communicators" on c-span2. >> in august, 1945, 70 years ago, american forces dropped two atomic bombs over japan. one in hiroshima and the other in nagasaki. laureate nobel val fitch talks about his time at los alamos, new mexico. after working on the timing apparatus of the atomic bomb, he was sent to observe the 1945 trinity test, the first nuclear bomb detonation. he also discusses the national and global ramifications of nuclear weapons and his thoughts on nuclear disarmament. val fitch died in february, 2015 , at the age of 91. this oral history is from the "the voices of the manhattan project" created by the atomic heritage foundation and the los alamos historical society.

val fitch: i was born on a cattle ranch in northwest nebraska, 1923. and actually born on a ranch. this is about five miles from a little town of merriman, in the sandhills of nebraska. you probably do not know anything, but they occupy 1/5 of the state. it is prime cattle raising country. they are called the sandhills because the terrain is made out of sand. the hills are the dunes. sand such aspierce you find at the shore. but the only thing that can be grown there without destroying the terrain is something that lives off the native grasses, and that is cattle. you try turning the soil lower, itover to grow crops and simply blows away. so, that's the sandhills dedicated to growing cattle.

my father raised purebred herford's on the little ranch he had. the ranch was too small to support a family on raising beef cattle. he raised breeding stock. that was the enterprise i was born into. i have an older brother and sister. both of them now dead. my brother was 10 years older and my sister six years older but they both started school, and as long as we lived on the ranch, they attended a one-room schoolhouse half-mile away. so, most often the schoolteacher lived in our home. and all three of them would get on their horses in the morning and ride up the valley to go to school. i thought it was a little ridiculous, but the important

thing was to get out of the house. and so, that's how they lived the first few years of their lives. and when my brother came of age to go to high school, then, and i was just about ready to start school, we moved to gordon nebraska, a town 25 miles to the west. and so, all of my k-12 education was in gordon, nebraska. and this is, this part of the world is just south of the pine ridge indian reservation. so there are a lot of sioux indians around. and my father was always rather close to them. he understood them. as a young teenager, he had bothered to learn their language. so he was really a great friend of the indians, which is very rare for white people in those

days. the net result of that was that he was, in 1937, he became an honorary sioux indian chief. chief eagle star. i think, to my knowledge, he was the only non-politician that has ever been recognized in such a way. so, he received on that occasion a full headdress of eagle feathers. all the way to the ground behind. and i inherited that. and just a couple years ago i presented it to the local library as part of their western united states collection. and so, that's now out of my hands. but they take good care of these things.

then after high school, i went two shaaban state -- shaderin state college. there is a geological formation called a shaderin formation. it is named for the formation. it is where the, where the high plains start to break away into the lower country in south dakota. and that is what forms the pine ridge escarpment. hence, the name pine ridge. pine trees grow along the escarpment. so, it's part of the formation. so, i guess, the only thing i emphasize here is that indians were always very much present in my young life.

i never learned the language unfortunately but it was an interesting thing to have about. interesting culture to have about. i went to state college. i graduated from high school in 1940. of course, in december 1941, you know what happened. and all of us who were 18 years old new precisely what was going to happen to us. and i did try to volunteer for the air force but was turned down for being colorblind. so i decided at that time just to wait it out and get as much college as i could before being drafted. that is what i did. so, eventually, i was, in march, 1943, i was drafted in wyoming. sent to utah for basic training. and then after that, after basic

training, the army was just starting their specialized training program. and so, i was taken out of regular army units and sent to astp, the unit in what is now carnegie mellon. then carnegie tech in pittsburgh. and i was, i had the choice of going into four different areas. chemical engineering, electoral engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering. i concentrated very heavily on chemistry and physics and mathematics in my undergraduate work.

the one thing i could learn something in was electrical engineering, so i opted for that. so, eventually, that program, well, in january of 1944, the pressures for manpower were being felt in the army. so they disbanded most of the aftp across the country. and most of my pals went off to the 95th infantry. then were subsequently part of the european enterprise. there were a number of us left behind. and i was one of those, sent to los alamos to work as basically a technician. so that was in december, 1944. so, there i was in the army. and part of a unit called the

special engineering detachment. and i was immediately assigned to work for a member of the british mission. so, very quickly i became this his right or left hand man. however you want to describe it. ernie had a flair to getting involved in interesting things. and i was always there. i don't know if you're interested in what i did a los alamo's or not. >> absolutely. when i arrived, they were just getting seriously involved in the fusion -- i'm sorry, the implosion program. there as is well known they were detonating explosives in such a

way as to produce a shock wave, spherical shockwave going inward to compress plutonium to a critical point. and timing of all of these explosive lenses was all-important. and so, i was very much involved in developing the timing apparatus for measuring when the shock wave passes a certain point and so on. so that is what i did. we developed the electronics for doing that and also made some of the measurements. i should say as an aside that it was a time in my life when, well, the sad's are a very unusual unit. there was a lot of talent. i made very good friends just among the people at the one end of the barracks.

