An Oral History of The Manhattan Project

By M. Abend February 2, 2002

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Statement of Purpose

• Biography

• Historical Contextualization

• Interview Transcription

• Interview Analysis

• Works Consulted STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

The purpose of this oral history is to provide a more thorough understanding of the Manhattan Project through an interview with James Pickard, an electrical engineer who worked on the project. The interview not only verifies known facts, but also adds personal emotion and feeling to the history of the project.

‡ TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHY

James K. Pickard was born on April 4, 1919 in Abilene, Texas. He and his family lived in Abilene throughout the depression while his father worked in town as a doctor. In his childhood years, Mr. Pickard spent his days at home with his family playing tennis on their homemade, backyard court. For his high school education, he attended the New

Mexico Military Institute and then proceeded to attend the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (M.I.T.) for college in 1941. At M.I.T., Mr. Pickard received his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering.

In the last three years of his schooling at M.I.T., Mr. Pickard worked part-time for the General Electric Company. After his graduation from M.I.T., he began to work full time for General Electric in their electrical engineering department, making and designing equipment. At the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Pickard applied to the navy.

He, however, had trouble getting a commission because of his colorblindness. Instead, the General Electric Company recommended that Mr. Pickard be sent to work on the

Manhattan Project.

Mr. Pickard went to the headquarters of the Manhattan Project in Schenectady,

New York where initial research was being done. He mainly worked out of Schenectady but also made frequents visits to the diffusion plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee where his expertise on certain instruments was needed. Mr. Pickard also attended the eighth test of the atomic bomb in the atolls of the Pacific Ocean. He observed the test and worked on calculating the efficiency of the bomb.

After the success of the atomic bomb, Mr. Pickard decided that he did not wish to continue with the development of new weapons, such as the hydrogen bomb. He became a consultant for the nuclear utility industry and purchased power plants from the big suppliers. Mr. Pickard is retired and now resides in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He has three children and five grandchildren.

‡ TABLE OF CONTENTS Historical Contextualization: The Manhattan Project

On August 2, 1939, German physicist Albert Einstein, supported by his scientific associates, drafted a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States warning him of German progress on the development of an atomic bomb. This letter was said to have “set in motion a series of events which led to the start of the Manhattan Project, a massive secret undertaking to produce the first atom bomb in the southwestern U.S. desert” (Bruun 635). Over the course of the six-year, multi-billion dollar project, it came to involve twelve American universities and three secret laboratories throughout the

United States. The end result of the project was the dropping of the atomic bomb on the

Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August of 1945 and, arguably, the end of World War II. Today, the decision to drop the bomb and whether or not it was justified is still highly controversial. This quest for an awesome weapon of mass destruction that would change war and humanity for all time was the secretive endeavor known as the

Manhattan Project.

The precise beginning of the Manhattan Project is debatable, but its foundation is generally attributed to Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Roosevelt. However, “serious research on atomic weapon development began in the United States in late 1941, around the time of Japan’s surprise attack on American naval bases at Pearl Harbor” (Truman

118). Initial research for the project was conducted in various sections of New York; hence the project is named for the borough of Manhattan. Eventually, the project would extend its boundaries to three secret laboratories and twelve American universities1.

“Scores of universities and scientific laboratories had a part in the work. Each was assigned one problem at a time, and they provided the answers, but still did not know what their work was ultimately related to” (AP 258). These universities played key roles in the completion of the initial stages of the development of the atomic bomb. The most significant of these university laboratories was located on the squash courts under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. Lead by the Italian Physicist

Enrico Fermi, the laboratory at the University of Chicago achieved “the first self- sustaining chain reaction and thereby initiated the controlled release of nuclear energy,” while “…Fermi supervised the design and assembly of an ‘atomic pile,’ a code word for an assembly that in peacetime would be known as a ‘nuclear reactor” (Fermilab 1). The

Chicago University’s work was crucial to the success of the project. Without the work of the scientists at American universities, the completion of an effective atomic bomb during World War II may have been delayed, if not made impossible. In addition to the contributions that universities made to the Manhattan Project, there were also key production facilities that were necessary for the construction of an atomic bomb.

Two of these production factories were instrumental in the success of the atomic bomb. One was in Hanford, Washington where three nuclear reactors, previously developed by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago, were built in order to “extract the element plutonium (an element with which atoms could be split) from a non- fissionable type of Uranium” (Grolier’s). The other, more significant production plant,

1 The universities involved were: Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Rochester University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the University of Wisconsin, Cornell University, and Columbia University. the Oak Ridge Tennessee National Laboratory, was founded in 1943 in order to produce mass amounts of uranium. One problem with the production of the atom bomb was its need for large quantities of a specific and very rare type of uranium, uranium-235.

However, this obstacle was overcome when scientists deduced several methods for separating the uranium-235 from the more common uranium-238, such as gaseous diffusion and thermal diffusion. The facilities at both Hanford and Oak Ridge provided the necessary fuel for the first atomic bombs. With the newly discovered fuel for the bombs, “a lab for the design and construction of the bomb was built at Los Alamos, New

Mexico”(Public Broadcasting Service).

The Los Alamos National Laboratory was founded in 1943 as Project Y of the

Manhattan Engineering District. Known as “the hill”:

Los Alamos produced two bombs. One, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, was a gun-type weapon that used U-235. A slug of U-235 would be projected down a gun barrel into the center of another piece of U-235. When combined, a nuclear explosion would occur. The second bomb, ‘Fat Man,’ used implosion to detonate plutonium. Here, explosives would surround the plutonium ball. When detonated, they would compress the plutonium, causing a nuclear explosion. (National Atomic Museum)

Los Alamos was imperative to the success of the Manhattan Project. Without it, the atomic bomb would not have been created nor been in existence during World War II.

