Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center Transcript of An
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Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center Transcript of an Oral History Interview with HUGH T. RICHARDS Civilian, Manhattan Project, World War II. 1995 OH 1156 1 OH 1156 Richards, Hugh T., (1918-2006). Oral History Interview, 1995. Transcript: 0.1 linear ft. (1 folder). Abstract: Hugh T. Richards, a Baca County, Colorado native, talks about his experiences working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. He describes how he became interested in nuclear physics during college and started graduate work at Rice University (Texas) in 1939. He touches on taking over classes for a professor who left to work on radar and writing his Master’s thesis on measuring fast neutron energies by use of photographic emulsions. He tells of signing onto an Office of Scientific Research and Development contract and working under Gregory Breit, who was “obsessed with secrecy.” He mentions finishing up his project at Rice University, driving to the University of Minnesota with a uranium sphere in his glove compartment to help them wrap up their research, and consolidating with other projects in 1943 at Los Alamos (New Mexico). He recalls hearing Robert Serber’s indoctrination lectures and helping set up his team’s two electrostatic accelerators. He explains how a nuclear bomb works and the difficulties posed by the need to separate enough of the rare 235 uranium isotope. He talks about spending a couple weeks measuring properties of plutonium and explains the development of implosion techniques. He discusses the security at Los Alamos: needing to have a birth certificate created because he’d been born without a doctor, censorship of incoming and outgoing mail, not being allowed to invite family to Los Alamos for his wedding, and only being allowed to talk freely in the technical area. He recalls that the scientists were kept so busy that they did not speculate very much on whom the bomb would be used against. He characterizes the Army’s interactions with the scientists as not obtrusive and states he had a Women’s Army Corps soldier working as a laboratory assistant. He relates his participation in the Trinity test, including measuring neutrons’ time sequences and his reactions after witnessing the blast. He reflects on inflicting civilian casualties in a total war situation, the scientists’ lack of concern about long-term effects from exposure to radiation, and recent radiation hormesis theories. He comments on his own reaction after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, which included being relieved that the war was over. After the war, he speaks of joining the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, which later merged into the Federation of American Scientists, and lobbying for international and civilian control of nuclear weapons. He states the Los Alamos scientists were generally young, characterizes scientist Edward Teller, and reflects on the effects the project had on Richards’ career. He discusses his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, installing the first tandem-type accelerator in Sterling Hall, and his department’s uneasy relationship with the Army Math Center because the center kept their doors closed and locked. He details hearing the Sterling Hall bombing and describes the destruction it caused Professor Henry Barschall’s research, his own lab, and his students’ research. Richards mentions his role in reconstruction efforts. 2 Biographical Sketch: Richards (1918-2006) was a civilian physicist who worked on Project Y, part of the Manhattan Project, at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He earned his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Rice University in 1942 and married Mildred Paddock in 1944. After the war, he became a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he helped the physics department recover after the Sterling Hall bombing, and he retired in 1988. Interviewed by Mark Van Ells, 1995 Transcribed by Karen M. Emery, WDVA staff, ca. 1995 Abstract written by Susan Krueger, 2011 3 Transcribed Interview: Mark: Okay. Today’s date is August 8, 1995. This is Mark Van Ells, Archivist, Wisconsin Veterans Museum doing an oral history interview this morning with Professor Hugh Richards who worked in the Los Alamos project during World War II, and our first civilian in our project here. Good morning. Thank you for coming in. I really appreciate it. As we spoke before I turned the tape recorder on, we’ve got Professor Richards’ memoirs here and they’re going to be on file in the library here so we’ll dispense with some of the questions about early background since that’s very well covered in this manuscript here. I thought I’d start out by having you tell me a little bit more about how you got interested in physics and what you knew about nuclear fission and these sorts of things prior to World War II. I mean, what were people saying about it? Was it a fantasy science fiction-type thing? Or was it something that serious scholars looked at? Those sorts of things. Hugh: Well, in college I started out majoring in chemistry but the sophomore year I took organic chemistry, and there seemed so much to memorize and so complicated. And at the same time I was taking a physics course, and that seemed too neat and very little to memorize—you reasoned it out—so I decided to switch to physics and I’ve never regretted it. Mark: It’s a purely practical concern in other words. An immediate sort of -- Hugh: Oh, I loved the chemistry but organic chemistry was more than I wanted to memorize. I did take some more chemistry though in college. I took a physical chemistry course and the textbook they used was by Ketman (sp??) and Daniels—Daniels was a professor here at the University of Wisconsin— and the last chapter in the book was on nuclear structure, and it discussed in detail some of the work of Professor [Raymond G.] Herb and the physics department at the University of Wisconsin and his accelerators and some of the results on that, and I was very interested in that then. So I was interested in nuclear physics before the discovery of fission which occurred in 1939, the year I graduated from college. And I went to Rice University for my graduate work largely because—I would have gone, I had an offer, a WARF fellowship from Wisconsin which I would have taken except for the fact my father was ill and had to quit teaching. He had Parkinson’s disease and had moved to Louisiana for a place to do subsistence farming, and so that was one reason that I accepted an offer from Rice for graduate work. And the other reason was that they had just completed a copy of Ray Herb’s Wisconsin accelerator and I thought it might be good to get in the ground floor of exploiting that and it turned out that was a good strategy actually. Mark: Yeah. Now, I get the impression Rice also had a very good graduate program. 4 Hugh: Oh, yes. Mark: It wasn’t a secondary choice necessarily. Hugh: Oh, no. It was, and is, a very good top-rated school. In fact, the recent, well, discovery of the Buckminsterfullerene in chemistry was at Rice, and the recent discovery of Bose-Einstein condensates as another phase of matter was done almost simultaneously at Rice and was in the New York Times about that. So, no, they have a very good physics department. Small but it’s good. Mark: Yeah. Now, you started graduate school just as World War II broke out in 1939, is that correct? Hugh: That’s right, that’s right, yeah. Mark: Now, if you would perhaps, if there is a connection—I’m only assuming that there is—could you perhaps describe how your graduate work sort of gelled with this sort of, the military applications of the nuclear fission program. Hugh: There was no connection initially at all. It was, I just did the regular nuclear physics program. The first real effect of the war on the program was when my major professor, Tom [W.] Bonner, took leave from Rice to go to MIT to work on radar and I took over his courses, teaching in his office, and that was my first, the first effect of the war on that. And then of course, that was in 1940, I guess, yeah, or ‘40, no, I guess that was spring of ‘41. But then in the fall of ‘41, well, the summer, we went to give a physics paper at Brown University, and that was my first time in the East. And we visited with Bonner at that time. He was working at MIT on radar. And then of course in December of that year there was Pearl Harbor. Bonner had urged me to apply for a National Research Council fellowship for post-doctorate work and I had done that but he wrote me after Pearl Harbor, he said, “Forget about that. There’s not going to be any nuclear physics done.” Cal Tech, where I wanted to go, or Wisconsin, were my two choices and he said, “We’d be happy to hire you here at MIT on radar work.” Well, that was agreeable to me but then in January the head of the department, H.A. Wilson, called me and another young instructor in and asked whether we would be willing to undertake a project on measuring fast neutron energies. He said it was known from intelligence that the Germans were working on a fission bomb and that, it wasn’t of course clear that such a thing was possible but even if they could produce a lot of radioactivity it was something which could have tremendous shock value for troops and civilian population.