continue -- tin yan island, when the e-nola gay returned, when did you learn that the bomb had been successful, the first bombn

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. you'll find a kaleidoscope of voices, which makes this a very rich tapestry. growing up in the same family we can experience an event a different way. >> cynthia kelly with the atomic heritage foundation, thank you for joining us on american history tv. >> thank you very much. okay. why don't you tell us something about your background, where you were born, education? >> my parents are russian-jewish immigrants who came to america just before world war i and one

just after world war i. they met at a night school. very romantic setting. they met at night school. they lived on the lower east side. they were very poor. my father worked as a restaurant worker all of his life. i grew up mainly in the bronx and partly in brighton beach in brooklyn. and i would say one of the great things about new york is the fact that it had city college, and city college was, just as with many other people, was a defining event in my life because it gave me a completely free education in exactly the subject that i wanted, which was physics. so that's basically my early

background. we were raised -- not insignificant. my parents were leftists as were most everybody i knew in the bronx. we lived in sort of almost a communist neighborhood. i was brought up in my early days as a young pioneer of america, which is a communist equivalent of the boy scouts. until i was in city college for a year or two, i would say that i was pretty radical. it slowly changed. my radicalism slowly changed. i became much more interested in science and physics. i lost complete interest in being radical and ended up being hostile to the whole idea by the time i left city college, which

was fortunate because otherwise i never would have lasted at los alamos. after two and a half years at city college, i started to take a job with the signal corps. i moved to philadelphia from where i was drafted in 1942. for the next year and a half or so, i moved around. i had almost no basic training, was shipped immediately to radio school to become a tail gunner and a b-17. that was the intent of my army career. a tail gunner and b-17, not a very long life expectant job in the air force, but i also had to

become a radio operator. i went to radio operator school in chicago. they kept me there as an instructor. from there, i went to a new army program called army specialized training program. i took a course in electrical engineering at ohio state university. in late 1943 during the battle of the bulge and fighting was fierce in europe, the army decided to give up an educating its draftees and shipping them off to battle to combat. once again, by accident, there was an interviewing board, came to ohio state. my commanding officer told me it was for something called the manhattan project and said -- knowing that i loved new york, said here's a good opportunity for you to get back to new york. i grabbed the opportunity, was interviewed. they asked my some strange

questions about science and my career. next thing i knew i was on a train going to knoxville, tennessee, from which i shipped nearby to a town called oak ridge, tennessee, and that's how i got into the manhattan project. >> that's great. aren't you glad you weren't a tail gunner? >> yes, i was supposed to be a tail gunner. my friends who went with me to radio school ended up as tail gunners. >> did they survive the war? >> some did and some didn't. >> what was the special engineer detachment? >> the special engineering detachme detachment, it was already clear that a major effort was going to be made to develop the atomic bomb. they had by that time, 1942, 1943, already many famous scientists were being assembled

at los alamos and elsewhere. lo and behold they discovered just like physics professors at universities discover, you can't do anything without assistance, so they realized that they needed an infrastructure of machinists and engineers and young budding scientists to assist in the development of the bomb. and so they developed something called a special engineering detachment, and they went around the country interviewing people who they thought might fit into the project. sure enough at los alamos there were many, many hundreds, almost 1,000, seds who eventually ended up there. some of them, like me, you might call budding graduate students, even though i only had two and a

half years of college at the time. also others who were machinists and engineers. the sed, among other things, became a breeding ground. historians of the war maybe don't understand as they should that this was a breeding ground for many phyicists. that was a really unintended consequence of the manhattan project. i'm an example. of course, i wanted to be a physicist before i got into the manhattan project. the experience i got at los alamos was invaluable in helping me build a career. >> that's great. very good. i know people are going to want to know about your career.