and there was gunnar thornton. who had a college degree, who had immigrated, his parents had brought him from norway when he was 10 years old. there was hans, perhaps that name rings a bell with you. he is the son of the famous mathematician. still, after all these years, still communicate all the time. when he left los alamos to go to finish his college work at m.i.t. after the war, he had a girlfriend at los alamos. he assigned me the job of taking care of his girlfriend. this i did. we eventually were married, as a matter of fact. so, that was a nice story.

but also, i learned to ski. this norwegian -- i had to learn to ski. and also at that end of that there was bill davis, who had been a member of the dartmouth ski team. so i had lots of good instruction on skiing. so that became, every sunday, we would go out to sawyers hill for skiing. many of the famous physicist were also skiers. you name them, they were probably on the ski slopes with us. i probably had more interaction with these famous people on the ski slopes than i did in the laboratory, as a matter of fact. in the spring of 1945, elaborate testing was underway with dummy bombs put in b-29's at wendover

air force base which was just on the nevada-utah border, near -- directly west of salt lake city. the technique was to load the dummy bombs in b-29's there and drop them over the salton sea where telemetry would pick up the signals from the falling objects and tell people what was going on inside the dummy bomb as far as the timing mechanisms, whether they were functioning correctly. in the spring of 1945 i was one , of those sent to wendover. another s.e.d. i worked with, we whose name was bud music playing i were sent upnd

a laboratory on the field to initiate this testing program. and also to educate some of the army officer so they could carry it on after we left. so that was my first exposure to, to b-29's and bombs and all that. but in my memory, i went to wendover from kirkland air force base in albuquerque. [coughs] and riding in an old b-17 bomber. and we were just over the mountains,untains and they were not far below, the second engine went out. so, we were asked to get on parachutes. and so on. so, it was quite a trip. in that respect. but it was also characterized by

the fact that during world war ii if you were ever out of uniform, you were automatically thought to be a deserter. so we were required to wear a uniform at all times. all those in the military. but there was a special dispensation for us. this group of s.e.d.'s who went out to wendover. for security purposes, we had to play the role of good scientists -- "scientists" from washington. so, we were given money and we went down to santa fe and bought civilian clothes. and including shoes. in order to have something to wear at wendover. there we were, civilians. i still have this piece of paper where they had given me

permission to wear civilian clothes. one of the memos that means a -- so much at the time. in any event, then it was not long after i came back that we went to trinity to start the testing program there. and initially, as you know, the first test was setting off 100 tons of tnt. with that, we tested all the far -- firing mechanisms and so on to make sure the signals were getting through, all that. the main control for the test was, the bunker was 10,000 yards, which is slightly less than six miles. from the gadget itself.

it was the job of tiverton's group to send out a signal to to detonate at the appropriate time. but also to send preliminary signals into groups that needed signals in anticipation of the thing going off. photographers had to open their shutters a few milliseconds before. we did the fast timing. actually, another name, bill elmore, his group did the slow timing which consisted of a rotating drum picking up signals. so, we did the fast timing and sending out the main detonation pulse at the end of the timing interval. by we, i mean in the main control bunker there was just titterton and myself. we did have a technician.

his name was calvin benton. , who helped out hauling things around, putting things together. the other, the fourth member of the team was rough flowery -- russ loughery. and his prime concern was the apparatus that we used to measure the simultaneity of which all the detonators were fired on the bomb itself. there were 32 of them, and it was our job to measure the degree of simultaneity of those detonators firing. that was where my previous experience had come in. russ was in charge of the recording of that data, done in a bunker half a mile west of the tower. so we had to pull in all of the apparatus to make those

measurements. got all that stuff ready, running cables up to the tower, up to the bomb, to carry signals back to the recording apparatus. that was the secondary measurement that group of just including the technician, that is what we were doing at the bomb test. actually, it was two or three days after the test when lowry made a very quick trip into the bunker to retrieve the film on which the data was recorded. and unfortunately, when it was developed, the film was totally black. the radiation had just been too much for it.

