Dayton Project
The Dayton Project was a research and development project to produce polonium during World War II, as part of the larger Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs. Work took place at several sites in and around Dayton, Ohio. Those working on the project were ultimately responsible for creating the polonium-based modulated neutron initiators that were used to begin the chain reactions in the atomic bombs.
The Dayton Project began in 1943 when Monsanto's Charles Allen Thomas was recruited by the Manhattan Project to coordinate the plutonium purification and production work being carried out at various sites. Scientists at the Los Alamos Laboratory calculated that a plutonium bomb would require a neutron initiator. The best-known neutron sources used radioactive polonium and beryllium, so Thomas undertook to produce polonium at Monsanto's laboratories in Dayton. While most Manhattan Project activity took place at remote locations, the Dayton Project was located in a populated, urban area. It ran from 1943 to 1949, when the Mound Laboratories were completed in nearby Miamisburg, Ohio, and the work moved there.
The Dayton Project developed techniques for extracting polonium from the lead dioxide ore in which it occurs naturally, and from bismuth targets that had been bombarded by neutrons in a nuclear reactor. Ultimately, polonium-based neutron initiators were used in both the gun-type Little Boy and the implosion-type Fat Man used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The fact that polonium was used as an initiator was classified until the 1960s, but George Koval, a technician with the Manhattan Project's Special Engineer Detachment, penetrated the Dayton Project as a spy for the Soviet Union.
Background.
In December 1942, during World War II, Charles Allen Thomas, a chemist and director of research at Monsanto in St. Louis, joined the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) as the deputy chief of its Division 8, which was responsible for propellants, explosives and the like. Early in 1943, he traveled to the east with Richard C. Tolman, a member of the NDRC, and James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University and the chairman of the NDRC, to witness a demonstration of a new underwater explosive. Conant and Tolman took the opportunity to quietly investigate Thomas' background. He was then invited to a meeting in Washington D.C., with Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the wartime Manhattan Project responsible for building an atomic bomb. When he got there, Thomas found Conant was also present.
Groves and Conant were hoping to harness Thomas's industrial expertise. They offered him a post as a deputy to Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, but he did not wish to move his family or give up his responsibilities at Monsanto. Instead, he accepted the role of coordinating the plutonium purification and production work being carried out at Los Alamos, the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, and Ames Laboratory in Iowa. Chemistry and metallurgy at Los Alamos would be led by the youthful Joseph W. Kennedy.
At Los Alamos, physicist Robert Serber proposed that instead of relying on spontaneous fission, the chain reaction inside the atomic bomb should be triggered by a neutron initiator. The best-known neutron sources were radium-beryllium and polonium-beryllium. The latter was chosen, as polonium has a 138-day half-life, which made it intense enough to be useful but not long-lived enough to be stockpiled. Thomas took charge of the development of techniques to industrially refine polonium for use with beryllium in the "urchin" internal neutron initiators. This effort became the Dayton Project.
Organization.
Thomas brought in key personnel from Monsanto's Thomas and Hochwalt Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio, including Caroll Hochwalt, James Lum and Nicholas Samaras. Thomas became Director of the Dayton Project, with Hochwalt as Assistant Project Director and Lum as Laboratory Director. They decided that about twelve chemists would be required, and Lum set about recruiting professors, graduate students and industrial chemists from universities and laboratories in the area. The first of these recruits commenced in August 1943, but few had any experience with radiochemistry. Numbers increased from 46 full-time employees at the end of 1943 to 101 at the end of 1944, 201 at the end of 1945, and 334 at the end of 1946, including 34 members of the Army's Special Engineer Detachment.
Locations.
Office space was initially found in the Monsanto offices at 1515 Nicholas Rd, which became known as Unit I. Unit II was the Monsanto Rocket Propellant works off Betty Lane near Ohio State Route 741. While it was administered by Monsanto, it was not used by the Dayton Project. The site handled explosives including ammonium nitrate and ammonium picrate, but no radioactive materials were handled there. Work at Unit II ceased in the fall of 1945. Consideration was given to using it in December 1946, but this proposal was rejected in favor of erecting a Quonset hut at Unit III.
A laboratory site was found at 1601 W. First Street that had originally been constructed to house the Bonebrake Seminary. It was a three-story brick building built in 1879, and owned by the Dayton Board of Education, which used it as a warehouse. Monsanto leased the site on 15 October 1943, and began converting it into a laboratory known as Unit III. The building was in poor shape when the Dayton Project took it over, with many broken windows, and the staircase between the second and third floors was missing. New heating and lighting were installed, windows were replaced, new flooring was laid, and some rooms were re-plastered. A pair of guard houses known as buildings J and K were added, as was a chemical storage shed known as building F, and a wire fence. Laboratory activities were transferred there from Unit I on 25 September. Initially only the bottom two floors were occupied, providing of laboratory space. Later, the third floor was taken over as well, providing another . In May 1945, five additional temporary buildings were constructed on land leased from the Board of Education that housed offices, a cafeteria, locker rooms, a physics laboratory and a laundry. A new guardhouse was also built. To this was added two portable buildings in 1946.
By 1944, space was running short, and Monsanto began negotiations to acquire the Runnymede Playhouse in the wealthy residential Dayton suburb of Oakwood. Built in 1927, the Playhouse was a leisure facility that included an outdoor swimming pool, a ballroom, a squash court, a tennis court with a cork floor and a stage for community theater. It had showers with Italian marble and a <templatestyles src="Fraction/styles.css" />1+1⁄2-story garage. The estate was owned by the Talbott Realty Company, which was controlled by Thomas's wife's family. The Talbotts were among the heirs of the Delco company, which was by then a part of General Motors. The Oakwood City Council wanted the Playhouse as a community center. Thomas appeared before the council and assured them that it would not be damaged, although he could not disclose what he was intending to use it for. When Talbott Realty proved reluctant to sell, the United States Army Corps of Engineers condemned the property, which became Unit IV on 15 February 1944. A lease was signed on 10 March 1944, under which the Talbott Realty was paid $4,266.72 per annum for the property. The lease was initially up to 30 June 1944, but was then extended annually until 30 June 1949. The lease specified that the property would be returned in its original condition. Talbott Realty were told that the property would be used to produce training films.
Remodeling began on 17 March 1944. The tennis courts were subdivided into multiple rooms. The ceiling was lowered, and heating, air conditioning and air filtration systems were added. One of the greenhouses was converted into a loading dock. The property was enclosed in a barbed wire fence that was floodlit by night, and patrolled around the clock by armed guards; there were 43 guards at Units III and IV. The Production Group began moving in on 1 June. Three guard houses were added, along with a wire fence. Changes to the site were minimized in order to make it easier to restore later. Because it was located in a residential area, efforts were also made to minimize noise and other disruptions.