we'll go through your experience and then we can get to the career. okay. tell us about oak ridge. >> when i got to oak ridge, the first thing i noticed was my feet were almost ankle deep in mud. it was a muddy place. mud had this characteristic orange-red color that you really knew you were somewhere in the mountains in tennessee. oak ridge, it was really thriving. there were construction machines everywhere. there was activity everywhere. it was clearly something going on. and as i say in my memoir, the most interesting things that i saw were these huge buildings

with towers that looked just like installation plants. and they were all over the place. and my first impression of them was that the distill iing sour mash whiskey to drop on the germans and get them to disable them. then i realized that couldn't possibly be true. it was only, of course, many, many months later that i found out that the real purpose of the installation plants was to distill 235 from the principle isotope of 238. we were housed in barracks like soldiers always are, but the barracks were cleaned by local young girls. again, it was very clear to me

that this was something going on that was very unusual. of course, we had no idea what it was. some of the buddies that i showed up with me, they were all science majors from various colleges all over the country, so it had something to do with science. that was clear. but what it was, of course, i did not know. at oak ridge, we were given tests. i was there for about a week. they were trying to find out where i would fit in the manhattan project. some of the people, particularly the chemists, stayed in oak ridge. the physics types tended to go to los alamos. what happened was i finally got shipping orders to go to los alamos along with several of my friends who were also physics majors.

we just traveled on civilian trains, which was the first time i had used a civilian train since i was in the army. ended up in lay mee, new mexico, which is a place where people go to when they went to get to santa fe. >> describe lay mee. >> lay mee was just a junction as far as i could tell. apparently, the train never gets to -- even today doesn't get to santa fe. it was simply a junction on the railroad line. it was a one horse town. that's it. now, i was met there by an army sedan driven by a lady soldier,

who drove me to santa fe, drove me to the central square in santa fe in the plaza and let me off in front of this famous building, 109, where -- it was just a store front. i went in with my papers, and i handed it to a lady and i said, here i am. i guess that's the same as what happened to everybody who came to los alamos. she looked at them. she said fine. she said sit here. sit down. we'll be with you in a little while. i waited for about a half an hour, just sitting in the store front. chatted with this lady. turned out to be dorothy mckenna. >> mckibbon.

>> yeah. the lady i spoke to was dorothy mckibbon. she was very nice and tried to make me feel comfortable. of course, i had no clue of what was going on and i had no clue of where i was going to end up, but she just chatted and made me feel comfortable and finally introduced me to another lady soldier. we got into a car. i believe that i was the only one in the car besides the driver. this was another one of these olive drab army sedans. so that was my experience in santa fe. of course, later on i found out that this was exactly the place

where all of the famous phyisicts came. it got pretty scary because after we drove for a while, we started driving up the side of a cliff. it was just a road with no guard rails. and we drove along this cliff up and up and up until finally we reached the plateau, which was the mesa in which los alamos was planted, but it was pretty scary. but we finally got there and

passed a bunch of guards. and i reported to somebody. i don't remember to whom i reported, but they shipped me -- they sent me to a barracks, and i put my gear in the barracks. i believe i went to sleep. >> tell us about your roommates, who else you recall living in the barracks with you. >> the barracks was very typical army barracks. i said in my memoir there were 50, 50 soldiers. i think val fitch said there was 60. i'm not sure who was right, but i do know there were three cold stoves in it strategically placed in the barracks to keep

us from freezing. the beds were double bunks lined in a row, in two rows actually, with the cold stoves in between, so there may have been 15 bunks on each side. and i took a bunk just at random and stayed there for a couple of days until finally somebody came up to me and introduced himself as a friend of a friend. that was william spindel. he was from brooklyn. he had a similar background to mine and knew some people i knew, so we decided to become

bunk mates. and so we shared a double bunk for the entire time i was at los alamos. almost two years. i don't know exactly why, but i got the bottom bunk. i can't remember. that was considered to be quite a coup to get the bottom bunk. it was very enjoyable to have new yorkers next to us. one was a machinist. in fact, they were both machinists. they came from the lower eastside. it turned out later that one of them happened to be david. he was in a lower bunk too, so we were next to each other in this barracks in lower bunks.

and then throughout the barracks were many of my friends. there was norman greenspan, who became a very good friend of mine. trained in mathematics at brooklyn college. unfortunately, he died recently. later there was richard bellman, who became a famous mathematician and system analyst working for the rand corporation. he's a legend there now. he also died some years ago. there was peter lex, who became a very highly distinguished mathematician working at the koran constitute in new york. there was mary pechkin. these were all my buddies in the

army. some buddies. really strange set of buddies. i should mention one person in particular who i became very good friends with. that was richard davison. he was unique at los alamos. he became a legend when he ended up at the university of washington. he became famous at the end of the war at the university of washington because he never finished his ph.d. he happened to be the son of a scientist who won a nobel prize for discovering the wave like nature of the atom. we hated saluting.

