Los Alamos: Beginning of an Era 1943-1945
Trial Run
Project Trinity, with Bainbridge as test director and William Penney and Victor Weisskopf as consultants, became an official organization and top priority project of the Laboratory in March 1945. At the same time Project Alberta, for combat delivery of the weapons, was organized under Capt. Parsons with N. F. Ramsey and Norris Bradbury as technical deputies.
Bainbridge was a Harvard physics professor with a background in electrical engineering and a three-year stint at the MIT Radiation Laboratory who had come to Los Alamos as a group leader in charge of high explosive development. As General Groves pointed out in his book, “Now It Can Be Told,” Bainbridge was “quiet and competent and had the respect and liking of the more than 200 enlisted men later on duty at Alamogordo. ”
Bainbridge’s first task was to rush his organization into preparations for a trial test—the detonation of 100 tons of conventional high explosives which had been proposed in the winter of 1944 and scheduled for early May. Since very little was known, in 1945, about blast effects above a few tons of TNT, such a test would provide data for the calibration of instruments for blast and shock measurements and would serve as a dress rehearsal to test the operation of the organization for the final shot.
Meanwhile, a vast and complex laboratory was growing in several square miles of empty desert. There was a maze of roads to be built, hundreds of miles of wires to be strung over, on and under the ground, a complete communication system installed, buildings to be erected, supplies, equipment and personnel to be transported between Los Alamos and Trinity, all under the cloak of supreme secrecy.
The man who shouldered this monumental task was John H. Williams, leader of the Laboratory’s Electrostatic Generator group, who became responsible for Trinity services as head of “[’R-1. As Bainbridge wrote later, “The correlation of the construction program and the proper and successful designation of construction aid was exacting work requiring ‘superior judgment,’ as the Army says, and long hours of hard work. This was done supremely well by Williams, to whom the Trinity project owes much for the successful completion of the operation.” Bainbridge has also pointed out the invaluable assistance provided by Sgt. J. A. Jopp, who was in charge of all the wire installation and construction at the site.
Procurement of an incredible assortment of equipment ranging from Kleenex to elaborate scientific instruments was a seemingly insurmountable job handled by Robert Van Germert, now alternate head of the Laboratory’s Supply and Property Department, aided and abetted by Frank Oppenheimer who served as Bainbridge’s trouble shooter.
By April the number of urgent purchase requests had increased so rapidly that it became necessary to inflate the urgency rating’s that had been in use by he Procurement office, Until things got out of hand that spring, four ratings-X, A, B and C–had been used in order of decreasing priority. By early May, when everything seemed to warrant an X priority, it was announced that this super urgent rating would be subdivided into three others: XX, X1, and X2. XX would be used only if failure to obtain the material would produce a setback of major importance in the overall program of the Laboratory. It authorized the Procurement Office, through the Washington Liaison Office, to have recourse to the highest authority of the War Production Board and all government agencies and to use a special dispatch or cargo plane from anywhere in the United States to get delivery.
But the manufacturers were not impressed. Representatives from every armed service and government war project were pounding on their desks with equally high priorities and waiting six to 15 weeks for delivery while Trinity people were demanding three weeks delivery for the same item.
The problem was further complicated by the fact that there was no direct communication between the Project and the purchasing offices, nor could Los Alamos buyers talk directly to the scientists at the site to discuss possible substitutions or compromises on specifications.
Some items were just well-nigh impossible to get–like the seismographs that were needed to check earth shock at outlying areas around the state. The only instruments available were finally located at a firm which had already sold them to the Nazi-sympathizing Argentine government. It took an overriding directive, direct from General Grove’s office, to get the instruments shipped to Trinity instead.
Another crisis came when 10,000 feet of garden hose were lost during a shipping strike. A second order was placed but by June 29 the hose was still on the list of critical items not yet on hand, The hose was used to encase cables to sensitive instruments to protect them from the weather.
Delayed delivery on a number of urgent requests led Oppenheimer to call a meeting in May to review the procurement situation. One of the principal reasons for the delays, it turned out, was the shortage of personnel in the Los Angeles, New York and Chicago purchasing offices. Although the number of requisitions had greatly increased there had been no increase in the number of buyers since January 1944, a situation blamed on salary restrictions. As a result of the meeting salary adjustments were agreed upon and more personnel secured for all three offices. Direct communications were established between the Project and the New York and Chicago offices and Project members were asked to submit improved drawings and specifications.