In May 1945, Monsanto rented three floors of a warehouse at 601 East Third Street from General Electric. Initially it was used to receive and store equipment used by the Project. Later the fourth floor was used as office space, and a laboratory was established on the fifth floor where studies were carried out on the effects of polonium on laboratory animals. Analysis of bioassay samples was carried out there to minimize the danger of polonium contamination of the samples.
Research.
Few people had seen polonium before. It was a silvery metal. In a dark room, it gave off an eerie, purple glow. Polonium occurs naturally in various ores, and the lead dioxide residues from the refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, left over after the removal of uranium and radium, were estimated to contain of polonium per metric ton. A curie of polonium weighs about . Port Hope was already under contract from the Manhattan Project for the supply and refining of uranium ore. The first of radioactive lead dioxide was delivered to the Dayton Project on 10 November 1943. The first batch was processed by 8 December, which made of polonium available for experiments a week later.
Three processes were investigated for extracting the polonium from the ore. J. H. Dillon of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company had patented a process in which the lead oxide was dissolved in hydrochloric acid:
PbO2 + 4 HCl → PbCl2 + Cl2 + 2H2O
The polonium could then be deposited on copper or nickel sheets. This required large-scale glass-lined equipment not available in Dayton, but available at the Monsanto B plant in Monsanto, Illinois. After small-scale tests at Unit III revealed that the process was practical, some three tons of lead dioxide were sent to the B plant, and were recovered. Getting the polonium off the copper and nickel sheets proved more problematic.
A second method attempted was a kiln process. The idea was to simply roast the lead dioxide and vaporize the polonium. The problem was that lead dioxide slagged at , which was too low for the process to work. So lead orthophosphate was tried, which slagged at . This was made by mixing the lead dioxide with phosphoric acid. Experiments showed that the polonium vaporized well when the lead orthophosphate was heated to for four hours. Unfortunately, the process then ran into problems with dust and other foreign matter, and with contamination of the personnel and equipment involved.
The third method involved dissolving the lead dioxide in a mixture of concentrated nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide:
PbO2 + 2HNO3 + H2O2 → 2 + O2 + 2H2O
This proved to be the best way to separate the polonium from the lead dioxide, although there were problems with the precipitation of various contaminants, including iron and aluminum. Although about of lead dioxide were treated with nitric acid, and about of polonium were produced, the process did not proceed beyond the pilot stage because a better source of polonium became available. The lead dioxide was not purchased by the Manhattan Project, and early in the war had been acquired by the Canadian government. In June 1945, the lead was precipitated as a lead carbonate slurry, and shipped to the Manhattan District's Madison Square area to be dried and returned to Canada.
Production.
Polonium could also be produced by neutron irradiation of bismuth. In 1943 the only polonium produced in this manner was in cyclotrons, but the Manhattan Project's development of nuclear reactors offered the prospect of producing large amounts of polonium in this manner:
Bi + → Bi → Po +
A metric ton of bismuth irradiated in the Manhattan Project's X-10 Graphite Reactor at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, contained of polonium, a vast improvement over the yields from Port Hope's lead dioxide. Irradiated bismuth came from Clinton in the form of bricks that weighed about . They were shipped to Dayton by rail in wooden boxes, which were stored in a tile-lined cavity in the floor at Unit IV.
These procedures were adequate because the quantity of polonium in the bismuth was still fairly low, but starting in June 1945, the Dayton Project began receiving bismuth irradiated in the more powerful reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington, which now became the major source of supply. Even at Clinton, unprotected bismuth proved problematic when a brick broke apart and chips fell into containers of uranium slugs, and had to be hazardously separated by hand by project personnel. Bismuth slugs irradiated in the reactors at Hanford were therefore canned in aluminium. The canned slugs were in diameter, and long. The problem was that the aluminium contained impurities such as iron, manganese, copper, lead, tin, zinc, silicon, titanium, nickel, magnesium, chromium, vanadium, bismuth and gallium, and when irradiated, these could form radioactive isotopes. Most were of little concern for the Dayton Project, as they had short half-lives, and would become harmless during the slugs' cooling off period in water at Hanford; but iron could form iron-59, which had a half-life of 45 days, and produced gamma radiation. The slugs were therefore shipped in casks, each of which contained several tubes which held the slugs. The spaces between the tubes was filled with lead. At Dayton, the slugs were stored in a lead-lined safe with doors on both sides containing tubes. They were also stored underwater on racks, and could be removed with tongs. A periscope allowed the identification markings on the slugs to be checked without removing them from the pool.
By the end of 1946 Hanford was shipping material that contained up to per metric ton of bismuth. Bismuth was purchased from the American Smelting and Refining Company of the highest purity that it could produce. It was sent to Hanford, where it was canned, and placed inside a reactor for 100 days. The irradiated slugs were then shipped by road to Unit IV, where they were bathed in hydrochloric acid, which dissolved the aluminum. This formed an aluminum chloride solution that was disposed of, as it was highly radioactive due to the iron impurities in the aluminum. The bismuth slugs were then dissolved in aqua regia. This was too weak for electroplating the polonium, so the nitric acid was removed, and then the polonium deposited on bismuth by adding powdered bismuth. This resulted in a 100–1 concentration. This could then be repeated by dissolving in aqua regia again to achieve a 1000–1 concentration. This was again dissolved, and the polonium electroplated on platinum foils. The main problem with the process was that it required glass-lined containers due to the aqua regia, and mechanisms for safe handling of the radioactive material. The Dayton Project explored alternative purification methods that were found to be workable, but less efficient or safe.
The first consignment of polonium left for Los Alamos on 15 March 1944 in a lead-lined suitcase carried by a military courier. Regular shipments were made thereafter. Initiator testing at Los Alamos required more polonium than anticipated, and in December 1944, Oppenheimer was forced to ask Thomas if he could ship per month. The Dayton Project was able to do so. In February 1945, Thomas agreed to increase shipments to per month by June, and 500 per month by December.
The total cost of the Dayton Project up to the end of 1946 was $3,666,507 ($ in today's dollars).
Health and safety.
Dayton Project employees were not allowed to eat or smoke in processing areas, and had to scrub their hands before leaving these areas. The chemists wore protective gear, with surgical, cloth and rubber gloves worn in three layers. When leaving for lunch or at the end of the shift, they had to wash their hands with dilute hydrochloric acid, dilute Clorox, and soap. The radioactive residue on their hands was measured with a special Geiger counter designed for the purpose by physicist John J. Sopka. No more than one thousand counts per minute per hand was permissible. They had to shower at the end of each day's work, and were subjected to weekly urine tests. Employees with elevated levels of polonium were not allowed in the processing areas. Working with polonium without spreading contamination proved to be almost impossible. Fortunately, it is not a bone seeker like radium or plutonium, and is thus readily excreted in urine. Detection methods had already been developed, making it easy to track. The employee at Unit IV with the highest levels of polonium in her urine had contaminated her hair, and often held bobby pins in her mouth.