After the completion of the first atomic bomb, scientists decided that a test was in order to ensure the success of the project. The site known as “Trinity,” located in

Alamogordo, New Mexico, approximately two hundred miles from the Los Alamos

Laboratory, was selected for the first test of the atomic bomb. At 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16,

1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded with a force of 21,000 tons of TNT, evaporating the tower on which it stood. General Thomas Farrell wrote: The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. Seconds after the explosion came first the air blast pressing hard against the people, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained awesome roar that warned of doomsday and made us feel we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved for the Almighty. (Trinity-Completion of the Wartime Mission)

On the day of the test, President Harry S. Truman was attending the Potsdam conference in Germany and he said:

The historic message of the first explosion of an atomic bomb was flashed to me in a message from Secretary of War [Henry] Stimson on the morning of July 16 [1945]. The most secret and the most daring enterprise of the war had succeeded. We [the United States] were now in possession of a weapon that would not only revolutionize war, but could alter the course of history and civilization. (120)

Not until the first test of the atomic bomb did the United States realize the tremendous power of their new creation. President Truman called the atomic bomb a “weapon of unparalleled power,” and said, “We have spent $2,000,000,000 on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japs have above ground in any city. We shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war” (20th Century America 257). After three years of research, the Manhattan Project had accomplished its top-secret goal of creating a new weapon of inconceivable mass destruction.

Following the test of the bomb, the United States began to focus all of its military strength toward Japan, especially since the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. The

Battle of Iwo Jima in February of 1945 and the Battle of Okinawa in May of 1945 were extremely costly to the Americans. The combined American death toll for the two battles reached 23,000 men. By the summer of 1945, the U.S. military had begun to devise a plan for the invasion of the Japanese islands. This plan, called Operation Olympic, was scheduled for November 1, 1945. The U.S. forces, however, “dreaded the prospect of the home island invasion, thinking it would mean yet another year of fighting and hundreds of thousands more American lives lost” (Truman 120). The estimated death toll for an invasion on the Japanese islands was five hundred thousand men. Another looming problem with an invasion of Japan was the Japanese people’s “commitment to honor in battle [which] drove many of them to choose death over surrender” (Truman 120). Their

“commitment to honor” was so great that “even after the B-29 bombing raids had destroyed half of Tokyo, the Japanese military would not give in [to surrender]” (Truman

120). An invasion of Japan seemed too costly, and an alternative was desired. That alternative was the atomic bomb.

Shortly after the testing of the atomic bomb, the director of the Los Alamos facility, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, advised President Truman to create a committee to

“study with great care the implications the new weapons might have for us [America]”

(Truman 124), if it were used against Japan. That committee included Dr. Oppenheimer,

Dr. Arthur Compton, Dr. E.O. Lawrence, and Dr. Enrico Fermi2. When consulted about the possible atomic bombing of Japan, they recommended:

The bomb be used against the enemy [Japan] as soon as it could be done. They [also] recommended that it should be used without specific warning and against a target that would clearly show its devastating strength…It was also their conclusion that no technical demonstration they might propose, such as over a deserted island, would be likely to bring the war to an end. (Truman 124-125)

After considering the advice of the committee, Truman then went on to question British

Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Truman says, “when I talked to Churchill, he

2 Dr. Arthur Compton was director of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago and Dr. E.O. Lawrence was program chief in charge of developing an electromagnetic process for separating uranium-235. unhesitatingly told me that he favored the use of the atomic bomb if it might aid to end the war” (125). On July 26, the Allies had issued to Japan the Potsdam Declaration, which allowed the Japanese the choice of unconditional surrender or “prompt and utter destruction.” There was never, however, any allusion to the idea that the Americans intended to use their newly acquired atomic bomb. President Truman noted:

The Big Three ultimatum issued on July 26 at Potsdam was intended ‘to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction,’ and the Japanese leaders rejected it. The atomic bomb is now the answer to that rejection…They may now expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen before on earth. (20th Century America 257).

On July 28, 1945, Radio Tokyo announced that the “Japanese government would continue to fight. President Truman then remarked that, “There was no alternative”

(Truman 125). The first atomic bomb to be used in war was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, to be followed by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki,

Japan three days later. Colonel Paul Tibbets, Jr. was the pilot of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He described the bomb itself, known as “Little

Boy,” as “a misnamed package of explosive force infinitely more devastating than any bomb or cluster of bombs ever dropped before” (Colbert 435). Although General

Thomas Farrell had previously described the explosion of the atomic bomb, Colonel

Tibbets’ tail gunner, Bob Caron, was the only one to see “the incredible fireball that, in its atom-splitting fury, was a boiling furnace with an inner temperature calculated to be

100 million degrees Fahrenheit” (Colbert 436). Caron also said:

At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar. If Dante had been with us in the plane, he would have been terrified…the city [Hiroshima] had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire. (Colbert 437) With the Japanese refusal to unconditional surrender, they brought upon themselves the wrath of the newly born atomic age. However, the question still remains: were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Or were they just excuses to demonstrate the awesome power of the atomic bomb, attempting to scare the Soviet Union.

President Truman writes, “ I gave the final order, saying I had no qualms ‘if millions of lives could be saved.’ I meant both American and Japanese lives…I did what

I thought was right (126). Truman stated that he truly believed that his decision was the right one, and it was thoroughly justified. However, historian Gar Alperovitz argues that with the information and data that the United States government had in the summer of

1945, the United States had no compelling reason to drop atomic bombs on Japan”

(Davidson 283). The information available to the American government in the summer of 1945 shows that:

The American Navy had already established a tight blockade around Japan, cutting off delivery of raw materials and isolating Japan’s army in Manchuria from the home islands. Allied land-based bombers had leveled whole sections of Tokyo without opposition from Japanese fighters. (Davidson 283)

Moreover, information shows that by 1945, the Japanese government was considering surrender. Their “only obstacle to peace” (Togo), however, was the United States’ request for an “unconditional surrender.” “The Japanese feared that the United States would insist that that their emperor leave his throne, a humiliation they wished at all costs to avoid” (Davidson 284). By the summer of 1945, the U.S. government knew that the

Japanese were militarily weakened and were close to surrender. It has also been theorized that the United States did not want to share post-war Japan with Russia. Russia had

“secretly agreed [with the US at Yalta] that they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war…On August 8 [1945] the Russians were due to declare war on Japan” (Zinn 309). If the Russians could be prevented from entering the war, then they would have no part in the peace-making process. Secretary of State James Byrnes, under President Truman, was described as “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in” (Zinn 310). Lastly, the US made the decision to drop the bomb even though an army report warned of the possibility of American prisoners of war dying among those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States, however, chose to use the atomic bomb even though countless information suggested that the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. “The atomic bomb did not win the war in the

Pacific; at best, it hastened Japanese acceptance of a defeat that was viewed as inevitable” (Grolier’s).

