Memoirs: After the Bomb

By the time we went to Los Alamos the world knew the essentials of atomic energy and atomic bombs because Dr. Harry Smyth had published his surprisngly complete description of the two different types of bombs; one employing uranium, the other plutonium. The uranium bomb was a simple linear device that was made to go critical by slamming two pieces of fissionable material together very quickly. The plutonium bomb, more complicated and also more elegant, was detonated by compressing the fissionable material to such a degree that it's neutrons passed the critical point -two per atom- and it exploded, releasing the envergy equivalent of many thousands of tons of normal high explosives.
The bomb's extraordinary power is still hard for me to visualize and when one considers how freely many people talked of using even the early, low yield bombs, its hard to imagine that many of them had ever truly visualize it either. This was before the arrival of the H-bomb, whose explosive power is normally measured in millions of tons.
Dr Smyth's book also described the enormous industrial effort that was necessary to make the small amount of fissionable material needed for the cricial assemblies of the first bombs and caused most readers to believe that only the United States had the industrial capacity to build them.

So I spent my time simultaneously attempting to plan a sensible but limited program for our group on the Hill and going the ninety or so miles to Albuquerque to make my small contribution to the plans for the new laboratory. Jerold and Roger Warner spent most of their time there, trying to give shape to their ideas for the new facility, often with more help than they needed from other people, including the top man, General Groves, who, competent though he was, had a special knack for annoying people. When we first arrived at Los Alamos we found most of the inhabitants incensed over a particularly ill-advised Groves economy.
The town water system was not working because its sources had dried up and tank trucks had to be used to haul river water up the mountain to be dumped into the distribution system that fed the houses and labs. This arrangement had a number of drawbacks. First of all there was always a shortage of water and the pressure was low,

so houses at higher elevations often had no pressure and the water was frequently dirty or at least sandy.
At times there was no water at all, usually during periods of high demand in the morning and evening. Once we had a fire in our laboratory and were only able to put it out by using water from a tank truck which I had to beg for. The rumor, which was generally believed, was that once, when Groves was in a foul mood, he had refused to approve a request for equipment needed to keep the water system operating.
In addition to problems with the water, the electrical plant, which consisted of a pair of old diesel driven generators, had long been inadequate to accommodate the peak load which came at the dinnertime cooking hour. The solution that had been reached for this was to randomly cut off power to some part of the village every night. This. too. was blamed on Groves and was one more source of the project members' annoyance.

One of the most curious incidents I witnessed at Los Alamos was typical Groves. For some reason he was very worried about a coming Congressional investigation of the money that had been spent building the bomb. He was particularly concerned about an enormous cylindrical drum called 'Jumbo'. Jumbo was about fifteen feet long, with sides a foot thick and open on one end. It had been ordered early in the project when conf idence regarding a successful explosion was low. The plan was to have the first test set off inside Jumbo so that if it wasn't a high-level explosion the uranium could be scraped from it's inside and used again.
Jumbo was made from one large, solid cylinder of steel, turned to hollow its inside, the largest steel turning ever done. It was so big that it took a special effort to deliver it, rerouting it to bypass low bridges, etc. By the time it was del ivered there was much more confidence in the project and the scientists feared that using Jumbo would inhibit the explosion, so they decided instead to suspend the bomb from a tower. General Groves was very upset by this decision and classified Jumbo "Secret". The episode war forgotten by everyone but the company that had made Jumbo and the people who had transported it. Since the war was over they wanted to show it in their advertising but Groves refused to declassify it, in spite of insistent and repeated requests from the maker. One day I happened to be present when a young colonel again gave the general a request for declassification. Half in jest, Groves said that if Jumbo was ever used it could be declassified. "Why don't you set off a charge in it?" he said. Taking Groves at his word, the colonel did just that, setting off an explosive inside it, but unfortunately he put the charge on the bottom of the cylinder instead of in the center where the forces were equal on all sides and it was scattered all over the desert. It was then reclassified, "Top Secret."

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