It had long been in my mind that with the end of the war we would lose the great majority of officers assigned to duty in the MED, including many on whom we had depended the most heavily. Like every other military command when V-J Day arrived, we were faced with the question of how fast we could reduce our work to peacetime needs and release our wartime personnel, yet still maintain a going concern.
As I explained earlier, the military side of the Manhattan Project was run almost exclusively by nonregular officers. Within a year after the project was set up, we had reduced the regular contingent to two—the District Engineer, Colonel Nichols, and myself. Later, as the war progressed, we picked up a few more as they returned from foreign service, but we never asked to have a man returned for this purpose.
At the war’s end, most of our temporary officers had been in the service long enough to be entitled to prompt discharge. They were anxious to return to civil life, and the majority had excellent positions awaiting them. But replacing them was not going to be simple.
I determined that I would need about fifty regular officers to run the various elements of the MED. I wanted men who were young enough to break into the atomic field, but who were senior enough in rank to have demonstrated their ability to accept heavy responsibilities, and whose age would be an asset in their dealings with our scientific personnel, almost all of whom were extremely young.
It was important that the officers whom we selected command the respect of persons already in the project, not only of the officers they would be thrown with, but particularly of the scientists. Experience had shown that the scientists were most critical of anyone whose mental alertness did not equal or excel theirs. Slowness of comprehension or inability to keep all the pertinent facts in mind, once they were explained, was fatal, as not only military personnel, but also civilians of considerable capacity and reputation in their own fields had repeatedly discovered. For example, it was not always easy for a nonscientific mind to grasp the idea of a critical mass, and the fact that it was not possible to determine whether a bomb was feasible until a full-scale bomb was exploded. Failure to understand this was never forgiven.
Because we were in a hurry, we concentrated at first mainly on graduates of West Point. We wanted officers who as cadets had been highly regarded by the Academic Board not only for their scholastic achievements but for their other qualities. We preferred men who were among the first five or ten of their class, and we did not want anyone who stood below the first 10 per cent. A successful athletic career, demonstrating a more than average determination and will to win, was a particular asset.
Later, when it became necessary to secure a large number of young officers for duty at the new Sandia Base at Albuquerque for our bomb assembly teams, these requirements were relaxed slightly. Also, as time went on, it became possible to make a searching investigation of the background, educational and military, of other officers, not graduates of West Point, and to bring them in.
My request for highly qualified officers was not greeted with too much enthusiasm by the General Staff, whose position was very well put by General Handy, when he said there was no reason why I should have a solid group of the best officers in the Army; that there were other important things besides the Manhattan Project. Many officers I wanted were in rather important spots overseas. All of them were officers that no commander wanted to lose. Many were removed from the list when we learned of their current duties. We did not want to interfere with an officer’s best interests if we could help it, and we did not want dissatisfied officers who were thinking about what might have been if we had not insisted on their assignment to us.
The situation came to a head when Tasked for Colonel K. E. Fields. This choice was vigorously opposed by General McNarney, who then commanded the American forces in Europe. Fields had been relieved from his command of an engineer group and placed in charge of the European Theater’s athletic program. This was a very important job at that time because of the absolute necessity of maintaining morale in the Army of Occupation. Yet, I did not feel that it would be particularly disadvantageous either to the Army or to Fields if he were brought back; so I asked Handy to have the necessary orders issued.
As was customary in such cases, McNarney was queried and he objected strongly. Handy then told me that he could not go along with my request, that I was asking for too many good men, and that by my system of hand-picking I was getting more than my share. I replied that there was no place for anyone in the atomic field who was not a super-superior officer, that we simply could not use anyone else and, moreover, that the assignment to the MED of anyone who was less than super-superior would lead to adverse reactions among our scientific personnel, and through them, among the rest of the academic world and the press.
My next step was to talk to the Chief of Staff, General Eisenhower. He more or less went along with Handy on the theory that, after all, I should not expect to be able to hand-pick my entire organization.