Soon after the bombs were dropped, there was great controversy amongst the people of the United States. The bombings were denounced in liberal religious circles and viewed as “a cause of American shame” (Bondi 495). From 1945 to 1947, less Americans considered the bomb as a “good thing;” “Public response [had] changed dramatically”

(Bondi 495). In addition to the general public, scientists had their own views on the bomb. “Many scientists were deeply troubled by their role in creating the atomic bomb and led efforts to persuade Congress of the importance of arms control. Physicist Eugene

Rabinowitch committed himself to ‘fight to prevent science from becoming an executioner of mankind” (Bondi 495). Other scientists wanted to share the secrets of the atomic bomb with other countries. This plan failed, however, with the coming of the Cold

War in the late 1940’s. Lastly, there were certain health hazards, due to the detonation of the atomic bomb, which posed a threat to Americans who lived near the Trinity test site. “People found it remarkable that the government never warned them about an event that some scientists thought might set off a chain reaction and destroy all humanity”

(Thompson 3). The cover story for the testing of the atomic bomb was that an ammunitions dump had blown up, causing the huge explosion. Although the test site was quite isolated, its effects still reached people living around the test site. William Wrye and his wife live twenty miles northeast of the test site. Wrye says that the morning after the test, he saw military men scanning his property for radiation (Thompson 3). At the time, Wrye did not even know what radiation was. Before long, however, “Wrye’s whiskers stopped growing. Three or four months later, they came back, but they were white, then later, black. Cattle in the area sprouted white hair along the side that had been exposed to the blast. Half the coat on Wrye’s black cat turned white” (Thompson 4). The government had not warned residents near the Trinity site of the possible effects that the radiation from the atomic bomb was might cause. Helen Wrye, William’s wife, says,

“People weren’t afraid of the government back then. It was a time of innocence. People were trusting. We had never heard of an atomic bomb” (Thompson 4). The people trusted a government that put their lives at risk by not informing them of the dangerous effects of nuclear radiation.

The Manhattan Project was the attempt to create a weapon more powerful than any other weapon ever seen. Its secrecy was extraordinary, and when President Truman

“disclosed one of the fantastically powerful bombs had been dropped on Japan, it was as surprising to the workers [of the project] as to the rest of the world” (20th Century

America 258). President Truman best summarizes the project when he says:

The entire development of the atomic bomb had been dictated by military considerations. The idea of the atomic bomb had been suggested to President Roosevelt by the famous and brilliant Dr. Albert Einstein, and its development turned out to be a vast undertaking. It was the achievement of the combined efforts of science, industry, labor, and the military, and it had no parallel in history. (121)

The Manhattan Project achieved its goal on July 16, 1945 with its successful test of their new weapon of mass destruction. With the creation of the atomic bomb, “humankind now had in its hands the unprecedented power to destroy” (Davidson 275).

‡ TABLE OF CONTENTS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION

Interviewee: James Pickard Interviewer: M. Abend Date: December 22, 2001 Location: Mr. Pickard’s Residence

M. Abend: Mr. Pickard, what was it like growing up in Abilene, Texas in the 1920’s and 30’s?

James Pickard: That’s a long time ago. All I remember was that it was a very relaxed and pleasant time. We didn’t have a lot of cars to run around in very much and we had a nice walk to school and home. We played a lot of tennis in the back yard where we had to grade the court and lime it ourselves, and all of this, and those days were sort of self-help. You did your own work. But it was a small town, Abilene; I guess it was around 20,000 at that time and its now much larger. But I went to grade school there and then I went to the New Mexico Military Institute to finish high school, and then I went to M.I.T3.

MA: Do you remember the years of the depression?

JP: Sure, I sure do.

MA: How was that? Were times rough?

JP: Yeah, not to hard. My dad was a doctor and we lived in town and we did all right. We ate a lot of salmon loaf and things that were inexpensive and cheap in those days.

MA: How did you become interested in science?

JP: Oh I can’t tell you. It was just my bent.

MA: Did you go to any special schools?

JP: No, well except for the New Mexico Military Institute for high school work.

MA: And where did you go after that?

JP: To the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MA: What degrees did you get?

JP: I got two degrees in electrical engineering: my bachelors and masters degrees, in 1941.

3 M.I.T. is also known as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MA: Where did you work after receiving your degrees?

JP: Well the last three years of my school there [at M.I.T.], I worked half time at the General Electric Company and went to school half time so I could pay my bills.

MA: How did you get involved in the Manhattan Project?

JP: Well I worked for the General Electric Company after I graduated. I was working in their electrical engineering department and I made and designed equipment. It was about the right time to be drafted so I applied to the navy, and being color blind, I was having a little bit of trouble getting a commission. So the G.E. [General Electric] Company recommended that I go down to the Manhattan Project. So they sent me down to New York where the Manhattan Project was headquartered. That’s why it’s called the Manhattan Project.

MA: Did you work in any other places?

JP: Well I worked at G.E. for several years. At G.E. we first worked on some of the projects for the diffusion plant at Oak Ridge.

MA: Did you ever go to Los Alamos, to work there?

JP: Yes, I never worked there, I visited there to follow up on some work we had done and for lectures, things like that.

MA: When you were working on the project, what was your understanding of it? Did you have any idea what it was?

JP: Yes I did because when I was told to go to New York to be interviewed for the job, because they didn’t tell me then what we were doing, the only thing the manager would tell me at that point was that the Germans are working on this project too. If they succeed, the war will end [pause], the wrong way. If we beat them, it will end the other way around, and that’s all he told me. And when I went back to close down my affairs at G.E. [laughs], I asked the head man in the drafting department, who ran this room full of drafting girls, what was going on down on the Manhattan Project. He said oh they are building an atom bomb [laughs].

MA: And he told you just like that?