But slow or not, the materials did arrive and in June the amount of goods handled by the main warehouse at Los Alamos reached its peak. During May the warehouse handled an average of 35 tons a day, 89% 01 which was incoming; during June the daily average rose to 54 tons of which 87% was incoming, and during the first half of July it was 40 tons a day, 80% incoming. A new shipping group was organized that spring to handle the out-going goods, most of’ them bound for Trinity or Tinian Island in the Pacific.
Plenty of local procurement problems remained. First there was communication. Only five people on the project were allowed to telephone between Trinity and Los Alamos and these calls were routed to Denver, on to Albuquerque and finally to San Antonio, New Mexico. Teletype service was so bad, Van Gemert recalls, that you never knew if the test site was asking for a tube or a lube job. It soon became evident that the best way to communicate was to send notes back and forth by the truck drivers.
At least two and often as many as ten trucks left Los Alamos every evening after dark to avoid both the blistering desert heat and unnecessary notice, and arrived at the test site early the next morning. Almost always there was a stop to be made at the U.S. Engineers yard in Albuquerque to pick up items addressed to Prof. W. E. Burke of the University of New Mexico’s physics department, who served as a blind to avoid a connection between the items and Los Alamos.
“We’d get things to Trinity any way we could,” Van Gemert says. Some of the ways were devious. A carload of telephone poles was desperately needed at the test site and no freight train was traveling fast enough to get it there in time. After considerable urging the Santa Fe railroad consented to attach the car to the rear of the Super Chief and sped the cargo to Albuquerque. Another time, for lack of freight space, 24 rolls of recording paper were luxuriously ensconced in a Super Chief drawing room for the trip from Chicago.
To supplement the special items, the Procurement people established a complete technical stockroom at the test site early in the game and trucked the entire stock from Los Alamos. The stockroom, known officially as FUBAR (fouled up beyond all recognition), was manned by enlisted men who used their spare time to manufacture the face shields needed to protect observers from the test blast. The shields were made of aluminum sheets, mounted on a stick handle, with welders’ goggles for a window. There never seemed to be enough people to take care of all the work to be done on the test preparations and those who were available, from mess attendants to group leaders, worked at a fever pitch. A ten hour day was considered normal and it often stretched to at least 18 hours.
In the spring of 1945 a big part of the Laboratory was reorganized to take care of the test and many people found themselves involved in activities far removed from their normal duties. John Williams, the high energy physicist, took the responsibility for construction and servicing of the base camp. John Manley was wrapped up in neutron measurements as a Research Division group leader when he suddenly found himself in charge of blast measurements for the test.
“I didn’t know anything about blast measurements,” he recalled 20 years later. “We’d never done anything like that before.”
But talent is talent wherever it is found and the displaced crews managed expertly and efficiently to bring their remarkable tasks to a successful conclusion under extreme pressure.
Throughout the spring and summer there was a constant stream of personnel traveling between Site Y and Trinity in a motley assortment of busses and cars, some of them barely able to make the long, monotonous trip.
Security precautions were rigid. In March, Dana P. Mitchell, assistant director of the Laboratory, that far, that’s the wall it would hit.” Luckily it issued terse, precise travel instructions:
“The following directions are strictly confidential and this copy is to be read by no one but yourself. You are to turn this copy in to me personally on your return to the site, ” the memo read, and continued with specific directions and mileages for reaching the site. “Under no condition,” it went on, “when you are south of Albuquerque are you to disclose that your are in any way connected with Santa Fe. If you are stopped for any reason and you have to give out information, state that you are employed by the Engineers in Albuquerque. Under no circumstances are telephone calls or stops for gasoline to be made between Albuquerque and your destination. ”
Travelers were then instructed to “stop for meals at Roys in Belen, which is on the left-hand side of the main road going south. If you leave the site at 7 a.m. you should make this stop around lunch time.”
Even so, by midafternoon when the travelers reached the little junction town of San Antonio, most of them were hot, tired and thirsty and Jose Micra’s bar and service station became a popular, if illegal, stop. Micra still remembers the unusually heavy traffic in those days. One of his customers, John Manley, remembers Micra’s wall of bottles.
“He had the whole south wall of his place lined with bottles,” Manley reports. "We used to worry an awful lot about that. If our big blast traveled didn’t.
Additional regulations required that all departing groups and individuals stop at the office of the intelligence officer for an explanation of “the security objectives of Trinity.” All personnel were required to sleep and eat at the camp rather than in nearby towns, and recreation trips for movies and dinners to nearby towns were prohibited to officers, enlisted men and civilians alike.
