Deceased--Lewis Worth Seagondollar

Lewis Worth Seagondollar
1921 to September 20th, 2013

"Emporian who worked on Atomic Bomb remembered"

by

Bobbi Mlynar

October 5th, 2013

The Emporia Gazette

Former Emporian and well known physicist Dr. Lewis Worth Seagondollar has died in Raleigh, N.C. The death occurred on Sept. 20, 2013, just short of his 93rd birthday anniversary.

Seagondollar, a graduate of then-Kansas State Teachers College, worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.

He had moved with his parents to Emporia from Hoisington when he was 3 years old and lived here until he graduated from KSTC in 1941, now known as Emporia State University.

His lifetime work in physics brought him recognition and respect in the scientific community worldwide.

Dr. DeWayne Backhus of Emporia State University had met Seagondollar on several occasions and had been his host when Seagondollar returned to ESU in April 1993 as part of a panel of Distinguished Alumni.

Seagondollar had been among several outstanding students of former KSTC /ESU professor Dr. S. Winston Cram in the early 1940s. Cram had “turned out top-flight physicists for more than 20 years,” according to an article published in The Gazette in 1995. “The scientists, most of them male, were known in the physics community as ‘Cram’s Boys.’” Many of them went on to become leaders in their field.

Giant in science

“In fact, we invited three stellar graduates from that early World War II period who were known as ‘Cram’s Boys’ back for an event,” Backhus said. “(Seagondollar) was a modest person but his record of accomplishments really spoke for itself. ...

“You knew when you were in his presence, he was a person who had rubbed shoulders with some of the true giants in physics during that Manhattan project period. And then his career after he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin was in the wake of not just World War II, but in the Cold War period and then ultimately in those decades that followed Sputnik,” the Earth’s first artificial satellite, launched by the U.S.S.R.

Seagondollar’s ongoing contribution to science is commemorated through the Seagondollar Award, a national honor given to an exceptional undergraduate student in physics, Backhus said.

Seagondollar had seemed to be on the physics fast track after graduating with a bachelor’s degree from KSTC. In addition to working at Los Alamos, after earning a doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin, he had worked his way from instructor to professor at the University of Kansas between 1947 and 1945. He was professor and head of the department at North Carolina State University and later had been professor emeritus and radiation safety officer. During summers in the 1950s and 1960s, he had been a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, a consultant at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and a physicist for General Electric Co.’s Hanford Laboratory at Richland, Wash.

Second chance
The job on the Manhattan Project, however, almost escaped him, according to an Aug. 7, 1995, article that marked the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

The story, picked up by the Associated Press and published in The Gazette, originated from an interview by the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C.

The article described Seagondollar as “a kid from Emporia who had enjoyed the simplicity of physics.”

He’d considered Los Alamos “the best place to be” at a time when leading scientists of the day were working on atomic bomb research with the code name of the Manhattan Project.

“Los Alamos in 1944 was the Hollywood of the science industry,” the article stated. “The stars were some of the foremost physicists in the world -- Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi."

Seagondollar first had been invited to Los Alamos in 1942, but his job was canceled two hours before his train was scheduled to leave the station.

“Too many people already, said Gen. Leslie Groves, the army commander overseeing the atomic research,” the article explained.

Los Alamos called Seagondollar again in the spring of 1944 and this time, the offer stayed in place.

Plutonium. Oops!

As the newest physicist on the project, Seagondollar worked the night shift, doing experiments that involved snapping plutonium hemispheres around a radioactive core; it resembled closing a plastic Easter egg. Then, he would record how many plutonium atoms the radioactive core had smashed, the article stated. ,

“The size of the plutonium spheres grew over time, from the size of a ping pong ball to the size of a softball, approaching critical mass, the point at which the fragments of atoms would break apart more and more atoms -- a sustained nuclear reaction,” the 1995 article said.

One drop of plutonium was capable of giving a healthy man cancer. For this reason, it was always sealed in a thin coating to keep it from leaking. Armed guards in the laboratory watched every move to ensure that no one smuggled any plutonium out of the laboratory.

“About 2:30 on morning, Seagondollar dropped one of the spheres,” the article stated. “He doesn’t remember how it happened -- he may have stumbled or lost concentration momentarily -- but he remembers watching the two hemispheres fall. One half he caught. The other dented as it hit a table. The two halves would not fit together."

“’What do you do when you’re scared?’ he said to the interviewer. ‘I felt like throwing up.’ “

He grabbed a hammer and carefully tapped the dent out so the two halves fit.

Witness to first test

Later, Seagondollar was one of a few members of his team to participate in the first atomic test at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945. He had worn a pair of welder’s goggles to protect his eyes from the glare of the blast, but traded them for a thick piece of blue glass.

The scientist-spectators were told to look away from the blast for at least 15 seconds, to avoid blindness. Still, the blast was so overwhelming that Seagondollar at first thought he had forgotten to wear the blue glass.

“I don’t think the noonday sun is that bright. The air was glowing all around,” he said in the 1995 article.

He was instructed not to utter a word about the test. The after-effects of bomb awed Seagondollar when he re-visited the site about a month later.

“The desert had melted and solidified into green glass. Lead bricks out there had been reduced to the size of bars of soap,” he told the interviewer.

Intending the war’s end

It was a plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, less than two years after Seagondollar joined the Manhattan Project. Three days before, the U.S. had dropped a bomb made using uranium on Hiroshima.

Seagondollar had been working in his lab in Los Alamos on Aug. 6, 1945, when the Hiroshima bombing was announced over the camp’s loudspeaker.

“It’s not comfortable to think of the misery you did cause,” he was quoted as saying in the News & Record article. “I take no great pride in helping kill a great number of Japanese men, women and children.”

Almost half of Hiroshima’s population died outright or within six months after the bomb was dropped.

Balancing the regret was the hope that the bomb would bring a quick end to the war with Japan.

As good as it gets

For his work on the Manhattan Project and his subsequent ongoing contributions to his field, Seagondollar earned numerous honors. Among them was Honorary Member status at an induction ceremony conducted by Sigma Pi Sigma, National Physics Honor Society, in 2004.

“Only distinguished scientists who have made a lifetime of valuable contributions to physics at the national level are eligible for Honorary status,” according to a letter from Sigma Pi Sigma.

Seagondollar, a member of Sigma Pi Sigma, also had served as its president from 1962-1968.

The significance of the Honorary Member status, Backhus said, may lie in the company of other scientists inducted in the same ceremony with Seagondollar.

“When he was given an honorary membership to Sigma Pi Sigma, another (recipient) was the president’s science advisor, and there was a Nobel Laureate in there, and there was a professor from MIT. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that crowd,” Backhus said.

“And his roots were in our community. That’s probably as good as we can get.”

"They helped start atomic age"

by

Jay Price

August 6th, 2010

NewsObserver.com

Sixty-five years ago today, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico, the public address system at a secret facility called Site Y - now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory - crackled to life.

Worth Seagondollar paused, along with hundreds of other scientists, engineers and technicians who had been working for years to figure out how to create the first nuclear bombs.

"Attention, please. Attention, please," the announcer said. "One of our units has just been successfully dropped on Japan."

That was it. No details about the destruction or even the name of the city that had been struck, Hiroshima.

But Seagondollar, 89, who now lives at Springmoor retirement center in North Raleigh, was one of only a handful of people who had seen an atomic bomb blast firsthand, and he knew that the world was suddenly much different.

Thousands of people had probably died in an instant, and a new weapon had been unleashed that allowed humans to kill each other in vast numbers. But it also surely meant the end of the most horrific war in world history and of the global march of fascism.

"I didn't have any feelings of regret at all," he said in an interview this week. "My feeling was that it was the beginning of the end of the Japanese war, and it was."

Later that day at another Manhattan Project site, Oak Ridge in the Tennessee mountains, Raymond Murray came home to his hastily-built government house where his wife had learned a secret he had been keeping. She had heard about the bomb on the radio.