JP: Just like that, and he wasn’t cleared or anything, he had just heard from grape vines some how. So then I went to the library in Schenectady [New York] and started digging up books on physics, fission, and all that kind of stuff. I ran into the names of the people on the project, so I put it together pretty quickly. And then in Manhattan, New York, we were in the instrument department for the diffusion plant. The instruments we were working on, designing, and building here and there, were those that measured the relative abundance of the different isotopes. And that instrument was required in a lot of places: Los Alamos, Hanford, Furnald, and other places of that matter. So I had contact with a lot of other aspects of what they were doing. They had to use the instrument.

MA: I had this whole idea that the project was something than nobody ever knew about. When I wrote my paper, the day that they [the people working on the project] had learned that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, they said oh I had no idea that they were building a bomb, and they didn’t know that they had anything to do with creating this huge bomb until the day it had been dropped. I was under the impression that it was pretty secretive. Its kind of funny that he [the recruiting officer] just flat out told you that.

JP: That’s right but remember, G.E. had been doing work for the project in Schenectady and Ernie [the recruiting officer] had learned this through contacts there. And even some of the work I had been doing there had to do with designing the valves for the diffusion plant and so he kind of put it together. But actually, the secrecy was pretty, pretty thorough and pretty good. We were always followed when going to say, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hanford, Furnald, wherever we were going. There would be secret service people hanging around all over the place. And if we would dare leave a piece of paper somewhere we really got in trouble, and if you left your briefcase at a railroad station. There was strict security in the offices all the time. Someone was in charge of checking the files in the offices every night after everyone had left to make sure they were all locked and everything was in and so forth.

MA: Could you tell your friends or family anything about the project?

JP: No I didn’t. I wasn’t married at the outset of it so I told them we had a secret project and that’s all.

MA: What was your job on the project?

JP: Designing and applying the use of instruments primarily for measuring the relative isotopes as I told you, and we had other problems, the temperature, pressure, and all those kinds of things. There were various atmospheres that we faced in the diffusion plant.

MA: At Oak Ridge?

JP: At Oak Ridge.

MA: Did you ever meet any of the famous scientists like Fermi4 or Einstein5 or anyone?

JP: Yes. I didn’t meet Einstein. I don’t really think he was around the project much. He made a lot of contacts with the administration and the president and so on. But I did meet Fermi and several others at Los Alamos, but I didn’t have a lot of contact with them. Just

4 Dr. Enrico Fermi was an important physicist who worked at the laboratory at the University of Chicago. 5 Dr. Albert Einstein was another important physicist who persuaded President Roosevelt to start the Manhattan Project in the summer of 1939. now and then there would be a problem where I had some understanding of an instrument and I was contacted. They all had special names you know. Fermi for instance was Mr. Farmer.

MA: [Laughing] I actually did not know that. How did you feel about the war when you got on the project?

JP: Oh, well I don’t know. I rolled along with the whole country. I was going to join the navy to see if we could do something to lick those guys, especially when the Japanese got in there and started bombing us at Pearl Harbor. That just about turned everything around militarily.

MA: So you felt sort of like it was your patriotic duty?

JP: Sure. I wouldn’t think twice about it.

MA: How did you feel when word got out that Hiroshima had been bombed and about the mass destruction?

JP: Well, it causes you to think pretty seriously because here was Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I don’t know exactly how many died, maybe 100,000.

MA: 150,000.

JP: Yeah, 150,000, and I never understood why Truman did this and why somebody didn’t say lets identify an island off of here and hit that island with a weapon we had, and we invite you to watch it. In those days they didn’t have very big weapons. And I would have thought that that might have convinced them to give up, but I wasn’t running the country.

MA: In my research, I found it was suggested that they show the Japanese a testing of the bomb, but the military advised the president to not give them a test and let them see it. But I also came across certain things such as the Americans had blockaded Japan and they weren’t getting any supplies and the Japanese had already started to consider surrender and were already having peace talks with Russia. Do you think that Truman dropped the bomb to show Russia our newfound power, for simply military reasons, or just because he wanted to drop the bomb [to test it in a war situation]?

JP: I don’t really know what his thinking was. I’m sure he had thought the thing through pretty thoroughly. Have you read Truman’s book, his life story?

MA: I’ve read some of his memoirs

JP: Well I thought him a pretty thoughtful man. Once you get a huge project like that rolling, it’s awful hard to stop it. But I would think he wouldn’t let that interfere and he would try to do it without killing 150,000 Japanese. But who can say. What the arguments were at those times, I don’t know.

MA: Do you remember what the American people’s reactions were to the bombings, how they felt about it?

JP: Well I think they were especially glad to have the war over, because that certainly ended the affair, and I think that was probably the basic reason why he [Truman] did it. It [the bombings] precipitated the termination of the fighting real quickly. We were all elated about that. I remember we all celebrated considerably in the project headquarters when the weapons were used. Actually we celebrated when the first shot, Trinity6, was successful back in New Mexico. We did a lot of celebrating and there was a lot of celebrating around the country.

MA: After celebrating, did people come out and criticize the bombs and say it was wrong?

JP: I didn’t hear so much of that. We tried to turn it around and I personally worked a lot on the development, the design, and the use of the energy to generate electric power. We tried to swing the whole emphasis around to that.

MA: Do you think that if the bomb was ready we would have dropped it on Germany?

JP: I think so. I wouldn’t be surprised. Or at least demonstrated that we could. The same question about do we demonstrate it or actually fire.

MA: After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, physicist Eugene Rabinowitch said “he had committed himself to the fight to prevent science from becoming the executioner of mankind.” How do your feelings compare to what Mr. Rabinowitch said?

JP: Well, its not science that executes people. It’s the administrations and armies that do it. It’s the science that can bring us lots of comfort and good things in this world, and had. And I would say that’s really the hallmark of humanity, is its brains to develop things. It doesn’t mean that they have to turn them around and use them for weapons. That’s just the wrong use and I blame that on the politicians. People who cant live with other people without fighting. So I don’t think that I would agree with Mr. Rabinowitch, I don’t think science is the executioner. I think its man who is the executioner and man is a creator and that’s how he really differs from the rest of the animal kingdom. He can create things that make life easier. And if he is dumb enough to use it the wrong way, then that’s another matter.

MA: What do you think of those people who did criticize Truman’s decision to drop the bomb?