Espionage.
George Koval was drafted into the United States Army in 1943, and was inducted into the Manhattan Project's Special Engineer Detachment. He was initially assigned to the Clinton Engineer Works, where his job as a health physics officer gave him access to much of the site. He began passing secrets relating to the production of polonium at Oak Ridge to the Soviet Union through his GRU (Soviet military intelligence) handler code-named "Clyde". In 1945 Koval was transferred to Dayton. Again, his job as a health physics officer gave him wide access to the secret installation. In 2007 Russian President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval a gold star, making him a hero of the Russian Federation for his work as the GRU spy "Delmar". Russian officials stated that the initiator for their Joe-1 bomb had been "prepared to the recipe provided by Delmar". The fact that polonium was used as an initiator remained classified until the 1960s.
Initiators.
After Leonard I. Schiff calculated that an initiator might improve the efficiency of a gun-type fission weapon, Oppenheimer gave approval on 15 March 1945 for initiators to be included in the Little Boy design. The initiators were tested to ensure they were rugged enough to handle being transported in an airplane and being accidentally dropped. Eventually, about forty initiators were dispatched to Tinian, where four were inserted into the bomb that was used in the bombing of Hiroshima.
The initiator used in the implosion design of the Fat Man bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was code-named "urchin". In order to increase the efficiency of the explosion, the initiator had to emit a large number of neutrons in a few microseconds while the plutonium core was fully compressed. At the heart of the urchin was a solid beryllium sphere in diameter. This was gold-plated and coated with of polonium. The gold kept the polonium's alpha particles from striking the beryllium. This fitted inside two beryllium hemispheres with 15 parallel grooves cut into the inner surface. These grooves converted the shock wave of the implosion into jets that shattered the spheres and caused the beryllium and polonium to mix and emit neutrons. The hemispheres were nickel-plated and the outer surface was coated in gold and of polonium. The initiator, which was hot to the touch, fitted neatly inside the hole in the center of the plutonium pit.
Mound Laboratories.
By 1945, the Dayton Project had assumed such importance that the Manhattan Project decided to make it into a permanent facility. The original intention was to move operations to Oak Ridge, but it was decided that a site near Dayton was preferable. Few of the scientific and technical staff wanted to move to Tennessee, and there were concerns about the dangers of polonium contamination at a plutonium processing site. A search for a suitable site began in early 1946, and one was found in Miamisburg, about from Dayton. The site was next to a state park containing a large prehistoric Indian burial mound, which ultimately gave the Mound Laboratories its name. It was initially known as Unit V. Monsanto began construction in May 1946, using the Detroit firm of Giffels and Vallet as architects, while the plant was built by the Maxon Construction of Dayton. The design called for an underground complex that could withstand a direct hit from a bomb, with protection against biological and chemical weapons, at a cost of $17,900,000.
Responsibility for nuclear weapons production was transferred from the Manhattan Project to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, but work continued on the Mound Laboratories. The first building was completed in May 1948, and polonium processing commenced at the Mound Laboratories in February 1949. Altogether, 14 major buildings were constructed with a total floor space of at a cost of $25.5 million. Due to fear of attack or sabotage, the former Scioto Laboratory Complex in Marion, Ohio, was acquired by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948. It was maintained as a cold standby site until it was no longer needed in 1953.
Site cleanup.
Unit I continued to be used by Monsanto as an administrative facility until 1988, when it was demolished. The land was sold to Quality Chemicals in 1992, and then to DuPont in 2002. Unit III, the former Bonebrake Theological Seminary, was decontaminated in 1950 and returned to the Dayton Board of Education. The original seminary building was subsequently demolished, but several structures remain from the Dayton Project. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 10 May 2006. Although the lease on Unit IV, the former Runnymede Playhouse, specified that it was to be returned, it was deemed to be too contaminated. The building was demolished in February 1950. The cobblestones in the driveway were removed and taken away, along with of earth from under the house. The excavation was filled in, and the site was returned to the Talbott family, who were paid $138,750 in compensation. As of 2017[ [update]], all that remains of the original playhouse is a brass doorknob and part of the greenhouse roof, which are part of the collection of the Mound Science and Energy Museum. Private residences now occupy the site. The Dayton Warehouse was decontaminated in 1950 and returned to its owners. The Mound Laboratories continued to produce polonium initiators until 1969. Polonium continued to be produced there for commercial sales and use in satellites until 1972. The laboratories were decommissioned in 1993, and the area was decontaminated. As of 2017[ [update]], it houses the Mound Advanced Technology Center.
In 1996, the Department of Energy, which had succeeded the Atomic Energy Commission, decided that since the Dayton sites already had been decontaminated, they did not warrant inclusion in the Army Corps of Engineers' Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). The local community in Dayton was concerned that the cleanup did not meet 21st-century environmental standards. Therefore, the state of Ohio asked the United States Congress to have the Army Corps of Engineers conduct a review. This was carried out in 2004 and 2005. The review concluded that no radioactive contaminants were found that would warrant inclusion in FUSRAP.
Notes.
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References.
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Robert Serber
American physicist (1909–1997)
Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as "The Los Alamos Primer". The "New York Times" called him "the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb."
Early life and education.
He was born in Philadelphia, the eldest son of Rose (Frankel) and David Serber. His family was Jewish. His mother died in 1922 and his father married her cousin Frances Leof in 1928. Robert Serber earned his BS in engineering physics from Lehigh University in 1930 and earned his PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with John Van Vleck in 1934. He married Charlotte Leof (26 Jul 1911 – 1967), the daughter of his stepmother's uncle, in 1933.
Shortly before receiving his doctorate, Serber was selected for a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship and planned on conducting research at Princeton University with Eugene Wigner. However, after spontaneously enrolling at the University of Michigan's physics summer school, he changed his plans and went to work with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley. For the next four years, he shuttled with Oppenheimer between Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, where Oppenheimer held a secondary faculty appointment. In 1938, he took one of the era's few tenure-track professorships in physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he stayed until he was recruited for the Manhattan Project.
Manhattan Project.
He was recruited for the Manhattan Project in 1941, and was in Project Alberta on the dropping of the bomb. When the Los Alamos National Laboratory was first organized, Oppenheimer decided not to compartmentalize the technical information among different departments. This boosted the technical workers' effectiveness in problem-solving and underscored the project's urgency, as they now understood its significance. Consequently, Serber was tasked with delivering a series of lectures to explain the basic principles and objectives of the project. These lectures were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as "The Los Alamos Primer", LA-1. It was declassified in 1965. Serber developed the first good theory of bomb assembly hydrodynamics.
