The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  One of the things we found in the junk pile was one of the searchlights that they used on the guard towers around the technical area. We decided we had to do something with it. It had a cracked reflector but we took it apart and repaired it with airplane glue and it turned out pretty well. But then we had this great big socket for a huge bulb. One of the fathers said, “I think that’s such-and-such a base for a 1000-watt bulb.” And one of the kids was going with his parents to Denver shortly, so we took up a collection, and sure enough, he was able to get a bulb.

  So we hooked it up and screwed in the bulb and turned it on, and it was like a campfire! This was in the winter, and we were warming our hands over it. It was amazing. So what do you use something like this for? Well, one of the first uses was to shine in one of the guys’ sister’s bedroom window. She totally freaked out! That was the last time we did that. There were better things to do.

  Some months before we found the searchlight, a B-24 twin engine bomber came over almost at treetop level. Los Alamos was a no-fly zone. I remember standing on the back porch of our place and seeing this plane and waving to the pilot. Well, about fifteen minutes after that, the plane was out of gas, and it crashed and the people on board died. That really upset us. They were completely lost. They might have thought Los Alamos was Santa Fe or something but because it is not on a map anywhere, it is really disorienting.

  So sometime after that, after we had set up our searchlight, we saw a plane circling Los Alamos one evening and it just went around and around. A couple of our teenage gurus, our Eagle Scouts, said, “We have to do something. We can’t let this happen again.” So they went over to the tree house and climbed the ladder and went out on top. One of them trained the searchlight on the plane, and the other one tapped out in Morse code: “Not Santa Fe, not Santa Fe! Go southeast! Go southeast!”

  After a few more circles, the plane went off. When the plane arrived safely in Santa Fe, the pilot must have told somebody about this miracle, how he was signaled what to do. That worked its way back to the security people at Los Alamos. The security folks scratched their heads and finally they figured out what had happened and removed our searchlight. That was the end of that one!

  The parents were very good, once we started school, about taking us on class trips. We went to pueblos and to see Indian dances and so on, but the class trip that I remember best was when we went to Maria [Martinez of the San Ildefonso Pueblo]. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Maria the potter, but her pots fetch thousands of dollars today. Even back then she was the potter. She showed us the bluff where she got her clay, and we dug some out. We put it in crocks with damp rags to season it for a month or two according to her instructions.

  Then we went back with our clay and Maria instructed us in how to coil the pot and how to bake the pots. The method was that you first dig a pit and line it with stones. We did this just a little ways from our group of apartments. Then you build a big fire there, let the fire burn down, dump in a bunch of horse manure, lay down the pots on the horse manure, and add another layer of horse manure. Then you cover the whole mess with a couple of sheets of metal and let it cook for three days.

  In the meantime, this smell of roasting horse manure went all over the neighborhood causing people to ask, “What the hell is that?! Why did you dig the pit there?!” But we got the pots out and following Maria’s instructions, went to the Rio Grande to get smooth stones. The stones were used to polish the matte finish to a shine. Of course, being a kid, I polished too hard on mine and polished down to the brown. But I still have the pot, and was quite proud of it at the time.

  My father knew that I was “Mr. Questions,” and tried to keep me busy. He came up with projects for me, like building a little seismograph together. One time he went away for a little while, and at that point, they blew up the atomic bomb [in the Trinity test]. When he came back, I had heard lots of buzz, nothing about an atomic bomb, but about a bright flash and lots of lights. I asked him, “What was all that about lights in the distance?” “Oh,” he said, “we were doing an experiment out there and we had a lot of big searchlights. But I stopped in Albuquerque and got these electronics parts you have been wanting for a year to build that power supply.” I didn’t ask another question for three days, because I was busy building that power supply. He had it all figured out.

  Later on, when the news came out, we went to the post theater to see a movie of the first detonation, and believe me, that was scary. The film that they showed us was taken a thousand yards or so from the blast. It showed the detonation, and the bubble, and as soon as the bubble started up, the film got a dot in the middle, and then the dot started to spread, and it spread out until you couldn’t see anything on the film, and they stopped the projector. They said the dot was from the heat of the bomb, and it just burned a hole in the film, and sorry, but they couldn’t do anything about it. I thought, “Oh, my God!”

