The terrain is made out of sand. The hills are the dunes. That is almost pure sand. But the only thing that can be grown there without destroying the terrain is something that lives off the native grasses, and that is cattle. You try turning the soil lower, and is simply blows away. So, thats the sandhills dedicated to growing cattle. My father raced purebreds. The ranch was too small to support a family on raising beef cattle. He raised breeding stock. That was the enterprise i was born into. It was, i have an older brother and sister. Both of them now dead. My brother was 10 years older and my sister six years older but they both started school, and as long as we lived on the ranch, they attended a oneroom schoolhouse halfmile away. So, most often the schoolteacher lived in our home. And all three of them would get on their horses in the morning and ride up the valley to go to school. I thought it was a little ridiculous, but the important thing was to get out of the house. And so, thats how they lived the first few years of their lives. And when my brother came of age to go to high school, then, and i was just about ready to start school, we moved to gordon nebraska, a town 25 miles to the west. And so, all of my k12 education was in gordon, nebraska. And this is, this part of the world is just south of the pine ridge indian reservation. So there are a lot of sioux indians around. And my father was always rather close to them. He understood them. As a young teenager, he had bothered to learn their language. So he was really a great friend of the indians, which is very rare for white people in those days. The net result of that was that he was, in 1937, he became an honorary sioux indian chief. Chief eagle star. I think, to my knowledge, he was the only nonpolitician that has ever been recognized in such a way. So, he received on that occasional full headdress of eagle feathers. All the way to the ground behind. And i inherited that. And just a couple years ago i presented it to the local library as part of their western United States collection. And so, thats now out of my hands. But they take good care of these things. Then after high school, i went to shattering State College which was shaderin State College, there is a geological formation called a shaderin formation. It is named for the formation. That it is where the, where the high plains start to break away into the Lower Country in south dakota. And that is what forms the pine ridge escarpment. Hence, the name pine ridge. Pine trees grow along the escarpment. So, its part of the formation. So, i guess, the only thing i emphasize here is that indians were always there he much present in my young life. I never learned the language which, unfortunately, but it was an interesting thing to have about. Interesting culture to have about. I went to State College. And i graduated from high school in 1940. Of course, in december 1941, you know what happened. And all of us who were 18 years of old new precisely what was going to happen to us. And i did try to volunteer for the air force but was turned down for being colorblind. And so i decided it that time just to wait it out and get as much college as i could before being drafted. That is what i did. So, eventually, i was, in march, 1943, i was drafted in wyoming. Sent to utah for basic training. And then after that, after basic training, the army was just starting their specialized training program. And so, i was taken out of regular army units and sent to astp, the unit in what is now carnegie mellon. Then carnegie tech in pittsburgh. And i was, i had the choice of going into four different areas. Chemical engineering, electoral engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering. Id already taken most of the i concentrated very heavily on chemistry and physics and mathematics in my undergraduate work. The one thing i could learn something and was electrical engineering, so i opted for that. So, eventually, that program, well, in january of 1944, the pressures for manpower were being felt in the army. So they disbanded most of the aftp across the country. And most of my pals went off to the 95th infantry. Then were subsequent part of the european enterprise. There were a number of us left behind. And i was one of those, sent to los alamos to work as basically the technician. So that was in december, 1944. So, there i was in the army. And part of a unit called the special engineering detachment. And i was immediately assigned to work for a member of the british mission. So, very quickly i became this right of left hand man. However you want to describe ernie had a flair to getting involved in interesting things. And i was always there. I dont know if youre interested in what i did a los alamos are not. Absolutely. Val when i arrived they were just getting, being seriously involved in the fusion im sorry, the implosion program. There as is well known they were detonating explosives in such a way as to produce a shock wave, spherical shockwave going inward to compress plutonium to a critical point. And timing of all of these explosive was all important. And so, i was very much involved in developing the timing apparatus for measuring when the shock wave passes a certain point. So that is what i did. We did all of the electronics for doing that. And also made some of the measurements. I should say as an aside that it was a time in my life when, well, the sads are a very unusual unit. There was a lot of talent. I made very good friends just among the people at the one end of the barracks. And there was gunner thornton. Who had immigrated, his parents had brought him from norway when he was 10 years old. There was hans, perhaps that name brings about with you. The son of the famous mathematician. And our, still, after all these years, i still communicate all the time. When he left los alamos to go to mit after the war, he had a girlfriend at los alamos. He assigned me the job of taking care of his girlfriend. This i did. We eventually were married, as a matter of fact. So, that was a nice story. But also, i learned to ski. This norwegian i had to learn to ski. And also at that end of that there is, a member of the dartmouth ski team. So i had lots of good instruction on skiing. So that became, every