6 Trinity was the name for the first testing of the Atomic Bomb. Trinity took place in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Trinity was fired on July 16, 1945. JP: I don’t really have much time for second guessers. Anyone can look back, with 20/20 hindsight of course after the fact, and its still not quite right unless they sit down and stand it in the whole atmosphere and the environment in which the decision was made so that they can truly understand what the forces that moved him to make the decision were. I don’t think they would really have much to say, or should say.

MA: There are lots of theories out there, such as Russia was supposed to enter the war on August 8, 1945, and we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Many people think that we dropped the bomb to keep Russia out of the war, to try and draw a surrender so we would not have to share post-war Japan with Russia. There are other theories out there, but do you think that the main reason was to end the war?

JP: Sure. Because people were being killed everyday.

MA: Do you think that the bomb won the war, that it was the last straw?

JP: I think it was, sure. It shut the Japanese off pretty fast.

MA: While on the project, did you witness any testing of the bomb?

JP: Yes, I witnessed the eighth shot, which was out in the atolls in the Pacific. It was a pretty small one, only about 8,000 tons, but we went over and gathered samples and computed the efficiency of the shot, things like that. Right there on the ship, [laughing] it was a lot of fun.

MA: You weren’t concerned about radiation or anything like that?

JP: Well we were, but you weren’t bothered about it very much. We actually went swimming in the water right near by where the shot had been fired. Some of the boys went into the crater on the island in a jeep and the jeep got stuck in the crater. Lord knows how much radiation they got. But they got out and were washed off and cleaned up and as far as I know they are all right. I haven’t heard anything. So we didn’t worry about it that much.

MA: Can you describe what the explosion looked like?

JP: Oh yeah, well you don’t look at it, you look the other way until after the flash and then you would turn around with thick glasses even then. We weren’t too many miles away, maybe ten miles or so. It was one hell of a big flash and it was pretty awesome. There was a lot of energy there and it happens real real fast. That’s why it’s so effective, because they burned. The efficiency of those things is actually pretty high. Of all the energy that can be gotten out of that amount of material, they get up there and high efficiencies, which is surprising with some of these new weapons. Actually when they came along with the H-bomb [hydrogen bomb], they were getting some real high yields then and that’s when they got some very big blasts, mega-tons and things like that. MA: What went through your mind when you saw your first explosion and you had seen what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

JP: It’s just a glimpse of hell, that’s what it is. It’s just gone. A hell of a blast comes out of it, radiation everywhere.

MA: Do you remember feeling the air blast as it came by?

JP: No I don’t. By the time it got to us it was pretty muted. The flash was the thing that was impressive. The whole sky lit up and I’m sure the radiation level zoomed up at that point, but then, of course, as the cloud drifted up, it dissipated.

MA: When you first heard that the Trinity test had been successful, did you think that the Allies were just going to go and drop the bomb on Japan?

JP: I assumed they would or that they would demonstrate. All we heard was after Trinity had been fired successfully, that it had been fired, and then we tried to accumulate enough fissionable material to build more bombs.

MA: What did you think of the decision to test the bomb on U.S. soil and 20 miles from U.S. citizens?

JP: Well, these fellows had thought about it pretty thoroughly about what kind of blast levels and blast ranges it would affect. Even if it had been 100 percent efficient in converting the mass to energy in the explosion, they still would not hurt anybody. And they didn’t know what could occur and they didn’t think it could because there wasn’t any reason why it would exceed 100 percent efficiency. There were a lot of people who speculated that, well your going to set up a huge explosion and the world was going to go up in smoke and all that stuff. That was just a lot of Sunday newspaper write-ups.

MA: When I did my research, I read that when the Trinity test exploded, it exploded with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT and that was four times the expected size of the blast. They picked the site in Alamogordo, New Mexico and there were American citizens 20 miles from the test site. The government figured that they had mountain ranges all around and that nobody really lived there so they would be fine. But people did suffer the effects of radiation. One man, William Wyre, his beard stopped growing and it came back white and three months later it turned black. Half of his black cat turned white and his cows stopped growing hair on one side. What do you think of the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens and when they blow something up that’s going to cause problems like this?

JP: Well, they certainly should try to avoid that. I don’t know. This guy was probably not where they thought he was. Maybe he just happened to be where a lot of the ashes fell and it’s going to happen when you have that powerful a gadget, you’re going to have problems. There were two or three people killed on the project, experimenting, trying to find out what was the critical mass. MA: How did they die?

JP: Well they had a gadget in which they would put little pieces of something, usually uranium-235, to build a ball. There was a counter and when you got closer to the critical point, the counter would tell you it’s a lot more efficient here and there. This guy was unfortunately dropping little pieces in this thing and he went beyond prompt critical. So he dropped a piece and didn’t mean to put it down. And it flashed and blew itself apart, nothing big enough to blow up a room or anything, but it did give him a hell of a wallop and it killed him. And there were a couple of other instances, but we didn’t worry about radiation as much as we do now. We subsequently realized that some of the effects are delayed and don’t appear for years down the road. And I think that they ought to do it carefully. But they don’t know what carefully is until you do some experiments.

MA: So they did inform you that there were some effects of radiation?

JP: Yes.

MA: Did you have any idea that it could cause genetic mutations and cancer and things like that?

JP: Yeah.

MA: And still you didn’t see it as a problem?

JP: Well that’s right but what does it take to cause genetic changes? How much?

MA: You have to be exposed three times.

JP: Yeah but I don’t think people really understood in the early days what the effects of various levels of radiation were. Well there is radiation everywhere. If you fly across the country you’re going to get four or five rads. So maybe you get five rads in a room where you’re doing experiments, is that bad? And what kind of radiation is it? Is it alpha, gamma? The alphas of course are a lot more dangerous but they don’t go through very much. A piece of paper will stop them. But some of the neutrons and gamma rays will penetrate a lot harder and will affect different organs in the body in different ways. So its something you cant dilly and dally about, you got to know what you’re doing. And that’s why I think that any of these terrorists who want to get into that business are going to have to be very careful or the are going to get themselves in some big troubles.

MA: After the end of World War Two and soon after the start of the cold war, were you ever called back to work on the development of the hydrogen bomb?