A few days later, in the course of a conversation with Secretary Patterson the matter of personnel came up. When, in response to a query, I told him that I was having trouble getting an adequate number of competent people, he asked General Eisenhower to come in and to bring Handy with him. Handy defended his position vigorously, stating that I had been demanding the best and was not willing to accept anything but the best, that this was unfair to the other commanders, and that he felt that I should be turned down. Eisenhower supported him.
Although the discussion was quite forceful, and occasionally even heated, not once was any reference made either directly or indirectly, then or afterward, to the fact that this was a matter that lay within the province of the Chief of Staff. After about five minutes, Mr. Patterson said, “I agree with Groves,” and went on to say: “I want him to have as many officers as he decides he needs and of the quality he thinks he needs, and I want him to have complete freedom of choice.”
I should point out in this connection that throughout my entire association with the MED, and later with the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, there was never a time when the Chief of Staff, either Marshall or Eisenhower, raised any question about, or indicated any displeasure over, the fact that the Secretary of War took up so many matters directly with me, and generally did so without their prior knowledge. Although this led to occasional embarrassment for me, and I am sure that more than once it caught them unawares, they were both big enough men to overlook such minor deviations from ordinary procedures.
So it was that the superb reserve officers of the project’s wartime years were replaced by equally fine professionals. Only the high quality of our regular officers enabled us to weather the difficult period of demobilization between V-J Day and the activation of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Unfortunately, the policy of super-selection has not endured. Its demise is one of the principal reasons why the Army is no longer supreme within the military establishment in the area of nuclear warfare. Indeed, by insisting upon putting the best people in command of units in the field, and giving staff vacancies in the nuclear weapons field equal rather than preferred treatment, the field Army commanders, though they may have solved their immediate problems, have brought upon themselves a rather bleaker future.
Even greater than the officer problem was that of the demobilization of the scientific staff. Many of these men had come from academic jobs and were anxious to return to them. The senior men wanted to get back to their universities in order to re-establish themselves in their departments. The more junior men wanted either to take up the unusually fine positions that had been offered to them or to complete their work for advanced degrees. There was also the unrest that always occurs whenever a large group that has been held under a tight rein is suddenly released from control. Many men had stayed on long after they would have preferred to leave for other fields. With the great interest in atomic physics, many comparatively junior men were receiving offers from academic institutions far beyond anything they could previously have expected to get after even twenty years of experience.
There was also the usual feeling that the great goal had been achieved and that there was nothing to look forward to. Primarily for this reason, I was certain that most of the senior men would want to leave promptly. There were also a few whom I was anxious to see leave for security reasons. In the main, these men had been engaged in the atomic project before the Army entered the field, and had been retained in the belief that from a security standpoint it was safer to keep them than it was to let them go. I also felt it likely that the American people would demand very rigid security clearances in the future, and that this was a time when anyone not possessing a perfect pre-MED record could leave the project without stigma of any kind, and with full recognition, well deserved, of having done a top-notch job for our country.
We did not think that the breaking up of the big laboratory at Columbia would be a serious handicap to us; its work was done. The Berkeley laboratory, I felt, would continue as long as Ernest Lawrence lived, provided it received proper financial support from the government. The Chicago laboratory had already been considerably reduced in size, as many of the scientists had moved on to Los Alamos; and with the need to develop the peaceful uses of the atom it could be reasonably maintained.
It was particularly important to continue the Los Alamos laboratory so that the nucleus of a staff for future weapon improvement would always be available; this presented a much more difficult problem. Oppenheimer had told me that he wanted to leave as soon as he could, and we discussed a possible successor for him. It would have to be someone with sufficient prestige to secure the co-operation of his colleagues at Los Alamos, and the assistance of distinguished scientists throughout the country—particularly of those who were now leaving the project. Also, he should not be one of the top four or five men in the project, for I wanted him to feel that this was a great opportunity for him.
After much thought and considerable discussion with Oppenheimer and others I asked Dr. Norris Bradbury to take the position. Bradbury had spent several years at Los Alamos and had played an important part in the development of the gun-type bomb. Also, he was a Navy reserve officer, a circumstance I thought would help him in maintaining smooth relations between the civilian scientific staff and the military administrative officers.