  About three months after the test, my father said he wanted me to know what he was working on and why he would be away from home a lot after we moved back to New York. Somehow he wangled a Trinity pass for me, a red “T-pass” with my name on it. It turned out that my father was good friends with the guy that was in charge of security out there. Colonel Bush took us on a tour, and he drove us to the actual explosion site. He got out of the car and he said, “Here are the canvas boots, and here’s the Geiger counter. You take my car, because I can’t go in with you. I’ve had my radiation dose already and then some. But we’ve got a radio out here and another car. If you break down or something, call us immediately on the radio and we’ll come and get you, because you’ve got 10 minutes in and 10 minutes out. That’s it.”

  So we drove in, and I immediately asked my father “How come the road didn’t get blown up?” He said “Oh, it got melted and somewhat vaporized, but it is asphalt and it just solidified again.” Before we got to the actual explosion site, I noticed that all the desert brush had been blown out away from ground zero by the shock wave, and then the tremendous heat of the bomb had charred these bushes and trees into place. It looked like something out of Transylvania. It was pretty gross. That really made me feel icky about this whole thing.

  When we got out of the car, my father turned on the Geiger counter and it just roared. It scared the hell out of me! I said “We’ve got to get out of here!” I was twelve by then and starting to know a few things.

  He said, “No, no, it’s okay.” He set it for a less sensitive range, but it was still making noise and I wasn’t entirely convinced.

  It looked just as though a big hand had gone and punched down into the desert sand and made a dish twenty feet deep or so and melted all the sand. When the sand solidified, it was kind of a greenish color, and that’s “trinitite.” We collected some samples, and I still have a jar of it somewhere.

  He showed me the stumps, and that was interesting because the glass around the stumps was stained red, streaks of red, a dark red, to me it was a blood red. I asked what it was, and my father said, “Well, when all the sand got vaporized, the tower was vaporized too, and some of the ferrous from the tower mixed with the silicon from the sand and dyed it red. So you’re just seeing the condensed tower there.”

  Believe me, this made one hell of an impression. To this day, I remember that vividly.

  “Something extraordinary was happening here”

  Ellen Bradbury Reid [née Ellen Wilder] was nearly six years old when her family went to join her father, Ed Wilder, in New Mexico. In this excerpt, Katrina Mason recounts the story of young Ellen’s first trip behind the fence and her discovery of what she believed to be the “secret” of Los Alamos.

  From Children of Los Alamos

  BY KATRINA MASON

  In March 1945 Norris Bradbury made a trip to Oak Ridge to recruit personnel for the explosives division. One of those he chose was Ed Wilder, a navy lieutenant with a degree in chemical engineering. Wilder was told simply that he was being sent to the Southwest and that he would be developin
g procedures for “machining a material that had never been machined before.” Wilder drove west with a fellow engineer, Bill Wilson. That May, Wilson’s wife, Betty, suggested to Duddy Wilder that “we go visit the fellows.” Together the two women packed up their four young children—Ellen Wilder, not quite six; her brother, Marshall, three; and the Wilson children, aged two and three—crowding into the Wilders’ “big old Buick Roadmaster.” They arrived in Albuquerque, almost 100 miles from Los Alamos “but as close as they would let us come,” recalls Duddy.

  There was no housing available in Los Alamos, where their husbands were living in military dormitories. So the families remained in an Albuquerque motel, and the two men made the 200-mile round trip twice a week to visit. “Finally the guys said they thought we could stay at Bandalier [National Park], so we got a shepherd’s tent, and we camped there for 10 weeks, if you can believe that,” says Duddy. It was shortly after they moved into the tent a few miles from the back entrance to the Laboratory that Ellen discovered the secret of Los Alamos.