JP: I did get into the early phases of this and I did edit some papers and write a book or so for the history of the project. I did go to Los Alamos for discussions on the H-bomb in the early days of that. But I decided that I would rather leave the project from the weapons point of view and go into the civil use of it for electric power plants. So I left it about that time when the h-bomb was being developed.

MA: Did you ever go to any of the universities to work there?

JP: No I didn’t. I did go to the universities that were working on my instruments. They did some experiments for us up at the SAM laboratories, that’s Special Atomic Materials laboratories, in New York. We had some lab work going on up there. The mass spectrometer was largely developed up there. That was one of the instruments I worked on, because it was used throughout the project to measure the relative abundance of different isotopes.

MA: Dr. Fermi completed his first chain reaction at the University of Chicago, and when I was doing my research I found a few things that said when that first chain reaction occurred, it seemed like that was not the beginning of the project but when they realized that they had something going, and it also looked like the project was going to work. After that was when they started isolating the uranium-235 from the [uranium]-288 and they created the plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford. You worked at Oak Ridge?

JP: I worked at Oak Ridge primarily but I also went down to Hanford off an on because our instruments were used there. Hanford was a different process all together. That was for making plutonium.

MA: What was Oak Ridge like?

JP: Oak ridge was an awful large project. There was building after building; five stories high; big, long buildings. There were many many compressors to push the uranium gas around, its hexoflouride, in the gaseous form, sub atmospheric pressure. You push it through one big, what should we call it? A siv more or less. And then it goes through another and it recycled all the time to push the light components, [uranium] 235, 234, and 236, up the cascade, and the heavy components, [uranium]-238, would go down the cascade in this circle. Those buildings, golly, there were about 100 of them, in each building, big compressors, as big as this room. We would take the gas streams off and measure it to see how effective the separation of the isotopes was at each stage. This was all at sub atmospheric pressure. If you let any air in, the hexoflouride would be oxidized and it would freeze up and jam up everything because it wouldn’t stay in the gaseous form.

MA: How did it fell to know that you helped to create this weapon of mass destruction that killed so many people?

JP: Well I don’t know if I ever stopped to think so much about it. The job had to be done and we did it. It’s that simple.

MA: So you did not feel guilty at all? JP: Well I now and then had the same thought we talked about a minute ago, could it have been done another way, but who’s to judge. It’s already done.

MA: In the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 150,000 people were killed, but on February 13 and 14 of 1945, 135,000 people were killed at Dresden, Germany by fire bombings. Why do you think that this was so different from those attacks?

JP: I don’t know that I think it’s so much different. An awful lot of people participated in the Dresden, Germany attacks, and bombings, and we lost some people in that too. That’s just another aspect of the war with different characteristics. Both of them horrible.

MA: Do you think that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki avenged Pearl Harbor?

JP: I didn’t really look at it that way. I think that Pearl Harbor said that these people [the Japanese] want to kill us, and we have to go out there after them. I think that the battles in the Pacific did more to avenge Pearl Harbor because we simply wiped out the Japanese fleets. Emits did a darn good job over there. Two million men were fighting for him.

MA: Did you feel a sense of pride, or nationalism, or patriotism when you found out that you had helped to create the weapon that ended the war?

JP: Not so much personally, we just did it as a country. I don’t know that I had a particular feeling about my participation. Thousands of people participated in different ways.

MA: Did you feel any pressure from your superiors because the Germans had already started work on their own bomb? Did you feel that you had to work faster and get things done quicker?

JP: I think we did. We did work as fast as we could. We didn’t pay any attention to whether it was a week, day, or a weekend. We just worked whenever it was necessary. Long hours, long trains going to Oak Ridge a lot, flying a lot.

MA: What were the hours?

JP: Golly, it was at least six days a week. For General Electric, while I was down there, we were working 12 hours a day for six days.

MA: After the Trinity test, was there any sense of relief for you?

JP: No not really. No we just had a lot of jobs to clean up, and we had to be sure to get in production on both plutonium and [uranium]-235. We had to get the diffusion cascades running and take care of the leaks down there. We had to get the reactors working at Hanford and separate the plutonium. It was just a lot of work.

MA: Do you think there was more work after the test or before? JP: I think the level just continued. Maybe even stepped up a bit since the tests were successful.

MA: When and why did you finally leave the project?

JP: Well I thought I had enough of it and I didn’t think that we needed to do anymore on the weapons. We had proven that it could be made and that it did work. Now you are going to stock pile a few so it was just a question of keeping the machines running and I didn’t feel that I wanted to participate any further in the development of larger, more efficient weapons. I would rather get into the commercial, civil use of nuclear fission.

MA: What work did you do after the project?

JP: I helped the nuclear utility industry buy atomic power plants from the big suppliers, G.E., Westing House, Bancock, Wilcox, etc., and select the best plant and then negotiate divide, and get it built and licensed and running and I did that for a few years, as a consultant.

MA: When you got married and started your family, did you ever discuss the project with them?

JP: Not much [laughs], not much.

MA: Were you allowed to?

JP: Sure.

MA: When you left the project, did you receive any last instructions or restrictions?

JP: No. I did while the thing was still going on before the war had ended. We were forever warned about the secrecy of the matter. I even had one time [laughing] when I came back from the Pacific, after I had watched the shot out there, and I had my notebooks, and I had been working on calculating the efficiency of the explosion, which was pretty secret. And the army people who checked us off the plane to come ashore confiscated my notebook, and I said you can’t see it. You aren’t authorized. We had quite a fuss and finally agreed to put it in a little pouch and send it to Washington for me. I couldn’t carry it through because this guy wouldn’t let me. So there was a lot of secrecy.

MA: Do you have any interesting stories about working on the project?

JP: Oh there are always stories. Every time you had to go to Oak Ridge, you had to take a bottle of whiskey with you. Whiskey was hard to come by at Oak Ridge, so we had too determine in advance whether it was going to be a one bottle or a to bottle trip. The trick was to get it on to the reservation without the guards getting it because if they found it, they would simply confiscate the liquor and then what happened was they drank it. So then what you would have to do was tell them look if you’re going to confiscate it, I’ll just break it right here. So we had a little fun with those little episodes. I can’t remember right off. After the Trinity shot, we all went over to Willy’s bar down near the city hall in Manhattan where we had lunch quite frequently and everybody got drunk. That was really quite an afternoon. We didn’t do any work that afternoon. When you work that hard and get a little while off, you go crazy. I can’t tell you any other silly things.

