phenomenal. people still recognize and they appreciate that. once they start reading the constitution and the declaration of independence, they're pretty well hooked. >> louisiana 5th district. thanks for being with us on c-span. >> thanks so much. in august 1945, 70 years ago, american forces dropped two atomic bombs over japan. one if hiroshima, the other in nagasaki. benjamin bederson recalls being sent to los alamos, new mexico, to work on the manhattan project. mr. bederson began working on designing the atomic bomb's ignition switches. but first, cynthia kelly from

the atomic heritage foundation discusses the origins and purposes of their oral history collection. cynthia kelly, what is the voices of the manhattan project? >> the voices of the manhattan project is a website that contains 300 oral histories, and we hope someday will be the central repository of the memories of the manhattan project veterans. >> well, tell us about the manhattan project itself. what was it and what does that name mean? >> the manhattan project was the effort in world war ii by the united states and its allies, primarily great britain and canada, to build an atomic bomb. the name manhattan is just as you think. it's after that island. now it's part of new york city.

but the project was run by the army corps of engineers. while they toyed with a name that would be something like "special materials project," they thought such a name would arouse suspicion, because it was sort of clumsy. they named the project after the place where the projects headquarters were. its headquarters were at 270 broadway in lower manhattan, hence it was called the manhattan engineering district. and we call it, for short, the manhattan project. >> you're president of the atomic heritage foundation, which has partnered with the los alamos historical society. >> i founded it for the purpose

to preserve the manhattan project and its historic sites to try to create a manhattan project historical park and preserve its histories. we partner with the los alamos historical society, which has its roots back in the 1960s, and its mission is to interpret the history of los alamos. we were a great partnership because what got us started was a grant from the institute for museum and library services and the los alamos historical society runs a museum. so that made us together eligible for the grant that helped us establish this manhattan project site. >> when did you start your first interviews? >> i started interviewing in 2002 as soon as i got my feet on the ground. i realized even then that this

was a very quickly ageing population. it would be a moment in time to capture the voices. ironically, we had these interviews, some of them for ten years or more, before we had the funding to create the website. >> did the end of the cold war make this project possible? >> well, the end of the cold war was the signal to ramp down the nuclear weapons complex. there was funding provided for the department of energy to clean up the environmental contamination at the various former weapons sites. some of them are still active today, so we do a little dance as to what can be preserved and what's still an ongoing activity. but yeah, the cold war got it started. >> well, tell us a little bit about the people behind the manhattan project. who were they? where did they come from? did they know what they were

doing? >> those are a lot of questions. the manhattan project must have employed something like 600,000 people over the course of three years in which was operative. some will say it's just 27 months, so it was a very short project, but it built the equivalent of the panama canal or the automobile of its time. there were huge factories built at two sites. one at oak ridge, tennessee, and one site was hanford in washington state, where they made the enriched uranium and plutonium, respectfully. they were construction workers. none of those people at that level knew what they were doing. it was astounding, but all of these hundreds of thousands of people kept the secret because they didn't know what the secret was. they came to work because after

the depression there was -- many people were just farmers. to have a steady paycheck was a very attractive proposition. in addition, there were top scientists who had fled the persecution of the nazi regimes in europe, so we benefitted from the anti-semitism that hitler and his allies represented and had 100 of the leading scientists in physics of the day. these people, 100 scientists, were not very many. jay robert oppositen hiemer who was in charge of the science research thought that would be enough, but it turned out at los alamos alone there were 5,000 people, and they supplemented these senior people with kids who had just finished a year or two of college, may have had

some chemistry or mathematics or physics and passed an aptitude test that showed they were very apt, intelligent, and capable. these people were recruited mainly in 1933, 1944, and were sent to work on the project as the junior scientists. >> i understand a very ethn ethnicalethni ethnically and diverse population. >> it was. there were hispanic laborers in new mexico and some people from the pueblos surrounding los alamos worked often as nannies or housekeepers so the wives of the scientists could help their

husbands on the project itself. >> well, all these decades later when you went to find these workers to create the oral history project, how did you find them? how did you decide who to interview? >> well, it was -- first thing we did was have an event here in washington, d.c. to remember the manhattan project. and while we were running the program that c-span covered, which was lovely, i announced that there was a videographer. we had a project to film the story of hanford. and while we were there, i went far beyond what the script of the film was supposed to be and interviewed anybody that i could

identify because i knew this was, again, a moment in time that these participants, who were then in their mid to late 80s, would not live forever, and we needed to capture them. >> were there any particular themes that had started to emerge in the interviews? >> it's interesting that the people all saw this as one of the most formative periods in their lives. they were working on a project they were told would help end the war. many of them had brothers or uncles or fathers or sisters and mothers who were involved the front lines in europe and sent to the pacific, who were very much in harm's way. they were in the heat of the battles, and they felt through this project they were going to help bring them home alive, if they possibly could, so very

dedicated, very motivated, very hard working. it was a very, very intense experience. >> did you find any reluctance among some of the subjects you sought to interview to talk about their work given some of the controversy that followed in later decades about the use of nuclear weapons? >> there are many people who said they didn't talk about what they did. it was only when they were -- i caught them in their late 80s, early 90s that they were opening up. some to their families. some of the families prevailed on us to come meet with them and draw on them about this. some others simply refused to participate. they weren't comfortable in recording their memories for a camera, but i think also they weren't comfortable yet with the project and how it made them feel. >> were there any stories that

stand out in particular for you? >> there are so many stories. it's hard to know where to start. there's one about dawn harnig, who was a young man and chosen to babysit the young mom. this was the gadget, the first test bomb, that was on 105th tower in the desert of southwestern new mexico. and the bomb was supposed to be detonated at 5:00 in the morning, but there was a huge thunderstorm and they didn't know what would happen if the lightning hit the gadget in some way, but they needed someone up there on the tower, too. because if someone snuck up and just pulled one plug, it might fail. so he had to sit up there all by himself, not knowing whether a lightning would hit him or the hit the gadget and be gone or not. >> well, how can people find

these interviews? you have an online database. how do they search it? >> it's very easy. first, you can get on by typing in manhattan project voices and then there'll be the website. it'll have a search category. you can search by name. you can search by category. you can search across all of the interviews to find the person, the place, the subject matter you're most interested in. >> one last question for you. how should people approach these interviews? they're part of the historical record of the atomic age. what should people keep in mind as they watch these recollect n recollections of that time? >> people should remember these are personal memories, and most of the people are talking about events that happened 20 years or in some cases 60 or 70 years earlier and memories are fallible. yo