Bradbury accepted with the understanding that he would not want to remain at Los Alamos indefinitely, and would, after not more than five years, return to academic life. Fortunately, he is still there, and the results of his work are a source of great pride to those of us who had a part in his selection. His performance has exceeded our expectations, and those were extremely high.
Bradbury’s appointment was well received, and greatly facilitated our efforts to build up a thoroughly competent staff in the laboratory. The new divisional heads were selected by Bradbury, with the advice of Oppenheimer and others at Los Alamos. Because of the excellence of their choices, my part was purely confirmatory. These men, like Bradbury, had all demonstrated qualities of leadership as well as technical competence, and held the respect of their fellows and of their superiors.
It was not long before the question of whether to relocate the laboratory or to build up Los Alamos as a permanent installation came to the fore. A number of people strongly urged that we abandon the Los Alamos site and re-establish the laboratory in southern California. They proposed that the work be concentrated in laboratories to be constructed in the general Los Angeles area, and that all experimental work requiring room be conducted in the vicinity of Inyokern, across the mountains in the desert area. No other site was seriously considered.
I decided against moving the laboratories for several reasons. Chief among them was a strong feeling that to separate the organization into a comfortable laboratory setup in an urban area, while all major experimental work was done at a point where living was not easy, would not only result in considerable operational difficulty, but also in a great deal of lost time and expense. We also had a major investment in Los Alamos—a site that had proved to be entirely satisfactory in every way, except for its distance from any large center of population, and this was a disadvantage I thought would largely disappear now that the war was over.
In order to make all concerned realize that Los Alamos would be an enduring affair, the decision had to be made without delay. It would not have had to be made by me if the Congress had passed necessary legislation for the peacetime setup with reasonable promptness, but as the hearings dragged on, it became impossible to wait any longer. One of the first steps was to initiate the construction of new permanent family housing at Los Alamos, which convinced all doubters that the site would not be abandoned. Nevertheless, this was the kind of decision I did not feel that I should be making, for it definitely committed my successors, whoever they might be, for years to come.
Another pressing problem during the demobilization period involved the thermal diffusion plant. This plant had been built in an abnormal hurry. While its construction had been justified at the time because it enabled us to speed up the production of the Hiroshima bomb, it did not seem wise to keep such an expensive plant going when time was no longer the all-controlling consideration. I therefore decided to close it down, though I knew that once it was shut down it would be extremely difficult to put back into operation.
This, of course, meant a sizable reduction in employment, but as people left our other plants for civilian jobs, there were plenty of vacancies for those who wanted to continue to work at Oak Ridge.
Another decision that had to be made without any guidance from Congress was in connection with the gaseous diffusion program. Here, we had started in early 1945 to extend the plant facilities in order to make certain that we would have an ample supply of uranium in case the bombs were not so effective as we expected them to be, and we would therefore need a much greater number of them. I decided that this work should be continued and the plant finished.
At the same time I was receiving little if any guidance from the Executive Branch, since both the Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff, having only recently come into the atomic picture, felt that my background enabled me to make the necessary decisions better than they could. Nevertheless, throughout this period and until the date of my retirement, I had no difficulty in seeing both Mr. Patterson and his successor, as well as General Eisenhower, whenever I felt there was a need. As a matter of fact, I saw even more of them and discussed our problems in much greater detail with them than I ever had with Secretary Stimson and General Marshall.
When I first started to explain the atomic program to Mr. Patterson and General Eisenhower, they said that they did not want me to give them any secret information if I could help it, particularly about the production rates and the number of bombs on hand. As General Eisenhower put it, “I have so many things to deal with that it puts an undue burden on me to be given any secret information, as I am then forced to think constantly about what is secret and what is not. In a project such as this, where knowledge is held to such a few people, it makes it particularly difficult.” Not until there was an actual threat of severe criticism from one Senator that the Secretary and the Chief of Staff were placing too much reliance on me was there any change in this policy. Even then, both expressed their regret that they had to have the information. Personally, I was relieved, since I had always thought they should have it.