"I finally know what you've been doing all this time," she said.

Seagondollar and Murray both later came to teach at N.C. State University's physics department and became department heads. By coincidence, Murray, now 90, also lives at Springmoor, making that retirement center an unusual repository of the memories of how the atomic age was born.

Murray and Seagondollar have given many talks on the bomb program, and Murray still makes annual presentations to groups of high school students who come to NCSU each summer and to a group at MIT.

Many of those who were in the heart of the Manhattan Project - the formal name of the U.S. effort to beat Germany in the race to building nuclear weapons - are gone now. Murray and Seagondollar were unusually young when they were recruited into the project, both in their early 20s.

Youngsters in new field

Nuclear science was young, too. Fission had been discovered just three years earlier, in 1939, and there were only a handful of scientists that physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his senior staff could call on to help develop a nuclear weapon.

At Los Alamos, Seagondollar was part of a team doing research on "critical mass," the minimum amount of fissionable material it takes to start a nuclear chain reaction and create a blast.

Murray, meanwhile, was assigned to run one of four massive production buildings at Oak Ridge that used electromagnetic radiation to extract Uranium-235, the isotope used in the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

Murray's building was able to separate out only about 25 pounds of it in a year and a half of production, he said.

They remember the mistakes and setbacks and the growing pains for the two isolated communities as thousands of people flooded in.

Murray remembers the red clay mud that dominated the instant town of Oak Ridge, built by the government for the project. It had been planned for about 13,000 residents but grew to 75,000 in three years. One uranium separation facility covered 44 acres and was the largest building in the world, though Oak Ridge was kept secret by the government and didn't appear on maps for years.

Los Alamos, meanwhile, was so far up in the mountains that people bought their food at the military PX on the facility and made their own entertainment. There was a lively group of square dancers, though when Worth and Winifred Seagondollar first arrived, they found that they weren't ready for so much exercise at 7,200 feet.

Worth Seagondollar was among a handful of people to get a preview of the terrible force that would be unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he was sent to a remote bombing range south of Los Alamos to help with the first test explosion of a nuclear bomb, on July 16, 1945.

He had fashioned eye protection from the darkest lenses he could find, dark blue glass used by welders in their hoods.

Seagondollar and other observers were put nine miles from the bomb and told to look in the opposite direction from the blast itself, but even with their backs turned they were still startled.

"It was like looking into a photographer's flashbulb, except that's concentrated in one place and this was just everywhere, the brightest light I've ever seen," he said.

He counted to 15 and turned to face the blast.

"My first reaction was, 'You darned fool, you forgot the blue glass,'" he said. "I was looking through the blue glass, but it was just pure white light coming through."

"When I saw it, the ball of fire was about its own diameter above the valley floor, and I watched it go on up and the clouds above it; a huge hole opened up, and the ball of fire went up through that, and it went through the proverbial mushroom cloud about 70,000 feet. ... It was not particularly loud, but it was heavy rolling thunder."

Germany had surrendered months before the Hiroshima blast, ending any threat that the United States would be beaten to a bomb, and the debate continues about whether it was proper to continue the program and use the bomb, given that Japan didn't have a serious program to build one.

An estimated 70,000 people in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki were killed instantly, and tens of thousands more continued to succumb to burns and the effects of radiation, including cancer. Estimates of total deaths range to 240,000 or more.

Lives lost, lives saved

Both Murray and Seagondollar say that the suffering and loss of life in Japan was a terrible thing. Their lives, though, were built around clinically analyzing data, and they can't help but look at the deaths the same way.

By ending the war before a planned invasion of Japan, on balance the bombs helped save lives, they say. By some estimates, an invasion of Japan would have killed 250,000 U.S. troops or more, and an even greater number of Japanese troops and civilians.

"I have had many, many people come up to me over the years and thank me because they were going to be part of the invasion force," Murray said.

Once, Seagondollar said, he had just finished a speech at NCSU on the Manhattan Project and said, as he always did, that the use of the bombs had been effective and positive, when he noticed a member of the audience walking stiffly toward him with a cane.

His heart sank. It was a professor visiting from Japan.

The man looked at him, then took the cane and whacked one of his own legs, which made a hollow sound.

"He told me that he had lost his leg at Hiroshima, and that he agreed that what happened was beneficial to both the Americans and the Japanese," Seagondollar said.

Still, Murray and Seagondollar both worry about the threats posed by terrorism and unpredictable regimes like that in North Korea.

"The use of nuclear weapons so far has been to the advantage of the civilized world," Seagondollar said. "I'm not so sure it will be in the future."


Seagondollar's lecture--Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory

Deceased--Harold M. Agnew

Harold M. Agnew, fourth from left, with other group leaders involved in the atomic bomb project. He later flew on the first atomic strike against Japan and helped perfect the hydrogen bomb.

Harold M. Agnew
March 28th, 1921 to September 29th, 2013

"Harold M. Agnew, Physicist Present at Birth of the Nuclear Age, Dies at 92"

by

William J. Broad

October 1st, 2013

The New York Times

Harold M. Agnew, the last surviving major figure to have been present at the birth of the nuclear age — a physicist who helped build the world’s first reactor and atomic bombs, flew on the first atomic strike against Japan, filmed the mushroom cloud, helped perfect the hydrogen bomb and led the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the height of the cold war — died on Sunday at his home in Solana Beach, Calif. He was 92.

He had recently been given a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, his family said.

Dr. Agnew was no giant of discovery, but he was ingenious technically and wielded great influence for decades as a presidential adviser and a gregarious hawk, as restless and unpredictable as the tumultuous age he helped define.

“We did pretty good,” he remarked during a 1992 flight between Moscow and Kiev, Ukraine. “We brought a quick end to a devastating war and maintained the peace, and eventually saw democracy prevail. That’s something you can hang your hat on.”

In a statement, Charlie McMillan, the current director of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb in the mountains of New Mexico, called Dr. Agnew “a national treasure,” saying the United States “will be forever in Harold’s debt.”

Harold Melvin Agnew was born in Denver on March 28, 1921, the only child of a stonecutter of Scotch-Irish heritage. A natural athlete, he pitched his softball team to a Denver championship. He majored in chemistry at Denver University, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1942 and won a scholarship to Yale.

But the secret wartime effort to build an atomic bomb intruded on his studies. Early in 1942 he was assigned to Enrico Fermi, the Italian Nobel laureate who was helping to lead the project at the University of Chicago. Dr. Agnew did what he called “grunt work,” making scientific measurements and getting a hefty dose of radiation.

Redirected because of the health danger, he helped stack tons of graphite bricks and uranium into a neat pile at a university squash court.

On a blustery Chicago day, Dec. 2, 1942, Dr. Agnew and a few dozen other people gathered to see if the pile could sustain a chain reaction. Recording pens jumped as atoms split in two. The success meant that in theory the human race now had the means to illuminate cities or level them. He was 21.

Dr. Agnew arrived at Los Alamos in March 1943 with his wife, Beverly. The couple shared a bunkhouse with another couple and a man who cooked nothing but Chinese food, even for breakfast. Amid the tall pines and deep canyons, Dr. Agnew helped build and run a particle accelerator whose data helped demonstrate the merits of various bomb designs.

When the world’s first nuclear blast lit up the New Mexico desert before dawn on July 16, 1945, Dr. Agnew was already far away, preparing for the bombing of Hiroshima. He was “aching” for the run to Japan, he recalled, because so many friends had died in the war. He autographed the bomb.

On Aug. 6, he boarded a B-29 bomber that accompanied the Enola Gay, which was carrying the bomb code-named Little Boy. Dr. Agnew and two other scientists measured the size of the shock wave and thus the bomb’s power.