and when the bomb went off, the blast had taken all the earth that was piled over this bunker and threw it back at it. and threw it off the bunker totally. between that bunker which was a ,alf-mile west and the tower the sand had all been turned to glass. so, when the time to set off the bomb approached we were at the main control bunker. and lowry was back at base camp, which was five miles further away. and i do not know if you have seen photographs of those places, but they are rather interesting. i have some upstairs if you would like to see them.

but just as far as our timing measurements are concerned, that was all done automatically, of course. when one is measuring time in milliseconds, it can't be somebody throwing a switch. it had to be automatic. that was all an automatic mode. then titterton suggested maybe if i wanted to go out and take a look at what was going on, go had, because we could not do anything about it. so i went outside the bunker and around to the east side. there were two or three others who went out. went out left the bunker and , went out to get a good view. course, i had this piece of welding glass to cover my eyes

with which i also kept as a , memento of the occasion. but sprawled out on the ground with the glass over my eyes. of course, initially, i was looking away from the tower. but that enormous flash of light, of course, just over -- overcomes any lack of transparency in the welding glass. it is the most surprising thing of all. a fantastic flash of light. then, of course, you see the dust cloud and the ball slowly rising off the ground. and the famous mushroom cloud eventually. ground top off the

get a better view totally forgetting that the shockwave had yet to arrive. it might take only 30 microseconds for the light to arrive but it takes 30 seconds for the shock way to arrive -- . i had plenty of time to get back down on the ground and hear that fierce rumble. first that blast, and then the rumble of the sound off the nearby mountains. echoing off the mountains. it was hard to overstate the impact on the senses for something like that. first the flash of light. that enormous fireball, the mushroom cloud rising thousands of feet in the sky. and then a long time afterwards, the sound, the rumble, the thunder in the mountains.

words have not been invented to describe it in any accurate way. so one thing you allude to and something i quoted when i wrote a piece about the experience, that you apparently read and put in your book about the manhattan overct, after it was people started milling about and , coming in out of the bunker, and so on. on duty atn m.p. the door, to control access. it had to mainly symbolism, because the security was just knowing each other. of course, the m.p. did not know

anyone. but in any event, i saw him absolutely ashen faced. and i simply remarked to him, the war will soon be over. that was my main reaction at the time. and of course i was right, , fortunately. i stayed around for two or three days to pack up equipment and take the stuff back to los alamos. and we were driving an army panel truck. len was driving, as we were leaving the place we had to go , past where the tower had been to leave the site. so as we were passing by the

tower, we rode past perhaps a mile west of where the tower had been, we turned up the road towards where the tower had been, past that small bunker that we had instrumented a half-mile west. and there the cable we had so laboriously strung to the tower were flung back over the bunker, and all of the earth that had been piled on top was gone. it was just sitting there bare. drove on a bit further to where the sand had been turned to glass. i pulled a little box out of the back that contained a transformer and i reached down and scooped up some of the glassy material. and then, we did not know what the radiation level was, but

i thought it was a good time to get out of there. that we did. so, i still have some of that turn a tight -- trinitite that i picked up myself. it was a couple years after that i went back to los alamos to work for the summer. and i came across a stockroom, an old stockroom where stuff was stored. the circuit we had used to put the signal on the line to trigger the bomb, the basic trigger circuit, the high-voltage trigger circuit, i do not know maybe 2000 volts to make sure it got through. and so, at the time, i was wondering, well, may be a should -- maybe i should call that to somebody's attention because no one else knows what that is. but, of course, i did not do it. it was undoubtedly scrapped with everything else at one time or another.

i was discharged almost exactly three years after i entered the army from texas. and then went back and worked at los alamos to make some money doing the same job i had before, but this time making a reasonable amount of money. and i had none. so saving money for college was important. so i worked there for another year and a half after being discharged. let me say more about the s.e.d.'s, because they're not properly advertised. virtually nothing to say about the s.e.d.'s in that otherwise fine book. by the end of the war, 50% of the technical personnel were s.e.d.'s.

they lived in barracks, ate in the mess hall. worked in the technical area for civilians. when we were in the technical area, military could not touch us. but of course, we ate in mess halls and slept in the barracks, and any time you have 60 to 120 -- the army is pretty good about making sure that a certain amount of order is kept. so, friday night scrub sessions, cleaning out down in the barracks. and saturday morning inspections. when i first arrived, there were also 6:00 calisthenics.

but that aspect was discontinued after he raised cain with the general. his grouphim because which was involved in was stabbed largely by std's. so he was working probably more closely with war than anyone else in the whole project. he was concerned about the way they were treated. 24was expecting them to work hours a day. he complained about the sped and polish attitude of the military that was there.

