Transcripts For CSPAN3 Oral Histories 20240622

Have noteworthy careers including several nobel prize winners. Fromirst, Cynthia Kelly the Atomic Heritage Foundation, discusses the origins and purposes of their oral history collection. The voices of the Manhattan Project is a website that contains 300 oral histories and we hoped someday will be the central repository of the memories of the Manhattan Project veterans. Tell us about the Manhattan Project itself. It was the effort in world war ii by the United States and its allies, primarily Great Britain and canada, to build an atomic bomb. Manhattan, just as you think, its after that island and now its part of new york city. But the project was run by the army corps of engineers, and while they toyed with a name that would be Something Like special materials project, and thought such a name would arouse suspicion, because it was sort of clumsy. Thehey follow traditions of army corps of engineers and name the project after the place where the projects headquarters were. And its headquarters were to 70 broadway in lower manhattan. It was called the manhattan engineering district, and for short, the Manhattan Project. The Atomic Heritage Foundation partnered to create the oral history project. Tells us a little bit about the organization. I founded the Atomic Heritage Foundation in 2002, especially for the purpose to preserve the Manhattan Project and its Historic Site to try to create a Manhattan Project National Historical park and to preserve its history. We partner with the las alamos historical society, which has its roots in the 1960s. Its mission is to interpret the history of los alamos. What got us started was a grant from the institute for museum and library services. That may does eligible for the grant that established the Manhattan Project site. I started in 2002. I understood it was a quickly aging population. Ironically, we had these interviews for 10 years or more before we had the funding to create the website. Did the end of the cold war make this project possible . Cindy the end of the cold war was the signal to ramped down the Nuclear Weapons complex. There was funding provided to clean up the environmental contamination at the former weapons sites. Some of them are still active today. The cold war got it started. Tell us a little bit about the people behind the Manhattan Project. Did they know what they were doing . Cindy the Manhattan Project must have employed Something Like 600,000 people over the course of the three years that it operated. It was a very short project, but it built the equivalent of the panama canal. They were laborers recruited from all over the country. They were construction workers. None of those people knew what they were doing. All of these hundreds of thousands of people kept the secret because they didnt know what the secret was. They came to work because after the depression many people were just subsistence farmers or driven off their firms in the midwest. To have a steady paycheck was an attractive proposition. There were top scientists who had fled the persecution of the nazi regime in europe. We benefited from the antisemitism that hitler and his allies represented. We had the leading scientists and physics of the day. J robert oppenheimer, who was in charge of the research would be enough. At los alamos alone, there were 5000 people. They supplemented the senior people with kids who had just finished a year or two of college, may have had some chemistry, mathematics, or physics, and passed an aptitude exam that show they were intelligent and capable. These young people were recruited in 1943 and 1944 and were sent to work on the project as junior scientists. They were a very young population. And a very ethnically diverse population. Cindy there were. There were many africanamericans who work at oak ridge, tennessee. There were hispanic laborers in new mexico and some people from the pueblos surrounding los alamos worked often as nannies or housekeepers, so that the wives of the scientists could help their husbands on the project itself. 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 . Cindy the first thing we did was have an event in washington dc to remember the Manhattan Project. While we were running the program that cspan covered, which was lovely, i and announced that there was a videographer in the library, please tell your story. There were many who came to remember the Manhattan Project, we recorded the first 1012 histories. Then we had the project to film the story at hanford. While we were there, we went far beyond what the script of the film was going to be an interviewed anybody i could identify, because i knew this was a moment in time that these participants, who were then in their mid to late 80s, with not live forever and we needed to capture them. Whether any particular themes that started to emerge in the interview . Cindy its interesting that the people all saw this as one of the most formative times in their lives. They were working on a project they were told would help in the war. Many of them have brothers, uncles, fathers, or sisters and mothers who were involved in the front lines in your and in europe and sent to the pacific. They were in the heat of the battles. They felt that through this project they were going to help bring them home alive if they possibly could, so they were very dedicated, motivated, hardworking. It was a 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 follow them in later decades about the use of Nuclear Weapons . Cindy there were many people who said they did not talk about what they did. It was only when i caught them in their late 80s, early 90s, that they were opening up to their families, some of the families prevailed almost to come and meet with them and draw them out about this. Others simply refused to participate. They werent comfortable and recording their memories force on camera, but i think they were not yet comfortable with the project and how it made them feel. Were there any stories that stand out in particular for you . Cindy there are so many stories that it is hard to know where to start. There was one who was a young man and was chosen to babysit the bomb, called the gadget, the first test bomb that was on a 100 foot 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 he did not know what happened if lightning hit the bomb in some way, but they needed someone out on the tower in case someone snuck up and pulled one plug, it might fail. He had to sit up there all by himself not knowing whether lightning would hit him with the gadget and be gone or not. How can people find these interviews . How do they search the online database . Cindy you can get on by typing in Manhattan Project voices, then there will be the website and it will have a search category. You can search by name, category, across all of the interviews, to find a person, place, subject matter you are most interested in. How should people approach these interviews . They are part of the historical record of the atomic age. What should people keep in mind as they watch these recollections . Cindy people should remember that these are personal memories, and most of the people talking about events that happened 20 years, or in some cases, 60 or 70 years earlier, and memo a