it didn't make any sense. here we were working on this fantastic project. we still had to salute. we still had to go in formation. we still had to undergo saturday morning inspection, things of that sort. his way of dealing with it was he made his bed and he never slept in it. he slept on top of his bed for the entire two years he was at los alamos. he was able to brag that he never made his bed in the army. dick davison also unfortunately passed away. was a brilliant, special guy, a friend of mine. of course, people like that i never would have met in the

regular army, if i had ended up as a tail gunner. >> let's see. >> now, i haven't talked about my work yet. >> no. >> well, shortly after i arrived there, they assigned me to a project. the project was called jumbo. i found it was a huge container, steel container huge in size. i don't know 15 or 20 feet high, maybe 8 or 10 feet in diameter. seds always had senior scientists. the science seds was always assigned to some project and there were very senior physicists and chemists they

work with. the person i was assigned to was phillip b. moon. he was british. he had apparently arrived at los alamos almost at the same time i did, so we came there together. his assignment, and therefore my assignment, was to study the ability of jumbo to contain an atomic bomb. if the atomic bomb did not actually work properly, the radioactive material would have spilled over the landscape. it would have been a disaster of enormous proportions, so the idea was to put the bomb inside this container. if it fizzled, then the container would hold it and keep it from spreading around and then destroying los alamos essentially. if it worked, it didn't matter

because then it would vaporize the container. that was what was called jumbo. he had some experience. i should say a few words about the british. the british, of course, were also working on atomic bomb sometime in late 1942. their project, which was called a maude project, by arrangement through winston churchill decided to join forces with the americans. so the british were shipped to los alamos as a group. there were maybe six or eight scientists that were the most famous physicists in england at the time.

i have a list here. just a minute. let me read them to you. george thompson, marcus, james chadwick, phillip moon, and p.b. blackett. now it turned out p.b moon, i was slightly mistaken in my memo memoir. he did his work at the cavendish lab. then ended up in birmingham with marcus, who was another nuclear physicist. he was part of this maude group, and he was assigned jumbo too,

just like i was, but i worked for him. so i started my actual research. my research consisted of blowing up containers to see how strong they were. so i became an expert in explosives. for two reasons, we didn't do the work actually on the los alamos mesa. the first reason was they didn't want us blowing up anything at los alamos because it was pretty dangerous. the second reason was it was too disruptive. there were too many wires and pulses and electrical sparks all over the place, so we were really destroying some delicate work going on at los alamos.

so they put us away on a two-mile mesa. so i worked at two-mile mesa with phillip moon and one or two other seds blowing up things. we used what are called strain gauges to study the actual distortion of the metal by the explosives. we would install small explosives inside small containers, put strain gauges on the outside of the containers, blow them up, and measure the distortion of the steel by the explosions. i didn't -- i wasn't given the job of actually deciding how strong these were. i assumed that phillip moon was doing that. i was giving him the data, so i was basically his hands along

with another sed, who incidentally did have an accident right next to me. he blew up one of these explosive caps by accident, and he was badly injured by that, but he recovered. so we worked on that. now, i should have mentioned that i wasn't allowed to work in the main part of los alamos called a tech area because i hadn't been cleared yet, so i was given sort of a second-class clearance tentative badge called a blue badge that i didn't know at the time that they were investigating me back in new york. well, they went through this series of -- this clearance in new york city.

apparently, i passed and was given a white badge, which was an entree into the actual technical area at los alamos where all of the important work was going on, so at that point that was two or three months after i started on jumbo. i got the white badge. just at that time, they decided to forget about jumbo because by that time their confidence was such they were pretty sure the bomb would work. they decided that jumbo was a waste of time. perhaps you know cindy kelly right here. jumbo is still there somewhere, isn't it? it's still there, right? >> it's at the trinity site. >> it's at trinity. it's right at trinity. are they going to keep it there? >> yes. >> yeah. >> you can walk inside it. >> have you been inside?

