were working.

You wanted to be safe and reliable and go boom in a very big way. I remember one time the system did not work. And I think we worked straight through for between 48 and 72 hours. It was simply a soldered ground connection that had broken loose. When you're out there with a war, you do what you can do. You don't worry about hours and things of that type. You do what's necessary to get your job done. It's unbelievable.

The things that you would see on this crummy little 9 square mile island. I saw young boys with their arms off, with their legs off, their faces shot off, of course there was some you saved and some you really couldn't save because of the condition they were in. We had one guy with both legs and both arms off and when we sent him to the ship, he was still alive. You look back and you say, how did I do it? One morning I went into a tent and there was about 12 or 13 men laying there. But they were all dead. Every one of them. And then you would see somebody that looked like they'd breathe. One time I said to one of the doctors, I said, guys, still alive. He says, no, you just don't die all at once.

It was just a catastrophe. I was feeling like it was going to go and go big. Well, it was open desert. And about all that were out there was coyotes and badgers and things like that. And so we were particularly interested in water.

And that's when the fun began. One thing that we had to have for instrumentation purposes was a good electrical ground. Water is a good ground. The problem we had not reckoned about was the people that occupied the range illegally. There are pretty rough, tough bunch of range cattle growers. And they gave us a lot of trouble from the standpoint that they've dried where we had the water wells dug for electrical grounds. They'd come along on horseback at night and drop dynamite down the wells and blow them up. The base camp was just a series of bunk houses with pipe frame beds

and no window just holds the wall where the wind would blow through and the crews would come through. And the crews would sit on the foot of the bed and look at you and they could get out of the sun. That's why it kept cooler inside the bunk house. The Germans had already surrendered. Well, they surrendered in. What may of that year, I think. But the Japanese were still killing our guys overseas and we were just hell bent to get that thing finished and get it over there. And we knew we had a good chance of ending the war. It was pretty primitive living. But in those days, people were all dedicated towards a given goal and there was no griping about anything. It was an interesting situation to try to do this in peacetime. It would never work, but nobody complained about anything. He just got on with the job and swallows you pride

and went ahead with what had to be done. No one knew what we were really doing down there. We were asked to do specific jobs, but we didn't know what the job was for. The men got along real, real well together. Consider 90 people being quarantined to an area. In the United States, you spend 24 hours and just maybe a 25 or 30 acre area with a dozen barracks and buildings on it. And you just have to find your own entertainment. We picked up some stray dogs in town. I myself found a couple of crows. Some of the MPs would trap rattlesnakes and all that and they even built a pen and they had several of them penned up.

And one night, somehow the snakes got out. I don't know how that happened, but in the next morning there were snakes crawling all over that camp and scared to hell out of a lot of people there. I don't know why I was picked to go down to the site. I had no skills whatsoever. Being a young 18-year-old boy from Brooklyn, New York with my Brooklyn accent of oil and void and tardy toid and all that. We got down to Trinity site and most of the engineers down there had a specific trade. They were either electricians, carpenters, plumbers. But I worked with every one of them and did the best I could. And finally, they needed someone to maintain the camp. I mainly volunteered because even though it's not a very high quality job, it's a job that has to be done

in any camp no matter where you are. And trash has to be picked up. And I really felt that I could contribute more to the camp doing that than any of the other skills that they asked me to do. Things were getting more and more tense as the weeks went by. Construction proceeded on the tower and the hoisting equipment with the tower. The thing we had at Trinity was an audit. It was purely a gadget in experiment. Aimed only at collecting information on how the thing worked. All kinds of instruments on the overhead to measure different phenomena. As diagnostic information in case there was a misfire of any kind. One of the big projects there, maybe the biggest was the effort to gather data photographically.

The brightness would be an important factor in determining the yield. And the size of the fireball was an important factor. It couldn't be measured any other way. Interestingly enough, this soccer ball out of a sporting goods store probably would have been classified top secret in 1942-43-44. Because interestingly enough, its geometry is identical to the geometry of the individual of explosive blocks that went into the design of the implosion bomb. So there's twirl panagons and in between them are 20 hexagons. All of them have obtuse angles at their corners, which is the ideal configuration to avoid fragility if you're going to make the thing out of high explosives.