Afterward, he and his colleagues took turns peering out a small window at the mushroom cloud and the ground damage. Dr. Agnew filmed the devastation with a 16-millimeter Bell & Howell movie camera he had taken along. He was the only person to witness the whole undertaking, from reactor to weapon to Hiroshima.

After the war, he studied with Fermi at Chicago and received his Ph.D. in physics in 1949. Returning to Los Alamos, he joined the hunt for a technical edge over the Soviet Union, which had exploded its own atomic bomb in 1949, surprising the West.

The first hydrogen bomb, tested successfully in 1952, weighed a staggering 65 tons. Dr. Agnew helped perfect lighter H-bombs that were deliverable over long distances.

In the 1960s, as scientific adviser to the supreme allied commander in Europe, he led the development of protective devices for nuclear arms that kept them under tight presidential control.

Returning to Los Alamos, Dr. Agnew was named head of the weapons division, which developed the warhead for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, among other arms. In 1970, he became director of the lab, with a staff of about 7,000. Meanwhile, political radicals at the University of California, which ran Los Alamos, labeled him a war criminal and tried him in absentia.

In 1978, Dr. Agnew advised President Jimmy Carter against seeking a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. He argued that such an East-West stoppage would have ended the development of new arms and, more important, reduced confidence in the potency of the existing arsenal. The White House eventually dropped the ban idea.

Upon retiring from Los Alamos, Dr. Agnew sought to encourage the growth of civilian nuclear power. In March 1979, he became president of General Atomics, a San Diego-based maker and developer of innovative reactors.

From 1982 until 1989, he was a science adviser to the White House under President Ronald Reagan. After the cold war, in 1991, he participated in the first meeting between American bomb makers and their Russian counterparts, seeking ways to reduce nuclear arsenals. In 1992, he urged the United States to buy bomb-grade uranium from scrapped Soviet nuclear arms to bolster the shaky Russian economy and reduce the risk of nuclear war, accident and theft. In August of that year, the White House announced a plan to buy at least 500 metric tons of the material in a deal worth several billion dollars.

The Russian bomb uranium was diluted into fuel for nuclear reactors that make electricity, turning a major danger into a peaceful bonanza.

Dr. Agnew is survived by a daughter, Nancy E. Chapman; a son, John; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

He also left a towering reputation at Los Alamos. Late in life, Dr. Agnew noted with pride that cars could occasionally be seen there bearing bright orange bumper stickers reading, “Harold, come back.”

Harold M. Agnew [Wikipedia]
 
This is what he photographed...

Lady Godiva and physics

"The time a legendary physicist was nearly killed by Lady Godiva"

by

Esther Inglis-Arkell

Septemeber 27th, 2013

io9

Otto Frisch got a Nobel Prize for figuring out the mechanics of fission. It seemed like he would be the last person to underestimate it. But he came within a couple of seconds of getting killed by the fission tester he named Lady Godiva.

Otto Frisch, while winding his way through Europe one step ahead of the spread of the Nazis, found time to figure out how uranium-235 could be involved in a chain reaction, leading to a massive output of radiation and an explosion. He earned himself a Nobel Prize for showing how a neutron ejected by one uranium atom could break up another uranium atom, splitting it and releasing more loose neutrons, which then went on to split more atoms. His work on the subject eventually landed him in New Mexico, as part of the Manhattan Project. There, he was nearly killed by his own creation.

Chunks of uranium send neutrons off all the time, and enriched uranium does even more. Too many blocks of uranium all together can start reacting all on their own. The Manhattan Project had to study the exactly how a reaction went critical, and so Frisch designed the Lady Godiva device.

He put a bunch of uranium together in a kind of block, with a hole through a certain part of it. A uranium plug was dropped through the hole, increasing the overall amount of reactions, and causing the entire device to fire up. At that point, the uranium plug dropped through the hole and out the other end of the block, and the thing powered down. It was called the Lady Godiva device because it had no shielding. Shielding would bounce neutrons back at the device and increase the rate of reaction.

Frisch ran the experiments carefully, always keeping an eye on the lamps that would flicker briefly whenever neutron output increased. One day, though, he didn’t quite hear what a person nearby was saying to him. He leaned over, absentmindedly, so he could hear them more clearly. This shielded Lady Godiva, and she did not react well. Out of the corner of his eye, Frisch saw that the lamps, which flickered during experiments, were glowing steadily. He reached out, and knocked some of the bricks of uranium that formed the main block away from the machine and onto the floor. The lamps went out.

Frisch’s white shirt, and the water in his body, had bounced neutrons back to the device, starting up the reaction. Afterwards, he discovered that he’d gotten a large dose of radiation in the time it had taken for him to lean over and notice the glow of the lamps. Some scientists on the project calculated that if he had stayed where he was for another few seconds, the dose of radiation might have killed him. Nobody got near Lady Godiva after that. Definitely not while wearing a white shirt.

Deceased--Nathan Safferstein

 Nathan Safferstein
1921 to March 5th. 2013

"Manhattan Project agent Safferstein dies at 92"

March 7th, 2013

seattlepi.com

Nathan Safferstein was barely 21 when circumstances suddenly propelled him from his job as a supermarket manager into the stealth world of a counterintelligence agent on the project that produced the atomic bomb.

A customer at the Connecticut market had told her brother — an Army intelligence commander — about a bright young prospect. Soon, paperwork was filled out, recommendations made.

Wartime security being paramount, Safferstein eavesdropped on phone calls of scientists and engineers in Los Alamos, N.M., to make sure no Manhattan Project secrets were leaked, and delivered bomb-making uranium and top-secret messages. He also scrawled his signature on the first A-bomb, called "Little Boy," dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. A second bomb leveled Nagasaki on Aug. 9, and Japan surrendered six days later.

Safferstein died Tuesday night at his home in the Bronx after a long illness, his family said. He was 92.

"We had that feeling right from day one that this was the instrument that was going to end this war," Safferstein said in a 2005 interview conducted by one of his sons, Michael, along with an oral history project moderator. "In my heart, I know that it saved us from the invasion of Japan and millions of casualties that would have come about."

The Washington-based National World War II Memorial online registry includes a photo of Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, who ran the top-secret Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Los Alamos, presenting Safferstein with a Bronze Star medal after the war.

Safferstein, a native of Bridgeport, Conn., had been working as a supermarket manager in nearby Fairfield when his life took the extraordinary turn. One day, he was ordered to join about 100 other men in New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

"It seemed like a thing out of a Bond movie," he recalled years later. "We were all dressed in our Adam hats and cover cloth coats. ... Ten or 12 agents would drop off: Syracuse, Buffalo, Chicago. The train kept going west."

Safferstein's group disembarked in New Mexico. Two cars took them to a wooded area where they met Maj. Peer DeSilva, the laboratory's commander.

"He explained to us for the first time this ultra top secret mission, that they were working on a bomb that would be able to dig a hole into the ground some 80 to a hundred feet deep and perhaps 5, 10 miles long. And that from this point on, you are in the Manhattan Project," Safferstein recalled.

Most of Safferstein's activities remained a mystery to his family and friends, including his future bride, Bernice Klein.

Duty later called Safferstein to the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, where U.S. forces had built airfields to launch long-range raids on Japan itself, and in mid-1945 the two bombs from Los Alamos had been secretly delivered by Navy ship.

About 12 hours before "Little Boy" was placed aboard the aircraft Enola Gay, a scientist appeared at a Quonset hut on the island of Tinian to make final adjustments.

He "explained the whole function of this bomb," Safferstein recalled. "And then he left and here I am alone with 'Little Boy.' And so I walked over to it, saw that there were some initials on it ... and added my signature to the bomb."

Though "extremely proud" to be part of history, Safferstein was not impervious to the ravages of war.

After the bombs were dropped, Safferstein accompanied a team that included U.S. doctors who surveyed the damage in Japan. Deeply moved by its "beautiful people," he recalled thinking: "Let's ... never have to use it again."