complained directly and threatened to leave the place if it wasn't changed. in a week or so things transformed around. we didn't have to get up at 6 a.m. the mess hall was staffed by indigenous labor. after that, that was also our responsibility until a cost things to -- one drug we only had was -- job

we had was keeping the stoves going in the wintertime. there were three or four potbellied stoves in the center aisle of the barracks. somebody had to keep those fires going. it does get a fairmount of snow in the winter time. in our barracks, we hired one of our members to do the job. he is happy to do it. more money to send home. a member of the dartmouth ski

team. [laughter] when you look at some of the alumni of the sed, there was one who lived in my barracks. then there was peter. became very well known. the mathematicians finally set up a prize equivalent to a nobel, and he won the very first one. >> if you could talk about the roles of the british and getting funding museum interest in having those exhibits come their way, talk about what it was

like at los alamos. >> i'm glad you asked that question. there's a tendency to forget about their contributions. there is a book about it. he has a rather peculiar name. it is all about the role of the british mission. there was tony who is going to be speaking at st. louis.

he is taking my place. and there was one of the authors about the original report that showed it was possible to make bombs. there was -- what was his name? the one who stayed on. they were instigators.

they were working on this. the current work on the supersecret rings going on in britain at the time. they were working on the ramifications on the process. they could play around with it. i once talked about that report that they put together.

they had calculated a critical mass might be as little as one pound. as you know the first weapon had something like 140 pounds, quite a difference from the one pound. the observation was it is a good thing they made that error. it wasn't exactly an error. it just wasn't the right information. if they had said 130 pounds, no one have ever have tried to make it to begin with. which i thought was an interesting observation. both were refugees from hitler's

germany. they were in england largely because the effort of mark all t. -- mark oliphan he made it his business to make sure those people have someplace to go to. somehow he managed to create a job for them. there are at best -- they turned up the magnetron. it have been instrumental in the development of the radar for use in airplanes. he brought a sample over to the united states on that same trip

when he was trying to sell the atom bomb project. he was really a great man. there is that connection. after the war he went to the science found section of the australian national university. there's a site section. that was roughly 1948-1949. he died at the right age of 96 or so. just two or three years ago.

it was an advocate of getting rid of weapons altogether. right to the end of his life. so in my book he is a great hero. >> where were you with the dropping on hiroshima? did you support that at the time? >> i had many friends in the military. many of those friend turned out

were preparing in the philippines. they told me all about this. i understand that totally. another g.i. in effect wanting to get home. get the whole thing over with. i certainly could not be against it. as i told the mp outside the warer door at trinity, the will soon be over. it certainly was. i would have to say i wasn't in -- i'm still in favor, no doubt.

there are a number of people walking today who would be walking around because their fathers or grandfathers would have been killed in japan, invading that island. i'm convinced of that. i've had in my own mind shutting down that a war was in a sense worth it. but that is not to say we shouldn't do everything we can to put that genie back in the bottle and keep it there. certainly my sense has been a long that line ever since.

doubt the military-industrial complex dictate the speed at which we arm ourselves is -- we somehow have two turn off the influence of the super hawks. that turns out to be awfully hard because they know to spend their money. even things like the b2 bomber. i noticed one of them crashed. it only cost a billion dollars a piece. it is a nonsense weapon.

it is no utility whatsoever. in a serious war, they would be the first to go. i'm convinced of that. i have some additional qualifications. part of the project -- later in 1970, i became a member of the president's science advisory committee. it had a number of panels. i happen to have become chairman of the strategic panel. it not -- meant to be done with all of the strategic forces in

the military. i became quite an expert on that. i know what is involved. remember when it was being first proposed. how many men it men do we need -- minutemen do we need? they had a single warhead at the top. they just automatically went to 1000. that is the way things escalated

again and again and again. besides the strategic panel, the so-called safeguard -- the safeguard system was something that nixon was pushing very hard. it involves a big radar in north dakota. in using missiles as a weapon. this whole safeguard system was funded. it was a hardin radar. that's hardened radar.

the size of a pyramid. an enormous waste of resources. it cost $20 billion in $1972. we now know that the country doesn't have them to throw away anymore, but we were certainly throwing them away then. so much what happens in the military is an enormous waste. it is all driven by those elements.

it is allocated on the basis of certain congressional districts to satisfy the demand of the clients of the congressman and those particular districts. it could point fingers at the government. that part of the -- it is a very real and present danger. somehow we have never been able to make sense of it. what others do i have?