In addition, all Trinity-bound personnel were required to report their impending departure to Oppenheimer’s office, to Intelligence Officer R. ii. Taylor, and to Lt. Howard Bush who was trying to keep Trinity base camp running smoothly despite the constantly fluctuating population.
As Bainbridge explained in a somewhat desperate-sounding memo “to all concerned” in April 1945:“If your schedule is planned some days ahead it will operate to the comfort of all concerned if you tell Lt. Taylor who is going down and when they are going down. Lt. Taylor will notify Lt. Bush, who can then make proper arrangements for sufficient food for the mess. Lt. Bush is issued rations three days a week–Monday, Wednesday and Friday–and he is required on a Monday trip to leave a list of his requirements to be picked up on the following Wednesday trip. This means a minimum of four days notification is necessary if there is to be sufficient food on hand so that he can avoid the present difficulties which late-comers run into of having to eat delicatessen store meat instead of the On May 10 shortly after 1 a.m., three practice particular roast scheduled for that day. Please cooperate . . .“
There were other problems than supply and demand. Sanitary conditions in the mess hall were difficult to maintain because of the hard water. When water softening equipment was installed later it turned out that a miscalculation in water analysis resulted in a unit too small to handle the huge amounts of gypsum and lime encountered.
In the barracks, desert creatures such as scorpions had to be carefully shaken out of clothes each morning before anyone dared dress.
But despite the difficulties the camp ran well. The heat of the desert summer was relieved by swims in the cattle watering reservoirs at the old McDonald ranch. A herd of antelope disappeared from the desert range, a fact which has been attributed by the press to the ravages of the first atomic bomb. Former Trinity residents, however, admit that hunting with submachine guns was a favorite pastime and antelope steak was an almost daily part of the camp menu. So was range beef, lassoed near camp by amateur cowboys. A beer fund maintained by Laboratory people helped make up for the rules against leaving camp and there were nightly outdoor movies supplied from the Army’s endless assortment of Hollywood films.
“The choice of Lt. H. C. Bush as commanding officer of the base camp, ” Bainbridge wrote in 1946, “was a particularly fortunate one. The wise and efficient running of the camp by Lt. Bush contributed greatly to the success of the test. It was a ‘happy camp.’ The excellent camp morale and military-civilian cooperation did much to ameliorate the difficulties of operation under primitive conditions.” But there were times when the excellent camp morale was put to severe test.
Back in December 1944 Bainbridge had discussed with an unidentified colleague the dangers of a possible overshoot by bombers using the Alamogordo Bombing Range for their practice runs. “If they should go north of Area No. 3 by mistake in 1945,” he wrote, “they would have to go more than 15 miles beyond the boundary in order to interfere with us. The probability that they will overshoot is likely to be very small. Let them have their fun and settle with Ickes for the White Sands National Monument.”
But within a few months they were trying to settle with Bainbridge.
On May 10 shortly after 1 a.m., three practice 100-pound bombs carrying five-pound black powder flash units were dropped near the Base Camp stables, setting them afire, straddling the main barracks and bringing a poker game to a sudden halt. Three days later another bomb dropped on the carpentry shop. There was no serious damage and no one was hurt.
An investigation revealed that a squadron of bombers from a base some 2500 miles away was on its final long-range practice mission before going overseas. The lead planes had hit and completely obliterated the clearly-marked bombing range targets and in the confusion the following planes assumed the well-lit camp site must be the place. Bainbridge’s suggestion that anti-aircraft guns loaded with smoke shells be used to defend the camp was rejected but no further bombing attacks were made.
On another occasion, however, a group of electricians working at a distant outpost stomped into camp headquarters, tossed a handful of spent machine gun shells on the CO’s desk and resigned. It was soon discovered that gunnery crews in Alamogordo bombers were encouraged to sharpen their trigger eyes on antelope herds roaming the bombing range. For the electricians it had been too close for comfort.
The original date for the trial shot of 100 tons of TNT was May 5 but was soon shifted to May 7 to allow for installation of additional testing equipment. Many additional requests had to be refused since any further delay would have put an intolerable burden on the whole group in its attempt to meet the July test deadline.