  Ellen and Marshall were playing in the Frijoles Creek near their tent site, throwing rocks into the water. Marshall accidentally dropped a large rock just as Ellen was reaching down to pick up another. Ellen’s thumb was smashed, and her father drove her to Los Alamos, where there was a doctor. Ellen remembers arriving at the back Site S gate—the one nearest Bandelier—and “they wouldn’t let us in.” The problem was that Ellen did not yet live in Los Alamos so she did not have a pass. They waited what seemed a very long time while the MPs looked at Ellen and said something about a “secret.” “An MP gave me some little mints with jelly centers,” Ellen recalls. “I didn’t want to eat them, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings either.”

  Finally, Ellen was allowed to see the doctor on duty, who happened to be an ear, nose, and throat specialist. After the thumb was bandaged, Ellen remembers, “Somebody took me to see the ducks on the pond, probably to get me to stop crying. I looked at the ducks and decided they must be the secret. I knew there had been this hoopla about getting me in, and I hadn’t seen anything else that was very interesting. So I counted the ducks [there were 11] and thought, ‘OK, I’ve got it.’”

  In the fall, shortly after the war’s end, the family moved into a McKee house not far from the fence that encircled the town, and Ellen frequently would go to the edge of the fence in hopes of finding someone on the other side to whom she could tell the secret about the ducks. The problem was that no one came, and “I got bored.” The solution, she decided one day, was to get her brother Marshall to crawl through the culvert that went under the fence and find someone. (Ellen was too big to crawl through.) Marshall wasn’t keen on the idea, so Ellen “started him in backwards.” When he decided he didn’t want to play and tried to come out, he found that his leg was jammed against the pipe, and he couldn’t move. He started crying. Neither Ellen nor her mother could get him calm enough to move his leg, and they had to wait for Marshall’s father to come home and do it. For Ellen, the afternoon was turmoil. “Marshall was crying, and I was thinking ‘I’m not going to get a pass when I turn six.’”

  Duddy Wilder suspects that some of Ellen’s fascination with spying may have come from the worry that her father and Bill Wilson had expressed during one of their visits to Albuquerque. They had said they thought the FBI were following them. That was one of the reasons they wanted their families to leave the motel. “Somehow it got impressed upon me that something extraordinary was happening here,” says Ellen. “I knew it was not normal to keep a little kid with a broken thumb out.… Something was out of sync or special. I was tuned into it.”

  S-SITE SOUNDS IN SANTA FE

  When I was five, my father, Ed Wilder, was transferred to Los Alamos. There he worked under George Kistiakowsky, the great Ukrainian explosive expert, on the plutonium bomb at the new V-Site, recently built as a part of S-Site.

  This was a time of great tension at Los Alamos, a real race to complete the plutonium bomb, the bomb that was tested at Trinity and later dropped on Nagasaki. There were technical problems with how to detonate the plutonium bomb, and the explosives used to detonate it were tested and reconfigured. This was all done at S-Site, so that the explosions (not nuclear) rang through the canyons and were heard as far away as Santa Fe.

  —ELLEN BRADBURY REID

  A Relief from the Hubbub of the Hill

  Edith Warner ran a small teahouse at Otowi Bridge over the Rio Grande, twenty miles down a winding road from Los Alamos. For many residents of the Hill, a visit to Edith Warner’s provided a much-needed break from the chaos of the project. She became close friends with many of the top scientists at Los Alamos, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr.

  From Children of Los Alamos

  BY KATRINA MASON

  Edith Warner, who had taught high school in Pennsylvania, had come to New Mexico for her health. In 1921 she suffered some kind of breakdown, and her doctor recommended an extended outdoor vacation. She sought a quiet place where she could be at peace with nature. A friend suggested a guest ranch at Frijoles Canyon, and in 1922 she stepped off the train in Lamy, greeted by invigorating air and a stark, desert landscape about which she later wrote, “I know that no wooded, verdant country could make me feel as this one does. Its very nudity makes it intimate. There are only shadows to cover its bareness, and the snow that lies white in the spring. I think I could not bear again great masses of growing things.… It would stifle me as buildings do.”

