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1 Harry Dreicer in Conversation with Sig Hecker March 30, 2017, Santa Harry Dreicer in conversation with Sig Hecker March 30, 2017, Santa Fe, NM HD: Harry Dreicer; SH: Sig Hecker SH: Harry, we are doing a series of interviews that capture experience of the Los Alamos people with the Russians over the years. Your contacts with the Russians date back into the 70s and 80s. But before we talk about that, I thought it would be good to talk about your personal path. Why don’t you tell us again when you were born, and then, particularly, when you came to the laboratory. HD: Ok. Well, I was born in 1927, October 6th to be exact, in a little resort town in Germany. The reason I mention that is because we’re talking about our collaboration with the Soviets, and it’s important in understanding my views that people who listen to this know that my parents were Russian. In the years 1917 to 1920, the family managed to get away from the Soviet Bolshevik Revolution, and it brought them to this little resort town near Leipzig, Germany, that was the only place they could manage to find a residence. They were supposed to leave Germany and go to South America, but they had no intention of doing that for various reasons - I won’t go into more details. But because they left Russia at a time of revolution and civil war that continued into what became the Soviet Union, they also left there a full family on my father’s side—three brothers, two sisters, a mother and father. And for many years in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, they supported them with medicines and clothing, and there was still contact. What remains of that is a lot of anti-Communist ideology of my parents. In fact, if I don’t forget, I will mention later when I took my first trip to the Soviet Union, which occurred in 1971, my father had passed away, but my mother was dreadfully afraid for me going to the Soviet Union. She was worried I would not return and would end up in a gulag. So that was my beginning. After about twenty years in Germany, we had to run away, and we went to Italy for reasons we don’t have time to describe here, which also turned out to be a difficult spot for us. We were Jews, we were stateless, none of us had passports or citizenship. It is through the help of my grandfather in Moscow, whose brother had emigrated to the US many years ago, that we managed to escape Europe in 1939 and then end up in the United States. In the United States, life was wonderful, except it was the end of the Depression still. And it wasn’t easy; all of us went to work, including me at almost eleven years old. But it was a wonderful experience, and I immediately started in the New York public schools, where I learned English and began to prosper. I had less trouble with dividing in the United States than I did in Europe, so I managed to become better at mathematics and such things. I ended up in a wonderful high school, which was the Brooklyn Technical High School, and I credit it for most of what happened to me afterwards because it was so good and gave me a chance to be accepted at MIT in 1946. At MIT, I went through the usual courses that you take to become a physicist. I was also interested in math, so I was heading for a double credit there, but it took five years. And in 1951, I finished the bachelor’s degree in physics and had a lot of credits in math. What shall I say? I have been very lucky. In my last year as an undergraduate, Jerrold Zacharias, a professor in the physics department, had pity on me. I got married and needed money, obviously, and he hired me for a summer classified project that occurred at Lexington, Massachusetts, close to MIT. Its purpose was to improve anti-submarine warfare and the protection of our submarines. The worry 1 at the time was that there would be war in Europe, that the Soviets would be attacking the Western Europeans, and that we would have again to ship all these convoys overseas, which had suffered terribly in World War II because of German submarines. So that summer I spent with a bunch of professors, people who had worked during World War II at the MIT Radiation Lab which saved us with the radar. SH: Yes, they did the radar. HD: Yes, they all did radar work there. In my senior year, I had to do a thesis. MIT Physics undergraduates had to do a thesis. And I did it with Sanborn Brown, a professor in the physics department, who had worked in the MIT Rad lab. His job had been to develop methods of protecting returning radar signals from the outgoing one. The powers were very, very different. And you had to protect the equipment, and that was done with gas discharges which protected the incoming signal from the outgoing one. So I did a bachelor’s thesis in a laboratory that was still doing microwave work with gas discharges. I learned a lot, and I did a thesis. And then I went into the graduate school, and what you have to worry about with getting a PhD at MIT is getting somebody that will let you do a thesis with them. The laboratory of Sanborn Brown had a theorist professor. His name was Will Allis. He provided the theory for all the work that was done there. There were weekly seminars, and we got to know each other and all that. So I went to him and asked him for a special problem, and he gave me one. And I also went to another professor to get a special problem—an experimental special problem, because Will Allis’s was theory. And that was Woody Strandberg. Woody Strandberg was a wonderful experimentalist who also was a good theorist. And he said, “Why don’t you help me put together an experiment that will reduce the Doppler line width of the famous ammonia line which occurs at microwave frequencies?” He wanted me to put together a cross-field microwave absorption experiment in which, in one direction, a microwave beam, which could be tuned, was propagated. And at right angles to it, a beam of ammonia molecules was injected. Well, just by luck, I had worked as an undergraduate also in Zacharias’s laboratory, and I knew that they had developed a device capable of producing intense beams. When we get through, I’ll show you one of those gadgets. I kept it. SH: Oh, you’ve got it? Great. HD: So I used that approach, and that gave enough sensitivity to do the measurement. I was very lucky to have a publication in the Physical Review Letters with Woody Strandberg. And the same thing was used by Charlie Townes. It was a great disappointment to Strandberg, who actually was on the same path that he got beat. Anyways, Townes used this same approach, and the line width due to Doppler broadening was essentially eliminated. At the same time, I was working with Will Allis. And he gave me a special problem, which was to compute the electrical micro field on a test particle in a plasma. At the same time, he asked me, “Do you want to spend the summer in Los Alamos? I’m a consultant there.” This was 1952. And I said no. Because I wanted to do this special problem, and I knew if I started to travel around, I would never get it done. And I was lucky—I got it done. But the next year, he asked me again. That was ’53. And I said OK. And I came out to Los Alamos, my wife and I. We spent the summer there with P Division, the physics division. They were doing magnetic fusion work, and I was attached to the group which was studying the toroidal pinch in the Perhapsatron, as it was called. That was the name of the machine. And I was very lucky again because they didn’t know how to determine the electron density in the pinch, and I was able to show them that, by using the microfield that I had computed the year earlier, one could essentially determine the Stark broadening of 2 spectroscopic lines in the plasma. The spectroscopic lines were due to hydrogen or deuterium, which were not yet ionized. And so most of it was completely ionized, but there were impurities left, a small percentage. And by looking at their Stark broadening due to the microfield, they could tell what the density was. SH: So you’re at Los Alamos for the summer, right? HD: Yes, and I’ve managed to help them measure the density of the toroidal pinch in the Perhapsatron. The division leader of P Division at that time was Jerry Kellogg, he had been a graduate student of Rabi’s. Zacharias had been a graduate student of Rabi’s. So anyway, they were impressed with me. And I was happy. I went back to Cambridge with Will Allis, and now we’re on the thesis. Now I’m okayed to do the thesis. SH: When did you finish that? HD: The thesis was finished in ’54. But actually, I didn’t get a PhD until ’55 because I moved my family out to Los Alamos, where I was hired.
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