He said that after the war, Groves urged him to remain in counterintelligence, but he decided on civilian life. He returned to supermarkets, became president of Storecast Corp., a merchandising and marketing company, then started Long Island-based Supercast and its spinoff, In-Store Distributing.

Deceased--Donald Hornig

 Donald Hornig
March 17th, 1920 to January 21st, 2013

"Donald Hornig, Last to See First A-Bomb, Dies at 92"

by

Douglas Martin

January 26th, 2013

The New York Times

In a small shed at the top of a 100-foot-tall steel tower deep in the New Mexico desert, Donald Hornig sat next to the world’s first atomic bomb in the late evening of July 15, 1945, reading a book of humorous essays. A storm raged, and he shuddered at each lightning flash.

It was his second trip to the tower that day as part of the Manhattan Project, the secret American effort to build an atomic bomb. He had earlier armed the device, code-named Trinity, connecting switches he had designed to the detonators.

But J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, had grown nervous about leaving the bomb alone. He told Dr. Hornig to return to the tower and baby-sit the bomb.

A little after midnight, the weather had improved, and Dr. Hornig was ordered down from the tower. He was the last man to leave and the last to see the weapon before it changed human history.

A little more than five miles away, Dr. Oppenheimer and others waited in a bunker to see if the device they called “the gadget” would actually go off. After Dr. Hornig joined them, he took his position for his next task: placing his finger on a console switch that when pressed would abort the blast, should anything appear awry. The countdown began, his finger at the ready.

The bomb was detonated at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16 as Dr. Hornig and the others watched from the bunker. He later remembered the swirling orange fireball filling the sky as “one of the most aesthetically beautiful things I have ever seen.”

Three weeks later, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days after that, another fell on Nagasaki.

It was the dawn of the nuclear age and also of a career that took Dr. Hornig to the White House as science adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and to academic eminence as the president of Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he died on Monday at 92, his family said.

Dr. Hornig worked under Johnson from 1964 to 1969, conferring with him on space missions and atom smashers as well as on more practical matters, like providing sufficient hospital beds for Medicare patients and desalting water for drinking.

He had actually been President John F. Kennedy’s choice for science adviser. Kennedy had asked him to take the job shortly before his assassination in 1963, and Johnson followed through with the appointment.

Working for Johnson was reportedly not easy. The president was said to disdain scientists and academics after so many of them had voiced opposition to the Vietnam War, which made it difficult for his science adviser to lobby for them.

But when a power blackout hit the Northeast in 1965, the president turned to Dr. Hornig for guidance, as he did when earthquakes hit Denver. After Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Johnson sought Dr. Hornig’s advice on ways to detect concealed weapons.

Under Johnson, Dr. Hornig doubled the budget of what is now the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which he led, and pushed for federal research in housing and transportation. He also helped kill a proposal to put giant mirrors into orbit over Vietnam to spotlight the enemy at night.

As the president of Brown from 1970 to 1976, Dr. Hornig established a four-year medical school. He oversaw the merger of Pembroke College, Brown University’s women’s school, with Brown College, the men’s undergraduate school. He faced student protests, including a 40-hour sit-in at Brown’s administrative building, over cost cutting, minority admissions and other matters.

He met some student demands but later declared that the university would never again negotiate with students occupying a building. He described his presidency as “bittersweet.”

Donald Frederick Hornig was born on March 17, 1920, in Milwaukee and attended Harvard, earning his undergraduate degree there in 1940 and his Ph.D. in 1943, both in chemistry. His dissertation was titled “An Investigation of the Shock Wave Produced by an Explosion,” and he went to work at the Underwater Explosives Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

He joined the Manhattan Project after his boss at Woods Hole passed along a mysterious invitation asking him to take an unspecified job at an unspecified location. No explanations were offered, and Dr. Hornig declined. James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, helped persuade him to change his mind.

Dr. Honig and his new wife, the former Lilli Schwenk, bought an old Ford with frayed tires and puttered to New Mexico. His wife, who also had a Ph.D. in chemistry, worked for the project as a typist, and then as a scientist.

Dr. Hornig is survived by his wife, as well as two daughters, Joanna Hornig Fox and Ellen Hornig; a son, Christopher; a brother, Arthur; a sister, Arlene Westfahl; nine grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. His daughter Leslie Elizabeth Hornig died last year.

After World War II, Dr. Hornig was a professor and a dean at Brown and then moved to Princeton as the chairman of the chemistry department. While at Princeton, he was on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s scientific advisory committee.

Dr. Hornig was briefly a vice president at the Eastman Kodak Company before accepting Brown’s presidency. After leaving Brown, he taught at Harvard’s public health school, retiring in 1990. He was one of the youngest scientists ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
 

"Donald F. Hornig, scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb, dies at 92"

by

By Matt Schudel

January 23rd, 2013

The Washington Post

Donald F. Hornig, who as a young scientist once “babysat” the world’s first atomic bomb and who later became Brown University president and the top science adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, died Jan. 21 at a nursing home in Providence, R.I. He was 92.

He had Alzheimer’s disease, his son, Christopher Hornig, said.

Only a year out of graduate school, Dr. Hornig was recruited in 1944 for the top-secret Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M.

The World War II project, directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, was designed to produce an atomic bomb. Dr. Hornig led a team that developed a device called the “X unit,” the firing mechanism for the bomb.

The first nuclear bomb — called “the gadget” by scientists — was scheduled to be detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on Monday, July 16, 1945.

“On the Sunday before the test, shortly before 9 p.m.,” Dr. Hornig recalled in a 1995 article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Oppenheimer decided someone should be in the tower to baby-sit the bomb because of the possibility of sabotage. Maybe because I was the youngest, I got the job. In the darkness, amid heavy rain, lightning, and strong winds, I climbed the ladder to the top of the 100-foot tower.”

To take his mind off the bomb beside him, Dr. Hornig attempted to read a paperback novel under a 60-watt bulb.

“I stopped frequently to count the seconds between the sound of a thunder clap and the lightning flash,” he told the Monitor, “and tried not to think of what might happen if the tower got a direct hit and the gadget went off. At least I would never know about it.”

Early the next morning, Dr. Hornig climbed down from the tower and took his place beside Oppenheimer in a control room more than five miles away.

“My right hand was poised over a control switch that would stop the test if something went wrong,” he said in the interview. The bomb exploded at 5:29:45 a.m.

“My first reaction, having not slept for 48 hours, was ‘Boy, am I tired,’ ” Dr. Hornig recalled. “My second was, ‘We sure opened a can of worms.’ Nobody knew where this would lead, but I had no regrets.”

Donald Frederick Hornig was born March 17, 1920, in Milwaukee. He was a 1940 graduate of Harvard University, where he also received a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1943.

After working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, he joined the Manhattan Project because of his expertise on shock waves produced by large explosions.

Dr. Hornig joined the faculty at Brown University in 1946, then moved to Princeton University in 1957. He served on science advisory panels of four presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In November 1963, Dr. Hornig was tapped as the top White House science adviser by President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated two weeks later. Dr. Hornig became head of the White House Office of Science and Technology in January 1964, after Johnson had assumed the presidency.

Business Week reported that the job “is expected to be one of the hottest seats in the Johnson administration,” but Dr. Hornig often found himself having to defend federal research programs from budget cutters in Congress.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, he said he sometimes had a hard time getting Johnson’s attention. He left at the end of Johnson’s term, in January 1969.

“I was never on easy personal terms with the president,” Dr. Hornig told Science magazine at the time. “There’s always been a certain gap in attitude and approach between a Texas rancher and an Ivy League professor. I was on much easier terms with Kennedy, who asked me to serve in the first place.”

Dr. Hornig was named president of Brown in 1970. He merged an affiliated women’s college, Pembroke, with the all-male Brown and helped establish a medical school at the university.