  When her year ended, Edith returned to Pennsylvania, with the goal of saving enough money to return to New Mexico. A few years later she was back, anxiously looking for a job. She found one—as caretaker at the Los Alamos Ranch School’s small freight house on the railway line near a bridge across the Rio Grande. The slender, shy spinster seemed an unlikely candidate for the job, but she needed a place to live, and the school needed someone to stay in the house on the edge of the pueblo. In addition to unloading and guarding the school’s deliveries, Edith opened a small tearoom—providing lemonade and her special chocolate cake to boys from the school and to the intrepid tourists who drove the winding dirt roads up the hillsides. By 1942 gas rationing had all but eliminated the tourists, and with word that the school would be closing in early 1943, Edith wondered whether she would be able to remain in this land that she loved. But as it had in the past, fate intervened—this time in the form of [J.] Robert Oppenheimer.

  Because of the urgency of the project and the tenseness it was likely to engender, Oppenheimer thought it would be a good idea to have a place where people could get away for a while—for an afternoon visit or a quiet supper. He knew the serenity of the little house by the bridge had a calming, centering effect on many who visited there. He asked Edith Warner if she would expand the tearoom to serve suppers. As she described this stroke of fate in a 1943 letter, “Stranger even than the army’s choosing this locality was that the civilian head [Oppenheimer] should be a man I knew. He had stopped years ago on a pack trip, come back for chocolate cake, brought a wife, and now was to be my neighbor for the duration.… That beginning has increased until there are one or two groups on most nights for dinner. They come in through the kitchen door, talk a bit before leaving, and are booked up weeks ahead. Because they are isolated and need even this change for morale, I feel it is definitely the war job for me. In addition they are mostly interesting and so solve my need for people.”

  Among those who came to dinner was the physicist Philip Morrison. Years later he told Peggy Pond Church (the daughter of the Los Alamos Ranch School’s founder, Ashley Pond), “Edith Warner stands in the history of those desperate times as a kind of rainbow… a sign that war and bombs are not all that men and women are capable of building.” Lois Bradbury, wife of Norris Bradbury and the mother of three young boys, was a frequent visitor to the little house by the bridge. “Sometimes you wanted to get off The Hill,” she recalls. “The men were just so involved. People needed to get away from the tension. It was a very com
mon feeling among the housewives.… Edith wasn’t interesting as an intellectual, but she was very interesting in her devotion to her ideals. What was right and wrong was very definite to her, and that attracted a lot of people here.… [Edith was] a very strong person and an idealist in a spiritual sort of way.… She was very quiet, very reserved.… She was such a relief after all the hubbub [of The Hill].”

  An SED at Los Alamos

  In this excerpt, Benjamin Bederson discusses his experiences as a member of the Special Engineer Detachment in Los Alamos. He later served on Tinian Island in the Pacific, the launch point of the atomic bombing missions.

  From “SEDs at Los Alamos: A Personal Memoir”

  BY BENJAMIN BEDERSON

  The role played by the common U.S. soldier in the development of atomic weapons during World War II is not generally appreciated. Early in the history of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Army decided to tap the vast pool of GIs possessing scientific and technical backgrounds who were serving in it, mostly as draftees. These soldiers were assigned to an entity called the Special Engineering Detachment, and hence were known as “SEDs.” Their ranks also included skilled mechanics, machinists, and electronics technicians. At its peak in 1945 about 1800 SEDs were working, mainly at the principal Manhattan Project sites at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.

  The main role of the SEDs was to act as assistants, something like graduate students, to the senior scientists who by then were arriving at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge in large numbers. The SEDs were assigned to many individual research projects that would eventually culminate in the successful design and construction of the two atomic bombs, the “Little Boy” and the “Fat Man,” as well as to the various technical shops. Often little distinction was made between people in and out of uniform, although the former were subject to army regulations and discipline, as well as to army salaries rather than civilian ones.