>> yeah. >> yes? that's wonderful. i never actually saw it there. i saw pictures of it. all i know is i was blowing up little muddles of it this big, so that's the end of my jumbo adventure. >> that's interesting because we found out -- we found little tiny jumbos. we wondered what they were. >> that was me. >> now we know. that's great. >> yeah, yeah. >> maybe we can have an art fact in the museum. >> yeah. >> good. >> both moon and i were reassigned. although i must say, however, we remained good friends. i loved phil moon. he was an enormously entertaining person. very highly cultured. very british.

had a very british wife. the two of them were just like out of the arthur rank movies that i used to watch all the time. i really loved them very much. we remained in touch for a number of years after the war. >> let's see. so after work with him -- maybe you can tell us about the mushroom society. >> oh, that was a little later. >> okay. so what was next? >> what was next was i got a new assignment. the new assignment, i met my boss, my new boss, donald hornig, h-o-r-n-i-g. he's a famous professor. i think he's still alive.

he's hitting almost 100. he was maybe two years older than me, so he's still in his mid 90s. he's in his 90s now. he was a professor chemistry at princeton university. long after the war, he became the science adviser to lyndon b. johnson. when i knew him, his assignment at los alamos was to design the ignition ñ:jçóswitches, which operated the explosive, which in turn operated the explosive lenses, which caused an implosion. you have switches and you have the igniters on top of the coneó

of the explosive lenses then you have the implosion. so our job was at the beginning to get switches. now, the important thing to note is the bomb consisted -- it was spherical. the whole purpose of the implosion was to compress the plutonium, plutonium metal, so that its density causes it to become critical and to cause nuclear chain reaction. in order to cause this explosion to cause an implosion, you need to have the entire sphere compress at the same time. if like, say, the left side explodes before the right side, then you'll get a jet in the stream and it will abort, so you need to know that these lenses

ignited at precisely the same time. there were 32 such lenses around the sphere. each of these 32 lenses had an explosive igniter on the top, and then there were 32 switches somewhere else. the 32 switches, that was what hornig and i did. that was what i was supposed to help him with. to get these 32 switches to ignite at precisely the same time, well, that's not a trivial thing to do. the timing -- the requirements on timing were microseconds. these switches needed to close within a few microseconds of each other. in 1944, when i was doing this, a microsecond was a very short

time. it's not a short time anymore. everybody that uses computers, they work on much shorter times these days. but in those days a microsec was a very short time, so we had to develop the switches and then we had to test them to make sure that they were igniting within a few microseconds of each other. so that's what we did. we had a laboratory. we had -- we didn't have the switches because the switches hadn't been designed yet, but we had a device, the testing system, so we could test the switches when they were designed. hornig, what he did was he figured out how to test these switches to within a microsecond

of each other. now, i'm not sure that i got this exactly right, but i think what he did was he remembered that michaelson at cal tech had a streak camera to measure the speed of light. and that was a pretty good way to start because we know the speed of light is very high and therefore, if you're making measurements, the measurements of the speed of light have to be precise within a very short time. so he got that -- he actually got that camera or something like that camera. i think it was the same camera. he got it and brought it to los alamos, and he gave it to me. he said, here's your camera. go do it. so the camera, it was

conceptually very simple. it was a rotating six-sided mirror, which was rotated by a stream of air going under with propellers. went very fast. light would come in on the mirrors and the light would be scattered by the mirrors along an arc like this, and then there would be a film that was maybe five feet in length that would be stretched along this circle. then the signal from the light would hit somewhere -- you wouldn't know where, but one of the sides of the mirror would surely hit the film somewhere along the five feet of length. so what we would do is we would line up. i'll tell you about the switches in a minute. we'd line up eight switches. we would ignite them. the light from the sparks would

hit a bunch of lenses, would go to the camera, the spinning wheel would scatter the light around the film, and then i would take the film, go to the darkroom, develop it, and look and see how simultaneous the eight sparks were of these switches. the sparks, that was sparks tha by -- i forget whom. it was me, margaret ramsey, my coworker at the laboratory back in the back. it was simply two pins. two regular, ordinary pins, like this. the spark would go between the pins. that's all. it was just a mockup for the real switches that were to occur later. so that was my job. my job was to put in all the wiring and to get the -- expose