Serber's wife Charlotte Serber was appointed by Oppenheimer to head the technical library at Los Alamos, where she was the only wartime female section leader.
Serber created the code-names for all three design projects, the "Little Boy" (uranium gun), "Thin Man" (plutonium gun), and "Fat Man" (plutonium implosion), according to his reminiscences (1998). The names were based on their design shapes; the "Thin Man" would be a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies of the same name; the "Fat Man" bomb would be round and fat and was named after Sydney Greenstreet's character in "The Maltese Falcon" (from Hammett's novel). "Little Boy" would come last and be named only to contrast to the "Thin Man" bomb. This differs from the unsupported, abandoned theory that "Fat Man" was named after Churchill and "Thin Man" after Roosevelt.
After receiving an identification card noting that his civilian noncombatant duties were commensurate in profile to the Army of the United States rank of colonel (an administrative designation only ostensibly valid if he were captured as a prisoner of war under the 1929 Geneva Convention, although he was frequently afforded salutations and other perquisites of the rank in practice by military personnel while traveling), Serber was to go on "Big Stink", the camera plane for the Nagasaki mission, as a technical advisor; however, it left without him when group operations officer Major James I. Hopkins ordered him off the plane because he had forgotten his parachute, reportedly after the B-29 had already taxied onto the runway. Since Serber was the only crew member who knew how to operate the high-speed camera, Hopkins had to be instructed by radio from Tinian on its use. Serber was with the first American team to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the results of the atomic bombing of the two cities.
Post-war work and personal life.
Although Oppenheimer sought an appointment for Serber in the Berkeley physics department following the end of the war, this was soon forestalled, possibly because of the anti-Semitism of department chair Raymond Thayer Birge. Birge had previously refused to offer a tenure-track appointment to Serber after he received his University of Illinois offer, opining that "one Jew in the department is enough." Oppenheimer prevailed in placing him as head of the theoretical division of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory under Ernest Lawrence; however, as his mentor segued into policy consultancies and the presidency of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947, Serber frequently took over his courses, ultimately resulting in his appointment to the Berkeley faculty.
In 1948, Serber had to defend himself against anonymous accusations of disloyalty, mostly because his wife Charlotte's family were Jewish intellectuals with socialist leanings, and also because he tried to remove politics from discussions of the feasibility of the fusion bomb, leading to arguments with Edward Teller. There was some speculation that Serber was a member of the Communist Party. Oppenheimer said it was possible he was member, but did not know, whereas the FBI concluded that "no definite evidence is known" for his membership. Although he had been cleared of any potential wrongdoing at a subsequent hearing that year, he was denied a prerequisite security clearance for a Japanese physics conference in 1952, precipitating his refusal to join a Teller-chaired Department of Defense advisory group.
While he reluctantly signed the loyalty oath stipulated by the Levering Act for Berkeley personnel in 1950, growing antagonism between Oppenheimer and the more conservative Lawrence eventually spurred his departure. In 1951, he became a professor of physics at Columbia University at the behest of Manhattan Project colleague I. I. Rabi. He served as chair of the department from 1975 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1978.
At Columbia, Serber served as doctoral advisor to future Nobelist Leon Cooper. He also collaborated with Abraham Pais on meson studies and developed the Serber-Dancoff method, a refined technique for analyzing strong coupling. He also consulted numerous labs, businesses, and commissions, including Brookhaven National Laboratory (where he worked one day a week during the academic year and occasional summers for twenty years) and Fermilab, as a specialist in the proton–proton chain reaction and the focusing properties of particle accelerators. Although largely bereft of any ideology, he refused to join the Defense Department-affiliated JASON consulting group because of his previous clearance issues and opposition to the Vietnam War.
After being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, Charlotte Serber suffered from depression and took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills on May 22, 1967. Serber then entered a relationship with Kitty Oppenheimer, who had been widowed in February 1967. She talked him into buying a yawl, which they sailed from New York to Grenada. In 1972, they purchased a ketch, with the intention of sailing through the Panama Canal and to Japan via the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti during Serber's sabbatical. They set out, but Kitty became ill, and was taken to Gorgas Hospital, where she died of an embolism on October 27, 1972. Serber and Toni Oppenheimer scattered her cremains near the Oppenheimers' longtime vacation home in Saint John, U.S. Virgin Islands, which he continued to use.
Following his retirement, he married Fiona St. Clair, a fabric designer from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, in 1979. He adopted her son Zachariah, and they had another son, William, in November 1980.
He served as president of the American Physical Society in 1971. A year later, Serber was awarded the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize.
Serber appears in the Oscar-nominated documentary "The Day After Trinity" (1980).
Serber died June 1, 1997, at his home in Manhattan from complications of surgery for brain cancer.
In popular culture.
He was portrayed by Michael Angarano in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film "Oppenheimer".
References.
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Lawrence H. Johnston
American physicist
Lawrence Harding Johnston (February 11, 1918 – December 4, 2011) was an American physicist, a young contributor to the Manhattan Project. He was the only man to witness all three atomic explosions in 1945: the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
During World War II, Johnston worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory where he invented ground-controlled approach radar. In 1944, he went to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he co-invented the exploding-bridgewire detonator.
After the war, Johnston completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1950, and became an associate professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He later worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center as head of the electronics department, and was a professor at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where he taught until his retirement.
Early life.
Born in Shandong, China, on February 11, 1918, Johnston was the son of American Presbyterian missionaries. The family returned to the United States in 1923, and his father became a Presbyterian pastor in Santa Maria, California.
After graduation from Hollywood High School in 1936, Johnston earned an associate degree at Los Angeles City College. He transferred to the University of California in Berkeley, where Luis Walter Alvarez was a graduate student. Johnston received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1940.
World War II.
MIT Radiation Laboratory.
Johnston intended to study for his doctorate under Alvarez, but instead followed him east to the MIT Radiation Laboratory near Boston in February 1941. Alvarez and Johnston worked together on ground-controlled approach radar. This allowed aircraft to be guided to a safe landing in adverse weather conditions, based on radar images, and would later prove crucial during the Berlin Airlift. They were awarded US Patents 2,555,101 and 2,585,855 for it.
While a graduate student at Berkeley, Johnston met Mildred (Millie) Hillis, a girl who shared his strong Christian faith. When Alvarez discovered how much Johnston missed Hillis, he arranged for Johnston to be flown back to Berkeley. Johnston and Hillis married, and returned to Boston together. She sometimes accompanied them on field trips to test the ground-controlled approach radar system. They had five children: Mary Virginia (Ginger), Margy, Dan, Lois, and Karen.
Manhattan Project.