MA: Did you ever get a vacation?

JP: No I didn’t. My best friend got married in the midst of all this and I couldn’t even go out to be his best man. That was disappointing but the war was on, and we were working.

MA: What was the town of Oak Ridge like?

JP: It popped up over night of course. They shipped in all this equipment and people in there and built all these houses. Well first a lot of the scientists and engineers were brought down in railroad cars and they had railroad cars instead of houses. The construction was a huge thing. I can’t even imagine how many acres and acres and acres of buildings were being built. I bet there is still a lot of bulldozers and heavy equipment down there in the river that nobody has ever found yet. I’m sure they disappeared over night and they just said send us another. We were working under wartime pressure and whatever we wanted we got. It was as simple as that. There were no problems with priority.

MA: President Truman once said something along the lines of we spent two billion dollars on the greatest military gamble in history, and won. Do you see the creation of the atomic bomb as a victory for the United States?

JP: Well we won the war and I think that’s good otherwise lord knows what would have happened. I didn’t view it as a big thing, just a job that had to be done and we had to get out there and shut the darn thing down.

MA: So you thought it was your duty to work on the bomb and help develop it?

JP: Sure.

MA: When it was finished and the tests were successful, you just felt like you were doing your job and it wasn’t anything special?

JP: That’s right. Well after all I hadn’t worked anywhere else my whole career. I did work at the General Electric Company testing equipment but that wasn’t anything like the weapons project. We worked on a lot of Russian equipment at the General Electric Company. We made and shipped over Russian steel and electrical equipment. That’s about the only other experience I had. That was the job so we did it. MA: During my research, I read that certain scientists were recruited for the projects. Why do you think you were asked to join the project?

JP: Well I think they needed more bodies to do a lot of things obviously. I was pretty young and an engineer. I was in my twenties. They needed more bodies to do some of the medial tasks that were assigned. I worked pretty regularly on how to doctor this and doctor that. I would also confer on how to get problems worked out. It was either that or I would go into the navy, just as a gob, so I figured it was better to go and do something.

MA: Is there anything else I should know or that you would like to add?

JP: No. I think you ought to give some footnote, if nothing else, to the useful purposes that fission can serve in this world. Sure they can make damn big weapons that can raise hell everywhere, but they can also generate a lot of electricity, probably pretty cheaply. It does create wastes and people have gotten kind of silly about storing them. There are ways to get rid of the waste that somebody can always find a problem with, right or wrong, and you just got to get over it. There are a lot of politics involved and its just too bad because it’s keeping the rest of the people from getting something cheaper. Certainly there are the nuclear submarines. The power plants there are spectacular. And the air craft carriers too. It has its problems but it also does a very good job for humanity. I would hate for you to go away thinking about just the weapon and its horrible consequences, and not think about some of the good things.

MA: Would you say that most people look at the creation of the bomb and say its such a horrible thing, that it’s a weapon of mass destruction and nobody really knows about what nuclear fission and the development and nuclear reactors has done for man and its ability to provide electricity and bring warmth, things like that?

JP: In all that’s flowed from the research of nuclear physics, the treatment for cancer and all those kinds of things, all of that ties together and you learn from one steel to another. It’s been very helpful. It’s been progress in an area that I think has done a lot for mankind and can do more. In a way it’s a shame that it had to be introduced to society through these terrible weapons. It would be nice if you could go out to Los Alamos and see the museum there. They have a wonderful museum there that you ought to see at some point if you get out in that part of the world. If you remember that Russian sub in not the North Sea but the Bearing Sea, they had an explosion in the front and things sank, and they recovered 87 bodies from it. But our submarines with the nuclear plant can stay submerged for months and months. They don’t have to come up for air. There is no doubt that the weapons are horrible. They have two or three kinds. They have developed them small enough to put them in Howitzers.

MA: With the bombs that can fit in Howitzers, what size explosion would it have?

JP: Well it might not be 20,00 tons [of TNT], but it might be 2,000. Look at that bomb that they have advertised in the past couple of days. Its 2,000 pounds of TNT and it penetrates the earth and when it explodes, it somehow develops very very high temperatures. No radiation, but very high temperatures and they are using those to destroy the caves in Tora Bora.

MA: Are there any final, closing comments that you would like to make?

JP: No I don’t think so. [Laughing] I wish you luck though.

‡ TABLE OF CONTENTS INTERVIEW ANALYSIS

In Edward Carr’s book, What Is History?, he states, “History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions, and so on…” (919). There is, however, another type of history and its facts are not obtained through historical texts: oral history. Although similar to primary sources that record first hand accounts of certain events in history, oral history allows an individual who actually witnessed an event to describe not only the historical facts, but also the personal emotions that are often lacking in historical documents. It must also be stressed that historians work under their own personal biases and conceptions of historical situations. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. identifies “unconscious preconceptions” (52) as those biases based on such things as an individual’s race, gender, and religion. In this way certain historical sources are selective in their content, and may leave out vital aspects of an event due to any biases that their author may have. Mr. James Pickard was an electrical engineer on the Manhattan Project, the United States’ top-secret quest for the creation of the atomic bomb. The interview with Mr. Pickard mainly confirmed my previous knowledge of the project as well as added some interesting personal stories. It also, however, opened my eyes as a student historian to uses of atomic energy other than to create weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Pickard recorded his emotions and personal feelings into history, and by doing so, allowed the world to see the Manhattan Project not only as a weapons project, but also as the development of nuclear fission, a crucial part of our world today.