The spherical assembly had 32 detonation points distributed all over its surface. Each of those detonation points had two detonators and fed by different electrical systems which came from different directions. So that literally you could go up to the side of this unit and grab any bunch of wires that you could wrap your hand around and cut them and it would not affect the function of the bomb. All of our 35 millimeter cameras were operating at 100 pictures of second. We had lots of 16 millimeter cameras that were operating at various speeds from slow to very high speed. Fireball expansion was important in 100 pictures per second between frames the thing was almost over. So all you get is three or four frames of the fireball expansion. So at a thousand or ten thousand pictures a second

you could then determine the rate of growth of the fireball which was an important item in knowing what the yield was, what the explosive yield was. Uranium 235 and plutonium are both hot, thermally hot because of the internal activity that's always going on in those metals. So the core of a bomb in your hand is uncomfortably hot. So the core had been carried in its own carrying case all the way from Los Alamos. Simple physics tells you the things expand when they get hot. So when it came time to put the nuclear core into the rest of the bomb assembly it wouldn't go in. The hole wasn't big enough to take the core. To everyone's consternation, particularly Oppenheimer, he thought it was a dimensional problem that somebody had made a mistake in machining but we knew that wasn't true.

It was purely a thermal problem. So the solution to it was to simply cool down the core artificially with ice packs around it and it went in perfectly well. The biggest problem was nobody knew how bright this thing was going to be. Our bosses decided, well, we're going to have at least three sets of cameras. We're going to have one set set for a dud. Won't put out much light. We'll have one set for a medium-sized event and one set set set for the very highest yields. We even had a pinhole camera. Our boss, Julian Mack, insisted that we have a pinhole camera. Why won't you do this? I'm not sure. So the main switch, the firing switch, was now down in the compound at South Tim. And it was going to be a machine driven. While we'd been there for months, you'd never really get ready.

I mean, we knew this thing was going to go the morning of the 16th. We was busting our buttons last minute projects. Bainbridge came to me about nine o'clock and said we were going to spend the night under the bomb. I had to be sure that nothing went wrong. The actual detonation time was delayed once because of rain conditions. However, I was so tired that I laid down about two o'clock and slept for a while. But it was rainy that night and I woke up dreaming that Kishti Kowski had gotten the garden hose and was sprinkling the bomb. After we had finished our job, got out the base of the tower, then we proceeded in the Jeep on up to the observation point, which was about 20 miles out across the desert.

We were told we had to be out of our bunks. We had to have the full feel on. We had to have our helmets on. We had to be behind the bunker. And we were given these special glasses that we were supposed to keep on and we could not turn around until we were given a command. No, but anxious at all that I knew the system. At minus 45 seconds, I threw the switch that turned on the automatic timer. And from that time, some 20 signals were sent out to start various cameras and so forth. The witnesses were the ones that were concerned. At minus one-tenth second, a signal was given to Ernie Titterton, who generated a couple more signals to set off the fast cameras of Berlin-Brickschner and Julian Mack. I was looking through the viewfinder of my Mitchell camera, but it had such a dark filter on it.

I really couldn't see anything, it was just black. But I was staring towards the point where the explosion would be. The whole filter lit up so brilliantly, it seemed to be as bright as a sun, just the filter itself, and so I was temporarily blinded. And I then turned my head to the side and looked at the oscuro mountains and they were lit up apparently more brilliantly than in daylight. And so after seeing that for a few seconds, I looked back through the viewfinder and I could see the great ball of fire was formed and was starting to rise.

So I grabbed the controls of my camera and started following the ball of fire. We were drawing so much current from the generator with four cameras going that we were burning the cables. And I said, Julian, this junction box on fire turned it off and he says, no, let it run, it's still running, let it go. So we lucked out. Even though we had been brief rather thoroughly on what we would see, it was still awe inspiring. You just couldn't imagine the brightness of this thing. Here we were 20 miles away and it was so bright that all color was destroyed. And the heat on my body was a thermal blast, so to speak. It was amazing that that much heat could be generated by this thing six miles away. Then all of a sudden this column broke through the fireball and you could see this tremendous cloud of ash and stuff going up into the sky.

It seemed like it was never going to stop climbing, it just kept going higher and higher. Shockwave finally rolled over us with a pretty good bang and it just hung there, it seemed like it just hung there forever. Then all of a sudden the fireball went out and the light was gone, you couldn't see. I stepped back a little in awe and said, God, it's beautiful. And Julian came back instantly and said, no, it's terrible. The fact that it was so big, it was awesome. I immediately felt that war would soon be over because I knew that we had two bombs about ready to be used in Japan. I have to be honest, it didn't mean anything to me. I'm still that 18-year-old naive kid never saw much more than a firecracker go off.