[laughter] i guess the other thing i wanted to say -- they were very much against the missile system i just described. this was during the nixon administration. some of the members were quite -- were members of the peace act. it is allowed in their opposition. they fired us all. there was no more psac.

there was a letter from nixon. that was 1972 or so. since then i have had little to do with any except -- had nothing to do with any classified work since then. that was a clean cut. >> you another nobel laureate -- and other nobel laureates -- in urge the senate to approve a comprehensive test ban treaty. and 49 other laureates urged clinton not to

try and antiballistic missile system. maybe you want to talk about those initiatives and how scientists have become politically active like yourself and what you hope to accomplish. >> newer quite right -- you are quite right. it started with the manhattan project. it was entirely due in the scientists sector. they were keen on getting control. there were some efforts to give an international control. we all ended up in the atomic energy commission.

it was a reasonable way. that was always entirely due to the activism of scientists. this is a very effective organization. entirely inspired. then there was the establishment of the t cell -- of the group that consisted of mostly physicists. that was a very effective

organization in advising the president. when i first went on psac, there is ahead of the radiation lab at m.i.t. during the war. then he became head of the psac. is very active and inviting. they would have to sign off.

as a matter of fact, it had been inhabited during the war. after nixon get rid of psac, everything pretty much fell apart. it is the office of science and technology. the chairman is pretty much a unit. originally that was not the case. it all started a change in the 1970's.

i say this to give you some idea of the high esteem with which science was held in the government, up until the early 1970's. psac,ter nixon got rid of then it pretty much fell apart. it's called the science advisory now but it's the office of science and technology in its off on 17th place in some of secure building. it was having an effect.

but originally that was not the case. it all started to change in the early 1970's, i would say. secrecy. to talk about he was very pressured with the secrecy. it wasn't just the duration of the war, but afterwards -- frustrated with the secrecy. wasn't just the duration of the work, but afterwards. the secrecy stamp.

there was a petition he started. >> oppenheimer found a way around that. [laughter] we didn't have any sense of compartmentalization. that was oppenheimer's doing. >> did you have any interactions with him? >> they would have to get out and parade. i think that happened once. i think i mentioned that in his

book -- what was the book's name? he never mentioned it at all. on the other hand, a brilliant administrator. it was the perfect choice. he had to stick out his neck along with to make that happen. i admire him very much for that.

>> do want to talk about the oppenheimer story? >> one of the great tragedies of our generation. with regard to the oppenheimer affair, i consider that to be a real tragedy. it was all because of the vending of nature with you people that oppenheimer at one time or another had managed insult. and they never forgot it. oppenheimer was an incredible resource for this country. there was a wonderful book about

the oppenheimer case. i highly recommend it. there is a very good account of the nasty doings of these people, these vindictive people. the kind of thing would've been impossible. i just continued on.

just personal nastiness. i have feelings about that. he was such a talented person. to throw that talent on the drain is too much for me. >> one of the things in your autobiography you say the

manhattan project was a time when the mind wandered freely and invented new ways of doing that job. >> the manhattan project had enormous effect on my own career. it was not so clear before. i liked them very much as people. i just came to anticipate having a collegial relationship with them. it was a great joy.

with respect to what i learned, and learned that i became very skilled at electronic. i was never limited for those instruments that were available and not the shelf. again the enormous freedom. i had a very successful phd project. a lot of the success came from

that kind of application of knowledge about all kinds of things. didn't have any particular frontier. for me that has been enormous advantage.

i haven't felt constrained. by what i see directly in front of me. >> maybe even make a couple of summary statements about how that manhattan project changed science. >> before the manhattan project, the league sources for any kind of science were private. it was all private money. that office did many constructive things. the national science foundation was created as a direct result

for things like the manhattan project. it has been without bounds. unfortunately as time has gone on, the government funding has been so successful that private companies have tended to give up their basic research.

the labs no longer exist. ibm used to speed something like -- oh some more like half $1 million. but no more. essentially left that for the government to do. i think that is a tragedy. congress doesn't really realize that this has happened and they now have a responsibility where before it was a shared sensibility. most congressmen don't really appreciate that.

they have left the leadership to the europeans. they could cancel it. all of that activity is taking place. they have all picked up where the u.s. is by default. it is my own area.

particle physics that has some of the most. at the same time, we could spend enormous quantities on absolutely foolish wars, etc., etc. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] >> on weekends, c-span3 is home of american history tv with programs that tell our nation war's including the civil 100 50th anniversary, visiting battlefields and key events. american artifacts, discover what artifacts reveal about america's past. history bookshelf, the presidency, looking at the policies and legacies of our