Hundreds of crates of high explosive were brought to the site from Fort Wingate, New Mexico, and carefully stacked on the platform of a 20-foot tower. Tubes containing 1000 curies of fission products from the Hanford slug were interspersed in the pile to simulate, at a low level, the radioactive products expected from the nuclear explosion. The whole test was designed in scale for the atomic shot. The center of gravity of the high explosive was in scale with the 100 foot height for the 4,000 to 5,000 tons expected in the final test, and measurements of blast effects, earth shock, and damage to apparatus and apparatus shelters were made at scaled-in distances. Only measurements to determine “cross talk” between circuits and photographic observations were, in general, carried out at the full distance proposed for the final shot.
Then, as the last day of the European war dawned, the TNT was detonated and it was spectacular. A huge, brilliant orange ball rose into the desert sky lighting the pre-dawn darkness as far away as the Alamogordo base 60 miles southeast.
Trial Run - May 7, 1945
A crew prepares fission products from the Hanford slug for insertion in the high explosive for the 100-ton test. Material simulated, at a low level, the radioactive products expected from the nuclear explosion.
Completed stack of 100 tons of TNT rests on the sturdy tower, ready for the May 7 firing. Carpenters who built the tower were appalled, on returning to the site after the test, to find the structure completely obliterated.
The 100-ton explosion would have been an unforgettable sight, witnesses say, had it not been outdone so soon afterward by the nuclear explosion. Brilliant orange fireball was observed 60 miles away.
The rehearsal proved to be tremendously valuable devices. Each experiment required different time able and the high percentage of successful measurements in the final test may be attributed in large measure to the experience gained from the shot. Blast and earth shock data were valuable not only for calibrating instruments but for providing standards for the safe design of shock proof instrument shelters. Measurement of the effects from the radioactive material inserted in the stack of explosive was especially valuable in giving information on the probable amount and distribution of material which would be deposited on the ground. This information was essential for planning the recovery of equipment, the measurement of bomb efficiency, and protection of personnel for the final shot.
The test also gave the men, accustomed to well-equipped laboratories, a familiarity with the tribulations of field work, and perhaps most importantly, showed up some defects in the test operations while there was still time to correct them. Immediately after the test Bainbridge asked for lists of complaints about the operations from the various group leaders involved and on May 12, while the experience was still fresh in everyone’s minds, held a gripe session to discuss suggestions for improvements.
Far and away the biggest complaint was transportation. Nearly everyone felt there were not enough roads between Ground Zero and the various shelters and the roads that did exist were in intolerable condition. The dust and ruts were hard on both personnel and instruments and the two-wheel drive GI sedans were constantly getting bogged down in a foot or so of soft, loose sand. They also asked for more vehicles and more repair men who could service the cars at night to avoid delays and keep up with the demand.
To overcome poor communications throughout the test site, new phone lines, public address systems to shelters and short wave radios in automobiles were requested as well as a building in which to hold meetings.
Everybody complained of lack of help to get things done on time and asked in particular for more help on procurement, shipping and stock management and a direct teletype to the Los Alamos Procurement Office.
The group felt the operation was severely handicapped by the interminable delays caused by rigid restrictions on the movement of personnel in and out of the various areas just before the test. They asked for and got free access to all parts of the test area during the last few hours before the shot.
Only one man complained about camp food.
As a result of the meeting, 20 miles of black top road had to be laid, new structures built and a new communication system installed. After the test, too, a major effort had to be devoted to the final timing schedules, some having to start ahead of Zero, others requiring a warning pulse only 1000th of a second ahead of the detonation. The circuits were the responsibility of Joseph McKibben and the electronic timing device was developed by Ernest Titterton of Australia. In addition to these chores there were the weak spots pointed out in the trial test to be over-come. And there was precious little time to do it.
As early as April hopes of meeting the original Independence Day deadline had begun to dim. Delays in the delivery of full scale lens molds and the consequent delay in the development and production of full scale lenses, as well as the tight schedule in production of active material made it necessary to reconsider the date, and on June 9 the Cowpunchcr Committee agree that July 13 was the earliest possible date and July 23 was probable.
In a memo to all his group leaders on June 19, Oppenheimer explained that although July 4 was accepted as a target date in March, “none of us felt that date could be met.” He then announced the Cowpuncher decision and explained, “In reaching this conclusion we are influenced by the fact that we are under great pressure, both internally and externally, to carry out the test and that it undoubtedly will be carried out before all the experiments, tests and improvements that should reasonably be made, can be made. ”
And so the pressure mounted, security tightened and preparation went on with increasing speed and intensity.