At age 26 in 1944, Johnston followed Alvarez to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where Robert Oppenheimer, who was also from the University of California, was the director. Johnston became involved in the development of the Fat Man plutonium bomb. Because of the high level of spontaneous fission in reactor plutonium, it was decided to use a nearly critical sphere of the metal and compress it quickly into a much smaller and denser core using explosives, a technical challenge at the time.
To create the symmetrical implosion required to compress the plutonium to the required density, thirty-two explosive charges were simultaneously detonated around the spherical core. Using conventional explosive techniques with blasting caps, progress towards achieving simultaneity to within a small fraction of a microsecond was discouraging. Alvarez directed Johnston to use a large capacitor to deliver a high voltage charge directly to each explosive lens, replacing blasting caps with exploding-bridgewire detonators. This detonated all thirty-two charges within a few tenths of a microsecond. The invention was critical to the success of the implosion-type nuclear weapon. Johnston was awarded US Patent 3,040,660 for the exploding-bridgewire detonator.
Johnston and Alvarez's next task for the Manhattan Project was to develop a set of calibrated microphone/transmitters to be parachuted from an aircraft to measure the strength of the blast wave from the atomic explosion, so as to allow the scientists to calculate the bomb's energy. He observed the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29 Superfortress that also carried fellow Project Alberta members Harold Agnew and Deak Parsons.
Flying in the B-29 Superfortress "The Great Artiste" in formation with the "Enola Gay", Alvarez and Johnston measured the blast effect of the Little Boy bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima. A few days later, again flying in "The Great Artiste", Johnston used the same equipment to measure the strength of the Nagasaki explosion. He was the only person to witness the Trinity test and the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Johnston never regretted the part he had played in the bombings. Years later, Johnston recalled:<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
Back at Los Alamos there was lots of rejoicing. "We won the War!" But several important people were having pangs of conscience, most notably Oppenheimer. Yes we had stopped the wartime killing, but we had killed a lot of people with our bombs, and worst of all we had let the genie out of the bottle, and now nuclear war would be a specter for the world to face. … Oppie felt especially responsible for this nuclear worry, and he made public statements of remorse. I think it was because of this that Oppie was forgiven by the 1945 Peace Activists in the Physics community. Instead he became their hero. But Alvarez was not forgiven, and he suffered public insults as a warmonger. The same for Ernest Lawrence. The Peace activists sounded like they wished we had lost the war, or at least that it had ended in a bloody stalemate.
After the war.
After the war, Johnston returned to graduate school at Berkeley. Under Alvarez's supervision, he wrote his PhD thesis at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on the "Development of the Alvarez-type proton linear accelerator". After he graduated in 1950, he became an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. There, he built a 68 MeV proton linear accelerator, which he used to perform proton-proton scattering experiments. In 1964, he joined the Physics Laboratory of The Aerospace Corporation, where he learned techniques for investigating far infrared radiation.
In 1964, Johnston moved to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center as head of the Electronics Department. He worked there on the construction of a , 20 GeV electron linear accelerator. He became a professor of physics at the University of Idaho in 1967, and focused on nuclear physics, far infrared lasers, and molecular spectroscopy. Johnston retired in 1988 at age 70, and continued to reside in Moscow as professor emeritus until his death.
In retirement, Johnston made a number of trips to Israel to work on biblical archaeology projects. He was a strong supporter of Christian ministries, and believed in intelligent design. Johnston died of lung cancer at age 93 in his home in Moscow on December 4, 2011. Married for 69 years, he was survived by his wife Millie and their five children.
References.
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Rubby Sherr
American nuclear physicist (1913–2013)
Rubby Sherr (September 14, 1913 – July 8, 2013) was an American nuclear physicist who co-invented a key component of the first nuclear weapon while participating in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. His academic career spanned nearly eight decades, including almost 40 years working at Princeton University.
Early life and education.
Sherr was born to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1913. After graduating from Lakewood High School, he attended New York University at his mother's behest, gaining a bachelor's degree in physics in 1934. He then went to study at Princeton University, where he obtained a doctorate in physics in 1938.
Manhattan Project.
In 1942, Sherr joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he worked to develop new airborne radar systems. In 1944, he became involved with the Manhattan Project, which was tasked with creating the first nuclear weapon. Together with Klaus Fuchs, Sherr developed a key component of the bomb's triggering mechanism, the Fuchs–Sherr polonium-beryllium modulated neutron initiator. On July 16, 1945, Sherr was present at the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico. He later recalled thinking during the test, "'This is the greatest scientific experiment of all time' – it was certainly the biggest. Then the horror sank in that the thing had actually worked, followed by relief that the atmosphere hadn't ignited, as some had feared it would."
Academic career.
Sherr became an assistant professor of physics at Princeton University in 1946, an associate professor in 1949, and a full professor in 1955. In 1953, he provided experimental evidence of Fermi's interaction, a theoretical explanation for the beta decay phenomenon. Between 1955 and 1971, he headed an Atomic Energy Commission-contracted nuclear research project, and oversaw the development of Princeton's AVF cyclotron in 1970. Sherr retired from Princeton in 1982, but remained active in the research community for the rest of his life. He published over 100 articles in scientific journals during his career.
Personal life.
Sherr was married to Rita "Pat" Sherr, with whom he had two daughters. In 1998, after his wife's death, he moved to a retirement community in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he lived until his death. In his spare time, Sherr was an avid fly fisherman, birdwatcher, and folk music enthusiast who counted the musicologist Alan Lomax among his friends. He died at the age of 99 on July 8, 2013. He was survived by his daughters and a granddaughter.
References.
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Lawrence Marvin Langer
Nuclear physicist (1913–2000)
Lawrence Marvin Langer (22 December 1913 – 17 January 2000) was a nuclear physicist and a group leader of the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He oversaw the final assembly of the first atomic bomb on the Pacific Island of Tinian and slept on the bomb itself the night before it was dropped. He also developed sonar and radar detectors during World War II and worked on the "gun" mechanism used to detonate the Uranium-235 bomb used on Hiroshima.
Early life.
Langer was born in New York City on December 22, 1913. He received his B.S. in 1934, M.S. in 1935, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1938 all from New York University. The year that he received his PhD, the President of Indiana University, Herman B Wells, had a vision to start a modern-day research program in the physics department. Wells recruited Allan C. G. Mitchell who in turn hired Langer to join the Indiana University (IU) faculty. Langer contributed to IU's construction of a cyclotron. In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
World War II.
As the war approached, Langer was recruited to work in the MIT Radiation Laboratory where he was involved in flight-testing of radar prototypes in fighter planes. He was then called by the Navy to San Diego, where he worked on the development and testing of sonar detectors. In 1943, he was invited to Los Alamos, where he worked on developing the gun mechanism used to set off the atomic bombs.