the film, then run to the darkroom and develop in the darkroom. then i would show the final result to donald, and he would decide how good these switches were. how good the switches would be and then make recommendations from that. that was my job. it was an interesting job. it involved a lot of physics. for a two and a half -- kid with only two and a half years of college, i was really thrilled with the idea of working in a laboratory, doing real science. it was a wonderful experience. >> interesting. wow. can you talk about, since there aren't that many women scientists, can you give us an introduction to margaret? >> margaret ramsey was a chemist. she had her degree. she was -- she had a bachelor's

degree in chemistry from boston. i forget which college, but she's from boston. we worked together as a team. we wired these little pins, and we soldered them with plastics. we made little forms to press them together. so we worked together very happily for, might have been -- i forget. it must have been four or five months. margaret was a really fine scientist, and she was the first person i ever worked with as a colleague. she ended up marrying james keck, another set. they lived -- they still live up in the boston area. jim keck, he was another fine fellow. the two of them have married and

been married ever since. >> okay. that was great. that gets us through -- oh, when did you work with george? >> so then -- well, i was still on jumbo. i couldn't -- they didn't let me know anything, but i got my white badge. shortly thereafter, couldn't have been more than a week or two, i was told that we were going to have a little meeting with the head of what was called the explosive division, of which i was now part of. donald worked for him, who was the head of the division. so i heard that there was a meeting. i was invited to the meeting. there were like, maybe, half a

dozen seds. couple of civilians. he came to the office, and since i had my white badge, i was cleared. it was perfectly legitimate to get the information. he simply told us what we were doing. that was probably three months after i got to los alamos. two or three months after. he told us, and that was a memorable moment of my life, of course. because he laid out the whole history of the atomic bomb -- of nuclear fission. the entire history of the manhattan project and of the entire goal of los alamos. he told it to us. you have to understand, i know people have mixed feelings about the use of the atomic bomb. many people do

good about the use of the atomic bomb. you have to understand when and where this was and where i came from. i came from a jewish family. my jewish relatives in russia were being killed left and right. i knew about that already. the world in 1944 was a horrible place. there were thousands of americans being killed every day. the only thing we could think of was the war and to end the war as soon as possible, to end the killing, in both europe and the far east. when i heard that we were working on something to end the war, i couldn't have -- it couldn't -- it was really hard to describe how i felt. happy and thrilled and honored i was to be working on something that would end the war. i knew it would end the war.

we all knew it would end the war, if it worked. the way history works, history never follows your script. sure enough, the war in europe ended before the atomic bomb was actually implemented, but it was not -- it did play a war in the ending of the war in japan. >> can you give the name -- start with george and describe him and what he was like. >> george came in. you have to understand, i have a russian background. here this guy comes, i think he was bald. he started speaking with a heavy russian accent. i thought, my god, what is he doing here? little did i know he was a professor of chemistry at harvard university. he was so honored and so give ing that it's hard to describe.

he simply laid it on. i don't know whether he was authorized to do all that. i mean, we hear all these stories about need to know and about everything at los alamos which was compartmentalized. that was nonsense. within three months of my getting -- my clearance as a pfc at the time, i believe, in the army, a private in the army, i was told this immense secret without any hesitation by profeprthe professor. of course, i could never forget the feeling, but he was a very interesting guy. he certainly put it across through -- to these low-level individuals that he spoke to. >> how did -- let's see, i guess

you can -- why don't you talk about being invited to attend the tuesday -- >> yes. so once i got into the tech area, you have to show your white badge to get in, by today's criteria, it wasn't very much. it was just a white badge. anybody could have made it. anybody could have made it. in fact, anyway, i guess people didn't think of those subtleties those days. i got into the tech area guarded by mps. i immediately found out that there were these tuesday evening seminars that met in the hole within the tech area. of course i went to them. why wouldn't i go? the first one i went to, there was this physicist who gave a

talk. i listened to this talk, and here, i was just thinking about the atomic bomb. believe it or not, he didn't talk about the atomic bomb. he talked about the hydrogen bomb. it was really mind boggling. here we were. it must have been in the spring of 1944. yes, 1944. and here he was, talking about a bomb whose predecessor had not yet been built. but the idea of nuclear fusion was on his mind, and he was thinking ahead. he had already realized that the atomic -- that nuclear fission was going to work and it would somehow or other produce an atomic weapon. then he realized that using the fission bombs, you can actually

create a temperature high enough to cause nuclear fusion, forming helium, the way the sun does it. he was thinking about a means of producing a controll eled and uncontrolled reaction with a fusion reaction of deuterium and helium. this was, really, 1944. he was very interest -- also a very interesting guy. he had an italian accent this time, not russian. not a british accent, italian. shows you the international nature of this. the good fortunate of america n getting these notable scientists away from hitler and getting them into the united states. we got firmy.