sunday, we would go out to sawyer field to ski. The many of the famous physicist were also skiers. You name them, they were probably on the ski slopes with us. I probably had more interaction with these famous papal people on the ski slopes than i did in the laboratory, as a matter of fact. In the spring of 1945, elaborate testing was underway with dummy bombs put in b29s at Wendover Air Force base which was just on the nevadautah border, near salt lake city. The technique was to load the dummy bombs in b29s there and drop them over the salted sea where to love it too would pick up the signals from the falling objects. And tell people what was going on inside the dummy bomb as far as the timing mechanisms, whether they were functioning correctly. So, in the sprin gof 1945, i was one of those sent to wendover. Another s. E. D. I worked with, we set up a laboratory on the field to initiate this Testing Program. And also to educate some of the army officer so they could carry it on after we left. So that was my first exposure to, to b29s and bombs and all that. But in my memory, i went to wendover from Kirkland Air Force base in albuquerque. [coughs] and riding in an old b17 bomber. And we were just over the mountains, and they were not far below, the second engine went out. So, we were asked to get on parachutes. And so on. So, it was quite a trip. In that respect. But it was also characterized by the fact that during world war ii if you were ever out of uniform, you are automatically thought to be a deserter. So we were required to wear uniform at all times. All those in the military. But there was a special dispensation for us. This group of s. E. D. s who went out to wendover. For security purposes, we had to play the role of good scientists from washington. So, we were given money and we went down to santa fe and bought civilian clothes. And including shoes. In order to have something to wear at wendover. I still have this piece of paper they have given me permission to wear civilian clothes. One of the memos that means a much at the time. So much at the time. In any event, then it was not long after we came back that we went to trinity to start the Testing Program there. And initially, as you know, the first test was setting off 100 tons of tnt. With that, we tested all the far he mechanisms and so want to make sure the signals were getting through, all that. The main control for the test was, the bunker was 10,000 yards, which is slightly less than six miles. From the gadget itself. And so, it was a job of his group to send up a signal to detonate the thing. At the appropriate time. But also to send preliminary signals into groups that needed signals in anticipation of the thing going off. Photographers had to open their shutters. A few milliseconds before him. We did the fast timing. Actually another name elmore did the slow timing which consisted of a rotating drum picking up signals. So, we did the fast timing and sending out the main detonation pulse at the end of the timing interval. By we, i mean in the main control bunker there was just titterton and myself. We did have a technician. His name was calvin benton. He helped out hauling things around, putting things together. On the other, the fourth member of the team was russ. And his prime concern was the apparatus that we used to measure the simultaneity of which all the detonators were fired on the bomb itself. There were 32 of them, and it was our job to measure the degree of simultaneity of those detonators fired. That was where my previous experience had come in. Russ was in charge of the recording of that data, done in a bunker half a mile west of the tower. So we had to pull in all of the apparatus to make those measurements. Got all that stuff ready, running cables up to the tower, to the bomb, to carry signals back to the recording apparatus. So that was the secretary measurement four of us, plus, including the technician. That is what we were doing. Actually, it was two or three days after the test when lowry made a very quick trip into the book or to retrieve the film in which the data was recorded. And unfortunately, when it was developed, it fell radiation had just been too much for it. And it blasted it. And when the bomb went off, the blast had taken all the earth that it piled over this bunker and threw it back at it. And threw it off the bunker totally. Between that bunker which was a halfmile west, and the sand had been turned to glass. So, when the time to set off the bomb approach, we were at the main control bunker. And lowry was back at base camp, which was five miles further away. And i do not know if you have seen photographs of those places, but they are rather interesting. I have some upstairs if you would like to see them. But just as far as our timing measurements are concerned, that was all done automatically, of course. One of measuring times in milliseconds. Cant be somebody throwing a switch. Had to be automatic. That was all an automatic mode. Then titterton suggested maybe if i wanted to go out and take a look at what was going on, go ahead, because he could not do anything about it. So i went outside the bunker and around to the east side. There were two or three others who went out. Left the bunker and went out to get a good view. Of course, i had this glass to cover my eyes with. Which i also kept as a memento of the occasion. But sprawled out on the ground with the glass over my eyes. Of course, initially, i was looking away from the tower. But that enormous flash of light, of course, just over overcame any lack of transparency. It is just, it is the most surprising thing of all. A fantastic flash of light. Then, of course, you see the dust cloud and the ball slowly rising off the ground. This Mushroom Cloud eventually. So i got up to, got up off the ground to get a better view. Totally forgetting that the shockwave had yet to arrive. So, i take only 30 might microseconds for the light to arrive but it takes 30 seconds for the shock way to arrive shock wave to arrive. I had plenty of time to get back down on the ground and hear that fierce rumble. First that blast, and then the rumble of the sound off the nearby mountains. It was hard to overstate the impact on the senses for Something Like that. First the flash of