The final assembly of the atomic bombs occurred on Tinian, an island in the South Pacific. In 1945 it was the home to the world's largest airfield—six runways each 2 miles long and as wide as a 10 lane highway.
The USS "Indianapolis" delivered the parts for the 9,700 pound Uranium-235 atomic bomb to the Tinian Islands in 1945 only to be sunk by the Japanese on its return voyage.
Langer was chosen to help assemble the bomb because of his experience with its development. Since he was not a naval officer, Langer had to train Navy Captain William S. "Deak" Parsons to arm the bomb once it was airborne using a wrench. This was a safety precaution since airplanes were known to crash upon take off from the Islands.
The first atomic bomb was nicknamed "Little Boy". The night before it was dropped it was hooked into the bomb bay of the B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay". The plane and its explosive cargo were guarded by the Military Police. Langer was not confident about the ability of the MPs to protect Little Boy from curious onlookers. According to an Associated Press interview he gave in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of detonation of the bomb, he recalled "My experience with the MPs is that they weren't very reliable so I decided to stay with the bomb and forgo dinner, " Langer said.
As twilight faded into darkness, Longer grew tired. "The only place to stretch out was on top of the bomb so I did and fell asleep," he said.
Langer was awaken from his night's rest on Little Boy by the sounds of the photographer's flash bulbs popping while they were documenting the Enola Gay before its historic flight. At 2:45 am on August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew lifted off. They dropped Little Boy about 5 hours later on Hiroshima and marked the beginning of nuclear warfare.
Indiana University.
Langer returned to Indiana University in 1946 after the end of World War II. He began to develop one of the world's major laboratories for nuclear spectroscopy and beta-ray spectral shapes becoming a leader in source and detector techniques.
His other interests included neutrino-antineutrino identity, a search for neutrino degeneracy and also for neutrino mass. He and his colleague in theoretical physics, Emil Konopinski, produced a 1953 article in "Annual Review of Nuclear Science" on beta decay that was widely cited.
He supervised 27 students through their PhD work.
He became Chairman of the IU Physics Department in 1965 and helped oversee the IU Cyclotron Facility and Nuclear Theory Center in conjunction with the National Science Foundation.
Langer stepped down as chair in 1973 and returned to full-time research and teaching. He was forced to retire in 1979 after losing his battle with multiple sclerosis.
He died in Bloomington, Indiana, on January 17, 2000.
References.
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Alexander Langsdorf Jr.
American physicist (1912–1996)
Alexander Suss Langsdorf Jr. (May 30, 1912 – May 24, 1996) was an American physicist on the team that developed the atomic bomb and several devices related to nuclear physics. He was a vocal opponent of the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Life and career.
Langsdorf was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1932 and a doctorate in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937. In this time he developed a continuously sensitive cloud chamber. After a research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, he became a physics instructor at Washington University in St. Louis from 1939 to 1942.
Prior to World War II, Langsdorf co-developed a cyclotron for splitting atomic particles at Washington University in St. Louis . It was designed for use in medical research. During World War II, he worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago on the Manhattan Project. Langsdorf was one of the designers of the first two nuclear reactors after Fermi completed the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in 1942. Langsdorf was able to produce a tiny usable sample of plutonium using his device. That sample was then used in the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945. Langsdorf urged President Harry S Truman not to use the bomb against the Japanese, but a plutonium-based bomb was dropped on Nagasaki soon after.
He continued to urge against expansion of nuclear weapons. He helped found "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists", and his wife Martyl Langsdorf designed the 1947 cover of the publication which debuted the Doomsday Clock. Langsdorf also invented the diffusion cloud chamber and the reactor oscillator.
Langsdorf died in Elmhurst, Illinois, from complications from hip surgery.
References.
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George Kistiakowsky
Ukrainian-American physical chemistry professor
George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky (, ; December 1 [O.S. November 18] 1900 – December 7, 1982) was a Ukrainian-American physical chemistry professor at Harvard who participated in the Manhattan Project and later served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Science Advisor.
Born in Boyarka in the old Russian Empire, into "an old Ukrainian Cossack family which was part of the intellectual elite in pre-revolutionary Russia", Kistiakowsky fled his homeland during the Russian Civil War. He made his way to Germany, where he earned his PhD in physical chemistry under the supervision of Max Bodenstein at the University of Berlin. He emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1930, and became a citizen in 1933.
During World War II, Kistiakowsky was the head of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) section responsible for the development of explosives, and the technical director of the Explosives Research Laboratory (ERL), where he oversaw the development of new explosives, including RDX and HMX. He was involved in research into the hydrodynamic theory of explosions, and the development of shaped charges. In October 1943, he was brought into the Manhattan Project as a consultant. He was soon placed in charge of X Division, which was responsible for the development of the explosive lenses necessary for an implosion-type nuclear weapon. In July 1945, he watched the first atomic explosion in the Trinity test. A few weeks later, another implosion-type weapon (Fat Man) was dropped on Nagasaki.
From 1962 to 1965, Kistiakowsky chaired the National Academy of Sciences's Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), and was its vice president from 1965 to 1973. He severed his connections with the government in protest against the war in Vietnam, and became active in an antiwar organization, the Council for a Livable World, becoming its chairman in 1977.
Early life.
George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky was born in Boyarka, in the Kyiv Governorate of the Russian Empire (now part of Ukraine), on December 1 [O.S. November 18] 1900. George's grandfather Aleksandr Fedorovych Kistiakovsky was a professor of law and an attorney of the Russian Empire who specialized in criminal law. His father Bogdan Kistiakovsky was a professor of legal philosophy at the University of Kyiv, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1919. Kistiakowsky's mother was Maria Berendshtam, and he had a brother, Alexander who became an ornithologist. George's uncle Ihor Kistiakovsky was the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian State.
Kistiakowsky attended private schools in Kyiv and Moscow until the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917. He then joined the anti-Communist White Army. In 1920 he escaped from Russia in a commandeered French ship. After spending time in Turkey and Yugoslavia, he made his way to Germany, where he enrolled at the University of Berlin later that year. In 1925, he earned his PhD in physical chemistry under the supervision of Max Bodenstein, writing his thesis on the photochemical decomposition of chlorine monoxide and ozone. He then became Bodenstein's graduate assistant. His first two published papers were elaborations of his thesis, co-written with Bodenstein.
In 1926, Kistiakowsky traveled to the United States as an International Education Board fellow. Hugh Stott Taylor, another student of Bodenstein, accepted Bodenstein's assessment of Kistiakowsky, and gave him a place at Princeton University. That year, Kistiakowsky married a Swedish Lutheran woman, Hildegard Moebius. In 1928, they had a daughter, Vera, who, in 1972 became the first woman appointed as a professor of physics at MIT. When Kistiakowsky's two-year fellowship ran out in 1927, he received a research associate and DuPont Fellowship. On October 25, 1928, he became an associate professor at Princeton. Taylor and Kistiakowsky published a series of papers together. Encouraged by Taylor, Kistiakowsky also published an American Chemical Society monograph on photochemical processes.