He also wrestled with a $4 million deficit and a confrontational student body that went on strike in 1975 to protest cuts in popular classes and programs. Dr. Hornig ordered a 15 percent cut in spending that included the dismissal of many faculty members. By the time he resigned in 1976, he was unpopular with students and professors, but he was eventually credited with steering the Ivy League university toward financial stability.

Dr. Hornig finished his career at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he established an interdisciplinary program in public health. He retired in 1990.

Survivors include his wife of 69 years, Lilli Schwenk Hornig of Providence; three children, Joanna Fox and Christopher Hornig, both of Washington, and Ellen Hornig of Shrewsbury, Mass.; a brother; a sister; nine grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

A daughter, Leslie Hornig, died in 2012.

In a 1964 article examining the state of science in the Johnson administration, a writer for Time magazine questioned whether Dr. Hornig could accomplish much because he “is a virtual stranger on the Washington scene.”

In a letter to the editor, Dr. Hornig’s 10-year-old son took exception. “My father has served for three Presidents,” Christopher Hornig noted, “and is in Washington so much that by now he is a virtual stranger to me.”
 

"Donald Hornig: Babysitter for the A-Bomb"

by

Patrick Kiger

January 24th, 2013

AARP

Donald F. Hornig was a top science adviser to three Commanders-in-Chief — Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson — and taught at Princeton and Harvard, in addition to serving a six-year stint as president of Brown University. But he achieved his greatest measure of fame  as a young chemist a year out of graduate school, when he joined the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s top-secret effort during World War II to develop an atomic bomb.

Hornig, who died on Jan. 21 at age 92 in Providence, R.I., was such a gifted young scientist that, despite his inexperience, he rose to the level of team leader, supervising a group that developed the “X unit,” the mechanism that actually triggered the nuclear bomb. Here are five fascinating facts about the scientist who helped to end World War II and launch the nuclear age.

In a 1995 Christian Science Monitor article [below], Hornig recalled that he was working as a physical chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts when he got a call from his old Harvard professor George Kistiakowsky, who said he needed Hornig’s help at a lab where he was working. When he agreed, Kistiakowsky told him to pack his bag immediately, and said no more. It wasn’t until Hornig got to Los Alamos, N.M., in May 1944, that he was told that he would be working on the effort to build an atomic bomb.

Hornig made his most important contribution to the bomb after just a month on the job. In June 1944, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s chief scientist, held a meeting to discuss a critical technical problem: how to trigger an implosion of the outer shell of the bomb’s plutonium, which would drive the fissionable material together and create the critical mass that would lead to a nuclear blast. Using explosives would destroy the firing mechanism, which would make testing difficult. Hornig suggested setting off electrical spark gaps, which would act as very precise switches that would trigger the process in a fraction of a microsecond. Oppenheimer was sufficiently impressed that he told Hornig to get some people together to work on the idea, and by October, the decision was made to use Hornig’s gadget.

The first full-scale test of the bomb — scheduled for Monday, July 16, 1945, the day before President Truman’s crucial meeting with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at Potsdam, Germany — had high stakes, but it was no sure thing. “Many involved in the project doubted that the complicated implosion-bomb system would work effectively and with a large enough explosive yield,” Hornig recalled. The scientists’ nerves were rattled all the more when heavy clouds over the desert test area created a powerful electrical surge that might have set off the bomb prototype, had its trigger been set.

On the evening before the test, Oppenheimer, who was worried about sabotage, assigned Hornig to go up in the bomb tower and keep watch over the nuclear device. Hornig climbed a 100-foot ladder to the top of the tower, with a paperback book to keep him occupied. It proved to be a hair-raising experience. The tower was battered by heavy rains from a thunderstorm, and Hornig anxiously counted the seconds between the thunder claps and lightning flashes. He recalled that he “tried not to think of what might happen if the tower got a direct hit and the gadget went off.” As a consolation, it occurred to him that if the bomb went off, “at least I would never know about it.”
Just before daybreak, Hornig sat in a concrete bunker about five and a half miles away from the bomb tower, watching control panels. Just before 5:30 a.m., he saw a brilliant flash, and then — ignoring the possible risks — ran outside to get a better view. He saw “a great fireball rapidly rising, with peach, green, and rosy red colors, gradually transforming into a mushroom cloud.”

Hornig, who was exhausted from going without sleep for 48 hours, had a subdued reaction to the event. “Boy, am I tired,” was his first thought, he later recalled. It took a moment for the significance to sink in. “Nobody knew where this would lead,” he later recalled. “But I had no regrets. If it ended the war without the tremendous casualties an invasion of Japan would cause, it was worth it.”

Here’s declassified film footage shot by the government of the historic bomb test: 

"Atom-Bomb Scientist Tells His Story"

Chemist Don Hornig kept his hand on the switch to stop the test

by

Donald Hornig and Robert Cahn

July 11th, 1995

The Christian Science Monitor

IN the spring of 1944, my life became a mystery novel. I was working at the High Explosives Research Laboratory at the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institute when I got a call from Harvard Prof. George Kistiakowsky, a scientist whom I greatly admired. He was working at a new laboratory, he said, and needed me badly.

That was all I needed to say yes. I was advised to leave as soon as possible, without telling anyone, and report to 109 East Palace Ave., Santa Fe, N.M., where I would be given further instructions.

At Santa Fe, I was directed to Los Alamos, a former boys' school on a mesa at the base of the Jemez Mountains. I found that I was to join Kistiakowsky and others under J. Robert Oppenheimer working on the Manhattan Project, the crash program to build an atomic bomb. I was 23 years old, a physical chemist of limited experience with a newly acquired PhD who had done research on shock waves produced by large explosions.

To maintain secrecy, the project's overall director, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, insisted on strict compartmentalization: Scientists would have access to information only on a need-to-know basis.

Oppenheimer persuaded Groves that the only hope of resolving the enormous scientific and technical problems facing his group was to let scientists discuss these challenges with one another.

When I arrived in May 1944, two ways to create a critical mass were being considered. The first used a high velocity gun to shoot two sub-critical chunks of enriched uranium (U-235) together. This would not work with plutonium, though, which requires much faster assembly to avoid a premature explosion. The solution proposed was ''implosion'': Surround a subcritical shell of plutonium with explosive charges (called ''lenses'') shaped to focus the detonation waves toward the center of the plutonium shell and drive all segments together.

Only enough U-235 would be available for one bomb. But if the implosion concept worked, several such bombs might be ready by the end of 1945.

ENOUGH was known about the gun method to justify going ahead without a full test. But the implosion method was still in a preliminary stage; among its problems was that of a firing system that could initiate all the explosive lenses at once. The only idea for doing so was an explosive switch, but that could not be tested without destroying the firing mechanism. Oppenheimer raised the problem in June 1944 at one of his seminars.

After listening to the discussion, I suggested developing triggered spark gaps to act as very rapid switches. They might make it possible to initiate the explosive lenses within a fraction of a microsecond. Oppenheimer told me to get a few people together and work on the idea. By the end of the summer, we had accumulated enough evidence to say that this method was feasible. After much debate and many misgivings, we were given a go-ahead in October to incorporate triggered spark gaps into a firing unit for ''the gadget,'' as the bomb was called.

Many months of work remained before the firing mechanism would be ready. The ''X-unit'' had to initiate at 32 points with astonishing simultaneity. If it did not, the explosive yield would be low.

The full-scale test of the bomb was planned for pre-dawn Mon., July 16, the day before President Harry Truman was to meet with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, Germany. By then, we felt we were ready, but many involved in the project doubted that the complicated implosion-bomb system would work effectively and with a large enough explosive yield. Several days before the firing date, the doubts were exacerbated when heavy clouds passed over the desert test area near Alamogordo, N.M., and an electrical surge set off the X-unit. It would have set off a live bomb.