During this trying period I was no longer able to turn to the Military Policy Committee for advice, for it had gone out of existence at the end of the war. However, with the exception of General Styer, who had left Washington for foreign duty, its members were always available for unofficial advice and consultation whenever I needed them.
I continued to be concerned about Los Alamos, where there was a natural but definite relaxation of activity. While plans for the future were being made, I arranged for members of the scientific panel of the President’s Interim Committee to go out to the laboratory to discuss the technical potentialities of atomic energy. A series of lecture courses was organized—called the Los Alamos University —to give the younger staff members a chance to learn some of the things that they had missed during the war years, about both the actual development of the bomb at Los Alamos and recent scientific progress. It was during this period, too, that under the editorship of Hans Bethe, the Los Alamos technical series was prepared. These papers set down a systematic record of the laboratory’s work during the war.
At the same time, a number of the scientists were doing some theoretical work on future bomb designs. Weapons production was being continued and plans made to carry on the work on the Fat Man, including certain changes that we felt would improve its explosive power.
I asked Oppenheimer to visit Los Alamos and tell me what I could do to help Bradbury during this difficult transition period, because I thought that since he had previously been so close to the situation and to the people he could get to the heart of matters better than I could. There was no question but that Bradbury needed all the help that I could give him if he was to have an adequate operating laboratory by June, 1946, which was the goal we had set. There was also the Bikini test to get ready for.
After his visit in November, Oppenheimer wrote to me, recommending two projects for my immediate approval, and asked for my guidance on two others. He urged me to expedite the declassification of information insofar as it was possible (plans for this were already under way); he also recommended that we arrange more efficient channels for classified communication between Los Alamos and the other MED activities, and that qualified scientists at other sites be authorized to discuss their work with their counterparts at Los Alamos.
Bradbury had told Oppenheimer that the senior regular officers who had recently been assigned to Los Alamos were not really equipped to supervise the more specialized technical aspects of the work, regardless of their excellent engineering and military training. I knew this and had not put them there for that purpose, but rather to familiarize them with the broader phases of the development. Bradbury did think they would be most useful at Sandia, our location in Albuquerque where the nonexplosive parts of the bomb were being assembled. He said that military personnel should not be assigned to the laboratory except at his specific request and that no attempt should be made to provide military personnel for responsible positions in the various physics or gadget (bomb components) divisions. This had never been our intention, since none of our regular officers had the necessary scientific knowledge for those jobs.
In his letter, Oppenheimer also made the point that there simply was not enough suitable housing to provide for both the laboratory staff and the Army contingent required for the nontechnical phases of the operation. The laboratory staff alone, at a minimum, came to something like fourteen hundred, with the word minimum emphasized.
Many things that had been merely troublesome in the past were intolerable in a permanent peacetime community; yet nothing had been done about any of them in the three months after V-J Day. Bradbury recommended that the censorship of mail be discontinued, and that no insurmountable obstacles be put in the way of having friends and relatives for visits on the post, provided that this would not require increased housing, and that, in certain specific cases, the visits be approved by the Intelligence Office.
Bradbury also said that proselyting of his staff by men who were at Los Alamos but who had plans for going elsewhere put a severe strain on his ability to keep the laboratory together. The University of Chicago was probably the worst offender, but others were also engaged in wholesale recruiting campaigns, disregarding the hurt to Los Alamos. Oppenheimer suggested, first, that we encourage the departure of the offenders, and second that Bradbury be enabled to offer to those men he wanted to keep definite reassurances about the technical program, about future living conditions and about their salaries.
Oppenheimer told me that Bradbury found it hard to explain “a statement attributed to you that you had lost your first and second quality scientists and were in danger of losing your third, fourth and fifth.” This was like many another statement attributed to me in that I had never said it or anything resembling it. It was true that we had lost some scientists of great reputation, and that we had lost many of the heads of the various groups, but Los Alamos had been so strongly staffed that even the men whose reputations were not so widespread were nevertheless possessed of great ability and, in my opinion, were fully capable of doing an excellent job and of carrying forward new ideas just as vigorously as would the slightly older men of greater reputation. To tell the truth, with the bomb now an accomplished fact and the war over, I had a feeling that the new leaders would approach the work ahead with greater enthusiasm than their predecessors might.