In 1930, Kistiakowsky joined the faculty of Harvard University, an affiliation that continued throughout his career. At Harvard, his research interests were in thermodynamics, spectroscopy, and chemical kinetics. He became increasingly involved in consulting for the government and industry. He became an associate professor again, this time at Harvard in 1933. That year he also became an American citizen and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1938, he became the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences the following year. In 1940, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
World War II.
National Defense Research Committee.
Foreseeing an expanded role for science in World War II, which the United States had not yet joined, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) on June 27, 1940, with Vannevar Bush as its chairman. James B. Conant, the President of Harvard, was appointed head of Division B, which was responsible for bombs, fuels, gases, and chemicals. He appointed Kistiakowsky to head its Section A-1, which was concerned with explosives. In June 1941, the NDRC was absorbed into the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Bush became chairman of the OSRD, Conant succeeded him as chairman of the NDRC, and Kistiakowsky became head of Section B. In a reorganization in December 1942, Division B was broken up, and he became head of Division 8, which was responsible for explosives and propellants, remaining in this position until February 1944.
Kistiakowsky was unhappy with the state of American knowledge of explosives and propellants. Conant established the Explosives Research Laboratory (ERL) near the laboratories of the Bureau of Mines in Bruceton, Pennsylvania in October 1940, and Kistiakowsky initially supervised its activities, making occasional visits; but Conant did not formally appoint him as its technical director until the spring of 1941. Although initially hampered by a shortage of facilities, the ERL grew from five staff in 1941 to a wartime peak of 162 full-time laboratory staff in 1945. An important field of research was RDX. This powerful explosive had been developed by the Germans before the war. The challenge was to develop an industrial process that could produce it on a large scale. RDX was also mixed with TNT to produce Composition B, which was widely used in various munitions, and torpex, which was used in torpedoes and depth charges. Pilot plants were in operation by May 1942, and large-scale production followed in 1943.
In response to a special request for an explosive that could be smuggled through Japanese checkpoints by Chinese guerrillas, Kistakowsky mixed HMX, a non-toxic explosive produced as a by-product of the RDX process, with flour to create "Aunt Jemima", after a brand of pancake flour. This was an edible explosive, which could pass for regular flour, and even be used in cooking.
In addition to research into synthetic explosives like RDX and HMX, the ERL investigated the properties of detonations and shock waves. This was initiated as a pure research project, without obvious or immediate applications. Kistiakowsky visited England in 1941 and again in 1942, where he met with British experts, including William Penney and Geoffrey Taylor. When Kistiakowsky and Edgar Bright Wilson, Jr., surveyed the existing state of knowledge, they found several areas that warranted further investigation. Kistiakowsky began to look into the Chapman–Jouguet model, which describes the way the shock wave created by a detonation propagates.
At this time, the efficacy of the Chapman–Jouguet model was still in doubt, and it was the subject of studies by John von Neumann at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Kistiakowsky realized that the deviations from hydrodynamic theory were the result of the speed of the chemical reactions themselves. To control the reaction, calculations down to the microsecond level were needed. Section 8 was drawn into the investigation of shaped charges, whose mechanism was explained by Taylor and James Tuck in 1943.
Manhattan Project.
At the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, research into implosion had been proceeding under Seth Neddermeyer, but his division had worked with cylinders and small charges, and had produced only objects that looked like rocks. Their research was accorded a low priority, owing to expectations that a gun-type nuclear weapon design would work for both uranium-235 and plutonium, and implosion technology would not be required.
In September 1943, the Los Alamos Laboratory's director, Robert Oppenheimer, arranged for von Neumann to visit Los Alamos and investigate implosion with a fresh set of eyes. After reviewing Neddermeyer's studies, and discussing the matter with Edward Teller, von Neumann suggested the use of high explosive in shaped charges to implode a sphere, which he showed could not only result in a faster assembly of fissile material than was possible with the gun method, but greatly reduce the amount of material required. The prospect of more efficient nuclear weapons impressed Oppenheimer, Teller and Hans Bethe, but they decided that an expert on explosives was required. Kistiakowsky's name was immediately suggested, and he was brought into the project as a consultant in October 1943.
Kistiakowsky was initially reluctant to come, "partly because", he later explained, "I didn't think the bomb would be ready in time and I was interested in helping to win the war". At Los Alamos, he began reorganizing the implosion effort. He introduced techniques such as photography and X-rays to study the behavior of shaped charges. The former had been extensively employed by the ERL, while the latter had been described in papers by Tuck, who also suggested using three-dimensional explosive lenses. As with other aspects of the Manhattan Project, research into explosive lenses followed multiple lines of inquiry simultaneously because, as Kistiakowsky noted, it was "impossible to predict which of these basic techniques will be the more successful."
Kistiakowsky brought with him to Los Alamos a detailed knowledge of all the studies into shaped charges, of explosives like Composition B, and of the procedures used at the ERL in 1942 and 1943. Increasingly, the ERL itself would be drawn into the implosion effort; its deputy director Duncan MacDougall also took charge of the Manhattan Project's Project Q. Kistiakowsky replaced Neddermeyer as head of E (for explosives) Division in February 1944.
The implosion program acquired a new urgency after Emilio Segrè's group at Los Alamos verified that plutonium produced in the nuclear reactors contained plutonium-240, which made it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. A series of crisis meetings in July 1944 concluded that the only prospect for a working plutonium weapon was implosion. In August, Oppenheimer reorganized the entire laboratory to concentrate on it. A new explosives group, X Division, was created under Kistiakowsky to develop the lenses.
Under Kistiakowsky's leadership, X-Division designed the complex explosive lenses needed to compress the fissile plutonium pit. These employed two explosives with significantly different velocities of detonation in order to produce the required waveform. Kistiakowsky chose Baratol for the slow explosive. After experimenting with various fast explosives, X-Division settled on Composition B. Work on molding the explosives into the right shape continued into 1945. The lenses needed to be flawless, and techniques for casting Composition B and Baratol had to be developed. The ERL managed to accomplish this by devising a procedure for preparing Baratol in a form that was easy to cast. In March 1945, Kistiakowsky became part of the Cowpuncher Committee, so-called because it rode herd on the implosion effort. On July 16, 1945, Kistiakowsky watched as the first device was detonated in the Trinity test. A few weeks later, a Fat Man implosion-type nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki.