On the Sunday before the test, shortly before 9 p.m., Oppenheimer decided someone should be in the tower to baby-sit the bomb because of the possibility of sabotage. Maybe because I was the youngest, I got the job. In the darkness, amid heavy rain, lightning, and strong winds, I climbed the ladder to the top of the 100-foot tower. Pulling out a paperback and sitting under a 60-watt bulb, I read to keep my mind off the lightning and the bomb. I stopped frequently to count the seconds between the sound of a thunder clap and the lightning flash, and tried not to think of what might happen if the tower got a direct hit and the gadget went off. At least I would never know about it. I was never happier than when the phone rang just before midnight, and Kistiakowsky told me to come down.

Shortly before daybreak at a concrete bunker 10,000 yards south of the tower, my final task was to watch the control panels to assure that all the condenser banks reached the 15,000 volts needed to initiate the explosion. My right hand was poised over a control switch that would stop the test if something went wrong. At 5:29:45 a.m. the gadget went off. Through the open door, looking away from the tower at the mountains, I saw a brilliant flash, then ran outside to see a great fireball rapidly rising, with peach, green, and rosy red colors, gradually transforming into a mushroom cloud.

My first reaction, having not slept for 48 hours, was ''Boy, am I tired.'' My second was ''We sure opened a can of worms.'' Nobody knew where this would lead, but I had no regrets. If it ended the war without the tremendous casualties an invasion of Japan would cause, it was worth it.

* After a career as a chemistry professor at Brown and Princeton universities, Donald F. Hornig became a science adviser to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Later he was president of Brown and concluded his career at Harvard.

Donald Hornig [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Robert F. Christy

Robert F. Christy
May 14th, 1916 to October 3rd, 2012

"Robert F. Christy, Atom Bomb Physicist, Dies at 96"

by

William J. Broad

October 4th, 2012

The New York Times

Robert F. Christy, who as a young Canadian-born physicist working on the Manhattan Project came up with a critical insight that led to the creation of the world’s first atom bomb, died on Wednesday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 96.

His death, after a brief respiratory illness, was confirmed by his family.

Dr. Christy later turned his mind to the riddles of space and served as provost of Caltech. But he was more widely known as one of the last surviving leading scientists to have worked on the atomic bomb.

Dr. Christy was present at important junctures in the early atomic era, including the debut in 1942 of the world’s first nuclear reactor in Chicago. Most notable was his contribution to the design of the explosive core of the first atom bomb, which lit up the New Mexico desert during a nighttime test in 1945. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki also used his design.

The first bomb, developed in secrecy during World War II at Los Alamos, N.M., relied on implosion. The plan was to detonate a sphere of conventional explosives, the blast from which would compress a central ball of nuclear fuel into an incredibly dense mass; that in turn would start a chain reaction that would end in a nuclear explosion.

But the Los Alamos team discovered that the interface between the detonating explosives and the hollow sphere could become unstable and ruin the crushing power of the blast wave.

Dr. Christy, while studying implosion tests, realized that a solid core could be compressed far more uniformly, and he worked hard in the days that followed to convince his colleagues of its superiority. He succeeded, and the hollow core was replaced with one made of solid plutonium metal.

A 1993 book, “Critical Assembly,” sponsored by the Department of Energy, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal, said Dr. Christy’s insight reduced the risk that the core would lose its spherical form and thus fail to explode.

And Robert S. Norris, an atomic historian and the author of “Racing for the Bomb,” called Dr. Christy’s breakthrough, known as the Christy pit, “a conservative solution to a problem they were having” that “increased the likelihood of a successful detonation.”

Robert Frederick Christy was born May 14, 1916, in Vancouver and studied physics at the University of British Columbia. He was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, under J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leading theoretical physicist who became known as the father of the atomic bomb.

After completing his studies in 1941, Dr. Christy worked at the University of Chicago before being recruited to join the Los Alamos team when Oppenheimer became its scientific director.

After the war, Dr. Christy joined Caltech in theoretical physics and stayed at the university for the rest of his academic career, serving as a faculty chairman, vice president, provost (from 1970 to 1980) and acting president (1977-78). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Christy came to question the wisdom of further developing nuclear arms, though he never became an activist on the issue.

His love of nuclear physics led him to study cosmic rays and to investigate what drove the pulsating brightness of an important class of stars used as yardsticks to measure cosmic distances.

In 1967, he won the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work in theoretical astrophysics.

While working for the National Research Council during the 1980s and ’90s, Dr. Christy studied the effects of atomic radiation on the Japanese people resulting from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to help determine safe radiation levels and better understand radiation’s medical risks.

He is survived by his wife, I. Juliana Christy-Sackmann; two daughters; two sons from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren.

Dr. Christy may be best remembered for a bitter encounter that crystallized the resentment that many American scientists felt toward Edward Teller, considered the father of the hydrogen bomb.

During the height of American cold war fears of Communist influences, Teller, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, had testified against Oppenheimer before the Atomic Energy Commission, questioning his judgment and recommending that the government revoke his security clearance.

Shortly after the testimony, in the summer of 1954, scientists attending a conference at Los Alamos were preparing for a picnic lunch on a terrace. Teller saw Dr. Christy, an old friend, and hurried over to greet him.

But Dr. Christy, a former protégé and colleague of Oppenheimer’s and known to be a courteous, genial man, threw back an icy glance and walked away.

“I was so stunned that for a moment I couldn’t react,” Teller recalled in “Memoirs,” a 2001 book. “Then I realized that my life as I had known it was over.”

Robert F. Christy [Wikipedia]

Interviewed by Sara Lippincott

 
Historical event in 1942 at the University of Chicago

Chicago and the Manhattan Project

December 2nd, 1942 and Henry Moore 1967

Deceased--George Cowan

George Cowan
February 15th, 1920 to April 20th, 2012

"Manhattan Project chemist George Cowan dies at 92"

April 20th, 2012

USA TODAY

Devoted to finding a way for science to help society, not much escaped the influence of chemist George Cowan. From the Manhattan Project and the hunt for evidence of the Soviet Union's first nuclear tests, to the Santa Fe Institute and the iconic Santa Fe Opera, friends recalled the fruits of his visionary ways.

Cowan died Friday at his home in Los Alamos. He was 92.

Friends confirmed his death to the Associated Press, saying it was the result of a fall at his home. Cowan was in good health and was planning to travel and continue working with the nonprofit science institute that he helped found in 1984.

"It's very sudden, very unexpected. An enormous loss," said close friend and institute co-founder David Pines. "The world is diminished for all of us who knew him."

Cowan worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for nearly 40 years. He started in 1949 as a scientist and went on to serve as a director of chemistry and as associate lab director of research.

After doing graduate studies at Princeton, Cowan continued his nuclear research as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. According to the Santa Fe Institute, Cowan was a troubleshooter for the effort at various research sites around the country and was among the few people who had knowledge of the bomb's separate components.

Cowan arrived at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1949 and within weeks began directing efforts to turn up radioactive fallout in samples that were collected near the Soviet border. What Cowan and his team detected indicated the Soviets were in possession of a nuclear bomb.

Cowan was considered one of the world's experts on nuclear weapons diagnostics by 1956, according to a biography from the lab.

"We can truly say that our country lost a true hero today," former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said in a statement. "He cannot be replaced, but let's hope he left footprints for us to follow."

Cowan was appointed to the White House Science Council during the Reagan administration.

It was during one of his meetings with the council that he looked around the room and thought about the need to educate the next generation of scientists to ensure the government would continue to have a valuable cadre of advisers.

Conversations about the formation of the Santa Fe Institute followed, some of them being held in the director's conference room on the fourth floor at Los Alamos Lab.

"He was a superb judge of people," said Pines. "He had a real instinct for who was a promising scientist and who was not and this was invaluable to him as he became a manager at Los Alamos."

Bill Enloe, chief executive of Los Alamos National Bank, which was founded by Cowan, said the chemist had a unique ability to lead people.

"It was not by intimidation or by position. It was because what he said made so much sense," Enloe said. "He accomplished a great deal because people were anxious to help and work with him."