I had to wait something like two weeks after the explosion and hear his humor to find out exactly what I was involved in. We had flown the Tinian late in June of 45. We were very busy engaged in setting up laboratories and setting up test equipment for the various components of the fusing system. We just continued such that we were then ready to test out the components and assemble them into systems for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. We got the results of the July 16 test further quickly. All our members, some tests were successful and it applied to what we were doing.

I had not been informed we were working on an atomic weapon. From everything we knew, we were doing something that was rather important. We had very high priority on everything we did. Other people were around making things happen sort of instantly. And we were given responsibility. I thought that it was great compared to our young ages. And there wasn't someone there checking on us all the time. We were expected to do our jobs. From our tent, we could see the four parallel runways of Darcefield on Tinian. Some of the takeoffs were rather massive with planes going down the runways simultaneously taking off. I've heard the story which I've never been able to verify that in January of 45 on the fire bombing missions over Japan.

Five of them crashed into the sea on takeoff. I saw one go in one day, scarcely a splash. Just a little splash, but it's gone. There's no way to rescue people out of airplanes to go into the ocean that way. Those people were under long missions over Japan. We're doing very dangerous things indeed. When we were actually approaching the missions over Japan, there were three of us that were qualified to go along as the weapon air for the, to check out the fusing systems. Mars, Jefferson, Phil Barnes, and myself. And we ended up, Jeff and I, flipping a coin to see who would go to Hiroshima.

And the toss came up and Jefferson went. You have asked about this green plug, which was part of the safety system. As long as the green plugs were installed in the nose of the bomb, the weapon was safe. Once the red plugs were installed, which were identical to this, but red in color, the bomb would have gone off full yield. And this is the plug out of the Hiroshima bomb, which Jefferson gave to me and his return from the mission. It was devastating. It was intimidating. It was sickening. I felt like a terrible tragedy had occurred, but I could also see a bigger tragedy if we had not brought the bomb.

I could 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. I have no regrets at all after the first test was successful. The war was over within a few weeks, so I was well satisfied with the effort we had put in during the war. That was immense, intense joy that came to my mind. The fact that we were successful, that there would be no more islands skipping and jumping and invading. We were sitting there on Tinian. We could look across into the harbor of Saipan. There were 1600 vessels preparing for the invasion. On Tinian, there was a 20,000-bed hospital going up. There must have been big hospitals going up on all the other islands, such as Guam, Saipan, and so forth.

I had been on Iwajima, and that wasn't too many months after the invasion of Iwajima. Iwajima looked as if it had been a rototel. The battles in Okanawa had been very fierce. From everything I knew, the invasion of Japan, was going to be a very bloody event indeed. From the way the Japanese had fought, they would have essentially fought to the last person in Japan. And probably every man, woman, and child would have been involved in that, and the casualties would have been unreal.

I think the use of the bombs by Truman was a very sensible and humane thing to do. The greatest thing is when that bomb was dropped. We were in training at that time. I fully believe I would have not survived that invasion of Japan, because I already had survived to them. So I'm very proud of the small role, which I played in that. I'm delighted that our efforts came to fruition the way they did. I don't know how anyone can be proud about this sort of a thing, but it had to be. It was there. It has been said by some real, the world's greatest thinkers, that knowledge cannot be denied. There's no way you can walk away from something that exists in science or in nature. And say, well, I'll forget about it. It'll stay there. It won't. It'll come out. It'll be dug up by somebody, and you want to make sure it's dug up by the right people.

I guess if I felt guilty about one thing, it's having it so well, while other people were crawling up those beaches under fire. I cannot comprehend it. And my furlough was right after the war in New York City when there were the people celebrated for, I believe, for two or three months after that war. They were what they'd call block parties. I was the only one in my block from the service home. So I got the welcome for all the kids in the neighborhood that were in the service. I got it all. The hugs to kisses, and the food, and the wine, and the drinks, and even some of the foods that I couldn't really like, I was eating it.

And the first time I'd seen my father get a little bit inebriated. And the reason was he had five sons in the service, and we were very fortunate that all five of us came home alive. And I felt a little bit of pride in the fact that so many lives were saved because the end of the war came, and I had in my little way I had something to do with it. And I still feel that way today. This colores program is available on home video cassette for 1995 plus shipping and handling to order call 1-800-328-563. Thank you.

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