Along with his work on implosion, Kistiakowsky contributed to skiing in Los Alamos by using rings of explosives to fell trees for a ski slope — leading to the establishment of Sawyer's Hill Ski Tow Association. He divorced Hildegard in 1942 and married Irma E. Shuler in 1945. They were divorced in 1962, and he married Elaine Mahoney.
White House service.
In 1957, during the Eisenhower Administration, Kistiakowsky was appointed to the President's Science Advisory Committee, and succeeded James R. Killian as chairman in 1959. He directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1959 to 1961, when he was succeeded by Jerome B. Wiesner.
In 1958, Kistiakowsky suggested to President Eisenhower that inspection of foreign military facilities was not sufficient to control their nuclear weapons. He cited the difficulty in monitoring missile submarines, and proposed that the arms control strategy focus on disarmament rather than inspections. In January 1960, as part of arms control planning and negotiation, he suggested the "threshold concept". Under this proposal, all nuclear tests above the level of seismic detection technology would be forbidden. After such an agreement, the US and USSR would work jointly to improve detection technology, revising the permissible test yield downward as techniques improved. This example of the "national means of technical verification", a euphemism for sensitive intelligence collection used in arms control, would provide safeguards, without raising the on-site inspection requirement to a level unacceptable to the Soviets. The US introduced the threshold concept to the Soviets at the Geneva arms control conference in January 1960 and the Soviets, in March, responded favorably, suggesting a threshold of a given seismic magnitude. Talks broke down as a result of the U-2 Crisis of 1960 in May.
At the same time as the early nuclear arms control work, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Nathan F. Twining, sent a memorandum, in August 1959, to the Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, which suggested that the Strategic Air Command (SAC) formally be assigned responsibility to prepare the national nuclear target list, and a single plan for nuclear operations. Up to that point, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had done their own target planning. This had led to the same objectives being targeted multiple times by the different services. The separate service plans were not mutually supporting as in, for example, the Navy destroying an air defense facility on the route of an Air Force bomber going to a deeper target. While Twining had sent the memo to McElroy, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed on the policy during early 1960. Thomas Gates, who succeeded McElroy, asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower to decide the policy.
Eisenhower said he would not "leave his successor with the monstrosity" of the uncoordinated and un-integrated forces that then existed. In early November 1960, he sent Kistiakowsky to SAC Headquarters in Omaha to evaluate its war plans. Initially, Kistiakowsky was not given access, and Eisenhower sent him back, with a much stronger set of orders for SAC officers to cooperate. Kistiakowsky's report, presented on November 29, described uncoordinated plans with huge numbers of targets, many of which would be attacked by multiple forces, resulting in overkill. Eisenhower was shocked by the plans, and focused not just on the creation of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), but on the entire process of picking targets, generating requirements, and planning for nuclear war operations.
Later life.
Between his work for the Manhattan Project and his White House service, and again after he left the White House, Kistiakowsky was a professor of physical chemistry at Harvard. When asked to teach a freshman class in 1957, he turned to Hubert Alyea, whose lecture style had impressed him. Alyea sent him some 700 index cards containing details of lecture demonstrations. Aside from the cards, Kistiakowsky never prepared the demonstrations. He later recalled:<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />I didn't think that was giving mother Nature a sporting chance. I would come into the lecture hall, glance at the chemicals and pile of cards and announce to the students "let's see what Alyea has for us today". I never used a text book, only your cards. I would glance at the instructions and carry out the experiment. If it worked we would bless you and pass on to the next demonstration. If it didn't work we would curse you, and spend the rest of the lecture trying to make it work. He retired from Harvard as professor emeritus in 1972.
From 1962 to 1965, Kistiakowsky chaired the National Academy of Science's Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), and was its vice president from 1965 to 1973. He received several awards over the years, including the Department of the Air Force Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service in 1957. He was awarded the Medal for Merit by President Truman, the Medal of Freedom by President Eisenhower in 1961, and the National Medal of Science by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. He was also a recipient the Charles Lathrop Parsons Award for public service from the American Chemical Society in 1961, Priestley Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1972, and the Franklin Medal from Harvard.
 In later years, Kistiakowsky was active in an antiwar organization, the Council for a Livable World. He severed his connections with the government in protest against the US involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1977, he assumed the chairmanship of the council, campaigning against nuclear proliferation. He died of cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1982. His body was cremated, and his ashes scattered near his summer home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. His papers are in the Harvard University archives. He is also memorialized by a redwood grove in Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve in California.
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Edward Teller
American physicist (1908–2003)
Edward Teller (; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian and American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design based on Stanisław Ulam's design. He had a volatile personality, and according to Richard Rhodes in his book "Dark Sun", was "driven by his megaton ambitions, had a messianic complex, and displayed autocratic behavior." A thermonuclear design he devised was an Alarm Clock model bomb with a yield of 1000 MT (1 GT of TNT) and proposed delivering it by boat or submarine. It would be capable of incinerating an entire continent. To David Lilienthal (chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission), men such as Teller and Ernest Lawrence might have appeared to be a "a group of scientists who can only be described as drooling with the prospect [of nuclear war] and 'bloodthirsty'."
Born in Austria-Hungary in 1908, Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, one of the many so-called "Martians", a group of prominent Hungarian scientist émigrés. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. According to Freeman Dyson, Teller thought about his problems using basic principles of physics and often discussed with other cohorts to make headway through difficult problems. This was seen when he worked with Stanislaw Ulam to get a workable thermonuclear fusion bomb design (a solution to Teller's own classical thermonuclear bomb proposal) but later temperamentally (and with fury) dismissed Ulam's aid. Herbert York stated that Teller utilized Ulam's general idea of compression and heating to start thermonuclear fusion to generate his own sketch of a "Super" bomb that would work. Prior to Ulam's idea, Teller's classical Super was essentially a system for heating (using a fission bomb primary) uncompressed liquid deuterium to the point, Teller hoped, when it would sustain thermonuclear burning. It was, in essence a simple idea from physical principles, which Teller pursued with a ferocious tenacity even if he was wrong or shown that it wouldn't work. To get support from Washington for his Super weapon project, Teller proposed a boosted nuclear fission explosion as the "George" shot of Operation Greenhouse.
Teller made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics and the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature in Bayesian statistics. Teller was an early member of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. He made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons, but ultimately fusion bombs only appeared after World War II. He co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was its director or associate director. After his controversial negative testimony in the Oppenheimer security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific community ostracized Teller.
Teller continued to find support from the US government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. In his later years, he advocated controversial technological solutions to military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using a thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot, and Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Teller was a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award and the Albert Einstein Award. He died on September 9, 2003, in Stanford, California, at 95.
Early life and work.
Ede Teller was born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Ilona (née Deutsch), a pianist, and Miksa Teller, an attorney. He attended the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest. Teller was an agnostic. "Religion was not an issue in my family", he later wrote, "indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for