Enloe ticked off a list of Cowan's accomplishments that ranged from his scientific accolades and the start of the scientific think tank to the early childhood development programs in New Mexico that he helped influence.

Then there was Cowan's love of travel, food, wine and music. He sat on the board of the Santa Fe Opera and was the first treasurer of the opera's foundation.

Pines recalled the story Cowan had told him about his role in helping preserve the opera, a venue that today draws thousands of visitors from around the world to its unique outdoor stage.

"He managed to get a loan for them from the bank that tied them over," Pines said. "Otherwise the Santa Fe Opera would have gone under many, many years ago."

Officials at the Santa Fe Opera downplayed the suggestion that the organization was ever on the financial ropes, but they said Cowan was a terrific asset to the opera while he served on the board.

Friends used words such as intelligent and practical to describe Cowan, who lived in the same modest home on Los Alamos' 42nd Street since first moving there with his wife decades ago. His wife, Helen "Satch" Dunham, was also a chemist. She died last year and the couple had no children.

Cowan was a philanthropist, having given most of his wealth to charitable causes that he was passionate about, Enloe said.

"He had a large impact on a lot of people," he said.
George Cowan [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Gerhart Friedlander

Gerhart Friedlander
July 28th, 1916 to September 6th, 2009

"Gerhart Friedlander, Nuclear Chemist, Dies at 93"

by

Vicki Glaser

September 12th, 2009

New York Times

Gerhart Friedlander, a veteran of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb and a pioneer of nuclear chemistry who later exploited the first particle accelerators to do major research as head of the chemistry department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, died Sunday in South Setauket, N.Y. He was 93.

The cause was coronary heart disease, said his wife, Barbara Strongin.

Dr. Friedlander’s groundbreaking research on how high-energy particles cause nuclear reactions, done in collaboration with colleagues in the United States and abroad, led to computer-generated calculations of nuclear reaction mechanisms that form the basis for theoretical models still used today.

With Joseph W. Kennedy he wrote the classic textbook “Nuclear and Radiochemistry.” Originally published in 1949 with the title “Introduction to Radiochemistry” and appearing in several editions and multiple languages, it became one of the standard introductions to both fields.

Gerhart Friedländer was born on July 28, 1916, in Munich. He fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and emigrated to the United States, where he changed the spelling of his surname.

As a Jew, he had not been allowed to attend a university under the Nazi regime, and instead he became a laboratory technician. Once in America, with the help of a scholarship provided by a Jewish refugee organization, Dr. Friedlander received a bachelor of science degree and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

While a student at Berkeley, Dr. Friedlander met his first wife, Gertrude Maas, who died in a car accident. Besides Ms. Strongin, his wife of 28 years, Dr. Friedlander is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Ruth Huart of Écoust-St.-Mein, France, and Joan Hurley of Agoura, Calif.; four stepchildren, Rabbi William Strongin, Stacey Strongin Blaney, Ronni Mordechai-Strongin and David Strongin; four grandchildren; six stepgrandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

At Brookhaven National Laboratory, Dr. Friedlander was an advocate for and contributor to the solar-neutrino experiment, better known as the Gallex experiment, conducted in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory in Italy. This project sought to explain the difference between the amount of neutrinos predicted to be released by the sun and the smaller number actually detected on earth; the Nobel Prize was awarded for work done by Raymond Davis Jr. of Brookhaven. When European financing came through for the Gallex experiment, “Dr. Friedlander came out of retirement to pull together a group in B.N.L. that collaborated with the Europeans,” said Alex Harris, current chairman of the chemistry department at Brookhaven.

In the 1990s, Dr. Friedlander was the first editor in chief of Science Spectra, a general interest science magazine published for nearly a decade.

Dr. Friedlander worked at Brookhaven for 33 years, retiring in 1981. He remained active in research at Brookhaven and visited regularly into his 90s.

“He had a tremendous influence on shaping Brookhaven’s scientific efforts in the chemical sciences as a researcher and manager,” Dr. Harris said. “And he was very influential in education.”

When he was named senior chemist emeritus at a ceremony in 2007 at the age of 91, Dr. Friedlander said, “My time at Brookhaven was during the golden age of science, when B.N.L. researchers could pursue their scientific interests relatively unfettered by red tape.”

George Koval...Soviet spy

George Koval
December 25th, 1913 to January 31st, 2006

I wonder how many moles we had infiltrating the Soviet science programs?

"New Evidence of a Soviet Spy in the U.S. Nuclear Program"

by

Justin Ewers

January 2nd, 2009

USNews.com

In a new book, two former nuclear weapons scientists make the case that Soviet spies didn't just steal atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project in the 1940s—something historians have known for years—but say a previously unknown spy also helped the Soviets design their first hydrogen bomb. The Soviet Union detonated its first thermonuclear bomb in 1955, only a year after the first American H-bomb was tested, ending the period of nuclear supremacy the U.S. military enjoyed after World War II.

A giant column of smoke rises more than 60,000 feet into the air, after the second atomic bomb ever used in warfare explodes over the Japanese port town of Nagasaki, on August 9, 1945.

In The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, published this month, Danny Stillman and Thomas Reed, two longtime veterans of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, do not provide the name of the spy they say took hydrogen bomb secrets out of the Los Alamos, N.M., weapons lab. But they do offer some of his biography, saying he was born in the United States, raised abroad, came under the sway of the Communist Party in the 1930s, and took a job at Los Alamos during World War II.

Stillman and Reed say in the book that they have refused to reveal the name of the suspected spy, who is now dead, because he "can neither defend his family name nor refute our arguments." They say his name doesn't really matter, anyway: "His fingerprints are what count."

Stillman, a physicist who worked at Los Alamos from 1965 until 2000, says he tried to make a case against the scientist in the 1990s, going to the FBI after he noticed the man's apparent wealth. The local Santa Fe office bungled the investigation, the authors say, and the inquiry was "botched beyond recognition." The FBI eventually became distracted by the modern-day spy scandal surrounding Wen Ho Lee, another scientist working at Los Alamos, and stopped pursuing the case, the authors say.

As the Cold War faded into memory, the authors say they began to get their first real confirmation that the Soviet H-bomb effort had help from someone inside the American nuclear program. In particular, they say Russian scientists told them at a meeting in the late 1990s that the Soviet bomb designer, Andrei Sakharov, had privately refused to take full credit for the hydrogen bomb. The Russians hinted that Sakharov knew he'd gotten a boost from someone in the American program.

Former Soviet weapons experts have also said they were given a copy of an early design drawing of a "radiation implosion," the technology used in hydrogen bombs, that appeared to have been sketched in the early 1950s by an American H-bomb designer. The document was apparently stolen or copied and found its way to the Soviets. Stillman and Reed say there is only one way this kind of information could have ended up in Soviet hands: a spy.

Most historians seem to be leery of Stillman's and Reed's conclusions, barring more hard evidence. But they say the notion of a Soviet spy inside the early American atomic program isn't so far-fetched. There is little doubt, in fact, that the Soviets' first nuclear weapon—a plutonium bomb like the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan—was the result of espionage. "We know now that their first design was a carbon-copy of the 'Fat-Man,' " Robert Norris, a researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the author of Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man, said in an interview earlier this year.

Nearly a dozen Soviet spies—including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs—were executed or imprisoned after World War II for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, including information about the plutonium bomb and the early work on the hydrogen bomb. Last year, Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president, shocked American historians and government officials alike when he announced that an undetected spy, George Koval, had also penetrated the Manhattan Project.

Putin said Koval, an Iowa-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had provided the Soviets with information about American atomic production levels while working at nuclear facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio. Koval moved back to Russia in the 1950s and died in 2006. He was posthumously awarded the Hero of Russia medal.