In the study of history, one must always strive for complete accuracy. Edward

Carr states, “All history is contemporary history…history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems…” (927). In order to be as accurate as possible and to avoid looking at the past with a present perspective, oral history must be utilized in conjunction with more traditional sources. This allows an interviewer to hear the history from a person who is not analyzing an event from the present but is describing a historical event with an intimate perspective on the past. For example, conventional sources of history estimate that 50,000 people were killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. Oral history, however, provides a much more vivid description of the bombing and also shows the personal emotions of someone who witnessed the event. Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, recalls the horrific site of the explosion:

The giant purple mushroom, which the tail gunner had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive…At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar. If Dante had been with us in the plane, he would have been terrified. (Colbert 437)

Oral history is extremely valuable to any historian. Its ability to provide personal emotions allows a historian to gain a more complete understanding of an event in history.

While historical documents provide foundations for events in history, oral history breathes life into the historical record itself.

The entire interview process, from the initial phone call, to the interview itself was something very new to me. After I decided that I wanted to interview Mr. Pickard, I did not hesitate very long to make initial contact and gather his background information. I did, however, take quite a while to call back and set up a time and place for the interview.

It was a mistake to wait that long because I thought that it gave a bad impression to Mr.

Pickard, and it looked like I did not want to interview him at all. When I did make the call to set up the interview, I apologized to Mr. Pickard for the delay and he said it was not a problem. That made me a little more comfortable going into the interview. I would have been far more nervous had Mr. Pickard been upset about my taking so long to call him back.

The interview itself was almost perfect; the only problem being that I did not prepare enough questions for the interview. I came with twenty questions and used them all after about forty minutes of interview. Mr. Pickard, however, had to take his wife to the hairdresser at that point, which allowed me some time to think of more questions based on what he had already said. The interview was a wonderful experience for me. I felt like I was recording a new, unseen perspective into history.

The interview with Mr. Pickard is very valuable to history because it describes not merely factual information, but also personal stories and opinions that are not available through conventional sources of history. Any historical document can provide facts and information about the Manhattan Project. Historian John Garraty, author of A Short

History of the American Nation gives, in his book, a very short and hardly detailed description of the Manhattan Project. He says:

After Roosevelt had responded to Albert Einstein’s warning in 1939, government- sponsored research proceeded rapidly. The manufacturing of the artificial element plutonium at Hanford, Washington, and uranium 235 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, continued along with the design and construction of a transportable atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. A successful bomb was exploded in the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945. (678)

Mr. Pickard, however, tells about personal feelings at crucial points in the project’s history, such as tests of the bomb or actual uses of the bomb on Japan. Also, at the end of the interview, Mr. Pickard made it clear the he did not want me to walk away from the interview thinking that the Manhattan Project simply created an awesome weapon. He wanted me to remember the other uses of nuclear fission that came out of the project. In the interview he said:

I think you ought to give some footnote, if nothing else, to the useful purposes that fission can serve in this world. Sure they can make damn big weapons that can raise hell everywhere, but they can also generate a lot of electricity, probably pretty cheaply. It does create wastes and people have gotten kind of silly about storing them. There are ways to get rid of the waste that somebody can always find a problem with, right or wrong, and you just got to get over it. There are a lot of politics involved and its just too bad because it’s keeping the rest of the people from getting something cheaper. Certainly there are the nuclear submarines. The power plants there are spectacular. And the air craft carriers too. It has its problems but it also does a very good job for humanity. I would hate for you to go away thinking about just the weapon and its horrible consequences, and not think about some of the good things. (Pickard 28)

This was the highlight of the interview. Mr. Pickard used oral history and its ability to provided personal perspectives to tell of additional uses for nuclear energy, other than for an atomic bomb, which were not mentioned in historical texts, such as Garraty’s A Short

History of the American Nation. The information that I found in my research covered only military aspects of the project, and never pointed out any other newly found uses for the nuclear power source. Historical documents speak of the atomic bomb and its destructive power. Mr. Pickard, however, not only verifies historical facts, but also tells about the personal opinions of people who experienced the project, that are not found in historical documents.

History needs to be put into context, and that is what oral history does. It provides an understanding of the historical facts and the period in which an event takes place. Oral history has opened my eyes to another form of uncovering the past. While using conventional sources is easier, due to their organization, straightforwardness, and accessibility, oral history gives an emotional perspective, something that I have discovered to be an essential part of history. I have also found that oral history, although it requires a large amount of work, is more exciting and interesting than historical documents. This interview with Mr. Pickard has changed my opinions about the

Manhattan Project. He showed me the better uses for nuclear energy and allowed me to realize other accomplishments that the project had, beyond the creation of the atomic bomb.

‡ TABLE OF CONTENTS Works Consulted

Bondi, Victor. American Decades: 1940-1949. Michigan: Gale Research, Inc., 1995.

Bruun, Erik, and Jay Crosby, eds. Our Nation's Archive. New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1999.

Carr, Edward. What Is History? New York: Vintage Books, 1961.

Colbert, David, ed. Eyewitness To America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Davidson, James West, and Mark Hamilton Lytle. After The Fact: The Art Of Historical Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992.

Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes. A Short History of the American Nation. Eighth ed. New York: Longman, 2001.

Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia. Manhattan Project. 7 Dec. 2001 .

Jones, Vincent C. Manhattan: The Army and the Bomb. Washington, D.C.: Center Of Military History, 1985.

Lawren, William. The General and the Bomb. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1988.

Los Alamos National Laboratory. New Weapons Laboratory Gives Birth to the "Gadget". 7 Dec. 2001 .

The National Atomic Museum: The Manhattan Project. 15 Dec. 2001 .

Pickard, James. Personal Interview. 22 Dec. 2001.

Public Broadcasting Service. A Science Odyssey: The First Atomic Bomb is Detonated. 7 Dec. 2001 .

Rhodes, Richard. The Making Of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1986. Schlesinger Jr., Arthur Meier. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multi Cultural Society. New York: Norton, 1998.

Shroyer, Jo Ann. Secret Mesa: Inside Los Alamos National Laboratory. New York, New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1998.

Thompson, Fritz. The Nuclear Age's Blinding Dawn. 7 Dec. 2001 .

Trinity - Completion of the Wartime Mission. 15 Dec. 2001 .

Truman, Harry S. Memoirs by Harry S. Truman Volume 1: Year of Decisions. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1955.

20th Century America: A Primary Source Collection From The Associated Press World War II 1939-1945.Vol. III. Grolier Publishing Company, 1995.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History Of The United States. New York: The New Press, 1997.

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