After looking into the matter for me, General Farrell recommended that I: (1) telephone Oppenheimer and Bradbury to say that I would formally approve Bradbury’s plans for the technical programs as soon as I received a letter from him on the subject; (2) informally approve his plans by telephone; (3) tell Bradbury that Parsons would keep him current on plans for the Bikini test and would bring the Los Alamos laboratory into the test as the principal technical operating agency; (4) tell Bradbury that I would discuss the super-bomb with him as soon as I had his report on it; (5) ask Bradbury for a letter outlining what he would like done to improve liaison between Los Alamos and the rest of the project; (6) inform Bradbury that officers would not be assigned to Los Alamos for technical duty without consulting him; (7) tell Bradbury that Farrell would go out to Los Alamos immediately to discuss matters with him; and (8) tell Bradbury I would like to have him visit Oak Ridge, Hanford, Chicago and Washington at his convenience in order to get an over-all view of the project.
I immediately put these recommendations into effect. No effort was spared in making certain that Bradbury knew that we were backing him to the hilt and were doing everything within our power to make his lot an easier one.
In the months immediately following and, in fact, until the middle of 1946, a major portion of the effort at Los Alamos went into Operation Crossroads—the Bikini tests. Although the Navy Department (Vice Admiral W. H. P. Blandy) had over-all responsibility for the operation, technical responsibility rested with the MED. Our people produced, assembled and tested the weapon components. They controlled the timing of Test Able and detonated the bomb for Test Baker.1
Out of these tests came a great deal of valuable information. We were able to plan carefully for the collection of much technical data, and for the first time were in a position to confirm much that we could only infer before. The tests clearly established that atomic weapons could easily rout any major beach attack and that a capital ship could not operate in an atomic war. They also demonstrated that the radioactivity generated by an underwater atomic explosion would result in major casualties wherever the contaminated spray reached.
The job of safeguarding the forty thousand men of the Joint Task Forces at Bikini was given to Captain George Lyons, of the Navy Medical Department, who had previously been associated with the MED. The nature of this operation required the division of medical duties into highly specialized fields. One of these was radiological safety. This was our job, planned and carried out under the direction of Colonel Warren. It included the protection of the entire task force as well as of the natives of the atoll and the surrounding area. Measures also had to be taken to assure that there would be no radiological damage to the people of Japan or the United States.
There were two specific categories of danger: first, from the detonation itself, and second, from radiation persisting after the detonation. The latter would come chiefly from fission products: fissionable material itself and the matter—salt water, dust, debris and such—in which radioactivity had been induced.
In January, we organized a group at Oak Ridge to train officers and men in the proper use of instruments to detect radiation; they were taught also how to interpret radiation in terms of actual damage. Later that month, they underwent additional training at the Universities of Chicago and Rochester and at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. In March, they witnessed demonstrations at Los Alamos and made several field trips, including one to the Trinity site. These men served as monitors in the photographic planes, the reconnaissance planes, the rescue planes and in all the various types of watercraft that participated in the Bikini test.
During these transitional months between the war’s end and the takeover by the Atomic Energy Commission, we launched a wholly new project—supplying radioactive isotopes to qualified researchers. Congressional delay in passing legislation made things particularly awkward for us in this venture, because all the work of the MED had been paid for by funds specifically appropriated for military use. Since the production of radioactive isotopes was for peacetime use, we actually had no authority to work in this area.
We had always been mindful that there would be these by-products of atomic power, but we had thought their major value would be in research—medical, biological and agricultural. We expected that they would have some industrial use, but not very much. Not long after the end of the war, however, we realized that they would probably prove to be of much greater value than we had anticipated.
I felt that they should be made available for research as promptly as could be arranged. Their production would require months, since the material had first to be radiated in a pile and then reduced to the form in which it would be used. Out of my discussions with people in whom I had the utmost confidence came a final plan for radioactive isotope distribution within the United States. The first shipment was made to St. Louis, Missouri, where it was used in research on bone cancer. Soon afterward, isotopes were made available to scientists in other countries under suitable restrictions that prevented their being used for research in military areas.