light. That fireball the Mushroom Cloud rising thousands of feet in the sky. And then a long time afterwards, the sound, the rumble, the thunder in the mountains. Words have not been invented to describe it in any accurate way. So one thing you allude and something i quoted when i wrote a piece about the experience, read, you put in your book about the Manhattan Project, apple is a f it was over, people started milling about and coming in out of the bunker, and there was an mp on duty at the door. A single mp. He was supposedly there to control access, even though it had to mainly symbolism, because the security was just of course, the mp did not know anyone. But in any event, i saw him absolutely ashen faced. And i simply remarked, the war will soon be over. I was right, fortunately. I stayed around for two or three days to pack up equipment and take the stuff back to los alamos. And we were driving an army panel truck. Len was driving, as we were leaving the place we had to go past where the tower had been to leave the site, so as we were passing by the tower, we rode past perhaps a mile west of where the tower had been, we turned up the road towards where the tower had been, past that small bunker that we had instrumented a halfmile west. And there the cable we had so laboriously strung to the tower were flung back over the bunker, and all of the earth that had been piled on top was gone. It was just sitting there bare. Drove on a bit further to where the sand had been turned to glass. I pull the little box out of the back that contained a transformer and i reached down and scooped up some of the glassy material. And then, we did not know what the radiation level was, but thought it was a good time to get out of there. That we did. So, i still have some of that trinitite that i picked up myself. It was a couple years after that i went back to los alamos to work for the summer. And i came across a stockroom, an old stockroom where stuff was stored. The circuit we had used to put the signal on the line to trigger the bomb, the basic trigger the highvoltage trigger i do not know maybe 2000 volts to make sure it got through. And so, at the time, i was wondering, well, may be a should call that to somebodys attention because no one else knows what that is. But, of course, i did not do it. It was scrapped with Everything Else at one time or another. I was discharged almost exactly three years after i entered the army from texas. And then went back and worked at los alamos to make some money doing the same job i had before, but this time making a reasonable amount of money. And i had none. So saving money for college was important. So i worked there for another year and a half after being discharged. Let me say more about the s. E. D. s, because theyre not properly advertise. Virtually nothing to say about the s. E. D. s in that otherwise fine book. By the end of the war, 50 of the technical personnel were s. E. D. s. They lived in barracks, ate in the mess hall. Worked in the Technical Area for civilians. When we were in the Technical Area, military could not touch us. But of course, we ate in mess halls and slept in the barracks, and any time you have 60 to 120 men collected the army is pretty good about making sure that a certain amount of order is kept. So, friday night scrub sessions, cleaning out down in the barracks. And saturday morning inspections. When i first arrived, there were 6 00 calisthenics. That was discontinued. His group, which was involved in producing the lenses for the implosion gadget was staffed s. E. Ds. Y stds he was worried working more closely than anyone else in the logic. He was concerned about the way they were treated. He was expecting them to work 24 hours a day. They had all of this other. Onsense to do he complained about the attitude of the military that was there, complaints directly to the and threatens to leave the place it was not changed. So after the complaint, things were muchformed and it became a easier life. We do not have to wake up at 6 00 a. M. We did not have any kp or anything like that. The mess hall was staffed by indigenous labor supervised by a drill sergeant. As staffed by we no longer had to clean the clean the latrines. Hat was not our sensibility one job we always had was keeping the stoves going in the wintertime. Any generic there was three or four potbellied stoves in the center aisle on either side. In the center i love the barracks. Those fires to keep going in the wintertime. Los alamosa is a wonderful climate but it gets a fair amount of snow in the one to time. He gets rather cool. In our barracks, we hired one of our members to do the job. He was happy to do it. He had more money to send home. He took care of the stove. We just checked in. Hats we just chipped in. He had been a member of the dartmouth ski team. When you look at some of the. Ds, he liveds. E my barracks that the other end. Then there was peter wax who became a wellknown mathematician. The mathematicians finally set up a prize equivalent to a nobel prize. He became the first one. London Museum Interested in the exhibit coming their way. This o talk about how what the british contribution was. Val i am glad u. S. That question. There is a great tendency in this country to forget about that component and their contributions. There is a book about it. Byook that has been written a professor of history at the university of new mexico in albuquerque. He has a rather peculiar name. One can take off the names. Niels bohr was one of the members of the british mission. And chadwick. Chadwick was the leader. Tony french was going to be. Peaking at st. Louis he is taking my place, as a matter of fact. Then there was otto frisch. One of the authors of that that showed that it was possible to make bombs. He himself was a member. Interestingly enough, they were because theyis cannot wake on work on the secret things in britain at the time. They denied clearance. They were working on the ramifications of the fission process. T was totally unclassified they could play around with it. They cannot work on radar which they should have been doing. They had this time available. They chose to work on the ramifications of fission. I once talked to him about the report the put together. They had calculated a