An Oral History of the Manhattan Project

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.

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