I did not approve of giving isotopes to researchers free of charge. In the first place, I did not think that it was in my province to give away material belonging to the United States; and, secondly, I thought the material would be much more carefully used if it were paid for than if it cost nothing. In setting up the price schedules—which later proved to be excessive in some instances, too low in others —our principle was to recoup for the United States the actual operating costs of producing the isotopes, with nothing to be charged for capital investment or depreciation. While everything about this undertaking was new, including the shipping of highly radioactive material to many different locations, it did not present too many problems.
Since the start of this program, the number of shipments has climbed enormously, so that in the last year the value of the radioactive isotopes to industry in this country has risen to somewhere between one-half billion and one billion dollars. It is not possible to calculate their value to research, and the surface in this area has scarcely been scratched.
The development of commercial power from atomic energy has not progressed so rapidly as I had hoped it would, although in the fall and winter of 1945 I estimated that it would be a matter of decades before we had economical atomic power for commercial uses under normal conditions. Even before the war ended we had started a group of scientists working on the problem. This was possible because, although it was a peacetime project, it was essential to keep the Chicago group together in case scientific support should suddenly become vital for the Hanford plant. We could not expect to hold onto such competent men if we merely let them sit idly by waiting for a call. For that reason alone, I thought it was wise to initiate studies of how best to proceed with the development of atomic power. This work was primarily under the control of Dr. Farrington Daniels, of the University of Wisconsin.
Before the end of 1945, the group had charted its course and was prepared to begin. Here I had to call a halt, for it seemed to me that the permanent peacetime organization that would succeed the MED should handle the practical development from the start. Unfortunately, it was over a year before the Atomic Energy Commission assumed responsibility, and then they did not proceed on the basis of Daniels’ studies. All his work had been carefully reviewed, and both Nichols and I, as well as everyone else whom we consulted, considered it a sound basis for the initial approach. The result was a serious delay before any effective work was undertaken on this problem. Today, nuclear power is still uneconomical under normal conditions, but I believe that it will not be too long before it will start to take its place in the world’s economy.
Nuclear power for special uses, such as the propulsion of submarines and other naval vessels, and the production of small power plants for the delivery of heat and power in isolated locations, has reached a quite satisfactory point, although undoubtedly a great deal of progress remains to be made. And, as no one needs to be told, since the end of the war the power of atomic weapons has been greatly increased and, in addition, tactical bombs of much lesser explosive power have been produced. The latter will enable a field commander to attack a much wider range of targets without destroying large areas and without danger of excessive fallout and ground and air contamination.
The advent of the hydrogen bomb has again entirely changed the military picture. This we always thought was inevitable; it was one of the reasons we worked on the hydrogen bomb, particularly on its theory, during the war years, though it was clear that the A-bomb could be completed much sooner and therefore should receive priority of effort.
As soon as the war was over, we took steps to provide for the indoctrination of a number of engineers in the atomic area. Among other moves we established a course at Oak Ridge where the engineers of some of the bigger companies, as well as some military officers, could be trained in what might be termed the practical end of atomic engineering.
One of the men who trained there was Captain H. G. Rickover, at the special request of Vice Admiral Earle Mills, the head of the Bureau of Ships in the Navy. Mills explained to me that he would probably soon retire from active duty and assumed that it would not be too long before I followed him. He said he was afraid that there would then be considerable danger that a development in which both he and I had long been interested—namely the atomic-powered submarine—would probably not be vigorously pushed unless we had suitable naval personnel convinced of its possibilities, trained in the fundamentals, and enthusiastic about its future. He was anxious to have a very determined man involved, and wanted my approval of the assignment of Rickover. First, though, he wanted me to know that Rickover was not too easy to get along with and not too popular; however, in his judgment, he was a man whom we could depend on, no matter what opposition he might encounter, once he was convinced of the potentialities of the atomic submarine.
Mills was a good judge of men.
1 There were two tests at Bikini—Able, where the bomb was exploded well up in the air, and Baker, where a bomb was set off under water.