hitler couldn't have been dumber, than to let people like firmy go. not that he would have worked for hitler. he hated hitler anyway. he came here with this italian accent. the italians i knew, and i knew plenty of italians from the bronx, they all have the same accent but they weren't physicists. they were storekeepers. here he was, this famous physicist giving this lecture. it was quite an experience. then later on, i heard many of the other notables give lectures there, too, includining niles borg. >> it's been fun. >> to tell you the truth, i had mixed feelings. it was fun. that part was good. the army part, i didn't like. i have to admit it.

i never could -- i didn't like sleeping in the same room with 50 or 60 men all snoring. having a single bathroom with no roof. just a lineup of toilets. it was undignified. >> let's see, i was going to ask you something about -- oh, i mean, everybody is interested, one of the things you note in your moemoirs is that -- >> david gringglass was very political. here he was, talking about russia and how wonderf fuful ru was and all that. it was really -- he really was a

communist. quite interesting. it even crossed my mind, i have to be honest -- to honestly say this, it crossed my mind that there was something wrong with a communist being at this project. russia was an ally. the russian -- war in russia was going on very heavily. but it didn't seem right, but i certainly never did anything about it. it crossed my mind, but i didn't do anything. it was so bad that, eventually, bill spindel and i got permission to move out. gringglass and his bunk mates stayed where they were, but we remained friendly. he was a communist. i don't even think he would deny it, if you were to have asked him. >> so he felt comfortable talking about his views with

you? >> felt what? >> comfortable talking about his views with you. >> yes. there was never any constraints about that. we never talked about work, except, although, i noticed that i did read the testimony during a trial, during the gringglass trial. i read the testimony, and he did mention my name in the trial. he said that he once asked me, innocently, what -- he was machining the parts for the bomb. he was machining lens for molds. he asked me, he says he asked me what they were for. he said i said something about a bomb, but i don't think -- i don't remember that. he did get me into a heap of

trouble, because he said that i -- i was a friend of his. they called me -- the fbi called me in, and we had a couple of sessions and it all worked out fine. the fbi, despite what you may hear about it, they were very fair. they listened. they asked hard questions. it turned out that i was an innocent victim, just as many other people were, of his friendship. >> let's see, tell me about ted hall. >> ted hall was another one, another sed. he was a very young one. 19? for some reason or other, i met him and he was interested in me because of my friend, normy greenspan and i loved -- i just

heard the philharmonic last week play the second symphony. gringglass, an electronics expert, had constructed an amplifier using -- forgive me -- parts from the electronic storeroom at los alamos. he built an amplifier, and it was a really good amplifier. we had a speaker somewhere, and we put -- we placed it in richard bellman's office. he had an office. of course, he was a theorist. experimentists didn't have offices, but he was a theorist, so he had an office. we had the amplifier, the loud speaker and the record player set up in richard bellman's

office. norman greenspan and i decided to form a society, where we could listen to classical music. we called it the mushroom society because it could only meet at night when there was nobody there. we would play music very loud. beethoven, all of the classics. very late at night and really enjoying it. ted hall heard about it, i guess. he invited himself to become a member. so we were glad to have him as a member, and he would come to hear the class cam muical music. he became a member of the mushroom society. that's how i knew ted hall. i didn't know him outside of the mushroom society. we didn't talk much, because he was a veperson that never spoke

much. we invited phil moon and his wife to our concerts. it was interesting. the room couldn't have been more than seven feet square, and the three of us plus the -- professor and mrs. moon listening to -- i forget what we were listening to. it was an experience. little embarrassing but, nevertheless, it was great. >> that's great. did you know claude? >> i did not know claude. no, no. >> that we know. >> that's enough, yeah. >> that's a lot. okay. i actually -- one thing i thought was very charming was when you forget to remove the shutter. >> yes. we had the final test, when these