There was widespread paranoia in the United States throughout the 1950s about the possibility of Soviet espionage, and these new revelations certainly seem to indicate that not all of it was unjustified. There is little doubt, of course, that the Red Scare—with the prodding of Sen. Joseph McCarthy—cast its net too wide in its frantic attempts to find communist sympathizers. No atomic bomb secrets leaked from blacklisted movie stars, after all. There is also no evidence that Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, ever provided assistance to the Soviets, though he was controversially stripped of his security clearance while overseeing the development of the hydrogen bomb.

If Stillman and Reed are right, though, there were some who did aid the Soviets. And it may have taken only one man in the right place to help them build their bomb.

The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation

by

Thomas C. Reed

ISBN-10: 0760335028
ISBN-13: 978-0760335024

"A Spy’s Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor"

by

William Broad

November 12th, 2007

The New York Times

He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by Stalin's ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as "the only Soviet intelligence officer" to infiltrate the project's secret plants, saying his work "helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own."

Since then, historians, scientists, federal officials and old friends have raced to tell Dr. Koval's story — the athlete, the guy everyone liked, the genius at technical studies. American intelligence agencies have known of his betrayal at least since the early 1950s, when investigators interviewed his fellow scientists and swore them to secrecy.

The spy's success hinged on an unusual family history of migration from Russia to Iowa and back. That gave him a strong commitment to Communism, a relaxed familiarity with American mores and no foreign accent.

"He was very friendly, compassionate and very smart," said Arnold Kramish, a retired physicist who studied with Dr. Koval at City College and later worked with him on the bomb project. "He never did homework."

Stewart D. Bloom, a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who also studied with Dr. Koval, called him a regular guy.

"He played baseball and played it well," usually as shortstop, Dr. Bloom recalled. "He didn’t have a Russian accent. He spoke fluent English, American English. His credentials were perfect."

Once, Dr. Bloom added, "I saw him staring off in the distance and thinking about something else. Now I think I know what it was."

Over the years, scholars and federal agents have identified a half-dozen individuals who spied on the bomb project for the Soviets, especially at Los Alamos in New Mexico. All were "walk ins," spies by impulse and sympathetic leaning rather than rigorous training.

By contrast, Dr. Koval was a mole groomed in the Soviet Union by the feared G.R.U., the military intelligence agency. Moreover, he gained wide access to America’s atomic plants, a feat unknown for any other Soviet spy. Nuclear experts say the secrets of bomb manufacturing can be more important than those of design.

Los Alamos devised the bomb, while its parts and fuel were made at secret plants in such places as Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Dayton, Ohio — sites Dr. Koval not only penetrated, but also assessed as an Army sergeant with wide responsibilities and authority.

"He had access to everything," said Dr. Kramish, who worked with Dr. Koval at Oak Ridge and now lives in Reston, Va. "He had his own Jeep. Very few of us had our own Jeeps. He was clever. He was a trained G.R.U. spy." That status, he added, made Dr. Koval unique in the history of atomic espionage, a judgment historians echo.

Washington has known about Dr. Koval's spying since he fled the United States shortly after the war but kept it secret.

"It would have been highly embarrassing for the U.S. government to have had this divulged," said Robert S. Norris, author of "Racing for the Bomb," a biography of the project's military leader.

Historians say Mr. Putin may have cited Dr. Koval's accomplishments as a way to rekindle Russian pride. As shown by a New York Public Library database search, the announcement has prompted detailed reports in the Russian press about Dr. Koval and his clandestine feats.

"It's very exciting to get this kind of break," said John Earl Haynes, a Library of Congress historian and an authority on atomic spying. "We know very little about G.R.U. operations in the United States."

George Koval was born in 1913 to Abraham and Ethel Koval in Sioux City, Iowa, which had a large Jewish community and a half-dozen synagogues. In 1932, during the Great Depression, his family emigrated to Birobidzhan, a Siberian city that Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland.

Henry Srebrnik, a Canadian historian at the University of Prince Edward Island who is studying the Kovals for a project on American Jewish Communists, said the family belonged to a popular front organization, as did most American Jews who emigrated to Birobidzhan.

The organization, he said, was ICOR, a Yiddish acronym for the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. He added that Dr. Koval's father served its Sioux City branch as secretary.

By 1934, Dr. Koval was in Moscow, excelling in difficult studies at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology. Upon graduating with honors, he was recruited and trained by the G.R.U. and was sent back to the United States for nearly a decade of scientific espionage, from roughly 1940 to 1948.

How he communicated with his controllers is unknown, as is what specifically he gave the Soviets in terms of atomic secrets. However, it is clear that Moscow mastered the atom very quickly compared with all subsequent nuclear powers.

In the United States under a false name, Dr. Koval initially gathered information about new toxins that might find use in chemical arms. Then his G.R.U. controllers took a gamble and had him work under his own name. Dr. Koval was drafted into the Army, and by chance found himself moving toward the bomb project, then in its infancy.

The Army judged him smart and by 1943 sent him for special wartime training at City College in Manhattan. Considered a Harvard for the poor, it was famous for brilliant students, Communists and, after the war, Julius Rosenberg, who was executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for the Soviets.

But Dr. Koval steered clear of all debate on socialism and Russia, Dr. Bloom said. "He discussed no politics that I can recall. Never. He never talked about the Soviet Union, never ever, not a word."

At City College, Dr. Koval and a dozen or so of his Army peers studied electrical engineering.

Dr. Kramish said the Army unit lived in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, across from City College, adding that Dr. Koval called himself an orphan. Something else about him stood out, Dr. Kramish said — he was a decade older than his peers, making everybody wonder "why he was in this program."

Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project was suffering severe manpower shortages and asked the Army for technically adept recruits. In 1944, Dr. Koval and Dr. Kramish headed to Oak Ridge, where the main job was to make bomb fuel, considered the hardest part of the atomic endeavor.

Dr. Koval gained wide access to the sprawling complex, Dr. Kramish said, because "he was assigned to health safety" and drove from building to building making sure no stray radiation harmed workers.

In June 1945, Dr. Koval's duties expanded to include top-secret plants near Dayton, said John C. Shewairy, an Oak Ridge spokesman. The factories refined polonium 210, a highly radioactive material used in initiators to help start the bomb’s chain reaction.

In July 1945, the United States tested its first atomic device, and a month later it dropped two bombs on Japan.

After the war, Dr. Koval fled the United States when American counterintelligence agents found Soviet literature hailing the Koval family as happy immigrants from the United States, said a Nov. 3 article in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, a Russian publication.

In 1949, Moscow detonated its first bomb, surprising Washington at the quick loss of what had been an atomic monopoly.

In the early 1950s, Dr. Kramish said, the F.B.I. interviewed him and anyone else who had known Dr. Koval, asking that the matter be kept confidential.

Dr. Bloom was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island at the time. "I was pretty amazed," he recalled. "I didn't figure George to be like that."

In Russia, Dr. Koval returned to the Mendeleev Institute, earning his doctorate and teaching there for many years, Rossiiskaia Gazeta said. It added that he was a soccer fanatic even in old age and that people at the stadium who knew of his secret past would quietly point him out.

Dr. Koval's spy role began to emerge publicly in Russia in 2002 with the publication of "The G.R.U. and the Atomic Bomb," a book that referred to Dr. Koval only by his code name. The book offered few biographical details but said he was one of the very few spies who managed to elude "the net of the counterintelligence agencies."

Dr. Koval died on Jan. 31, 2006, according to Russian accounts. The cause was not made public. By American reckoning, he would have been 92, though the Kremlin’s statement put his age at 94 and some Russian news reports put it at 93.

Posthumously, Dr. Koval was made a Hero of the Russian Federation, the highest honorary title that can be bestowed on a Russian citizen. The Kremlin statement cited "his courage and heroism while carrying out special missions."

Dr. Kramish surmised that he was "the biggest" of the atomic spies. "You don't get a medal from the president of Russia for nothing," he said.


George Koval


Deceased--Robert Furman

Los Alamos staff